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Barrett responds, "Thus there is a gaping hole at the center of any
human being, at least as Heidegger describes this being. Consequently, we
have in the end to acknowledge a certain desolate or empty quality
about his thought, however we may admire the originality or novelty of
its construction." And Barrett asks, "How can a being without a center
really be ethical?" He concludes: "[Heidegger] cannot be dismissed: that
desolate and empty picture of being he gives may be just the sense of
being that is at work in our whole culture, and we are in his debt for
having brought it to the surface. To get beyond him we shall have to
live through that sense of being in order to reach the other side."
To this, I should like to add that questions which can be closed by
philosophic argument can remain open for art, and it is therefore a mis–
take for writers to accept the preeminence of the philosophers and write
poems, novels, and plays to illustrate, to confirm, to work out in their
art and in human detail, the thoughts given abstractly by distinguished
(and also by undistinguished) thinkers. Neither the philosopher nor the
scientist can tell the artist conclusively, definitively, what it is to be hu–
man.
But enough of this for the moment. I said earlier that the fate of the
Jews in the twentieth century was to suffer the cruelties of nihilistic
thought and nihilistic politics. I did not say that the Jews - the survivors
and descendants themselves - escaped altogether the desolate and empty
picture of being that Barrett correctly tells us "is at work in the whole
culture." All of us living in the West must endure this desolation. The
feelings it transmits, the motives it instills in us, the human states our sur–
roundings make us familiar with, the invasive force of these states which
we are constrained to submit
to,
the coloration they give to our per–
sonalities, the mutilations they inflict on us, and the overwhelming shap–
ing powers of a nihilism now commonplace do not spare anybody.
Philosophers sometimes tell us that in the eyes of science, nature itself is
soulless. One of the effects of this premise of soullessness, perhaps, is to
turn the imagination in a literal direction. We speak of this as demystifi–
cation, but it may just as aptly be called dismemberment or fragmenta–
tion. Corpse-making trench warfare in 1914 made this fragmentation
universally familiar. Leninist Russia justified this as revolutionary severity.
Intellectuals in Weimar Germany took pride in the realism and hardness
this view of nature inspired. Edmund Burke identified this in 1789 as
revolutionary reductionism - a Queen is only a woman, he wrote , and a
woman is only a piece of flesh. In a similar frame of mind, Jews were
used by Nazi doctors as laboratory animals. The remains of millions of
people became a problem in garbage treatment, a technical challenge in
waste disposal.
What this brings into prominence is the special view of the Jews held
