Lessons from the history of the holocaust

Social Philosophy
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My impression about the response of philosophers to the holocaust, is that they popularized postmodernism because of it. The postmodernists reasserted subjectivity over the pretended objectivity of racial pseudoscience of the nazis.

The postmodernists do not strictly validate the concept of subjectivity, they do not explain how subjectivity works, instead postmodernists just assume it from common knowledge, and assert that facts in general are tainted with some subjective aspects. So to soften the hardedged materialism somewhat, with some emotion. And this works to some extent.

The holocaust has gained some quasireligious meaning for especially Western societies, or the history that includes scientific and technological progress. Currently the lesson drawn from the history of the holocaust is focused much on punishing hatespeech. Which is a very outrageous and wrong interpretation of the history in my opinion. That people are now put in jail for some remark they make on the internet, is I believe, mainly because of this interpretation. So that the holocaust has become the main reason for wideranging surpression of free speech.

The story that nazi ideology is based on hate, is an error. Instead the main characteristic of nazi ideology is emotionless calculating judgment on the personal character of people, asserted as fact of racial science. So nazism should be thought of as marginalizing all emotions, including also hate.

Hate is really just an ordinary human emotion. There is danger associated to it, on the other hand identities can’t really prosper if you are only allowed to express appreciation about the identity, and aren’t allowed to mention anything you don’t like about it. In that case people prefer not to talk about the identity at all, ignore it altogether, and the identity withers. So there is general loss of identity, by surpressing hatespeech.

The very obvious lesson that should be drawn from the holocaust instead, is to learn the logic of fact and opinion, a simple school lesson.

It was an error of the nazis to assert that personal character can be established as fact, instead personal character is identified with a chosen opinion. As for example, it is a chosen opinion to say “Trump is a nice man”. That opinion says something about Trump, but it also says something about the person who chose that opinion, because this person chose the opinion from their own emotions and personal character.

I should say though that even with the correct interpretation that personal character is esssentially identified with a chosen opinion, this still leaves a theoretical opening for racism which asserts that there is some objective heritable organization of decision-making processes. For example to say someone has the heritable organization of decision-making processes that are similar to that of a pig, which is a very racist thing to say.

But I think the evidence shows that it is mainly and only the marginalization of subjectivity in nazi ideology which carries the evil load of it. Which is because that part has by far the biggest motive behind it, and for a crime you need a big motive. Which big motive is the psychological pressure to do your best.

This psychological pressure to do your best occasions people to conceive of choosing in terms of selection of options (selection of the best option). And that is where it all goes wrong, because the concept of subjectivity requires “choosing” to be defined in terms of spontaneity, in order for the concept of subjectivity to function. So the underlying reason for why nazis incorrectly objectified personal character with racial science, is because they had no functioning concept of subjectivity to begin with. Nazis were essentially “selectionists”, which means, people who conceive of choosing in terms of selection of options, instead of conceiving of it in terms of spontaneity.

In the mind of a selectionist, the decisions they make refer back to the values that they used to evaluate the options with. Their decisions do not refer back to their emotions. The emotions being cut off, therefore the emotions become morbid. And then these selectionists compensate for these morbid emotions, by generating more feelings of doing their best, which feelings are associated to their idea of choosing in terms of selection of the best option.

So typically a nazi would be very full of the feelings of doing their best, but the normal emotions, like for family, are much marginalized and instrumentalized to the background, and morbid. The genocides were then conceived of in terms of what the nazis called, the socialistic process of selection, which meant wiping out the less worthy, and preservation of the best. But the main motor behind all this is the exaggeration of policy, which exaggeration serves to generate more feelings of doing their best, for their own emotional survival. That is what makes the policies extreme out of all proportion.

Another aspect of this is, that when someone conceives of choosing in terms of selection of the best option, which is actually very common to do, then any decision they make is by their own definition of the verb “choose”, automatically doing their best, regardless of what they choose. So that conscience is much circumvented. If you would ask a nazi about their crimes, then this analysis predicts that they would respond that they were doing their utmost best.

Learning the logic of fact and opinion, would fundamentally undermine the error of selectionism. Because in the logic of opinion it would be explained that choosing is in fact spontaneous, and that selection of options is a valid but different idea from choosing. Spontaneous meaning that a decision can turn out one way or another in the moment that a decision is made.

The logic of fact and opinion is explained with creationism. Science is limited to facts, which idea of fact is validated by materialism. Opinions, like opinions on beauty, are outside of science. The two fundamental categories of creator and creation are required to validate both concepts of opinion and fact respectively.

Creationism: What is subjective, creates what is objective, by decision. As for example, the baby (objective) was born from love (subjective), or, God (subjective) created the earth (objective).

  1. Creator / chooses / spiritual / subjective / opinion
  2. Creation / chosen / material / objective / fact

subjective = identified with a chosen opinion

objective = identified with a model of it

Personal character would be classified in category 1, because decisions are made out of personal character. Therefore personal character is identified with a chosen opinion. Which shows exactly why it is wrong to objectify personal character.

While this logic is very simple, it is psychologically a very hard lesson. It is hard for people to accept the fact that decisions are spontaneous. However the logic shows that you cannot have a functioning concept of subjectivity otherwise.

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The essay contains severe misunderstandings, historically inaccurate claims, and problematic leaps of logic. For example, postmodernism was a critique of Enlightenment rationalism and power structures, not an anti-Nazi emotional theory.

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The lesson from the Holocaust seems to be "Never again … until next time."

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The rise of antisemitism was not from a “psychological pressure to do their best.” The ordinary emotions of hatred and resentment were manipulated for political purposes. The evil that grew from that was a loss of a common humanity.

Hannah Arendt charts the development through intersecting threads in history. Here is a thread:

Friedrich Engels once remarked that the protagonists of the antisemitic movement of his time were noblemen, and its chorus the howling mob of the
petty bourgeoisie. This is true not only for Germany, but also for Austria’s
Christian Socialism and France’s Anti-Dreyfusards. In all these cases, the aristocracy, in a desperate last struggle, tried to ally itself with the conservative forces of the churches-the Catholic Church in Austria and France, the Protestant Church in Germany-under the pretext of fighting liberalism with the weapons of Christianity. The mob was only a means to strengthen
their position, to give their voices a greater resonance. Obviously they neither
could nor wanted to organize the mob, and would dismiss it once their aim
was achieved. But they discovered that antisemitic slogans were highly
effective in mobilizing large strata of the population.
The followers of Court Chaplain Stoecker did not organize the first anti
semitic parties in Germany. Once the appeal of antisemitic slogans had been demonstrated, radical antisemites at once separated themselves from Stoecker’s Berlin movement, went into a full-scale fight against the government, and founded parties whose representatives in the Reichstag voted in all major domestic issues with the greatest opposition party, the Social Democrats. They quickly got rid of the compromising initial alliance with the old powers; Boeckel, the first antisemitic member of Parliament, owed his seat to votes of the Hessian peasants whom he defended against “Junkers and Jews,” that is against the nobility which owned too much land and against the Jews upon whose credit the peasants depended.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, page 38

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I don’t think we’ve learned substantive lessons from this event, given subsequent genocides.

If this is how you understand the “culture wars”, then there are other models you can go to. Classically, people like Vervaeke and McGilchrist are arguing that, with the loss of Christianity and theism in the West, identity politics has simply taken their place as religious expressions and provided us with different forms of fundamentalism. It has a bit of a Nietzschean glow to it, but seems serviceable in some contexts.

I would have thought post-structuralism and postmodernism have their roots in ideas that predate the Second World War, with Nietzsche being a key figure. Later influences would include thinkers like Heidegger and Freud.

You’re making a series of claims about post-structuralist thought without, it seems, citations or evidence for the claims. I haven’t closely followed post-structuralism/post-modernism, which is a pretty broad category, but how would you demonstrate that your thesis is correct?

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Post-modernists criticizing the enlightenment idea of a neutral objective observer discovering facts, is at the same time promoting subjectivity. Which is also criticizing the racial pseudoscientists asserting as fact what the personal character of someone is, which was the mainstay of nazi ideology.

Of course the argument isn’t that postmodernism was invented in reaction to the holocaust, but that it was popularized in reaction to the holocaust.

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I don’t understand what your idea is of the reaction of philosophers to the holocaust.

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That is just ordinary politics. There are likes and dislikes associated to any identity at all, not just jewish identity. What matters more is if beliefs, political or religious, aren’t properly framed in terms of the logic of fact and opinion, as explained.

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I’m saying that post-structuralism, draws heavily on pre-war sources. Your thesis would be supported if you could provide evidence that the Holocaust directly influenced the development of postmodernism in the way you claim, for example, through specific citations, statements from key thinkers.

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Postmodernism wasn’t even a thing when the Holocaust was around.

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One of the themes often repeated in Arendt’s work is that we have to look for the particular circumstances of the people involved rather than assume an intrinsic “identity” of the killers and their victims. That is what makes the book an historical study. The study includes the arbitrary killing in Russia when nothing provided a check on complete state power.

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Nazism and the rise and popularity of nazism cannot be explained without the defeat of Germany in WW1. The racism is quite essential in the ideology as is the idea of the “Dolchstoss”-myth being the reason for Germany’s defeat in the war. In that myth the Jews (and the left) played a large role for the defeat. To say that the ideology marginalizes all emotions is wrong. On the contrary, the ideology cherishes and justifies this hatred of the untermenschen.

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Is an error because there is no functioning concept of subjectivity in nazi ideology. The personal character is objectified with racial science. So where then does the nazi acknowledge anything inherently subjective? They simply don’t.

First all emotions are marginalized, and then these morbid marginalized emotions are compensated with feelings of doing your best.

The less worthy are wiped out as a matter of emotionless calculation to achieve an optimum, not as a matter of hatred.

As explained nazi ideology is based on conceiving of choosing in terms of selection of options, selection of the best option. There are no essential subjective elements in a selection procedure.

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That’s what I said, the postmodernism was popularized after the holocaust.

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Please provide examples of “Nazi ideology” that support your thesis.

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The handbook for schooling the hitler youth starts out with the title to the introduction stating “factual outlook on life”.

Then it explains that nazi ideology is an ideology which adapts itself to reality, that is factual and realistic. Then it asserts that the foundations of nazism are differences among people, especially differences in mental characteristics.

Later in the book selection and evolution are explained in reference to Darwin. Then selection is extended to the socialistic process of selection, which meant wiping out the less worthy and preservation of the best.

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That bit of indoctrination does open a window on the race thinking of the regime after it had attained state power.

It does not explain how the Jews were singled out as the “race” to be wiped out. This selection was made before the regime came into power. It is how they got in power.

You are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

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It’s of no significance to the underlying structure of nazi ideology which are designated superior and which are designated inferior.

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So, if the Nazis turned out to be inferior, they would have destroyed themselves as a matter of principle?

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This juncture in the discussion is a good opportunity to hear more from Hannah Arendt:

Every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine. It is true that sometimes-and such is the case with racism–an ideology has changed its original political sense, but without immediate contact with political life none of them could be imagined.
Their scientific aspect is secondary and arises first from the desire to provide watertight arguments, and second because their persuasive power also got hold of scientists, who no longer were interested in the result of their research but left their laboratories and hurried off to preach to the multitude their new interpretations of life and world.

Hannah Arendt,The Origins of Totalitarianism, page 159