Since the Holocaust€”that Emil Fackenheim
rightly named "the rupture that ruptures philosophy" (To Mend the
World)€”philosophers of the Continental tradition have been highly critical of
their own metaphysical tradition. They came to recognize that philosophy’s
mission, its epistemological framework, and methods must be entirely rethought.
Philosophy’s most glorious moments, it was finally recognized, were structurally
analogous with Nazism. Philosophy’s grandiose metaphysical constructions, from the
ancients (Parmenides, Plato) to Descartes and Hegel (the moderns) have had much
in common with the hierarchical worldview that became the battle-cry and the deathcamp
justification of the Nazi totalitarian project. That project was grounded in
the firm metaphysic that saw some people as more culturally/ethically advanced
than others. Hitler sought to purify the German state by annihilating the alien
contaminants of the system€”handicapped, Gypsies, Jews, and any other
undesirable (to them) elements.

The philosophers were deeply
implicated in the construction of this hierarchical worldview. Their "modern"
ideas spawned anthropological investigations of "primitive peoples,"
imperialistic ventures to "tame" them, and Christian evangelical
missions to save the "savages" from their supposed ethical and
cultural "backwardness." The philosophers were sadly implicated in
the production of a Western worldview that unfolded logically into the
slaughter of non-Europeans, into the slave trade, and into the exploitation and
degradation of the vast mass of indigenous peoples during the closing centuries
of the second millennium.

Philosophers of the postmodern era
take as their starting point the admission that philosophy, whose realm of
inquiry includes the Just, the Beautiful and the Good, possesses its own
troubling connections to injustice. It, in fact, provided the "rational"
foundation for Nazi anti-Semitism. The recognition of this discomforting link
has led to a radical turn in the methodology and the perceived task of the
philosopher in the post-Holocaust era. Philosophers have grown far more wary in
regard of their language (resulting in the poetic opacity that so annoys
philosophers of the analytic tradition), the direction of their questioning,
and the certainty of their conclusions.

Nevertheless, despite general
agreement on the complicity of philosophy in the crimes against humanity of the
last centuries, few thinkers have explicitly taken up and critically reflected
upon the precise nature of this relation, and none, before now, has brought the
problematic to scholarly articulation. Thus, Michael Mack’s German Idealism
and the Jew fills a grave void in philosophy’s self-critical corpus of
knowledge. Mack seeks to map out for the reader how the German Idealist
philosophical tradition directly served the anti-Semitism that, under the all-too-lazy
eye of "civilized" nations and with the blessing of the many Christian
churches, resulted in the systematic slaughter of millions upon millions of
European Jews, Gypsies and Communists.

Since one of the most baffling mysteries
of the Nazi era is the degree of blind cooperation and even enthusiasm for the
extermination project that Hitler received from the German populace (as well as
from the local populations in Europe where victim populations were being publicly
executed), then it is clear that the phenomenon of Nazi anti-Semitism
must necessarily be understood within the larger context of the socio-cultural
realities and the philosophical ideas of the time from which the phenomenon took
its rise. It is this riddle that Mack takes up in German Idealism and the
Jew. He investigates the tradition that evolved into that "dark riddle"
that Mack calls "a metaphysical kind of anti-Semitism" (2).

The Idealists developed a rational
orientation (I would suggest as working from the Father of Modernity, René
Descartes) toward accurate observation of the empirical (Kant), that logically
culminated as the unfolding of a divine (and Gentile) Reason in the world
(Hegel). Wagner had simply to refabricate the binary opposition between German
Idealism and Jewish realism into the polar identities of non-belonging, illegitimate
Jew and Volksgemeinschaft (German legitimate "community of people").
In each of these cases, Mack demonstrates, the German prioritization of
idealism over realism characterized reason (and thus historical and scientific
progress, or modernization) as freedom€”freedom from material necessity.

In order for Germans (and white
male Europeans in the larger, global, aspect of this problem) to equate
themselves with the cultural headwaters of a progressively unfolding
rationality, they required a radical "other" to fill the role of the
non-rational, empirically-bounded, "natural," embodied peoples, tied
to the earth and material property. Hitler articulated this necessity in his
famed declaration: "If the Jews had not existed, we would have had to
invent them." The role of alien "other" to the Germans was
served well by the Jew and the Gypsy, just as the "savages" and "primitives"
of Africa and distant exotic isles served that role for the white Europeans in
general.

German Idealism culminated in a hyper-rational
universalism so complete, so totalizing that it had no room for any kind of
difference. It made for a radical ethnocentrism that, in the popular mind,
served to justify the exclusion and extermination of any "alien"
components that which stood in the way of history’s perfection of the body politic.
In this seminal work, Mack traces the creation of the new "metaphysical
anti-Semitism" and demonstrates how the notion of radical "others"
to Reason’s purity disseminated throughout ethical, aesthetic and political assumptions
on the continent in the wake of Kant and Hegel.

Scapegoats arise in social groups
during times of internal crisis. They serve well the unifying purposes of the
dominant group. Seen by their victimizers in exaggerated terms€”as more powerful
and more malevolent than they really are, they provide a rallying point around
which the people can unite. One of the richest ironies of the Idealist reconstruction
of the Jew into the impure counter-reality to their Reason was the irrationality€”the
empirical blindness€”of the Idealists to the reality of their scapegoats. Mack assures
us that the majority of European Jews were anything but materially bounded.
They were in fact, disproportionately poor, materially destitute. If anything,
the centuries of historical exclusions left them suffering a severe lack of the
worldly goods, despite Nazi anti-Semitic fantasies to the contrary.

German Idealism and the Jew
is a work long overdue. It is of great importance to scholarly understandings
of Nazi Germany and anti-Semitism and to the larger problem of comprehending the
functioning of the scapegoat mechanism in chaotic societies. If it has a
weakness at all, it is in failing to see Nazi anti-Semitism as one facet of a
grander diabolical European rational arrogance that had been slaughtering,
enslaving, appropriating and exploiting its way across the globe for centuries,
ruling with an iron fist the embodied, helpless, poor, radical "others"
that got in its way.

© 2004 Wendy Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet,
Ph.D., Philosophy Department, Adelphi
University, New
York, author of The Sacred Monstrous: A
Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (Lexington Books, 2003).

Categories: Philosophical