Analytic Philosophy and the Holocaust

“They philosophize as if nothing has happened”
Derrida

On the surface, the omission of the Holocaust in analytic philosophy might well appear (optimistically) as a concession to the limits of representation. Whereas aesthetics has sought to overcome these limits by way of eschewing a beautification of destruction, the question of theory as rendering intelligible an event which exceeds rationality (and so implicating moral uncertainty) has largely been overlooked. After all, philosophizing has an aesthetic aspect which is central to its foundation. Even Bertrand Russell was conscious of this. If metanarrative philosophy was deemed pernicious because it aspired towards a totalizing aesthetics at the expense of actual experience, then where does this leave academic analytic philosophy?

Philosophy’s humiliation – its retreat from speculation – entailed an absolute self-delimitation which quickly proved fertile for dogma. As a result of this, analytic philosophy sought to deflect the historical character of philosophy by reducing particulars to paradoxes. In turn, the ‘humility’ of analytic philosophy is seen as a measure of its supposed refinement and so success. The question of evil becomes, in the hands of the analytic philosopher, contentless; the historical emplacement of events, an irrelevance. Is it prudence which steers analytic philosophy away from the Holocaust, perhaps a thoughtful reflection on the aestheticizing of theory? Invariably not. The stripping away of history is informed, above all else, by a conceited impression of philosophy which is incapable of readapting itself to a context which resists certainty. At the same time, paradoxicality is often a ruse which masquerades as being open to doubt whereas the firm entrenchment of the ‘problem of the paradox of x’ is often an end in itself.

Update: In the absence of a comment box, the conversation at Pas Au-Dela along with Philosophical Conversations’ report on analytic philosophy in Australia might be of interest.