The Death of Transcendence: Reflections on Jean Améry’s “At the Mind’s Limits” 3031038150, 9783031038150

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The Death of Transcendence Reflections on Jean Améry’s “At the Mind’s Limits” Yoav Ashkenazy Translated and Edited by Tom C. Atkins

The Death of Transcendence “Yoav Ashkenazy’s book opens up to its readers the spiritual world of Jean Améry, the Austrian Jewish intellectual and Auschwitz survivor whose experiences led him to dark conclusions about the possibility of morality in the West after the Holocaust. Europe betrayed itself and negated the grounds of its culture, which was founded on the distinction between good and evil, and Ashkenazy traces in great depth the implications of this treachery. Améry’s personal story turns into a paradigm of the contemporary human situation. Until today, Europe has not assumed responsibility for the Holocaust, rejecting blame for it and imposing it on the victims. In splendid prose, the book reveals Ashkenazy’s broad knowledge of Améry’s thought and of analytic and continental philosophy, conveying a deep moral commitment. This book is a must, meant to perturb anyone attentive to the moral problems of contemporary life.” —Avi Sagi, Professor of Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Senior Research Fellow, Shalom Hartman Institute, Israel “In this insightful and brilliant tribute to Jean Améry, Ashkenazy explores the foundation of our humanity—the ability for transcendence. Ashkenazy carefully discloses Western civilization’s self-imposed blindness concerning the meaning and implications of the Shoah through a perceptive reading of Améry’s testimony.” —Adam Afterman, Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, Israel “The Death of Transcendence provides a profound philosophical interpretation of Améry’s remarkable essays. At the core of Ashkenazy’s book stands a brilliant exploration of what it is to be human and its relation to self-transcendence, as it encounters Améry’s experience of radical dehumanization and the Holocaust.” —Moshe Halbertal, Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and Gruss Professor of Law, NYU School of Law, USA

Yoav Ashkenazy

The Death of Transcendence Reflections on Jean Améry’s “At the Mind’s Limits”

Yoav Ashkenazy Wien, Austria

ISBN 978-3-031-03814-3    ISBN 978-3-031-03815-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03815-0 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This reading of Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits has two main aims. The first, and most important, is related to my sense of commitment and debt to Améry and to his testimony, a commitment to present both his experience of loss and failure to regain what was lost. In this context, and out of a sense of loyalty to the author, an attempt will be made to present this short book as one progressive argument leading to death by suicide, not just of the author himself but also of the culture he grew up in and its values. In accordance with this insight I will attempt to present the first three essays as embodying the meaning of a complete loss of selfhood, itself deeply related to being denied the possibility of belonging to a common “we.” A total loss of trust in the human world, of language and fatherland, manifested in a complete detachment from one’s inner personal texture of constitutive imagery, which normally colors and gives value and significance to one’s life and world. The fourth and fifth essays will attempt to explain why there was no way back for Améry, exposing in the process the German and Western condition after the war as one of self-betrayal and of complete self-denial, a state of self-imposed blindness to the meaning of the holocaust and its implications, stemming from an unwillingness to change. This criticism of German and Western culture is one I believe still holds great validity. My second aim is to develop a thin metaphysical conceptualization using the experience and concept of Transcendence as denoting the human possibility for acquiring a true sense of selfhood, of being in the world, v

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and as signifying the possibility of a meaningful self-existence with others. Here an attempt will be made to show that what Améry lost in Breendonk and in Auschwitz is deeply connected with what we take most for granted in our everyday life. That is, our ability to share in and personalize existing structures and institutes of common transcendence, of our practical ability to be with and for one another. This ability, I believe, stands at the core of the possibility of being human, of being part of a human “we” and of being a unique human persona. In this negative way and through presenting what Améry has lost, I hope to expose what it means to be and see in a human way in our times, and what suppressing the true meaning of the rise of the Nazi Reich and of the Holocaust amounts to, a lesson I believe Améry’s book can teach us if we only let it. Wien, Austria

Yoav Ashkenazy

Acknowledgments

For Jean Améry, the memory of past wrongs and the residue of resentment it left were a mark of humanity, one last barrier holding back self-­ alienation. For us, who are lucky to have been born in a free, safe world, the memory of kindness leaves a residue of gratitude, which is just as much a mark of humanity. I wish to share some of it with the readers of this book. First and foremost, I would like to thank Mr. Tom Atkins, who translated and edited the book (including these very words). His talents and insights far surpass the narrow, technical sense of translation. He advanced many of the arguments put forth in this book, and without him it would not have been born. My thanks to my teacher and friend, Prof. Moshe Halbertal, who has read the manuscript and shared with me words of encouragement, support, good advice, friendship and uncommon affection. He, too, was instrumental in producing this work. I am also grateful to Prof. Avi Sagi, who has read the Hebrew version and expressed great support and enthusiasm in the project. My thanks are given also to Prof. Adam Afterman, Mr. Ofer Levin and Prof. Adiel Shermer, for reading the Hebrew manuscript and sharing their acute observations, and for the support they showed me in the various phases of work and contemplation invested in this book. I am also greatly thankful to Dr. Hillel Ben Sasson, for his comments on earlier versions and the aid he has lent me in the publishing process. I would like to thank Prof. David Heyd for his attentive reading of the Hebrew manuscript and for his support of the entire project. To my friends vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dr. Nadav Shir, who has read, remarked and aided in developing some of the concepts and arguments in this book, and Dr. Meirav Jones, who has read attentively the English draft and offered me wise counsel, I send my warm thanks. I would also like to acknowledge my friends Mr. Motty Fogel and Mr. Eli Rotenberg, for the numerous ways in which they offered support, and in particular for their intelligent and involved reading of the manuscript. My deep thanks to Palgrave Macmillan’s Mr. Philip Getz. His support and faith in this project, and the patience and good nature with which he delivered advice and help were of utmost value in producing this book. I would also like to thank Mr. Tikoji Rao Mega Rao, for his professional and dedicated work in preparing this book for print. Last but not least, my thanks are to the anonymous readers of this book—their comments and critique improved it. With hope for a better, more attentive human future, Yoav Ashkenazy, Jerusalem and Vienna, 2022

Contents

Introduction 1 Part I: Loss 5 Part II: I, Myself, Torture25 Part III: Homelessness43 Part IV: Endgame57 Part V: Jewishness as the Final Solution77 Part VI: Human Face89 Index95

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Introduction

Abstract  Jean Amèry’s At the Mind’s Limits comprises five essays based on his experience during and after the Holocaust. While each essay examines a certain concept in depth (loss, trust, home, society and identity), when read together they form one coherent and progressing argument. The introduction provides background information on Jean Améry, gives an overview of the individual essays as well as of the entire argument and discusses the author’s method and emphases. Keywords  Transcendence • Loss • Turture • Homelessness • Self • Identity

Jean Améry was born in 1912  in Vienna as Hanns Chaim Mayer, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. In 1938, with the Nazi annexation of Austria, he fled to Belgium, where he joined the resistance. He was later captured and sent to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated by the British Army in 1945. At the Mind’s Limits is a collection of five essays, based on his experiences during the war and after it. It was first delivered by him as series of radio talks after the war, and later published in German in 1966 under the title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, or Beyond Guilt and Atonement. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Ashkenazy, The Death of Transcendence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03815-0_1

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At the heart of the first essay, “At the Mind’s Limits,” is a total loss. My commentary will begin by characterizing that loss—what it is and the price it exacts; how it came to be and what it means to those who suffer it. In the second essay, Améry deals with torture. He describes the torture he suffered at Breendonk and the mental and psychological effects it had on him. My commentary will discuss what is necessary in order to see and live humanely, the fundamental difference between being an I and being a Self, between having a body and being reduced to merely being a body, and how they relate to the loss discussed in the first essay. At the heart of this essay is its author’s trust in the human world, its constitution and that which it depends on. The third essay discusses the homeland and what it means to those who have forever lost it, or more precisely, to those who discovered it was never theirs. This discussion reveals another essential condition for meaningful human existence: home and a feeling of homely familiarity. These conditions are only attainable by those who have a homeland, and have therefore been made an integral part of a certain community and society by the significant experiences of their lives, from childhood to old age. From there, Améry proceeds to discuss the profound relationship between belonging to a society and culture and having a sense of self and self-worth. The fourth essay discusses those who have been brutally cast out of society, described as pollutants and enemies-from-within. The perspective is that of the exiled, and it discusses the possibility of the exiled’s return to human life shared with others. At the heart of the essay is a discussion of the meaning and value of the victim’s resentment. Resentment is promoted as necessary for the victim’s ability to transcend himself, and thus his only possible mode of self-existence, one that affords him the minimal positive transcendence he is capable of after the Holocaust. For as an inner structure of conceptual imagery rooted in the past, resentment allows Améry to embark on his last mission, thus filling his life with meaning and even a community (of surviving Jews) in which he is unable to participate in the “real” world.1 1  Here I wish to qualify Lahad’s argument that Améry’s refuses to accept a fantastic reality for the purpose of healing from his trauma. Améry considers his so-called trauma to be a product of his resentment, which is the only moral response to a world contaminated and corrupted by the Third Reich. This in turn means that joining that reality can itself be considered a retreat into fantasy, albeit a common one. In this state, resentment is more real and just then what is considered healthy and real under normal circumstances. Furthermore, Améry describes transcending through resentment as his only possible means of surviving

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Finally, in the fifth essay, Améry deals with the religious and national identity which is forced upon the victim from without. This identity, being from without, is simultaneously impossible and unavoidable for him. For Améry, the religious and national identity forced on him is that of a Jew. Lacking any previous affinity to his Jewishness, Améry finds himself Jewish in the eyes of those who hate and seek to kill him, and nothing at all in his own eyes. The way he is treated by non-Jews and the number etched onto his arm in Auschwitz are the markers of his Jewishness, Jewishness he cannot live in any other way. In my commentary I read the five essays as a single argument, centered around a number of related claims. These claims, when understood, lead to an impossibility of continued existence with others in the world. Together they reveal the meaning of the Third Reich in ways which are perhaps beyond atonement, but not at all beyond guilt. In effect, the entire text can be seen as an accusation: first and foremost of Germany and of German culture, but also of the Christian West and the entire project of Modern selfhood. My interpretation strives to follow Améry’s arguments and the lessons he draws from his experience, a task that demands an adherence to the style as much as to the content of his essays. For this reason, I will provide a running interpretation as close as possible to what I perceive to be the true meaning of his work. That is, his understanding that the fall of German enlightenment values makes it impossible to explain or describe the Holocaust through the rational discourse of German enlightenment.2 One of my main goals in interpreting this text is to show how relevant Améry’s remarks are to our lives today, and not only to the understanding of the post-war reality in Europe and America. I wish to expose the ways in which different kinds of transcendence relations are essential to the possibility of being human and becoming a real self, in contrary to the possibility of deteriorating to being a mere body, or a totally egocentric “I.” I will try to show that resentment can also operate as a source of transcendence itself, essential to the survival and moral persona of its bearer. and accomplishing his mission after the war. This response is therefore revealed to be not only just but also life-affirming, if only for a while. See Yochai Ataria, Amit Kravitz and Eli Pitcovski, Jean Améry, Beyond the Mind’s Limits (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 172–192 (hereafter Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry). 2  See Vivaldi Jean-Marie, Reflections on Jean Améry, Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 4–5 (hereafter Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness).

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Read as a single work, the first essay introduces Améry’s radical exclusion from his own selfness, his culture and his relationships, with his existence and meaning transposed to a purely instrumental physicality. The second further clarifies the meaning of this loss as a loss of all faith in a common world and in mankind as a whole. In the third Améry goes on to discuss the meaning of a common human world, a homeland, out of which we are able to develop and shape ourselves as humans and moral personalities. Together these three essays point to a complete loss of an inner texture which constitutes all personal attachments to world and others from childhood. In the fourth essay, on resentment, Améry begins drawing the terrible conclusions of the situation imposed on him. His condition leads him to conclude that Nietzsche was wrong, and that sometimes, as in his case, resentment can be the most fitting moral response.3 He further concludes that once his personal mission has failed, the fitting response to his own resentment is self-annihilation and suicide. The last essay in the collection presents a final clarification of why Améry cannot be a part of any community.

References Jean-Marie, Vivaldi, Reflections on Jean Améry, Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Kravitz, Amit, Pitcovski, Eli and Ataria, Yochai, eds. Jean Améry, Beyond the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

3  As I will try to show later, acknowledging and writing out of that resentment was the only “high” form of transcendence afforded to him after the war, and one possible through living “philosophy as a way of life,” to quote Haddot’s famous paper. Here I will be continuing Jean-Marie’s point with regard to Améry’s perception of philosophy as therapy and as a possible home for his, otherwise homeless, self. See Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, pp. 126–17.

Part I: Loss

Abstract  At the heart of the first essay, “At the Mind’s Limits,” is a total loss. My commentary will begin by characterizing that loss—what it is and the price it exacts; how it came to be and what it means to those who suffer it. After a close reading of the essay, the chapter provides additional interpretation of the concept of loss in modern philosophy and in particular the philosophical works of Wittgenstein and Murdoch. It further discusses its place at the foundation of the overarching argument Améry unfolds. Keywords  Transcendence • Loss • Wittgenstein • Murdoch • Fantasy • Imagination The first essay, “At the Mind’s Limits,”1 is concerned mainly with the concept of loss. In it, Améry recounts his experiences in Auschwitz and 1  The German title is An den Greinzen des Geists. The German text distinguishes between the term Intellekt, which refers to a person’s mental cognitive ability and education, and the much broader term Geist, which includes a person’s intellect, but also their mind, spirit and culture. Geist refers also to emotional aspects of a person’s conduct in the world and, importantly for the purpose of this commentary, relations with other people. The English translation all but abandons this distinction. In this commentary, the distinction is restored, and Geist is referred to as either spirit or mind. In places where quotes were altered, the change is indicated by a footnote.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Ashkenazy, The Death of Transcendence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03815-0_2

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how what he experienced there was not simply loss, but a total loss, specifically the total loss of a fundamental human ability; the ability to relate to others and exist with others in the world—what I will term Transcendence. This loss and what it entails are embodied in a fundamental and essential change in the individual’s mode of seeing and being, which will be discussed later using Iris Murdoch’s concepts of fantasy and imagination. Loss, as it is traditionally understood in the Idealist and Romantic traditions, often relates to the fall of Western consciousness into instrumental and theoretical reason, which has become a primary human way of relating to others and the world. Here, I will use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work to present instrumentality as our most fundamental mode of transcendence. Wittgenstein’s writings on seeing as, meaning experience and aspect dawning demonstrate how our ability to transcend beyond this instrumentality constitutes our possibility of seeing others as human personas, and is therefore crucially implicated in the creation of interpersonal relations, by allowing us to see others as existing beyond their mere physicality. With Wittgenstein’s work in mind, Iris Murdoch introduced the concepts of fantasy and imagination, which relate our use of language to our perception of the world and others. While fantasy is our ability to use selfish images to hide from moral reality, imagination is characterized as our ability to transform those images into more realistic ones that acknowledge the reality of the world and others. This process of transformation, which can be presented as a continuous and progressive process of transcending toward others, is achieved through a purification of the individual’s way of seeing, the images and words that are used in the attempt to depict the other to oneself. Murdoch presented this change as a moral change of being which involves “loving attention” and results, when successful, in a new sense of self. I will refer to this process as one of mutual self-creation with the loved other. Both Wittgenstein and Murdoch follow a Hegelian path here, when they present the mature self as already taking part in, and partially determined by, transcendent relations within the world and society. The central intuition here is Aristotelian in nature, in which the we precedes the I in the order of becoming. We learn of friendship because we are social creatures initialized into an existing society, with concepts and institutes that allow us to experiment with friendship and experience its virtues.2 2  See Robert P. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness, Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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Jay Bernstein, himself a devotee of Hegel, describes a process by which first love, the love a baby receives from its parents, engenders in it a feeling of trust, security in its position in the world, and allows it, as an adult, to experience mature love, care for others free of the demands of the selfish ego. Moreover, Bernstein’s account also exposes the ways in which trust and loving attention are directly connected to acquiring a sense of selfhood and self-worth. It connects the most basic self-recognition with love and trust, and the ways in which gaining a sense of self depends on a sense of self-worth, which depends on trust in others and the world.3 This trust, as we will discuss in Chap. 3, was what Améry had lost when he was tortured in Breendonk. Later, in his time in Auschwitz, this became a total loss of self. In Améry’s case, this loss ultimately manifests itself in a total loss of his ability to positively transcend toward others, that is, to see and feel with them as one of their own. In addition to my main argument regarding seeing Améry’s essays as one progressive argument, necessarily leading to self-annihilation, I will also try to connect these themes regarding “seeing as,” creative imagination, loving attention and trust to the idea of mutual self-creation achieved via long and lasting loving relations. * * * Améry begins his personal story with a declaration that he intends to discuss the intellectual in Auschwitz. The cultivated, well-read man who, as we will later see, cannot find peace in any fantasy of perfection. He cannot believe in the fantasy of a communist era, just as he cannot accept the traditional Jewish conception of history. The significance of intellect is revealed to be the vantage point it affords to the intellectual, from which he is better able to recognize and understand what Auschwitz and the Third Reich mean for Western Modernity and for modern man in general. When the same intellectual, or Améry himself, as he writes a few lines later, finds himself in Auschwitz, he has to “confirm the reality and effectiveness of his mind,4 or to declare its impotence” (At the Mind’s Limits, p. 2).5 3  See Jay M. Bernstein, Trust: On the real but almost always unnoticed ever-changing foundation of ethical life, Methaphilosophy, Vol 42, No 4, Oxford, 2011 (hereafter Bernstein, Trust). 4  The English translation uses intellect here. The German term is Geistes. 5  Unless otherwise noted, all references in the text are to Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).

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The intellectual is able to do that exactly because he is both Western civilization’s most prized result and its central protagonist. Being an intellectual and a scholar, Améry believes in the Geist, a term which includes spirit, mind and the essential moral aspects of his own culture, or the source of its inner vivacity. This is the source of all meaning and sense for him. However, upon finding himself in Auschwitz, he reveals to us, he was forced to wonder on the reality and meaning of this “mind,” since, he claims, he could not find any use for it. Améry considers himself one of the “so called higher-professions”6 who were of no use to the Nazis, and had therefore suffered the worst conditions and labors. They lacked discipline, were physically weak and did not have the inclination to follow orders. Further, being refined and non-vulgar, their situation was “still worse: they didn’t even find friends” (p. 4). No less difficult, they realized that a “spiritual7 background and an intellectual basic disposition” could not help them in any way. Améry contrasts Auschwitz with Dachau, which held mainly political prisoners and, Améry notes, had a tradition and a library, and therefore spirit could find a fitting function within the prisoners’ society. Auschwitz, on the other hand, was a brutal “SS state” devoid of any tradition, in which “[t]he spiritual8 person was isolated, thrown back entirely upon himself. Thus the problem of the confrontation of spirit9 and horror appeared in a more radical form … in a purer form … in Auschwitz the spirit10 was nothing more than itself and there was no chance to apply it to a social structure … Thus the intellectual was alone with his mind,11 which was nothing other than pure content of consciousness” (p. 6). When reading these lines, the reader begins to understand what was it that the author lost in Auschwitz, and the meaning of its absence. Améry did not lose his spirit, but he lost its relation to any social or natural world outside of it. He lost its natural form, the way in which it integrated him into the community and provided him with a form of communication; a way of addressing society and marking his place in it. Every matter of spirit lost its reality in Auschwitz and became a forbidden indulgence which 6  See also the discussion on the inversion between “high” and “low” professions in Jean-­ Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, p. 13. 7  The English translation uses intellectual here. The German term is Geistesbildung. 8  The English translation uses intellectual here. The German term is geistige. 9  The English translation uses intellect here. The German term is Geist. 10  The English translation uses intellect here. The German term is Geist. 11  The English translation uses intellect here. The German term is Geist.

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merited condemnation and prompted aggressive responses from others. It is as if along with the loss of community and society in which mind had sense and meaning, with the loss of the “world” in which it naturally lived, any attempt to discuss it became nothing but self-indulgence, a weakening self-pampering. Spirit gave way to survival and instrumentality after it had “abruptly lost its basic quality: its transcendence” (p. 7). Améry describes this using an anecdote: I recall a winter evening, when after work we were dragging ourselves, out of step, from the IG-Farben site back into the camp to the accompaniment of the Kapo’s unnerving “left, two, three, four,” when—for God-knows-­ what reason—a flag waving in front of a half finished building caught my eye. “The walls stand speechless and cold, the flags clank in the wind,” I muttered to myself in mechanical association. Then I repeated the stanza somewhat louder, listened to the words sound, tried to track rhythm and expected that the emotional and mental response that for years this Hölderlin poem had awakened in me would emerge. But nothing happened. The poem no longer transcended reality. There it was and all that remained was objective statement: such and such, and the Kapo roars “left” and the soup was watery, and the flags were clanking in the wind. Perhaps the Hölderlin feeling, encased in psychic humus, would have surfaced if a comrade had been present whose mood would have been somewhat similar … The worst was that one did not have this comrade; he was not in the work ranks, and where was he in the entire camp? (p. 7, emphasis added)

To understand the above quote, we must consider the nature of the loss and deprivation described in it; its meaning and importance for the author and for human life in general. Améry recounts that facing the words of Hölderlin’s poem The Middle of Life, which naturally and immediately arose in him when faced with the flag waving in front of a half-finished building, he felt nothing. The “emotional and mental response” (p.  7) which Améry had come to associate with the poem throughout the years was lost. It became another matter-of-fact statement, as the Kapo’s roars and the watery soup. Reading the words of a poem as merely functional, that is, demoting them to the lowest possible level of transcendence, that of instrumental use, can be likened to urinating into Duchamp’s fountain. Améry clarifies that the words had lost the “Hölderlin feeling, encased in the psychic humus” (p. 7).12 All this might not have happened, he argues, 12  For further elaboration of the meaning of this type of transcendence see Martin Buber, I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 85.

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had there been another like-minded prisoner present; a prisoner he couldn’t find. And even if he had found such a prisoner, the few intellectuals he could have met would have refused to discuss anything beyond the mundane matters of survival and what it entails. They “no longer believed in the reality of the world of the mind, and rejected an intellectual word game that here no longer had any social relevance” (pp. 7–8). Even worse, Améry says, any detail or artifact of the culture which had given the Jewish intellectual his spirit and self-meaning belonged not to him, but to the enemy: “In Auschwitz … the isolated individual had to relinquish all of German culture … to even the lowest SS man” (p. 8). All of his mental resources, and as we will later see, the spiritual sense of his past, were brutally robbed of him, leaving him unable to realize or transform the self. This privation is experienced by Améry as a total loss of self. Auschwitz represents the collapse of communication and of the possibility of friendship and love, the annihilation of the possibility of any relation beyond a casual, survival-oriented one, along with the ability to share a common human and meaningful world. The ability to be myself through meaningful relations and meaningful activity and projects in the world. This is the loss Améry refers to. For someone like him it is to be considered a complete loss of meaning, and therefore of any feeling of humanity and of the world as a human world and as a home. Art as a higher form of communication loses its power, and friendship and love do not exist. Community and society have been annihilated, the entire existence had been diminished to the level of instrumentality and functionality, and life itself had lost any human character or taste. Even analytic thought had failed, Améry tells us, since the camp deliberately toyed with the prisoner. It was forbidden to miss a button, but inevitable to lose one and impossible to replace once lost. Guards took all your possessions, and then mocked you for having none. Shaving was mandatory, but razors were banned. The human mind’s entire structure of argument had lost its reason and meaning when basic logic, as well as humanity, was lost in the camp (p. 10). With the failure of the idea of pan-human logic, to which the free intellectual was so accustomed, and which provided a sense of security in the common and the human, the idea of morality itself had failed, and with it the concepts of humanity and personality. Moral categories were passing fashions in Auschwitz. Any idea of possible human progress quickly shatters in such circumstances (p. 11).13 13  It is worth noting the parallels to the feminist discussion on the “death” of the belief in the power of consciousness to change history, following Tolstoy, Weber, and finally Gillian

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Here, too, Améry was ill-served by his intellect. Unlike the common prisoner, who does not expect too much of the world for it to be meaningful, the intellectual is the first to understand that he faces his tormentors completely empty-handed. Unlike the Liberal intellectual, who had staked everything on the Liberal cultural project, the Marxist prisoner or the religious one had a communal “spiritual continuum” outside of himself which could give meaning to his personal suffering and struggle. “Both of them transcended themselves … They were no windowless monads; they stood open, wide open onto a world that was not the world of Auschwitz” (p. 13). In other words, they had a shared form of “high” transcendence, shared a (common and fantastic) world with a necessary order beyond circumstances, a world which lived in their communal imagination and in which Améry could not participate. That collective principle of transcendence, as fantastical as Améry considered it, held up.14 But Améry could not believe in any Hegelian idea to explain the situation in terms of the struggle against Capitalism, or the God of Israel who leads his people through the treacherous path of history. Unable to indulge in a fantastic reality like the rest of the camp, the intellectual lost everything.15 His spirit was lost and with it his own individuality, his dignity as a person, the control over his body and even the feeling of meaning and of home which art, thought, love and community bring with them. And worse of all—the intellectual Rose and Brown. According to Brown, the nihilism which accompanies the mourning process opens up possibilities for new futures. See especially: Wendy Brown, “Women’s Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics”, Parallax, 9:2 (2003): 3–16; 6, 7. 14  It is here where I feel Lahad’s misunderstanding of “fantasy” is most obvious, for humans cannot live in the ordinary (real and terrifying) world alone, they must transcend it through rituals and forms of socialness which rely, in part, on fantasies. But as Geertz notes, like rituals and other forms of D-cognition, when shared by many those mutual fantasies go on to change the nature of the ordinary world itself. This makes them very real indeed, in the sense that they are necessary components of any human existence in any human world. See Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry, p.  191, Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), introduction p.  12 (hereafter Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution). 15  Kitty Millet takes this argument a step further, arguing that the intellect did not only prevent the intellectual from finding a community within the inmates, but, by subjecting him to the logic of the camp, actively became his undoing, that the loss of transcendence was not merely a by-product of life in the camp but “an ancillary effect that his tormentors effectively used to end his existence.” See Kitty Millet, “Contemplating Jean Améry’s loss of Transcendence” in On Jean Améry: Philosophy of the Catastrophe, ed. Magdalena Zolkos (New York: Lexington books, 2011), pp. 21–37 (hereafter Millet, Loss of Transcendence).

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suffers his loss in full consciousness, unable to believe in the naive myths and ideals the common prisoner clings to. Améry’s testimony demonstrates how losing the ability to transcend his immediate condition means losing a primordial structure through which one extends into the world with others, a loss that results in a petrified state of selfhood which excludes the possibility of change and self-renewal. A state experienced as a total loss of self and meaning. Améry is therefore faced with a total loss. * * * The concept of loss, celebrated by early Idealist and Romantic writers such as Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel and Hölderlin had a lasting influence on Western philosophy, from Kierkegaard to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch. All associate it in various ways with the fall of Western consciousness into instrumental and theoretical reason. Theoretical (or objective) perspective was assumed to be a primary human way of seeing and relating to the world and others. This led to the expansion of an instrumental attitude and a technical mode of being into vast areas of human existence. Schiller was the first to claim that although this perspective is essential for the development of ancient and modern self-awareness, when it becomes dominant and is presented as the primary human perspective (e.g., in the writings of thinkers like Descartes), it distorts our understanding and leads to a growing estrangement. The idea that the most basic and essential human relation to the world and others was so distorted troubled many thinkers since and led many, like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, to despair of modern culture and struggle to create a new philosophical language (Heidegger) or develop philosophical methods (Wittgenstein), to try and combat its influence on our understanding and allow us a new speculative perspective, to paraphrase Schelling.16 I have suggested already that Améry’s loss can best be understood by another common term, and one he himself uses, that of transcendence. This term, while certainly used by other thinkers of the time, receives a subtly different meaning in Améry’s, and therefore also in this, text. It by 16  Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human life – Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago, Illinois: Chicago University Press, 1997). And also Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2014).

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no means conforms to the rigid definition of “that which is contained in itself,” or to the sharp distinction between “partial” and “complete” transcendence. Rather, I will strive to expose a new sense of the term, a more graduated one, applicable to both personal and communal relations. This sense would be revealed and defined throughout the text, but to attempt a tentative definition, we can say that to transcend is to go beyond. Transcendence, in its most minimal and fundamental sense (which Buber referred to as the I-It relation, Heidegger recognized in his discussion of the hammerness in section 15 of Being and Time, and Wittgenstein discussed when he defined words as tools used for various purposes), is a transcendence to the level of instrumental equipment. That is, beyond a mere existence of objects toward a configuration of usage with a certain, rigidly defined, mechanical order. An order which, were it to become a world order, would only produce an inhuman anti-world.17 This structure of transcendence into the dimension of equipment and tools, or what I termed a transcendence into the possible instrumentality of our world, is a fundamental structure of transcendence available to us, transcendence to the most minimal sense of the term world. While a world is only a correlate of the human, a purely instrumental existence implies only the most reduced sense possible of humanity. Let us open the discussion of transcendence, by examining Wittgenstein’s remarks regarding “seeing as” and “the dawning of an aspect,” specifically section 11 of the fragment on the philosophy of psychology (previously known as part 2 of Philosophical Investigations [PI]), where I understand Wittgenstein as leading the reader to the understanding that seeing people as human beings and as “one of our own” demands a minimal level of transcendence beyond the instrumental. For Wittgenstein, transcendence beyond our automatic instrumental attitude toward words and objects (which Heidegger refers to as being ready at hand) is transcendence beyond the necessary or material conditions to a gestalt. This relation is most easily demonstrated when we examine the characteristic human way of seeing depictive or representational objects such as paintings, human bodies and faces or religious icons. In all 17  See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, Blackwell, 1958). In particular, part 2, section 11, pp.  203e–240e (hereafter Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI, parts 1 and 2). See also Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World, Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects and Being in the World (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) (hereafter Mulhall, On Being in the World).

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of these cases we perceive the thing (a picture or a face) directly and immediately under a concept, that is, as what it represents (a tree or an expression of sadness, for example). And not in terms of its material conditions. This for Wittgenstein suggests a human attitude toward representations as what they represent. When confronted with my father’s smiling face in a painting, I see the painting as a representation of what is depicted in it. I never see “[a] collection of items that can be interpreted as a depicting object, painted with a collection of lines, shapes and colors on a piece of paper, which can then be interpreted as a depiction of a human face, which can in turn be depicted as the face of my father,” but “a painting of my father’s face.” More accurately, I simply see my father, and react to it as such. This “seeing” under conceptual clusters which give us a unified object of meaning is embodied in certain immediate reactions to the depicting object as if it were what it depicts.18 We never interpret like a computer or a translation algorithm, but simply and directly see a painting as a depiction, and what is painted as the thing depicted. We therefore react to it directly in the same way we would react to what is depicted, as when we kiss the picture of a loved one or shed a tear when facing an icon of God. Our fundamental human relation to reality already embodies a certain human arrangement. It embodies an intimate form of transcendence held in common with others, mediated by conceptual clusters, or conceptual images, which together constitute a human way of seeing and being in the world. The same form of transcendence is expressed when we use a phrase such as “this music is sad.” When hearing music, we do not merely hear certain pitches arranged in succession in certain intervals and rhythms, we experience its meaning. This property of the possible meaning experience we can have with art, that it relates to our inner feelings and emotions, and that it produces in us experiences which have a sense of sanctity and transcendence, is shared with religious experience, love and study. It is what Wittgenstein referred to as meaning feeling and presented as dependent on imagination, in his discussion of the “sadness” of music and the concept of seeing as.19 18  Michael Lemahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekple, eds., Wittgenstein and Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017) 54–70 (hereafter Lemahieu and Zumhagen-­ Yekple, Wittgenstein and Modernism). 19  The loss of the ability to experience aspect dawning and meaning feeling becomes clearer in Améry’s case, when one considers Lahad’s argument that Améry refuses the help available to him via using his Imagination. Although I suspect the truth is more complicated, for I

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This is the experience Améry misses when remembering Hölderlin’s poem. Reality exists for Améry in his state of total loss, but it lacks any sense of meaning, home and humanity. These depend on communication and codependency, and when these are annihilated, only alienated, instrumental functionality, completely separate from other human transcendent dimensions which made it possible in the first place, remains. The flag is just a flag and the walls are collections of stones arranged on top of each other for a certain practical purpose, nothing more.20 Being an intellectual, dependent on the company of similar cultivated men, when such men cannot be found, or are considered only on the level of physical, functional survival, Améry’s human world is lost.21 Now we can start to understand the meaning of Améry’s loss of spirit. For Améry, geist (translated to English as spirit or mind) denotes everything related to creativity, culture, aesthetics, religion, nature and so on. Its loss, therefore, means that all spiritual phenomena lose their hold on the world beyond them, as well as their ability to transcend time and space and give the intellectual or artist, for example, a sense of importance and meaning beyond, a sanctity or transcendence to a dimension of importance and reality beyond themselves. We transcend the instrumental attitude in our relation to art, others, natural phenomena and religious experience. To lose this ability is to lose the ability to transform our way of seeing— that is, the self’s ability to go beyond itself and acquire a new meaning and a new sense of selfhood. And this petrification is experienced as a total and complete loss of self. So, for Améry, losing the ability to experience the last three forms of transcendence and being reduced to the first, means, as we will see, an almost total loss of selfhood. Of all kinds of transcendence lost for Améry in Auschwitz, the most important was that of transcending toward others. Our ability to progressively transcend toward others in the context of personal relations is essential in mutual self-building and personal identity. This ability relies on a structure of human relations, themselves built on a less-than-­conscious, invisible texture of trust. This constitutes the core of what constituted selfhood and what it means to be human. I wish to present all these relations, believe he refuses one type of usage of the imagination for another. See Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry, pp. 173, 188, 191. 20  See Kitty Millet’s discussion of the term Wirklichkeit: in Millet, Loss of Transcendence, pp. 21–37. 21  See Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI, part 2, section 11.

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and the acts of transcendence that constitute them, as essential for being human and for perceiving a human world. Without them the world becomes a living inhuman hell.22 As Améry seems to suggest in this essay, while we can survive on a semi-animalistic and mechanistic level, as was life in Auschwitz, we lose our real particular self in the process. And it is here we will see him call upon the last type of transcendence, possible through resentment, a reactive or negative type of transcendence, for help. Here I’d like to introduce Iris Murdoch’s distinction between fantasy and imagination. She presents the first as the ability to hide from moral reality and its demands, that is, to succumb to selfish images that distort reality and empower the “I” and its egotistic wants and motives, and therefore hide from the nature of real world and other; and the second as the ability to transform fantastic images (or ways of seeing as) from childhood years to more realistic ones, that is, to images revolving around the reality of the world and others rather than the ego. Murdoch presented the loss discussed by Schiller as the product of complicated historical and social developments, but also as related to our basic nature as selfish beings and to the ever-changing nature of human reality.23 Our images and ways of seeing are formed in our childhood and we often shy away from the hard and long task of transforming them into more realistic ones. She also argued that while our everyday practices and our real concepts change constantly, our words remain the same. This fixates our consciousness and vision, blinds us to changes in our life and nature, and leads to a great conceptual loss, even if not a total one. A loss embodied and expressed by a nonsensical use of words under the spell of a misleading mental image, which leads us away from our real self and others. Murdoch thought that the major concepts lost on us are those of human selfhood and consciousness, and that the role of the philosopher was to retrieve them and allow himself and his readers a more realistic access to their everyday reality, that is, to our world and to our meaningful relationships with others.24 In this, Murdoch follows Wittgenstein, in suggesting that just like using a hammer, using words in an undeliberate, everyday manner does not require much awareness. We are configured onto their possible  See Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, introduction, pp. 2, 4–5, 8–11.  Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Press, 1992), p. 85. 24  Niklas Forsberg, Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (UK: Bloomsbury, 2013). Introduction and Chap. 1. 22 23

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functions in an immediate, direct and mechanical manner. As for the hammer, we are configured through the concept of “hammerness” which includes all of its possible functions in our lives. The hammer is the result of human creativity and action which are meant to enter into the world and manipulate it to our various needs. We are already with it, transcending into the dimension of possible activities when we see it from afar. And when we lift the hammer, it becomes, as Aristotle said, an extension of our arm and will which operates in the world. Wittgenstein presented words as similar to tools and instruments, the meanings of which are determined by their use in real-life contexts.25 In a common, everyday usage, we do not need to think about the possible meaning of our words, or what meaning the speaker attributes to them. As soon as a certain context exists, we are already configured into the practical rules of use in the contextual background in which they appear. Much like the way we are configured into the roles of games, which we naturally perceive as closed universes.26 Appropriately, Wittgenstein refers to our everyday uses of words as “language games.” Wittgenstein, who sees practical meaning or use as a collection of rules which determine how a word is used in a specific context, also sees the rule as a breakdown of a myth or story into human, ritualistic, moral and everyday practices. For example, when I hear the word “board!” shouted in a construction site, it means “Bring me a board!” and I do not need to picture the definition of a board as a rectangular object made of plaster which can be used for this and that and so on, in my mind in order to understand it. In the same way, I am not required to understand every possible use, or have control of every possible way in which the same word can be given different meanings in different places and times. I do not have any special inner “feeling” which accompanies the practical use of the word. Rather, the whole context in which it plays a meaningful role appears to have a particular purposeful atmosphere, in which it finds its correct use. Only when it is organized and presented artistically can this specific feeling of meaning and importance appear, as Hölderlin’s words did for Améry. But the human world is not a static one, it continuously develops and evolves as we continue to observe and consider others. Consider, for example, double objects such as the duck-rabbit presented by Wittgenstein  See Wittgenstein, PI, part 2, paragraph 11, p. 9e.  For a more extensive analysis of play see H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 106–136 (UK and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). 25 26

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in the fragment on the philosophy of psychology (or part 2 of Philosophical Investigations), which can be seen either as the head of a duck or as that of a rabbit, but never as both at the same time. When the aspect dawns on us and we notice for the first time that it can be seen differently, as the head of a different animal than the one we naturally assumed, or “saw as,” we express surprise. This surprise shows that we were caught in a “conceptual seeing” of the drawing. If we first saw it as a duck, the moment our perspective changes we will exclaim “hey, it’s a rabbit now!” in a surprised intonation. The reason for this is that with vision, much like with the daily use of words in language games, we do not realize that we see under a concept, we simply see, and react to depictions in the same way as we would react to the things they depict. Wittgenstein’s investigations lead him to present the relation of “seeing as” as distinctly human, meaning that as human beings we see directly through conceptual clusters.27 He exposes the complicated nature of human vision, and, as Améry’s text shows us, also its ethical significance.28 If a person or culture were to lack this relation, they would see everything as nothing but object and function. Auschwitz is revealed to be such a place. It seems one is warranted in deducing that the threat of falling into the purely instrumental mode of seeing is ever present. In order to present that theoretical possibility as inhuman, Wittgenstein considers two thought experiments: that of the aspect-blind and that of the emotionally detached, and tries to imagine how would such people experience reality and interact with each other and society.29 When faced with a portrait of his smiling father, the aspect-blind would not see the smile as kind. They would not see it as a smile, or see it on their father’s, or any human’s, face. They would not see it as a portrait, would not even see it as canvas and pigment. All they would perceive is atomic sensory information, from which they would consciously interpret the meanings we so naturally described. Naturally, they would not react directly to a change of aspect, such as the sharp transformation from the head of a duck to that of a rabbit in the duck-rabbit double image. The image would not take hold of their perception directly and immediately as  Lemahieu and Zumhagen-Yekple Wittgenstein and Modernism.  Avner Baz, Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception, Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 29  Wittgenstein, PI, part 2, section 11, pp. 213–216. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, & 383, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). 27 28

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either one or the other. They would perceive it simply as an object to be interpreted, first as a duck then as a rabbit. There would be no surprise, no experience of aspect change, no continuous aspect perception. The aspect-blind would not feel as part of humanity, would have no feeling of familiarity with language as a natural human habitus, as a home. They would not experience meaning feelings with words, would not be moved by hearing the names of their parents or children, would not react to a portrait of a loved one or understand how can one weep when facing an icon. More than that, they would have no feelings toward nature, would not experience it directly as meaningful and sublime. This contra-factual example presents a being that we will hardly recognize as human, which is more akin to a parody of the empiricist theory of perception, the idea that perception consists of interpretation of simple given atoms of perceived experience. This theory is part of an objective-­ scientistic view of human reality, which Améry exposes as part of a dangerous fantasy to rid us of what makes humanity human, excising every human weakness in the process. As Améry shows, were this view true, we would not be who we are. Western culture had toyed with the idea for years before the Nazis exposed its horrible potential. Gradually, one starts to recognize Wittgenstein’s investigation as a deep and critical look at our modern, instrumentalist culture, at the idea that humans are but an object complete with a set of functions, that the universe is a huge, empty, dead tank of objects related to one another only through efficient causes. Wittgenstein allows the reader to understand that we would not consider the aspect-blind to be truly human,30 and Améry’s experience confirms that. Feeling, modern man and culture must have taken a few wrong turns for this image to be presented as a legitimate view of the human world. Murdoch argues that something similar happens when we put in the effort to see others as they are, rather as how they affect us. The aspect dawns on us and we can see them anew, this time without the interference of our ego. This movement is, in her terms, a move from fantasy to reality, from seeing them through our wants and angsts, to seeing them as they really are. This feat is achieved by the imagination, which is dependent on

30  Mulhall, On Being in the World. Alexander Stern, The Fall of Language, Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2019).

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our ability to refine our fantasies.31 As we will see in the next chapter, these processes rely on what Bernstein termed trust in the world, a trust born out of first love. This first love is the love the baby receives from its parents and, through engendering trust, enables the baby later in life to experience mature love, which is the continuous personal striving to see the other as who they are, rather than through the lens of our selfish needs. My position here is an elaboration of what Murdoch suggests in the thought experiment of M and D in her essay “The Idea of Perfection.”32 By this I wish to connect transcending the ego’s base motives with the idea that we are being automatically initiated into humanity through different forms of transcendence, which we later need to personally transform by rearranging our attention in the process of creating our unique self with others. Failing or being prohibited from doing so diminishes our humanity or our ability to act, feel and see in a human and personal way. The processes described above are very unique and personal ones, in which two persons are trying to overcome general conventions and selfish motives present in their automatic ways of seeing one another. They strive to create a mutual self-structure, now built on higher forms of transcendence, that will allow their relationship a higher degree of freedom and originality. This is an achievement which requires great personal effort, and which, if successful, allows for an original and mutual self. The freedom achieved here is immediately manifested in their new shared vision. Let’s try and follow such a process through the example of an everyday relationship between life partners. A person’s image of their spouse, for example, can be so precise that they can see, just by the spouse’s smile, how hard their day at work was. This level of precision is achieved by the countless times they have let their partner be and moved themselves away 31  See Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge, 2014). 32  In that essay, Murdoch argues that M, a mother-in-law who has a low opinion of D, her daughter-in-law, could change her internal image of the daughter-in-law, and therefore her quality of consciousness or state of being, by interpreting the daughter-in-law’s behavior in a more positive manner. The mother-in-law, uncomfortable with the way she perceives her daughter-in-law, is intuitively driven to have other aspects of her behavior dawn on her. These new aspects change her mental image of the daughter-in-law, and ultimately her behavior toward her if they meet again (a possibility Murdoch excludes from the thought experiment, in order to make her point about the importance of the inner realm to morality). Ibid.

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from the center of attention in order to observe them. Ultimately, what we present as one of the greatest human achievements, an original, expressive and unique human personality, demands a long and arduous development of our ability to transcend the egotistical part of our self-being, and focus our attention on others. This way, lovers can have a very exact conceptual image of their partners, which allows them to see what others can’t. The exact facts with regard to my spouse’s state of mind can be completely clear to me while being almost completely obscured from another, who knows them only superficially. Something that I will see and react to immediately, that may put me in a moral situation demanding a responsible choice, may not even be identified by another, and for no fault of their own. Only I, as a life partner, entered the kind of relationship in which I was constantly required to take myself out of the picture, and concentrate on my partner’s specific ways of feeling and being. Only I can react automatically out of my specific mental apparatus, act out of my complicated and exact conceptual image of them, which ties me to their every expressive bodily and facial movements, no matter how slight and imperceptible. And when the relationship is mutual, both sides share the imagery, which now denotes parts of their mutual selfhood. This set of complicated relations, in which we extend with and toward one another, can lead to a form of being-for one another, in a mutual and loving world. This exposes the self again as a structure of conceptual imagery, born out of transcendence and mutuality, and also as almost completely out of our control. This is why at times it is enough that a loved one twists their mouth in a certain way, almost imperceptible to others, to ruin their lover’s day. We are already inside a network of conceptual images, a complex, meaningful and far-reaching network with others, with nature and with depicting and ritualistic objects. The personal space which every lover and loved one clears for the other is a mutual and shared constitutive space, in which they each transcend the I and become selves. Its absence or reduction is a lessening of the self. Just as a complete lack of relations which are not completely instrumental and interpretative embodies an annihilation of humanity itself. Again, the problem is that as humans we all suffer from a partial loss. We can be completely blind to the feelings of others and to the meaning of our words, just as we can sharpen our perception when we wish to instrumentally manipulate others. We are perfectly capable of being strange and estranged from one another in everyday life.

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This mix, which Iris Murdoch claims characterizes human consciousness or the human condition, creates many philosophical problems and confusions. Both friend and foe can be very sensitive to the condition of a person in front of them (a lover, however, would probably still have a clearer, more direct approach to their loved one, mainly because their gaze lacks other interests). In higher human relations of love, loyalty and friendship, both sides of the relation are required to put in an effort to lessen the egotistical I’s distorting influence, and to allow space for the other’s self in order to create an exact image of them. Through dedicating continuous attention to the other, we are able to weave a very precise image of them, by a continuous process of directing our attention, which includes repeated aspect dawning, so that our conceptual images of the world and others become progressively more detailed and specific. And while we described the process for two partners, something similar happens for larger communities, which determine and affirm their mutual identity as groups through participation in shared rituals or cleaving to common ideals, as in the case of the religious or Marxists prisoners in the camp. In both cases we focus on others, people or ideas, rather than on ourselves and our egos. We transcend toward them. All these are uses of the imagination which Améry, to his great loss, is unable to perform.

References Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Kravitz, Amit, Pitcovski, Eli and Ataria, Yochai, eds. Jean Améry, Beyond the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Baz, Avner, Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception, Introduction, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2020. Bellah, Robert, Religion in Human Evolution, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011. Bernstein, Jay, M. Trust: On the real but almost always unnoticed ever-changing foundation of ethical life, Methaphilosophy, Vol 42, No 4, Oxford, 2011. Pippin, Robert P. Hegel on Self-Consciousness, Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Brown, Wendy, “Women’s Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics”, Parallax, 9:2 (2003): 3–16. Buber, Martin, I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New  York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.

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Eldridge, Richard, Leading a Human life—Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism, Chicago, Illinois: Chicago University Press, 1997. Forsberg, Niklas, Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013. Gadamer, H.G. Truth and Method, pp.  106–136, UK and New  York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Lemahieu, Michael and Karen Zumhagen-Yekple, eds. Wittgenstein and Modernism, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017. Millet, Kitty, “Contemplating Jean Améry’s loss of Transcendence” in On Jean Améry: Philosophy of the Catastrophe, ed. Magdalena Zolkos. New  York: Lexington books, 2011. Mulhall, Stephen, On Being in the World, Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects and Being in the World, London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, New York: Penguin Press, 1992. Murdoch, Iris, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good, New York: Routledge, 2014. Nassar, Dalia, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2014. Stern, Alexander, The Fall of Language, Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2019. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell, 1958. Wittgenstein, Ludwig Zettel, & 383, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

Part II: I, Myself, Torture

Abstract  In the second essay, Améry describes the torture he suffered at Breendonk and the mental and psychological effects it had on him. At the heart of this essay is its author’s trust in the human world, its constitution and that which it depends on. Using works by Iris Murdoch and J.M.  Bernstein, the commentary discusses what is necessary in order to see and live humanely, the fundamental difference between being an I and being a Self, between having a body and being reduced to merely being a body, and how they relate to the loss discussed in the first essay. Keywords  Torture • Love • Trust • Self • I • Bernstein The second essay, titled simply “Torture,” delves deeper into the exact way in which Améry lost his ability to transcend toward others. It is the testament of a person who knows he will never again feel “held” or “grounded” among other humans, since his trust in the human world, his belief, his identity itself, have all been ruthlessly grinded by his Nazi captors and tormentors. This terrible ordeal has two main consequences: the impossibility of community, and the reduction of the self. Building on the concepts of I and self presented in the previous chapter, I will discuss J.M. Bernstein’s concept of trust in the world. I will try to show that this trust is a prerequisite for transcendence toward and with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Ashkenazy, The Death of Transcendence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03815-0_3

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others, and discuss how it is built through loving relations and how it is destroyed through torture. I will then discuss how Améry exposes torture to be an inherent property, a guiding principle even, of the Nazi regime, rather than simply a tool used by it. Finally, I will show how the tortured person is left in an existential paradox—living and functioning in a world that has lost all humanity for him, a paradox Améry can escape only by expressing his resentment and exposing the Third Reich for what it is. * * * In “Torture,” as part of the description of the concentration camp’s universe, Améry describes how he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo in the fortress of Breendonk, “halfway between Brussels and Antwerp.” At the time Améry wrote the essay, torture was again becoming an accepted technique in the West; the Americans, for example, practiced it in Vietnam. Améry believed that Western conscience had grown accustomed to torture after the world wars, and mainly in the European colonies in Africa (p. 23). On this background, Améry sought to differentiate the torture of his time (the 1960s) from that of the Third Reich. Unlike torture in Vietnam and the French colonies, which were a means of oppression and acquiring information, Améry argues that “torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence” (p.  24). While being tortured Améry discovered, so he writes, that the ruthless men of the Gestapo had human faces. They were not villains taken from movies or nightmares, they had “faces like anyone else’s. Plain, ordinary faces … [which] finally become Gestapo faces after all, and how evil overlays and exceeds banality” (p. 25). He could not, however, recognize those faces “like his own,” for, as we shall see, he could not recognize himself anymore as part of the former “we” or “us” he was raised in. An “us” he could now see only as a “they” to which he could never belong, and whose parts he could not recognize anymore as being “with” him, but only as standing against him. The first blow dealt by a torturer to his victim, Améry argues, is the most important one. It makes it clear to the prisoner that he is helpless, and gives shape to the torture to follow. It is the moment when knowledge becomes substantial. It is when the torture victim realizes that “[t]hey will do with me what they want. Whoever would rush to the prisoner’s aid—a wife, a mother, a brother, or friend—he won’t get this far” (p. 27).

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Soon after, Améry clarifies that it is not “human dignity” that the torture victim loses, for this he takes to be an arbitrary, shifting construct (p. 27). Rather, as Ilit Ferber writes,1 what the torture victim loses when the first blow lands is their trust in the world, which for Améry includes “the irrational … belief in absolute causality … or the likewise blind belief in the validity of the inductive inference … the certainty that … the other person will spare me … will respect my physical and with it also my metaphysical, being” (p. 28). This fundamental trust in the world is what stands at the basis of each particular conceptualization of “human dignity” which a human community can develop. Therefore, Améry’s loss amounts to losing a most basic relation of being with others in the world. Améry clarifies this central point to the reader by saying: “The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of myself. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel” (p.  28). According to Améry, when the first blow lands, the trust in the world collapses entirely, the other forces upon me its physicality and trespasses my boundary “and thereby destroys me” (p. 28). Améry goes on to compare it to rape. He also tells us that when you can no longer expect help from anyone in this state of torture, the act of another physically overcoming you becomes a destruction of your entire self-existence. The person is no longer the owner of a body, they become merely a body, nothing more. The help that the tortured will not receive is, according to Améry, his security in his community and the world. He reminds us of the mother who comforts her child, saying that she will bring them a hot bottle and a cup of tea, the doctor who assures the patient and the Red Cross ambulances that make their way to the injured even on the field of battle. What he describes is the intimate social tissue which resides in our spirit, is necessary for our survival and prosperity, and is built on free and legitimate transcendence toward one another.2 The expectation of help, the type of “heldness” or standing with, the care and comfort embodied in relationships of love and 1  See Ilit Ferber, “Pain as Yardstick: Jean Améry,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy—Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XXIV, No 3 (2016): 3–16. 2  The ambivalence between body and subjectivity could be exemplified using another “case study,” although admittedly, a radically different one. The analogy to the subjectivity expressed in pregnancy, especially as exemplified in Kristeva’s work, could illuminate important aspects of the “embodied” subject. See Kelly Oliver, “The Maternal ‘Thing’”, Reading Kristeva, Indiana University Press, 1993.

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kinship, solidarity and community are, Améry argues, “as much a constitutional psychic element as the struggle for existence” (p. 28). This is exactly what is shattered and disappears when the first blow lands. During torture, Améry tells us, “all your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body, the shoulder joints, and it does not react; for it exhausts itself completely in the expenditure of energy” (p.  32). “The border violation of myself by the other … torture is all that, but in addition very much more. Whoever is overcome by pain through torture … in self-negation, his flesh becomes a total reality … The transformation of the person into flesh becomes complete. Frail in the face of violence, yelling out in pain, awaiting no help, capable of no resistance, the tortured person is only a body” (p. 33, emphases added). This is the real essence of the Third Reich—a perfect denial of humanity and meaning, a reduction of the self, normally constituted through transcendent relations, to the boundaries of the physical, the I. Only Nazism, according to Améry, gave dominance to the violent, the ruthless and the ignorant as a matter of principle. Only it detested Humanism to the extent that it was not content with merely detesting, torturing and murdering its victims, but went as far as finding theoretical justifications for it (p. 31). Only in Nazism did torturers torture for the sake of torture. Torturing the enemies of the Reich and killing its contaminators was a virtue, it required one to overcome the human conscience in favor of the higher purpose of a pure and eternal Reich, as Himmler explained in his famous speech to the officers of the SS. The Reich’s torturers did not so much use torture as they served it, Améry says. That is, evil was a justified, worthy cause, and a constitutional human good was defined as evil (p. 31). Nazism, which places torture at its heart, as a central moral ambition, is dedicated to making the other merely a body. It is dedicated to annihilating the human from the person. Annihilating every possible relation of transcendence from the person’s life and self, tearing apart the fabric of their being. The tortured can never forget the wound left by torture, just as they can’t forget the one left by resentment (p. 34). In other words, Améry tells us, a person tortured by agents of the Reich cannot find themselves again in a human world of relations and meaning. They are forever destined to remain a diminished self who cannot transcend the boundaries of the physical, the I. Améry recounts that his torturers expressed a kind of sadism different from the sexual, pathological one described by Freud. Their sadism was

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psychological, existential. It expressed a radical negation of the other. Nazism bore the mark of sadism—it knowingly strived, as an ideology and a moral mission of the highest degree, to literally eliminate the person. First by annihilating their humanity, and then by making them into ashes, a function, a tool, a bloody piece of meat. Nazism was dedicated to tearing people out of their world and relations and throwing them into humanity in its most minimal sense, the body and its primal, egotistical drives, into functionality and instrumentality. This was all part of the deformation of the human figure from a person to be improved to an entire race to be purified through genocidal eugenic means (p. 35). By making the other into flesh and destroying it, “the torturer and murderer realizes his own destructive being, without having to lose himself in it entirely, like his martyred victim … he is master over flesh and spirit, over life and death” (p. 35). The Third Reich, represented by the torturer, acquiesces to a radical fantasy of affirming its own selfness and identity, not through consideration of the other and creating communication and commitment toward them, but through total control, ownership of their body and the complete objectification of it. Nazism portrays a fantasy of self-affirmation and an ascension beyond the human, through an expansion into the body of the other and a destruction of their human spirit, of them being a person with reality and value, who can support and affirm the reality and existence of your own self. The Reich legitimizes man’s degradation into a murderous beast. It creates a state in which the torturers are concentrated on “murderous self-­ realization … They went about their business, and the name of it was power, dominion over spirit and flesh, orgy of unchecked self-expansion” (p. 36). This is another incarnation of the age-old Christian fantasy (manifested, for example, in Nietzsche’s übermensch) to rise above the human and establish the Kingdom of God on earth, by converting the human species to something completely beyond itself and presenting it as the final and ideal uber-human state.3 It constitutes a rejection of the moral demands of real transcendence in favor of a fantasy of total transcendence, of 3  In an essay on Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, Charles Taylor presented Nietzsche’s rebellion against the idea that our highest goal is to preserve and increase life and prevent suffering, as a part of a rebellion against the confined moral dimension left for us by secular humanism, and as expressing an inability to be content with an affirmation of life. Something which Christianity and religion in general express as well. See Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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becoming gods. And it is realized here as a destruction of the humane, and as an extermination of our ability to become selves through our relationships and projects. An annihilation of our common way of life and our ability to manifest human relations. Instead of self-withdrawal in favor of the other’s appearance and reality, a focus on their being and concern with their autonomy, the Reich posits murderous self-affirmation, a radical affirmation of the transcendence beyond the human by its extermination. The definition of humanity itself is warped. Instead of being built on mutual and consensual transcendence, the Reich’s warped concept of humanity was constituted on brutal and one-sided transgressions of others. These transgressions violently severe the victim, which is defined as sub-human, from the mutual structures of transcendence which constitute humanity in general. This severance is what Améry cannot escape when he says: “It was over for a while. It is still not over. Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting, and accusing myself,” for one cannot “shake off torture” (p. 36): The tortured person never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may, according to inclination, call his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed … that a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh and by that, while still alive, be partly made into a prey of death. Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world …. Trust in the world … collapsed … in the end, under torture, fully … that one’s fellow man was experienced as the anti-man remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules … It is fear that henceforth reigns over him. Fear—and also what is called resentments. (p. 40)

* * * In the previous chapter, I discussed the concepts of “self” and “I” as essential concepts denoting not metaphysical or physical entities, but a complex set of inner abilities and structures built on relations with others and the world, of which we are never completely conscious. Here, I will use these concepts, as well as Murdoch’s distinction between ego and self, to further interpret Améry’s condition as one who, through torture, has lost almost all possibilities of transcendence. The only one he had left carried with it a death sentence, a sentence postponed for 33 years for the sake of his life-denying mission of resentment, but never revoked.

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Murdoch presents us as fundamentally selfish creatures, shaped in childhood years in ways dominated by the all-powerful ego. However, we also have an inner magnetic center that constantly pushes us toward care for others and external entities. This inner center allows us to build our original moral personalities, or selves, by constantly pushing us toward others, pushing us to transform our images regarding them, in search of the truth of things and individuals. These transformations, essential to love and mutual self-constitution, involve feats of what I called “high” transcendence, themselves functions of what Murdoch refers to as loving attention. This makes Murdoch’s essential concepts of the ego and the good (reflected on the epistemological level in the distinction between fantasy and imagination) very helpful in deciphering Améry’s condition and account of torture. Murdoch’s transformations assume what J.M. Bernstein calls trust in the world. This trust is born out of first love as part of parental care which “provides the ethical substance of everyday living.”4 These transformations are practically primary to rational constitution and developmentally prior to reason. They are built on mutual personal acknowledgment of vulnerability and respect. In this chapter I will try and develop Bernstein’s conception a bit further, by presenting its almost total negation in the case of Améry, and showing, using Wittgenstein’s and Murdoch’s ideas, how loving attention continues to be the key to our personal achievements of mutual selfhood with others. The central concept will therefore be that of love, as a continued personal striving to see the loved other as they are, while resisting the continuous pull of the ego toward one’s selfish motives and needs. In this sense one may say that trust as understood by Bernstein—a type of primitive and less-than-conscious attitude and seeing which mediates our most basic relations to others, “part of the original physiognomy of social interaction” (p. 405)—is a precondition and a precursor for mature love, which is itself essential for forming and transforming the self. That is, for our ability to mutually transcend toward one another. Following Wittgenstein, I want to say that trust is expressed in personifying seeing as present in ritual, and also to suggest that love is a deepening and expansion of trust, 4  See Bernstein, Trust, p. 395, For the remainder of this chapter, references in the text are to this work. See also Annette C.  Baier, Moral Prejudices, Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 98–9, 105–109, 149, 156–160.

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a continuous process of coming to another. Bernstein defines trust as an existential confidence that permits a forgetting of our dependence on others surrounding us, a relative existential safety “that we have a standing in the world that matters to those around us” (p. 398). Losing it exposes the “intractable dimensions of vulnerability, dependence, and potential helplessness that are normally hidden from consciousness … [and which] enable a trusting and confident relation to an individual’s personal, social, and material environments” (p. 399). This results in the undoing of “the self as a self … because of … [its] severed relations to others … the self disintegrates, no longer able to do those ordinary activities that define normal functionality” (p.  399). Once again, “loss of trust in the world reveals the self … [as] helpless before others … [and the] helplessness relates to the self’s standing as a person, as a self überhaupt.” Trust, Bernstein says, is born out of “first love” (p. 402), by which he means parental love and guidance. It is created in the child as an expectation that is then transformed into an attitude. It is prior to reason and is a primitive form of reaction and a pre-reflective attitude which enables types of phenomena, like persons, to appear (p. 404). I understand these persons to be the product of the child’s first experiences of transcendence, his first steps in constituting himself and his world. Bernstein goes on to present trust as “a constitutive attitude or orientation to the world that acts as an interpretative filter through which we make sense of the brute appearing of others” (p. 403), what I referred to earlier, when discussing Wittgenstein, as “seeing as.” That is, trust is a general name for our most basic human relation to the world. One that stands at the base of ethical everyday life (p. 395). A fundamental way of seeing and being in the world which presents it as human, or better yet, as having a human face. The “orientational acceptance of the other as one who accepts you into his presence” (p. 403). Bernstein also connects trust to normativity and to being part of the realm of justifications, in contrast to being only causally determined. He says that before learning to trust, infants must develop a sense of self-­worth in an inter-subjective setting, through their radical dependency and incompleteness, which is later completed by parental care (p. 407). They must learn what is the normal response to their presence, and when affirmed by the loving feeling of the caretakers, this becomes anticipation.5 5  Bernstein describes in the essay how a parent initiates their child into humanity through an extended exercise of loving attention, which eventually leads the child to develop trust in

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Furthermore, Bernstein relates all processes of socialization to mimetic interactions (p. 409), in which the child learns how to act in a way internally connected to relating to others. This explains the connection between self-standing and acting in normatively appropriate ways (pp. 409–410). This is how, through first love and mimesis (in which the right response is being lovingly affirmed), the child is being gradually initiated into the dimension of justifications, becoming a being that can make claims and respond to claims in appropriate ways. Gradually, the child learns to identify self-worth with being deserving of a normative response from others. This is essential for perceiving themselves as self-determining and as a source of value in themselves. This is also how they create a perception of the world, as a place worthy of a being that was loved the way they were. This perception is essential for developing a unique moral persona (pp. 412–415). We should note here that first love is required for developing trust, itself necessary for developing a human persona and a vision of the world as a home. And that all these relationships demand transcending toward others, first through loving mimetic reactions, later becoming a normative expectation. Bernstein exposes trust as the zero point of being a self, or being with others, and as partly built on a mutual fantasy (ignoring the very real dangers of our everyday world), which becomes a basic attitude toward others. It makes sense, therefore, to present trust as an extension and development of what Bernstein calls “first love,” that is, as a basic condition for all mature loving relations, including those involving focusing attention on natural objects, artistic creations and the objects of natural science. This loving attention reveals the child as separate beings, and according to Murdoch, demands progressive feats of transcendence. That is, it demands a continuous effort to leave ego behind, and let something or someone be for what they are, with no relation to our motives and interests. These relations of love should also be understood as progressive transformations

the world. This is done by making a gesture that, when repeated by the child, is rewarded with a special smile and tone of voice, repeated over and over again in a type of game behavior. The child is thus initiated into a correct use of specific expression, and simultaneously into the concept of following a rule, which stands at the basis of every game we play. This assures the child that the world has structure and order, which, when followed, rewards them with recognition. It is this recognition that stands at the source of their trust in the world. Trust built on initiation through love.

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of existing social structures and institutes, which already embody presumed relations of transcendence toward one another.6 I have already suggested (in discussing the way a husband and wife grow closer together and learn to know each other) that the end result of these efforts, when successful, is a mutual Selfhood. A mutual co-­extension into the world and others, which creates and is being created by this process. This all changes when the first blow lands. Therefore, I take Améry to be revealing a profound point when he discusses the torture victim’s realization, following the first blow dealt by his torturers, that there is no one to rush to his aid, a point I see as potentially embodied in Murdoch’s conception of the ego and the good. The self is something completely different from the I. The second is a fundamental condition for the possibility of the existence and development of the first, which is somewhat identical with Murdoch’s selfish ego. The boundaries of the body, which embody the I of self-reference, mark the self’s conditions of possibility, egocentric, mechanic and otherwise. The self needs a body and an I to be. However, it can only realize itself and come to be through transcending to a common world and to others, achieved through transforming inner imagery constituting the selfish ego or the I. In this sense, we must defend both our physical-bodily border in order to preserve our humanity and personality, and the possibility of free and legitimate mutual transcendence toward others. Human development is conducted primarily through personal relations of love, friendship and camaraderie. More precisely, by mutually transforming existing institutionalized relations into our own. Two people become more than themselves by diminishing the influence of the egotistical I and focusing attention on each other’s real self-presence, until they create a basis for mutual growth and development. Each person’s self feeds off and builds off the freely given attention of the other. The self then develops and expands into and with the world and the others in meaningful creative projects, some of which require the cooperation of others, while others are completely personal.7 6  Think of Aristotle’s example of friendship as an institute into which one is first inaugurated by their society, before they can truly transform it into their own in the context of a concrete relationship with a loved other. 7  In feminist literature, there’s an alternative tradition of interpretation of the subject, understood as vulnerable and dependent upon these relationships. In a sense, this tradition puts an emphasis not on transcending social and subjective conditions, but on engaging with them relationally. According to what has been argued so far, Améry is a candidate predeces-

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In the dialectic between the preservation of bodily boundaries and human dignity, and the penetration of these boundaries through love, consent, creation and cooperation, a real selfness can be constituted through a mutual self-focus between individuals and others toward whom they transcend. In the background there is always the threat that the aforementioned human relation will be reduced to an instrumental one, characteristic of the manipulations involved in this fundamental form of transcendence to the world, one which makes use of it for our practical, everyday lives. These efforts of “high” transcendence are efforts to afford attention to the humanity and unique personality of the other side of a relationship, to see them as human and as the unique personality they are. This is, in fact, the key to all our meaningful relationships in the world, and therefore the possibility of personality and selfness, uniqueness and creativity. A gradual and increasing transcendence toward others and the world, tied with an unending effort to change, focus and convert attention to a direct and accurate sensory perception. When a person arrives at the “end of the world,” which is Breendonk, to be tortured in its dungeons, they experience the exact opposite. Being brutally severed of almost all constitutive relations with world and others, they lose all faith in friendship, love, community and human meaning in general. These institutes, gradually built through consensual and mutual penetration of the self, are instantaneously destroyed as a result of the forceful and one-sided penetration of the body represented by the first blow. They are reduced to the boundaries of the egotistical, survival-­ oriented I of purely physical boundaries. The ruthless severance of his relationships, this positioning in complete helplessness in face of blows and pain, the knowledge that no one will come to give aid or comfort, these are all signs of the Nazi de-humanization that Améry sees as the essence of Nazism. When discussing how torture allows the torturer to safely face his own destructive urges, Améry implies again, this time by way of negation, how human relations of partnership, love and creativity can bring us to face the real image and personality of the other, which, just as our own, are inexhaustible. Facing, which in and of itself creates empathy and identification sor of this tradition. See especially: Lorraine Code, “Self, Subjectivity, and the Instituted Social Imaginary”, The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Oxford 2011), 733–734.

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by confronting one’s likeness in someone completely distinct, still requires an acceptance of the other’s excess, of their being a personality and mode of being which transcends the possibility of complete understanding, summation and exhaustion. Torture is the rejection of this fundamental attitude, whose mythical expression is embodied in the myth of man’s divine image, but is regularly expressed in our immediate willingness to transcend toward one another in everyday life.8 Améry mentions that this is a reversal of the social world. Instead of finding space for the other, responding to their suffering and restraining ourselves, all of which are necessary virtues for coexistence, the Third Reich sought to establish a society on the values of persecution, terrorizing and the murder of others. It is anti-humanity, embodied in a fantasy according to which it is such a society, built upon a complete liberation of egotistical and violent drives of murder and extermination, that will allow mankind to construct a society lacking the faults of the human creature, which is compassionate to others like it and is created only with the help of widespread communication and cooperation. For the Nazi regime, the broken trust, the inability to transcend toward others and share a common world with them, is not a by-product of torture, it is its purpose. It is a perfect denial of humanity which demands to be perceived as lovable, as worthy of the efforts of “high” transcendence, and which carries an implication that we are all equal in value as individuals. The Reich is therefore presented as a supreme expression of the human passion to annihilate everything that makes us distinctively human, such as dependence on others and the recognition of all others as human. And at the center of its cult of death and destruction stood a vicious attack on the possibility of being perceived as “lovable” and as worthy of “high” feats of transcendence. Himmler’s “sacred ground of dream reality” would not stand for anything to exist beyond it, it was to be an eternal, total and final reality. The Reich’s essence was to deny the self and leave the tortured in the confines of the body, as a number and a function in the system, with no hope for solidarity or relations with the outside. By definition, the torture victim must be presented as a “non-human” which disguises itself as human but is in fact a dangerous contamination. Therefore, he must be humiliated to the status of a non-human by definition, in order for the 8  In the same spirit, many studies have shown that when we meet others for the first time, we tend to treat them as equals and with a friendly attitude.

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Reich to be able to be what it is, a pillar of pretended supreme, pure humanity.9 Through the fantasy of a humanity pure of evil, aided by a system of “dual humanity” as Ernst Fraenkel notes,10 the Reich had the ability to give its supporters the illusion that evil can be completely purified from humanity, a vision which plays a central role and affords a wide basis to the radical evil on which it sought to constitute a “world.” This implies that the dialectic between preserving minimal boundaries and responding to the other and the world (alongside critical self-reflection, which embodies an acknowledgment of the ever-existing threat living in the depth of culture and humanity) is at the center of the Nazi offensive, which seeks to eliminate humans in order to purify its supporters. To excel as a Nazi one had to torture, eradicating all feelings of compassion, Améry explains. Améry detested the idea that Hitler was only part of a totalitarian trend which bears the real guilt, just as much as he detested Arendt’s idea that evil was banal and Eichmann was simply a Modern man, as anyone else. That is, he detested the idea that the Third Reich is nothing but a sin of Modernity itself rather than of its instigators and executioners, as if it was simply another phenomenon of evil. Being an attack on humanity and personhood, Nazism is revealed as not just annihilation and elimination of the person, but also as annihilation of the human world by severing it from the possibility of transcendence embedded in humanity (embodied in the fantasy of an ultimate reality here and now). Since one becomes a human and a personality through one’s relations and contacts in the world, the richer this world is in constituting relations, the more enriched the meaning of a person’s selfness becomes. Through negating the other, the Nazi torturer (and through him the entire Reich) constitutes itself as a complete sovereign over it. In this it was often described as a perpetuating intoxication. After one has become completely drunk on the powers of the selfish I by negating the being of others “at night,” there could not be any real sobriety in the “morning.” One had to constantly push the stakes higher, for that was the credo of the entire society. This can be considered a complete reversal of 9  Non-human, in the sense mentioned here, again relates to my understanding that to be reduced to ego and corporality, reduced to the basic general necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of being a human, is to be severed of almost all structures of mutual transcendence and thus to be reduced to a form of being which is sub-human or even inhuman. 10  Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State—A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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the Judeo-Christian idea of man created in the image of God. From its inception the Reich represented a declaration of war on humanity by denying Transcendence.11 Since the Nazi Reich is exposed as a project of denying high transcendence and communication from all non-Arians, and, as we shall see, Western language and culture were deeply infiltrated by the Reich, we must look for radical evil as close to home as possible, that is, as close to what we usually perceive as necessary and good, the basic nature of our common existence and our institutional arrangements.12 This reveals another fundamental issue: that for Améry the ideas of right and human dignity, which are embodied in our political institutes of human rights,13 equality before the law and non-coercion, are established on inner conceptual ties which have constitutive roles in the modern man’s inner world and rely on love, that is, on “high” forms of transcendence toward one another. Liberty is exposed here as part of, sometimes as identical with, a person’s inner core, not as a detached, outside political structure or a relic of an old, archaic Judeo-Christian ethics and worldview. Its loss is therefore the loss of the person in the deepest sense. This intuition, which identifies our selfness as tightly woven in mutual structures of conceptual evaluation, themselves dependent on “high” forms of transcendence, seems to have been forgotten nowadays, when a person can pretend that the unique values of their community (such as modesty) have the same status as the values that allow the democratic system, which is what enables them to preserve that unique community, along with its very specific set of values, in the first place. Améry reminds us that values are not fundamentally equal and that there is a core which

11  See Moshe Halbertal, Commentary Revolutions in the Making, Vol. II (Jerusalem: Magnes 1997). Max Webber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Stephen Kalberg (New York: Routledge, 2012), 39–93. See also the introduction to Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12  On this point, the fear that future generations will inherit Nazism against their will, through institutes and language, and on resentment as the only means of bringing the holocaust to a moral tribunal, see Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, pp. 76, 86–7. 13  In his essay “Améry’s Body: ‘My Calamity … My Physical and Metaphysical Dignity,’” Bernstein presents it as essential to being human and being considered human by others, which he identifies with being worthy of love or being lovable, something that is embodied and perspicuously presented in the discourse of human rights. See On Jean Améry, Philosophy of Catastrophe, edited by Magdalena Zolkos (UK: Lexington Books, 2011), pp.  40–41 (hereafter Bernstein, Dignity).

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makes us what we are, liberty in its most basic sense, and a more particular periphery alongside it. The two cannot be judged by the same standards. Here we can clearly see how positive freedom is required for the mutual selfhood, which becomes possible in personal relations through legitimate acts of transcendence toward others. This mutual selfhood itself depends on respecting the borders of negative liberty.14 * * * As we have seen, it does not take a long process for trust to be broken. It is shattered in an instant, the instant the first blow lands. In Hegelian terms, the first blow can be said to take us from a world of a recognition of every human consciousness being for itself, of it being a unique perspective on life and the world, just as mine is and with which I must occupy a shared dimension of justification, to a perspective that can forever be nothing but an interruption of my ambitions. It takes us into a world in which humans are objects or animals, which can either promote or hinder my will, and who should never be offered a justification of my actions. It takes us into the universe of the camps. Bernstein offers an intriguing account of that lost trust in accordance with Hegel’s understanding of human consciousness: “Trust is the ethical foundation of everyday life … a set of attitudes, presuppositions, and practices we typically fail to emphatically notice until they become absent” (p. 395). Losing it means a loss of “the sense one morally matters to others, that one’s existence is part of the moral shape of the world, and hence that the world has a moral shape for one” (p. 396). It is the undoing of a presumed relation between self and world, which results in the loss of the sense of the ability to determine yourself, “a kind of social murder,” that is connected to the experience of complete inability to exert control over the world (p. 397). As discussed, trust in the world is built gradually, through countless experiences and situations which configure us into the human world, and build our expectation that the condition of human distress would lead to 14  Negative liberty is the liberty to act without interference by other persons, that is, the individual’s ability to lead their life in any way they see fit, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The freedoms of movement, expression, religion, assembly and equality before the law are all negative liberties. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays On Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–172.

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and cause a reply from other selves who share our world, whose being is intimately tied with our own. The respect and sacred reverence of the boundary between two I’s, or bodies, are elemental to the ability of the self to grow and develop. The first blow from a torturer shatters not only that boundary, but also the fundamental belief that others will come to my rescue. It shatters a very fundamental human way of seeing which ties us to each other as personalities and human beings, dependent on each other to be themselves. The shattering of this boundary means that a new one immediately rises, between the tortured and the rest of humanity. In other words, what we realize when trust is lost is that we are dependent on others for our standing and being as persons, that our “pure” self is not enough for selfhood in the full sense of the word. A selfhood is relational in nature and always out of our direct control (p. 400), because trust is the primary form through which we recognize one another as persons. So when trust is lost, what Améry actually experiences is a sense of paradox, stemming from the fact that while he can still recognize the functional aspects of the world and even function within it, the humanity of that world, whose internalization precedes being initiated into this instrumental way of being, is lost on him forever. This is because this humanity was constituted on first loving relations, turned into normative expectations involving mutuality and freedom, and eventually emerging as a unique human persona or a self in the full sense of the word. The basic attitude of trust constituted through acts of transcendence, which usually serves as the foundation for every possible conceptual relation, including the objective and instrumental ones, is missing. These objective and instrumental attitudes themselves, however, endure as the only relations possible for Améry. This reality of something partial, yet in many ways constitutional (objectivity and functionality), which normally grows out of and is mitigated by something else (trust constituted by love, itself a matter of transcendence), now presents itself as the only possible mode of being and extending into the world. This is the hellish nightmare Améry finds himself in. What was once a unique persona with a rich and full sense of selfhood is now reduced to pure instrumentality. Ferber suggests that Améry reveals here violence and pain as public events, as events which shatter our common world. One may add that what is shattered is none other than the structures of mutual transcendence that form the basis for our essential way of being with others in the world. Améry sets out to present all this. That is the reason for his unique, distant writing

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style, a style which seeks to manifest the meaning of violence by pulling the reader into the experience, at least to a certain extent, in a way that no theory can. Améry seeks to make present the rift, the tear created by violence, a crack through which the dim flicker of essence of the anti-human can be seen. Whoever has experienced the rift and has glimpsed through it can no longer believe in the human world, certainly not take it at face value.15 Trust in a human world, fraternity and partnership, shown by Bernstein to be based on rearing, childhood and expectations, can in fact be seen as a way of seeing and a fundamental and immediate evaluative attitude toward the world and others. Its loss for those who survived torture and the camps erects a barrier between them and others, and creates a paradoxical experience of existence: a human world of care and mutuality is not possible for them, even as fantasy, but somehow it carries on for others. The survivor lives on among humans, and seemingly takes part in their world, yet is only able to participate in its instrumental aspects. Never again able to truly experience it as meaningful and as a human home, never again able to experience its transcendence. The survivors themselves, their very existence, become a paradox—just as torture in a common human world, they too appear along with their impossibility. For how is it possible that our humanity, which is built on partnership, fraternity and ongoing and mutual cooperation, is expressed in their radical denial implied by the very existence of the universe of concentration camps and the anti-world of torture? As a torture victim, Améry is a perpetual witness of the human fall, he experiences the unraveleness, fragility and paradoxicality of the possibility of existence of a human world. In order to survive in a human manner, as minimal as it may be, he seeks to draw the reader, and in fact the entire world around him, into the feeling and description of this tear, or rift, that torture opened in him and opens in the world. He makes the question into one which relates to humanity in general and to what conditions make humanity possible, as well as wonders on the possibility of radical evil being part of the normal human existence in the West in the years after the war. * * *

15  Perhaps this is the evil of which Simone Weil speaks, that enters into the man when harm is done to him. See Simone Weil, “Human Personality,” in Simone Weil, an anthology. Edited by Siân Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), p. 74.

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In order to contend with this fall, in order to resolve this paradox, Améry sets out on a mission to express his resentment and expose the inherent dehumanizing nature of the Third Reich. This, however, raises another paradox. Améry, who was born and raised in Vienna, whose father served in the Imperial German Army during World War I, was the product of the same culture and society that gave rise to the Third Reich. Resenting it means resenting himself. As we will see in the next chapter, however, this paradox was resolved before it was raised, for Améry’s culture and society had rejected him long before he could reject them.

References Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Baier, Annette C., Moral Prejudices, Essays On Ethics, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1996. Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays On Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Bernstein, Jay, M. Trust: On the real but almost always unnoticed ever-changing foundation of ethical life, Methaphilosophy, Vol 42, No 4, Oxford, 2011. Bernstein, Jay, M. “Améry’s Body: ‘My Calamity … My Physical and Metaphysical Dignity’” in On Jean Améry, Philosophy of Catastrophe, Edited by Magdalena Zolkos, UK: Lexington Books, 2011. Code, Lorraine “Self, Subjectivity, and the Instituted Social Imaginary”, The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Oxford 2011), 733–734. Ferber, Ilit, “Pain as Yardstick: Jean Améry,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy—Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XXIV, No 3 (2016): 3–16. Fraenkel, Ernst, The Dual State—A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Halbertal, Moshe, Commentary Revolutions in the Making, Vol. II, Jerusalem: Magnes 1997. Oliver, Kelly, “The Maternal ‘Thing’”, Reading Kristeva, Indiana University Press, 1993. Taylor, Charles, Dilemmas and Connections, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007. Webber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Stephen Kalberg, New York: Routledge, 2012. Weil, Simone, “Human Personality,” in Simone Weil, an anthology. Edited by Siân Miles. New York: Grove Press, 1986.

Part III: Homelessness

Abstract  The third essay discusses the homeland and what it means to those who have forever lost it, or more precisely, to those who discovered it was never theirs. This discussion reveals another essential condition for meaningful human existence: home and a feeling of homely familiarity, conditions that are attainable only by those who have a homeland, and have therefore been made an integral part of a certain community and society by the significant experiences of their lives, from childhood to old age. Keywords  Homelessness • Paradox • Identity • Language • Weil The third essay, “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” deals with the meaning of a homeland as a home and a common way of living to which the individual belongs, and from which they draw their vivacity and all possible meaning for their life. This is contrasted with homelessness, Das Unheimliche. Homelessness denotes an experience of a total loss of human belonging, of not recognizing your immediate environment as human anymore. It is a feeling of radical estrangement, accompanied sometimes by an experience of a total lack of recognition of one’s time, place, culture,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Ashkenazy, The Death of Transcendence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03815-0_4

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language and homeland, everything that enables a concrete identity and selfness—everything that Améry had lost.1 The previous chapter presented the early formation of trust as a condition for developing a full sense of selfhood, of becoming and being human or seeing the world in a human way, as a home for human life. Trust is required for a person to experience others as being with him, rather than against him. In this essay, Améry returns to the particular conditions of his past formation as part of a particular Tirolian community, in which his way of experiencing, seeing and being in the world was formed in his early years. He thus describes the ways and conditions that were most essential to the formation of his identity and sense of self, and how their loss led to the loss of that identity and sense of self. By this he exposes a most fundamental set of structures which usually remains hidden, but which nonetheless constitutes the structure of everyday human life, in all times and types of societies. A structure of institutes and concepts built on shared ways of doing and seeing things, themselves based on former ways of mutually transcending toward one another. Ways that have become institutionalized, and now signify what we can see as human and as part of us, but also the base for our possible future original selfhood, our moral being. Améry opens with the description of how he was smuggled into Belgium, escaping the murderous agents of the Reich. He explains to the reader that “the German word for misery, whose early meaning implies exile, still contains its most accurate definition” (p. 42). For Améry, the meaning of exile is first and foremost that there is no return. He labors to show that his loss is not identical to the loss of a German expelled from the Sudetenland, for example, because that German would have lost a country, possessions, a job and so on, but would not have lost his sense of self, his ability to identify with his community or his mother tongue as such. Améry and his fellow Austrian Jews, on the other hand, “also lost the people: The schoolmate from the same bench, the neighbor, the teacher.

1  Homelessness is a central feature and experience in the works of E.T.A Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Franz Kafka. Perhaps the most radical example of such estrangement can be found in Nabokov’s short story Terror. Heidegger also elaborates on the concept in his later philosophy. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). For an elaboration of this experience and condition see also Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, pp. 54, 64–65.

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They had become informers or bullies, at best, embarrassed opportunists. And we lost our language” (p. 42, emphases added). In this context, Améry notes his longing for his homeland. But what is it that he misses? As we shall soon see, Améry misses himself and his identity and personality, which, before the war, were tightly woven into the fabric of his constituting relationships, culture and language, all of which constituted his ways of transcending toward others and the world. He recounts that before the war: My identity was bound to a plain German name and to the dialect of my more immediate place of origin. But since the day when an official decree forbade me to wear the folk costume … I no longer permitted myself the dialect. Then the name by which my friends had always called me, with a dialect coloring … and my friends, too, with whom I had spoken in my native dialect, were obliterated … Everything that had filled my consciousness—from the history of my country … to the landscape images … had become intolerable to me since that morning of the 12th of March 1938, on which the blood-red cloth … had waved even from the windows of the out-­ of-­the-way farmsteads.

As a result, Améry continues: “I was a person who could no longer say ‘we’ and who therefore said ‘I’ merely out of habit but not with the feeling of full possession of my self … I was no longer an I and did not live within a We” (pp. 43–44, emphasis added). Améry adds that “[t]he itinerant Jew had more home than I,” for religion can be an “ersatz for home”; enough of a replacement for a group, assembled together in a collective fantasy. He also names money, fame and esteem as possible substitutes for a homeland. Améry, however, had nothing. He was unknown, devoid of fame or esteem, and therefore could not take part even in the fantasy of the “True Germany” of intellectuals. Améry’s exclusion is complete, the loss of his homeland and culture is almost the complete loss of his selfness. He was exiled from his own mind, from the German spirit itself, that is, from his own home through which he expressed and realized his selfness with others like him. When Améry is required to define homeland precisely, he says it is security (p. 46), expressed in an intimate understanding of the person sitting on the other side of the table in a beer hall, as well as the official or

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doorman; an understanding which stems from intimately sharing a way of life.2 Connecting it directly to the trust in the world he completely lost later, when he was tortured in Breendonk, he notes that just as in Breendonk, here too “faces, gestures, clothes, houses, words … were sensory reality, but not interpretable signs.” Unlike in his homeland, “[t]here was no order for me in this world. Was the smile of the police-official who checked our papers good-natured, indifferent or mocking? Was his deep voice resentful or full of goodwill?” (p. 47). Améry is unable to read his human and linguistic environment in the same immediate manner that a common past and community would enable him to. He had lost his security and sense of belonging, and “[t]he entire field of the related words: loyal, familiar, confidence” (p. 47). The adult exile faces signs which they are no longer able to comprehend as spontaneously as the ones into which they had been configured and wired directly in their childhood, “at the same time as … gaining possession of our external world,” the signs which they allowed to become “constitutional elements and constants” of their personality. Améry comments: “Just as one learns one’s mother tongue without knowing its grammar, one experiences one’s native surroundings. Mother tongue and native world grow with us, grow into us, and thus become the familiarity that guarantees us security” (p. 48). Effectively, Améry describes how we are configured into common structures of meanings which are based on common forms of transcendence. This is why for Améry “there is no ‘new home.’ Home is the land of one’s childhood and youth. Whoever has lost it remains lost himself” forever (p. 48). To illustrate the paradoxicality and cruelty of his situation, Améry describes a situation in which an angry SS man burst into the Belgian apartment where he and his friends were printing anti-German pamphlets. The SS man, who occupied the apartment below theirs, demanded that they stop making noise, so he could sleep. When Améry heard the man speaking his regional dialect, he was torn between a desire to answer in the same dialect, a desire engendered by a growing feeling of cordiality and 2  In this context, Améry prefers the preserving function of the home to the homebuilding one. This has interesting implications to Irigaray’s discussion of Heidegger’s preference of the homebuilding element in a home and its misogynistic implications. See Iris Marion Young, “Chapter 8: House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme”, in Motherhood and Space. Edited by Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer (London 2006, 116–118), p.  132 (hereafter Young, House and Home).

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intimacy, and the knowledge that uttering even one word in that specific German dialect can bring about his death. “For the fellow … whose joyfully fulfilled task it was to take people like me in as large number as possible to a death camp, appeared to me suddenly as a potential friend.” That was the moment, Améry says, that he has lost his homeland forever, when he realized that “the good comrade was sent here from the hostile homeland to wipe me out” (p. 50). That is the exact meaning of his description of “Genuine homesickness” as “self-destruction. It consisted in dismantling our past piece by piece, which could not be done without self-contempt and hatred for the lost self. The hostile home was destroyed by us, and at the same time we obliterated the part of our life that was associated with it. The combination of hatred for our homeland and self-hatred hurt” (p. 51). Toward the end of the essay, Améry shifts from a description of loss and its meaning to a description that resembles a discussion of what a man is and what is needed in order for one to be human, or a unique persona. He describes what those excluded from their homeland need. “[W]e are dependent on seeing, hearing, touching … we are accustomed to living with things that tell us stories. We need a house of which we know who lived in it before us, a piece of furniture in whose small irregularities we recognize the craftsman who worked on it. We need a city whose features stir at least faint memories of the old copperplate engraving in the museum” (p. 57). And if everything tells us a story, it means that for us, all these things potentially transcend themselves. Améry describes the absence of those things as a wound which never heals, because it is the sign of an insidious disease. What was lost, then, is all inner apparatus constituted in childhood years, every image transcending to the world or others, which was built on a sense of home and community later discovered to be false and illusory. That is, the entire past—everything that has happened and gives meaning and sense to their life and selfness. And in this sense, they have been cruelly excluded from their own selfness. Their presence was erased from the world along with everything they had been, and therefore with their identity in general. Améry notes, with characteristic acuteness, that “in order to be one or the other we need the consent of society. But if society repudiates that we ever were that, then we have also never been it” (p. 60). * * *

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Throughout the essay, Améry uncovers the importance of both a community and the kind of society which displays humanity and a respect for individuals, thereby allowing for free and rational self-expression. That is, the realization of an original and creative ethical personality. After mourning the loss of spirit and experience of transcendence in the first essay and explaining the loss of trust in the world as a complete breakdown of human selfhood in the second,3 in the third essay, Améry turns to discussing the meaning of being in perpetual exile, as related to a loss of childhood memories and the sense of belonging to an “us” and a “heimat.” By that, he exposes the meaning of a total loss of a community, a shared language and heritage he once felt part of, but which was revealed to be merely a fantasy. In other words, Améry traces here the “history” of his loss, how it gradually came to be experienced as a total loss of self and world. Again we see the self as constituted through communal and personal acts of transcendence from childhood. But Améry set his sights in this essay not on spirit and trust in the world, but on the loss of the German language and way of life. Language, as Wittgenstein and Murdoch often insist, means here more than words. It also means images, with no clear line drawn between the two. Those sounds, images, words and atmosphere played essential roles in forming Améry’s selfhood, so much so that he once mistook it and them to be his own and under his control. It is only when all sources of the former sense of security in body and home are lost that one experiences estrangement on a massive scale, and realizes that his way of being and form of life were never his. Let us return briefly to Wittgenstein’s discussions in PI on using words automatically and “seeing as,” as exemplifying both the meaning and consequences of being conceptual creatures with a conceptual way of seeing and being in the world. Wittgenstein exposes how our fundamental vision happens and receives its meaning in a common conceptual world. We learn the word “rabbit” through its common uses in our lives, by communicating and cooperating with others. Therefore, when we are in our natural, common state, transcending our body, or our “Iness,” we stand at all times in a common world with others, even when we are alone. The 3  Part of the function of home seems to be to provide one with sufficient caring relationships, a sort of trust, that serves as a condition for one’s ability to express themselves outside of home. Améry describes here a situation in which exactly this sort of home has been deprived of him. For a discussion on the positive meanings of home in this sense, see: Young, House and Home, 140–141.

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structure of perception is not personal or private in the sense that it is understandable only to me, it is a common structure founded on an interaction between creatures who have common concepts embodied in complex conceptual images we can share. This interaction puts them in a much more intimate proximity than we tend to imagine when we think of ourselves philosophically. In the discussion of “seeing as” mentioned in the first section, Wittgenstein suggests that we think of something utterly different from us which can still seem close. As we have seen in Chap. 1, if a person would always and immediately consider an expression of human emotion, such as a smile, as merely a twitch of facial muscles to be interpreted, that is, would perceive the human creature as a body, or as a bundle of physiological perceptions held together, we would not think of them as human. Seeing the inner depth in a human face assumes a common transcendence achieved through a complex conceptual image which was arranged into an immediate way of seeing (what Wittgenstein calls “seeing as” or “continuous aspect perception”). The image intimately connects us with others, by embodying the insight that behind every body and face there is an inner depth and a depth of personality, like our own. It is this continuous way of directly relating to reality with others that is described in this essay as permanently lost for Améry. It is as if one was violently robbed of what they always naturally perceived as their own, their deep childhood memories along with all of their immediate ways of relating to themselves as belonging to the others they grew up with. Ways and attachments embodied in an inner texture of imagery constituted through their entire life, and now lost forever. It is here where the meaning of the concepts of long experience, seeing as and individual selfhood start to converge. According to Améry, the most severe exclusion was from language itself, which continued to evolve in Germany out of the needs of the Third Reich, and was based on new and sinister concepts and images, such as contamination and purity, poisoning by a Mediterranean Jewish infestation and so on. This exclusion means that a significant part of his self-­ being became cancerous, attacking other essential parts, demanding him to take a stand and assist in destroying these rogue areas of his inner existence. Améry further remarks that the exclusion from language is also an exclusion from community. It is clearly an exclusion from the structures of selfness constituted through mutual transcendence which was afforded to

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us in childhood years by language and community. Améry’s mother tongue became the language of the murderer. With the alienation from it, the author’s self-presence in the world was gradually lost. This language, as he will note in the last essay, had spread into the West and begun to be used in it extensively after the war, when expressions such as “the Jewish problem” found their way into other European languages and cultures.4 It’s no coincidence, then, that Améry designates language and homeland as the main losses he incurred. As we have seen, initiation into language is the most basic initiation into the human race, through a specific community, and the homeland is where all lines of identity converge: the people with whom you grew up and experienced your constitutional experiences, the dialect in which you feel particularly at home, even the familiar lay of the land and of your childhood mythology. It is the determining background for the formation of all images that mediate our constitutional attachments in childhood years, and which become the less-than-­ conscious sources of our self-perception.5 With them, one also loses the ability for what Maslow calls B-cognition, an experience of fullness and wholeness that enables one to find meaning and comfort and cope with the usual everyday experience of deprivation, lack and deficiency characterized by continuous angst. A type of cognition Robert Bellah describes as emerging out of communal ritualistic games.6 This is what Améry implies when he mentions that, unlike the Germans who were expelled from the Sudetenland, he also lost the people and the language—a total loss of the “us” of early years, upon which all first attachments depend, and from which they normally continue to draw power even when one has grown up or even left their old home. Childhood attachments, which are constitutional in early self-forming, are mediated by deep and personal conceptual-evaluative imagery, and those are forged within, and in many ways depend for their meanings on, a specific community, language and culture. Améry shows here that community, language and culture dictate the ways and conditions in which one’s identity and sense of self form. These  See Holly Case, The Age of Questions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).  Jean-Marie points out that Améry is very influenced here by Heidegger’s perception of language as the essence of the human, our form of life, the seat of cognition and sensory experience, a necessary condition for having a will. That is the reason for Améry’s total loss of possibility of having a home and a true self. Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, pp. 55–58. 6  See Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, first chapter. 4 5

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ways and conditions include the communal institutional ways of transcending toward and with others, through which one is constituted in childhood years: those of friendship, belonging to a community and group, relating to transcendence through common ritual and so on. I understand these to be lasting communal institutes and projects of mutual transcendence, the personalization of which allows one to become a unique moral persona.7 They are all connected to an initiation into a particular language and manifested in a regional dialect, which Améry describes as being completely estranged from after the war. These pictures and sounds form what is sometimes referred to as the long experience, a term I take to mean something like a continuous seeing of an aspect.8 This is part of the continuous way one experiences everyday reality, part of the individual’s continuous way of seeing and feeling the world around them. As has been repeatedly hinted in previous essays, what was lost by the Jew who was a part of the German cultural and social project is not the same as what was lost by a person who lost their property in a storm. The former had also been exiled from their selfness, a selfness whose main expressions were embodied in their relations with others in the community, with its institutes and language. This loss is the real meaning of Das Unheimliche, homelessness. It is the loss of any mutual, communal and personal expansion and realization into the world which leads to deep, all-­ encompassing estrangement. Améry demonstrates how selfness depends on community when he recounts how his pre-war identity was bound to his German name and dialect. He shows not just that only within a “we’ can one obtain and feel a true sense of selfhood, but also that the total loss of that “we” he experienced was retroactive. Later, when discussing homesickness, he describes a retroactive action that dismantles the childhood memories and their special atmosphere, which constituted essential parts of his particular identity by transforming deep and constitutive images, once a source of belonging, warmth and security, into something foreign and hostile. In effect, Améry turned himself into an enemy of his former Self. In Chap. 2, we discussed the sense of paradox stemming from being able to function in a world whose humanity was lost. Something of this  See footnote 28.  For my use of the concept of long memory see Eran Dorfman, Foundations of the Everyday (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), chapters 3 and 4. For the concept of continuous aspect perception see Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World. 7 8

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sort indeed happened to Améry, although even his “total” sense of loss cannot be considered as totally complete, for he can identify and react functionally to his environment. But he has lost his immediate experience of them as human. That is, as belonging to creatures like him. They lost their “soul” and intimacy for him, lost their human character. Améry also experiences the reversal of this paradox when he encounters an SS officer who speaks his own dialect. He feels immediate kinship, based solely on dialect and accent, to a man he knows intends to do him harm. The officer stands as a monument of Améry’s lost selfhood, one built on being-with-others, and forged through communal initiation and mutual feats of transcendence in childhood years. His appearance represents the violent tearing of Améry’s inner structures of all images forming the most precious parts of his self-being, as well as the understanding that the way back is forever closed. All that Améry believed, everything he aspired to become, a German man, is personified in front of his eyes in the form of his persecutor and potential murderer. And that makes the expulsion from life and selfhood into a very real and dominant experience. Devoid of all former sources of transcendence, of all access to what Maslow designated as B-cognition—meaningful experiences of the world and of life as human and as one unity, he is left only with the deficient world experienced only instrumentally through angst.9 What Améry and other exiles have learned was that their homeland, and with it their language and culture (and therefore their community and all of their meaningful relationships in the world thus far), was never theirs. In fact, his belongingness to the Austrian society and German language was, as Jean-Marie points out, only an “Existential mistake.”10 In other words, through the loss of his homeland Améry went through a radical alienation and realized that his selfness was never his own, or even completely clear to him. It was based upon shared experiences, a common dialect and relations to others that turned out to be themselves based on an illusion, and melted away once exposed as forgery. This is another step in explaining his 1978 choice to take his own life, as an inevitable implication of his experiences and moral conviction during and after the war. Améry has not only lost his selfness when he lost his community, but even worse—because he was rejected so violently by his culture and former home, he was forced to become the executioner of his own memory and childhood. Any attachment to the past self meant the destruction of 9

 See Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, p. 5.  Ibid., pp. 64–65.

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the present one. Améry was forced to tear out his own identity, an inner bloody strife which could only result in defeat, regardless of the outcome. The fact that in those years even the most “culturally advanced” nations, such as Sweden, Australia and others, conducted eugenic cleansing of natives, Lapps, Aboriginals and others (in Sweden more than 60,000 people had been sterilized by the end of the ‘60s) affords Améry’s personal story an additional chilling aspect. It meant that the West still continues to wage war against itself and its higher values, and makes it clear that our Western way of life continues to attempt to “cleanse” humanity out of the person, as perfectly liberal as our rhetoric is. What Améry retains from his terrible experience is the understanding that the holocaust never ended; that he remained in some sense a “dead man on leave” from the moment the Reich declared him to be an enemy from within. There is also a holocaust in potentia that accompanies the West; the West is the same West, the Germans are the same Germans and mankind is the same mankind. This attack, therefore, seems to be an attack on a fantasy of human cleansing, which lives in the egotistical norms of the Western Christian community, as it lives in every individual who strives to overcome weakness, fear and evil through an egotistical projection onto others. The amazing thing is that the same way of life which cultivated the concepts of the image of God, the liberal state, human rights and so on holds in it the real potential for the radical rejection of the person and humanity. The desecration of the boundaries of the body and a forced transcendence into the other while destroying their autonomy, their freedom and their very self can presently replace a recognition of the equality of individuals and respect of their boundaries, as well as the mutual, gradual transcendence which allows a construction of real selfness, and an original and rational self-expression. In this universe, in which the anti-human ceaselessly penetrates the boundary of the human, it is hard not to remember Wittgenstein’s words in his Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics that “in the midst of life we are in death, so in sanity we are surrounded by madness.” Améry was cruelly excluded from his home and culture as an enemy and sub-human; a threat to the very health of his homeland and its way of life, a threat to healthy German self-being. The act of destruction is not only from the outside by the homeland, but also from the inside by those who were forced to understand this self-betrayal of the communal parts of his selfness, and aid in the process of disengagement, alienation and destruction. This meant a constant process of inner struggle and self-­ negation. He mentions that only a historic move of return, from within and at the request of the homeland, could have rectified the act, and begun

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the return of the lost self. This, however, did not happen. And when all else failed, it was again resentment that allowed him to transcend his state and survive with some dignity, for it provided the only real and moral depiction of the social and ethical situation in post-war Europe. In the words of Jean-Marie, “in contrast to Hanns Chaim Mayer, which embodied the unity of native customs, language, and socio-cultural practices, Jean Améry is singular and fragmented.”11 Améry sets out to create himself in his critical and literary work and takes on his new name for that purpose. As I will try to show, he did so based on the only real inner resource of transcendence he had left, a form of reactive resentment allowing him only a temporary and minimal self-expression and sense of self, not enough for the creative fashioning of a true substantial self. In the words of Simone Weil, “A man, considered in isolation, has only duties. He … has rights when seen from the point of view of other men, who recognize that they have obligations towards him.”12 In exile, Améry is alienated from his environment, and by that he is also alienated from himself. This exile, followed by the torture he suffered in Breendonk and his experience in Auschwitz, resulted in his ultimate exclusion from the entire human community, an exclusion which, as we will see in Chap. 5, made it necessary, and at the same time impossible, for him to be a Jew. To summarize my argument so far, in an effort to present Améry’s short book as one continuous and devastating accusation toward German and Western culture, an argument necessarily leading to his own demise because of the inability to live by resentment alone, I argued that the first essay introduces the loss of transcendence, that is, the loss of a human way of seeing and being in the world. The second essay presented becoming only a “body” with the breakdown of selfhood emanating from forever losing trust during the experience of torture. The third essay went farther in elaborating the loss of the inner structure of images, forged in childhood years and constituting his identity, now gone with the lost language and fatherland. All of this paves the way for one of his most powerful discussions, of the last and only means of transcendence left for him, that of resentment.13  See Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, p. 59.  Simone Weil, “The Needs of the Soul,” in Simone Weil, an Anthology. Edited by Siân Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), p. 74. 13  For an alternative account of Amery’s conception of the homeland, see the introduction to David Ohana, Birth-Throes of the Israeli Homeland: The Concept of Moledet (London: Routledge, 2020). 11 12

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References Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Bellah, Robert, Religion in Human Evolution, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011. Case, Holly, The Age of Questions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Dorfman, Eran, Foundations of the Everyday, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Heidegger, Martin, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Jean-Marie, Vivaldi, Reflections on Jean Améry, Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Ohana, David Birth-Throes of the Israeli Homeland: The Concept of Moledet, London: Routledge 2020. Mulhall, Stephen, On Being in the World, Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects and Being in the World, London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Weil, Simone, “The Needs of the Soul,” in Simone Weil, an Anthology. Edited by Siân Miles New York: Grove Press, 1986. Young, Iris Marion, “Chapter 8: House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme”, in Motherhood and Space. Edited by Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer, London, 2006.

Part IV: Endgame

Abstract  In the fourth essay, Améry proceeds to discuss the profound relationship between belonging to a society and culture and having a sense of self and self-worth. The perspective is that of the exiled who have been brutally cast out of society, and it discusses the possibility of their return to human life. The essay discusses the meaning and value of the victim’s resentment, promoted as necessary for the victim’s ability to transcend himself, and thus his only possible mode of self-existence, affording him the minimal positive transcendence he is capable of after the holocaust. Resentment allows Améry to embark on his last mission, thus filling his life with meaning and even a community in which he is unable to participate in the “real” world. Keywords  Resentment • Nietzsche • Alienation • Kant • Hegel The penultimate essay in the collection is titled simply “Resentments.” In it, Améry clarifies the extent to which the self which has been radically alienated—alienated from its homeland, and therefore from its language, culture and early constitutive relationships, from its selfness and even from its own body—cannot be rehabilitated. This alienation from selfhood and impossibility of rehabilitation entailed feelings of resentment, which remain the last inner moral-creative resource available to him. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Ashkenazy, The Death of Transcendence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03815-0_5

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This chapter is dedicated to the analysis of “resentment” as more than a wish to reverse time and an inability to join the living, even for moral reasons. Criticizing Nietzsche’s description of resentment as a reactive attitude, Améry presents his refusal to proceed with time and his wish to reverse the past as the only correct response,1 not only morally but also epistemologically—as the only right way to describe and understand the holocaust historically.2 Therefore, resentment will be presented here as both a political act and an internal moral and mental attitude, itself demanding and affording transcendence through a creative use of the imagination. On the one hand, my interpretation will follow Jean-Marie’s argument, claiming that Améry’s feelings of resentment were used to expose the horrors of the holocaust and present the demand that they be recognized by the perpetrators. On the other, I will suggest that they should be understood as an act of personal transcendence. As such, they provide the only piece of self-­ being possible for Améry—albeit only for a limited amount of time—given the situation in which he found himself in post-war Europe. Finally, following Brudholm’s suggestion that the two viewpoints should be integrated, as well as David Heyd’s remark that Améry’s resentful attitude demands that the perpetrators be sucked into the experience of the survivors, I will attempt to show how these two aspects not only coincide, but support and complement one another. Presenting Améry’s feelings of resentment as his last possible form of transcendence exposes them as providing him his only possibility of being with others as part of a “we,” that is, of having a true sense of selfhood and community. This itself depends on the possibility that this “we” accepts his critical assessment of its culture and way of being. Resentment is therefore the source of both Améry’s tactless existence after the war and of his final 1  Amery’s justification of his resentment bears some similarities to the feminist discussion of the role of resentment, and negative emotions in general, in aspiring to justice, especially from an epistemological standpoint. For a further elaboration of this point, see: MacAlester Bell, “A Woman’s Scorn: Toward a Feminist Defense of Contempt as a Moral Emotion,” Hypatia, Vol. 20, No. 4, Analytic Feminism (Autumn, 2005): 80–93. See especially pp. 8–9 for an elaborate discussion on the potential of such emotions. 2  In a fascinating article, Amit Kravitz explains Améry’s argument on the necessity of the subjective perspective and judgment of the survivor for a real “objective” assessment of the Holocaust, and how so-called objective history, done from a perspective of a purely descriptive science, represents a moral and epistemic failure when evil is involved. See Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry, pp. 22–23, 27.

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act of resistance, his suicide in 1978.3 Without the collaboration of his society and community, this death sentence became inevitable. Indeed, one may even argue that Améry was murdered by his own society twice, the second manifesting as suicide. Améry opens his discussion of resentment with Nietzsche’s argument that it can never be a proper source of true originality.4 Nietzsche considers Western Christian morality to be the product of an inward application of violence by a lower class of weak slave-like people, who could not accept their weakness relative to their masters or betters. Lacking an ability to act in a healthy and creative manner in the real world, to act out of an inner sense which seeks to express and create in the world, the revenge they took on their masters was negative and internal. It took the form of a gradual shift in the values celebrated by the masters’ class, such as generosity, power, cruelty, respect toward your enemy, contempt for the weak and so on. The new values they created were the Christian values which celebrated the poor, the weak, the sick, those who renounce the worldly goods, who turn the other cheek. They thus created a new value system, which digested the healthy nobleman from within, celebrated the regressive and weak aspects of mankind, and as time went by, managed to overcome nobility and create a new and powerful clerical elite. The priests created a conscience which tortured the healthy man who sought to enter the world with creative power and create it in his own image, and gave themselves both right and might. Their actions were reactive and vengeful. Instead of confronting their enslavers in the real world, their weakness led them to seek revenge on the inner mental dimension, by poisoning their souls with values that celebrated weakness and unoriginality. This unoriginality is a result of resentment being a negating response, rather than an independent, positive and creative action. This lack of originality is also related to the fact that each negation carries with it the sense of what it negates and without which it would not have any sense (pp. 67–68).5

 See Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry, pp. 88, 93, 98.  Nietzsche develops and describes his theory of resentment, or ressentiment, in his On the Genealogy of Morals. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 5  See also Raymond Geuss’s lectures on Nietzsche available on YouTube. 3 4

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Early in the essay, Améry declares that “I speak as a victim and examine my resentments” (p.  63). He diagnoses resentment as a disease which originates in victimhood, and immediately clarifies that the source of his resentment is not that justice was not done and that war criminals were still living in welfare in Germany of his days (p. 63). He seeks to characterize his situation as a victim, infected by resentment, and then to accept it, and even justify it, as an inseparable part of his personality, but also as indispensable to German society. Paradoxically, the only real living, authentic and relatively free part of his moral persona and inner being. In other words, Améry seeks to justify the same thing which necessarily renders him incapable of complete human self-expression, and, in fact, sentences him to self-destruction. To this end he describes the historic process through which these feelings of resentment have formed in him. It is his last and final anchor of transcendence. Améry begins by describing the German and Western reaction to the holocaust. Immediately after the war, he recounts, everything was in order. The political prisoners were lauded as heroes, and their torturers were banished from the victors’ camp (p. 64). For a while, Améry found himself strangely part of the mainstream. He imagined that he had conquered his past torturers. But that did not last. Very soon the discourse of regret began to wear down, and the discourse of German victimhood took center stage. Moreover, he describes how at times he had had discussions with intellectuals whom he describes as refined, modest and tolerant, but “it always seems unreal to me when I think how many of them … only yesterday swore by Blunck and Griese. Because not a trace of it can be found in our conversations on Adorno or Saul Bellow or Nathalie Sarraute” (p. 62). In only a few years Germany had shaken off its collective guilt, Améry says. A militant spirit rises up again in its citizens, it stops talking of regret and focuses on victimhood and a return to the family of nations (pp.  65–66). The Germans draw victimhood back from the pursuit of their collective consciousness, and now present themselves as “overcoming” their fate since the war, their dissection into two political entities and humiliation after the war. They forgive their enemies in the most corrupt way possible, by presenting themselves as victims of the radical evil they themselves created. This attempt by Germany’s statesmen to ignore a discussion of the past through reparations to Israel, denial and victimhood is something Améry cannot remain silent about (p. 67). Contrary to those who wish to reject the Holocaust as the act of a gang of murderers, or as an accident in German history, Améry wishes to

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present it as an inevitable result of German culture itself. That’s the source of his claim that it was not ordinary man, some general trade of Modernity alone, that was responsible, and that’s also the reason for his deep despise of the idea that it was only a cadre of madmen surrounding Hitler who were responsible for the Holocaust, and that the German people carry no responsibility (p. 67). Since the end of the war, the Germans made it clear that they carry no ill feelings toward those who fought them, and that they consider the past to have been merely an accident, and that it is those who harbor any resentment because of it that are morally at fault. Unlike them, Améry could not, and did not wish to, overcome his resentment, and even made an effort to cultivate it. For him, resentment was the only fitting moral response: not only his only means of survival, but at the same time the only way for him to critically reconnect with German and Western culture (p. 67). So when he notes that textbooks on psychiatry discussed the victims and the internal wounds of war, claiming that “the character traits that make up our personality are distorted. Nervous restlessness, hostile withdrawal into one’s own self … it is said that we are ‘warped.’” Améry seems to rise to the challenge these words hold, and sets out to define this warped state “as a form of the human condition that morally as well as historically is of a higher order than that of healthy straightness” (p.  68). Here he directly opposes Nietzsche’s position and suggests that there are times and situations where reactivity can be a source of a more moral response than creative action—that in his condition, it is in fact the only moral response. The problem for Améry is not the morality of his condition, but the fact that it is “logically inconsistent.” When the world refuses to accept the truth of its condition, it isolates and ties the survivor to the ruined past he discussed in the previous essay. Améry must therefore demand that time be turned back if he is to be able to return to and rejoin the human race, after every source of relation to humanity and a feeling of security in it have been systematically annihilated for him by the agents of the Third Reich.6 And since one can never return to the world on his own, without society returning with him, and certainly not in a way that erases what had happened previously, the survivor cannot return to himself and regain his selfness, feel his life has meaning again. The only meaning left viable for him is the one produced through resentment (p. 68). 6

 See Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, p. 71.

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Through his resentment, Améry presents what must happen so he could still continue to live as a person, something he knows he can demand, but will never receive. Améry demands that his torturers negate themselves as they negated him. Only so could they join him and share in his condition.7 He demands decisive victory in the field of informed action, that is, in history. His resentment would be satisfied when “the crime becomes a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity.” This demands a full and willing acceptance of his understanding by the others (p. 70). Only that could allow him to start over and create a real and original self, within a new community—one which accepts and celebrates his war-time experience and its horrific meaning as real and as critical for its own identity and well-being. Here, Améry exposes the fact that his personal loss of self and identity is also a communal one—German culture and community have also suffered an extreme loss during the Nazi revolution, a loss of former identity and communal and political virtue. And if the community is to return to itself and to its real moral possibilities, it must place the survivors at the center of all that is good in it, in a way that exposes the Nazi crimes as what they are, a sinister self-betrayal of man and culture. It must present the survivor as its central image of the human moral good. What Améry really demands, and presents as impossible, is that all of his torturers, their helpers, those who ignored what they saw and the silent supporters, all share in his resentment and seek to turn back time. This movement, which will lead to collective repentance, could have—had it been possible—put his personal disaster at the center of the community. But overcoming resentment when such repentance is impossible (i.e., when all forms of transcendence toward others remain blocked) demands acceptance and willful participation on all sides. For Améry, that means repentance which accepts the Third Reich as the flesh and blood of high German culture, just as Schiller and Goethe are, which accepts that this radical evil was born of the essence of Germanness, rather than of some inconsequential margin (pp. 70–71). Améry demands that society as a whole aligns itself in accordance with the significance of the past, as he sees it; from the perspective of a survivor and a political prisoner. He demands that it transcends its egotistic struggle to prosper and justify its past doings, and place those rejected as its best and brightest sons and daughters. He clarifies that it is a moral man who 7

 Ibid., p. 77.

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demands that time be annulled, an impossible demand that the criminal would be nailed to his deed and could, when time has passed, rejoin the victim as a person. This, for him, is the only appropriate demand (p. 72).8 For Améry, while not every German was an accomplice in the crimes, the crimes still did enter his consciousness as the collective acts of the German people. The good people “were not numerous enough in my numberless statistics to tip the balance in their favor” (p. 73). The multitude of bad people outweighed them (p. 73). Considering all those who worked to maintain Auschwitz, there was no recourse but to declare that “Hitler really was the German people” (p. 74). The few brave Germans Améry had met in the war “have already gone under in the mass of the indifferent, the malicious and vile, the shrews, the old fat ones and the young pretty ones, those intoxicated by their authority, who thought that it was a crime not only against the state but also against their own ego if they spoke with people like us in any other but a crude, domineering tone … They were the German people. What was taking place around them and with us they knew exactly. For they perceived the burnt smell from the nearby extermination camp as we did” (p. 74). Faced with the multitude of petty bourgeois, academics and workers who willingly followed the evil of Nazism, the victim cannot help but think that Hitler is the Germans, and that they all took part in this ritual of mass murder. And the world preferred to punish the victims for their impudence in refusing to forgive, rather than the perpetrators of the crime itself (p. 75). Faced with this warped sense of seemingly Christian forgiveness, the reader can’t help but being reminded of Kierkegaard, who took pains to make it plain to his contemporaries that what, on the surface, seemed to be Christian piety was nothing but a selfish and evil corruption, which considers only appearances and rejects the meaning of humanity.9 8  And in post-war Germany, it is those full of resentment, with their “unhealthy” attitude toward time, who are truly ethical. See Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), p. 105 (hereafter Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue). 9  Brudholm points out here that when Améry convicts the whole of the German people, it is for the sake of the younger generation, who did not participate in the Holocaust, but who will find itself contaminated by the values and language of the third Reich without a proper historical understanding. Brudholm dedicates his book in part to the idea that forgiveness is not always the right response, and is definitely not a replacement for justice. Here, I can only add that allowing the situation to go on as it did made sure that German and Western conceptual images constituting the picture of the “good” self remain contaminated perhaps to this very day. See Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue, pp. 2–4, 66, 135–146.

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Améry sees the generation of his torturers, Hitler’s servants, those who poisoned his selfhood and almost exterminated him, live to see respectable old age, while he is being blamed for holding on to his resentment and the demand (which he thought supremely moral) to turn back time. “The world” he writes “has sentenced me, not those who murdered or allowed the murder to occur. I and others like me are the Shylocks, not only morally condemnable in the eyes of the nations, but already cheated of the pound of flesh too” (p. 75). Améry also cites a letter by a German teen, born after the war, who asks to no longer be reminded of his fathers’ wrongdoings, since the English too had killed many Boers, and the Americans had also murdered many Germans in their bombings (p.  74–75). Post-war Germany succumbs itself to victimhood and resentment. It resents the demand to take responsibility for its actions. This is indeed a weakening and an anti-moral stance, which could never lead to an original moral and cultural renewal. Améry’s resentment, on the other hand, is the exact opposite—it is a demand that lessons be learned, that responsibility be taken. Indeed, it is the part of his inner self that allows him to keep living and surviving in an estranged world. In this sense, it is a wholly moral stance directed at the social realm as much as at the individual inner being. Améry voices his objection to the claim that time heals all wounds. He denounces the return to life and conformity as an immoral response.10 It is not feelings of reconciliation, but the survivors’ resentment that he feels should drive the German people to digest its Nazi history as part of its German essence (pp. 77–78). Only when Germany would come to see the choice of the Third Reich as a negation of its goodness, only then would it join the victims who were negated by it, and would no longer repress the Reich’s rule. Then history could become moral again. Only when the German people, as a collective, would undergo a revolution to parallel the Nazi one, a revolution in which it will spiritually chew, digest and regurgitate the Nazi aspects of its past, only then would the survivors’ “resentments be subjectively pacified, and have become objectively unnecessary” (p. 79). Améry retains his feelings of resentment since this is the only appropriate, or even possible moral response to the meaning of World War II. And because no one is willing to take them from him and repair history by their light, he swallows them (p. 81). He swallows them, and they gnaw at him,  See Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue, p. 105.

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until finally he can no longer bear to live. Only through resentment Améry remains capable of any kind of transcendence and ability to play any meaningful existential moral role for his former community. And although resentment is the proper moral response to the survivors’ horrible situation, without external support it cannot afford its owner the possibility of a real selfhood with others in the world. As we will soon see, his resentment is what defines Améry as Jewish, and it is the only thing that does. He must be a Jew because he must resent his Nazi tortures, but he cannot be a Jew, because there is nothing else to define him as one. * * * In recent years, the discussion regarding Améry’s feelings of resentment has revolved around the question of their meaning and implications. Two sides quickly emerged, reflecting a deontological attitude on the one hand and a Hegelian hermeneutical one on the other. Kantian interpreters see Améry’s resentment as permanent and prohibitive of reconciliation. It is to be forever preserved as an expression of total desperation and of the absurdity of his personal situation. It is a personal ethical response to the experience of the Nazi radical evil, one that leaves only one ethical option to its subject.11 On the other side of this dispute stand those who see Améry’s resentment as related to the social situation in Germany after the war, as a wish that the Nazi past be integrated into the German historical consciousness, which has become reactive and adopted a false attitude of victimhood, accompanied by a demand that the survivors look only forward, that they forgive and forget. These interpreters see Améry as concerned primarily with the social and cultural state of his culture, and therefore believe that Améry’s resentment could, in principle, be overcome given the right social response.12 11  See David Heyd, “Resentment and Reconciliation, Alternative Responses to Historical Evil,” in Justice in Time, Responding to Historical Injustice. Edited by L.H. Meyer. (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2004), pp. 185–197. Susan Naiman, “October 1978: Jean Améry Takes His Life,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996. Edited by Sander L.  Gilman and Jack Zipes. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 75–82. Giorgion Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books), 1999, p. 100. 12  See Jean-Michel Chaumont, “Geschichtliche Verantwortung und menchlicge Würde bei Jean Améry” In Über Jean Amerz, Edited by Irène Heideberger-Leonard. (Heidelberg: Carl

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Thomas Brudholm presents both sides as lacking. The first is loyal to the personal aspects of Améry’s text but blind to the social ones, while the second is too focused on the social, neglecting the personal. Brudholm’s interpretation suggests that these two perspectives should be integrated.13 In this vein, I’d like to offer a third option, one which sees Améry’s loss and feelings of resentment as both a personal tragedy and the only mode of transcendence left possible for him. Resentment therefore represents both a personal crisis and a refusal to join the world, and also the theoretical possibility to do so (a possibility not realized because of the Germans’ refusal to earnestly engage the meaning of their past doings). This reading brings together the Kantian personal perspective and the Hegelian social one, and by that connects the possibility of being a human consciousness and an ethical persona with transcendence toward the world and others, constituted within a social and cultural background. In that, I’m once again following a Romantic insight expressed by Murdoch, that the relation between the self and an ethical and political community is somewhat transcendental. Each mirrors the other, at least to some degree, and cannot be understood or expressed clearly without it. I will therefore try to present resentment both as an internal ethical issue and as a social political one, by relating it to the concept of transcendence. Jean-Marie presents Améry’s concept of resentment as a mechanism designed to expose the horrors of the Holocaust and oppose the demand that the Jewish communities conform and assimilate into European society. It embodies the demand to recognize that there was torture. Resentment is therefore Améry’s rejection of a European attempt to suppress the Holocaust in the optimistic spirit proposed by Nietzsche. Instead, he offers it as a mechanism of preserving the past against the demand to transcend it. A way of opposing the morality and the processes which characterized the society of his time. This can only be done if the Germans, and indeed all of Europe, accept the Holocaust as an integral part of German culture and heritage. In his demand to transfer the evil of Nazism Winter Universitäsverlag, 1990), 29–47. Jan P. Reemstma, “172,364: Gedanken über den gebrauch der ersten person singular bei Jean Améry,” In Jean Améry (Hans Maier). Edited by Stephen Steiner (Basel/Frankfurt am Main: O Stromfeld/Nexus, 1996). Margret U. Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Revelations After Wrongdoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 141–143. 13  See Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue, pp. 168, 170–175.

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from history to the European consciousness, Améry is transcending Nietzsche’s concept and qualifying it.14 From Améry’s point of view, the Modern conception of humanity itself had failed, and with it, humanity as a whole. Intellectuals were revealed to be spineless participants in a Socratic dialogue; parodies of responsible moral human personality. The criminals roam free, and Germany starts to rear its head again and stand up for itself in a roundabout, self-righteous manner. This is why, Améry says, from the 1950s onward he starts developing feelings of resentment.15 As an example, he mentions a German merchant who explained to him that Germany is no longer racist, a statement he supports by mentioning the reparations it paid to the young state of Israel. At that moment Améry felt as if he was a kind of Shylock, asking for his pound of flesh. That merchant was by no means the only one to hold this position. Indeed, after the war, popular sentiments in Germany ranged from putting the full weight of the guilt on the shoulders of the Nazi regime and Hitler in particular, through considering the German people to be the central victim of the Nazi party, to outright accusations of Jews as the cause and sole winners of the war. The fact that large parts of the German population knew, and were ashamed, of the extermination of Jews even during the war, as well as American attempts to force the populace to confront the horrors after it ended, did not alleviate these sentiments, and perhaps only stoked them.16 14  See Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, pp.  67–8, 70–71, 73, 83, 85, 88–89. 15  Reading the first three essays suggests that resentments started building up in Améry already in Breendonk and Auschwitz. In this regard I want to suggest that at that time they were mainly means of personal-ethical survival, and only after the war he came to fully acknowledge them as a necessary moral response to his social environment. 16  See David Bankier’s introduction to Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt. Edited by David Bankier and Jacob Golomb, Translated by Jacob Gottschalk and Daphna Amit (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006), pp.  9–29, and the sources cited there, in particular: Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungmacht: Ein Beitrag zur historisch politischen Neubesinnung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags - Anstalt 1949), regarding the consideration of the German people as the central victim of the Nazi regime and restricting the blame to Hitler alone; Morris Janowitz, “German Reaction to Nazi Atrocities,” American Journal of Sociology, 52 (1946), pp. 383–401, regarding German population knowledge of the atrocities; Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden: Eine deutsche Rechtslehre (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), regarding accusation of Jews; Tim Gallwitz “‘Unterhaltung - Erziehung Manhung’; die Darstellung von Antisemitismus und Judenverfolgung im Deutschen Nachkriegsfilm 1946 bis 1949″, in beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses. Edited by Andreas

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The new Germany was revealed to be a thin layer of tact, culture and acceptance of its fate that covered a smoldering abyss. Germany is full of victims, fake forgiveness for its destroyers and in fact a deep hatred of whoever will try to drag it to the depth of the hell which was the Third Reich in order to confront the actions of its sons and daughters, and the meaning of these actions. Germany and, as we will see, the entire world seek to be cured without having to swallow the bitter pill of a painful critical examination of their actual selfness and culture. Many have commented on this post-war state,17 but not enough attention was given to the fact that Améry’s accusations are equally strong when it comes to the whole West, indeed the whole world. When reading Améry’s account, it quickly becomes clear that it is not only Germany that stands trial, but the West as a whole. The future belongs to these people, Améry says. And at this point, his condemnation becomes a general accusation of the entire Western world. Since the world stands by the Germans’ side and with the evil of moral relativism, which equates Auschwitz with the Boer internment camps, the world justifies the criminals and demands that the pesky survivor dies. Améry demands that Germany embrace and accept Schäfer and Himmler as its own flesh, just like Goethe and von Stein. He demands that Germany understand that evil is alive in its culture, that the Third Reich was not an accident, but an integral part of itself and its own narrative. Hitler and his actions must be perceived as part of the German history and tradition. Only when Germany takes responsibility for its past and places the survivor as its hero would Améry’s resentments fulfill their historical role and morally advance the world, and only then would he be able to be morally free of them.18 Here Améry argues that embracing the survivors is the only way to put the Western Modern project—a project in which Germany took center stage before the war— back on its true moral track.

Hofmann & Irmtrud Wojak (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999), pp.  275–304, regarding the failure of American re-orientation efforts. 17  See, for example, Theodore Adorno, “What does coming to terms with the past means?” In Bitburg in Moral and political perspective. Edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Translated by Timothy Bahti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) p. 115. And Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration. Translated Joel Golb (New York: Colombia University Press, 2002), p. 6. 18  On this point, of resentment as moral advancement, see also Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, p. 83.

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Améry detests the idea that the Holocaust and the Third Reich were only accidental to the history of the German people, the idea that “everyone suffered” during the war and that now it is time to reestablish a common humanity, without the need to deal with the real significance of past events. As one who has personally experienced his culture fall into the deepest abyss, armed with a nuanced understanding of that culture and way of life, he wishes to present the Holocaust in the right light. As far as Améry is concerned, there is no shortage of blame, but there is also a hierarchy. And it is German and Austrian culture and tradition that stand at the top of the pyramid of accused. That is the reason for exposing German forgiveness as a reactive resistance to the real and collective guilt. This is the meaning of his last mission, ever since his release in 1945. He sets out to express his resentment completely by putting a mirror in front of the German culture and nation, and then acts as this resentment finally demands: die. This last mission consisted of the demand that the Holocaust be moved from history, where it safely sleeps, to the consciousness of its perpetrators, that it be integrated into their culture with full awareness of its source and meaning.19 In this he exposes the Hegelian aspects of his self-­understanding and remains paradoxically loyal to his lost culture and upbringing. Indeed, Améry sometimes seems to think himself one of the last real representatives of the true German culture, as is evident in his critical demands from it. However, Améry knows that this will never happen, and that his resentful demands will remain unanswered as long as the Third Reich is considered a mere accident rather than something which had happened in Germany and grew organically, as an integral part of its culture and history (and by extension, as part of Western culture). * * * In total agreement with Jean-Marie’s view, I wish to add the personal aspect of Améry’s experiences and thoughts, that of a total loss of transcendence and real selfhood, which is deeply connected to the state of his society as a whole. Recognition of that state by that society was essential for a true self-understanding, and for the demand for a deep cultural change.  See Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, p. 87.

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When Améry makes the choice to use the concept of resentment to describe his inner world and its values, he not only suggests that his life and selfness are lacking the possibility of a complete self-determination and free, original self-expression, but also sentences himself to never be able to free himself from them, without general external cooperation.20 Moreover, Améry is determined to respond to Nietzsche, for his resentment, which is expressed in his critical examination of his past and the trial of his torturers, is both necessary for the minimal manner of freedom and transcendence he is still capable of and what allowed him to survive and meaningfully express himself for two decades after his imprisonment. This presents the reader with another horrifying insight into Améry’s condition, the fact that his creative and moral effort can only be made through renewed identification with the culture that turned on him and tried to destroy him. In some ways, Améry still thinks of himself as a German, perhaps one of the last “real” and loyal tenants of the real German culture and way of life still alive. And this is also what sentenced him to death, once he finally realized his sentiments will not be adopted by his society and culture as harboring crucial moral criticism, that his mission had failed. For it made an authentic and moral response possible only as part of a reactive mode of self-­ negation, as it presents the so-called healthy Western self as an anti-human abomination, thanks to its debt to the Third Reich. Therefore, insinuating that, without a radical change in the German and Western historical narrative and consciousness, there could be no genuine transformation of Western selfhood, which is constituted by it. No deep cultural aspect change of the type Wittgenstein discusses in the introduction to his Philosophical Investigations. Améry’s culture betrays him a second time by denying its responsibility in this manner. It triggers in him another self-destruct mechanism, one he is determined to expose as a destruction of everything that was good and worthy in his former heimat. Deliberately tactless, Améry is determined not to allow the world this pretense. He throws his own shattered self and body in its face and demands justice by exposing his own resentment for all to see. This self-destruction is the last feat of original and moral self-­ expression possible for him, and the last and ultimate personal-moral mission he takes upon himself: to tell his story after the war.

 See Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue, pp. 101–119.

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The exact reason for the “death sentence” mentioned above is that the person Améry had never made it out of Auschwitz. His true self was turned into ash along with those whose bodies perished there. The only part of him that made it out was his resentment. And without being realized in the public sphere, it could not afford him the possibility of a new free and creative selfhood. After he was dehumanized, turned from a self into an “I” and robbed of all of his internal resources, the only part of his self-being Améry could preserve was the part that did not originate directly from his selfness, but was a response to the violence projected on him. In a similar vein, he would later write of the violent response as the only response fitting for the camp prisoner.21 * * * To summarize my argument on resentment, the mass betrayal he experienced by his culture left Améry lacking a possibility for a positive meaning experience of belonging and wholeness. He is unable to see it as a “home,” and to relate to its habits and language. Locked in an isolated inner prison of resentful imagery after being defined as a dangerous threat, and being retroactively robbed of all childhood memories and attachments, all he can do is write out of the only area of inner moral life he has left. For him to ever feel part of a meaningful human whole again his entire culture and society must undergo a complete change of aspect. Without it, he can never break out and live in the light, for there are no other parts of his selfhood available for him to rely upon. He must reject any attempt at reconciliation that does not adhere to his resentment, for that will only be a disastrous moral fiasco on his part.22 Here, resentment functions therapeutically, as a “high” (although negative) form of transcendence. It allows Améry to survive until his moral mission is done. But in the absence of a society which accepts and appreciates this moral criticism, it ultimately leaves him with only one option. Still, this is not necessarily a sentence of death by resentment. If only Améry’s culture and community would have joined this ambition to 21  Ibid., 117–118. Bernstein identifies an insistence on self-respect and dignity in Améry’s violent response to the Polish criminal in the camp. See Bernstein, Dignity, pp. 53–55. 22  My response to Lahad’s question, why didn’t Améry use transcendence to survive in the camp, would be that he used the only possible one for him in the situation during and after the war. The only form viable for him in his state of complete loss of world and self. See Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry, p. 182.

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restore the true meaning of the past and turn it into a communal mission to be achieved, he could have found new sources of transcendence to revive his lost selfhood. But this did not happen, and left to his own devices, resentment afforded Améry only a limited amount of time and creative energy to continue. The difference between Améry’s state and that of his environment is the same as the one between those who can and those who cannot repress. Here, however, the repression is done on a massive scale, saving the repressors the trouble of having to deal with its social and personal consequences, at least for a while. However, only resentment allows the transcendence needed for a genuine and critical response, that German and Western selfhoods, not just Améry’s, require. In other words, Améry’s mission includes a claim regarding the right path toward healing and reestablishing the true German self, not only his own. That’s part of the reason he rejects the idea of a literary Germany of intellectuals as being merely a piece of selfish sophistry unable to yield any real atonement, and therefore providing no real moral resources to begin anew as a nation and a culture. And indeed as Brudholm points out in 2010, “During the last couple of years, German victimization and the humanity of the perpetrators have become prominent issues on the public scene … Améry would have found sufficient reasons to retain his mistrust.”23 A decade later, I dare say the situation in Germany has only worsened. Hate crimes on a scale never seen before and even the murder of liberal politicians have become all too common. By taking his life more than two decades later, Améry leads the blame back to the German Reich, which exists in him as part of his feelings of resentment. In that he also turns Nietzsche’s ideas on their head and shows that not everything which helps promote life is moral, and that resentment can in fact be, in certain contexts and even at the cost of living a full life with others, an appropriate moral response. It was resentment that helped him survive the camp and make it through the post-war years by offering him a minimal form of transcendence that allowed him to reject the camp’s life and “logic.” By demanding that the perpetrator be united with his victim in punishment and consciousness, Améry is indeed transcending imaginatively to a fantastic reality, albeit one that is more moral and therefore more self-conscience 23  See Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue, p.  147. On the post-war situation, see pp. 73–78, 91,134.

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and real than the reality of his time, one demanding a real and deep social and cultural change that will allow future generations to continue in a healthy and moral way by integrating the Nazi past into German historical consciousness. This, in turn, will allow him to positively transcend to his society and play a moral role within it, allow him (at least partially) to take part in a common “we” again. Améry’s demand that Germany, Europe and indeed the entire West must willingly partake in his resentment stems out of responsibility and a wish for them to come to terms with their past and live by their real values. But it is also essential to his own moral and personal survival. His private reality of resentment represents a philosophical home to replace the real one he had lost, but it is a temporary one, which requires the compliance of the outside world. However, once it becomes clear that this fantasy will not be realized, its owner discovers himself as living on borrowed time, delaying the final tactless act of suicide. By that he had made it possible, at least for his readers, to come to terms with, and to understand, the problems of German and Western society, which have become problems of the Modern self.24 Améry does not only criticize Nietzsche (and according to Kravitz, Heidegger as well), he also offers a more detailed and realistic understanding of humanity and of the meaning of being human, by de-facto reinterpreting two of Nietzsche’s central concepts, those of transcendence and resentment. He exposes its childish self-centered assumptions when faced with his Auschwitz experiences and post-war reality. This provides a more mature and ethical way of understanding the human, which rejects Nietzsche’s ethics of amor fati.25 He shows how, in lieu of positive ways to mutually transcend toward the world and others, one may preserve a real and moral sense of selfhood, which can also perform the important moral act of social and cultural criticism. In this sense it becomes a true and intense expression of the image of God in man, which Murdoch presented as the image of eternity which dwells deep within every individual soul as its unique potential for good. His unique potential to develop a particular moral personality.26  See Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, p. 128.  See his criticism of Heidegger’s position in Kravitz’s article in Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry, pp. 28–30. 26  See Murdoch’s short book “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Edited by Peter Conardi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), pp. 386–463. 24 25

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To summarize what was said thus far, we have observed Améry’s loss of spirit and transcendence, trust and self-being, and the complete loss of his inner structure of evaluative imagery, his unique inner self. These experiences have led him to revive what was left of his lost moral-personal selfhood, and recreate what he could through the continuous effort of tactless moral criticism, using resentment. This move condemned him to die, as a final act of reactive rebellion. It is now time to turn to the last essay, discussing the loss of dignity and possibility of being part of any Jewish community, while compelled to remain a Jew.

References Adorno, Teodore, “What does coming to terms with the past means?” In Bitburg in Moral and political perspective. Edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Translated by Timothy Bahti, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books. Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Bell, Macalester, “A Woman’s Scorn: Toward a Feminist Defense of Contempt as a Moral Emotion”, Hypatia, Vol. 20, No. 4, Analytic Feminism (Autumn, 2005): 80–93. Bernstein, Jay, M. “Améry’s Body: ‘My Calamity … My Physical and Metaphysical Dignity’” in On Jean Améry, Philosophy of Catastrophe, Edited by Magdalena Zolkos, Lexington Books, UK, 2011. Brudholm, Thomas, Resentment’s Virtue, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. Chaumont, Jean-Michel, “Geschichtliche Verantwortung und menchlicge Würde bei Jean Améry” In Über Jean Amerz, Edited by Irène Heideberger-Leonard (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitäsverlag, 1990. Frei, Norbert, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration. Translated Joel Golb, New York: Colombia University Press, 2002. Gallwitz, Tim, “‘Unterhaltung—Erziehung—Manhung’; die Darstellung von Antisemitismus und Judenverfolgung im Deutschen Nachkriegsfilm 1946 bis 1949”, in beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses. Edited by Andreas Hofmann & Irmtrud Wojak, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999. Gross, Raphael, Carl Schmitt und die Juden: Eine deutsche Rechtslehre, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2000. Heyd, David, “Resentment and Reconciliation, Alternative Responses to Historical Evil”, in Justice in Time, Responding to Historical Injustice, Edited by L. H. Meyer. Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2004.

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Janowitz, Morris, “German Reaction to Nazi Atrocities”, American Journal of Sociology, 52 (1946). Jaspers, Karl The Question of German Guilt. Edited by David Bankier and Jcom Golomb, Translated by Jacob Gottschalk and Daphna Amit, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006. Jean-Marie, Vivaldi, Reflections on Jean Améry, Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Kravitz, Amit, Pitcovski, Eli and Ataria, Yochai, eds. Jean Améry, Beyond the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Murdoch, Iris, “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists”, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Edited by Peter Conardi, London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. Naiman, Susan, “October 1978: Jean Améry Takes His Life”, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996. Edited by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Reemstma, Jan P., “172364: Gedanken über den gebrauch der ersten person singular bei Jean Améry”, In Jean Améry (Hans Maier). Edited by Stephen Steiner, Basel/Frankfurt am Main: O Stromfeld/Nexus, 1996. Ritter, Gerhard, Geschichte als Bildungmacht: Ein Beitrag zur historisch politischen Neubesinnung, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags—Anstalt, 1949. Walker, Margret U. Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Revelations After Wrongdoing, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Part V: Jewishness as the Final Solution

Abstract  In the fifth essay, Améry deals with the religious and national identity forced upon the victim, an identity that is simultaneously impossible and unavoidable for him. The religious and national identity forced on Améry is that of a Jew. Améry finds himself Jewish in the eyes of those who hate and seek to kill him, and nothing at all in his own eyes. His Jewishness is marked by his treatment by non-Jews, and the Auschwitz number etched onto his arm, and he cannot live in any other way. Through Améry’s conflict of identity we learn of the identity crisis faced by the Western world as a whole—a crisis Améry believed could only be solved by Germany, and the world, acknowledging their sin toward him. Keywords  Jewishness • Exile • Identity • Dignity • Betrayal The last essay, “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” is not only Améry’s swan song for both his own identity and his ability to exist as part of a community, but also a harrowing summary of the accusation drafted in the previous essays. I will discuss this essay using Bernstein’s concept of dignity, and specifically his assertion that it requires the recognition of others and must be insisted upon. We will see how Améry’s human dignity was taken from him alongside his German identity even before the Holocaust, and how he

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Ashkenazy, The Death of Transcendence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03815-0_6

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struggled to regain it for the new Jewish identity that was forced on him— through physical violence in the hellish world of Auschwitz, and through resentment and tactlessness in the years after the war. * * * Améry begins by noting that as hard as he tried, he was never a “German youth” and that even today he is not a “German man” (p. 82). And he immediately clarifies that he can also never be a Jew. However, unlike his Germanness, an illusion he had forsaken, Améry tells us: “It is not because I don’t want to be a Jew, but only because I cannot be one.” To this he then adds: “And yet must be one” (p. 82). This is then the core problem this essay confronts—what does it mean to say: I cannot, yet I must, be a Jew? Améry notes that he is not a believer. He does not share a tradition or religion with Jews, nor is he part of the national movement, and he knows nothing of Jewish culture. His childhood memories are from church, not the synagogue, he does not speak Yiddish and his memory of his father is of a photo of a soldier in the uniform of a Tyrolean Imperial rifleman (p. 83). Améry cannot be a Jew, and yet he must be one. For “you are a human being only if you are a German, a Frenchman, a Christian, a member of whatever identifiable social group” (p.  84). This is the lesson taught to him by years of imprisonment and torture. Améry must be something he cannot be at all: part of a greater social whole he never belonged to and that played no constitutional part in his childhood and formative years. This is why he continues to say: “I must be a Jew and will be one, with or without religion, within or outside a tradition, whether as Jean, Hans or Yochanan” (p. 84). We have here the same paradoxical construction of a person who cannot be something they must be. One who must be a human being although they had lost all trust in humanity and human relations. Cannot be a Jew and yet must be one. The purpose of this essay is to explain, from a religious-­national point of view, why Améry must be a Jew when he clearly cannot be one, and what does it mean for him to be Jewish. Améry surprises the reader by saying that it was in 1935, when the state which had been the representative of the German people declared him to be a Jew, that “[s]ociety … had just made me formally and beyond any question a Jew” (p. 85). Améry, who believed himself to be part of the humanistic

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German culture, who drew security in his selfness and identity from within this culture rather than from within Jewish tradition or memories of his Jewish father, cannot retain this security once his culture has decried him as its enemy. Judaism simply provided no means of expression to someone who was never initiated into it or lived as a Jew in any sense of the word. It allowed no real “us” to transcend to. According to Améry, his Jewishness was expressed in the fact that after reading the Nuremberg laws he became “a quarry of Death.”1 As a Jew, he was given to death more than any other. The German culture and people had defined him from that moment onward as a “dead man on leave” (p. 86). A man who was not where he should have been, and is to be murdered. This becomes clear when he presents the propaganda system which portrayed the Jews as the scum of the earth, ugly, lazy, evil, despicable, liars and so on and so forth. This propaganda had in fact destroyed, in advance, his human image in the eyes of others and himself, as a spiritual preparation and completion of the Reich’s future murderous policy. When Améry contends that “All of Germany—but what am I saying!— the whole world nodded its head in approval of the undertaking” (p. 87), he presents the German attack on the dignity and selfhood of the Jews as something endorsed by the whole world during the war and, as we shall see, also in the years after. Because unlike other refugees who have left countries turned communist and were gladly accepted in the West, no one desired the Jews, not before the war and not during it. And German Jews were resigned to surrender to the image of the Jews projected on them from the pages of Der Stürmer. That was the social reality that created them and in which they lived (p. 87). For even in Auschwitz, Améry remarks, Jews had the lowest rank and “The world approved of the place to which the Germans had assigned us, the small world of the camp and the wide world outside, which but rarely, in individual heroic instances, arose in protest when we were taken at night from our homes in Vienna or Berlin, in Amsterdam, Paris, or Brussels” (p. 88).

1  Jean-Marie sees here the influence of Sartre’s essay Anti-Semite and Jew, in seeing inauthentic identity as forced by society from the outside. He suggests that Améry is also criticizing Sartre’s authentic Jew and replaces him with the resisting dignified Jew, after determining that it was impossible to be an authentic Jew under the Third Reich. Jean-Marie, Torture, Resentment and Homelessness, pp. 103–105, 108, 117–118.

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His movement is therefore into the realm of contradiction, acquiring his dignity by accepting the death sentence society placed on him while simultaneously opposing it. This is what it means to write out of resentment (p. 89). In the ‘30s he learned to recognize his self being negated by a whole world which did not lift a finger for the Jews, effectively joining the Germans, and even continuing to approve their actions after the war (p. 90). His reaction is thus an affirmation of his Judaism as a wound, a revolt, an opposition and projection of the wound on those who had caused it; Germany and the whole Western world. In the anti-world which is Auschwitz, the meaning of violence is turned on its head. Instead of tearing the fabric of life and selfness as in a normal society, it becomes the “sole means of restoring a disjointed personality” (p. 91). In other words, Améry, who in the camp had been lowered to the degree of merely an object, that is, had lost his Self and remained just an I, a body, could acquire a minimal sense of human selfness through violence. In a world in which the physical was everything, violence is the only way to distinguish the self and retain bodily dignity. The intrusion into the sacred domain of the other, the breach of the boundaries of his body, becomes the only way to preserve identity and reality in the universe of camps and torture. “I gave concrete social form to my dignity by punching a human face,” Améry writes. He adds that the “society” in Auschwitz was one of bodies and objects, in which a constituting relation was based on undermining and dominating the body of another. “To be a Jew meant the acceptance of the death sentence imposed by the world as a world verdict … whereas acceptance was simultaneously the physical revolt against it. I became a person not by subjectively appealing to my abstract humanity, but by discovering myself within the given social reality as a rebelling Jew.” And this campaign, Améry notes, is still ongoing (p. 91). It is still ongoing because, as he has made clear in his essay on resentments, Germany and the whole world resigned themselves to forget and return to normal daily life, while antisemitism still raged in the pogroms in eastern Europe, in the Nazi phrases of the French bourgeois, in new expressions adopted by various nations, such as “the Jewish problem” in the Netherlands, in closing Palestine’s borders by the British mandate, in immigration boats being turned back by the Americans and so on. Améry understood that not much had changed “even though the potential executioner now cautiously restrained himself or, at best, even loudly protested his disapproval of what had happened” (p. 91). When the war was

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over, and with it the possibility of revolt, Améry was left with a necessity to be a Jew, and an impossibility of being one. His Jewishness, which was distilled into an opposition to his external definition as a parasite to be annihilated, had also lost this last layer, and he was left with no choice, having to be what he couldn’t be (p. 92). From now on, his resistance will be a tactless way of being which stemmed directly from his resentment. From this moment on, Améry’s Jewishness remained wholly encompassed in the Auschwitz number etched onto his arm, as a constant reminder of the fall of German culture manifested in the fate of the European Jewry (p. 94). The number etched onto his arm carries for him the weight of the generations, the burden of one who had lost his home and sense of belonging forever, who was defined as the threatening other who must be destroyed. Améry took on the mission of identifying himself as a Jew whenever he heard untruths spoken about Jews in the street, in his appeal to others over the radio and in writing his testimony. Améry felt he must live as a testimony to the death of his person, a testimony of one who would never again belong to mankind (pp. 94–95). Humanity and community became strangeness and alienation for him. He was left a complete stranger in the world, stranger to man in his inability to transcend toward others and community, both of which were lost for him with the loss of all trust in the human world. This became the essence of his personality and existence. Men lived next to him, but never with him. The world had forsaken him and he could no longer lean on mankind. He could only lean on his Jewishness, which was pure negation, a burden which was also a sole support (p. 96). Améry, who had seen everything which was close and familiar turn its head away when he and his people had been led to the death camps, could no longer return to the human community of trust. The world for him was nothing but a madhouse, run by the madmen themselves (p. 96). And because he had no affinity to Jewishness other than negation, it was a disaffinity. He could exist in solidarity with Jews only insofar as they are victims of racism and exclusion, for he cannot leave behind his own victimhood. After reading the previous essays, one can clearly see what does it mean for a person to be cast out from his culture and way of life, to be denounced as a dangerous enemy and an inside contamination. Améry can no longer hold on to his youthful illusion that he was German. He is cast out from this childhood myth forever, and left with few resources from which to reestablish his lost identity.

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Moreover, another identity was forced on him, an identity previously alien to him—that of a Jew. Previously, Améry had no part in Jewishness. He had no tradition to join and the idea of immigrating to Israel was nothing more than sophistry, seeking to obliterate the internal exile more than overcome it. His Jewishness was forced upon him as an issue he could not avoid in his homeland. It was common knowledge that the family was Jewish, and even before the Nazis rose to power it was considered a stain; a social embarrassment to its bearer. After it, it made him a “quarry of death.” Here, Améry is again exposing the all-important place of conceptual images in forming our selfhood. Through diverse acts of transcendence, the self is exposed as an internal structure of evaluative images born out of mutual efforts to reach the real world and others. These images have a crucial place in forming our identity and self-worth. By creating a twisted public image of the Jew, the Nazis presented Améry, even to himself, as a creature whose only purpose was to die. He was cast out of the domain of things worthy of human relations, respect and love. His only right, his only obligation, was to die. Bernstein elaborates on this point at length. In his paper on dignity he identifies this moment in the Viennese café in 1935 as the moment in which Améry was robbed of his human dignity. He sees it as a testimony to the fact that “human dignity is … a social accomplishment bound to structures of recognition … a social product [that] can be destroyed,” and for it to be meaningful it has to be insisted upon “through resistance and revolt; hence there is an ethics and politics of dignity.”2 Following Hegel’s insight that a human consciousness recognizes itself as such only when confronted with another, he tries to present the consequences of this move which “entwines a political thesis with a thesis concerning the degradation of the Jewish character.”3 The socio-political meaning of his criticism is quickly exposed when Améry says that [it was] not only radical Nazis, officially certified by the party, who denied that we were worthy of being loved and thereby worthy of life. (p. 87)

Bernstein therefore concludes that “the comprehension of human dignity is not detachable from the perception of others as in principle 2 3

 See Bernstein, Dignity, p. 40.  Ibid., pp. 41, 49.

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lovable.”4 That is the source of our regard for others as having self-value, as valuable for what they are, not for what they do. This, in turn, is the source of them being considered irreplaceable.5 We have here an ethical and political thesis that sees humans not as detached beings finding meaning and value inside their closed self-being, but portrays creatures that are porous in nature, that owe their values and self-perception to the norms and values of their society through structures of mutual recognition. This exposes being considered by others as principally lovable as constitutionally essential for a person’s own dignity and self-image. In accordance with this insight, I proposed in Chap. 2 that the de-facto transcendence involved in loving relations is the origin of true selfhood built on respect, and suggested that human rights are the essential expression of this ethical intuition in the political realm. This stood at the basis of my argument that being robbed of spirit and experience of transcendence is the result of a complete lack of loving relations to others, nature and art. Bernstein labors to clarify the corporeal dimension of dignity, which presents itself as a condition of possibility for any kind of love and transcendence. He finds it in “having control over the relation between (the) voluntary and involuntary body.”6 This presents the human body as a “culturally organized bearer of meaning” but also as “a natural being [that] exceeds our powers of determination.”7 As Bernstein points out, the image of the Jews presented by Der Stürmer finds its final expression in the Muselmann and in the piles of unidentifiable bodies being shuffled around by bulldozers. The first is a paradigmatic case of a human deprived of humanity, lacking all self-worth and devoid of all moral presence. By relinquishing even the small agency they had left, they in fact gave up on their autonomy and human selfhood. The second is related to the body as an image of that freedom and autonomy, and culture as giving meaning to death through the rituals of burial and commemoration. Having lost those freedom and autonomy, first in theory with the Nuremberg laws, and then in practice in the camps, the Jews were left only as bodies and as physical bundles of functions.8

 Ibid., p. 41.  Ibid., p. 42. 6  Ibid., p. 52. 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid., pp. 46–54. 4 5

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I have already mentioned Weil’s assertion that a right which is not acknowledged and respected by others is not a right at all, unlike duty, which she says retains its status even if the whole world had degraded to murderous barbarism. And while Améry may have lost all his rights in Auschwitz, he still retains one duty to himself—to retain his Self. This feat, as we shall soon see, is achieved by insisting on his dignity “through resistance and revolt.” * * * As we learned in previous essays, after the Holocaust Améry became an exile by his very essence. His Selfness was totally lost to him in Auschwitz, when his place in the culture in which he was raised was taken from him. Unlike the normal condition, in which a person becomes what he is by taking part in a community, its customs, values and concepts, Améry is a Jew solely by the virtue of the number on his arm, a number which marks him and defines him as a dead man. He can only define himself in a way which expresses the complete loss of trust in the human world, define himself by negation. And from this betrayal he experienced at the hand of his community, Améry cannot recover. His trust in mankind and the world as a human home had been irretrievably shaken. He will never again be part of a society and community. Améry cannot believe that the world had changed, he remains a stranger to others and the world. This is why Améry considered authentic Jewishness to be the opposite of the traditional stance, which requires a community. Améry considered being a stranger, not participating in any community or tradition, to be the authentic way of living his Jewishness. Holding on to his resentment, that is, to a reality that after 1945 he experienced as strange and hostile, is an act of heroism, of insisting on what was left of him. Thus, Améry clarifies that his Jewishness is an identity only to the extent that it is part of the German general culture and way of life, and their values.9 Once it positioned him as the other and defined him as a dangerous and condemned man, it filled the entire “volume” of his identity with negative and resentful content. His identity becomes self-negation—the negation of the person and his image—a negation that forms the essence of the future Reich. It is not an empty identity, but a self-identity which 9  This brings to mind a remark by Moses Hess, that Jewishness and Germanness have a deep and unique relation, which, left without a critical examination, may lead to disaster.

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spews poison, which gradually poisons itself on the altar of resentment, whose phrasing as an accusation against the human, and in particular Western man, is its owner’s only possible redemption, for such a phrasing is a negation of negation itself. And here we get a glimpse of the way resentment allows Améry to live, while slowly poisoning him to death. It was clear to Améry that nothing had changed and “a new mass extermination of Jews cannot be ruled out as a possibility” (p. 99). Améry’s Jewishness was of the Holocaust. It meant a perpetual and metaphysical unrest. Antisemitism remained present in Germany and Austria, where many Nazis were pardoned, and many others jailed for only short periods. In the USA and the UK Jews were merely tolerated. There was a new antisemitism in Arab countries, and in the Catholic Church, which found it hard to establish an appropriate stance in relation to the events of the Holocaust. The possibility of another extermination thus remained present. The world had turned its back on the need to address the faults of mankind by betraying the memory and meaning of something real that had been internalized into its identity and threatened to erupt again, like molten lava, and consume the surface. This is why Améry persevered in his mission to make present the total loss of humanity as much as he could, until his eventual suicide. From Améry’s point of view, the whole world betrayed the Jews’ humanity (their literal bodies and souls, Bernstein says). When the Nazis took away their human dignity, the world refused to take Jews as refugees; a Jew is never truly German, but the Jew is also never truly French. This betrayal is in fact a self-betrayal. It is the world turning its back on its own constitutive values, its own human essence, manifested in the concept of being born in the image of God. When Amery briefly considers the benefits of a belief in God,10 he implicitly rejects it on the grounds of that very same conception of human dignity grounded in the Judeo-Christian theological tradition. Implicitly, there is a theological argument here that rejects the traditional pitfalls of post-Auschwitz theologies on the one hand, and on the other hand resonates well with recent critical tendencies in feminist post-Holocaust theologies.11 Since identity and dignity depend on social acceptance and community recognition, Améry is left only with this last move of identifying his  See Ataria, Kravitz and Pitcovski, Jean Améry, p. 191.  To understand the traditional pitfalls of patriarchal theodicies which Amery avoids here, see: Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 28. 10 11

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Judaism with the events of the Holocaust and opposing their meaning. This project, his testimony, effectively rejects what he finds in himself as the only meaningful content of his Judaism—its dehumanization. A project whose core is the minimal transcendence born out of his resentment into complete self-negation. Its aim is to reflect the Reich’s means and ends, from within Western civilization itself. In so doing he exposes it and us as part of a way of life which had not been able to deal with this murderous, negating potential within it. In the camp, the only possible mode of resistance was through violence. Améry therefore describes himself as addicted to the temptation to force the world to recognize his right and dignity by joining the resistance, or striking back at a Polish foreman who abused him in Auschwitz. As we have seen, to survive morally one needs to be recognized as principally lovable. Once this was violently taken away, Améry had to turn against “the society and the world that had condemned him.” That was the only way someone reduced to being a body could assert his fundamental worth.12 In the years after the war, his way of resisting a world which still dehumanized Jews was by writing tactlessly and out of resentment. The Auschwitz number is not a parody on identity. It marks the tragedy and fall of the entire Western project of Self. It signifies that the all-human Western culture fell victim to the clutches of evaluative modes of relation and profound egotistical and exclusionary internal motives, which incessantly undermined the appropriate aspects of the myths, values and institutions through which Western culture tried to create world and man in the image of God. Améry’s tactlessness, his resentment, his insistence to remind the world that he bears that number, is both an ethical act and a political one, both his last resort for restoring the Selfness and dignity which were taken from him and his attempt to save the West from itself. It is one and the same, since only a return of Western culture to its true values could allow Améry to regain a sense of dignity and true selfhood.

References Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Bernstein, Jay, M. “Améry’s Body: ‘My Calamity … My Physical and Metaphysical Dignity’” in On Jean Améry, Philosophy of Catastrophe, Edited by Magdalena Zolkos, Lexington Books, UK, 2011.  Bernstein, Dignity, p. 55.

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Jean-Marie, Vivaldi, Reflections on Jean Améry, Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Kravitz, Amit, Pitcovski, Eli and Ataria, Yochai, eds. Jean Améry, Beyond the Mind’s Limits, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Raphael, Mellisa, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, London: Routledge, 2003. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker, New York: Schocken Books, 1948.

Part VI: Human Face

Abstract  The concluding chapter clarifies the structure of the argument put forth by Améry, centered around a number of related claims. These claims, when understood, lead to an impossibility of continued existence with others in the world. Together they reveal the meaning of the Third Reich in ways which are perhaps beyond atonement, but not at all beyond guilt. In effect, the entire text can be seen as an accusation: first and foremost of Germany and of German culture, but also of the Christian West and the entire project of Modern selfhood. Keywords  Resentment • Transcendence • Violence • Humanity • Death When reading Améry, the readers find themselves penned up against the boundaries of expression. The way Améry walks on the borders of humanity, his attempt to characterize human existence through its absence, his reliance on the most terrible and extreme experiences imaginable, all seem to come close, in its most profound moments, to the book of ethics on which Wittgenstein says, in A Lecture on Ethics, that “I can only describe my feelings by the metaphor, that if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion,

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destroy all other books in the world.”1 In his discussion on the modes of existence and reality of the non-human, alongside and from within the human, Améry seems to come as close as possible to the boundaries of human expression, giving exalted expression to the meaning of humanity and its absence. Thus, the main arguments presented in the previous sections demand first that we consider Améry’s five essays as one progressive argument pressing toward a justified self-annihilation, itself presented as more just and dignified then continuing to exist in the post-war West. The first essay contributes to this cause by exposing the total deprivation and absence of the possibility of having a meaning experience of transcendence, the complete loss of the ability to naturally experience the world as having significance or perfection beyond the instrumental. This loss, in turn, leads to a complete loss of human relation and communication. The second essay exposes the loss as connected to a complete loss of trust in the human world, born out of the experience of torture, but one that quickly develops into a complete loss of self. The third deepens the readers’ understanding of that loss by presenting it as an almost complete loss of the individual’s inner structure, resulting from the complete loss of all childhood memories and attachments; loss of homeland, language and people. The fourth essay focuses on the only source of inner meaning and transcendence left for Améry after the ultimate loss described above. It presents resentment as the only form of negative transcendence to a meaningful way of being and seeing available to the survivor, albeit one representing a total negation of the life form and culture from which he originated, and therefore of his own selfhood, and demanding the last act of self-­ annihilation in death by suicide. The fifth essay finally presents Améry’s possible belonging to Judaism and a Jewish community, as another embodiment of resentment and therefore as death again. Read together, Améry’s essays expose the radical dehumanization involved in reducing the individual to the most basic level of transcendence involved in the constitution of a “world,” transcendence into the dimension of equipment and tools, which I have referred to as the one constituting the I-It relations. When regarded as the only mode of evaluation, or the only way of being with and seeing personas, it becomes a 1  Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics, edited by Edoardu Zamuner, Ermelina Valentina Di Lascio & D.K. Levy (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).

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negation of their humanity and their sense of self, which are both expressed in the ability to transcend toward and with others. It becomes pure negation. Exposing it as an essential part of a central Western cultural mode means a serious accusation against Modern morality and the modern notion of self. For Améry, the only way to deal with this infestation of his selfhood by this negation in Auschwitz was to negate the negation. By hitting a camp guard in the face, and by giving himself to the only possible feat of transcendence opened to him through resentment, speaking and writing out of it after the war, he was able to survive and create, able to be a self in the only sense possible for him. This exposes resentment as the only right response in this situation, and as a possible vehicle for goodness and truth manifested in his critical project through which he lived after the war. Resentment allowed all this by becoming negation of a negation. A negation of a way of seeing that was devoted to negating humanity. Améry’s project ultimately convicts Western civilization and the Western way of life in no uncertain terms. The intimate connection to this dehumanizing mode of being and evaluating exposes it as deserving of being negated, and criticized, by resentment. This shocking accusation receives the title Beyond Guilt and Atonement, which appears as a momentous accusation, centered on Améry’s personal experience. The core of the essays thus becomes the radical dehumanization celebrated by Germanness during the Reich, as it appears out of an examination of Améry’s lost selfness and ruined body, and as etched onto his flesh as a prisoner of an extermination camp. Améry seeks to show the celebrating, secure world of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s what it had repressed and the terrible truths at the foundations of Western and human existence. In other words, his body and mind are a portrayal of the real state of humanity in the West, contrasted with its self-delusions. Many readings of Améry contend with the question of whether he was engaging in an internal, ethical project or an external, cultural one. In this reading I tried to pose a third alternative—that Améry’s experience allows him not just to expose but also to utilize the Kantian strand of thought alongside the Hegelian one. I find Améry’s inner phenomenology, analysis and cultural critic complementary of one another, allowing for a deeper and wider view of our own culture than those afforded by each individually. Améry exposes the tension between these two philosophical perspectives, not as contradictory in nature, but as necessary for a comprehensive critique that is also deep and personal in nature. In this way he is able to

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transcend the false distinction between subject and object, internal and external, culture and self, the social and personal, without falling into the pitfalls of sharp dichotomies, as those holding on to the distinction between fact and value often do. In fact, I see him here as exposing the fact that one is almost worthless without the other, especially when relating to the subject at hand. In other words, his ruined body and devastated soul expose both a diagnosis of our culture from an external, institutional point of view, that is, in terms of the complete institutional failure to defend our most important values—the image of God in man, as codified by universal human rights, and that from a personal, internal point of view by exposing the deep meaning of that failure for a particular subject, and one standing at its forefront, the intellectual. He thus allows us a more profound and radical critique of culture and self than the ones provided by those who neglect one side or the other. Améry’s work exposes not just what it means to be stripped of your humanity, but also what our real humanity is composed of. It presents the meaningful visual structures and direct ways of relating to others, our “seeing as,’ as essential to being human in both a minimal and a conditional sense, and in a higher and ethical one, as a moral achievement. Seeing through evaluative visual structures (or conceptual clusters), and relating to others through them directly, is exposed as one of the ontological and fundamental structures of reality as human beings. Indeed, one may say that his work in this book is completely devoid of the puritan strand that often accompanies political and cultural critique in our time. In my opinion, the achievement of such great clarity, accuracy and selflessness, which are so rare in our time, in itself marks a new way of writing, both personal and public, that should be used as a model for critical writing and critical thinking. Here I see an important and unique contribution of his work. In this reading I tried to expose and clarify the true character of transcendence and its importance to being a human self, by presenting the consequences of losing trust and dignity, which are both dependent on a free and legitimate experience of transcendence toward one another. In this way I hoped to represent the real nature of becoming a unique self, that is, of establishing a unique inner being through culture and relations with others. This was to serve as an attempt to clarify the meaning of being a body and being a self, being considered as human and as “one of us,” in contrast to the sea of undistinguished Muselmann in the camp. This also exposed first love or loving attention as the main source of human

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transcendence, and mature love as the possibility for true selfhood, that is, the key to a free, rational and unique self and self-expression. Lastly, I attempted to reformulate Améry’s most terrible accusation against Germany and the West in general after the war, and to present it as revealing a deep self-betrayal of its own core values and concept of the good. This was done out of a commitment to present his arguments with the same urgency and severity emanating from his original presentation. Presenting Améry’s essays as one argument, logically progressing toward death, was meant to serve as a presentation of love and transcendence in their crucial roles of constituting a unique and moral self in the full sense of the word, that is, as essential to humanity and being human, but also to expose the book itself as a project of critical resentment toward Germany and the West. However, I find this book to be not merely an accusation of Germany and the West, but also a warning sign still relevant in our times. While the Third Reich has taken the objective-instrumental mode of evaluation to its extreme, it still exists in Western culture today just as much as it did before it. It was not only the political institutions that have betrayed Améry, it was the people, too. The onus is on us, then, as individuals and members of society alike, to actively prevent a similar fall. This is a feat we can achieve only through repeated acts of rejecting our egotistic self in favor of a transcending I, constantly striving toward others in our everyday life. In the essays discussed, Améry offers his own mental state to the reader as a poignant human and cultural critique of the society and community from which the reader’s own inner self was created. In exposing the evil which is characteristic of human societies in general, alongside the particular manner in which Nazi evil emerged from German culture and from being an integral part and a natural implication of it, he reveals to the reader a human evil which exists in him as original sin. The potential evil emerges as a fundamental characteristic of the human state, as well as the ways in which this evil acts in us as Modern persons. In this sense, Améry excuses no one from responsibility. It is Humankind who is responsible; Modernity had given the tool and the German culture gave evil its ultimate expression, out of internal resources unique to it. Améry thus exposes the place of transcendence and meaning feeling in human life, the difference between being a body—being an I—and being a real self with others in the world, the meaning of reducing the person to pure instrumentality and the impossibility of returning to oneself without a community of equals. He exposes the core characteristics of the human

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and the Western human, without which we can no longer identify ourselves as the people and personalities we are. He exposes how values cannot be forced on us from without or by the state, but are pre-reflective suppositions which enable us, as the humans and individuals we are, a reactive-evaluative internal fabric. The loss of this fabric, which is built on the ability for transcendence, is also a loss of others with whom to reflect on and live our values, and indeed a loss of humanity itself. It is death.

Reference Wittgenstein, Ludwig A Lecture on Ethics, Edited by Edoardu Zamuner, Ermelina Valentina Di Lascio & D.K. Levy, Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2014.

Index1

A Alienation, 57 Antisemitism, 80, 85 Arendt, Hanna, 37 Art, 10, 11, 14, 15, 83 Aspect, 5n1, 8, 13, 18, 19, 20n32, 58, 59, 64, 66, 69–71 Aspect-blind, 18, 19 Aspect dawning, 6, 14n19, 22 Attention, 6, 7, 20–22, 31, 32n5, 33–35 Auschwitz-Monowitz, vi, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 54, 63, 67n15, 68, 71, 73, 78–81, 84–86, 91 B Bankier, David, 67n16 Bellah, Robert, 11n14, 50 Belonging, v, 90 Bernstein, J. M., 7, 20, 25, 31–33, 32n5, 38n13, 39, 41, 71n21, 77, 82, 83, 85 Breendonk, vi, 2, 26, 35, 46, 54

Brudholm, Thomas, 58, 63n8, 63n9, 66, 72 Buber, Martin, 13 C Care, 27, 31, 32, 41 Christian/Christianity, 59, 63 Community, 25, 27, 28, 35, 38, 44, 46–54, 77, 81, 84, 85, 90, 93 Conceptual clusters, 14, 18 Conceptual imagery, 2 Culture, 2–4, 57, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68–72, 90–93 D Das Unheimliche, 43, 51 Death, 79–83, 85, 90, 93, 94 Denial, 28, 36, 41 Dignity, 27, 35, 38, 71n21, 74, 77, 79, 80, 82–86, 92 Double objects, 17

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

E Ego, 93, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37n9, 62, 63, 86 Ethics, 89 Exile, 44, 46, 48, 52, 54 F Fantasy, 6, 7, 11n14, 16, 19, 20, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 41, 45, 48, 53 First blow, 26–28, 34, 35, 39, 40 First love, 31–33, 92 Fraenkel, Ernst, 37 Fragment on the philosophy of psychology, 13, 18 Freud, Sigmund, 12 G Geist, 5n1, 8, 8n9, 8n10, 8n11, 15 German/Germany, 1, 3, 44, 45, 47–54, 60–70, 63n8, 63n9, 67n16, 72, 73, 77–81, 84, 85, 93 Gestalt, 13 God, 92 Guilt, 91 H Halbertal, Moshe, 38n11 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6, 7, 11, 39, 82, 91 Heidegger, Martin, 12, 13, 44n1, 46n2, 50n5, 73, 73n25 Heimat, 70 Hess, Moses, 84n9 Heyd, David, 58 Hitler, 61, 63, 64, 67, 67n16, 68 Hoffman, E. T. A., 44n1 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 9, 12, 15, 17 Holocaust, 2, 3, 58, 58n2, 60, 61, 63n9, 66, 69, 77, 84–86

Home/homeland, 2, 4, 4n3, 10, 11, 15, 19, 43–48, 46n2, 48n3, 50, 50n5, 52, 53, 54n13, 57, 90 Homelessness, 43–54 Humanity, 89–94 Human life, 2 Human rights, 38, 38n13, 83, 92 Human world, v I I, 2, 3, 6, 16, 21, 22, 25–42 Identity, 25, 29, 30, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 77–82, 79n1, 84–86 I-It, 90 Image, v, 6, 14, 16, 18–22, 20n32, 59, 62, 63n9, 73, 79, 82–86 Imagination, 6, 7, 11, 14, 14–15n19, 16, 19, 22, 58 Institute(s)/institutional, vi, 6, 44, 51, 92 Instrument/instrumental/ instrumentality, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 21, 29, 40, 93 Intellect/intellectual, 5n1, 7, 7n4, 8, 8n7, 8n8, 8n9, 8n10, 8n11, 10, 11, 11n15, 15, 92 J Jaspers, Karl, 67n16 Jean-Marie, Vivaldi, 38n12, 44n1, 50n5, 52, 54, 58, 66, 68n18, 69, 79n1 Jew/Jewishness, 2, 3, 45, 51, 54, 65, 67, 67n16, 74, 77–86, 90 K Kafka, Franz, 44n1 Kant, Immanuel, 65, 66, 91 Kierkegaard, Søren, 12

 INDEX 

L Lahad, Mooli, 11n14, 14n19, 71n22 Language, 44, 45, 48–52, 50n5, 54, 57, 63n9, 71, 90 Language games, 17, 18 Liberty, 38, 39, 39n14 Loss, v, 2, 4–22, 43–45, 47, 48, 50–52, 50n5, 54, 62, 66, 69, 71n22, 74, 90, 94 Love, 7, 10, 11, 14, 20, 22, 27, 31–35, 33n5, 38, 38n13, 40, 82, 83 Loving attention, 6, 7, 31, 32n5, 33 Loving relations, 26, 33, 40 M Marx, Karl, 12 Maslow, Abraham, 50, 52 Meaning experience, 6, 14, 90 Meaning feeling, 14, 14n19, 19 Mimesis, 33 Mind, 5n1, 6–10, 15, 17, 21 Modern/modernity, 7, 12, 19, 37, 38, 91, 93 Moral persona, 3, 33 Murdoch, Iris, 6, 12, 16, 19, 20, 20n32, 22, 48, 66, 73 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 44n1 Negation, 29, 31, 35, 59, 64, 81, 84, 85, 90, 91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 29, 29n3, 58, 59, 59n4, 59n5, 61, 66, 67, 70, 72, 73 Nuremberg laws, 79, 83 O Ohana, David, 54n13

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P Paradox, 26, 40–42, 51, 52, 60, 69, 78 Persona, 47, 51, 60, 66, 90 Philosophical Investigations (PI), 13, 18, 70 Poe, Edgar Allan, 44n1 Political institutes, 38 R Repentance, 62 Representation, 14 Resentment, 2–4, 2n1, 4n3, 26, 28, 30, 38n12, 42, 57–62, 58n1, 59n4, 63n8, 64–74, 67n15, 68n18, 78, 79n1, 80, 81, 84–86, 90, 91, 93 Ritual, 11n14, 22, 31, 51 S Sadism, 28, 29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 79n1 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 12 Schiller, Friedrich, 12, 16 Schlegel, Friedrich, 12 See/seeing/seeing as, vi, 6, 7, 12–16, 18–20, 48, 49, 90–92 Self, v, 2, 4n3, 7, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20–22, 25, 28–30, 32–36, 40, 57, 61, 62, 63n9, 64, 66, 70–72, 71n22, 80, 82, 84, 91, 93 Self-creation, 6, 7 Selfhood, 7, 12, 15, 16, 21, 44, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 64, 65, 69–74 Society, 2, 6, 8–10, 18, 44, 47, 48, 52, 59–62, 66, 69–71, 73, 79n1, 80, 83, 84, 86, 93

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INDEX

Spirit/spiritual, 5n1, 8–11, 15, 29, 36n8, 45, 48, 60, 66, 74 Stranger, 81, 84 Suicide, 59, 73, 90 T Tact/tactlessness, 68, 78, 86 Taylor, Charles, 29n3, 38n11 Third Reich, 2n1, 3, 26, 28, 29, 36, 37, 42, 49, 61, 62, 63n9, 64, 68–70, 79n1, 93 Torture, 25–42, 44n1, 50n5, 54, 60, 62, 64–66, 70, 78, 79n1, 80 Total loss, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15 Transcendence, v, vi, 2, 3, 4n3, 6, 9, 9n12, 11–16, 11n15, 20, 21, 25, 27–41, 37n9, 46, 48, 49, 51–54, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 69–74, 71n22, 90–94 Transformation, 6, 18, 28, 31, 33

Trust, v, 2, 7, 15, 20, 25, 27, 30–33, 32–33n5, 36, 39–41, 44, 46, 48, 48n3, 54, 74, 78, 81, 84, 90, 92 V Victim/victimhood, 60, 61, 63–65, 67, 67n16, 68, 72, 81, 86 Violence, 78, 80, 86 Vision, 16, 18, 20, 33, 37, 48 W We, 51 Weil, Simone, 41n15, 54, 84 West/Western, 3, 6–8, 12, 19, 26, 38, 41, 50, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63n9, 68–70, 72, 73, 79, 80, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 12–14, 16–19, 48, 49, 53, 70, 89 Word game, 10