How To Criticize Holocaust Denial

"4. Irving's writings on Hitler

• 4.1 Admiration
• 4.2 Exculpation

4.3 Historical method: case-studies

• (a) Irving's 'chain of documents'
• (b) Evidence at Hitler's trial in 1924
  • (i) Historical background
  • (ii) David Irving's argument
  • (iii) Inconsistencies and omission of references
  • (iv) Misrepresentation of documents; invention and falsification.
  • (v) Use of unreliable sources
  • (vi) Skewing reliable sources
  • (vii) Conclusion

(c) 'Reichskristallnacht' November 1938.

• (i) Background
• (ii) Irving's Account of the Events of the Night of 9-10 November 1938
  • (A) Misquotation and Skewing of Documents: The Goebbels Diary
  • (B) Suppression of relevant evidence: the Eberstein testimony and the Goebbels speech in the Old Town Hall
  • (C) Manipulation of evidence: The involvement of the SA in the pogrom
  • (D) Invention and manipulation of evidence: the Eberstein testimony
  • (E) Use of unreliable evidence, suppression of reliable testimony, and invention: von Below and Schaub
  • (F) False attribution of conclusions to reliable sources: the Heydrich telex
  • (G) Bending a reliable source to fit the argument: the Hess order
  • (H) Manipulation of evidence (Wiedemann testimony, Hederich testimony) and suppression of reliable documentation (Goebbels diary, Supreme Party Court Report)
  • (I) Use of insignificant evidence and suppression of important evidence: the Groscurth and von Hassell diaries
  • (J) Conclusion
• (iii) Irving's Account of Events After the Night of 9-10 November 1938
  • (A) Misquotation, manipulation, and discounting of reliable evidence to fit a preconceived argument: the Goebbels diary
  • (B) Suppression of important aspects and concentration on insignificant aspects of reliable evidence to divert attention from its significance
  • (C) Suppression of evidence: Memoirs of Hans Kehrl and Correspondence of Carl Burckhardt
  • (D) Misquotation and suppression of evidence: the von Hassell diaries
  • (E) Misrepresentation of reliable documents: the Communication of the SA Leadership
  • (F) Misconstrual of books that directly contradict Irving's arguments: the Goebbels diary
  • (G) Invention of evidence: the Ribbentrop memoirs
  • (H) Misrepresentation and presentation of irrelevant evidence: the Wolff memoirs
  • (I) False attribution of a conclusion to a reliable source: the Goebbels diary
  • (J) Misrepresentation of reliable sources: the reports to the British Foreign Office
  • (K) Use of a discredited and disreputable source: Ingrid Weckert
  • (L) Invention of evidence: testimony of Schirmeister and Fritzsche
• (iv) Conclusion"

"In dealing with Irving as a Holocaust denier, this Report has already noted a number of instances of Irving's misinterpretation and misconstrual of the sources, and subjected his inconsistent and unprofessional methods of dealing with historical evidence to critical scrutiny. However, the following case-studies, some of which are very extensive and extremely detailed, will show beyond all doubt that Lipstadt is correct in claiming that Irving misstates, misquotes, falsifies statistics, falsely attributes conclusions to reliable sources, relies on books and sources that directly contradict his arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors' objectives, manipulates documents to serve his own purposes, skews documents and misrepresents data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, bends historical evidence until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda, takes accurate information and shapes it to confirm his conclusions, and - a vital point not mentioned by Lipstadt - constantly suppresses or deliberately overlooks sources with which he is familiar because they contradict the line of argument he wishes to advance." (source)

Matthew Dentith - On Conspiracy Theories

Judith Butler - Good Life in Bad

Judith Butler Adorno Prize

Talal Asad

Philosophy and Life

Those familiar with ancient and late-antique Mediterranean philosophical schools will probably also be familiar with the work of Pierre Hadot, an historian of philosophy who ended his career at the College de France. Hadot is famous (as much as any academic is ever famous) for treating ancient philosophical schools as coherent ways of life. Platonism was a way of life. Aristotelianism was a way of life. Stoicism was a way of life. Back then a student of philosophy did not simply ask questions about the fields we delineate under the categories of physics, metaphysics, and ethics for the sake of asking questions. These investigations, and the answers characteristic to the various schools, were not only guides to correct living, but exercises in themselves; they molded the psyche of their practitioner so that it conceived of the world in a way distinct from other schools. The leaders of these schools were far more like priests of the Most High Good than they were like modern university professors. In some cases, especially in the Platonic tradition, they approached the status of holy men.

In a very short radio broadcast, transcribed in Philosophical Chronicles, Jean-Luc Nancy explores the act of philosophizing, contrasting it against the image of the philosopher presented above. Asking whether or not philosophy gives form to life, he determines that the question itself is about energy, about the difference between Descartes and Heidegger. “In one case, one supposes that the order of reasons generates energy, and in the other, one affirms that the effectivity of this energy is of an order different from the order of reasons. One thus poses the problem of the passage from one order to the other.”  Reasoning through concepts and ideas somehow mobilizes life into a particular configuration or it does not. In the latter case, we are speaking of two distinct forms of energy.

Nancy goes on to assert that this tension between ‘form’ and ‘life’ is necessarily internal to philosophy. Why? Because “a philosopher immediately disqualifies the notions of both ‘form’ and ‘life’ understood as frame and content or even as signification and experience…Neither form, nor life, nor concept, nor intuition, but from one to the other, or rather, from one within the other, through the other, but also one against the other, a tension without resolution.” Here Nancy efficiently twins a series of words which roughly sum up human being: frame-form, content-life, signification-concept, experience-intuition. Frame-form rests opposite content-life; signification-concept opposite experience-intuition. The philosopher, in thinking, thinks within and through and against and between the four polarized ends of this axis, mixing and matching, transposing and contrasting. According to Nancy, this tangle is the truth of life, which is “never simply available but is always caught up in its own practice.”

“Thus philosophy is less a ‘form of life’ than life forming itself, that is to say, thinking itself, in accordance with its excess over every given form or signification. Which also means, of course, this life thinking itself even in its death.”

We are reminded of Phaedo now. Philosophy is practicing to die. We are also reminded of the later Platonists who sought, through the practice of death, an ineffable and illuminating experience of Mind or the One. But those goals are not what Nancy is attempting to describe, are they? For Nancy, philosophy is a process that both produces itself and overcomes itself. It is a fundamental quality of life-as-thinking, which is the necessary life of humanity. Its purpose is to create and explore space in being. "Between religion and lived experience--in a space, let us note, where one also finds politics, science, and art--philosophy has the task, if I may say so, of spacing as such." According to Nancy, philosophy performs its work on the organization of society, on the investigation and cataloging of natural phenomena, and on the expression of lived experience. Like the ancients, Nancy's philosophy is an art of all arts.

  

Here we might infer Nancy’s evaluation of the philosophical schools described by Hadot and other historians of ancient and late-antique philosophy. They were bad at making space between religion and lived experience. Why? Perhaps because their philosophy, their life-thinking, was focused overly on the future of life-ending or life-over. The foundations and ends of their frame-form and signification-concept were gods or God. In which case, Nancy's philosopher would be a modern invention, or--if we are being charitable--a full flowering of philosophy's potential. I would say that Nancy's philosopher is one who faces death much less often than the ancients and early moderns would have faced it. It is the philosophy of a life possessing social services.

Whatever the case, it is interesting to note that much of Nancy's most recent thought has concerned religion. Having written this out, I now see that, through thinking, he is attempting to create space not only between religion and life, but within religion itself, transforming that age-old thought barrier into philosophy as such.

I wish him luck and success.

Jean-Luc Nancy - God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues

"Why have religions used this word god? Why even outside of religion is it not so easy to do without naming god in one way or another? Because it is not enough to use abstract names like Love, Joy, Mercy, or Justice in order to name this dimension of opening and going beyond. It is necessary to be able to address oneself to or to relate to this dimension. Why address oneself to this dimension or establish a connection with it? In order to be faithful to it.

What does it mean to be oneself as much as possible? It means nothing other than being faithful to this opening or to this infinite going beyond of the human by the human. It means being faithful to the sky or the heavens, in the sense I've spoken of."

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Jill Kraye and John Marenbon

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has reached its 200th episode. To celebrate this event, the host, Peter Adamson, a specialist in medieval Arabic philosophy, takes some time to discuss the category of 'medieval philosophy' with John Marenbon and Jill Kraye. The former is a specialist in early Latin medieval philosophy and the latter is a specialist in late medieval (or 'Renaissance') Latin philosophy. 

Marenbon advocates for a Long Middle Ages stretching from Plotinus to the mid-17C. He doesn't explain precisely why this would be, but we can assume that he's envisioning a period in which Platonic metaphysics makes up the core of elite intellectual culture. Beauty = Truth = Good = God as the centre of all thinking up until Leibniz.

Kraye is sympathetic to this notion but seems to want to claim that the Middle Ages represent a moment in which Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy came to surround and modify that core of Platonism. This would place the Middle Ages of intellectual culture between early-12C and mid-17C. The Renaissance would then name a phase in the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages in which the style and form of philosophical discussion mattered to intellectuals just as much as content did. Furthermore, the Renaissance would name a period in which philosophies other than Aristotelianism, such as Epicureanism or Pyrronic Skepticism, gained in popularity without replacing the Platonic core of most forms of thinking.

Jill is an historian interested in philosophy and John is a philosopher interested in history. They both want to contextualize the thought of their objects of study, but only John wants to think with those objects. Here in this podcast and also in a lecture given elsewhere, Marenbon suggests that we first isolate a philosophical problem that concerns us today, something that to us seems like philosophy. With that problem in hand we return to the past to see how it was dealt with then. But, in the process of doing so, we contextualize the old arguments and old solutions in order to provide contrast for the new, or to inspire new approaches to present problems.* Marenbon respects difference while prizing similarity. Jill, on the other hand, like most historians, wants to paint--to the best of her ability--a true and faithful portrait of her subject as it changes over time. Hers is the instinct of an antiquarian and a biographer and a pedant. Such an approach no doubt keeps us honest, and reveals to us the peculiarity of past minds, but it does little to sketch out how to make use of the past.

There is too much of Jill in me, and not enough of John.

*this strikes me as a benign version of Quentin Skinner's methodology. For more on him, check out this two part interview.

Slavoj Zizek - What Is Freedom Today?

David Luban - Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb

"But the pressure of liberalism will compel them to think about it in a highly stylized and artificial way, what I will call the 'liberal ideology of torture.' The liberal ideology insists that the sole purpose of torture must be intelligence gathering to prevent a catastrophe; that torture is necessary to prevent the catastrophe; that torturing is the exception, not the rule, so that it has nothing to do with state tyranny; that those who inflict the torture are motivated solely by looming catastrophe, with no tincture of cruelty; that torture in such circumstances is, in fact, little more than self-defense; and that, because of the associations of torture with the horrors of yesteryear, perhaps one should not even call harsh interrogation 'torture.'
 And the liberal ideology will crystalize all of these ideas in a single, mesmerizing example: the ticking time bomb."(source)