Humanism to Holocaust

In his The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation , David Levin briefly traces the line from humanism to 20th-century terror.  Early moderns developed a vision “derived from an egological and essentially anthropocentric vision of reason: reason as instrumental, pragmatic, practical.  And people slowly began to lose sight of the difference between reason and power: reason, increasingly asserting itself in self-destructive ways, began to think of itself as the will to truth.”

Essentially, subjectivity inverted into objectivity, and objectivity meant the destruction of subjectivity:

“When subjectivity triumphed, it imposed its will on things and brought into being a world ruled by objectivity.  But in a world of objectivity, there is no place, no home, for the subject, whose subjectivity – that is to say, experience – is denied value, meaning, and ultimately any truth or reality.  This triumph of subjectivity has been self-destructive; we can now see how the subject falls under the spell of its objects; how it becomes subject to the objectivity it set in power.  The subject is in danger of losing touch with itself.  When reason turned totally instrumental, a function solely of power, it legitimated the construction of a totalitarian state and engineered a Holocaust.  The legacy of humanism is terror.”

To gloss that: Modernity opens up a gap between subjects and objects, subjects standing above and surveying passive objects before them (the philosophy of vision implicit there is the subject of Levin’s book).  But if we’re going to have a comprehensive gaze, then we have to be included in that comprehensive gaze.  Subjects have to be objectivized in order to fit into the picture.  Once objectivized, subjects can be treated as objects, manipulated and controlled for supposedly rational purposes.