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Having survived the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's genocide against the Jews, the philosopher Jean Améry concluded that the Nazis "hated the word humanity" (Amery, 1980, p. 31). They wanted to destroy the idea that all men, women, and children possess shared and perhaps even divinely created origins, which imply basic equality and obligations to respect human life. Instead, Adolf Hitler called for racial purity that would be Aryan or German, and not merely human. According to this ideology, allegedly inferior forms of life—Jewish life first and foremost—threatened German superiority. Genocide eventually became the Final Solution for the Nazis' Jewish question.

Although philosophy often highlights characteristics shared by all persons, its history contains theories that have negatively emphasized differences—religious, cultural, national, and racial. Such theories have encouraged senses of hierarchy, superiority, and "us versus them" thinking in which genocidal policies may assert themselves, especially in times of economic and political stress. If philosophy itself is divided between views upholding that all people are equal members of humanity and others stressing differences between groups as fundamental, how can philosophy contribute to stopping or mitigating genocide?

Philosophy is critical inquiry about reality, knowledge, and ethics. It explores what is, what can be known, and what ought to be. Germany has produced some of the world's greatest philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Regrettably, neither in Germany nor elsewhere have philosophers done all that they could to protest genocide and crimes against humanity. On the contrary, as Heidegger's case reveals, philosophy can expedite genocide.

Hitler rose to power on January 30, 1933. Three months later Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. On May 27, 1933, he was inaugurated as rector of Freiburg University. Although Nazi book burnings and the dismissal of many non-Aryan academics had taken place a few weeks earlier, Heidegger's inaugural address advocated stepping-into-line with the times, which was at least an implicit embrace of Nazi anti-Semitism. He also stressed that the Führer's leadership was crucial for Germany's future. In February 1934 Heidegger resigned his rectorship, but he never became an obstacle to the Third Reich's genocidal policies.

Living for more than thirty years after Hitler's defeat in 1945, Heidegger neither explicitly repudiated National Socialism nor said much about the Holocaust. Debate continues about his philosophy as well as the man himself. In Being and Time (1927) and other major works, Heidegger analyzed human existence, its significance within Being itself, and the need for people to take responsibility within their particular times and places. Arguably, his philosophy includes a fundamental flaw: The abstract, even obscure, quality of its reflection on Being and "authentic" action precludes a clear ethic that speaks explicitly against racism, anti-Semitism, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

If support for genocide has philosophical roots at times, resistance to genocide is also deeply grounded in philosophy. For example, philosophy's history includes defenses of human rights, and genocide is morally condemned because it violates rights, especially the right to life. An important chapter in the development of the philosophical conception of genocide involves Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), who coined the term genocide and spearheaded the drive that led to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). That document sought to define "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such."

Unfortunately, the UN's definition does not make it simple to identify genocide, particularly in its early stages when intervention could stop genocide before it is too late. Identifying genocide depends on determining intent, which can be a complex philosophical issue. If intent is not included in the meaning of words such as genocide or genocidal, it would be hard to understand how one might account for the very thing that genocide turns out to be: namely, the conscious targeting for destruction, in whole or in part, of some specific group of people. Nothing, however, makes the concept of genocide more ambiguous than the emphasis on intent that seems unavoidably to be built into it.

Although no perfect definition of genocide or intention is likely to be found, genocide's reality has alerted numerous post-Holocaust philosophers—Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, to name only two of the most important—to claim that philosophy's integrity depends on its ability to help bring genocide to an end. Philosophy's best contributions to genocide prevention appear to be in criticisms against racism, anti-Semitism, religious dogmatism, and tyranny and in defenses of shared human rights.

SEE ALSO Genocide

John K. Roth