I just watched a new German movie called "Die Flscher", the English title is "The Counterfeiters" about a group of jews forced to work as counterfeiters in the Operation Bernhard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
I'm still speechless so I quote:
Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen. - Adorno
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Maybe the only thing that remains in the face of the unspeakable, the irrationally and banally evil (in Hannah Arendt words), is to reinforce our own rationality. To be relentlessly rational in all things, to never relent in the face of the specters of violence and the intoxication of humanity with its own most destructive (and often complacent) impulses.
About Eichmann she wrote:
Dass eine solche Realittsferne und Gedankenlosigkeit in einem mehr Unheil anrichten knnen als alle die dem Menschen innewohnenden bsen Triebe zusammengenommen, das war in der Tat die Lektion, die man in Jerusalem lernen konnte. Aber es war eine Lektion und weder eine Erklrung des Phnomens noch eine Theorie darber.
It was his detachment from reality and thoughtlessness that made him commit evil on an unprecedented scale.
Taking this dictum then the moral imperative is to never shrink from engaging reality directly. to never shrink from thinking and rational inquiry into the circumstances we are put in.
This is the one moral imperative that we can and have to live up to.
I'm still speechless so I quote:
Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen. - Adorno
---
Maybe the only thing that remains in the face of the unspeakable, the irrationally and banally evil (in Hannah Arendt words), is to reinforce our own rationality. To be relentlessly rational in all things, to never relent in the face of the specters of violence and the intoxication of humanity with its own most destructive (and often complacent) impulses.
About Eichmann she wrote:
Dass eine solche Realittsferne und Gedankenlosigkeit in einem mehr Unheil anrichten knnen als alle die dem Menschen innewohnenden bsen Triebe zusammengenommen, das war in der Tat die Lektion, die man in Jerusalem lernen konnte. Aber es war eine Lektion und weder eine Erklrung des Phnomens noch eine Theorie darber.
It was his detachment from reality and thoughtlessness that made him commit evil on an unprecedented scale.
Taking this dictum then the moral imperative is to never shrink from engaging reality directly. to never shrink from thinking and rational inquiry into the circumstances we are put in.
This is the one moral imperative that we can and have to live up to.
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mein mitgefhl. ich kann wenigstens heizen.