Introduction: Reason and Horror

Keeping company with the many explanations marshaled over the decades for the rise of German Fascism and its extermination of the Jews, one constant suspicion may be held in common at this late period of modernity by all who have thought about those events. Those who participated in the crime of the Holocaust did so in the wake of some terrible sea change that had been effected in the human spirit. If such a fear does haunt us, perhaps through all our efforts to lay blame for the Holocaust elsewhere so that we can feel less vulnerable precisely where we may have become the weakest, then the thesis of this work will resonate. The destruction of the Jews was the consequence of the destruction of the aesthetic features of what the Western philosophical tradition since John Stuart Mill more narrowly understood as “individuality.” “Aesthetic individuality,” as I will call it, disappeared with the triumph of a form of rationality whose progress led inevitably to the Holocaust. Set forth in Dialectic of Enlightenment, I will argue in part I of Reason and Horror, this is Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.Adorno’s discovery. ¹ It is the sea change in the human spirit from which the horror of the Holocaust followed. ²