Justin Richards
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Well, you gotta draw the line somewhere on what is going to work as a magazine article, and some of the nuances have to remain unnuanced, for sure. And, darn these continentals, sometimes for neologisms and sometimes for using ordinary words in nonordinary ways, why can’t they either just speak clearly or remain silent?!

I don’t think that, especially with the clarification, a goal oriented suffering is problematic, but remaining with the specific example of the holocaust I guess it makes sense to ask to whom does the suffering make no sense? Especially when we realize that not every concentration camp succeeded so totally in dehumanizing the victims that their humanity no longer appeared to themselves. And of course here is where I have to add the caveat “from my inexpert understanding”, in some camps the occupants managed to form in a limited sense a community amongst themselves. In which cases the suffering they endured could be made to make sense to each other, but not to anyone outside this limited community, and I would point to Frankel’s little book as an example. And, on the other hand, at Auschwitz and elsewhere the dehumanization seems to have reached such a monstrous level that the victims no longer appeared to each other as human beings, and I believe Arendt makes the case that some camps managed to destroy the possibility of solitude and so they no longer appeared to themselves as human. In this case the suffering does not even have the possibility of making sense within a limited community, nor at the most extreme, to oneself.

So, I guess my question is just that to whom does the suffering make no sense?

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    Justin Richards

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    BA philosophy, builds things, fixes things, sometimes, he sings.