Man-Made Mass Death and Changing Concepts of Self

The fact that human beings can foresee death is what distinguishes us from the animals. Ours is the only species, so far as we can tell, that knows it will die. This observation, familiar to us but still fresh to the ancient Greeks, may have led to the conclusion that death is the muse of philosophy. From the time that human beings first began to reflect about cosmic structure, knowledge, and justice, they became attentive also to death and the long shadow it casts on life. But now, in the twentieth century, we are confronted with a new phenomenon whose radical character we have not yet begun to assess: man-made mass death. I intend to consider the old model for understanding death that I call the authenticity paradigm and the alterations this paradigm undergoes under the impact of changed historical circumstances as well as to propose a new model of selfhood that takes man-made mass death into account (Wyschogrod, 1985).

One could reasonably ask: “Hasn't there always been mass death? Earthquakes, epidemics, wars?” Yes, but scale cannot be assessed in terms of numbers. What is different now is the compression of time and the means for bringing death about. Thus, for example, 25,000,000 people died of bubonic plague or the Black Death in Europe between 1384 and 1666 (Nash, 1976, p. 54), but 55,000,000 people (if noncombatants are included) died between 1939 and 1945 as a result of World War II (Nash, 1976, p. 775). The means of destruction have also changed to include biological, chemical, nuclear, and sophisticated conventional weapons as well as gas chambers and the subtler disposition made of persons by means of planned starvation, disease, and mass deportations. It is by now a truism that a point has been reached