Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits:

"When I stand by my resentments, when I admit that in deliberating our problem I am "biased," I still know I am a captive of the moral truth of the conflict. It seems logically senseless to me to demand objectivity in the controversy with my torturers, with those who helped them, and with the others, who merely stood by silently. The atrocity as atrocity has no objective character. Mass murder, torture, injury of every kind are objectively nothing but chains of physical events, describable in the formalized language of the natural sciences. They are facts within a physical system, not deeds within a moral system. The crimes of National Socialism had no moral quality for the doer, who always trusted in the norm system of his Fuhrer and his Reich. The monster, who is not chained to conscience by his deed, sees it from his viewpoint only as an objectification of his will, not as a moral event."

and also:

"Whoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief be metaphysical or bound to concrete reality, trascends himself. His is not the captive of his individuality; rather he is part of a spiritual community that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz. He is both more estranged from reality and closer to it than his unbelieving comrade. Further from reality because in his Finalistic attitude he ignores the given contents of material phenomena and fixes his sight on a nearer or more distant future; but he is also closer to reality because for just this reason he does not allow himself to be overwhelmed by the conditions around him and thus can strongly influence them."