The Right To Be?

Are our present joys linked, in some inextricable way, to “some mass atrocity that was committed in the past”? Philosophy professor Peter Atterton considers (NYT) how historical injustices affect our existence today:

Nietzsche once surmised that anyone who had ever wanted to relive a moment of joy was committed to affirming the idea of reliving the entirety of his or her life up to that point. Why? Because Nietzsche, a dyed-in-the-wool determinist, believed that the present instant of joy is made possible by all the events in one’s past that caused it. As he lyrically put it, “All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love.” For Nietzsche this is a splendid thing, for it gives us the power to redeem the past. … I had always solaced myself with Nietzsche’s idea of looking back at one’s life and affirming all of it, even the bad parts, which are indispensable conditions for whatever happiness my life currently contains, until one day it dawned on me that if I am to say “yes” to those events in the past that caused me to suffer but which are causally necessary for my life’s being lived as I live it now, then I must also say “yes” to those events that have caused others to suffer as well.

But who can do this? Who can maintain in good conscience that the Holocaust or slavery was justified because otherwise he or she, or anyone else currently living for that matter, wouldn’t have been born. (Nietzsche notoriously maintained that the only justification of the French Revolution — including the Reign of Terror — was that it produced Napoleon.) Whose natural narcissism is so extreme that he or she can justify the unjustifiable suffering of innumerable innocent lives? The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was more discerning: “What is most natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?”