In one sense the individual, as a matter of fact, is not very much, and we can understand the misanthrope who in 1939 declared: “After all, when you look at people one by one, it doesn’t seem so awful a thing to make war upon them.” Reduced to pure facticity, congealed in his immanence, cut off from his future, deprived of his transcendence and of the world which that transcendence discloses, a man no longer appears as anything more than a thing among things which can be subtracted from the collectivity of other things without its leaving upon the earth any trace of its absence. Multiply this
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She is saying that when you look at just one man versus the multiple men, it does not seem so bad to burden him or to go to war against him, as just one soldier among many soldiers. We lose sight of the whole and lose some humanity in ourselves as we become indifferent.
Like the question of does the good of the one outweigh the good of the many (or the few)?
