In a happier age, Immanuel Kant identified one of the problems of understanding any of the genocides which come all too easily to mind. It is the problem of the mathematical sublime. The arithmetician has no more difficulty in principle comprehending one murder than 600,000 - the number murdered in the Armenian atrocities of 1916-17 or by Nazi Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front in 1941 before the death camps were fully geared up - or five to six million, the best estimates we have of the number of Jews murdered in the camps. At a purely cognitive level any number can be understood by adding, unit by unit, to the unit that comes before. But for Kant, the ability to take in great magnitudes - to feel their sublime terror - is ultimately an aesthetic act and one which depends on gaining the right distance from the subject. His example comes from a French general's account of a visit to the Pyramids and his anxiety about how to feel the emotional effect of their sheer magnitude. Too close and we see only stone by stone without taking in the full sweep from base to peak; too far away and we lose the sublime wonder predicated on the sense that something so massive was made discrete block by discrete block.

LRB 5 June 1997 | PDF Download