Concentration Camps and (Ir)Rationality

Abstract

Concentration camps became a subject of philosophical reflection after the Second World War. Some philosophers have linked their emergence and functioning to rationality. Skepticism toward rationality in relation to concentration camps is present in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman. According to these philosophers, concentration camps hold the key to understanding modern society. It is widely acknowledged that concentration camps were, to a certain extent, effective tools of totalitarian regimes, if evaluated from the perspective of the empirical approach, but is there any moral justification for such rationalisation if their result is the transformation of a human being into an ordinary thing?A moral perspective on concentration camps may reveal their inherent irrationality from the perspective of the transcendentalist approach. The central thesis of this article is that in philosophical studies about concentration camps, it is necessary to distinguish two concepts of rationality – empirical and transcendentalist, only in this way it becomes clear that treating a person as a means, rather than an aim, arises from irrational reasoning. This article presents an analysis of the goals and means of concentration camps from the perspective of Kant’s categorical imperative and compares them with Karl Popper’s two approaches to social construction – gradual and utopian engineering, as well as a distinction between rationalism and irrationalism. The conclusion is made about the appropriateness of considering the problem of concentration camps from the standpoint of contrasting rationality and irrationality, rather than rationality and empiricism. With this approach, the prospects of modern society become clearer: open – thanks to rationality, and closed – through irrationality.