How can science work both as a positive (even dangerously utopian) discourse
positing human perfectibility and the order of Nature, and as a dangerously
impersonal, dehumanizing discourse that allowed for millions of human “specimens”
to be experimented on, and then exterminated during the Holocaust? What does it
mean for Levi to turn to science to tell his story, and to tell aspects of THIS history?
Does the science, like the carbon atom, give us hope, or does it act as a God-
substitute, where God has failed us, or some interesting combination of effects? How
do theories of Nature complicate our theories of human nature? How does a focus on
the concrete help put the lie to systems of ideas, like Nazi ideology? How does the
abstraction necessary to doing complicated science, e.g. studying the invisible world
of atoms, call us to look below the surface of received History and complicate that
too? If science suggests linear progress, how does the 20th Century complicate THAT
myth? Can history be used to complicate what we mean by science, which is afterall,
conducted by scientists – fallible people?
