18

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

populace in wholly abstract terms. Heidegger argued in several places that
the hydrogen bomb an instrument of mass extermination was not the real
problem facing us. Instead, the problem is the perversion and constriction of
humanitys understanding of being itself in the technological era. Extermination
camps and hydrogen bombs, from Heideggers viewpoint, were both symptoms of
humanitys conception of itself and everything else as resources to be produced
and consumed, created and destroyed, at will.26

It is interesting to note that, when Zimmerman offers this less critical reading of
Heideggers agriculture remark, he draws the comparisons between the deployment
of nuclear weaponry and death camps. This is noteworthy since, Zimmerman himself,
along with the majority of commentators, usually overlooks the rather interesting
parallels that can be drawn from these developments in the Second World War and
inveighs instead about Heideggers attempt to measure the suffering at Auschwitz
against the industrial harvesting of crops. Indeed, the more obvious comparison with
the slaughter houses which have since become conveyor belts for death on factory
farms is also typically omitted in order to scandalize things further. The very fact that
the whole statement is referred to as the agriculture remark as opposed to the Atomic
Bomb Remark is indicative in its own right.27
Many commentators, in their capacity as human beings, want Heidegger to show
some smidgen of humanity and to publicly condemn the heinous crimes that took
place in camps such as Auschwitz. That he chose not to for the most part is something
that gives us all pause. But that we should somehow demand of his philosophy that it
offer us the basis for such a condemnation, when it was never designed or intended
for such ends, is wrongheaded. Heidegger consistently steered clear from all forms of
ethics or moral anthropology. He believed his questions were more preliminary or
preparatory. He insisted that this was the case in Being and Time and he maintained
this stance throughout his career. If one wanted an ethical response, one should have
discontinued reading Heidegger half way through Being and Time. Heidegger did
argue, however, that there were essential features of the Holocaust, the use of nuclear
weapons, the blockading of countries and indeed the assembly line production of meat
for consumption which were symptomatic of the peculiar Gestalt of the technological
age. They were all symptoms of the holding sway of Gestell and tackling the question
of human freedom in the face of this danger is where Heidegger invested his energies.
That he chose not to make moral distinctions between the horror of the Holocaust
and the horrors of a factory farm that is, perhaps, a human failing. Nonetheless,
the possibility of a very penetrating insight into the philosophical backdrop to the
Holocaust is available in Heideggers extraordinary confrontation with technology.
Heidegger is asking why it is that things reveal themselves to us in the ways that
they do. He eventually concludes that since the early part of the twentieth century,
everything is more or less revealed through a technological lens and Heidegger
looks at the levelling gaze at work in some of the worst abominations of technology
witnessed in the twentieth century: nuclear weapons and the razing of Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, the Holocaust gas chambers and the crematoria, the ability to systematically blockade a country to the point of starvation and indeed the application of