The Essence of Technology and the Holocaust

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hideous, nightmarish vision of a people. A vision that, almost as an expression of the

danger Heidegger warns against, can actually look on a people as a problem, the
Jewish problem, and come up with a solution, the Final Solution. This devastating
solution may well articulate the Gestell that holds sway as the most extreme danger of
the essence of technology. But why not shed a tear at it all? Why not show the world
that he was, after all, not just a thinker but an emotively engaged human being, moved
like the rest of us? These are difficult and uncomfortable questions, and yet, philosophically, they dont really do a whole lot!
Heideggers brief remarks concerning the Holocaust itself, in the context of
his comprehensive meditation on the essence of technology, can however serve
as cautions against what has happened, against the historical palliative we have
swallowed. His remarks are not intended, in my view, to diminish the horror of the
Holocaust but more to show that part of the horror is something that transcends the
boundary fences at Auschwitz, something that lingers on in our atmosphere long after
the languorous legions of liquidated lives rising from the chimney stacks of the crematoria have dissipated. And the danger, the very real danger, is that if we do not see
how such intolerable cruelty can happen again, if we treat the Holocaust and Nazi rule
as the kind of singular aberration which emerges from out of nowhere human, then
we are indeed condemned to repeat such pasts until such time as we confess their
origin in the way we have looked and do look on the world and each other. Might we
not argue then, admittedly with Heidegger to an extent, that the Holocaust, far from
being different in kind, far from having a different, singular essence, was to the most
extreme degree imaginable, the very quintessence of how we had begun to reveal
large numbers of people, entire races, as problems that admitted of solution, in this
instance, a solution through dissolution? Can we not say that the Holocaust was in
fact the purest and, in that sense, the most grotesquely vivid expression of the extreme
danger of Gestell? That is not, however, to look to exculpate Heidegger and his thought;
that would be to misunderstand the aim of this study. Rather, in looking to unravel
this Gordian knot which cannot be chopped clean through we need to undermine the
criticisms of Heideggers philosophy that are wide of the mark. That is not to say that
Heideggers philosophy is only tangentially relevant to his political views, rather, the
most distressing aspects of his political views are related to other aspects of his thought
initially presented in Being and Time.