Re-assessing the Affair

19

techniques for mass production to the rearing and slaughtering of livestock on factory
farms. Regardless of the ethical or ontic distinctions one might want to make between
these various events, Heideggers concern is not with why people choose to wage war,
act on xenophobic impulses or eat meat these have ever been human shortcomings.
Rather, for Heidegger, the question is how we came to prosecute those ends in the
shocking ways in which we have done in the twentieth century and Heidegger wants
to suggest that this relates to the peculiar way in which we reveal the world which
in turn is revealed to us in the technological age under the stamp of Gestell. The real
challenge is perhaps to try and see how we begin to think events like the Holocaust
from this perspective and, as we shall see in the next chapter, there is some potential
in Heideggers later work for such an engagement. Objections to the effect that
Heidegger is guilty of a category mistake are completely wrongheaded; Heidegger is
not comparing agriculture with atomic energy and genocide Heidegger is suggesting
that the manner in which agriculture, military conflict and genocide have been undertaken in the twentieth century have been very heavily influenced by a technological
type of understanding.

Heideggers refusal to recant

Perhaps the least contested issue in all of this concerns Heideggers silence.
Heideggers supporters no less than his critics find it difficult to countenance his
refusal to offer any public apology for his actions under Nazi rule.28 The sporadic
remarks he did make have been widely disparaged for what is seen as an appalling,
utterly indefensible lack of humanity or compassion. Yet Heideggers silence and
the cryptic remarks he made can be taken to indicate that he was wary of the way
that our discourse concerning this blackest night in Europes turbulent history was
already predetermined according to certain schemes. One reason, I believe, Heidegger
remained silent was because anything short of a public spectacle of self-flagellation
was out-of-joint. It might not simply be the case that Heidegger lacked the ability to
apologize publicly (though I am quite sure that that had something to do with it29).
He may also have been loath to simply join the procession of reformed Nazi flagellants in a way that would only expedite the spread of the plague of myth that was
sweeping through the West.30 It was something of a lose-lose situation for Heidegger.
One of the most important thinkers of his generation who, in some ways due to his
insights into the real essence of technology, was supremely well equipped to situate
the Holocaust could not possibly do as much explicitly since what was demanded
was a reinforcing of the discursive rules. People wanted an auto da f (in the original
sense of that term) or they wanted a public, medieval spectacle of harsh corrective
punishment for unrecanted heresy. To be true to his conscience publicly would have
been the end for him, to placate the mob would have destroyed whatever intellectual
integrity he had left, and so in a rather pregnant silence, punctured only sporadically
with a smattering of ambiguous remarks, he managed to secure a grudgingly afforded
exile.31 Indeed theres a curious irony to the fact that what is demanded of one of the