40

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

Moreover, failure to reflect on how they each share this manner or way of challenging
revealing may itself condemn us to a fate that does indeed compel. By the time of his
posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel, one can almost get the sense that
Heidegger believes that while there is always hope, it is diminishing all the time; we are
enveloped by the extreme danger since we cannot seem to extricate ourselves from this
inadvertent and automatic reductive ordering and levelling of everything in the world
to calculable resource or waste to be used or disposed of. Heidegger is not so much
looking to diminish the undeniable inhumanity of simply erasing from existence vast
numbers of people with staggering efficiency, nor is he comparing the moral weight of
that atrocity with what happens in an abattoir, or the events at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Rather what he is drawing attention to is the way that we take a levelling gaze to all
of these situations which points to something extremely disturbing. We reduce them
down to problems to be solved; we treat everything as calculable resource or obstacles
to be efficiently dealt with. Helping us to see that this very way of revealing the world
and others around us stands as a very immediate underlying problem is, for Heidegger,
one of the most pressing tasks. After all, many people will continue to eat meat, ethnic
conflict will continue to emerge as will conflicts between nations. For Heidegger,
there is an important question as to how we approach these situations, which in turn
requires that we reflect on how we have come to view the world around us along with
those in it. War, conflict, bombing raids, xenophobia, genocide these words are
hardly archaic they are common enough in our daily news. More recently the euphemized language of military conflict (with casualties calculated to within acceptable
limits and the frequently employed, yet no less dreadful, phrase collateral damage)
should strike us as impossibly sinister. Calculated and acceptable losses such
rhetoric begins to smack of a certain ruthlessly mercantile idiom for example, how
many items in a given batch will typically perish before reaching the shelves; what kind
of losses and bad debts can be brooked as part of a larger business plan? The parallels
proliferate more and more since the lens with which we routinely filter the world and
people around us is quite close to that described by Heidegger. When it comes to the
Holocaust we are all shocked by the cold, desensitized industrial-speak employed by
those who either conceived of or ran the factories of death where people were treated
much as animals are on factory farms today, or perhaps as little more than industrial
waste, as either resources to be used or waste to be disposed of. That human beings
could even begin to conceive of an entire race of fellow creatures in those kinds of
terms required that they look through an interpretative lens which Heidegger believed
was fast becoming the dominant one throughout the world. If we want to progress past
the mythical characterizations of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust and to begin to
reduce the risk of history repeating itself, then we need to come to terms with how
it is that human beings can reveal themselves, the world and others in the ways that
we have done since the early part of the twentieth century. The Holocaust should be
understood as the zenith of Enframings holding sway, not as a singularity beyond
compare that was perpetrated by those who were not like us!
Of course, as Lacoue-Labarthe has remarked on a few occasions, there is a scandal!
It leaps out at you,31 so to speak. The scandal concerns the refusal, the refusal to
simply break down at the absolute inhumanity of what happened as a result of a