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Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

Heidegger has not as yet thematized this kind of instrumentality as problematic in its
own right in Being and Time. Nevertheless, a life lived merely in the project-oriented,
everyday world dominated by equipment, as a mere cog in a mass machine, was
deemed ultimately inauthentic by Heidegger; one can surely then say that the seeds
of his later thought were beginning to gestate here as opposed to the idea that the
latter thought was a rejection or abjuration of this earlier discussion. In The Question
Concerning Technology Heidegger notes:
a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now
reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that
the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently
than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain
Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield
nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is
set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or
for peaceful use The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It
sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines
turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the
electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of
cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes
pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself
appears as something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into
the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for
hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the
river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the
power station. (QCT: 1416)

Spenglers confident prediction of the imminent demise of technics/the technological

world, however, seems a little nave in retrospect and certainly is nowhere to be found
in Heideggers eschatological outlook. As it turns out, technology has proved itself far
more flexible and resilient than Spengler supposed:
The machine, by its multiplication and its refinement, is in the end defeating its
own purpose. In the great cities the motor-car has by its numbers destroyed its
own value, and one gets on quicker on foot. In Argentine, Java, and elsewhere
the simple horse-plough of the small cultivator has shown itself economically
superior to the big motor implement, and is driving the latter out.50

Heidegger was not nearly so confident of the imminent demise of technology. He was
adamant of course that the technological nature of our world and the holding sway of
Enframing was not a fate that compels, at the same time, even in his later proclamations concerning the prospects for humanity in the technological era towards the end
of his life, Heidegger appeared anything but sanguine.
As we have seen briefly in Chapter 2 and has been discussed in detail elsewhere,51
Heideggers concerns with the technological age simply do not reduce to anything
like what we find in Spengler. Heidegger is interested in the essence of technology
which is nothing technological. His position is a philosophically sophisticated and