Michael Pugliese wrote:
http://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1994/ MBrev.html
>...Spanos's forceful and compelling final chapter brings us
back to what Davidson takes as Heidegger's most "callous" statement,
the critical force Davidson's own manipulations try to cover
over. This is the now- infamous equation Heidegger makes in a
1949 lecture between a "mechanized food industry" and other examples
of technological thinking: "Agriculture is now a mechanized food
industry. As for its essence, it is the same thing as the manufacture
of corpses in the gas chambers or the death camps, the same thing
as blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same as
the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." Davidson is outraged here
by what he sees as the collapse of distinctions: "Do we have
no criteria of evaluation to distinguish between the waste products
of technology and the production of human corpses in the gas
chambers?" But as Spanos points out, this outrage disguises a
refusal to think the identity in essence between these manifestations
of the "age of the world picture," an essential sameness whose
disastrous effects were exposed by the American war against Vietnam.
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I write:
Blech. People make way too much out of this damn quote. Heidegger was trying (in usual sensationalistic style) point out the what he viewed as the inhuman nature of mechanized agriculture, not apologize for the death camps. And to assert that the essence behind each -- that is, mechanization in general -- is the same.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal