Oodles and oodles of rights

ChrisD(RJ) chrisd at russiajournal.com
Mon Apr 8 02:41:38 PDT 2002


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. --------------- 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



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