Heidegger

In a message dated 7/16/2008 8:33:05 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
tgeorgescu at home.nl writes:

> Dear Tudor;
> You mean they wish to grow beards? A society of bearded ones
> (barbarians) would of course have to exclude all those without penises
> and hair on their face. This would go along with your cold turkey
> justification of genocide which has no compare in the ancient world

Well, I was not trying to “justify” genocide. I was only bringing it into
historical context. I explained the facts of history and evolutionary
biology, I wasn’t trying to justify anything. I was descriptive, not
prescriptive.
Then why bother with historical precedents which were hardly descriptive of
the modern case?

> where there was no such thing as technological mass slaughter. All
> slaughter was done by hand. Better to re-evaluate your view when it is
> techno that depersonalizes murder as more civilized.
> Bernard

This is Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis, which, oddly enough, has peculiar
similarities with a quote for which Heidegger got labeled as a Holocaust
apologist (or a Holocaust denier):

“Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence
as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination
camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine,
the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”

Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Martin… (at the bottom of the
page).

Greetings,

Tudor
Yes, of course. That is because Heidegger makes no distinction between a
collectivist response and that of the individual who is identified with such a
response whether it be the autonomy of technological means or its application as
an agency of didatically wrought mass slaughter. In either case it is missed
that the collective response has no access to moral conscience, no more so that
would a hurricane or a flood.
Cheers;
Bernard

Posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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