ABSTRACT
At the end of the foregoing analysis we are left with our own judgment of the inescapable fact that we ourselves are daily steeped in a “fateful decision” (in Heidegger’s sense of decision, Entscheidung), each of us individually and jointly confronting a disclosure of reality, appearance, and semblance as we appropriate or ignore our ownmost possibilities of historical being. We may argue, in the end, that Heidegger could have and should have declared the Nazi genocide of the European Jews to have been morally wrong, that as a person and as a philosopher he was mistaken not to have asserted these fundamental moral judgments when given the opportunity to do so. However, one who makes that moral judgment must be clear that, if it is so given, it is given in the context of one of three possibilities, if there is a post-Holocaust ethics reasonably to govern our time.
