The conclusions that Heidegger drew from this last point were not as radical as we might hope: he questioned not the stereotype of the calculating Jews but only their uniqueness. He himself speculated that the Jews might have a role to play in the technological crisis of the modern world, though he never specified what. What Heidegger thoroughly rejected, however, was any description of the Jews as a "race": "The question of the role of World Jewry", he insisted, "is not a racial one, but the metaphysical question of a form of humanity" characterised by deracination and instrumental reasoning. It would be absurd to assume that this "form of humanity" could be eradicated by eliminating a particular group of people. On the contrary: such calculated extermination would only perpetuate the technological logic that Heidegger was calling his compatriots to abandon. That logic could only be overcome, as Heidegger wrote, by "suffering and danger and knowledge".

All this creates the strong impression that Heidegger's thinking about the Jews is governed not by a pragmatic but by a poetic logic. His "Jew" is not Hitler's Untermensch but Shakespeare's Shylock: on a practical level, an outsider advantaged by the commercial ambitions of the city; but on a more profound literary level, a personification of that city's own dangerous tendency to see in fellow human beings nothing more than so many pounds of flesh. This "poetic" logic aims to resist the instrumental logic of his technocratic surroundings. But within these surroundings, Heidegger's literary armchair approach is also his great weakness. The real danger of his comments about the Jews is not merely that they are racist but that they seem to hold out an abstract, poetic typology as a replacement for political awareness: by reducing the Jews to a poetic type, he becomes deaf to their practical plight. This sometimes takes grotesque forms: though he would never advocate or condone Hitler's and Himmler's "final solution", for example, Heidegger seems to find a measure of poetic justice in the Nazis' calculating reduction of the Jews to a "race" as matching the Jews' own reductive tendency towards racial thinking. He is, as Hannah Arendt later put it to Günter Gaus, "caught in the trap of his own ideas".

This does not force us to dismiss Heidegger's project, but to recognise its blind spots. On the one hand, his analysis of the Nazi regime is eerily accurate: Nazism is neither the unique good its masters proclaimed nor the singular evil we sometimes lazily imagine, but merely a particularly efficient working out of the devastating human tendency to strip others of their humanity. On the other hand, his critique of technology, though it put Heidegger in ideological opposition to the party, left him practically complicit with it: by substituting poetic justice for legal justice, he gave away any criterion by which to condemn the calculated technological extermination of the supposedly technologically-minded Jews. Perhaps his own call to a poetic appreciation of the world, for all its rejection of a forceful "enframing" of the world, is simply another version of the human tendency to remake the world in the image of our own fantasies.