Ernst Jünger's Philosophy of Technology

Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene

Vincent Blok

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351733618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book examines the work of Ernst Jünger and its effect on the development of Martin Heidegger's influential philosophy of technology. Vincent Blok offers a unique treatment of Jünger's philosophy and his conception of the age of technology, in which both world and man appear in terms of their functionality and efficiency. The primary objective of Jünger's novels and essays is to make the transition from the totally mobilized world of the 20th century toward a world in which a new type of man represents the gestalt of the worker and is responsive to this new age. Blok proceeds to demonstrate Jünger's influence on Heidegger's analysis of the technological age in his later work, as well as Heidegger's conceptions of will, work and gestalt at the beginning of the 1930s. At the same time, Blok evaluates Heidegger's criticism of Jünger and provides a novel interpretation of the Jünger-Heidegger connection: that Jünger's work in fact testifies to a transformation of our relationship to language and conceptualizes the future in terms of the Anthropocene. This book, which arrives alongside several new English-language translations of Jünger's work, will interest scholars of 20th-century continental philosophy, Heidegger, and the history of philosophy of technology.

Part I
The Age of Technicity and the Gestalt of the Worker

“I am a Stranger on Earth”

(Psalm 119:19)

Introduction

Like no one else, Hermann Hesse revealed in his novel Demian the umbilical cord of the “war fever” in Germany. The liberation of the German youth, which took place with the outbreak of the First World War, was described by Hesse as the experience that “fate and adventure called us and that soon the world needed us to revolutionize.”¹ This revolution of the world is not so much related to the geographical redefinition of Europe, but to the paradoxical intuition that a new future, a new humanity would emerge in this war. The First World War was widely hailed as a liberating way out of the meaninglessness of bourgeois existence, in which the Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution from 1789 were rejected and “the birth of a new Germany” was inaugurated.²

Such a war ideology was not limited to the Germans. It could also be seen on thousands of French and English faces who, packed on boats and trains, said goodbye to their families to sacrifice themselves in the struggle of “civilization against barbarism” (Henri Bergson) and against a “world full of devils” (Paul Natorp). It concerned “the war to end all wars” (H. G. Wells) or, more generally, the liberation of the world.

A great deal of historical research has already been done about the so-called war fever of 1914 and the related war ideology. Some historians, such as Wolfgang Kruse and Jeffrey Verhey, have convincingly shown that both concepts are in fact the product of war propaganda.³ Verhey shows for instance, based on a statistical analysis of utterances in the press, that the enthusiasm for the war was a constructed myth created by the politics of war.⁴ Kruse comments on this in the following way: “The beginning of the war, which was long before stylized into a downfall of the world, was now interpreted as a world-verdict and at the same time as the start of an all-embracing renewal of the world, that a ‘chosen’ people has to execute in war.”⁵ Others, like Reinhard Rürup, recognized the role of propaganda, but pointed to the fact that the ideology of war resonated to a widespread demand in Germany, and therefore should not be reduced to a mere construction.⁶ The “Spirit of 1914” could indicate a profound societal crisis, which eventually became the prelude to National Socialism in Germany. The question is: what is the nature of this societal crisis?

The work of Ernst Jünger can give an indication of the real meaning of this societal crisis. In this chapter, we explore Jünger’s concept of this crisis, which he calls the age of technology, and the turning of Being—the emergence of the gestalt of the worker—he surmises in the technological world we currently live in (Chapter 1). Because Jünger is heavily influenced by Nietzsche, we will focus on Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power first (Chapter 2), before we move on to Jünger’s transition from the totally mobilized world we currently live in toward a world in which a new type of man—the type of the worker—represents the gestalt of the worker (Chapter 3). We end the chapter with a methodological reflection on the question of how Jünger can have access to a gestalt of the worker which is not there and still has to come.

Notes

1. Hesse, Hermann, Demian (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981) 158.

2. Cf. Kruse, W., “Kriegsbegeisterung? Zur Massenstimmung bei Kriegsbeginn,” Eine Welt von Feinden. Der große Krieg 1914–1918, ed. W. Kruse (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1997) 159–166; Rürup, R., “Der ‘Geist von 1914’ in Deutschland. Kriegsbegeisterung und Ideologisierung des Krieges im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Ansichten vom Krieg. Vergleichende Studien zum Ersten Weltkrieg in Literatur und Gesellschaft, ed. B. Hüppauf (Königstein: Verlag Anton Hain Meisenhem, 1984) 1–30.

3. Kruse, W. “Kriegsbegeisterung? Zur Massenstimmung bei Kriegsbeginn,” 160.

4. Verhey, J., The “Spirit” of 1914: The Myth of Enthousiasm and the Rhetoric of Unity in World War I Germany (Berkeley: PhD thesis, 1991).

5. Kruse, W. “Kriegsbegeisterung? Zur Massenstimmung bei Kriegsbeginn,” 170. Cf. 165–170.

6. “The year 1914 was without a doubt a turning point in European history and world history. But it was not the ‘Spirit of 1914’ that gave it its meaning. 1914 brought the bourgeois world together, ended a historical epoch that had begun in 1789” (Rürup, “Der ‘Geist von 1914’ in Deutschland,” 29). Cf. Leed, E.J., No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 39–72.

1
The Ontological Meaning of Gestalt

Understanding the Worker

In 1932, Ernst Jünger, like no other before him, envisioned the technological age in The Worker. He describes the technological age as “total mobilization.” When he speaks of total mobilization, Jünger means nihilism, which in our world has become the “normal state.”¹ Jünger’s achievement consists of the fact that he accepts it without hunting for alternatives or excuses, and attempts to stay in the world as it is, rather than what he strives for it to be.

Although he affirms it, he senses the meaninglessness of our working world. “The work-world expects, hopes for its meaning,”² and that is the primary concern The Worker. This meaning is found in a new “purpose” of Being, which Jünger believed to have encountered in the First World War and calls the “gestalt of the worker.” It is understood as “unity that can ensure a new security and rank order of life.”³ In total mobilization, he suspects an ontological difference between the gestalt as a new unity and the things in the world. The primary concern in The Worker is consequently the concept of the gestalt of the Worker.

This first chapter centers on the question of how the mysterious gestalt in Jünger’s work can be understood. In doing so we will concentrate on The Worker, from 1932. First we will examine Jünger’s experience of the First World War (Section 1.1), in which he sees the demise of the ideals of the Enlightenment of man as animal rationale and the completely meaningless world of nihilism that remains after this demise. Section 1.2 deals with the incommensurability of the First World War: the world and the human encounter that go with it appear now totally mobilized. Jünger calls the totally mobilized world meaningless and asks about the hidden meaning of the millions of victims of the First World War (Section 1.3). He finds it in that which he calls the “gestalt of the worker.” Its precursor is the new type of warrior that fought in the First World War and who is familiar with the world of technology. Section 1.4 deals with the occasion that moved Jünger to a concept of a gestalt: the Battle of Langemarck, in which he experienced a gestalt-switch. Section 1.5 asks what a gestalt actually is. It will be argued that it centers on the ontologically different unity that gives the world meaning. According to Jünger, it embodies the meaning of the First World War. Its realization allows the transition from total mobilization to a world in which the new race of man—the type of the worker—represents the gestalt of the worker.

1.1 The Destruction of the Platonic Idea in the “Shaking of the World Order”

Like many of his contemporaries, Ernst Jünger, full of idealism, dove enthusiastically into the First World War as though in a trance:

We had left lecture halls, school desks and work tables and in those few short weeks of basic training had been merged into one large, keen body. Having grown up in an era of security, we all longed for the unusual, the greatest danger. And the war caught us up like a drug. We departed under a shower of flowers, in an atmosphere of roses and blood. The war would give us what we craved, the great, the strong, the solemn. It seemed like a manly thing to do, a jovial fraternity duel on a flowery meadow dewy with blood. “There is no finer death in all the world….” Anything not to get stuck at home, to be allowed to go!⁴

An experience speaks from his novels and essays that reaches far beyond the historical experience of the war.

He speaks about it as the “shaking of the world order.” Jünger sees it in its most concentrated form at the Battle of Langemarck—later called the Massacre of the Innocents. In the winter of 1914, around 3,000 boys went willingly to their deaths, students who left the lecture halls to rally around the flags and fight for “German culture”:

We see here a classical attack breaking down, regardless of the strength of the will to power that enlivens the individual and the moral and intellectual values through which they are distinguished. Free will, education, enthusiasm and the thrill of death-defying acts do not suffice to overcome the gravity of the few hundred meters on which the magic of mechanical death reigns…. In essence, the operation in Langemarck formed the basis for the entry of a cosmic opposite that continually repeats itself when the world order shakes, and which expresses itself here in the symbols of a technological era.⁵

This is not about the actual destruction of the German troops by the English forces, rather about the experience of nihilism. That is apparent in that “shaking” refers to world order. It becomes clear what kind of shaking when we first ask about the measurement or the unity, within which the world becomes visible as order.⁶

The metaphysical tradition finds this measurement in the ontological determination of the nature of things; of the transcendental horizon of the Platonic idea. In it is the idea or category the fixed measurement, within which the world has order and meaning. So appear, for example, in the light of the idea “man” different people as man, and we can recognize the different people as such. The idea “man” is thus not himself a man, rather it means the metaphysically given measurement within which the multiplicity of people manifests itself as unity, i.e., as man. Thus there are significant differences in the metaphysical tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I The Age of Technicity and the Gestalt of the Worker
• PART II Heidegger’s Reception of Jünger: Work, Gestalt and Poetry
• PART III The Essence of Language and the Poetics of the Anthropocene
• References
• Index