Ernst Jünger
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 128th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Jünger (29 March 1895–17 February 1998), who was born in Heidelberg on this date in 1895. He served in both world wars and lived more than a century.
Jünger was neither a philosopher nor an historian in the conventional sense, but his influence on how we understand our own time, starting with his memoir of the First World War, The Storm of Steel, has been enormous, and as he began to plumb philosophical questions in works such as On Pain and War as Inner Experience, and especially in The Worker, Jünger ultimately produced a more abstract and theoretical rendering of the “Front Experience” (“Fronterlebnis”). What began as something concrete and even autobiographical, grew into something Jünger believed to be universal. Undoubtedly, Jünger’s most famous book was his first book, recounting the concrete experiences of war with which he began, near the end of which book, in preparing to advance in another offensive, Jünger makes this observation:
“The destiny of the nations drew to its iron conclusion, and the stake was the possession of the world. I was conscious, if only in feeling, of the significance of that hour; and I believe that on this occasion every man felt his personality fall away in the face of a crisis in which he had his part to play and by which history would be made. No one who has lived through moments like these can doubt that the course of nations in the last resort rises and falls with the destiny of war.”
I have written previously that the philosophy of war is a close cousin of the philosophy of history; in this observation, Jünger makes war the engine of history, or, at least, the decisive event that shapes the fate of nations. If history is made by war, then the philosophy of war is the philosophy of history at one remove, and, arguably, the necessary foundation of history.
In the 1920s Jünger envisioned a kind of totalitarian society that had not previously existed, but which grew out of his war experiences. In the First World War, “Mobilization” was the widely-used term to describe the necessary process of preparing an industrialized nation-state to fight: the calling up of soldiers, reporting to an induction center, the procurement of arms, food, and transportation, and movement of troops to the front, and so on. Jünger envisioned a total mobilization in which an entire society — if not an entire civilization — restructured itself for war. Richard Wolin, the editor of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, introduced Jünger’s essay on total mobilization by reference to its influence:
“It is important to understand the paramount strategic role played by works such as ‘Total Mobilization’ and The Worker among the German conservative intelligentsia in the postwar period. For thereupon hinges the all-important difference between the ‘traditional German conservatism’ and the new generation of ‘conservative revolutionaries’.”
Jünger and Oswald Spengler are recognized as the two most influential voices of the conservative revolution of the interwar period, and their influence filtered into academic philosophy. Wolin also quotes Heidegger on Jünger’s influence:
“The way I already viewed the historical situation at that time [i.e., in the early 1930s] may be indicated with a reference. In 1930, Ernst Jünger’s essay on ‘Total Mobilization’ appeared; in this essay the fundamental outlines of his 1932 book The Worker are articulated. In a small group, I discussed these writings at this time, along with my assistant [Werner] Brock, and attempted to show how in them an essential comprehension of Nietzsche’s metaphysics is expressed, insofar as the history and the contemporary situation of the West is seen and foreseen in the horizon of this metaphysics. On the basis of these writings, and even more essentially on the basis of their foundations, we reflected on what was to come, i.e., we sought thereby to confront the later in discussions.”
In the essay Jünger explains what he means by “total mobilization”:
“We can now pursue the process by which the growing conversion of life into energy, the increasingly fleeting content of all binding ties in deference to mobility, gives an ever-more radical character to the act of mobilization — which in many states was the exclusive right of the crown, needing no counter-signature. The events causing this are numerous: with the dissolution of the estates and the curtailing of the nobility’s privileges, the concept of a warrior caste also vanishes; the armed defense of the state is no longer exclusively the duty and prerogative of the professional soldier, but the responsibility of everyone who can bear arms. Likewise, because of the huge increase in expenses, it is impossible to cover the costs of waging war on the basis of a fixed war budget; instead, a stretching of all possible credit, even a taxation of the last pfennig saved, is necessary to keep the machinery in motion. In the same way, the image of war as armed combat merges into the more extended image of a gigantic labor process [Arbeitsprozesses]. In addition to the armies that meet on the battlefields, originate the modern armies of commerce and transport, foodstuffs, the manufacture of armaments — the army of labor in general. In the final phase, which was already hinted at toward the end of the last war, there is no longer any movement whatsoever — be it that of the homeworker at her sewing machine — without at least indirect use for the battlefield. In this unlimited marshaling of potential energies, which transforms the warring industrial countries into volcanic forges, we perhaps find the most striking sign of the dawn of the age of labor [Arbeitszeitalter]. It makes the World War a historical event superior in significance to the French Revolution. In order to deploy energies of such proportion, fitting one’s sword-arm no longer suffices; for this is a mobilization [Rustung] that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life’s finest nerve. Its realization is the task of total mobilization: an act which, as if through a single grasp of the control panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life, towards the great current of Martial energy.”
In the book-length exposition of these ideas in The Worker, Jünger elaborates on all of these themes in greater detail. This paragraph occurs near the end of the book:
“We call technology the manner in which the form of the worker mobilizes the world. It includes the offensive against historical systems and religious powers as an apparently neutral means, yet which is only at the disposal of the worker, without any resistance. Technology is not the instrument of a boundless progress, but rather leads to a completely determined and clear condition distinguished by an increasing permanence and perfection of the means, which runs parallel with the education and formation of a new race, a condition which cannot, however, be reached arbitrarily. Rather, we still live in a very variable world, which begins, nonetheless, to raise itself out of the explosive-dynamic character of the early landscape of workshops through the increased planned and predictable character of its processes. Even where technology supplies the undisguised instruments of power, a conclusion of the process of armament is only possible if the worker takes it away from pure competition and initiative within the nation-state, and then stabilises and legitimises the means of revolutionary movement. This is possible only if he deploys the means subordinated to him alone not in the liberal sense, but in the sense of a superior race.”
Jünger’s philosophy is not only a philosophy of war, but also a philosophy of technology. Vincent Blok has written Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene, which is a deeply Heideggerian work, so that might think of it as a Heideggerian reading of Jünger’s philosophy of technology. Early in Chapter 10 Blok writes:
“In the prevalence of materialism in the workshop landscape, Junger sees the upswing of the new earth power of the worker. On the one hand, this materialism destroys the categories of the Animal Rationale and on the other hand, it ‘forms the ground floor for the workshop in which the scaffolding for the workers is forged.’ The earth is here understood as an inexhaustible fertile field of possibilities for a new metaphysical position of the worker as representative of the gestalt of the worker and in this respect, the earth is homeland of the worker. ‘The world of the worker will also be the homeland of man.’ As in The Worker, the worker is son of the earth and enemy of the ideas of the Animal Rationale, i.e., a new titan who destroys the categories of the Animal Rationale in favor of the gestalt of the worker: ‘The worker fights and dies in apparatuses, not only without “higher ideas,” but also in his conscious rejection. His ethos flows into the clean service of the apparatus. He does not have to think; he does not have an overview of the plan.’ The worker trusts that the earth will respond and give rise to the gestalt.”
The intersection of war and technology is to be found in the concept of the Materialschlacht, the battle of materiel, in which the production of war industries and the technological mastery of the tools of war is as important as personal courage and martial spirit. Alternatively, we can think of the Materialschlacht of industrialized warfare as the pervasive infiltration of personal courage and martial spirit throughout a society and an economy in a condition of total mobilization. In other words, technology shapes war, and, as we have seen, war shapes history.
While this conception of a society in total mobilization for war, and the role of technology in warfare, could be taken to imply dehumanization and the extirpation of the individual, Alexander Mikhailovsky notes:
“In the book the descriptive accuracy of reporting is matched by the heroic interpretation of the military experience. But in spite of the ‘outstanding significance of matter’ the German warrior-intellectual spares a thought for individual Iliad-style heroism. Jünger upholds the ‘uniqueness’ of man in ‘the epoch of masses and machines.’ He sees all the military situations in terms of a ‘face-to-face’ encounter with the enemy. The elite of the storm battalions are ‘the princes of the trenches, with stern and decisive faces,’ heroes ‘whose names are not on any list’.’’
Jünger’s conception of war pursued through total mobilization may be understood in a much wider sense than mere armed conflict. Bogdan Costea and Kostas Amiridis elaborate on the larger implications of Jünger’s vision:
“Jünger’s critical range extends far beyond war itself. The core themes that connect his investigations to central concerns in the analysis and study of organisations and management are those of technology, reason, power and knowledge. In particular, he examined how the permanent invocation of rationality allows the consolidation of the liberal state to unfold behind the mask of the protection of freedom. Jünger attempted to dissect and understand how social, political and cultural tensions inherent in systems of rational management are manifest in the spheres of production, exchange and consumption. These lines of inquiry have been of constant interest in the development of organisation studies. Jünger’s works are therefore part of a continuous and connected line of thinkers who placed at the core of their studies of institutional orders the questions of technology, rationality and power as elements defining the outlines of this domain of inquiry.”
Jünger has had no end of critics who have dismissed or derided his work in the strongest terms, and this criticism began with his contemporaries. For example, Walter Benjamin wrote a review of War and Warrior (Krieg und Krieger), edited by Jünger and including his “Total Mobilization” essay (“Die totale Mobilmachung” mentioned above by Richard Wolin as the basis of a Heidegger seminar). Something of the flavor of Benjamin’s critique of Jünger can be gained from the following:
“It is… astonishing to find, and on the first page at that, the statement that ‘it is of secondary importance in which century, for which ideas, and with which weaspons the fighting is done.’ What is most astonishing about this statement is that its author, Ernst Jünger, is thus adopting one of the principles of pacifism, and pacifism’s cliched ideal of peace have little to criticize each other for. Even the most questionable and most abstract of all its principles at that. Though for him and his friends it is not so much some doctrinaire schema that lies behind this as it is a deep-rooted and — by all standards of male thought — a really rather depraved mysticism. But Jünger’s mysticism of war and pacifism’s cliched ideal of peace have little to criticize each other for. Even the most consumptive pacifism has one thing over its epileptically frothing brother for the moment; a certain contact with reality, at least, some conception of the next war.”
I don’t know if Jünger read this review or responded to it, but it would be interesting to have his response, as I think that Jünger and others who had known the “Front Experience” (“Fronterlebnis”), of fighting in the trenches during the First World War, felt that they had been exposed to a visceral reality that bourgeoise intellectuals like Benjamin did not know and could never know.
But Jünger’s thought, like Benjamin’s, is filled with contradictions, many of which result from his changing views. At times his vision of society outlined in The Worker seems like a kind of hyper-individualism, in which the worker is not a cog in the machine of industrialization, but is rather a Titan (Jünger uses this term in the Swedish film linked below), while at other times its seems like the utter abnegation of all individuality. But that the status of the worker and the individual is the focus of figures as divergent as Marx and Jünger demonstrates the extent to which these are both fundamental and contested categories of western thought.
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger
Mikhailovsky, A. (2014). Fjodor Stepun and Ernst Jünger: intellectuals at war. Studies in East European Thought, 66(1–2), 77–87. doi:10.1007/s11212–014–9202–5
Costea, B., & Amiridis, K. (2017). Ernst Jünger, total mobilisation and the work of war. Organization, 24(4), 475–490. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508417699619
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1350508417699619?journalCode=orga
Benjamin, Walter. (1979). Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, Edited by Ernst Jünger. New German Critique, №17, Special Walter Benjamin Issue, pp. 120–128. Translated by Jerolf Wikoff.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/488013
A Portrait of Ernst Jünger
In Swedish and German with English subtitles
