The Work of Forgetting by Symons Stephane;

Author:Symons, Stephane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

A Note on Ernst Jünger

In the essay ‘Across the Line’ (1950), originally written as a contribution to a Festschrift for Heidegger’s sixtieth birthday, Ernst Jünger, as well, considers the question of whether the nothingness and emptiness of historical time can be transmuted into productive forces. This leads to what he calls ‘diagnostic remarks’ about nihilism.[91] Like Nietzsche, Jünger refuses to consider nihilism as a merely negative event, stressing that nihilism can be ‘as much the sign of the weakness as of the strength’.[92] For Jünger, nihilism has nothing to do with disease (‘[O]ne will find that physical health is connected with [nihilism]—above all where it is vigorously at work’),[93] evil (‘There are proven remedies against evil. More disturbing is the fusion, indeed the total confusion of good and evil, which often eludes the sharpest eye’)[94] or chaos (‘[N]ihilism can in fact harmonize with vast worlds of order, and . . . it even needs them in order to become active on a large scale’).[95] In line with Heidegger, however, Jünger connects the phenomenon of nihilism with the modern age of automation and mechanicity. For him, as well, increased specialization precludes a lived experience of absolute values. In Jünger’s view, humanity has crossed a line that makes impossible the return to an era with stable values and an intimate feel for transcendence. For this reason, man no longer has the freedom to decide between a nihilistic world and a world with an undamaged moral sensibility. Jünger connects nihilism to the ‘inevitability of destruction’.[96] Replete with references to the First and Second World War and written during the Cold War, he draws attention to a degree of violence that is potentially all-consuming. ‘There is no doubt that our situation as a whole is crossing over the critical line. With this, danger and security change. One can no longer think how to remove one house, one single property, from the path of the firestorm. Here no ruse, no flight can help’.[97] Since this cosmological expansion of nihilism has been completed, the only alternative that can be taken seriously is the one between a ‘pessimistic’ nihilism that stands in the way of genuine innovation (it ‘corresponds to the impossibility of bringing forth higher types, or even conceiving of them, and flows into pessimism’)[98] and an ‘optimistic’ one that expresses ‘the uselessness of the other world, not however of the world and of existence in general’.[99]

In his response to Jünger’s text, initially entitled ‘Concerning “The Line”’ (1955) but then, revealingly retitled ‘On the Question of Being’, Heidegger agrees with Jünger’s perspective that nihilism has become a global phenomenon for which there remains no direct alternative, let alone the possibility of a return to a previous era with supposedly intact moral values. However, Heidegger dismisses Jünger’s suggestion that nihilism is first and foremost a process that was initiated by man. His criticism singles out Jünger’s statement that ‘[t]he moment in which the line is passed brings a new turning approach of Being, and with this, what is actual begins to shine forth’.

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