Autonomy and the Automaton
Ernst Jünger, mechanistic tyranny, the conquest of fear, and true individual freedom
A new conception of power has emerged, a potent and direct concentration. Holding out against this force requires a new conception of freedom, one that can have nothing to do with the washed-out ideas associated with the word today. It presumes, for a start, that one does not want to merely save one’s own skin, but is also willing to risk it.
That’s Ernst Jünger (German WWI hero, novelist, dissident philosopher) writing in 1951 in The Forest Passage, a slim volume on resistance to totalitarian tyranny that I’ve come to consider one of the most poetic meditations on the nature of individual freedom ever written. Densely, often even beautifully symbolic, his book aims to show us the importance of man’s individuality in maintaining our collective humanity. But it also helps reorient us, reminding us that the way in which we typically conceive of individual freedom today is indeed corrupted, “washed out,” and feeble compared to what we once understood.
Moreover, I believe Jünger helps resolve a paradox that I at least have wrestled with for some time (especially as a freedom-loving American): the paradox of individual autonomy. The paradox is this: we subsist under an increasingly totalizing and oppressive managerial regime, in which a vast impersonal hive-mind of officious bureaucrats and ideological programmers aims to surveil, constrain, and manage every aspect of our lives, from our behavior to our associations and even our language and beliefs. This rule-by-scowling-HR manager could hardly feel more collectivist – we’re trapped in a “longhouse” ruled over by controlling, emasculating, spirit-sapping, safety-obsessed nannies. Naturally, our instinct is to sound a barbaric yawp of revolt in favor of unrestrained individual freedom. And yet, as I’ve endeavored to explain several times before, it is also a kind of blind lust for unrestrained individualism that got us stuck here in the first place…
The paradox is that the more individuals are liberated from the restraints imposed on them by others (e.g. relational bonds, communal duties, morals and norms) and by themselves (moral conscience and self-discipline), the more directionless and atomized they become; and the more atomized they become, the more vulnerable and reliant they are on the safety offered by some greater collective. Alone in his “independence,” the individual finds himself dependent on a larger power to protect his safety and the equality of his proliferating “rights” (desires) from the impositions of others, and today it is the state that answers this demand. Yet the more the state protects his right to consume and “be himself” without restraint, the less independently capable and differentiated he becomes, even as his private affairs increasingly become the business of the expanding state.
Subject to the impersonal regulations of mechanistic processes and procedures rather than his own judgement or that of the people in close communion with him, the individual is molded into a more and more uniform cog to fit into the machine: a mere passive “consumer” and easily manipulated and programmed puppet – an automaton – rather than a true individual actor. In the effort to maximize his autonomy, his real autonomy has been lost.
Such an individual has succumbed to what Jünger fittingly describes as the all-encompassing “automatism” of our modern age, in which more and more of human life seems reduced to “mere functionality” and constrained by unliving mechanistic processes. Even our minds become subject to ideological machine code alongside base desires. And it is out of this loss of our humanity that totalitarianism and its atrocities are born.
To escape this automatism, achieve real individuality, and recover our humanity will require us to find a “new freedom” – or rather, an older and nobler freedom – that reconciles liberty with duty, independence with love, life with sacrifice, and the barbarian with the saint. This is the passage to freedom that Jünger seeks to offer us.
Automatism and the Abyss
By 1951 the devastation of war was over but Jünger’s view of the future remained dark. Something ineffable about the world seemed to have shifted with the two world wars, characterized as they had been by “escalated mechanical development” of the kind “which approaches extreme limits of automatism.” And this mechanization – as exemplified by the German war machine – had not remained confined to the battlefield but had turned and conquered society as well. It had even entered the hearts of men and begun to wage “intensified assaults on nomos and ethos.”
Instead of feeling free and happy amid a lasting peace, post-war modern man had found himself increasingly hemmed in, dispossessed, and terrified. “In fact,” Jünger wrote, “the growing automatism is closely connected with the fear, in the sense that man restricts his own power of decision in favor of technological expediencies. This brings all manner of conveniences – but an increasing loss of freedom must necessarily also result.” True, modern man “enjoys the advantages of a peaceful age of technological comfort,” including near “automatized perfection” in the provision of his needs, alongside “theoretical equality” and greater individual freedom of lifestyle than ever before. But, Jünger warned: “Every comfort must be paid for. The condition of the domesticated animal drags behind it that of the slaughterhouse animal.” And today people are “incorporated into the collective structures in a manner that makes them very defenseless indeed.”
The individual no longer stands in society like a tree in the forest; instead he resembles a passenger on a fast-moving vessel, which could be called Titanic, or also Leviathan. While the weather holds and the outlook remains pleasant, he will hardly perceive the state of reduced freedom that he has fallen into. On the contrary, an optimism arises, a sense of power produced by the high speed. All this will change when fire-spitting islands and icebergs loom on the horizon. Then, not only does technology step over from the field of comfort into very different domains, but the lack of freedom simultaneously becomes apparent…
Even amid still pleasant conditions of “progress” many can sense something badly amiss. The atomized modern type is liable to constantly “feel haunted by malevolent forces, which penetrate even into his dreams, have a low capacity to enjoy himself, and have forgotten the meaning of a real festival.” And he knows deep down that “man is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence, which in some cities and even in whole lands so overshadows life that the last smiles have been extinguished and people seem trapped in Kafkaesque underworlds.”
No amount of optimistic state propaganda can banish his unease, as “the individual still possesses organs in which more wisdom lives than in the entire organization – his very bewilderment, his fear, demonstrates this.” And if he finds his subconscious always “agonizing about finding a way out, an escape route, he exhibits a behavior appropriate to the proximity and magnitude of the threat.”
If he is skeptical about the currency and wants to get to the bottom of things, then he is simply conducting himself as someone who still knows the difference between gold and printer’s ink. And if he awakens at night in terror – in a rich and peaceful country at that – this is as natural a reaction as someone’s head reeling at the brink of an abyss. There is no point in trying to convince him that the abyss is not there at all.
What is this abyss, the threat, that the aware individual can sense approaching? The wind he feels whipping by as Titanic speeds ahead informs him that progress is the rule of the day. Yet he intuits awareness of those “atrocities that are seldom absent whenever great changes are taking place.” And behind this he feels the march of automatism, the mechanization of society and of himself, proceeding to such an extent that it threatens to strip him of his individuality and humanity entirely, dragging him into the inhuman machine and its bureaucratic gears. He understands deep down that he is experiencing the abolition of man. And he knows that this brings mortal peril to his own person, as what is most “unsettling in the present case is that the brutality [of the machine] is threatening to become an element, a constitutive part of the new power structures, and that we see the individual placed helplessly at their mercy.” Brutality is the handmaiden of the machine, because machines are the creation of rational thought, and by this point in history we ought to understand “above all that rational thought is by its nature cruel.”
The yawning abyss ahead is the risk of managerial totalitarianism, the fruit of automatism, and the unprecedented capacity for calculated cruelty produced by its inhuman nature – by its boundless appetite for rationalistic schemes, ideology (the mechanization of the mind), social engineering, centralization, and technocratic control. Jünger – himself all too personally familiar with inhuman cruelty – understood that totalitarianism’s core nature had hardly died with Nazi Germany but had become a defining feature of the modern age.
The hopeless encirclement of man has long been in the preparation, through theories that strive for a logical and seamless explanation of the world and go hand in hand with technical development. At first there is the rational encirclement of the opponent, then the societal one; finally, at the appointed hour, he is exterminated. No more desperate fate exists than getting mixed up in a process where the law has been turned into a weapon.
The old mythic figures associated with tyrannical oppression – the great “man-eating ogre,” the “exploiter and taskmaster” – might have altered their shape and number but their menace was only the greater once taken up into the collective structures of the machine. Only now it’s more likely the bone-milling ogre-tyrant will manifest as a swarm of lawyers and bureaucrats, or that he “will appear as a serologist, sitting among his instruments and retorts and pondering how to use human spleen or breastbone to produce marvelous new medicines.”
In fact Jünger warned (rather presciently) as way of example that one “dubious development to be to be wary of in the highest degree is the constantly increasing influence that the state is beginning to have on health services, usually under philanthropic pretexts.” For medical professionals “whose treatments are supervised by bureaucracies… should be regarded with suspicion; overnight they can undergo alarming transformations, and not just in the event of war. It is not inconceivable that the flawlessly maintained files will then furnish the documents needed to intern, castrate, or liquidate.” Even human care can, if subject to automatization and separation from the dignity of individual relationship, become a mechanism for inhumanity.[1]
In fact where once a tyranny might start and end with an individual, who could meet his end at an assassin’s blade, the machinery of modern tyranny is made only the more monstrously robust by the fact that so often no one seems to be in charge. The “combination of significant scenes with insignificant actors” has become a particularly characteristic feature of our times, noted Jünger. Only in the age of the automaton do we find ourselves ruled by so many men of “such trivial stature with such enormous functional power.” Yet “one must concede the zeitgeist an infallible hand in picking out just these characters” to carry on the great “demolition enterprise” of our times. For indeed all “the expropriations, devaluations, equalizations, liquidations, rationalizations, socializations, electrifications, land reallocations, redistributions, and pulverizations presuppose neither character nor cultivations, which would both actually impede the automatism.”
“Man has immersed himself too deeply in [his] constructions,” Jünger warned. “He has devalued himself and lost contact with the ground. This brings him close to catastrophe, to great danger, toward destruction.” And as the grip of a totalitarian machine grows tighter, for the individual there may appear to be no way out:
The automatism seems to effortlessly break down any remnants of free will, and the persecution concentrates and becomes as ubiquitous as an element. For a privileged few flight may remain an option, though it usually leads to something worse. Resistance only seems to invigorate the ruling powers, providing them a welcome opportunity to take offensive action. In the face of all this, the only remaining hope is that the process will be self-consuming, as a volcano exhausts itself in erupting. In the meantime, for the besieged, there can only be two concerns at this point in the game: meeting obligations and not deviating from the norm. The effects carry over in the spheres of security, where people are stricken by an apocalyptic panic.
“It is at this point,” says Jünger, “that the question arises, not merely theoretically but in every human existence today, whether another path remains viable.”
Standing Axe in Hand
Jünger had first-hand experience with totalitarianism and the difficulties and perils of resisting it. He had lived through the rise and fall of Nazism in Germany, watching as his country was consumed and brought to catastrophe by a crude ideological machine he despised. He kept his distance from the regime (unlike his friend Carl Schmitt). And, contrary to accusations that he willingly collaborated (by agreeing to rejoin the army to fight for his country during the war, as he did), or that he remained wholly aloof, he helped back the plot to assassinate Hitler (if not to the degree that he later wished he had – a fact that seems to have haunted him for life). When that conspiracy failed he was saved from death only because his status as one of Germany’s most famous heroes of the First World War had left him too popular for Hitler to want to touch directly. His family, however, was not as lucky: his eldest son (imprisoned for saying Hitler ought to be hanged) was soon sent to the front as part of a penal battalion and killed under suspicious circumstances, likely, Jünger believed, by the Waffen-SS.
Totalitarianism and the nature of resistance would become Jünger’s primary literary focus for the rest of his life, and this agonized investigation came down to one great question: how can an individual remain free – and find the strength to do the right thing – amid overwhelming pressures to conform and obey?
The individual was, Jünger felt, necessarily the locus of resistance against totalitarian control.
When all institutions have become equivocal or even disreputable, and when open prayers are heard even in churches not for the persecuted but for the persecutors, at this point moral responsibility passes into the hands of individuals, or, more accurately, into the hand of any still unbroken individuals.
Although he thought the masses too easily cowed to ever collectively resist tyranny, Jünger was convinced that even a small number of individuals engaged in personal resistance could represent a decisive quantity. “It must be recognized that even a tiny group of truly resolved individuals can be dangerous” for a regime, both effectively and as moral exemplars, he wrote. In fact their example might prove sufficient to bring down Leviathan. Though only a handful of people making a stand might seem suicidal, “it is precisely here that vulnerable spots are revealed in the colossus’s armor.” Thus, “In such situations, the initiative will always pass into the hands of a select minority who prefer danger to servitude.”
Jünger was especially captivated by the “extraordinary image” of “a young social democrat who shot down half a dozen so-called auxiliary policemen at the entrance of his apartment” in 1933.[2] “If we assume that we could have counted on just one such person in every street in Berlin, then things would have turned out very differently than they did,” he mused. (This calls to mind Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s nearly identical reflection in The Gulag Archipelago that “if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive” this would have quickly ground Stalin’s “cursed machine” to a halt.)[3]
Jünger is fascinated because he concludes that an “assault on the inviolability, on the sacredness of the home, would have been impossible in old Iceland in the way it was carried out in 1933, among a million inhabitants of Berlin, as a purely administrative measure.” Viking man would have fought to the death against such an intrusion into his own domain, and so totalitarian control would likely have simply been impossible in such a vital barbaric society:
Long periods of peace foster certain optical illusions: one is the conviction that the unviability of the home is grounded in the constitution, which should guarantee it. In reality, it is grounded in the family father, who, sons at his side, fills the doorway with an axe in hand.
The young social democrat in Berlin had acted in the same spirit. Though, as Jünger noted, naturally “he did not get this from his party’s manifesto” full of nice, tolerant left-liberal values. He was “certainly not the type Léon Bloy describes as running to their lawyer while their mother is being raped.” Rather he “still partook of the substance of the old Germanic freedom, which his enemies [the Nazis] only celebrated in theory.”
Jünger is not so much interested in armed resistance itself as he is in the mindset of individuals willing to engage in a mortal risk for the sake of liberty. Clearly their conception of autonomy can have nothing to do with comfort, opportunity, the fulfillment of hedonistic desires, or even just the license to go on living, for they are willing to die to obtain it. The “jewel” of this liberty “can only be won by sacrifice, because freedom is precious and may demand that precisely one’s individuality, perhaps even one’s skin, be offered as a tribute… Each individual must know if freedom is more important to them – know whether they value how they are more than that they are.” This freedom must in some sense be a thing not entirely of this world at all.
Passage to Freedom
Jünger sees modernity’s calcifying automatism as above all the product of that most widespread condition of our times: fear. The growth of Leviathan’s machinery of control is, as he put it, a process that has two poles. At one pole is Leviathan’s goal of “imperial expansion and perfect security,” while at “the other pole there is the individual, suffering and defenseless, and in an equally perfect state of insecurity.” Each of these poles “conditions the other, since the vast unfolding of power subsists on fear, and the coercion is most effective where the sensitivity has become acute.”
I think this is exactly right. Modern managerialism is fundamentally an ideology of fear. It is characterized by its endless desire for the power of control, but this need to control everything is born out of a deep fear of uncertainty and of what might happen if anything were allowed to unfold outside of managerial hands. Of course in reality the managerial regime – which promises freedom from fear through control – has a constant incentive to itself provoke ever greater levels of fear (even within its own hive-mind), identifying more and more objects of terror that necessitate an expansion of its powers of control. In turn a fearful public duly yields up more and more decision-making capacity to the “expert” guardians they’re persuaded will protect them; yet their sense of helplessness merely grows in proportion to their increasing automatism, accentuating their fear.
With startlingly prescient foresight for 1951, Jünger noted that the United States, being at the forefront of technological advancement, had become a new epicenter for this fear-automatism feedback loop:
Where the automatism increases to the point of approaching perfection – such as in America – the panic is even further intensified. There it finds its best feeding grounds; and it is propagated through networks that operate at the speed of light. The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex. The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end – they provoke demonic contracts. [4]
Mass fear is particularly dangerous because it can also be manipulated such that the sentiment of those in its grip “changes from fear to open hate the moment they notice a weakening in those they feared only a moment before.” Suddenly cruelties and even atrocities become permissible in the name of safety and the alleviation of acute anxiety. Humanity diminishes as automatism increases. Little wonder then that Jünger asserted that the “emergence of this condition [of widespread fear] is a clearer omen of downfall” for a nation “than any physical danger.”
“The basic question in this vortex is whether man can be liberated from fear,” Jünger wrote. If fear can be “forced back into a dialogue” within a human heart, “this represents the first meaningful step toward [real] security” for the individual. Only “the individual who has renounced his inner fear” has a chance at breaking free from automatism and regaining his sovereignty. “The illusion of encirclement will also disappear therewith, and another solution will always become visible beyond the automatic one. Two paths will then be possible – or, in other words, free choice will have been restored.”
Moreover, at the social level “the probability of catastrophe diminishes in step with the individual’s victory over fear.” In fact, legitimate authority has always been bound up with a leader’s ability to tame the contagion of fear: “The ruler by calling proves himself such by ending the terror. It is the person who has first conquered his own fear.”
He is not advocating for blind optimism, naivety about risks, or passivity in the face of danger (quite the opposite), but for overcoming fear in order to be able to act freely despite all realism. A coward is never really free, but enslaved by fear no matter how well armed or prepared. So, although ever the soldier, with an enduring fondness for brave acts of physical resistance, Jünger warns that anxiously stockpiling weaponry is in itself no path to real security or independence (for an individual or for a country): “fear cannot be diminished by armaments, only by gaining new access to freedom.” All the tyrannies of “the giants and the titans” in myth also always “manifest with the same apparent superiority” in strength, yet “the free man brings them down; and he need not always be a prince or a Hercules. A stone from a shepherd’s sling, a flag raised by a virgin, and a crossbow have already proven sufficient.”
Freedom is on the other side of fear. “If a man succeeds in creating breathing room here,” Jünger wrote, “Then he will fell the giants whose weapons are terror.” But how can man overthrow fear’s rule? In short, by one means alone: through overcoming his terror of death.
At all times, in all places, and in every heart, human fear is the same: it is the fear of destruction, the fear of death. We can already hear it in Gilgamesh, we hear it in Psalm 90, and to this day nothing has changed. To overcome the fear of death is at once to overcome every other terror, for they all have meaning only in relation to this fundamental problem.
The “forest passage” of Jünger’s title holds multiple meanings. In part it refers to an inward flight into the sheltered wilderness of one’s own inner being, where the “forest rebel” can find refuge even amidst the most oppressive cityscapes of unthinking public automatism. But the forest passage, and the way of the “forest rebel” who treads it, is “above all a passage through death.” A forest is verdant but also a place of darkness, terror, and death. Thus the forest rebel’s “path leads to the brink of death itself – indeed, if necessary, it passes through it.” Only “when the line is successfully crossed, the forest as a place of life is revealed in all its preternatural fullness.” The path to the most powerful and abundant freedom begins with the resolute acceptance of death.
This is of course no small obstacle. And so it is “at this threshold,” where the individual finds himself “surrounded, encircled by fear, which pushes walls in against him on all sides,” that “man is initiated into his theological trial whether he realizes it or not.” Theological because, as Jünger concluded, there is ultimately only one thing that can truly overcome man’s fear and the process of automatism: a faith in the immortality of the spirit.
“Where there is immortality, indeed, where only the belief in it is present, there points may be assumed where violence or any other earthly force cannot reach or damage man, let alone destroy him,” Jünger wrote. The Icelandic Viking or the Germanic tribesman would boldly fight to the death to defend his sovereignty not just because he was less conditioned to accept state authority but because he had Valhalla. In contrast, the great conspiracy of modernity has been to strip mankind of any such remaining refuge of immortality, and therefore of his will to resist tyranny:
The panic so widely observable today is the expression of an emaciated spirit, of a passive nihilism that provokes its active counterpart. Of course, no one is easier to terrorize than the person who believes that everything is over when his fleeting phenomenon is extinguished. The new slaveholders have realized this, and this explains the importance for them of materialistic theories, which serve to shatter the old order during the insurrection and to perpetuate the reign of terror afterward. No bastion is to be left standing where a man may feel unassailable and therefore unafraid. To oppose this, it is essential to know that every man is immortal and that there is eternal life in him, an unexplored and yet inhabited land, which, though he himself may deny its existence, no timely power can ever take from him.
Unfortunately “education today aims at precisely the opposite of this” transcendence, seeking instead to further despiritualize, demoralize, and automatize. And indeed, because far “greater force can be preserved in churches and sects” than in mere “natural science raised to the level of philosophical conviction,” this “necessarily leads to the persecution of the churches” by the modern state, “which aspires to absolute power” over all the world and man. “It is for this reason that we see tyrannical regimes so rabidly persecuting such harmless creatures as the Jehovah’s Witnesses – the same tyrannies that reserve seats of honor for their nuclear physicists.”
Scientific Man has, in exchange for the promise of autonomy, liberated himself from his spirit, internalizing the technological in its place. But in doing so he has liberated himself from his own power, and from his humanity. And he now finds himself a being less free – indeed somehow less than – his predecessors. The automaton is a material construct, programmable and conditionable; desacralized, it is fashioned for mass homogenization, commodification, and control. In this condition man is now liable to at best find himself treated as we treat livestock (“living property”):
In the new state of affairs man is to be handled as a zoological being, regardless of whether the theories predominating at the time categorize him along economic or other lines. This leads into zones of pure utility, thereafter to bestial exploitation.
Crude rationalistic materialism lies at the core of the automatism, and it cannot abide the immortal. Thus Jünger proposed that wherever we find any tradition of a spiritual “being in man” that cannot be destroyed – “whether this being is conceived as salvation, as the soul, or man’s eternal cosmic homeland” – we are today likely to find it under assault. And “it will always be evident that the attacks on it must originate from the darkest abyss.”
It is part of the “gullibility of modern man” to pride himself as “a scoffer of values and as a cold calculator,” and yet to then find himself “in despair when, from the depths of the labyrinth, his gaze searches for the stars.” The foremost and most difficult goal of the “forest rebel” is thus to recover his own soul, and with it his humanity and his courage. And yet, as fortunately the immortal spirit cannot needless to say be killed, Jünger is confident that it can even today be recovered by emaciated, automatized man (in a process that “resembles resuscitation routines for the drowning,” after which hopefully “breathing and a pulse return.”) Though this will not be easy:
For many, indeed for most, the access to this life will resemble a well into which rubble and rubbish have been thrown for centuries. Yet, if someone manages to clear it out, they will not only rediscover the spring but also the old images. Man is infinitely wealthier than he suspects. It is a wealth that no one can steal from him, and in the course of time it wells up, again and again, above all when pain has dredged out the depths. This is what man really wants to know. Here is the germ of his temporal anxiety, the cause of his thirst, which grows in the desert…
Here is his answer to fear; here begins his passage to freedom.
Love Wins
With freedom from fear “the possibility of a new order presents itself.” We might even “imagine a spiritual movement that seeks out the terrain of nihilism and places itself in opposition to it.” Such a posture would represent a true “resistance against the times, and not merely against these times, but against all times, whose basic power is fear.”
Yet even the alleviation of fear is not in itself sufficient to fully oppose automatism. A man without fear of death still risks becoming entirely self-centered, turning entirely inward in meditations on the eternal or otherwise growing wholly callous to the fate of others. This is no real help against nihilism and the theft of our humanity, “For we cannot limit ourselves to knowing what is good and true on the top floors while fellow human beings are being flayed alive in the cellar.” Recalling all the past and future atrocities of totalitarianism, Jünger chides us that this “would also be unacceptable if our position were not merely spiritually secure but also spiritually superior – because the unheard suffering of the enslaved millions cries out to the heavens. The vapors of the flayers’ huts still hang in the air today; on such things there must be no deceiving ourselves.”
Once free, the individual must have something to orient him toward a higher purpose and thus direct him through the “darkness and the unknown” or he is still lost. If he merely allows himself to be passively swept along by the world and its tragedies without any resistance he simply surrenders to another form of nihilism and inner automatism. In contrast the whole point of Jünger’s forest rebel is that he “possesses a primal relationship to freedom, which… is expressed in his intention to oppose the automatism and not to draw its ethical conclusion, which is fatalism.”
The character examples alluded to by Jünger throughout his book are telling. David, giant slayer and shepherd of his tribe; William Tell, tyrannicidal folk hero and nation-builder; Joan of Arc, pure, martyred defender of nation and faith – all heroic individuals who acted with disregard for their own lives in benefit of their peoples. Added to these figures of legend are two striking contemporary examples, both prisoners, both martyrs: Graf von Moltke, a German aristocrat who founded an anti-Nazi resistance group and was executed by Hitler in 1945; and Petter Moen, a Norwegian resistance member who died while detained by the Gestapo after secreting away a prison diary about faith in the face of death profound enough, in Jünger’s words, to make him “a spiritual successor of Kierkegaard.” Persecuted for righteousness’ sake, these men “touched the bedrock of being” and were transformed by it. Anti-fatalists, they were driven as much by their sheer humanity as by their fearlessness.
For in the most trying circumstances, when courage alone is not enough, more is needed by man and of man, and:
This can only be in his quality of being an individual, in his human Being, which remains unshaken. In such conditions it should be considered a great merit if knowledge of the virtuous way is not entirely lost. Anyone who has escaped the clutches of catastrophe knows the he basically had the help of simple people to thank, people who were not overcome by the hate, the terror, the mechanicalness of platitudes. These people withstood the propaganda and its plainly demonic insinuations.
Even in the most totalitarian bureaucratic machine, “there will always be men who break through the pure functionality, be it through their kindness, their freedom, or their courage in taking direct responsibility.” This may be as simple as a “doctor who does something for a patient against the regulations,” but this choice may “lend miraculous power” to his actions, and to himself. For, “We are truly alive only insofar as we are able to emerge from mere functionality.” Precisely in moving beyond “mere functionality,” such people conquer fear and automatism in order to do the right thing; they conquer fear and automatism because they do the right thing. They have risked taking the path of humanity and overcome the machine in doing so; the alternative, the coward’s road of utility, might save their skin, but not their autonomy, nor their souls:
Even assuming the worst possible scenario of total ruin, a difference would remain like that between night and day. The one path climbs to higher realms, to self-sacrifice, or the fate of those who fall with weapon in hand; the other sinks into the abysses of slave pens and slaughterhouses, where primitive beings are wed in a murderous union with technology. There are no longer destinies there – there are only numbers.
This is the mechanistic abyss of automatism that individuals – indeed only individuals – can ultimately overcome with the “divine power” of their own free will “in man’s encounter with himself.” They do it, Jünger marvels, by miraculously choosing the good over fear and sacrificing utility to love:
Countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock-bottom of the maelstrom. They have learned that the mechanism reveals its menacing nature all the more clearly there; man find himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction. They have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture as its logical consequence… Only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools. This miracle has happened, even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless numbers to extend a helping hand to others. This has happened even in prisons, indeed especially there. Whatever the situation, whoever the other, the individual can become this fellow human being – and thereby reveal his native nobility. The origins of aristocracy lay in giving protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons. This is the hallmark of nobility, and it still shines today in the guard who secretly slips a piece of bread to a prisoner. This cannot be lost, and on this the world subsists. These are the sacrifices on which it rests.
“Victory comes when the assault of the ignoble is beaten back in one’s own breast,” Jünger proclaimed. Here, at the meeting of love and willing sacrifice, is real autonomy, the true and highest individualism. Here freedom and duty are reconciled, and the individual with his fellow man. Here the barbarian with his axe and the saint with her shroud are reconciled in the figure of the fearless knight, in all his selfless honor and glory, and in his own epitome, the stern and merciful king, who tramples down death.
Every authentic spiritual guidance is related to this truth – it knows how to bring man to the point where he recognizes the reality. This is most evident where the teaching and the example are united: when the conqueror of fear enters the kingdom of death, as we see Christ, the highest benefactor, doing… In its train followed not only the martyrs, who were stronger than the stoics, stronger than the caesars, stronger than the hundred thousand spectators surrounding them in the arena – there also followed the innumerable others who died with their faith intact. To this day this is a far more compelling force that it at first seems. Even when the cathedrals crumble, a patrimony of knowledge remains that undermines the palaces of the oppressors like catacombs.
When this truth is instantiated in enough hearts “the dictatorships then sink into the dust.”
Epilogue
Jünger chose to become a Catholic just before his death in 1998, but there’s always been some debate over whether his conversion to Christianity was genuine. Some have insisted it was merely “social” in nature, done only to please others close to him. After all, some wonder, how could a man so consistently heterodox and devoted to individual autonomy adopt orthodox religion? Frankly I find this debate a bit silly, because The Forest Passage is one of the most startlingly Christian books I’ve ever read.[5] At its most condensed, Jünger’s answer to the problem of totalitarianism is Christian ethics, and he is not even all that shy about it.
In any case, at one point Jünger discusses Christ as being “the exaltation of Heculean and Dionysian power”: at once Hercules, the archetypal individual hero, who “by defeating the fiends and monsters” through his active and vital strength “makes the wastelands habitable”; and Dionysus, “the spirit of community,” the “master of ceremonies” and “the deepest fount of cheerfulness.” In defeating death through loving self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity, Christ fulfills both roles. On both is the polis founded and maintained, and so Christ also becomes the model for legitimate earthly authority.
Here Jünger symbolizes the solution to the paradox of individual autonomy I mentioned at the beginning and which his book resolves. But to reach this resolution we must move beyond the simplistic “individualism vs. collectivism” debate. Jünger finds that true liberty and true individual autonomy – individuality that breaks free from mere functionality – is grounded in self-mastery, is expressed in love and defense of others, and obtains immortality in self-sacrifice. The autonomy of this virtuous individuality both underpins community and directly undermines the mechanistic nature of societal collectivism.
It is little wonder that we seem to find our loss of this individualism so difficult to discuss today, however. We have already strayed very far from modern orthodoxies. This is a conception of individual autonomy very different from the “washed out” notion so often and so loudly praised today: the freedom to do and be whatever one wants, no matter how ignoble. To move beyond worship of this false idol would require us to wrestle seriously with issues of virtue, telos, and the question of what an individual ought to do with freedom – issues that we moderns remain loathe to dwell on even as we suffer the consequences. Yet, like Jünger, I am convinced that this older, nobler individualism must be recovered if we are ever to have hope of reversing the automatism of our times and preserving our humanity.
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[1] Jünger’s advice for living a long and healthy life was “avoiding doctors.” He died at 102.
[2] I.e. the Hilfspolizei (“HiPo”) forces of the SS and SA.
[3] “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrest, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. What about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The [Soviet] Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough.” — Solzhenitsyn
[4] Interestingly he here appears to be describing the Internet several decades before its invention.
[5] If Jünger then spent much of the 60s and 70s freely dabbling in psychedelic drugs and various mystical traditions (like so many of the time), I hardly think that diminishes the fact that he clearly seems to have found the spirit of the law by 1951.
Bravo... why I subscribe, for this
Fantastic stuff, especially for today.
I read The Forest Passage last month and I'm currently making my way through Eumeswil.
Timely reads. Suspiciously so, in that way life manages.