“Who would have imagined that these sons of a materialistic generation would have greeted death with such ardor?”
—Ernst Jünger
“Our writers used to do their utmost to expose the humbug, deceitfulness, fraudulence, and even the secret crimes of outwardly decent, genteel, and smiling people, but it is a lucky society in which despicable behavior at least has to be disguised.”
—Nadezhda Mandelstam
A few years before Jünger’s essay appeared, Winston Churchill described the Great War as a combination of pre-Christian ruthlessness with modern national and technological power. “When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific Christian States had been unable to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility” (The World Crisis). The nineteenth century culminated in something unforeseen: thumotic utilitarianism. The Great Society produced the Great War, as progress in education, science, and the political economies of the nations provided the riches possible materials for conflagration: “When all the trumpets sounded, every class and rank had something to give to the need of the State.” “Far more than their vices, the virtues of nations ill-directed or misdirected by their rulers, became the cause of their own undoing and of the general catastrophe.” But such misrule calls into question the character of the Machiavellian/Baconian enterprise, the conquest of Fortuna: “One rises from the study of the causes of the Great War with a prevailing sense of the defective control of individuals”—even the most powerful individuals—”upon world fortunes.” Or, as John Keegan puts it, the generals were gripped in “a spirit not of providing for eventualities, but rather of attempting to preordain the future,” a spirit that led the old regimes to military and political self-destruction.
Churchill diagnosed the debacle as the result of the substitution of “national passions” for religious ones. “Almost one might think the world wished to suffer. Certainly men were everywhere eager to dare.” Having hectored themselves for more than a century concerning their insipid materialism and narrow individualism, segments of the bourgeoisie tried heroism. The war may be partly ascribed to moral uplift gone mad. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche—along with such lesser lights as Carlyle, Ruskin, Barrès, and Wagner—all attempted in various ways either to elevate the bourgeois lump or to explode it. They nearly succeeded.
Most commercial republicans learned the lesson, and spent subsequent years attempting to promote peace, however ineptly. Wilson had seen the Kantian apocalypse, and readied the Kantian solution—the League of Nations. Lloyd George and Clemenceau were not ready, but their mild-mannered successors were. The Germans—those poets, philosophers, and musicians had played more lovingly with thumotic fires—needed more convincing. So did the Russians, who had never been bourgeois in the first place, and were now in the ideological grasp of a ‘German.’
America won the Great War, Ernst Jünger claims. In a triumph of the only real commercial-republican art form, advertising, Americans cloaked self-interest in the regnant ideology of constitutionalism and humanitarianism. But—what might have been! Had Germans not been European-all-too-European, had they been uninhibited by vestigial ‘old-regime’ habits, that “mixture of false romanticism and inadequate liberalism”—habits “at heart… not Prussian”: then the youth of Germany, “glowing, enraptured, hungering after death,” nobly despising bourgeois self-preservation, joyfully would have made themselves instruments of the most glorious triumph. Had there only been leaders ready to give German youth “direction, awareness, and form,” then the spirit of the nation would have fused with the spirit of the age, “heroic spirit” with “severe necessity.”
Jünger senses that the ‘dialectically’ progressivist historicism of the nineteenth century amounts to a thumotic appeal to the human soul, and a critique of the commercial-republican solution to religious strife. ‘Germanism’ (so to speak) has “cultic” dimensions, “the force of faith”; “the great popular church” of the nineteenth century combines utilitarian ‘realism’ with the absolutism utilitarians dislike. As the near-culmination of this synthesis, the Great War destroyed the old monarchies, the last regimes that respected limits, by means of “Total Mobilization,” i.e., democracy plus bureaucracy, the disciplined participation of all elements in society for a single unifying purpose. The bourgeois social contract is demolished by the revival of the Hobbesian war of all against all—with the crucial difference that “all” now means societies, not weak individuals who are ready to fall into each others’ arms in a new ‘contract.’ Wilson was betting that the national societies, too, would do exactly that, but Jünger matches that bet and raises it.
The social bonds of these new societies will be far more powerful than the rational calculations of individuals. The ‘inner logic’ of ‘History’ may be seen in the unintended participation even of the soi-disant critics of the State: pacifists on the battlefield; Marxian socialists abandoning their economic determinism for the trenches; nihilists cheering for the Fatherland. The victory of Americanism can be reversed, the true end of ‘History’ achieved, if Germans will only listen to their Prussian soul, realize themselves, bring out “the new race” of the “deep Germany,” author of “a new form of domination.” Even now, bourgeois esteem for equality—prosperity and votes—gives way to the thumotic passions of national socialism. “Behind every exit, marked with the symbols of happiness, lurk pain and death. Happy is he alone who steps armed into these spaces.”
Walter Benjamin sees that historical materialism is surreptitious theology, a way of reviving many of the passions commercial republicanism sought to redirect, but with the added danger of asserting that in this world might makes right. “[P]oliticians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis,’ and, finally, their servile integration into an uncontrollable apparatus [cf. Churchill] have been three aspects of the same thing,” and it is sobering to see that Benjamin here criticizes the relatively benign social democrats, not the Stalins or Hitlers. “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current.” This Whiggish tale of corruption, which John Adams rightly insisted could be told of classes high and low, recurs with added vehemence when ‘History’ inflates material ambitions with unstable ‘spiritual’ gases.
Once victorious, modern tyranny reconstitutes the original version of the Hobbesian state of nature, as may be seen (in different ways) in Mandelstam and Jean Améry. In Mandelstam’s telling, “self-government” under Stalin meant control by mutual surveillance—gossip armed with a truncheon. The real Absolute Spirit turns out to be the Terror democratized, made pervasive, atomizing all social relations by making them impossible to rely on. (It took Stalin for twentieth-century intellectuals to relearn what Tocqueville had to say about despotism.) Mandelstam shows that social relations require taking things for granted—such things as decent habits and hypocrisies, reasonable expectations, ordinariness. The inclination to lay bare social relations, subjecting them to unsparing analysis, destroying bourgeois decadence in preparation for some vast, envisioned new creation: all of this unfailingly results in thumos turning in on itself, making life in the anti-society solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and (often decidedly) short.
Améry unforgettably describes the ultimate anti-society, the concentration camp. He missteps in arguing that Hitlerism was even worse than Stalinism; Nazism most assuredly did have an “idea of man,” namely, the Aryan conqueror, and it likely would have suffered the same welcome ossification as its proletarian counterpart on the ‘Left,’ had it survived. But if this is an error, it is an understandable one; to each his own Hell. Amery’s testimony concerning the impotence of intellect in Auschwitz illustrates not only the obvious point—you can’t think your way out of a well-organized death camp—but also the not-at-all obvious point that in late modernity intellect has lost its primary object, a point well made by Benda, years before the Second World War.
To say that, in Auschwitz, “intellect had to capitulate unconditionally in the face of reality” means that there was no intellectually respectable ‘court of appeal’ from this concentration of social antimatter. Améry courageously rejects the claim that unassisted human intellect can discover God or ‘History,’ even when the prospect of torture and death concentrate the mind wonderfully. Contra religious and secular-historicist prophecy, the intellect cannot grasp the future, much less shape it. There is a terrible dilemma here: Because the late-modern intellectual’s own intellectual moorings are predominantly social, with a special emphasis on “respect for power”—a mild form of historicism—he cannot adapt even in a limited, ‘merely intellectual’ way to the supreme, ‘totalizing’ historicism, the supreme power-worship, of the death camp. The philosopher’s unassisted intellect, unhinged from its object, nature, by historicist doctrines or secularist ‘religions,’ short-circuits’ in the camp, which, being socially ‘total,’ seems the most real of realities to him. Had Augustine been sent to a death camp, he would have been as miserable physically as anyone else, but he would have faced the brutal fact without intellectual or spiritual disorientation.
This anti-society has its “antiman,” the torturer, a would-be anti-god who would transform his enemy into nothing but body, then into nothing at all. More, the torturer wants to torture the whole world, “realize his own total sovereignty,” become “master over flesh and spirit, life and death.” This is much more than “the total inversion of the social world,” as Amery calls it. It is the inversion of natural right, that supposedly naïve and superficial doctrine that profound ‘historical thinkers’ rejected. Amery’s experience is the most powerful ‘negative’ argument in support of the existence of natural right. “Amazed,” the tortured person “experiences that in this world there can be the other as absolute sovereign, and sovereignty revealed itself as the power to inflict suffering and to destroy. The dominion of the torturer over his victim has nothing in common with the power of social contracts.” Precisely: it is the purpose of social contracts to prevent such dominion. Those boring, bourgeois, Lockean impediments to tyranny have their modest place, after all.
In Homer, the heroism on which Jünger and his epigoni keen has its limit: death, the response to which is the fraternity of enemies, Achilles and Priam breaking bread. In Plato, the apparently irreconcilable conflict between thumos and eros is limited by logos and the nature it discovers. The tragic demi-gods of the epics and tragedies and the comic demi-god, the philosophe, of the Platonic dialogues are just that: demi-gods, part god, part mortal human. In Christianity, there is again the man-God who finds—indeed sets—limits. Machiavelli’s centaur, who counsels princes to conquer Fortuna, is the half-man, half-beast who will rule all ‘gods’ and (in the Baconian version) nature too. His limits are only circumstantial; in principle they can be overcome. Nietzsche radicalizes Machiavelli: The philosopher now is neither man-god nor beast-man, but a beast-god, a being of unlimited appetite or eros an unlimited power, the apotheosis of libido dominandi. Nietzsche prudently sees that only the few should aspire to such being, but his vulgarizers, ‘Left’ and ‘Right,” are predictably less cautious and additionally possessed of Wagnerian—no, more, Jüngerian—hubris.
The course of Western thought since Rousseau has shown how the thumotic critique of the ‘bourgeois’ or self-limiting, self-governing form of modernity became progressively wilder and self-entrapped: a concentration camp in theory leading to concentration camps in practice. Rousseau’s critique retains the limit of nature, although human nature conceived as more or less infinitely malleable provides modest limits, indeed. Hegel’s critique eschews natural right altogether, but sets itself the limit of the ‘end of history,’ which, immodestly but safely, happens to occur in the mind of the sane bureaucrat, Hegel. But in Marx the end of history is material, and in the future; there are no limits or conceptual constraints on how to get there, only an infinitely malleable ‘dialectic.’ In Nietzsche there is not even the vague limit of the end of history; the limit is rather in the conflict of wills, the most powerful and (so he hopes) refined subordinating all the others. ‘Postmodernism’ merely exaggerates the defects of all these later systems.
The task for political theory is to discover or rediscover conceptual constraints that can be translated into practice. In the meantime, the ‘bourgeois’ solution is the best available—to be criticized, but with equanimity and an occasional dose of modesty. There is some substantial good in much-despised ‘banality.’
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