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Ernst Jünger and the domination of the world by the Worker – Joachim de Brescia – PHILITT – May 12th 2020

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

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In The Worker (1932), Ernst Jünger wrote, “The peasant who begins to work with horse power instead of horses no longer belongs to any ‘estate’. He is a worker in particular conditions” Henceforth the peasant on his tractor, or the soldier using his machine gun no longer belongs to any “estate.” They personify the seizure of power by a new type of man: the Worker.

The Worker is a piece that the German author never reworked, contrary to his habits. He would agree to re-release this piece for the first time in 1964, but he added “complementary notes” to it, which would form the volume Maxima-Minima, an update comparing the Figure of the Worker to that of Titans like Antaeus, Prometheus, and Atlas. The Worker appeared in this piece as a telluric and mythic figure, a son of the earth and an enemy of the gods. Thirty years later, Jünger noted the irrefutable character of his analyses: the contemporary world henceforth solidified the domination of the Figure of the Worker.

By “Figure” Jünger means a spiritual reality reality that confers a meaning. The Figure is “a whole that encompasses the sum of its parts.” By assuming the Figure of the Worker, the individual inserts himself into a great hierarchical order of Figures. He becomes a symbol, a representative of a superior order, of a vocation, and of a destiny. The notion of Figure is a resurgence of the Platonic “Idea”, a kinship that Martin Heidegger would address during a seminar in 1940. Jünger, who didn’t appreciate this comparison, preferred to compare his Figure to Leibniz’s monad, or Goethe’s “Urpflanze” [Translator’s note: archetypal plant].

“Technology is the art and the manner by which the Figure of the Worker mobilizes the world”, Jünger notes in The Worker. It’s not a neutral power. Technology inevitably delivers the means of power that permits the domination of the Worker, the only Figure capable of utilizing it. The replacement of the lamp by the perpetual presence of the electric light-bulb highlights a universe henceforth foreign to religion. The writer remarks accurately that the instinct of Christian preachers to equate the empire of technology with the empire of Satan is far from lacking sense.

This new domination leads to the replacement of the “individual” by the “type.” The “worker” is not irreplaceable. Actually, every dead one can be immediately replaced by another “worker.” Bourgeois constitutions are replaced with a “work plan”, liberal democracy replaced with the democracy of labor or the state. Total mobilization renders the distinction between wartime mobilization and peacetime mobilization moot, like the distinction between “combatant” and “non-combatant.”

Jünger also notes in a striking manner the change in the physiognomy of his contemporaries, whose faces assume the appearances of masks, devoid of traits and giving a metallic impression. “The bone structure thrusts markedly forth, the features are sparse and taut. The gaze is quiet and fixed, trained in the contemplation of objects that are captured in situations of high speed.” He also notes the increased role of masks in daily life, whether it’s masks protecting the face in sports and from high speeds or protective masks for people working in zones that have become too dangerous.

The replacement of the bourgeoisie by the Figure of the Worker

In The Worker, Jünger mentions the replacement of the bourgeois by the Worker. The Great War constituted a decisive experience, accelerating the advent of new type of man, a new Figure. The resurgence of deep, telluric forces, in the deserts of fire in the material war permitted the advent of a new human type, whose mode of action was “total mobilization” of life through technology. This new type no longer belonged to an association or a party, but to a group of partisans. He forms a New Order, silent and invisible, a new aristocracy whose slogan is “heroic realism.” For him, the sacrifice of life is the ultimate good, and the supreme art of command “consists of showing purposes worthy of this sacrifice.”

In the epoch of mass revolutions, crowds of individuals flowed into the streets, followed by determined commandos, seizing the vital centers of cities with precise technology. The targets are no longer the personal representatives or individuals of the state, but communication centers, broadcasting antennae, or factory warehouses. If the mass is no longer capable of attacking, nor defending itself, the police henceforth effectively possess sufficient means to crush a revolutionary crowd in a few seconds.

The Worker is distinguished by a new relation to the elementary. The term “elementary” designates profound forces, those of faith, struggle, and passion, but also the four original elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The combatant youth experienced the elementary on the front, thanks to the extreme proximity with death, fire, and blood. They experienced the pleasure of absolute offerings, the maximal satisfaction of action. They passed through anarchy, through the destruction of old bonds. They crossed the zone of combat without being destroyed itself, and consequently possessed a new power. There is an ideal continuity uniting the combatant youth of the Great War with the figure of the Worker.

On the contrary, the bourgeois appears as someone who tries to escape danger by seeking refuge in a would be utopian security, that of glass walls and asphalt. The bourgeois forms the race of the defeated, the race that believed elementary power could be mastered by the old order, excluding it from danger in fortified enclosures, its secured citadels. Its slogans like “order and peace” or “pacifism” are equally slogans reflecting its weakness withing the new order.

New aristocracy or the terminal phase of civilization?

According to Julius Evola, the advent of the Worker is not the advent of a new aristocracy, but it further symbolizes a phase of leveling and dissolution. In the traditional model, spiritual aristocracy, warrior aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie correspond to different types, different “estates” and the Worker doesn’t escape this rule. Jünger’s Figure confirms the “Fourth Estate’s” seizure of power and the suppression of other castes by a new form of civilization.

In this twilight world that is the ultimate stage of advanced civilizations, all human activity is effectively transformed into “work.” Within this landscape of work sites, Jünger admits that generations of Workers will not leave behind savings or monuments, but only “a certain level, like a tide-mark of mobilization.” Nevertheless this Figure, who henceforth possesses an unequaled technical arsenal of surveillance, repression, and propaganda in its service, is more redoubtable than ever.

In The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), Guénon reminds us that he who invokes the brutal forces of matter must necessarily perish by these same forces, forces of nature or forces of the human masses. It is always the laws of matter that crush anyone who believes he could dominate them without elevating himself beyond matter. It is written in the Gospel: “Any house divided against itself cannot stand”; this quote perfectly applies to the world forged by the Worker, which can only, in essence, incite conflict ad division everywhere.

In the Treatise on the Rebel, Jünger mentions two other figures who will come to add themselves to the first. Firstly the unknown soldier, bearing the burden of the sacrifice of his life on the front, to the benefit of the Worker’s domination. Finally, the Figure of the Rebel, the Figure of resistance to the domination of technology, and the refusal to accept its consequences. He is someone who holds his own against the propaganda forged by fear, particularly fear of death. The Rebel is consequently capable of overthrowing giants, whose strength is terror.

If the twilight Figure of the Worker can justifiably provoke fear in some people, it is interesting to reread these lines from the philosopher and jurist Walter Schubart: “It’s not in the balance of the bourgeois world, but in the thunder of apocalypses that religions are reborn.” (Europe and the Soul of the East). Actually, according to René Guénon, everything indicates that we are henceforth in the final phase of the Kali-Yuga, in the darkest period of this “dark age.” If a restoration must happen, it will not be a simple recovery, but a total renewal, a rebirth.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2020/05/12/ernst-junger-et-la-domination-du-monde-par-le-travailleur/

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Interview on Ernst Jünger – Julien Hervier – PHILITT – March 15th 2018

28 Tuesday Aug 2018

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On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Ernst Jünger’s death, PHILITT spoke with Julien Hervier, his translator, friend, and biographer who reflected on the life of one of the great German writers of 20th century.

PHILITT: Ernst Jünger is known today for his war writings which would establish him as a major author, from his first book Storms of Steel, published in 1920. The war was destruction but also revelation for him. What did it reveal to him?

Julien Hervier: The truth of the Man. At the start of the Great War, Ernst Jünger was a young man from a bourgeois family, adventurous and psychologically unstable. He was immersed in the Christian morality proper to the society of his time, although his family was rather distant from religion and his father was a fervent rationalist. In the course of the conflict, he discovered what Freud had perfectly analyzed in the same era, but far from the fighting: the unleashing of instinct that breaks all moral barriers erected by civilization. It revealed itself to him without God – he then call himself totally atheist – man was disoriented in the moral scheme. There is, on this subject, a beautiful passage from his novel Lieutenant Sturm: the hero seduces a young prostitute and confesses his instinct to kill and his violent impulses during the assault. It’s as if he was seeking a form of forgiveness in which absolution is given, not by a priest, but by a benign person. We can compare this reaction with an episode from Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, in it an old Republican peasant dramatically describes the loss of his belief in God; he finds its leaves him helpless before the necessities of war, as if he sees himself forced to kill, to whom could he confess his error and how would he be absolved of his sins?

PHILITT: What was Jünger’s place in this intellectual abundance of the interwar German Conservative Revolution?

Julien Hervier: Following the war, there was a whole nebula of extremist movements, on the right as well as on the left, which spent their time dividing themselves. Ernst Jünger collaborated with a certain number of small magazines on the nationalist right. He then appeared as one of the most remarkable personalities of this movement, because of his glorious war experience, symbolized by his exceptional decoration “Pour le mérite.” This decoration was actually given to numerous superior officers, but very rarely to simple infantry lieutenants. He possessed an exceptional combatant’s prestige which would then serve to protect him from Hitler. Moreover, intellectually, he was considered the most brilliant writer in this nebula. From the point of view of style or thought, he is incontestably the most prestigious. In the philosophical scheme, his brother Friedrich Georg had received a much deeper philosophical education than his; furthermore Heidegger considered him a better philosopher than Ernst. But very rapidly, from his arrival on the front, he was seriously wounded and thus didn’t have the occasion to distinguish himself and attain the same military prestige as his brother. Younger and not having experienced the war, though having combat experience in the Freikorps, Ernst von Salomon was also a representative writer of this German right, but he doesn’t situate himself on the same literary level.

PHILITT: Jean-Pierre Faye, in the line of Albert Béguin, didn’t hesitate to write “Thus three friends, Schmitt, Jünger, Heidegger – the strange trio of thinkers – contributed to the language of this Reich that devastated Europe in the Second World War.” What response do you have to these excessive, to say the least, statements?

Julien Hervier: You know Talleyrand’s quote: “All that is excessive is insignificant.” What Faye wrote is purely ideological and of little interest. Here we’re denying a complex reality. What is true on the other hand, it’s that there were degrees of compromise more or less elevated. The altitude at which Carl Schmitt’s thought moves is undeniable, but he was also a careerist eager for honors and success. And at the level of simple moral decency, the moral decency of Orwell or Camus, he behaved in an inadmissible manner when he justified the massacres of the “Night of the Long Knives” by raison d’État. His initial engagement on the side of Hitler was indeed scandalous, even if he then became more critical and ended up being viewed negatively by the regime. Heidegger was in turn a philosopher who didn’t understand what Nazism really was. Against a flood of scientist and purely materialist enthusiasm for technical progress, especially among the Anglo-Saxons and Russians, he thought that this new German party could allow the philosophy of being to resist decline. It’s quite clear that he could only have been disappointed; furthermore he recognized this major error, this “big mistake.” Ernst Jünger, unlike the other two, never joined the Nazi party; and his allegorical novel On The Marble Cliffs was considered at the time, as much by Hitler’s partisans as by his enemies, as a novel of opposition to the Führer, as a work of resistance. The judgment of his contemporaries has more weight than ours.

PHILITT: The Soldier, the Worker, the Rebel, the Anarch, all of these are at the heart of Jünger’s work. What do they tells us about his era?

Julien Hervier: The Worker (Arbeiter in German) is a figure linked to the evolution of technical thought, itself arising from the philosophical thought of the West. It is part of a historical logic of the development of Western civilization, and the man of technology is currently present everywhere. Nevertheless, we must be specific: translated into French, Arbeiter can also have a very particular meaning: that of “worker,” especially since the industrial revolution as analyzed by Karl Marx. But the Jüngerian Arbeiter is a vaster figure, he can also be a general as much as a businessman. Jünger defines him as someone whose values come from technology and its prodigious development over the past past three centuries. He’s a figure of reference, ontological in nature, linked to the essence of civilization. The figures of the Rebel or the Anarch are moral figures. In order to define them, Jünger often used the image of the Leviathan, to which they are contrasted. Leviathan, such as the state conceived by Hobbes in the 17th century, or the present technological state, a state whose omnipotence we see reinforcing itself, thanks to modern means of control over the individual. We are in a world where Big Brother’s control is pervasive and resistance is needed. The “Rebel”, it’s a French translation, but the original German word, der Waldgänger, evokes someone who seeks refuge in the forests. It’s for that reason that in French the book is entitled “Treatise on the Rebel or the Recourse to the Forests.” Jünger refers to the old Icelandic practices in which rebellious people banished from society found refuge in the forests. But Jünger always insisted that, in the modern world, the Rebel doesn’t necessarily hide in nature but he can hide in the most populous cities, camouflaged in the eyes of the state. With the Anarch, he wanted to go further in his analysis of resistance. It must totally shift in relation to the scale of value they seek to impose on us. If we only want to invert it, we are lost, as Montherlant pleasantly wrote: “There is nothing that resembles a torpedo boat more than a destroyer.” Starting from the moment where you accept the problem as posed by your adversary, you are lost. You only reverse his values. The Anarch refuses this game. He doesn’t create a party, and this sense, he distinguishes himself from the anarchist. He is alone while the anarchists are part of a collective movement.

PHILITT: Reading his Parisian Journals, one is instantly struck by a certain passivity, a comfortable atonia during the Second World War. The man of action then disappeared, replaced by the contemplative spirit that he would remain until the end of his life?

Julien Hervier: Jünger couldn’t show what he thought. In a totalitarian regime, if you say that you’re against it, you are immediately shot or sent to a concentration camp. So showing his opposition in an explicit manner would be suicidal and useless. So he only followed the assassination attempt planned by Stauffenberg from afar. He could have still been executed as an accomplice if they reported him; it was punishable by death, even if he was not actively engaged in the operation. One of the motifs of his mission in the Caucasus, at the end of 1942, was to gauge the reactions of officers on the Eastern front, in case of an attempt against Hitler. Furthermore, high treason against the state was incompatible with his vision of the soldier. In his journal he mentions the Roman general Coriolanus, the subject of Shakespeare’s play, who revolted against his country and dreads his fate.

PHILITT: Regarding his work, Jünger mentions “an old and a new testament.” Do you share this vision of two Jüngers?

Julien Hervier: It’s true that an enormous difference exists between the young 20 year old thirsting for action who found the bourgeois world stifling, and the man who matured and became a sort of old sage, absorbed by his research on insects whose progressive disappearance he deplored in an ecological spirit. His evolution is incontestable.

PHILITT: You just wrote a book on Drieu la Rochelle. Une histoire de désamours (Gallimard); what intellectual and personal links did the two men entertain in Paris during the Occupation?

Julien Hervier: They only met rarely, but Drieu la Rochelle had an admiration for the author of Storms of Steel. It was a reciprocal esteem. Rapidly wounded on the field of battle many times, the French writer spent relatively little time on the front; on the contrary, Ernst Jünger fought for the entire duration of the entire war, despite numerous wounds. Their service records had nothing to do with each other, even if Drieu was also very courageous and experienced the exaltation of war. For him, modern war has two aspects: the exhalation of the charge, when he took part in the assault on Charleroi; and panicked terror in the face of the superpower of technology, which expresses itself in his cry of absolute terror at Verdun, under the bombardments that they had to passively endure. This battle embodied all the horror of modern industrial war. What brings these two writers closer together is both the exaltation of physical courage and the vision of war as the revealer of human truth. Neither of them were followers of Rousseau, neither of them believed in fundamental human goodness. However, they diverged on their analyses regarding technology. As from a certain side, we can consider The Worker as an apology for technology: Jünger considers it as something that imposes itself with the same obvious character as the laws of nature. The evolution of Western society cannot escape it. We observe it even more today: for example, how to organize de-growth today, without putting millions of people into unemployment? We are caught in the gears, the world has entered into total dependence on technology. The two authors were great readers of Nietzsche but on this precise point, at the time where he wrote The Worker, Jünger was more Nietzschean than Drieu, as for him, we must day yes to the state of the world as it is. It’s useless to oppose it.

PHILITT: Novalis, the poet, the figure of Romanticism from Jena, exercised a considerable influence on Jünger. Was he the last of the German Romantics?

Julien Hervier: There is indeed an entire aspect that underlines Ernst Jünger’s romanticism, particularly concerning the dimension of the dream. He presents very beautiful narratives of them in his journal. His most beautiful novel, in my opinion, On the Marble Cliffs is also a reinterpreted dream. A dream that he had during a voyage to Rhodes by boat which is not far from the visions of the Apocalypse in the Christian tradition. This dimension of the dream, of the relation to nature, to the unconscious, this refusal of a mechanized vision of the world: all this links him with the German Romantics but also the French symbolists. He is much closer to Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who he admired, than the French Romantics.

PHILITT: We are very familiar with Jünger the warrior, but much less so with Jünger the dabbler in drugs. What was he seeking in what he called “psychonautics?”

Julien Hervier: Precisely, he sought to break the purely rational and materialist comprehension of the world. He was a man of risk who wanted to touch the boundaries. He wanted to see what was on the other side. As much on the field of battle, in violent action, as in the framework of psychological experimentation, but always under the control of instruments of reason. Thus he had did first LSD experiments with his friend Albert Hoffman, the inventor of this drug, and practiced these experiences under strict medical control.

PHILITT: A writer who converted to Catholicism at the end of his life but whose writings nevertheless reveal a profound pagan mystique, what was the place of religion in his life?

Julien Hervier: Having spoken with his wife about it, I can affirm that his conversion to Catholicism at the end of his life was purely social. The Catholic readers of Jünger often want to imagine this moment as a true conversion. But Jünger’s entire body of work tends to show that there is a religious dimension and a form of spirituality among all peoples. He was not far from believing that it was of little import if one worships the Christian Trinity, Jehovah, or Allah … Thus there are texts by him where he says he’s willing to adopt the religion of the place where he finds himself: if he had lived in a Muslim country, he would be a Muslim. In his elderly years, he was perfectly integrated in the Swabian and Catholic world of Wilflingen, whose parish priest he was close to. He believed that in contemporary Western civilization, where death was skirted around, Christian religion remained capable of honoring human beings when they passed. In this sense, his interment was one of solemnity and grandiose simplicity. That’s Chateaubriand genius of Christianity. That’s the reasons for his conversion.

PHILITT: How would you analyze the difference in the perceptions of his work between France and Germany?

Julien Hervier: He’s read a lot more in Germany than in France, even if, among us, there is a little circle of people inspired by Jünger. But in comparison with Germany, his readers are relatively less there. In the “Society of Friends of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger”, there are very few French people. Only three or four of us are coming to the Heiligkreuztal colloquium this year where I’ve sometimes found myself to be the only French person. For a long time, in France, we appreciated literary quality above the political opinions of writers. People hardly questioned their political color then. In Germany, after the fall of Nazism, the question was much more sensitive; unfortunately in France as well, now we’re tending to enter in this logic. Just look at the problems currently posed by Céline and Maurras, though nevertheless commemorations do not mean that we admire people, only that we recognize the importance of the historical role they played. In this domain, the contemporary French mentality tends to blandly join the German mentality.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2018/03/15/julien-hervier-pour-ernst-junger-le-monde-est-entre-dans-la-dependance-totale-de-la-technique/

Carl Schmitt: The Nomos of the Earth or the Rootedness of Law – PHILITT #2

10 Wednesday Jan 2018

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In “The Nomos of the Earth” (1950), Carl Schmitt shows that order cannot exist without rootedness. Against positivist thought and the cosmopolitan ideal, he appeals to the earth, the elementary substrate of any society, in order to understand humanity’s relation to the world.

[Article initially published in the magazine PHILITT #2 devoted to the earth and rootedness.]

A great figure of the German Conservative Revolution, Carl Schmitt opposed the heirs of Auguste Comte’s positivism, and more specifically judicial positivism, whose most famous theorist was Hans Kelsen (also an opponent of Schmitt). In his “Theory of Pure Law,” he only studies and recognizes law enacted by man, that one calls positive law, obscuring the deep origin of these norms and rejecting the very idea of natural law which would be based on higher values. On the other hand, striving to find the source of law, Schmitt revives the concept of an inherent law of the land. If localization, defined geopolitical space, primarily figures in his study of power relations, his philosophy of law invites us to a very organic reading, with a ecological connotation. Then, without even mentioning any moral values, that positivists qualify as extrinsic to judicial matters in order to disregard them, “The Nomos of the Earth” puts the logic of these legalists to the test of peasant common sense: “First, the fertile earth contains within herself, within the womb of her fecundity, an inner measure, because human toil and trouble, human planting and cultivation of the fruitful earth is rewarded justly by her with growth and harvest. Every farmer knows the inner measure of this justice.” The earth is also delimited by the man who works it, just like mountain ranges and waterways. Finally, it is the foundation of all enclosures, the visible manifestations of social order, power, and property. So one understands that the earth is “triply linked to law.” A particular order exists, proper to and defined by a given territory, which imposes itself from the moment it is taken. If seas are free, order reigns on terra firma.

This vision of an a priori and de facto rootedness of order seems to void the relativist posture which consists of believing that states and nations plunge an order that they create from scratch into the soil they dominate through force, great fireworks, symbols, and inflammatory speeches. If rootedness decrees order, it gives itself the attributes of a natural force and the reassuring face of a founding myth that aims unite a people with its land in a quasi-mystical manner. Schmitt refutes those who still want to see in the notion of rootedness a pure romantic abstraction without basis in reality, a superfluous and trite tool of policy provision, indeed a “nationalist” myth of “inwardness and hate for the other,” according to the now common abject expression. In reality we will discover that it is entirely the opposite, as someone who doesn’t accept a particular soil is irrevocably linked to a particular order and would consider that the order to which he consents is valid everywhere – for example, someone who pretends to be a citizen of the world: he would potentially violate every land, every order, every law, with the exception of his own.

The authentic peace lover can only admit that from the very moment where a territory is seized, the order that it bears imposes itself, as much on the inside, on whose who have seized it, as on the outside, that is to say, on the foreigner who can only legitimately impose a different order. In other words, to consider that a concrete link between rootedness and a particular order, between a given law and the land it rules over, doesn’t exist is a negation of the sovereignties that express themselves in the diversity of orders. So rootedness no longer appears as a choice, a myth, or an a posteriori construction, but primarily as an unsurpassable necessity of politics: the necessity of submitting to the order that the earth bears and imposes on he who takes it, divides it, and works it. To refuse this postulate can only lead to the destruction of the elementary substrate of all society. By using the term of nomos to designate “the first measure of all subsequent measures, the first land appropriation as the first partition and classification of space, the primeval division and distribution,” the author formulates a deep critique of positivist thought in its entirety, which is uninterested in the “way of birth” and for which only “the law of phenomenon” counts. This semantic method shows that in legal matters as well, he who disregards history disregards the earth as much as he who disregards the earth disregards history: he is rootless.

The idealist and universalist political project inherited from the French Revolution then seems absurd, making a concrete ambition of what the author designates as “philosophical generalizations of the Hellenistic era creating a cosmopolis from the polis.” And Schmitt adds that “they were deprived of topos, that is to say localization, and thus couldn’t constitute a concrete order.” One naturally comes to think that any political project, expressed through law, that doesn’t anchor itself in solid land and the reality it imposes is suspect.

From Ungrounded Thought to the Destructive Disdain for the Earth

If the rootlessness of the positivists, when it is only a working hypothesis, an academic intellectual posture, is not an a priori danger, the judicial and political evolution that concerned Carl Schmitt at the end of the “Nomos of the Earth” illustrates the disaster to which this paradigm leads. The “jus publicum europaeum” that the French Revolution began to question before the First World War finished it, rested on the acceptance of the diversity of judicial and spatial orders and the recognition of the enemy as justus hostis, in other words as a legitimate enemy to make war upon. But the ungrounded thought of the League of Nations (now the United Nations), American imperialism sometimes masked under the traits of a benevolent universalism, linked with the considerable means of mass destruction, could have broken humanity’s instinctive and natural attachment to the earth by reintroducing the notion of justa causa, once theological (and subject to the judgment of the Pope), into military relations while subsidizing the cosmopolitan dream. It’s as if the man capable of destroying the land of another (especially if the latter cannot do the same) despised the land deeply. As if the man capable of destroying the planet only thirsts to dominate it entirely to preserve himself. The the ambition of a “new world order,” the expression that George H.W. Bush himself imprinted on us, is the most striking symbol of this political and intellectual rupture: there no longer seems to be a place for multiple and diverse political and judicial orders, linked to their own lands, whose relations would be ruled by norms simply aiming to limit war. There will henceforth be a single order, universal and cosmopolitan, that we can envision being born in the rubble of Old Europe, symbolically taking root in the ruins of Dresden Cathedral. An order that has no history since it took nothing, an order that has no land but that which it has destroyed.

Also, war will no longer be limited, but criminalized, and prohibited in principle by the United Nations. Because an order, even global, can only be peaceful. Having tasked themselves with accumulating the sufficient means to reduce the world to dust, humanity is confronted with the moral question of the usage of these weapons of mass destruction. One can only reasonably allow using them in so-called just wars against an enemy that must be destroyed, and not only contained. But air war and the very newsworthy “police bombing” operations are the image of absolute contempt for the earth. “Aerial bombardment has annihilation as its only meaning and purpose,” states the author. We see fighter planes as arrogant and proud vectors of this new world order that is imposed from above, dismissing the earth from their cockpits, only knowing the earth of the American parent company. By pretending to conduct a war without ever treading on enemy soil, the essential link between occupation, obedience, and protection is broken in the eyes of Schmitt. Without soldiers on the ground, and thus without concrete links with the earth, the way to pure and simple destruction from the air is opened. But the opinion remains: soldiers no longer die on the field of honor. Once again, the link with the earth appears as an unavoidable and necessary source of order, while the use of aerial space alone sows chaos. It seems that only the projection of men onto the earth, the mother and support of all order, is capable of giving satisfactory political results. But that doesn’t matter, because there is no longer war, because all the enemies we strike are no longer states equal to those who fight against them, but the incarnation of evil! But, as David Cumin, biographer and specialist on Carl Schmitt, likes to recall, the enemy for the latter is “the figure of our own question,” the war of annihilation examines the paradigm and the morality of great Western military powers. This new relation to the earth invites us to seriously consider the lesson of Carl Schmitt at the end of his preface: “The earth has been promised to the peacemakers. The idea of a new nomos of the earth belongs only to them,” for modern destructive war separates law from its source and its seat, which is the earth.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2016/06/20/carl-schmitt-le-nomos-de-la-terre-ou-lenracinement-du-droit/

Ernst von Salomon – Revolutionary, Conservative, Lover – Philitt – October 7th 2016

10 Thursday Aug 2017

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In The Outlaws (1930), Ernst von Salomon retraces his madcap political adventure shortly after the Great War. His literary persona became emblematic of the German Conservative Revolution and the work became a prophecy for the lost generations. His lesson: nihilism can be conquered by a passion stronger than the torments of History. The outlaw thus finds his salvation in the warrior experience that precedes the elevation of the spirit.

The Outlaws opens with a quote by Franz Schauweker: “In life, blood and knowledge must agree. Then the spirit rises.” That is the entire lesson of the work, which contrasts knowledge and experience and concludes by discovering that these two opposites inevitably attract. Then a question is posed: must we let these two attractions cancel each other, striking and destroying each other, and the one who experiences them as well; or must the tension be resolved in creation and thought.

A lover distraught by a Germany in tatters, spurned by history at the twilight of the First World War in which he was too young to participate, Ernst von Salomon embodied the Revolutionary Conservative passion in action when he chose to participate within the Freikorps in order to continue the fight. But if Dominique Venner could describe this mythic epic as a nihilistic adventure, the irrational stubbornness of Salomon appeared as an authentic quest for meaning which he pursued throughout his entire journey as warrior and then militant. Despite the surrounding disarray and the lack of purpose from which some hot heads seemed to suffer, the dropout Salomon always expressed the instinct to reconquer a cherished nation. In his eyes, only revolution could return Germany’s former splendor, which he had been taught to die for.

The Troubled Revolutionary

Ernst von Salomon was just 16 years old when the armistice was signed on November 11th 1918, an age of razor sharp follies, ideas, and passions which prevent resignation. If confusion is the first feeling that the author confesses at the start of The Outlaws, hope soon follows and it’s this permanent tension between these two contrary inclinations that creates the relentless struggle between reason and life. As the life of the author, at the start of his work, seems to only sustain the pursuit of his ideal, which he doubtlessly already perceived as a mirage even though he refused to abandon it. Thus he admits: “We were ready to act under the impulse of our feelings alone; and it didn’t matter if we could prove the righteousness of our acts. The accomplishment of the act is what matters these days.” It’s not reason, it’s not ideas that guide the enamored lover of Germany, vexed by a humiliating peace, but a sentimental rage that he cannot control. Thus the revolutionary instinct arises, the essentially destructive instinct whose sole objective is to overthrow the established order, including the internal, spiritual, and moral order of the one guided by it. He challenges the world by challenging himself to test himself before pretending to know.

Movement before anything else, action from every angle appeared as the only way of salvation, the sole conviction of this frustrated generation was that nothing good could arise in the era of parliamentarianism and the ruling bourgeoisie. Maybe he doesn’t understand it yet, but what matters is the struggle against the immobility of systematic thought, whether liberal or Marxist. And if we speak of salvation, it doesn’t solely mean collective salvation through the restoration of German grandeur. War, then defeat and the conditions of the peace are morally destroyed the individual as well. So movement is the condition for the survival of everyone, a vital attempt to rediscover meaning: “In the attack we hope to find deliverance, a supreme exaltation of our forces; we hope to be firm in the conviction of being up to our destiny, we hope to feel the true values of the world in us. We march, nourished by no other certitudes than those that could be worthy for our country.” Lines that join those from Battle as an Inner Experience by Ernst Jünger and show the extent of the spirit of revenge that motivated and shaped warrior instead of soldiers, free men rather than replaceable parts.

It’s the expression of an impatient folly, a lover’s folly. Refusing immobility, ceaselessly putting oneself in peril as one questions himself, is the sign that the nationalist revolution rejects the Platonic love of an idea. Because the beloved nation has been lost, it should be conquered again, by occupying the borders, not by seducing it. Yet a moment comes where action no longer suffices to nourish hope. Exalted violence can destroy the one who endures it and the once who exercises it alike. The author avows, “We have ignited a pyre that not only burns inanimate objects, it burns our hopes, our aspirations, but also the laws of the bourgeoisie, the values of the civilized world, it burns everything, the last remnants of the vocabulary and beliefs in the things and ideas of this time, all this dusty junk that still lingered in our hearts.” The ideal annihilates, the idealist tends towards nihilism. Fate is increasingly obvious, obligating the warrior to reconsider his aspirations, or to die from having used up all that resided in his heart. In order to survive, it is necessary to project a new ideal, to cut an alternative from the tarnished banner that one brandishes without believing in it. Movement becomes an empty shell that demands only to be filled by a production of the spirit, experience is useless without knowledge. It is no longer a question of moving to survive, but of knowing how to move, towards what goal. Then, revolutionary passion, remembering that it was born from reaction, proposes an audacious conservative goal.

Intellectual and Violent: The Outpouring of the Spirit

The permanent tangle of individual and collective considerations in the work creates the perfect psychological portrait of the revolutionary, of the militant in the strict sense (ie military methods). But in the political struggle of the immediate after war era, the young Ernst von Salomon firstly revealed himself to himself, intellectual and violent, rather than advancing an idea. From the start, the political will of the author and his accomplices was at best a quest, a will to find points of reference in the fog of the surrounding crisis, more than a real inclination. But if simple reflection was not the beginning of this quest, it’s a sign that the German ideal of the nascent Conservative Revolution was not purely philosophical. It was more encompassing, more total: it’s a “worldview” (Weltanschauung), certainly impregnated with philosophy, guided by intellect, but also concretely experienced, visceral. This worldview nourishes will as much as thought and expresses itself sentimentally in lyrical, dreamlike, suggestive, or allegorical terms that defy jargon and rationalist concepts. The emblematic style of the German Conservative Revolution that we find in the prose of Ernst Jünger or Carl Schmitt aims to suggest, touch, project rather than simply expose. The outlaw that Salomon embodies is not a man of the drawing room. With him, experience comes before knowledge. The young man’s feelings precede his intellectual formation and metapolitical consciousness. It’s only through writing that he seeks the truth of eternal values in the extremes of lived experience, in order to transform experience into knowledge. Thus the work takes its meaning in order to raise it to another level, to raise it to the rank of a tool accessible to all.

Here one finds a magnificent expression of the paradox of Revolutionary Conservative thought, modern among the anti-moderns in that it proposes to turn modernity against itself, but also and especially in that it can seem to accord priority to action, the driving impulse comes from the domain of the senses, and not from the domain of ideas. What is not experienced is only bourgeois equivocation, as one of Ernst von Salomon’s comrades says about a book by Walter Rathenau – assassinated with the complicity of our author by Organization Consul- entitled In Days To Come, inspiring this terse comment: “So many sparks and so little dynamite.” Salomon himself admits to feeling shipwrecked, when he swears with spite that the considerations of high politics have made the Freikorps useful idiots in the service of foreign interests. And the will to act towards and against everything in a permanent headlong rush only seems to spare those who, like von Salomon, are capable of sublimating action into thought and extracting a little truth from it, clarifying a worldview, proposing a goal. Revolutionary folly, the irrational and anarchic impulse, channeled like so, moderated by conservative instinct, calls for a much greater wisdom and an indispensable effort of conceptualization.

But Salomon would not find this equilibrium, though he had the intuition, until his release from prison. Still too fevered, too extreme in his will to act at any price, until the crime, until a damnation that he didn’t even seem to fear. The outlaws were the outcasts thrown into the arms of the devil by the blows of history, exclusion would destroy the weakest of them, and reinforce the others in a besieged citadel. A bit before his death, more than 40 years after the publication of the Outlaws, he confessed to having really questioned the meaning of his action during his second imprisonment, after which he fully espoused the Conservative Revolutionary Movement by initiating the “revolution of the spirit,” already mentioned and presented in his work in embryonic form. Namely a task of redefining concepts, like the French encyclopédistes of the 18th century, presumed precursors of the French Revolution. But as if the tension between knowledge and experience was fundamentally insurmountable, history would confront this task, this knowledge, with the experience of politics and cause to it languish through the ideological and political deviation of National-Socialism.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2016/10/07/ernst-von-salomon-revolutionnaire-conservateur-amoureux/

Werner Sombart on the Ethic of Subsistence and the Capitalist Spirit – Philitt – May 22nd, 2017

15 Thursday Jun 2017

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A figure of the German Conservative Revolution, Werner Sombart devoted a large part of his work to the analysis of the capitalist spirit and the research of its origins. By focusing on the genesis of capitalism which he situated in the Late Middle Ages, the German sociologist highlights the opposition between a pre- capitalist European commercial ethic, called subsistence, and a specifically capitalist ethic. This latter was firstly influenced by Christian thought, which limited it, before it freed itself from it.

The feudal and corporatist economy of the Middles Ages was dominated by the idea that everyone should be capable of living from his work in conformity with his rank and by leading an honest life. The statement of Sigismond, the Germanic Holy Roman Emperor at the start of the 15th century, recounted by Werner Sombart, transcribes this ideal: “Work exists so that each man can earn his bread by performing it and so that no one can impinge upon the trade of another. Thanks to it each man can satisfy his needs and feed himself.” The economic logic governing such a society was thus subordinated to the necessity of providing for the producers and the determination of prices was essentially based on the costs of production. Usage value took priority over exchange value: prices didn’t depend on supply and demand in the pre- capitalist commercial spirit. Likewise, any maneuver aiming to depress prices, like a fire sale, was judged immoral.

This ethic, which Werner Sombart qualified as the ethic of subsistence, created a particular conception of the notion of competition. In order to assure price stability and the means of survival for everyone, tradesmen and artisans were restrained to the domain of a particular activity and a defined clientele. Impregnated with the peasant spirit, this commercial morality considered that “the client was for the city dweller, what the plot of land was for the peasant,” according to Sombart. Any pursuit of clients was thus prohibited and the actions aiming to attract clients from one’s neighbor were forbidden. Relying on the commercial regulations and the legal records of large commercial cities, Werner Sombart showed that any attempt at commercial promotion could lead to sanctions.

Moreover, by assuring the organization and regulation of professions, the guilds watched out to make sure no one impinged on another person’s realm of activity. Regarding the prohibition of lending at interest that predominated at the time, it conformed to the ethic of guarding against any panic by forbidding the production of money from money. The sociologist remarked that this pre- capitalist economy was not very productive. The lack of commercial rigor, the multitude of holidays, and the slowness of transaction speed reduced the efficiency of a society in which economic work was not the central point, a society in which the elites were not legitimized by their commercial prowess. In effect, this spirit corresponded to European societies in which life was regulated by social, popular, and religious events, which imposed their imperatives upon commerce. Moreover, Werner Sombart was well aware that the principles of this ethic of subsistence were regularly violated. Yet the regular transgression of the forbidden, even the occasional tolerance of this transgression, did not weaken the principle nor its mark left on the spirit of the age.

The emergence of the first forms of capitalism in Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, notably in Florence, broke with the preceding eras not only by valuing wealth obtained from work, but especially by rationalizing economizing attitudes. Werner Sombart underlined the role of certain aspects of Catholicism in this evolution. By advocating the idea of a chaste and moderate life but also the absolute mastery of oneself and rigor in work, the Thomist doctrine of Catholicism encouraged the rationalization of life and created a fertile ground for the development of homo economicus. Honesty and rigor in business were no longer solely constraints imposed by reputation but virtues required by the personal conscience of the individual, which increased the degree of necessity. These Christian virtues were a catalyst for the capitalist spirit but they were equally an important limit. Thomism did not condemn wealth but it distinguished it from enrichment. Movement, dynamism always excites mistrust and the fear of a violation of limits. Furthermore, even when it is allowed, this enrichment must not be the end goal. Man must remain the ultimate ends of the economy.

The Persistence of the Ethic of Subsistence

However the principles of the ethic of subsistence remained omnipresent in this first form of capitalism. More rational and effective than before, commercial activity remained low intensity. The ideas of limits combined with the ethic of subsistence had lost none of their importance and commerce remained subordinated to the social life of individuals. Devoting one’s life to the expansion of one’s wealth was not the capitalist ideal of this era, it was to earn enrich oneself rapidly and retire from business in order to enjoy and live on the earned wealth. Werner Sombart explained that during this period of primitive capitalism, prices remained essentially determined by the usage value of goods and competition was strictly subordinated to the principles of the pre- capitalist economy: “Even during the first half of the 18th century, the merchants of London saw the efforts of some of their colleagues to decorate their shops or attract clients with tasteful and elegant displays as unfair competition.” The sociologist illustrated this late remnant of the ethic of subsistence by citing the writings of Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe but also a figure of English capitalism and editor of the Complete English Tradesman published in 1725. In this work, the entrepreneur didn’t hesitate to take a position against unregulated commerce. He accused it of lowering prices by drastically diminishing the jobs necessary for an equal amount of production in order to concentrate profit in the hands of a few. Werner Sombart also recalled the mistrustful attitude of Italian Guilds in the 16th century towards the first machines in the name of defending labor. So this first capitalist period remained profoundly enclosed by social life, limiting any desire for the autonomy of economic logic in relation to religious and traditional principles.

The mutation of this classical capitalism into modern capitalism began the 18th century but it only truly revealed itself in the 19th. The economy then became autonomous and was no longer subordinated to the limits of traditional society. Man was no longer the center of the economic universe. The old principle of “earn as much as possible by the doing the least amount of business possible” was no longer fashionable, on the contrary, it was to always produce more in order to compensate for ever falling prices. Commercial advertising became widespread and attempts to attract and seduce the clientele were no longer objects of moral condemnation. All the juridical and moral shackles of the past ages were treated like obstacles to destroy in order to liberate commerce. Economic efficiency became the only moral principle in business. Werner Sombart remarked the former virtues of primitive capitalism (rigor at work, a spirit of thrift and honesty) survive in the modern world but under an “objectified” form. These virtues are justified as long as they prove their economic effectiveness but are no longer followed if their utility ceases, in private life for example.

The Modern Cult of Growth and Movement

For Werner Sombart, the principal mutation of the modern capitalist spirit resides in the motive of the capitalist. In the era of primitive capitalism, the merchant was animated by the love of profit and the will to conform with Christian virtues, the latter stimulated but limited the capitalist spirit. In the modern era, the love of profit was accentuated, the virtues objectified, but the capitalist was especially moved by a new force. It is the will to grow and the love of this growth that motivates him before all. The limitless expansion of business constitutes his supreme goal. This imperative of growth suppose an absence of limit on work, production, and the creation of wealth. Werner Sombart explained that modern commercial activity achieved an unbounded wealth, but also and especially a depth and intensity previously unparalleled: “Forward, forward! Such is the watchword of our times. The advance of the market and furious commotion: that is what characterizes it before all. We know to what extent this excess of activity exhausts bodies, withers souls. All the inherent values of life are sacrificed to the Moloch of work, all the aspirations of the heart and the spirit must give way to a single interest, a single preoccupation: business.” The sociologist did not hesitate to compare this psychology of the modern businessman to the psychology of a child whose mental world rests upon permanent agitation, the desire to always attain more, the love of novelty, and the feeling of power. Education permits the regulation of such caprices by imposing limits on the desires of the child. The modern commercial ethic rests on this infantile psychology freed from any educational shackle.

This fundamental rupture brought by modernity created the cult of movement and change. Negatively perceived, stability became, on the contrary, a synonym for immobilization and sterility. At the end of the tumultuous 19th century, Charles Péguy still perceived the vestiges of the old ethic of subsistence: “They said that a man who works well and conducts himself well will surely never lack anything … this whole old world was essentially the world of making a living” whose disappearance constitutes what is properly modern: “And maybe that’s the most profound difference, the abyss that exists between the ancient, pagan, Christian, French world, and our modern world.” The dynamic of modern capitalism analyzed by Werner Sombart in the first part of the 20th century has continued to our day. The recourse to publicity and marketing, the race to lower prices, and the imperative of economic growth have intensified since the writings of the German intellectual. While the fluidification of society appears to be the ideal of the modern world now more than ever, the practices condemned by the ethic of subsistence are made commonplace. Yet one still finds significant traces of this ethic in the deontological rules of certain so-called “regulated” professions. The lawyer’s organization thus forbids the canvassing of clients from a member in the name of the principle of brotherhood and restrains advertising to preserve the dignity of the profession. Through his original approach to notions of economic growth, competition, and price determination, the historical and worldly wise analysis of Werner Sombart constitutes a relevant tool to address contemporary questions of growth and the local or alternative economy.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2017/05/22/ethique-de-subsistance-et-esprit-capitaliste-chez-werner-sombart/