Interview on F. G. Jünger
Technological Civilisation and the Human Hive
I was recently invited on the excellent Hermitix podcast, hosted by James Ellis, to discuss the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Georg Jünger.
Overshadowed today by his much more famous brother Ernst Jünger, Friedrich Georg was once an influential figure: first during the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution, then during the early decades of the Federal Republic. In 1963, he was awarded West Germany’s highest honour, the Bundesverdienstkreuz.
Jünger’s most fascinating and studied work is the book-length essay The Failure of Technology, written in 1939 and first published as Die Perfektion der Technik in 1946. The book is an extensive reflection on technological progress, which has assumed, in Jünger’s view, cult-like proportions in the contemporary imagination. Far from a utopian force, however, the machine world is predicated on the indiscriminate exploitation of nature and tends inherently towards totalitarianism. Lead by a philistine yet arrogant class of engineers and technocrats, its undeclared goal is the perfect automatism of the beehive or ant colony – what Jünger later termed the “technological collective”.
Produced at the same time and place as his brother’s novel On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger’s essay is a prime example of the literature of those dissident conservatives who remained in Germany, in a state of ‘inner emigration’, during the Nazi dictatorship. It was also crucial to the development of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, who read Jünger’s “outstanding” text in May 1942.
Yet what makes The Failure of Technology so fascinating today is that it offers much more than a window into that benighted age. In the digital era, the veneration of ‘science’ and technology seems cruder than ever, while the human hive is all but built. Remarkably, however, both Jünger and Heidegger refused the temptation of fatalism, implicitly rebuking Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the West. The romantic return to a pre-industrial past might well be hopeless, but all talk of future catastrophe remains premature. “Wo aber Gefahr ist”, as Hölderlin famously writes, “wächst das Rettende auch.”
This was excellent.