Maxima-Minima is the title Ernst Jünger gave to his notes for his great book The Worker. First published in 1964, 32 years after the writing to which they are assigned, the notes act as a supplement to The Worker, providing additions, reflections, explorations, methodical explanations.
Regarding the format, the essay represents a shift in Jünger’s thought towards theological reflections, aphorisms, and additions. Stylistically these writings are closer to his diaries and the sui generis used by authors like Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Friedrich Hölderlin.
In his later work Jünger would separate passages and notes using an asterisk, here he relies on spacing. This represents a challenge for online formatting, so the editors have decided to use asterisks for ease of reading, although it is not used in the original text. Any print editions will continue to use the original spacing format.
Part One here:
With such adnotes, pedagogical intentions are to be suppressed; they can only contribute to confusion. What are points of view when the avalanche comes down?
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Finally, at least insofar as prognostic considerations play a part, one abandons even the barometric reading. That of the electroscope or the maxima and minima of a thermometer suffices. One sees the individual who dares not touch a hair of the thousand-fold murderer as a contemporary of the other, whose conscience is not clouded by the thousand-fold murder – and then knows what the hour has struck.
This is the salvation-army style of the generals, the old tetante style of the philosophers, the collective-glove style of the pedagogues in a world of violence, of spitefulness, of merciless trials – as the exact correspondence of inaction and action or of fear and terror in general. But this is sine ira et studio, ultimately with goodwill, and without falling into Nietzsche's error of moralising as an amoralist three times as much as everyone else. Before this flood, in this turning point, no one acts quite right and no one quite wrong. It is much more important to re-calculate than to re-justify – just as research precedes evaluation, so topographical endeavour precedes the legal order.
One must either expand a position or reach a new one in a leap; one can gain time by stretching it or by compressing it. According to Clausewitz, defence is the stronger form. This thesis, however, is only valid from section to section, for absolute time continues to run, and haphazardly everyone must set the clock according to it.
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In this sense, the German has remained in the intermediate field; he has neither succeeded in fortifying himself in the principles of 1789, nor in credibly disposing of them and the forms they have shaped. As he had taken insufficient advances on them in 1803 and 1813, and failed to enforce them in 1848, so too in 1918 to free himself from them. In 1933 the last opportunity was missed. In the meantime, it was like any decision that had been postponed too long: it became irrelevant. What the landslides failed to do, erosion completed.
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This also shows that the conflict between peoples no longer has a definitive character, but a functional one. The figure of the worker, changing from the bottom up, passes not only through individuals but also through nations.
"It is another who commands; and what is to happen, happens" (Gotthelf).
*
That theories are not sufficient is shown more and more clearly by the way in which they pale in comparison with the facts. Their inadequacy leads to a directionless pulling back and forth of great masses in unclear fronts and directions. Although intellectual abilities are growing rapidly, they are less and less sufficient for a satisfactory assessment of the situation.
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The author, on the other hand, must strive for a position in which he agrees with the great course of events, even if it is contrary to him, even if it threatens to override him. Fate is all the more comprehensible the more thoroughly one disregards one's own weal and woe. Then it becomes fascinating even in its threat: "Everything that comes to pass is admirable."
Every political theory has stronger relation to activity than to reality. It is therefore primarily a matter of parties and their distinctions of top and bottom, austerity and credit, right and left. These are movements within the state; other measures apply to the state itself, in which being is concentrated. Therefore, statecraft will not be based on the theoretician, but, on the one hand, on the philosopher, who is more profoundly grounded, and, on the other hand, on the poet as the performer and creator of models of a higher kind.
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The fact that the situation today is quite different, insofar as the powers rely primarily on theories and lack credible works of art, may be taken as a confirmation, ex negativo – as a sign that here there are fewer real states than dynamic variables: active parties in the world civil war. This, by the way, is one of the favourable omens.
If, in the face of one of the unexpected turns or even charges that are inevitable, the theorist wants to contradict the course of events by pointing to the beginnings, the development passes him by or sweeps him out of the way. This confirms the primacy of the facts. The best theorists are those on the monuments.
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The real value of theory lies in the guidance, the sensible approach to an object. This means achievement and limitation at the same time. Once the object is attained, the theory becomes superfluous, gains historical significance, or changes.
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If we compare the attainment of the object, for example the state, with the emergence of a statue, the theories belong to what falls away; they remain on the ground as splinters and shards, perhaps also as relics. But they have liberated an image from matter. At the unveiling, in great jubilant celebrations, this is symbolically repeated.
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That would be one of the possible views. The other is that the figure begins to stir of its own accord in matter and emerges from it at the appropriate hour; it leaves behind the thoughts of development as a historical uniform, an automaton-shell.
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It depends on the position of the individual which of the two views seems more credible. Whether man leads or is led, whether he changes the world on his own initiative or by order – the dispute about this leads into the old and eternally new question of freedom of will.
It may be necessary that freedom of will is affirmed with passion at the focal points today. The perpetrator needs impartiality, which can rise through all levels of naivety to the consciousness of the godlike.
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Post festum, the disproportion between the paucity of individuals and the tremendous changes that attach themselves to names, the mere mention of which embarrasses the historian, is astonishing. This is, of course, one sign among many that his means are inadequate.
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The fact that the visual arts are becoming inimical to the mind is not only due to the artist, but also to the model. Tailors and hairdressers used to be able to help. Under museum aspects badges of rank and status can hardly be shown anymore; the sight of them evokes an Ash Wednesday mood. A camouflage net has been thrown over the world, an anonymous curtain behind which a new appearance is being born.
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This is also where the destruction of form by colour comes from: on the battlefield, in painting, in architecture under flooding, swirling light. But even form itself cannot be held; an imprecise will, focused ever more sharply on the effects, dissolves it into a chain of models. Cinders are left behind.
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The old "Es kreißen die Berge – – –" can almost be turned into the opposite – there comes a little mouse that seems to give birth to mountains. The secret lies in the suspended masses; the reverberation of a shot, the foot of a hare can trigger the avalanche. This says nothing against human greatness – on the contrary, the dimensions change on the immense stage and with them what can be understood as great. At such a sight, the observer must come to a different judgement of freedom than the one who acts.
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When the tide rises, the one who tears down the dams has a greater effect than the one who maintains it. The seafarer is not concerned with either; he remains in the element.
The true conservative does not want to preserve this or that order, but to restore the image of the human being who is the measure of all things. That is precisely why any conservative approach today is questionable.
*
With increasing depth, conservatives and revolutionaries become very similar, because they necessarily approach the same ground. In the case of the really great changemakers, those who not only overthrow orders but also found them, both qualities can, therefore, always be demonstrated.
Before the great performances, there are attunements, delicate but foreboding overtures with gradually seeping light. The ballroom brightens up until the new company recognises each other as brothers in the splendour. Everything has changed - the decorations, the faces, the robes - and everything confirms the great discovery and rediscovery: to be a human being. This may last a hundred years or more. How everything fits together, the rational and irrational sounds, the actors and those who played along without stakes or fees, the images, thoughts and events, inventions and voyages of discovery to distant worlds – this is probably felt solemnly in the moment, but only revealed in memory.
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Whatever happens, the earth responds. It is always ready for anything. But it becomes uncanny when the old Gaea begins to stir of its own accord. Then it moves deep under the layers on which state and society thrive, deep under the crypts and cellars. Events cannot be directed by man, let alone explained. When the historian lays down his arms, when language fails him, it does not mean that he is confronted with the senseless, but that his means are insufficient.
*
The fact that great plans turn into their opposite does not mean that they are senseless; rather, they follow a different plan. The means of the statesman fail no less than those of the historian. Statesmanship becomes a system of temporary measures. If it wanted to achieve more, for instance to found order, it would soon be reduced to absurdity. If one does not want to live purely as a nomad, then in an earthquake landscape the workshop style is the only sensible one, the only one that is, if not durable, at least sustainable.
With the figure of the worker, therefore, a brother of Antaios, Atlas, and Prometheus, rather than Heracles, appears – a new Titan and son of the Great Serpent, of whom the demigod only destroyed an image. Now not only the historical structures are torn away, but also the mythical and cultic presuppositions which underlie everything – the human perhaps not at all.
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The figure of the worker corresponds to no class, no rank, no nation, no culture, no faith, if not in matter, which is admittedly rather a knowledge or a certain confidence. It answers as gods did before, but more strongly, more visibly. That for the time being only the phenomena are recognised is not cause for worry.
The light on the new stage becomes stronger than it has ever shone as a change of form, as far as memory reaches. Not historical, but inner experience conforms to it. Where thought recedes into history and myth, as into a milder medium or into half-dark niches, it has insufficiently emancipated itself. In the crises, the heroes are invoked, the relics are shown, but no answer comes from there any more.
The question of the mission is only likely to confuse the actor. "He gets farthest who does not know where he is going." In the Promethean workshop with its countless fires, telluric-plutonic rather than Apollonian light prevails. Divine mission, heroic ethos, paternal right will be sought in vain where a world is born in tremendous convulsions. Fear and blindness reign between two contractions – whoever wants to stand firm now must exchange transcendental optimism for fundamental optimism. Then he will also gain the necessary powers in the real world.
Nothing can happen without the earth. Zeus must seek advice from the Moirae, the ancient mothers. He measures the weights; and what is weighed there weighs heavier than will and spirit. The elder and eternally young Mother has outlived gods and heaven, fathers and sons. The Great Serpent: mountains and seas, volcanoes and glaciers, plants and animals are stripped away at every moult. In ever-new youth it rises from the baths of flame.
The rising earth spirit speaks from the mouth of Pythia; Apollonian interpretation must be added. The interpretation is necessarily correct for all eventualities – whether this or that empire is destroyed, whether one or another of her sons falls or prevails: the meaning of the earth is fulfilled. The father sacrifices the son with pain, while the mother receives him with joy. One of the great qualities of the earth is that of the grave: wherever a man dies, there is holy land. Without the earth there is no sanctuary.
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Everywhere the earth burns – but where the fire becomes visible - in volcanoes, blossoming spring meadows, murder fires, love feasts, hearth and sacrificial flames - it has already gained quality. The eye sees prominence – the sight of the central fire in which death and life unite is denied to mortal man.
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Moses saw the bush burning before he heard the voice and received the command. The prophet is an outpost of the extreme limit; he does not have knowledge like the priest, he is in the elemental. "Assuredly I am a flame."
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Moses at Horeb, John on the beach of Patmos: there the unseen begins. There, as there is only one man, there can be only one element. "This is you."
This utmost simplification, the confrontation with the absolute in the timeless, is followed by endless exegeses, operations, and expansions. The serpent stirs for the span of a flash of lightning and gives millennia the form according to which phenomena align themselves. Now the world becomes a mill; a new calendar begins.
"Woe, the birthing cry." Endless disaster announces itself in it. Long before the plans, long before the battles, it is heard: "Woe comes to pass"; the spinner ties on. The thread is still grey; the dawn will bring the colours. Everything is still a foreboding. The whistle of the first siren in "Wilhelm Meister" – greater and heavier than the dawn of a new century stirs the heart of the lonely wanderer. Again and again this shadow falls on his path. The suffering is deeper than its interpretations.
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The study of fate has become an obsolete subject. And language lives on its waste. Under such circumstances, what sense can a higher-order assessment of the situation have?
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Shall we content ourselves with the answer that a noble instinct innate to the species demands its satisfaction? The situation of man has been endangered since the beginning; in this respect the reading of Isaiah always remains contemporary. In the case of the Westerner, there is also the specific desire for knowledge. A fine example is given by the downfall of the elder Pliny: scientific ethos united with that of a magistrate.
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It may seem like a loss that intellectual sovereignty has been isolated and that, if one still wants to say that thinking rules the world, it has nevertheless become a very specific thinking. The elaboration of Hegelian philosophy and the dominating, even fateful, importance that the exact natural sciences have acquired are examples.
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Thought undoubtedly creates facts; but then, also, the facts give rise to thought, and move ever closer until thought gives way to them. It follows the events – at last, the course of the day. Thus the philosophers accept the atom as it is supplied to them by the physicists. Even Nietzsche considered, and in a rather late passage, whether he should not study natural sciences for another ten years – no doubt at a weak moment. One does not put the cart before the horse.
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When Overbeck said: "Nietzsche is not to be taken seriously at all as a scholar, but very much as a thinker", he meant it critically. But it is the best that can be said of a mind that it nourishes itself not from the texts but from the source. Either the philosopher remains on the basic line of thought, of which even the strongest developments of the sciences are only side-shoots, or he degrades himself to a mere stooge of philistines, in the end also of political marauders. No one can stand through mere knowledge.
Spiritual freedom is not granted; it is present or absent. Spiritual freedom is not demanded either, but proven, and the world lives through this. Nothing is easier than this proof, and nothing more difficult either. What can anyone do, who would know it?
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Everyone crowds to sit with Socrates on the mockers' bench, but the rows thicken when it is necessary to accompany him with shield and sword like Xenophon, and when even the cup is passed, the hall empties.
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The fact that individual disciplines intervene directly and uncontrollably is a sign that the centre of action has shifted. It can therefore no longer be captured by classical means.
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As far as the form is concerned, it is the secondary characters of work that draw themselves into the world. Therefore, it appears as a gigantic building site filled with restless activity. An examination of the work processes and sections, even of the great state plans, does not convey a meaningful picture. Apart from the fact that they are (and must be) often contradictory, the result reaches far beyond what was planned and intended. Although this entails great dangers, and also catastrophes, on the other hand it permits the conclusion, or at least the assumption, that there is comprehensive coordination and that the visible plans are to be understood as emerging parts of a still invisible overall plan. This in turn suggests a goal.
This assumption is strengthened by a number of other perceptions. For example, by the fact that a world style is already spreading in the workshop landscape, which overlaps all the opposites of the races and peoples, and also of the world powers. These antagonisms still exist and may even intensify, but they take on a different meaning. Kennedy's death marked the first eruption of world sympathy.
Even more surprising than the mutual assignment of sub-disciplines is their sudden and unexpected blossoming, which in turn corresponds with the desolation or loss of other disciplines. This resembles the rise from the larval state, the unfolding of liberated wings from the pupa form. One example is the transformation of astronomy from a theological to a theoretical and, finally, to an applied science. Until recently, it was regarded as a model for the state to maintain professorships that were of little or no use to it.
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Only in retrospect does the plan of the embryonic plant reveal itself. The umbilical cord withers, the egg tooth is rejected, but the lungs fill with air. All this can only be interpreted if one accepts and recognises a centre. It must not be sought within human plans and human intelligence, which has no legislative power, but only a share, albeit a substantial one, in the executive.
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This share in the whole must be excluded in a satisfactory way if the harmony between man and his destiny, between freedom and providence, state and world plan, real, spiritual and metaphysical power, is to be restored. This depends on the depth to which a new, direct approach to being, not bound by tradition, succeeds.
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This is the only way to judge common truths such as that technology is changing the world. An extraordinary sharpness, combined with obvious blindness, leads to the assumption that part of the unconscious is even stronger than consciousness. The playing field is superluminous in the midst of impenetrable, eerie night. The ship is upright, but who knows the current that carries it? This becomes clear when you meet the men who drive the process. They bring to mind one of Clemenceau's words: that no one knew less about the "affair" than Dreyfus himself. Newton's triumph over Goethe is perfect. The conversation bogs down in relations of measure and number, rage du nombre, ethical and political commonplaces. "The lowest gate to hell opened" is still one of the best things heard – provided you are master of your thoughts about this place.
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The end of the world is in every minute, because when man dies, the world ends – and with all the other people as well.