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:
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Intelligent minds tend to overestimate the influence of opinion, especially the device of irony. This is an error from which they are cured late or never – often only when, like Chamfort, they fall with the branch they sawed off.
Finally, the ironic process always leads back to the ground on which things are stronger than criticism. This is followed by enthusiasm, annihilation, even the turning to taboo of commonplaces.
Opinion does not create truths, but establishes realities. Authoritarians therefore often emerge precisely from epochs of unrestricted freedom of opinion. They progress through the change of criticism as through good and bad weather to their goal. They would never reach it if truth-telling were the rule of the game. "Exposure" falls to no one who has a face to offer behind the mask or a heart under the waistcoat. These are constitutional questions. He who is built like Clemenceau will survive even a Panama.
Press freedom is dangerous for powers that are in retreat. And there is no power that does not sooner or later find itself on the defensive. Those who appear help themselves to opinion and then dominate it. In every age and under every constitution there is a catalogue of things that must not be touched.
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In dictatorships, but also where authority becomes weak, intelligent condottieri emerge – here in the service of the rulers and their language regime, there in that of competing bodies and private citizens. The term public relations originated in the First World War; it describes not only an expansion but also a change in the formation of opinion and its technicality. The “machine of fame” was already vividly illustrated eighty years ago by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. He also came up with the plan to divide the sky into advertising spaces to be rented out. In the meantime, propaganda has become a science, forming fixed rules and its own technique.
In the long run, substance cannot be replaced by opinion even where the means of reproduction is under supervision. Where there is no collapse erosion is slower, but more thorough.
These, too, are problems of lesser importance as far as the figure of the worker is concerned, for more important than the diversity and the spiral course of development is its unity, which manifests itself in the fact that no power can dispense with the use of specific means even in the formation of opinion. From there, something more convincing radiates than through the statement – still unseparated, rhythmically inflowing, and illuminating potency. This outweighs the formulated opinion and its quarrels, because technology is the language of the worker; it is the world language. It is not what is negotiated for and fought out in it that determines the direction, but victory belongs from the outset to the one in whose language it is negotiated, even if it is still difficult to grasp, difficult to recognise. Therein lies its power.
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Whether a person, a people, a movement has a future, can be heard very well today, if one knows how to listen – that is, not so much to the words and their content as to the sound and music.