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INTRODUCTION


Friedrich Georg Jünger's The Failure of Technology (Die Perfektion der Technik,1946) was written under the shadow of World War II – the threat of a German sky black with enemy aircraft that splattered fire and death on the burnt-out caves of industrial man. "Lava, ashes, fumes, smoke, night-clouds lit up by fire" – the landscape of twentieth-century man erupts, in Jünger's pages, like a volcano returning man's boasted artifacts to that first wilderness that stretched back beyond the age of the gods. This book is the sombre meditation of a poet who has looked into chaos, even into hell, and who has not flinched.

But man was made for hope. Karl Jaspers and others have criticized Jünger severely for concentrating exclusively on the destructive and demonic power of technology. They have accused him of writing a one-sided document. Their very contention heightens the significance of his achievement. Jünger has not told us that the future belongs necessarily to a technocratic slave state. He has not predicted a century of mass men, faceless and without hearts – a century of robots marching over the parched desert of a mechanized west. He has not written an apocalyptic proclaiming a new iron age. He has done something else, something that badly needed doing: he has shown us the essence of technology. In so doing, he has revealed western man standing at the crossroads of history.

To know the essence of technology is to know that the control of technological power implies much more than its humanization, its direction into channels which are in accord with human dignity, much more than a hasty baptism of the machine by men eager to absorb the new world into the ethos of our Christian inheritance. All the evils of the age cannot be blamed on the bad will of men who misuse machines; some of them are intrinsic to the very nature of the machine itself. The control of technology means a severe limitation of its hitherto unchecked growth, a limitation demanding an almost savage asceticism on the part of an age drunk, not merely with the synthetic emotions and pleasures manufactured hourly by the entertainment factories, but with dreams of power and of the conquest of outer space. As Gabriel Marcel has said, it is easy to take up technics; it is almost impossible to lay them down. Once man has assumed what is both a promise and a burden, once he has tasted the temptation of absolute power, he will never be the same again. The modern world, stamped as it is with the image of the machine, must learn to look technology in the face and read its essence, soberly and without illusion.

Jünger writes as a poet shocked by the ravages of a technology within which the elemental forces of creation, chained and directed into technological ends, have spread demonically and erupted into history to exact their revenge upon man himself. Jünger writes as a poet, but he also writes as a philosopher who understands the nature of the rationalized, the abstract thought which lies at the center of modern science. It is upon this aspect of his achievement that I would concentrate in my introduction to his work: –

It is not only the scientist, however, who abstracts: everyone does. Abstraction is necessary in order that man may cooperate with nature, because unless he can do so he dies. Abstraction is a practical necessity for survival. In the non-technologized modes of production and work, abstraction is never found in a pure state; there it is a simple means to a practical end. When man abstracted the nature of a circle from the wood of the tree, he immediately reintegrated the form with the wood itself because his wheel was to be made of wood. Discrimination in the non-technologized order is but a preliminary phase of understanding which terminates in a judgement looking to things as they really exist. The materials of construction are never far from underived nature, and the form given the tool is often discovered in the very stuff from which the tool is made. Abstraction as a habit of thought in and of itself, as a deliberate, willed concentration on one segment of reality to the suppression of the whole, however, is not characteristic of artisan and peasant societies. The partial alienation from existence involved in merely technical or artistic abstraction is immediately overcome by an artistic judgement – a judgement bearing on a thing to be made. The artisan or peasant who uses abstraction in this way uses it as little more than an instrument; it has no more value than it would were it a tool itself. Like a tool, abstraction in this order has but one crucial function: the integration of man with reality for the sake of human living.


But abstraction may be given other ends. When I abstract a reality, an object is constituted for my intelligence; a world is disengaged for the reason, a world that can be understood on its own terms only so long as it is held before the intelligence in that act alone. To abstract the nature of circle for the sake of making a wheel is not to render full "justice" to the circle as such. "Justice" is done the circle when it is understood simply as a circle, as an intelligible form partaking of the nature of quantity, as a mathematical object. Technological thought, as distinct from merely technical or artistic thinking, demands a steady and deliberate abstract consideration of the cosmos, of nature, and of man, in order that they might be described in purely mathematical terms. By ignoring the irreducibility of the being of things – unique and unrepeatable –modern science found it was possible to unite all things under the concept of quantity. Since measurable quantities can be predicted, they can be controlled. As Jünger points out, technological rationalism makes an act of faith in the uniformity of natural laws. This act of faith stands alone as the single non-rational postulate in the credo of scientific rationalism. The characteristics of technological rationalism are so well known that it suffices merely to list them in this place: the elimination of sense qualities; the suppressing of the organic; the mechanization of time; the patterning of the world after the dead dynamism of the machine; the suppression of the richness and idiosyncrasy of personal existence; the ideal of an horizontal and featureless cosmos; the postulate that the universe is less rich and beautiful than it looks.


In Jünger's mind, the clock stands as symbol and type of technological thought:-


Clock time is lifeless time, tempus mortuum, in which second follows second in monotonous repetition. Lifeless, clock-measured time flows along side by side with the life time of man, but aloof from it, utterly regardless of the high and the low tides of life where no two moments are alike.


To the reflective mind, the clock summons up the thought of death. The figure of the dying Charles V, pacing among the clocks in his collection and attempting to regulate their movements, emits the frost of death. He watches and he listens to the passing of time that inevitably leads to death. . . . In an era when the public clock, visible from far off, was still looked upon as a rare masterpiece, it proclaimed an unmistakable Memento mori.


The rhythm of life which is one with the coming and passing of the seasons, with the flood and ebb of the tides, with the dawns and evenings of all our days, with the very birth and death of man and beast and plant upon the earth – these rhythms are not caught by the fine mechanisms of clocks and watches. Thus life is forced to measure up to the relentless beat of a machine. Time as the rhythm of eternity has been shattered; hurry and speed, "the bastards of time," as Irina Gorainoff has written, have conquered everywhere. By comparison, the modes of technology are destructive of life's rhythms in all their tragedy and their joy. A technology bent on easing the tragedy of life would be a good thing indeed. But there is no real ease. On the contrary, life is invaded as by an automaton. Nature withers. The springs of piety corrupt. Man is left to shuffle along the pavements of the modern city surrounded by, and formed in the likeness of, a dream world of puppets, of flickering shadows created by minds bent on reducing the human substance to a burlesque of the machine.


There are those who believe we are living in the age of the twilight of man. Jünger is not among them. As technology, in any of its mechanisms, can come into its perfected state only by preying upon a natural order which exists independently of itself, so too technology as a habit of thought can exist only within men who, as living creatures, stand outside the world of technical organization. Technology, which is an instrument for utilizing the raw material of nature, can move toward its ultimate perfection only by impoverishing nature; the less you have to work with, the more accurate and sharp must be both the machinery used and the technological thinking employed. The zero of nature would be the zero of a technology that had reached both its apotheosis and its death. Conversely, technical thinking, as an act of the mind of man, is qualitative and living – but life is foreign to the essence of technology. Hence the full reduction of man to a set of measurable quantities would be the end of all technics. The zero of human nature would be the zero of a technics that had reached both its apotheosis and its death. Thus the complete perfection of technology is a contradiction. It follows, therefore, that as technology approaches its asymptote, it nears its own destruction.


If the thesis sounds strange to American and English ears it may be due to the ambiguity surrounding the word "perfection." It is not without significance that the original German title of Jünger's book was The Perfection of Technology. The German Perfektion does not carry the optimistic and moral overtones of its English equivalent. The German simply implies an achievement, a fullness, an actuality of something which now stands completed, finished, altogether one with its own essence. Perfektion bespeaks a purity and thus a purification of the irrelevant, a purgation of all things other than itself. Jünger insists that as technology approaches these states, it purges nature of life and man of humanity. It perverts the state by turning politics into an order of technical problems rather than an exercise in moral judgment. It destroys the profit motive by subordinating the good of both capitalist and laborer to the good of the machine: thus the technician, writes Jünger, "drove the craftsman from his hand loom and forced him to become an operator in a mill, a proletarian.In this act his intent was not to enrich the capitalist at the expense of the factory worker, but he accepted this consequence without compunction. He was interested above all in developing the technical mechanism, and not at all in who profited by it." And we can hear Orwell's O'Brien admitting casually that the vision of constantly increasing power has its own consolations, even if they bring with them the victory of the robot. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever."


It is precisely this characteristic of technological thinking which Jünger finds vicious. It bears for many the illusion of disinterestedness. The American tends to praise the scientist and the technician for abstracting himself from the impurities of the market place, for dedicating himself to his science. Jünger locates the danger in technological perfection in this very dedication to an abstraction from the dust and the splendor of history. The disinterested mind, the abstract mind, uproots – in the name of his science – all peasantries and it annihilates the sense of personal proprietorship. The pure technician "attacks the right to land; for landed property he feels that loathing which the dynamic mind has for all that is immobile." He subverts law in the name of the dictates of engineering: we need only think of those pitiful photographs that crop up from time to time in the daily newspapers showing some aged family evicted from a ramshackle house because it stood in the way of a road or a railway. We need only think of the five ghost towns in South Carolina, towns abandoned by their inhabitants because thermonuclear perfection demanded their destruction.


The American and the English mind bridles against the assertion that technological perfection has to do with a finality of its own; rather, they still see it as a good for man or for his universe. But that mind must humble itself and come to learn that technology can only serve man provided that it remain impure, touched with the mystery beyond rational, the sense of play, the jeu d'esprit, the joy of contemplation.


Jünger does not tell us how to do this or even what to do. He has confronted us with a vision of "Christmas Future." Unless we act, the tombstone of mankind will be read under the snows of other-years only by dumb eyes, those of a twisted remnant pausing amidst the dead craters of what was once the western world. Yet Jünger's was a pre-atomic vision.


No longer can we laugh at the man of the future as did Stephen Leacock in 1938, when he described him as a man "with large fluted ears, pendulous and quivering, to sort out noises with, and to scoop in aerial radio as it goes by. But very often he will have on his radio-flaps right over his ears." Leacock wrote as a man who was too civilized to take the future seriously. After all, no gentleman would care to go to the moon! But Leacock wrote this description before the last war. Today, even gentlemen can laugh no more. Today we are reminded of that grim note of warning Hilaire Belloc left with us when he wrote – like a man who had seen the angel of death and a vision of things yet to come –


We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the
long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by
his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes
and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we
laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from
beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.


An old world is dying. There are those who regret its passing. It was hardly a reality, more a memory, to those of us born soon after the first world war; but even this benediction will be denied our children. A new world is being prepared for them in the womb of history, and if we would fix its nature as by a symbol – with the resolved hope of understanding that world in order to save it – we can do no better than turn to this remarkable study by Friedrich Georg Jünger.


FREDERICK D. WILHELMSEN
Santa Clara, California.
January 17, 1956.  


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