Jünger and Heidegger

When living, studying and teaching in Montreal in the early 1980's I spent many hours at the Goethe Institut and at McGill University to improve my German.  Somehow I stumbled upon the colelcted works of Ernst Jünger and began to work my way through his In Stahlgewittern.  It was slow going: I preferred reading plays or news items, but I stuck with it and by the end I was reading German with ease.

Coming to the German text as an English reader, I would not have found fault with André Gide's praise for that book (I had learned to read French in large part by working my way through his Journal - an easier task than my first effort: Michel Tournier's Vendredi, ou les limbes du pacifique.)

Later I read from travel writings of Jünger which I enjoyed - but never informed myself as to his politics or his career - something that the internet makes a mater of a few keystrokes.

My dismay in discovering that In Stahlgewittern had more than one version and that the author was compromised in undermining the Weimar Republic is hard to convey: shock.  Disbelief.  Anger.

It was like learning the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt - the author on Homo faber (I also liked to read Max Frisch when I was first learnig the language) on Totalitarianism  had been Heidegger's lover.  Then came the documetns that gave the lie to the explanations of the two Heidegger apologists who had influenced me as a student and as a reader of philosophy.

Then this year: to read what Husserl had said about Edith Stein and to read what he had done to block her career: now Jaspers on AFra Geiger was no passing remark about a social occasion at Husserl's house (and yes, I read that Lutheran Husserl would go on to be discussed as "that Austrian Jew" when suggesting that a Protestant might be acceptable to Freiburg's chair of Catholic philosophy.)

For years I have been hoping for a poem to take shape: a poem for Husserl's lost of his son Wolfgang.  But that was before I knew of Husserl's foolish patriotism.  Today I think much more of Bernard Bolzano and Franz Brentano.  Husserl's foolishness and his bigotry put his idealism in another light: stubborn folly.

Of course Husserl was never really certain of any position that he took: constantly revising.  He was foolish in embracing Descartes as his model for a renewal in philosophy.  He was foolish in not publishing of what was critical to an assessment of his views.  He was foolish in heeding Heidegger on Galileo and Lebenswelt.  In doing he so he succeeded in undermining the phenomenological philosophy and ended up helping to turn a quasi-phenomenological method against science itself.

Husserl misunderstood what the impact of the war had been on Heidegger.  Husserl utterly misunderstood both the goodwill of Edith Stein and the ill-will of Heidegger.  To have been a fly on the wall when Heidegger was mocking Husserl and Cassirer in talking with Jaspers!  And then when Heidegger was talking about Jaspers and Weltanschauung behind Jaspers' back!

Years later, Walter Biemel spoke more freely when Heidegger was not present, just as Eugen Fink spoke more freely to Dorian Cairns when Husserl was not present.

What we may face is the widespread adoption of something like Heidegger in a post-Communist China which is looking for a variant of Taoism.  We can only hope  that they do not produce their own Ernst Juenger (and the same for Russia after its defeat in Afghanistan.)

Glorifying war - let alone total war - these must be the most frightening of messages from demagogues in an era of instant global "communication".  Bolzano was more than a century ahead of his time.

Over at aule-browser.com I will be showing some techniques in presenting annotated texts using the Curl web content language: at least one of those examples will tie a text of Juenger to a text of Heidegger.

In the meantime, some relevant texts can be found at poets.aule-browser.com - but note that the pages linked there all require the Curl browser plugin.