From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger - Wolf Kittler

From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst JngerWolf Kittler

Cultural Critique, 69, Spring 2008, pp. 79-97 (Article)

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Cultural Critique 69Spring 2008Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

FROM GESTALT TO GE-STELLMARTIN HEIDEGGER READS ERNST JNGER

Wolf Kittler

Ernst Jngers book Der Arbeiter (The Worker),1 which waspublished in 1932, is his last and Wnal reXection on the battleWeldexperience in the trenches of World War I. Having joined the Germanarmy as a young volunteer in 1914, Jnger was, at the end of thewar, one of only a handful of young lieutenants who had managedto achieve two goals that had proved elusive for almost everybodyelse: to receive the Ritterkreuz and Pour le mrite, the armys two high-est medals, and to survive the machine-gun barrage of the Wrst daysof the war, the gas attacks that came a year later, and the Material-schlachten of the Wnal and unsuccessful German attack on the WesternFront in 1918. The aura of invincibility resulting from such an excep-tional fate is described in Jngers work.

Shortly after the war, Jnger turned his war diaries into a seriesof books, which earned him a solid reputation as both a modern heroand a literary author from the early days of the Weimar Republic on.What distinguishes Der Arbeiter from such books as In Stahlgewittern(Storm of Steel) or Das Wldchen 125 (Copse 125) is the leap from crispand lucid descriptions to a treatise that reads like a manifesto andthat, not content with a diagnosis of its own world historical situa-tion, aims at predicting the future destiny of mankind on the planetearth in the age of technology. It is a remarkable symptom that noEnglish translation of the book is available to this day because thecopyright has been blocked by the author himself.

Reading Der Arbeiter together with Heideggers essay Ques-tioning after Technology after many years, in the Wrst decade ofthe twenty-Wrst century, I was struck by the number of parallels inboth the arguments and the terminology of these texts, not only withBenjamins essay On the Origin of the Work of Art in the Age of

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Mechanical Reproduction but also with his Theses on the Philoso-phy of History. It is, of course, easy to locate Benjamin, on the oneside, and Jnger and Heidegger, on the other one, to the so-called Leftand Right of the political spectrum, but in doing so we should at leastbe aware of two facts: One, Jngers work rejects such simple clas-siWcations, which more often than not amount to a refusal to think.And two, his book places itself explicitly above and beyond thisdistinction because it dates back to the seating order of the FrenchConvention, the foundational body of bourgeois societies.

Granted, the way in which Jnger appropriates the socialist termworker for his own purposes amounts to a violent gesture. The factthat he chooses to use the German Arbeiter instead of proletarian isa political statement in itself. But it is also true that one of his crownwitnesses for the new order of the world he is proclaiming is noneother than Lenin. Such terms as total mobilization and imperialdictatorship are coined in reference to that author.

For Jnger, the world political map splits into three parts. Thereare the liberalbourgeois societies of the West: France, the UnitedStates, andwith certain residues of aristocracyGreat Britain. Then,there is the socialist society of the Soviet Union. And, Wnally, there isGermany. What we now call the Third World Wgures as colony andas such takes part in Jngers world political game only as far as thecolonized people, in the name of universal human rights, are giving alot of trouble to the victorious nations of World War I. Der Arbeiteropens with the claim that, since Germany never really was a bourgeoiscountry, it is the nation in which the advent of a new world order isready to happen. There is only one other nation that is equally engagedin what Jnger calls a revolution sans phrase, a revolution that does notneed an ideology because it is justiWed in and of itself. This nation isnever named explicitly, but it is easy to guess that it is the Soviet Union.

Although such terms as nationalism and socialism are outdatedfor Jnger as belonging to the nineteenth century, the forces that uniteunder their banners belong to a future that will terminate the rule ofthe bourgeois and initiate that of the worker, whose rule is explicitlydeWned in terms of the communist movements will to international,or, to use Jngers word, planetary power. If that alliance sounds likea strange breed, one should keep in mind that, in his claim to stayabove the political squabbles of his time, Jnger carefully avoids

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using the two key terms of his world historical argument: the wordscommunism and fascism. But the code of the two substitutes, social-ism and nationalism, is not hard to crack.

Hence, the Great War, the Bolshevik revolution, and the opera-tions of the paramilitary units of the German Freikorps, which con-gregated after the war in an attempt to turn the lessons they hadlearned in the trenches into another means of politics, were all serv-ing one and the same cause, the cause of total mobilization againstan obsolete order of the world; against the liberal democracy with itscontracts, universal rights, and laws, which never was adopted by theGerman people, and which is to be destroyed.

A northsouth axis divides the planet earth into East and West,the latter being conservative, the former revolutionary. Germany be-longs to the East. Such an alliance may sound strange today. And onecan, in fact, read the analysis of totalitarian systems, which Jngerundertakes in his book Der Gordische Knoten in the 1950s, as a revoca-tion of the position he had taken in Der Arbeiter. Twenty years later,after World War II, Jnger diagnoses a rift between those Germanswho have an Asian relation to powerHitler and the fascists, thatisand others who, like the ofWcer corps of the Wehrmacht, adhereto a Western style of power.

In 1932, however, when Der Arbeiter was published, the memoryof the alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union was still freshfor those who had taken part in the 1918 spring offensive of the GreatWar. By signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks underLenin had freed the German army on the Western Front for an attack,which, according to Jngers reading, storm troops would have turnedinto victory if high command at the bases in the hinterland had notbungled the new tactics. And the ofWcer corps was bound to fail be-cause the new tactics was the work of those who, instead of pon-dering over maps, numbers, and strategies, had been Wghting in thetrenches at the front for almost four years. After all, Ernst Jnger hadbeen one of those who invented the formation and tactics of thestorm troops (Stahlgewittern), which was to become the basis of theBlitzkrieg strategy in World War II. Keep in mind also that, when DerArbeiter was published, Stalin had just started suppressing, deport-ing, and killing the kulaks, that his Wrst Wve-year plan was still underway, and that Hitler had not yet won a landslide election.

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The worker, for Jnger, is neither a social class nor an economicforce, but simply the type of soldier, also called warrior, who foughtin the trenches of a war that had functioned as a melting pot, in whichthe petit bourgeois, the peasant, and the proletarian stood shoulderto shoulder. This is the reason why Jnger can imagine national-ists and socialists joining forces in the service of a new world order.The combination of these two terms is not necessarily meant as areference to the members of the German party that deWned itself byexplicitly disregarding, even rejecting, the historical contradictionbetween these two terms, but there is no doubt either that the Nazisare an essential part of Jngers project at this point.

The justiWcation for this claim to be placed above the fray of theWeimar Republics day-to-day political battles is spelled out in thebooks subtitle: Herrschaft und Gestalt. At least the last term is one ofthe few words of German origin that even my Microsoft U.S. Englishspell-checker recognizes as a naturalized citizen, but it would be aninteresting task to trace the trajectory of its migration to this country.Herrschaft, an obvious reference to Nietzsche doctrine of the will topower, has all the connotations of power, dominion, reign, rule, evenlordship. In this sense, the worker is the lord of the planet earth, thebermensch, the one who will supplant Nietzsches last man, thebourgeois.

The terminological meaning of the word gestalt in twentieth-century psychology goes back to an article by Christian von Ehren-fels entitled ber Gestaltqualitten (On Gestalt Qualities), whichwas published in 1890. Following a suggestion by Ernst Mach, Ehren-fels deWned Gestalt as a phenomenon, an event, a thing that, althoughconsisting of discrete and not necessarily coherent, connected, or re-lated elements, we perceive as a whole. The two classical examplesare the melody and the constellation in the astronomical sense ofthe term. The reference to the concept of the constellation is one ofthe parallels I mentioned that exist between Jngers Arbeiter andBenjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History.

The term gestalt was picked up and further developed after WorldWar I by a group of psychologists, which included such authorsas Max Wertheimer, Felix Krueger, and, most important, WolfgangKhler (Psychologische Probleme). Although a gestalt always consistsof a multiplicity of elements, it is a whole that is more than the sum

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of its parts. As such, gestalten are the primary givens of any percep-tion of the world. This almost axiomatic statement implies that allthose schools of psychology that try to split the functions of the psycheinto primary elements are bound to miss their target. By studyingan artiWcial mosaic of disconnected atoms, they cannot grasp theirobject, which is, by deWnition, a Weld of already organized and struc-tured wholes. This error unites the psychophysics of the nineteenthcentury with Pavlov and his behaviorist followers in America, but,according to Khler, it goes back to Hume and from there directly toPlatos philosophy of ideas insofar as these are conceived as elements,, letters of the alphabet.

In a more speciWc reading, Khler links the atomistic schools ofpsychology to the structure of mechanical technologies and physics.The notion of the arc that connects stimulus and response is derivedfrom such simple deterministic systems as a piston in a cylinder, ora single electrical circuit, like Freuds notion of Bahnung (path), forinstance. But that is nineteenth century. Twentieth-century physicsand technology reckon with networks, force Welds, and energy distri-butions, hence with complex relations whose dynamics, when brokendown into discrete units, cannot be understood. Jnger does not failto mention the methodological similarity between Gestalt psychologyand state-ofthe-art modern physics. And Heidegger, whose Da-seinsanalysis owes so much to the psychology of his time, was acutelyaware of these connections, too.

A word on Khler in passing: he was the pioneer who startedthe study of intelligent behavior in primates (Intelligenzprfungen anMenschenaffen). The experiments he conducted during World War I athis laboratory on Tenerife were an inexhaustible source of Beckettsinspiration (see, for instance, Act Without Words). Shortly afterHitler came to power, Khler made some derogatory comments aboutthe Nazis, and had to emigrate. Having chosen to go to the UnitedStates, he taught psychology at Swarthmore College. After the war,he was invited to join the famous cybernetics group sponsored bythe Macy Foundation (Heims, Cybernetics Group, 20147). I think it issafe to assume that this was the place were Norbert Wiener picked upthe term gestalt for his own purposes, which, in the age of electronicdata processing, would soon lead to automated systems of patternrecognition.



I am mentioning these events because one could make a case thatthere are quite a few conduits that connect Jngers and Heideggersunderstanding of technology to Wieners concept of cybernetics. Onecould argue, for instance, that what Jnger calls organic construc-tion (Arbeiter, 306) comes uncannily close to the manmachine sym-biosis which is the basic assumption of cybernetics, the science thatstudies Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, toquote the subtitle of Wieners famous book. This is not so surprisingif one considers that the two authors share one and the same sourceof inspiration. Wieners standard model of cybernetics is the systemthat links the pilot who, as a living being, is symbiotically attachedto his plane, in the air, to the anti-aircraft artillerist, on the ground,who, in turn, is an integral part of his gun. In the trenches of WorldWar I, Jnger must have encountered similar hybrids between high-tech machinery and living organisms. He writes: The workers garbcan be seen on the many occasions where one can speak of a crew[Besatzung], hence in those places where man appears in closecentauricconnection to his technical means (Arbeiter, 121). In hisnotes to Jngers Arbeiter, Heidegger speciWes: aircraft crew, subma-rine crew, astronaut (Ernst Jnger, 369), but also: An organic con-struction is, for instance, the S.S. (202). It should be noted in passinghere that the term cyborg is a useless tautology because Wienersconcept of cybernetics implies already the prosthetic coupling orgrafting between machines and living organisms.

Read within the context of Nietzsches philosophy of the will topower, the term gestalt is radically transformed. The gestalt of theworker is not simply a given, a result of experiments, a theoreticalconcept, it is the product of the workers creativity itself. The workeris the whole that wills itself. The soldier, for instance, in a heroiceffort, manages to make sense and, thus, to operate in and out of thechaos of a constantly changing battleWeld. No ideology, no belief, nofoundation remains intact for Jnger under such conditions, only thepure will to the will to power itself. This will creates the worker as atype, in Nietzsches sense, like a die mints a coin, violently, power-fully (Arbeiter, 31, 221).

In stating the problem in this way, I am already alluding to Hei-deggers reading. Two years ago, in 2004, volume 90 of his collectedworks was published, a whole book exclusively Wlled with notes,

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sketches, and drafts on Ernst Jnger, the vast majority of them refer-ring to Der Arbeiter. These annotations testify to a strenuous, almostpainful effort to come to terms with a book that must have beendeeply fascinating, disturbing, and annoying to the philosopher ofbeing. Some of the material is incredibly repetitive. There are cynicaland down-to-earth criticisms next to deep philosophical insightsand reXections. Admiration is not absent, but sparse. All in all, I thinkit is fair to say that this volume sheds a completely new light onHeideggers late philosophy or, to use his own term, die Kehre, theturn of his thinking after World War II.

For Heidegger, Jnger is the only one in their time who has ex-perienced the world of modernity as the will to power, an assessmentin which the term experienced, meaning not just academically orjournalistically exploited and commented, is key because it impliesHeideggers main objection, too: Der Arbeiter is the description of anexperience, a mere description, not thinking, not questioning (ErnstJnger, 92, 255, 259, 354, 355). Hence, the book is, for Heidegger, asit were, a source book, a compendium that not only contains a trea-sure trove of insights into the essence of state-ofthe-art technologyand physics but also a lot of solid information on the secret armamentof the so-called 100,000-men army under the strictures of the Treatyof Versailles. Jnger, the war hero, with his connections in the high-est ranks of the Wehrmacht, was extremely well informed. He statesbluntly that the next war will be about such resources as oil, cobalt,and steel. And one of the examples he gives for his claim that val-ues in the state of total mobilization are necessarily Xuid turns out,in hindsight at least, as a great piece of information for any spy witha gift for the intricacies of close reading, a piece of informationthat both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union failed to grasp intime. Since the Germans were not allowed to build military aircraftafter Versailles, Jnger writes, they started experimenting with gliderplanes, a seemingly innocuous hobby practiced to this day in theRhn mountains, but, in fact, a powerful tool to study aerodynamics(Arbeiter, 166). The knowledge gained by means of such primitivecontraptions was to give the German air force its decisive edge overits British and American adversaries not only in the Wrst half butalsowith the invention of jet enginesuntil the very end of WorldWar II.



I am sure Heidegger soaked up such pieces of insider informationeagerly, and in his essay on the Question of Technology he quotesJngers remarks on industrial agriculture (Arbeiter, 72; Heidegger,Frage nach der Technik 1415; Ernst Jnger, 349), as well as thoseon the storage and release of natural energy resources more or lessopenlyadding and then retracting again a reference to the Nazi gaschambers. It is easy to see why: because he had nothing new to addto the ideas he had worked out during the 1930s and 1940s.

What Heidegger hates is Jngers pathos, his romanticism. Hence,his dry comment in the margins of the passage where Jnger writesthat the battalions of young volunteers who, with a song on their lips,marched into the barrage of British machine guns on the battleWeldof Langemarck were initiating the beginning of a cosmic antagonismwhich is repeated each and every time when the world order is per-turbed and which is expressed here by the symbols of a technologicalage (Arbeiter, 105). Heidegger comments:

to speak of the cosmic here is romantic bogus! . . . it is the sheer supe-riority of machine power, controlled by experienced British colonialtroops and privates . . . the world order is not perturbed at all, butthe one which has reigned up to now is coming to an end; just thatMr. von Falkenhayn [the German Chief of Staff who had succeededMoltke after the battle of the Marne in 1914W.K.] did not have aclue of this. . . . The machinegun is a symbolbetter an instrument ofa technological agewhich, actually, did destroy the cosmos; a[nd]which, in the Gestalt of the worker, is determinately working towardsthe Wnal destruction in the form of Chinese deserts. (Ernst Jnger, 366;cf. 372, 377)

Let me note in passing that this reading of weapons technology inWorld War I comes surprisingly close to Benjamins claim, made atthe end of the second-last paragraph of his Artwork essay, that thekiss of death that killed the artworks aura off, once and for all, wasan effect of the gas attacks in that same war (Kunstwerk,176).

A common thread and one of the most repetitive gestures in Hei-deggers notes are references to Lenin. When Jnger speaks of thewill to a total dictatorship (Arbeiter, 42), Heidegger corrects: dicta-torship of the proletariat (Ernst Jnger, 325). When Jnger states:Revolutions can be considered continuations of war, just as war canbe read as the visible beginning of great revolutions (Arbeiter, 240),

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Heidegger attributes the copyright of this formula to Lenin (ErnstJnger, 402), without tracing its origin back to Clausewitz. AnotherJnger quoteWe recognize technology as the most effective, themost incontestable means of total revolution (Arbeiter, 162)evokesthe following comment: what then is this revol. so that t.[echnology]should be its highest and most appropriate means? compare Lenin:socialism (reign of the proletariat) is Soviet power + electriWcation(Ernst Jnger, 380). This famous quote from Lenins speech Our For-eign and Domestic Position and the Tasks of the Party (419), a speechwhich refers to the situation of 1917, is repeated in the margins ofanother statement, which I quote: it stands to reason that electricityis more closely related to him [the worker] and hence also to the staterather than to steam-power (Arbeiter, 215). After having underlinedelectricity and the expression also to the state, Heidegger writesdown Lenins formula once again (Ernst Jnger, 392; cf. 40).

Yet another symptomatic exchange between the two writersoccurs in the same paragraph only a few lines below the one justquoted. Jnger: What is to be expected as resulting from . . . [thephase, in which great plans are conceived and executedW.K.] is abold and certain mastery of the constructive element (Arbeiter, 215).Heidegger comments: R.[eichs]-Autobahnen (Ernst Jnger, 393). Theequalization of Germany with the Soviet Union is further narroweddown by a minor intervention into the following statement fromJngers book: The more cynical, the more Spartan, the more Prus-sian or the more bolshevist life can be lived, by the way, the better willit be (Arbeiter, 201). Heidegger underlines the more Prussian or themore bolshevist and, Swabian as he is, he replaces the word orwith an equal sign: Prussian = bolshevist (Ernst Jnger, 388). Closerto home are Heideggers comments on the following statement: Thus,it is, to choose a trivial example, as easy to join a political party or toresign from it as it is difWcult to resign from such forms of communityto which one belongs as a receiver of electrical power (Arbeiter, 114).Heidegger underlines or to resign from, adds two question marks,and, Wnally, comments: that is to say the party in the so-called one-party state is something else (Ernst Jnger, 368). Thus, the afWnitybetween Prussian militarism, fascism, and communism, which DerArbeiter had postulated in 1932, remains in place, but the embrace oftotal mobilization with its reference to industrial warfare is rejected:



both fascism and communism are lined up for the Wnal devastation ofthe planet earth. The German has Verwstung, which in Heideg-gers vocabulary is related to Nietzsche/Zarathustras word of thegrowing desert, Wste, and, thus, code for nihilism (berwindungder Metaphysik, 64).

Heidegger accuses Jnger of advocating a politics of mere par-ticipation (mitmachen) (Ernst Jnger, 91), unconsidered readinessfor action (Einsatzbereitschaft) (344) for the sake of being up todate (zeitgemss). For Heidegger, these attitudes are not attributesof mastery, but of enslavement (341), enslavement to the circularstructure of the will to power, which implies that the will is alreadypower, and power nothing but will. The more literal reading, whichwould have to recognize that Jnger more or less openly advocatesthe continuation of the Great War in order to take revenge for thedefeat of 1918, is never imputed to the author of Der Arbeiter, butrather shifted onto Lenin.

After 1934, the year in which Heidegger began annotating Jngersbook, it was, of course, not only easy to see but also easier to state thatLenins legacy was being revoked in the Soviet Union, easier in anycase than to speak about the fascists in the thinkers own country.Hence, Hitlers name is never mentionedprovided, of course, thatwe can trust the editorsand Mussolinis, together with dAnnun-zios, only once (239). The enemy is the Soviet Union. Thus, Heideg-ger notes with reference to a passage in Der Arbeiter, which celebratesthe manifest unity . . . of revolutionary nationalism and revolution-ary socialism (237): National-bolshevism (Ernst Jnger, 401). Andin the margin to a statement that there are countries in which a per-son can be shot for sabotaging an industrial operation like a soldierwho deserts his post (Arbeiter, 248), he speciWes: R.[ussia] (ErnstJnger, 402).

Yet, just like Jnger, who never mentions Stalin in Der Arbeiter,Heidegger remains preoccupied with Leninnot even using Stalinsname when he is obviously alluding to his politics. But the status ofLenin has changed radically. For Heidegger, he is not an ally but theenemy. A text entitled On Ernst Jnger and dated 193940 containsa Werce attack: Since the essence of power pushes toward absoluteand complete control [Herrschaft], therefore the principal processof empowerment [Ermchtigung] of power into its essence is the

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total mobilization. . . . A note in passing: Ermchtigung, a wordthat Heidegger uses again and again, was a decisive feature in theWeimar Republics constitution, which the National Socialist Partyexploited, in March 1933, in order to abolish that same constitution.But back to Heideggers text:

Therefore, Lenin cheered the outbreak of the world war in 1914. Sincea world war is only possible within the movement of total mobilization,it is bound to break ground for what Lenin understands by com-munism. That is something completely different from any kind ofMarxism. But communism is even less a Russian thingnor is itdetermined by Bolshevism.

Communism is a metaphysical process, i.e., an essential form ofbeing as a whole [Wesensgestaltung des Seienden im Ganzen] inwhich the occidental age of metaphysics comes to an end.

. . . Lenin says: Socialism (that is communism) is Soviet power +electriWcation. In this sentence, both the content and the terminologi-cal wording and presentation are equally essential.

Thus, the handling and the execution of total mobilization is in thehands of few people on the way to the complete rule of technology[Technisierung].

. . . Lenins deWnition of communism is metaphysicaland in itswording particularly strange because of the +.

However, only as long as we do not know that Lenins thinking isdetermined by Richard Avenarius, who was the one to think the meta-physical positivism around 1890 most stridently and who liked to usesuch formalisms and mathematical symbols. The + does not mean asumlike addition of co. + el.; rather, it is the abbreviated symbol of theinclusion of technology into the stock of the Soviet powers essence[Wesensbestand] as it is occupied with nothing but total mobilization.

Yet, since total mobilization is most stridently required by a worldwar, only one thing is necessary when such a war breaks out: to stoke upthe Wre. Any Comintern propaganda is superXuous in such a moment;indeed it can only disturb. The Russians can not only dispense with pro-paganda now; they have to give it up if they do have a true knowledgeof the metaphysical essence of communism. And they have just that.

The more determined the world war and its decisiveness are beingcarried on, be it in defense, be it in attack, the less stoppable becomesthe total mobilization on each side. . . . The respective political systems,the democratic, fascist, bolshevist systems and their hybrids are nothingbut facades. (23031)

In its leveling of the battlefronts that divide the political forces intowhat we call the Right and Left, this last sentence is pure Jnger;



however, with the difference that Heidegger does not shrink fromcalling these parties by their names. Heidegger continues: . . . power,even if it brings savagery and intemperateness and atrocity in thewake of its bursting forces, is not simply something spiritualbutabove spirit and soul and bodyabove and beyond any single being[Seiende] and it is foremost an essential being of Being itself [eineWesung des Seyns selbst] (23032).

Could it be that by conjoining defense and attack . . . on eachside of the war that was raging when these lines were written, Hei-degger was secretly trying to distance himself from those who, with-out even declaring war, had started it in his own country? Maybe. Butthe true enemy is still the same Lenin who stands for the consummateend (Vollendung) of metaphysics and, thus, for everything that iswrong with and in Jngers Arbeiter. In this sense, Jnger is inferiorto Nietzsche who, instead of merely experiencing and describingthe last stage of metaphysics (7475, 92, 94), was suffering through itas a thinker (. . . denkerisch erlitten) (214). There are two morethings Jnger does not get in Nietzsche: one, the link between the willto power and the doctrine of eternal return (59); and, two, Nietzschesrelation to the Greeks. Hence, Heideggers outcry at Jngers read-ing of the antique aqueducts as a prototype of modern technology:Roman, but never Greek! (384).

This is the basic stand of Heideggers late work, the Grundstel-lung of the turn (Kehre) (297), not to be confused with overturn(Umkehrung), as in Nietzsche/Jngers overturn of Platonism2

(Ernst Jnger, 57, 131, 133, 136, 343; Wissenschaft und Besinnung,71). Here is how I would describe the strategic situation: JngersArbeiter serves as a junction where the lines of the two most impor-tant thinkers of the last stage of metaphysics intersect: Nietzsche andLenin. Marx, by the way, is not absent, but certainly not at the centerof attention (Ernst Jnger, 312, 313). Lenin is the one who describedwhat Heidegger incidentally calls the new Chinese-dom (174),which is the bermensch as the Wnally stalled animal (das endlichfest-gestellte Tier) (333, 364, 399). And Nietzsche, as both the mostsevere critic of positivism and the thinker who still had a relation tothe Greeks, serves as a tool that helps decode both Lenins notion oftotal mobilization and Jngers gestalt of the worker as the last stageof the forgetting of Being (Seynsvergessenheit). Such forgetting

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necessitates a return to the origins of occidental thought, to the pre-Socratics, and to a poet, Hlderlin.

In an analysis, which is based on a very small set of German,Latin, Greek, and, in the Wnal analysis, Indo-European roots, Heideg-ger turns Jngers Arbeiter on its head. One of these key terms is, which Heidegger traces from its Greek meaning as vision(Schau) or sight (Anblick) to contemplation, in the sense of par-titioning, and from there to German Betrachtung (Wissenschaftund Besinnung, 45), which he traces back, in turn, to Latin tractare,which then leads to Arbeit, work (4748). His antidote against thishistory, which he conceives as one of successive losses, is his transla-tion of as Besinnung (60), another equivalent of contempla-tion, which is obviously derived from Jngers claim that Arbeit isthe sense-setting (Sinnverleihen) (Arbeiter, 201) activity par excel-lence, a statement on which Heidegger comments in the followingnote: Metaphysics? its last escape sense setting [Sinngebung] (ErnstJnger, 388). As opposed to such violent and, by that same token,metaphysical acts of setting, Besinnung is supposed to be the com-posed attitude (Gelassenheit) of one who, instead of acting blindly,thinks and asks questions.

The origins of the term gestalt are unraveled in the oppositedirection, from Jnger to Parmenides. Key to the analysis is the Indo-European root *stha, from which such words as object (Gegen-stand),representation (Vor-stellung), and gestalt are derived. Accordingto Heidegger, these terms, which translate such Greek terms as , , and , are the signature of modernity. It was Descarteswho Wrst deWned the being of objects as a standing against the ego ofthe cogito, which is the modern subject as a general principle, Kantstranscendental apperception, for instance, rather than Protagorassparticular I, the measure of all things (Ernst Jnger, 6870). TheCartesian subject is the basis of all objectivity and the model of objec-tivity as such.

As a consequence, the world can be read, if I may say so, asMade in Humanity, as ein Gemchte des Menschen, as Will andRepresentation, (Schopenhauer) as Will to Power, or, with a quotefrom Heisenberg, to which Heidegger refers explicitly: In the age oftechnology, . . . man is confronted with nothing but himself . . .(Heisenberg, Naturbild, 60; Heidegger, Frage nach der Technik,



27). At this point, metaphysics comes to its completion in the sensethat the foundational idea of Platonism is overturned: not that whichalways is, , is the truth of things, but the Xeeting reality of lifeitself. By abolishing the virtual reality, the true world is killed as well,as Nietzsche said. Jngers book is but a repetition of this samethought. The subtitle Herrschaft und Gestalt speaks for itself. One, theworld is made by man. And, two, the gestalt is a form that is not,as in Platos thought distilled as the one, , out of the many, (Ernst Jnger, 351), but, on the contrary: it is the one, from which themultiplicity of elements is to be deduced: hence, yet another reversal,or overturn of Platonism.

The gestalt of the worker stalls, brings to a standstill in the senseof challenging, provoking, defying, and hunting down any being inthe worldincluding that eminent being-there, Da-sein, which manis. The end product of such stalling is what Jnger calls Bestand,meaning asset, stock, inventory, standing reserve; and which encom-passes such notions as Menschenmaterial, human material, stockin the sense of stored energy, Steuerung, in the sense of feedbackcontrol (Frage nach der Technik, 16), and Melden in the sense ofinformation (2223).

A third line of argument concerns the term reality, Wirklich-keit, in the sense of causality (78), but also as a word that is ety-mologically related to work, Arbeit, (Wissenschaft undBesinnung, 4142). Heidegger goes back to what Schopenhauercalled the fourfold root of the principle of causality, to the four ,as deWned by Aristotle. For the Greeks, truth is neither based in thesubject/object relation, nor in the purely temporal sequence of causeand effect; it rather is rooted in , a term that Heidegger trans-lates as both her-stellen, to set forth or produce, and dar-stellen,to represent (Frage nach der Technik, 11). encompasses anyform of coming into beingbe it natural or human, organic or tech-nical, physical or artiWcial in the modern sense of these oppositions.It follows that , the Greek term for the arts and crafts, and theetymon of the modern terms technique and technology, is but an emi-nent form of as a mode of unveiling, a mode of !, truth(12). The place of this unveiling is the identity stated by Parmenides:Being namely is the same as thinking " " $% % & (Diels and Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 231, frag. 3;

WOLF KITTLER92


Heidegger, Identitt und Differenz). Once this identity breaks apart,truth is read no longer as unveiling, but rather as Descartes certum(Heidegger, berwindung der Metaphysik, 66, 78; cf. Heidegger,Wissenschaft und Besinnung, 43), the correctness of statements, theresult of exact calculations.

With these arguments in mind, the essay Questioning afterTechnology [Die Frage nach der Technik]3 turns out to be a dev-astating attack on Jngers Arbeiter, but, as I said, through Jnger onLenins form of communism. With the help of Jngers word Bestand,Heidegger deWnes the difference between such a pretechnologicaltechnique as a windmill, which will only run when the wind blows,and a modern power plant, for instance, which is all about the stor-age of energy, insofar as any electrical power that cannot be imme-diately fed into the net is used to pump water back into the reservoir,to stock up potential energy again. The same holds for the farmersWeld, which is no longer cultivated, but set up for holding maximumresults in store, or matter insofar as it stores energy that can be re-leased in a nuclear reaction. The worker as the agent of modern tech-nology transforms, stores, distributes, shifts, and taps into standingreserves of energy.

The term Bestand, in the sense of human forces, also serves todistinguish the being of Jngers worker from the being of man as itis conceived in the Da-seinsanalyse of Heideggers Being and Time(Sein und Zeit). In this interpretation, man can no longer claim tobe the master of the universe, and is, thus, no longer enslaved to thepure activism of commitment; he rather is the place where unveil-ing, truth, happens. Yet, since according to Hlderlins word, whichHeidegger quotes in concluding his questioning of technology, wher-ever there is danger, the salvaging is growing, too, Jngers visionof the worker as gestalt is as dangerous as it can be redeeming. Thus,in the margin to Jngers statement: The seeing of gestalten is a rev-olutionary act insofar as it recognizes a Being [Sein], in its wholeunitary fullness of its life (Arbeiter, 39), Heidegger can comment:

The revolution is such a one, from the point of view of the meta-physic-less and metaphysics-denying positivism. It is that turn-around[Umwendung], which, instead of only calculating objects of being[Seindes], be-holds Being [Sein, capital B]; that is the pre-condition in order to see Gestalt! resp.[ectively] the Gestalt-seeing can



prepare the beholding [er-sehen] of Being! Or, after all, just here stillforgetting of Being. (Ernst Jnger, 322)

This beholding [Er-sehen] is an eyeing [Er-ugnen]; hence, Hei-deggers Ereignis, the event of the turnback from metaphysics, asthe forgetting of Being, to an original understanding of Being (ber-windung der Metaphysik, 63, 91). But why is it possible at all toremember an origin in a history of forgetting? Because it is a history,in the sense of dispatch, as letters in litterae, literature. Therefore, theforgetting of Being is preserved, waiting to be unveiled within thevery words that execute that forgetting. To make the event of unveil-ing happen, Heidegger keeps his sights Wrmly Wxed on Parmenidesidentity of Being and thinking. And he Wnds this identity in a historyof words: as her- and dar-stellen, Gegen-stand, object,Vor-stellung, representation (cf. 77), Be-stand, standing reserve,worker as the animal that has been stalked and stalled (Frage nachder Technik, 14), and, Wnally, gestaltall of these words are modesof Being. That this is so can be seen by the thinker who, instead of justafWrming the workers activism, sets his sights on this standing, set-ting, stalling, provoking, and challenging. As a consequence, not onlythe subject disappears but also the objects of his will to power. Hei-deggers essay speaks of Arbeit, work, but only twice (20). Andinstead of using Jngers word der Arbeiter, he chooses the para-phrase man, the master of the world (26), but only in order to replacehim with man, the guardian of the essence of the earth (berwindungder Metaphysik, 8990; Wissenschaft und Besinnung, 32).

Once the subject/object relation has been conjured away, thetruth of technology can be unveiled. Its name is derived from theessential being of the last stage of metaphysics, which is Stellen,stalling. And, since technology is not just one act, but the wholeof metaphysics insofar as it is essentially a stalling, the German wayof forming collective nouns applies in this case. Just as the addition ofthe preWx Ge- turns one mountain, Berg, into a mountain range,Gebirge, so is the essential Being of technology, Wnally, revealed asGe-stell (27). In-stallment is not a bad translation, as long as youkeep a ring of stalling in your mind.

Thus, if title and subtitle of Jngers book can be transformedinto the sentence: Der Arbeiter herrscht als Gestalt (The workerrules as Gestalt), then Heideggers essay on technology can be read as

WOLF KITTLER94


a word-for-word translation of that same phrase: Die Technik westals Ge-stell (Technology essentially is as Ge-stell), where the wordW/wesen, English was, is to be heard as a pun, which comprisesat least three meanings: wesen in the sense of being; whrenderived from wesen by rhotacismin the sense of enduring, per-severing; and be-whren in the sense of being true (2931). Theworkers being turns out to be technology. The will to power is re-vealed as truth. The truth is not a manmade gestalt, but Being (Seyn)(berwindung der Metaphysik, 84) as Ge-stell.

The Question after Technology was Heideggers contributionto a conference entitled The Arts in the Age of Technology, whichwas organized by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (BayerischeAkademie der schnen Knste) and took place from November 16to 20, 1953. Werner Heisenberg gave a talk on The Image of Naturein Contemporary Physics. And Jngers brother, Friedrich Georg,lectured on Language. Ernst Jnger was in the audience. After hisreturn from the conference, Heidegger drafted a letter, from which Iquote in concluding:

Dear Mr. Jnger

On the occasion of our last encounter in Munich . . . the desire awoke inme that you, I and Heisenberg might get into a conversation for a goodhour. About whatyou will ask. About that which to raise as a questionnone of us is entitled as a single person. Hours of such a conversationcannot be arranged, conversations, where name, achievement, and per-son vanish and the non-said speaks for them, are rare, indeed, perhapsbut a dream.

When we greeted each other one last time from opposite sides ofthe street in the bleakness of trafWc, I felt as if a propitious momenthad passed away in those days. How many of such passings-away dowe leave unnoticed. (Ernst Jnger, 298)

The war hero, the physicist, and the thinker pondering the futureof the planeta truly Platonic utopia. Yet the letter was never sent.Did Heidegger sense that Jnger might have noticed how indebtedhe was to his friends book Der Arbeiter, and how completely he hadtried to destroy it? And Jnger, who had contributed his essay berdie Linie to the Festschrift for Heideggers sixtieth birthday in 1950,what did he think of his friends talk? I postpone the answer to thisquestion to another place and time.



Notes

1. All translations from Der Arbeiter mine.2. My philosophy is inverted Platonism (Nietzsche, Kritische Studienaus-

gabe 7, 199, no. 7 [156]).3. My translation may sound unusual, but it takes into account three dif-

ferent readings: 1. that this essay asks the question of technology; 2. that it ques-tions technology; and 3. that it also asks what questioning itself could be aftertechnology.

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Heims, Steve. The Cybernetics Group. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.Heisenberg, Werner. Das Naturbild in der heutigen Physik. In Bayerische Aka-

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Mittler. 1924.Khler, Wolfgang. Intelligenzprfungen an Menschenaffen. 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer,

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From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger - Wolf Kittler

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