/lit/ - Literature

If you can't understand this book you didn't understand the Greeks.

"The secret which conceals itself here is of a simple nature: It consists, on the one hand, in the fact that the economy is not a power which can bestow freedom, and, on the other, that an economic sense is not able to access the elements of freedom – and yet it requires the eyes of a new breed to work out this secret."

Third part of introduction before getting into the actual work. What is wealth? This question helps situate the worker in time, and just what it is the figure inherits.

HERVIER: Do you believe that the defeat of Germany was inevitable and necessary?

JÜNGER: Misfortune is necessary in order to allow change and the birth of the new. History is filled with overriding necessities. The historical necessity of the First World War was that it did away with monarchy. The monarchies vanished among both the winners and the losers. The inherent necessity of the Second World War was the elimination of national states. Now, there are only huge empires, such as Russia, America, China; such is the form that power assumes today. This is a necessity - as bitter as it may appear to some people. I said so in The Worker, and I repeated it later. The only thing to survive is the mythical figure of the worker. It transcends defeats, civil wars, fire and blood, and is even strengthened by them.
We have to admit it, even if I don't have too much personal sympathy with this figure, who is a product of technology, and even if my taste runs more to the romantic deviation. But if you propose to describe a situation, you are duty-bound to stick to the facts, though without neglecting the relationship to transcendence.