/lit/ - Literature

>>19030476
doubt

>>15880595
>>15880595
>In relation to the catastrophic rise of the NSDAP.
That probably should have been stated in another way...
It may be best to understand Junger's position as he understood Nietzsche, as a timepiece of the era and towards whom one must not bear resentment of faults. Germany died in 1917 and the events of the 1920s and 30s were essentially a funeral amidst demonic forces (not only Germany's), wherein a return of German pantheism mourned for Europe - or would come to mourn for it after facing a final injustice in Valhalla. Few could have anticipated the extent to which Europe would trample on its own grave after the death of its internal enemy, and if we are not to judge the Heidegger figures then we must extend the same benefits to Germany's detractors. The suffering of the whole of Europe is what has been on trial for the last century, and is what now seems inescapable.

That catastrophic end of Germany is an Antigone myth, without burial of the dead - or an Orestes without an Iphigenia. The situation that unfolded holds eschatological qualities, a secular cataclysm without morality, values, nor even power, but rather something much more raw and brutal. The force in culture which suggests a chasm from the Enlightenment era, or even the modern totality, may be true. That world has ended, the destruction was simply so great that it has taken a century to escape the ruins. A dead century and its failed attempts to reestablish European Law through treaties - thus the return to the first days of the Katechon, and a revolt against all of its timed events... This is what lies behind our divided West and its inability to reconcile with its own victory, a Pyrrhic victory of the spirit if not in material forces. Junger handled the situation as best as anyone could.

If one takes the position that Hitler was well-meaning, and I'm not entirely opposed to this considering the other choice of trampling on the German grave, it must also be remembered how he was incapable of rising to the occasion: the crisis of the European spirit was beyond him, but also anyone else. 'Only a god can save us.' The millions dead could only have found fruitful sacrifice in an equal peace - this was already true of The Great War, and no second war was needed for failure or betrayal to reveal itself. Only time could reveal the deep wounds of a dead state.

Paradoxically, in peace before death. It is our fear of death that necessitates suicide as a fundamental question of modernity, as if death could bring us closer to being than anything we have. This is also the essence of romanticism, where we are at one with nature even though it forever evades us in the creation of new horizons. Pessimism is the other pole, where we become so close to death that we are petrified by it.

Kant's moral law of never dying in a mound of cowshit, while praying that such a fate befalls the man next to him. This is the result of Aristotle's unlucky fate in being struck with the arrow of Zeno's Paradox. Man is one being, and our instruments make it so.

Being exists in moments of peace before death, when our spirit is discarded only to achieve greater strength. We exist between worlds, it is as if a shard had been torn from us, and then crystallizes as a saecellum. Here our essence continues to exist beyond the laws of time. Memory becomes extremely powerful, the place left behind by being forms as a polluted region, or as if a hidden monument pulls at our senses. Prostration of entire lands, wending through the forest. The snake is blinded in moulting; man abandons his metaphysical laws and they become more forceful.

And yet Aristotle must have had some luck if he has survived. Death brings its own form of peace, a moral law that persists beyond the contradictions of movement. Aristotle lives on in a world built upon Zeno's Law of the Stadium. Truth persists beyond the realism of its monuments.