Although for his conception of modern technology Heidegger owed more to Ernst Jünger than to anyone else, the views of both men were consistent with those of certain other members of the “conservative revolution.” They agreed that technology could not be understood in terms of social, political, or economic categories; instead, the socio-economic structures of modernity, including great industries and mechanical warfare, were the empirical manifestations of that which transcends the causal-material realm. Under Nietzsche’s influence, Jünger conceived of modern technology as the latest manifestation of the eternal but hidden Will to Power. The essence of technology, then, was nothing mechanical or technical; rather, the world was mobilized in technological terms because humanity itself had become the primary instrument required to carry out the latest historical phase of the Will to Power. Likewise, Heidegger concluded that the essence of technology was the disclosure of all entities as standing-reserve for enhancing the sheer Will to Will.
Both Jünger and Heidegger regarded themselves as chosen to peer beneath the material surface of events into the elemental-spiritual domain. Jünger portrayed the titanic process of modern technology as an aesthetic phenomenon, as a terrifying but sublime spectacle that was “beyond good and evil.” Refracting technology through the prism of literary-aesthetic categories, he explained socio-economic reality in terms of mythical symbols of a supernatural and irrational power. Heidegger also claimed to discover an intimate relationship between technology and art: technology, like art, was a way of disclosing the being of entities. Moreover, like the work of art, modern technology could not be conceived in pragmatic or purposive terms; rather, technology was that mode of disclosure driven by the sheer Will to Will, by a Will that willed no goal except its own expansion. In the late 1930s, Heidegger began to conclude that Jünger’s predictions about the technological future were accurate and unavoidable. Paradoxically, Heidegger believed, moving beyond the nihilism and violence brought by modern technology was possible only on the condition that humanity first submit to the claim of modern technology.
Despite the extent of his debt to Jünger’s vision of technology, however, and despite his sympathy with Jünger’s political vocabulary, Heidegger viewed him as a philosophical primitive, whose account of technology had to be reinterpreted in light of Heidegger’s ontological categories. In what follows, I provide an outline of those early writings of Jünger that were influential on Heidegger’s thinking. In chapters five and six, I explain how Heidegger appropriated Jünger’s ideas.