In The Worker, Jünger defined this new kind of humanity, which was compelled by the Gestalt of the worker to produce ever more powerful technological devices in the service of planetary domination. What Jünger meant by Gestalt is not entirely clear. In psychological terms, it means a shape or form that is more than the sum of the perceptual elements organized by that shape. Jünger often let the word be defined negatively, by that with which it stood in contrast: the spineless, fragmented bourgeois world. Jünger’s Gestalt promised a totalizing, unifying movement that would heal the class conflicts and social disorders plaguing the Weimar Republic. Following Spengler, Jünger contrasted Gestalt with reason: the latter was abstract, lifeless, repetitive, and derivative; the former was concrete, lively, novel, and creative. The Gestalt was associated with rooted Kultur, not with rootless Zivilization. Gestalt makes history and cannot be explained in terms of the heartless rationalism of bourgeois Zivilization. [DA: 88ff.] Gestalt “stamps” everyone with its character; leaders and followers alike are shaped by it. [DA: 75-76, 89-90] The Gestalt of the worker, then, names the metaphysical “stamping” [Prägung] and “imprinting” [Stempeln] that organizes the worker’s experience and behavior. “By Gestalt we refer to the highest meaningful reality. Its appearances are meaningful as symbols, representations and impressions of this reality. The Gestalt is the whole which embraces more than the sum of its parts. This ‘more’ we call totality.’’ [DA: 323]
Moreover, “from the moment in which one begins to experience things in terms of a Gestalt, everything becomes Gestalt. The Gestalt is not a new magnitude which would be disclosable in proximity to the already known, but instead by a new stroke of the eye the world appears as a stage [Schauplatz] of Gestalten and their relations.” [DA: 39] The Gestalt is like a metaphysical magnet that organizes things and people by invisible lines of force. However, “one ought never forget that here it is a question not about cause and effect, but about simultaneity. There is no purely mechanical law; the changes in mechanical and organic conditions [occur] through the superordinate realm [of the Gestalt], from which is determined the causality of individual processes.” [DA: 137] The Gestalt, then, cannot be conceived as an entity, but instead as the very “being [Sein]” of the worker. By “being,” Jünger sometimes meant the “deepest reality,’’ which for him amounted to “life” or to the Will to Power that animates all things. At other times, he spoke about being in a way that was close to what Heidegger meant by it. Jünger did not conceive of his new breed of men in biological-racist terms, but instead in metaphysical terms, as the manifestation of a new organization of all entities. [DA: 160] Ontologically conceived, the Gestalt is a kind of prism through which one perceives the “light” that constitutes reality in the technological era. [DA: 92] This prism changes unpredictably, such that in different historical epochs men experience themselves and the world in different ways. “Values” thus are not eternal but perspectival; they serve the Will to Power that manifests itself now in one way, now in another. Far deeper, more refined, more meaningful than man is the hidden and eternal power that works through him. The industrial world of factories and cannons, then, amounts to a “projection” in the spatio-temporal domain of natural laws of an eternal being (Sein) that lies beyond human comprehension. [DA: 147-148]
The Gestalt imprints all entities so that they appear as raw material in the process of total mobilization: “The Gestalt of the worker mobilizes the whole standing-reserve [Bestand] without distinction.” [DA: 160] Such imprinting changes the character of activities which might otherwise be regarded as “timeless.” For example, “the farm worked with machines and fertilized with artificial nitrogen from factories is no longer the same farm.” [DA: 176]
Jünger argued that in the 1930s humanity was in the “between” period, the period of anarchism and nihilism, which had to be worked through before the Gestalt of the worker could be fully projected. This period is marked by war, confusion, and horror. Nevertheless, he announced, people must press on like soldiers on a battlefield who somehow know they are part of something grander than themselves. In the technological era, we are all expressions of the Gestalt of the worker-soldier: “Among all uses which are to be carried out in the realm of work, armament is the most significant. This is explained by the fact that the most mysterious sense of the Typus and his means is directed to domination. Here there is no be it ever so special means that is not at the same time a power-means, i.e., an expression of the total character of work.” [DA: 313]
Emerging in the place of collapsed Christian and liberal values, the Gestalt of the worker organizes all human experience symbolically in terms of participation in work, which for Jünger is the human version of cosmic energy. In this mythological view, the worker cannot be conceived as a member of a mere “class,” for the concept of “class” belongs to the bygone bourgeois world. The worker has, “from the ground of his being [Sein],” a relation to “elementary powers” of which the bourgeois world has no suspicion. [DA: 23] [59]
The heroic worker, like the Unknown Soldier who died on Flanders’ fields, surrenders totally to the higher claims of the Gestalt. [DA: 153, 162ff.] Devoid of bourgeois individuality, he becomes a Typus (”type”) who achieves “freedom” by surrendering to the higher power working through him. At first, Jünger spoke of the Typus as having a steely, chiseled face, but later he spoke of the omnipresence of the mask, whether it be the gas mask of the soldier, the mask of the industrial welder, the face mask of the hockey player, or even the make-up of the modern woman. The masked, depersonalized Typus goes everywhere in uniform. [DA: 153, 241] Having moved beyond the dualism of subject and object, the worker becomes “standing-reserve” to be “stamped’’ by the Gestalt of the worker. [DA: 155ff.] The Typus, more disciplined even than the Prussian officer corps or the Jesuits [DA: 222], would achieve a measure of serenity in his submission:
There is produced the possibility of a serene anarchy that simultaneously goes together with the strictest ordering, a spectacle as is already shown in the great battles and in the enormous cities whose image stands at the beginning of our century. In this sense, the motor is not the master but the symbol of our time, the image of a power for which explosion and precision are not opposites ….
… As Gestalt the individual encompasses more than the sum of his forces and capacities; he is deeper than he can achieve in his deepest thought and more powerful than he can bring to experience in his most powerful deed.
… [T]he unlosable inheritance of the individual is that he belongs to eternity, and in the highest and most indubitable moments is aware of that. It is his task, that he bring this [eternity] to expression in time. In this sense his life becomes a likeness of the Gestalt. [DA: 41-43]
Jünger maintained that many young men were willing to let themselves become the “stuff of nature” to be “shaped according to the demands of the Gestalt….” [DA: 221] He proclaimed that “no spirit can be deeper and more knowing than those beloved soldiers who fell somewhere on the Somme or in Flanders.” [Ibid.] Those soldiers ushered in the age of technology, that is,
the ways and means by which the Gestalt of the worker mobilizes the world. The degree to which man stands decisively in relation to technology and is not destroyed by it depends on the degree to which he represents the Gestalt of the worker. In this sense technology is the mastery of language that is valid in the realm of work. This language is no less important or profound than any other since it possesses not only a grammar but also a metaphysics. In this context the machine plays as much a secondary role as man; it is only one of the organs through which this language is spoken. [DA: 165]
Jünger’s own language produces a striking but difficult-to-describe effect upon the reader. Despite his talk of the hot-bloodedness of “inner experience,” he described things in a strangely detached way, as if he were an observer in a nightmarish world from which there was no awakening. Yet because his writing involves a flow of icy hard depictions of the overwhelming horrors and uncheckable advances of the technological impulse, Jünger’s language [60] comes close to realizing his view that technological language is the “clatter of machine guns at the World War I battle oil Langemarck.” [DA: 145] Not identical with the language normally associated with instrumental rationality, he believed, this new language is the symbolic manifestation of the ultimately meaningless, eternal, non-historical Will to Power. No words are needed to understand this new language, which gives voice to the “secret mythical law.” The power at work in modern technology “stands in separable binding with a firm and determinate life-unity, an unquestionable being [Sein]the expression of such a being it is which appears as power …. “ [DA: 79] The rationality at work in modern technology is merely an expedient means to an inherently non-rational end: production for production’s sake. Hence, the Gestalt of the worker does not “mean” anything apart from the restless activity of the cosmos at work; the new world forged by the worker is simply a more straightforward manifestation of the Will to Power. The Gestalt cannot be explained in human terms; rather, human experience must be organized in terms of the Gestalt which in itself ‘’possesses no qualities.” [DA: 90] Just so, technology cannot be conceived in merely technical terms, but instead as the manifestation of elemental powers. [DA: 22-23, and passim]. About the qualitylessness and meaninglessness of the Gestalt of the worker, one commentator has observed:
This, in effect, generates a rather amazing paradox. Technology means the domination of a language whose symbolism is derived from the rationalistic attributes of work. But that domination is maintained by a totality deprived of any signifying quality whatsoever, namely the Gestalt. This being the case, language in its ordinary sense is redundant. Bereft of will and bereft of values, the worker relies in his work-performance on his purely “existential being.” What characterizes this existential being? The fact that his performance or achievement is “an achievement without any conceptual attributes, so that in a very cogent sense, the worker is a supporter of a revolution sans phrase.”
Although at times Jünger spoke as if the age of the worker is totally dedicated to means, at other times he acknowledged that this age contains its own goal: world domination by the master race of workers. Attaining this goal, however, required a period of instability and nihilism:
Our technological world is not an area of unlimited possibilities; rather, it possesses an embryonic character which drives toward a predetermined maturity. So it is that our world resembles a monstrous foundry …. [I]ts means have a provisionary, workshop character, destined for temporary use.
To this condition it corresponds that our environment has a transitional nature. There is no stability of forms; all forms are constantly molded by dynamic unrest. There is no stability of means; nothing is stable outside of the rise of production curves. [DA: 181-182]
The bourgeoisie viewed the changes wrought by industrialization as part of the progress toward “a rational and virtuous perfection. It is therefore [61] bound up with the evaluation of knowledge, morality, humanity, economics, and comfort.” [DA:171-172] But Jünger insisted that the idea of progress was rooted in illusory beliefs about human mastery of history. In fact, he argued, history is the manifestation of forces stronger than merely human ones. In surrendering to these higher forces, so Jünger wrote, the worker develops cultic symbols of technology that replace traditional religions.
Reserved for [the Typus] is the rediscovery of the strong way in which life and sacred ceremonies are identical — a fact which, except in certain borderlands and mountain valleys, is lost upon men of our continent.
This interpretation allows one to risk the suggestion that a deeper piety may be observed today among a movie or auto-racing audience than beneath the pulpits or before the altars…. It would be a good guess that other games, more sacrifices, other revolts are imminent. [DA: 171; my emphasis]
The suppliant attitude on the part of workers toward modern technology reveals their understanding that technology is an expression of a transcendent and “hidden center,” which has no purpose external to the completion of the goal of the totality. [DA: 153] Technology is a manifestation not so much of the Will to Power, but of what Heidegger spoke of as the sheer Will to Will. Yet Jünger also spoke as if the nihilistic period that grips contemporary humanity would eventually lead to a period of repose, characterized by total organization, total planning, total control. “The goal at which the efforts are aimed consists in planetary domination as the highest symbol of the new Gestalt. Here alone rests the measure of a superordinate security, which reaches beyond all warlike and peaceful work-processes.” [DA: 321] Still, this totally controlled world would not have a ‘’purpose” beyond functioning in its deterministic way. Eventually, this era would give way to another, equally astonishing “spectacle” in the cosmic drama to which the elite can bear witness.
Before the culmination of the present Gestalt can occur, however, existing states must become authoritarian. Hence, today
one experiences the spectacle of the dictators which the people impose upon themselves, in order that the necessity can be ordered; [the spectacle] of dictators in whose appearances there is achieved a strict and sober style of work. In this appearance is embodied the attack of the Typus against the values of the masses and of the individual — an attack which immediately shows itself as against the organs (already moving toward collapse) of the bourgeois concepts of freedom, as against the parties, the parliament, the liberal press, the free economy. [DA: 283]
While the bourgeois revolutions took place within absolute regimes and made use of spiritual-conceptual weapons, the workers’ revolution will take place within bourgeois democracies and will make use of objective-technical weapons. All instruments of bourgeois culture — from radio to newspapers to schools to barracks to factories — will become objective means for a revolutionary process that will culminate in planetary domination. [DA: 296-299] The power of these technical instruments is not infinite in scope, but only [62] totalizing. The technological age, in Jünger’s view, is neither the last, nor the best, but only yet another manifestation of the eternal Will to Power.