SOURCE: "Ernst Jünger: Literature, Warfare and the Intoxication of Philosophy," in Mosaic, Vol. XIX, No. 4, Fall, 1986, pp. 107-19.

[In the following essay, Bullock explores Jünger's ideas about the use of drugs and intoxication in intellectual thought.]

When the editors of Mircea Eliade's Festschrift of 1969 at the University of Chicago Press asked Ernst Jünger to contribute an essay on the use of drugs as an agency in the exploration of human consciousness, their choice reflected the general recognition of a place to which he has long held undisputed claim in Europe. He is without doubt the most solidly established and authoritative literary voice on that continent to continue the tradition of Baudelaire, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poe and Coleridge by making the experience of drugs and intoxication central to the world he investigates. The association between Jünger and Eliade had, of course, been active for many years before then. In 1959 they founded the journal Antaios together, brought out in Stuttgart by Jünger's publisher Klett-Cotta. The precise nature of this association, illustrated by the focus of interest to which their journal is dedicated, reveals a great deal about the particular way Jünger carries on that tradition. It also indicates some very important differences between Jünger's approach to this issue and that which has become established in the English-speaking world. Through these differences, one can not only account for the striking lack of familiarity with his name and work among British and American audiences—in dramatic contrast to his success and influence in France—but also show something very specific about the German tradition which he represents.

The record of interests and accomplishments by the two editors of Antaios gives a clear sense of how it cuts across the customary dividing line between disciplines of objective knowledge and the realm of literature. Eliade, the Rumanian cultural anthropologist, achieved international renown as a scholar and researcher into the esoteric religious traditions and occultic folklore of both East and West. He is also the author of several works of fiction. Ernst Jünger is known primarily as a novelist and as the writer of some of the most remarkable accounts of experience in the trenches of World War I, but his copious output extends far beyond literary fiction and reminiscence. Not only is his range of interests astonishingly broad, but he has also been quite influential in the most diverse areas. In 1932, for example, he published Der Arbeiter, a hotly debated analysis of the political consequences of twentieth-century technology and mechanized warfare, for which he represents a radical right-wing perspective on the contemporary situation and prospects for the future. In 1950 he contributed a philosophical essay, "Über die Linie" ("Across the Line") to a collection in celebration of Martin Heidegger's sixtieth birthday. Heidegger responded with a discussion of that work he entitled "Über 'die Linie'" ("On 'the Line'") in a collection to celebrate Jünger's sixtieth birthday. That essay was later reprinted, with minor additions, as Zur Seinsfrage.

While philosophy and political speculation both lie within the domain of the pen as close neighbors of literary fiction, there are yet further extensions of Jünger's concerns that, even to a superficial glance, suggest an unusual combination of interests and talents. As a young man after the war, he studied biology, including a period in the twenties at the University of Naples. This itself was the expression of a passionate curiosity from his earliest years about the phenomena of nature, and it developed later into a real expertise in entomology. Jünger's scientific work on insects, specializing in beetles, earned him a measure of international standing seldom accorded an amateur in our age. His discoveries are reflected in the fact that three species bear his name.

The tradition in which he carries on this research, which he refers to as "the subtle hunt," is not that of conventional natural science, but is rooted in the same kind of metaphysical speculation that underlay Goethe's scientific work. Goethe's attempt to overturn the Newtonian theory of color with his own ideas in the treatise Die Farbenlehre, or his efforts to argue the existence of a primal plant form, die Urpflanze, are not generally taken very seriously by English commentators. Literary critics have tended to take their cue on these matters from the established scientific world, where, of course, those hypotheses have been completely rejected. Even the genuine and scientifically recognized discovery of the intermaxillary bone in the human skull credited to Goethe, and therefore the speculative method which led him to it, is often dismissed as a fluke. The methodological debate at that time concerning restrictions in the definition or conception of objective knowledge is continued today in a figure like Jünger, and in the project carried on by the contributors of Antaios. Through his work, one can identify a great deal of that which is represented very strongly, though by no means exclusively, in the German tradition, and stands distinct from epistemological criteria predominant for generations in the Anglo-Saxon and French rationalist view of knowledge. The contrasting approach one finds in Jünger's thinking is therefore very useful in opening up an understanding of the different ways in which the divisions of knowledge are brought about, as well as the different ways in which the content of normal and altered modes of experience is interpreted.

What we think of as the practice of rational scientific investigation is based on the idea of bringing as much of the world as possible into the singular plane of critical observation and causal explanation. Historically this springs from the Enlightenment, and this in turn is usually associated with the socio-historical development of bourgeois power and influence through the rationalized relations of the market economy. Without wishing to probe these propositions too carefully, one can still say with confidence that Germany did not pass through any such historical process as unambiguously as did Britain and France or, via the export of their institutions, North America. Germany, politically fragmented into a patchwork of, in many cases, quasi-feudal states until these were progressively absorbed by Bismarck's Prussia in the nineteenth century, was not a conducive background for a philosophical vision of transparent, rational unity on a single, naturally articulated plane. This simple and positive picture does not seem to reflect the truth of a German's rather more complex, frustrating and contradictory experience in the world. German thinkers, accordingly, show a tendency again and again to have to resort to a further dimension. They look for another level of being from which a speculative or metaphysical unity may be derived.

For Goethe, this was a hierarchical order of nature. For Hegel, the Weltgeist. By the later part of the nineteenth century, the subsequent versions of such entities were becoming increasingly identified with that which was peculiar to German history and, more specifically, foreign to the conditions in its more "advanced" rivals. By the same token, emphasis on such elements as the foundation of Germany's identity meant suspicion and dislike of those alien characteristics which Germany was inevitably coming to adopt more and more as it progressed in its efforts to compete with foreign rivals. Thus, these philosophical outlooks came to be set in radical opposition to the evolving social realities accompanying increased urbanization, industrialization and liberalization. Friedrich Nietzsche's will to power was one of these. Another, less well-known to the outside, but probably more subtly influential within Germany, was Wilhelm Dilthey's "philosophy of life." In his essay "On some Motifs in Baudelaire," Walter Benjamin remarks:

Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the 'true' experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Their point of departure, understandably enough, was not man's life in society. What they invoked was poetry ['Dichtung'], preferably nature, and, finally and most emphatically, the age of myths. Dilthey's book Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung represents one of the earliest of these efforts….

The concern of these nineteenth-century German thinkers is to shift the criterion of truth and significance away from that which is central to rationalist and pragmatic ways of thinking, to shift the center of "reality" to a new locus in a "depth" separate from the surfaces of material or social human phenomena. Jünger most certainly stands in that same tradition. His writing, from his earliest work portraying the battles and slaughter of the war, has striven to identify and reveal an inner dimension of experience in violence and conflict which runs diametrically counter to any rational revulsion toward and rejection of those aspects of human existence. His studies in entomology consider the insect world as a kind of hieroglyph by which nature reveals its fundamental patterns, which likewise prove to flow through an equality of creation and destruction quite indifferent to rational desires for a productive stability in the world. The mythic stratum of life which enters and transforms the ordinary domain of existence, therefore, is opposed to the pragmatic considerations of advantage and security. It breaks into that domain disruptively and rapturously. In contrast to the pedestrian values of the "civilized masses," it is an ecstasy and an intoxication.

The fundamental idea behind the interpretation of enraptured, ecstatic and intoxicated states, in a tradition which turns toward a hidden mythic or elemental level for its truth, is that this alteration of consciousness is a break with the singular level of a unified world. It is not a more fluid, swifter, less inhibited movement through the articulations of one continuous reality, like a renewed melody in a single key, but the sound of new notes from a quite different key, one with a deeper and more universal tone. In "Drugs and Ecstasy" Jünger expresses this as the difference separating mythic and historical time:

If we compare the triumphs of Alexander and Dionysos, we touch upon the difference between historical and elemental power. Success in history, as the conquest of Babylon, for example, shows, is fleeting and tied to names. The moment does not return in the same form; it becomes a link in the chain of historical time. But if we consider changes in the elemental world, neither names nor dates are important and yet changes take place time and again, not only below historical time, but also within it. They burst forth like magma from its crust.

But let us stay with wine. Alexander was forced to retreat from India, while Dionysos even today reigns as a nameless host. Wine has changed Europe more forcefully than has the sword: even today it is considered to be a medium of cultic transformation. The exchange of new poisons and ecstasies, and also of new vices, fevers and diseases, lacks the kind of definite dating by which coronations or decisive battles are remembered. Such exchanges remain in the dark, in the entanglement of the roots. We can surmise the events, but we can neither know their extent nor penetrate their depth.

Considered from this aspect, the boundaries between different disciplines which make up the various territories of the "horizontal" plane of objective or historical knowledge are transcended by their relation to the depth of the elemental and the mythic representations by which we attempt to grasp it. All branches of learning in this light begin to resemble the compositions of poetry. They are metaphors or translations of something both separate from them, yet perhaps alive in the spirit which animates them. This is clearly visible in the contributions which make up the journal Antaios. Here, the results of research by archaeologists, psychologists and linguists appear alongside essays by philosophers and literary scholars, by art historians and ethnologists. What characterizes almost all of them, and indeed makes the journal absorbing reading, is that each is willing to surrender the autonomy of his or her own field—from which only a limited surmise of deeper understanding is possible—and struggle toward an exchange of knowledge which cannot appear to a singular and complete view. The horizontal distribution in a mosaic of knowledge is made relative to a more obscure vertical dimension toward which all pitch their labors.

Jünger's own essays illustrate that same approach to a wide range of his own interests, from speculations on the nature of language in "Sprache und Körperbau" in 1947, or on the nature of Orient and Occident in "Der Gordische Knoten" in 1953. What is no less important, though much more commonly misinterpreted, is the effect this approach has on his literary fiction. It turns his focus away from the portrayal of individuals pursuing the motives which are evident in the ordinary experience of daily life. It turns him away from what one expects to find as "character development." His narratives do not invite one to identify with the action or the figures who carry it. His novels do not hold up a mirror to the familiar domain of human life, but clearly and deliberately go exploring beyond it.

For this reason many critics have castigated him for his "coldness." George Steiner, for example, in an article on Jünger's novel Auf den Marmorklippen writes that "Reading [Jünger's] work, one experiences what Emily Dickinson termed 'a zero at the bone.'" That which for Jünger himself is a deliberately chosen path, a fundamental shift in the place where the star is sought by which the voyage to truth should navigate, appears to Steiner simply a failure. He accuses Jünger of writing as he does out of incapacity to hold on to the familiar dimension of experience: "Jünger makes a virtue of what is, essentially, a grave defect of consciousness, an atrophy at the vital center."

J. P. Stern, in what is still the best book on Jünger in English, attacks him for what he calls the "abstraction" of his language. He sees this, moreover, as a quite general feature of German writing in our time: "In this sense, then, twentieth century German is invaded by abstraction, for it responds to the events in the world not directly, in the language of common discourse, but imperfectly, in semi-philosophical, semi-sociological, 'learned' and set terms, which are committed neither to the events nor to fundamental doctrine."

It is clear from these two sources that the problem lies in the inability of one tradition to find correct terms and criteria to account for the concerns in another. Each of these critics sees only the negative movement, the deviation from that standard mode of consciousness whose "vital center" Steíner cannot find represented in Jünger's writing. If Jünger has chosen an alternate center about which true experience is to orbit, one which does not lie within what Stern recognizes as the reality of "events" or a tenable and plausible "fundamental doctrine," then this would have to produce a division between two mutually incomprehensible domains. And if the language which represents Jünger's "truth" seems to the alternate view "abstract" or without life from one sìde, this begins, as Benjamin pointed out in relation to that enterprise he dates from Dilthey, with exactly the same response from the other.

Similarly, the living experience pursued in each of these two directions, and the validity of their esthetic achievements, will appear hollow and bogus to the other. But this is inevitable with any situation where there are two mutually exclusive ways of making meaning out of the world and the human condition in it. As Benjamin observes in his essay on Surrealism: "The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious. Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it?"

Opinions on Jünger's work generally, on the quality of his writing, and especially on the "ecstatic" or "intoxicated" elements of the experience he portrays, vary according to the way the commentator identifies his own position relative to the tradition represented there, and the validity of a "mythic" stratum of being. Helmut Kaiser, for example, in his book Mythos, Rausch und Reaktion, which is written from the East German ideological perspective, refuses to acknowledge any genuine esthetic achievement in such work. Commenting on what is intended to be a moment of epiphany in the contemplation of a particular plant described in Auf den Marmorklippen, he observes: "One has to take his word for it that he was, as he himself says, pierced 'by lightning' at the sight of the plantain; he does not show it in the text."

Like Stern, he objects to the deliberate, and, for him, false efforts to create symbols which are as dead in conception as the world they are meant to signify is abstract and void of reality: "What the reader finds in his symbols are robots, perhaps spiritual symbols, but these are always defunct, paper fruits which were dead before they were born. Thus Jünger lacks precisely that on which art depends: a portrayal of the human sphere." This, Kaiser argues, reflects Jünger's retreat into the sterile isolation of private fantasy. He cannot accept it as a separate order of experience, for with these images "this meeting takes place in great solitude, mostly in dreams or in intoxications produced by particular alkaloids."

Such criticism of Jünger is clearly tied very closely to the perception that he stands in a line of development which includes Fascism. Benjamin actually concludes his comment on Dilthey by tracing that line through Klages to Jung who, he says, "made common cause with Fascism." Although Jünger in fact distanced himself from the Nazi party before it was established in power, and his political sympathies did not ally him with any very specific entity or policy among the actual choices, there is no doubt that in his theoretical positions he can be located very close to a fascistic or fascistic ideology. Indeed, in 1930, Benjamin wrote an article entitled "Theorien des deutschen Faschismus" on a volume Jünger edited, and in which he included the radically imperialist and militarist essay, "Die totale Mobilmachung."

Jünger's supporters, like Eliade, have often been simply indifferent to the question of ideology. In other cases—like the comments of the novelist Alfred Andersch, who was distinctly left-wing politically, and had a scrupulously anti-Fascist record—the connection between any occasional ideological lapses and the esthetic quality of his literary work is denied in plain terms. More recently, the very thorough, detailed and scholarly book on Jünger's work by Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens, has attempted to connect this particular approach to writing with that of a non-German, and politically more defensible tradition: French Surrealism.

The essential idea of this is not new. Many critics have referred to similarities between the two perspectives: their emphasis on the imagination, enraptured states of mind, the use of intoxicants to transform the shape of experience and the fascination with highly charged, shocking or even violent imagery. One will find that connection made repeatedly in Gerhard Loose's commentaries, to name just one. The special contribution of Bohrer's long and ambitious study is that it does not rest with enumeration of surface parallels, but endeavors to show that there is a deeper necessity running through the developing histories of each manifestation.

This argument takes the form, in part, of tracing their origins back to an anti-Enlightenment ancestry in figures of the late eighteenth century, including the Marquis de Sade on the French side, and J. G. Hamann in Germany. Commenting on remarks in the first (1929) version of Jünger's book Das abenteurliche Herz which mock the pallid lifelessness of the Enlightenment, Bohrer notes: "He probably took his philosophical support for this from Hamann, whose statement that 'thought' is the 'garment of the soul' he recalls. Hamann had put forward the priority of sensual cognition over philosophy in such a manner in 'Aesthetica in Nuce' that Aragon, had he known this text, would have felt an absolute identity with it." Bohrer's enterprise is taken severely to task by subsequent commentaries like Wolfgang Kaempfer's 1981 book on Ernst Jünger for having blurred a number of essential concepts and distinctions in order to establish his position.

It is true that Surrealism represents one instance of a repeating pattern in French culture of phases where a strong attraction for mythic, metaphysical or esoteric modalities recurs. Frequently this manifests itself in some enthusiasm for German culture, such as Baudelaire's response to Wagner, and indeed one might see the same thing at work in the current enthusiasm in France for Jünger's work. Nevertheless, there remain real distinctions here which it is quite wrong to overlook. Certainly nothing of this apparent parallel history mapped out by Bohrer through late Romantic pessimism and nineteenth-century estheticism accounts for the strong commitment to social revolution and political justice which André Breton and Louis Aragon espoused after the Moroccan War of 1925.

This difference can also be drawn into line with the distinction between the conception of intoxication to which they held, and that of the tradition represented by Jünger. What they hoped to release by the use of drugs may indeed have been a kind of antipodes to the experience of regular life in the bourgeois sphere, but it was by no means so distant an opposite as the elemental realm to which Jünger refers. On the contrary, the Surrealist understanding of the subconscious clearly posits it as still only an extension of the human sphere, not an alternative to it. Jünger's violent and harshly demanding mythic domain is one where the person not only transcends the narrow and bogus values of bourgeois individuality but also frees himself from all the desires of security, comfort, pleasure and happiness which animate the familiar experience of everyday life.

For the Surrealists, the subconscious was merely the home of a more vivid, vibrant and unfettered version of those desires. Thus although there is a real difference between the desire uncovered by revelation of subconscious contents of the mind and personality and that of the bourgeois domain, that difference does not involve breaking out into a realm which disrupts the integrity of the desiring subject. Surrealism simply subverts the false limits constructed about the enfeebled and conventionalized image of the bourgeois individual as defined by the relations and demands of a competitive economy and administrative structure.

Benjamin, in his essay on the Surrealists, notes how their emphasis on ecstatic experience as an opposition to that domain of purposes does indeed dissolve away the idea of the self determined by it: "In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth." Yet he sees an important dialectical element in their procedure here: "This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain of intoxication." This is all-important to Benjamin, for, writing in 1929, the aspect of their work and their movement which strikes him as embodying its principal value is its place in the political awareness and struggle of socialist resistance to the rising threat of Fascism. The dialectical step beyond intoxication which is reached by entering into it is the beginning of a new realm of purposes, now directed toward the revolutionary transformation of social reality. This means that the intoxicated rapture of poetry must be carried over beyond the limited space of a momentary ecstasy, and sustain a renewed sense of the rights and potentials to be redeemed in all levels of actual human life.

Benjamin has hopes for their project to "win the energies of intoxication for the revolution," but he has doubts too. He wonders whether they are "successful in welding this experience of freedom to the other revolutionary experience that we have to acknowledge because it has been ours, the constructive, dictatorial side of revolution? In short, have they bound revolt to revolution?"

Their task is to step beyond the imaginative rejection of things as these make themselves known under the conditions of bourgeois knowledge, a rejection pursued into the alternative domains of art, literature, the occult and drug-induced raptures, and bring this exterior perspective to bear on the irrational self-contradictions of an ideology which insists on calling itself rationalism. The danger to which the are subject and which threatens their ability to complete this task lies in the "pernicious romantic prejudices" which lead to fascination with those alternatives as objects of desire and pursuit for their own sake. They are emphasized instead of the renewed possibilities of consciousness in political reality. They are a place of flight and complacent illusion. Understanding this is the key to all Benjamin has to say about the dialectic of intoxication:

Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance.

The validity of exploration of such altered states of consciousness depends on the capacity to overcome that romantic attribution of separate reality which enthralls the mind and "takes us no further." That in turn depends on the understanding that the subject experiencing an altered state of consciousness remains in principle the same; the consciousness is essentially that of the same person, and the content of consciousness, the ideas and dreams, are those of the same person also, albeit revealed at a heightened level of intensity by the removal of inhibiting agencies and habits of mind. Although the Surrealists distanced themselves from Baudelaire's posture of religious and moral condemnation of drugs, their sense of how opium or hashish affected the economy of the mind was similar to his as expressed in Les Paradis artificiels, just as he followed De Quincey on the psychology of intoxication.

Baudelaire affirms, as does his English forerunner, the closeness of the intoxicated state to the norm which reigns in the drug-taker's life: "Dans ses Confessions, De Quincey affirme avec raison que l'opium … n'excite [l'homme] … que dans sa voie naturelle, et qu'ainsi, pour juger les merveilles de l'opium, il serait absurde d'en référer â un marchand de boeufs; car celui-ci ne rêvera que boeufs et pâturages." It is on this basis that Benjamin can demand that the revelations of ecstatic visions be made subject to the same criteria of knowledge as those of a sober state, just as the conventions of conformist ideology must be treated to the same skepticism as one applies to raptures and dreams.

Once again, he is highly suspicious of the excesses of Surrealism in its disregard for the seriousness of an objective knowledge. He cites a declaration by Appolinaire and Breton that "The conquests of science rest far more on a surrealistic than on a logical thinking" and rejects it because "such integration is too impetuous." The estheticism of this position has its equivalent in the pose of moral Antinomianism to which they likewise yielded too readily: "The seduction was too great to regard the Satanism of a Rimbaud and a Lautréamont as a pendant to art for art's sake in an inventory of snobbery." Nevertheless, there is a dialectical aspect in that apparent romantic fecklessness: "If … one resolves to open up this romantic dummy, one finds something usable inside." And that bears out the positive position adopted regarding the political currents of the time, for "One finds the cult of evil as a political device, however romantic, to disinfect and isolate against all moralizing dilettantism."

The estheticism, the antirational epistemology, and the cultivation of intoxications are all, therefore, directed away from the thinking which reigns in the established ideological domain, and yet remain close enough to the sphere of concrete life, the material issues of politics, that they may be drawn on in their behalf in a positive sense. Benjamin's response in Theories of German Fascism, on the other hand, finds absolutely no such positive aspect in Jünger's estheticism, which he regards solely as a rejection of human life and an abandonment in favor of mythic phantasm of the tasks imposed by the realities of concrete existence: "The most rabidly decadent origins of this new theory of war are emblazoned on their foreheads: it is nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l'art pour l'art to war itself." And he quotes his friend Florens Christian Rang on the confused otherworldliness behind Jünger's glorification of purposeless destruction, and the flight from reality into bogus ideal realms in this:

[The] horrible world-view of world-death instead of world-life … is made lighter in the philosophy of German Idealism by the notion that behind the clouds there is after all a starry sky. This fundamental German spiritual tendency in its depth lacks will, does not mean what it says, is a crawling, cowardly know-nothingness, a desire not to live, but also a desire not to die either…. For this is the German half-attitude towards life—to be able to throw it away when it doesn't cost anything, in the moment of intoxication, with those left behind cared for, and with this short-lived sacrifice surrounded by, an eternal halo.

This "starry sky" in its crisp clarity which justifies the blurry and abysmal vision of real life is given incomparably greater command over all things to deny and contradict them than the "Surreal" is given over the things of the "real." It does not just loosen individuality "like a rotten tooth," it completely dissolves away the particularity of the subject and his claims to a real place in the world.

The separateness of this ideal or "true" domain from the sphere of ordinary human interests and human life can be detected in that aspect of the psychology of intoxication where it would seem Jünger comes closest to agreeing with Baudelaire and De Quincey. In Annäherungen, the book of reminiscences and speculations about drugs which he put together in 1970 as a direct result of the train of thought begun by "Drugs and Ecstasy" and taking that essay as its first chapter, he refers directly to the observation in Les Paradis artificiels on cattle merchants and intoxicants. The idea that drugs do not add anything, but only potentiate the ordinary circulation of thoughts and impressions also occurs elsewhere—for example in comments written in 1940 in response to a book on E. T. A. Hoffmann. The difference from either Baudelaire, or De Quincey, or the Surrealists is that he is concerned neither with new ways of living in the same world, nor new knowledge about it.

He compares Baudelaire's position here with a poem on a similar theme by Goethe, "Die Schatzgräber." He rejects Goethe's admonition against vain efforts to dig for treasure one would not know how to possess. The objective is not to gain something new brought into one's possession from another dimension, but rather to transform one's existence by engaging in life focused on another center altogether. He writes: "Digging is never in vain, if it goes deep enough. Every point is equidistant from the center, wherever we put our spade to the earth. Every step leads nearer to the goal; that is also true for steps backward."

His agreeing with Baudelaire on the point that no new insight or knowledge is gained in intoxicated states does not imply that Jünger also concurs with Baudelaire's insistence that states of consciousness altered by drugs fail to break the singular dimension of common reality. The reason for this is that Jünger does not consider the issue here to turn on questions of knowledge. The order of transformation he envisages is not restricted to the elemental entering the mind in the form of anything so objective as a specific insight. Acquiring such insights in the modality of knowledge would mean that the knowing subject remained in essence unchanged. As a mere object, the elemental dimension would then be no more than an extended content in a vessel which might accept and hold it, but without undergoing transmutation of its own substance—an abstract enlightenment as opposed to vital participation. The alternative world of experience Jünger depicts is the transmutation of life itself as an expression of the elemental domain.

This may be seen most distinctly in the way he regards the experiences he went through as a front-line soldier in the First World War, especially as these are portrayed in his 1922 book Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis. Here he is concerned with unveiling the esoteric forces which manifest themselves in warfare, entirely unconnected with the apparent political and economic purposes the means of war are intended to attain. War is therefore a world unto itself, in the creation of which it is the other aspects of life that are secondary, and only means. The vision and experience of war are an intoxicating fever pitch of life. Only that which matches the overwhelming fury in the flood of impressions it sets loose is worthy of desire and worthy of being considered real.

In the chapter entitled Eros, he starts with an explanation of the double meaning of the soldier's hard and brutal pursuit of sex. It is both "the urge of life to express itself at the height of intensity once more, and flight into the thicket of intoxications so as to become oblivious in lust to the dangers that threaten." Sexuality figures at this stage as a much more intriguing counterpart to concrete reality than the simpler stimulation and oblivion produced by that other agency used to shift the accent of consciousness at the front, alcohol. It involves a more elaborate set of circumstances and a different kind of human context removed from the trenches, but the role it plays is not that of the tender restoration of personal existence in a relationship of love. The sexual encounter becomes a rare and separate point of vantage at which one kind of elemental experience sweeps through another. Love is transformed into an impersonal force, one that is more powerful than death, and therefore capable of obliterating the soldier's personal fear of death: "When his breath died away in the whirlwind of love he was so freed from the self, so entwined in the whirl of life, so infused in the eternity of all things, that for this moment Death appeared to him in its true aspect: small and contemptible. It was left behind, far below, when the curve of feeling shot steeply up beyond thinking."

It is significant that this is the point at which death is said to appear in its true guise, rather than the temporary disguise in which ecstatic erotic pleasure might be thought to veil it. The full implications are still not always articulated at this stage, for the idea still seems half lost in the rhetorical flourish of a mind fascinated by its own triumph over fear. He writes, in this vein: "Then, though only as a gift granted to those with the best blood, there came the intoxication at the spectacle of one's own daring." It is still an ecstasy, a fiery moment in which the heat of feeling lifts a spirit beyond the light of thinking. He ranks it together with other conventional figures of this experience: "And one last thing: ecstasy. This state of the saint, the great poet and the great love is also granted to great courage."

Such an experience does, however, have two phases. First it is a liberation, a breaking free of an ordinary place cramped among the oppressive desiderata of individual existence: "That is an intoxication beyond all intoxications, an unleashing that bursts every bond." But it is also an experience which brings the soldier into another sphere, uniting him with a larger reality: "Then he is melted together with the universe … it is as though the wave had glided back into the ocean's surge."

The abandon of wild ecstatic courage is a self-abandonment. It breaks away from the despised brief life of an individual and the enclosed, fragile existence he knows, to hatch out for flight through an experience beyond bounds. The things of the narrow world therefore undergo a reduction in significance. Their meaning in themselves is also abandoned; they must become indifferent as ends. Nothing may be desired for its part in the texture of ordinary human life. This ecstasy of self-forgetting weakens the links of consciousness to a domain of rational purposes and breaks loose from an identity anchored there. Consequently strength accumulates in the reality and attraction of what lies beyond, even though it may strike the person looking on from outside as strangely abstract and nebulous.

Yet for the soldiers this may grow beyond mere glimpses of a realm manifesting itself through those elements which fret and strain the tissue of the regular order of things. The war may supplant that order. A new and dangerous mythic reality takes form in its place. Out of the tormented fragments of such an existence, a fearful ideology takes shape. Those elements begin to take on a single meaning—as doorways to pass through into this fire: "All being blazed for them from one source, whether that was in a full glass, the raging eyes of the enemy or in the yielding smile of a girl."

This intoxication is the construction of a unified world where there is no unity in the reigning order of things. That is also why, beyond the particular experience of warfare, it becomes possible to subsume all the different fields of knowledge represented in Jünger's wide-ranging interests and writings under his singular view of the ideal or mythic stratum of being. In the same way, all the different areas of special knowledge represented in the contributions to the journal Antaios can be brought together as indications of a deeper, hidden knowledge to which they are all relative. In politics, that might appear to give the right to one tyrannical power to subjugate the varieties of human existence before a single expression of the mythic entity. Such was the ideological basis on which the Fascist movements were able to draw adherents from the ranks of "romantically" enthralled intellectuals nostalgic for life imbued with elemental meaning. In Jünger's case, however, any political engagement along these lines was always restricted to theoretical positions. Though he was intrigued by all violent and absolutist expressions of power, including those of Bolshevism as well as the Right, they also disgusted him in their actual reality.

No particular manifestation of political order could ever be an adequate or true representation of the Idea he traced into the darkness at the root of all things. But at the same time, the attitude of l'art pour l'art applied to the normal disciplines of understanding asserts an indifferentism between discourses. It produces an equality between fiction. Dichtung, and all attempts to claim truth in the rational pursuit of knowledge. Therefore, in the spirit of Dilthey and the Lebensphilosophie, it raises up the practice of poetry, as it does the idea of "Nature" and the "Age of Myth," to a degree of significance which completely distorts the role and function of fictional representation in language, and this, in turn, is a damaging affliction of the different fields of rational knowledge. It is not a dialectical development of consciousness through them, but rather leaves them lame, just as Jünger describes himself in his Paris journals as lamed by the image of Hitler, and, as he makes clear in those journals during the last year of the Second World War, incapable of taking any part in the resistance to him.