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German social theory and the hidden face of technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John Orr
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European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , December 1974 , pp. 312 - 336
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Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1974

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References

* Jünger, Ernst, In Stahlengewitten [1922]Google Scholar, in Werke I (Stuttgart 1962)Google Scholar; ID. (Hrsg.). Krieg und Krieger (Berlin 1930)Google Scholar; ID, . Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Berlin 1932)Google Scholar; Marcuse, Herbert, Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitaren Staatsauffassung, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, III (1934), pp. 184 sqqGoogle Scholar. English translation: The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State, in Negations (London 1968), Chap. 1Google Scholar; ID, . One-Dimensional Man (Boston 1966)Google Scholar; Heidegger, Martin, Die Frage nach der Technik [1952], in Verträge und Aufsätze (Tübingen 1954)Google Scholar. English translation: The Question of Technology (London 1954)Google Scholar.

(1) Spengler, Osward, Der Mensch und die Technik (Munich 1930)Google Scholar.

(2) Schmitt, Carl, Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierung und Entpolitisierung [1929], in Der Begriff des Politischen3 (Berlin 1963)Google Scholar.

(3) See Heidegger's, Martin Freiberg rectoral address, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitäten (Breslau 1933)Google Scholar.

(4) Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, op. cit.

(5) Jünger, In Stahlengewittern, op. cit.

(6) Schmitt, , op. cit. p. 80Google Scholar.

(7) Ibid. p. 93.

(8) In October of 1932.

(9) As a disciple of Nietzsche, Jünger envisaged the ‘impact’ (Prägung) of technology on the world in terms of the “will-to-power” and the “eternal recurrence” of all cosmic energy. Instead of the term “will-to-power” however, he used the Weberian term ‘legitimation’ to emphasise the importance of Herrschaft as a mode of ensuring the obedience of commands. At his most extreme, he suggests that “domination and obedience (Dienst) are one and the same thing”. Jünger, , Der Arbeiter, op. cit. p. 13Google Scholar.

(10) Nietzsche's most important condemnations of bourgeois society are to be found in The Genealogy of Morals, The Will-to-Power and The Antichrist. For a national-bolshevik assessment of Nietzsche as the most profound critic of “bourgeois decadence”, see the study by one of Jünger's close associates, the Leipzig philosophy teacher Fischer, Hugo, Nietzsche Apostata (Leipzig 1931), pp. 15 sq., 108 sqqGoogle Scholar.

(11) Jünger, , Der Arbeiter, p. 21 sqGoogle Scholar.

(12) The term “heroic realism” was first coined by a young disciple of Jünger, Werner Best, a lawyer who went on to become one of the leaders in the Gestapo and until 1939 was effectively Reinhold Heydrich's right-hand man. See Best's essay, Das Krieg und der Recht, in Jünger (ed.), Krieg und Krieger, op. cit. See Also Der Arbeiter, pp. 148 sq.; also Höhne, Heinz, The Orders of the Death's Head (London 1970)Google Scholar.

(13) Mobilmachung, Die totale, in Krieg und Krieger, op. cit. pp. 5 sqqGoogle Scholar.

(14) Der Arbeiter, pp. 32, 295.

(15) Der Arbeiter.

(16) Ibid. pp. 120 sq.

(17) Ibid. p. 147.

(18) Ibid. p. 150.

(19) Jünger, op. cit. p. 80.

(20) Ibid. p. 79.

(21) Schmitt, , op. cit. p. 79Google Scholar.

(22) See Niekisch's, Ernst memoirs, Gewagtes Leben (Köln, 1954), p. 225Google Scholar. For an earlier Prussian but anti-industrial account of the Drang nach Osten, see his book Entscheidung (Berlin 1930)Google Scholar.

(23) Mezhlauk, V. I., The Second Soviet Five-Year Plan (London 1937), p. 8Google Scholar.

(24) For Radek's attack on Soviet scientists, see Joravsky, David, Soviet Marxism and the Natural Sciences 1917–1932 (London 1961)Google Scholar.

(25) Rausching, Hermann, Hitler Speaks (London 1939), p. 136Google Scholar.

(26) See Niekisch, , op. cit. p. 238 sqqGoogle Scholar.

(27) “In 1933, when a decisive moment was present in Germany, Heidegger became decisively engaged in a world-historical situation. He took over the leadership of Freiberg University and equated the Dasein of Being and Time with the ‘German’ Dasein. This political ‘engagement’ in the factual events of the time, which is of late continually referred to as “the atomic age”, was not a deviation from Being and Time as the naive suppose. It was a consequence of Heidegger's concept of human Dasein as a temporal and historical existence that only recognises temporal truths relative to its own Dasein and its potential being”. Lōwith, Karl, Nature, History and Existen-tialism (Evanston 1966), p. 76Google Scholar.

(28) Palmier, Jean-Michel, Les écrits politiques de Heidegger (Paris 1968)Google Scholar.

(29) See Baumler's, AlfredMännerbund und Wissenschaft (Berlin 1934), pp. 94 sqq., and Ernst Krieck's Rectorial address at Frankfurt. Die Erneuerung der UniversitätGoogle Scholar.

(30) Heidegger, , Arbeitsdienst und Universität, Freiberger Studentenzeitung, 20 06 1933Google Scholar.

(31) Heidegger, Der Ruf zum Arbeitsdienst, ibid. 23rd January 1934.

(32) Rauschning, , Die Revolution des Nihilismus5 (Zurich 1938)Google Scholar.

(33) Ibid. pp. 100–102. The section on Jünger is omitted from the abridged English version Germany's Revolution of Destruction (London 1939).

(34) Makers of Destruction (London 1942), p. 195Google Scholar.

(35) Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination (London 1973)Google Scholar.

(36) Lukaćs, Georg, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin 1955)Google Scholar.

(37) Neumann's classic work Behemoth was never fully accepted by the leading spokesmen of the Frankfurt School as a real expression of the Institute's views. On the difference between the Horkheimer circle and the Neumann circle over the role of the economy in the interpretation of Nazism, see Jay, , op. cit. pp. 158–167Google Scholar.

(38) Marcuse, , in Negations, op. cit. Chap. I, p. 3Google Scholar.

(39) Marcuse op. cit.

(40) Horkheimer, Max, Zum Rationalismusstreit in der Gegenwärtigen Philosophie, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, III (1934). PP. 42 sqGoogle Scholar.

(41) Cited in ibid. p. 44.

(42) For the controversy over the rearmament policies in the Third Reich, see Millward, Alan, The German Economy at War (London 1965)Google Scholar; Carroll, Berenice, Design for Total War: arms and economics in the Third Reich (The Hague 1968)Google Scholar; Mason, Tim, The Legacy of 1918 for National-Socialism, in Nicholls, A. and Matthias, E. (eds), German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler (London 1971), pp. 215 sqqGoogle Scholar.

(43) In Negations, pp. 124 sqq. (transl. from Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung VI (1937)Google Scholar.

(44) Jungk, Robert, Heller als tausend Sonnen (Berne 1958)Google Scholar. English translation. Brighter than a Thousand Suns (New York 1958)Google Scholar.

(45) Ibid. p. 74.

(46) Ibid. pp. 82 sqq.

(47) For a brief biographical portrait of Walter Benjamin, see Arendt's, Hannah introduction to his collection of essays Illuminations (New York 1969)Google Scholar.

(48) Jünger, , op. cit. p. 217Google Scholar.

(49) One-Dimensional Man, op. cit. p. 18.

(50) Heidegger, , Zur Seimfrage (Frank-furt-am-Main 1956)Google Scholar. English translation: On the Question of Being (London 1959)Google Scholar.

(51) Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik, op. cit.

(52) Ibid. p. 25.

(53) Ibid. p. 23.

(54) Marcuse, , op. cit. pp. 154 sqqGoogle Scholar.

(55) Weber, Max, Economy and Society (New York 1968), vol. IGoogle Scholar.

(56) Industrialism and Capitalism in the Work of Weber, Max, in Negations, op. cit. pp. 223–224Google Scholar.

(57) Jünger, , op. cit. p. 37Google Scholar.

(58) In the nineteen twenties and early thirties the study of atomic physics was developed more crucially in Germany than anywhere else. In fact there are some links between Heideggerian philosophy and the most famous German physicists and philosophers of science, Werner Heisenberg and Carl von Weizsācker. Both regarded Being and Time as a philosophical treatise which accorded closely with their own natural philosophical standpoint—Heisenberg with his repudiation of causality and Weizsäcker with his rejection of the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans and res extensa. In addition both philosophers were nationalists who stayed in Germany during the Third Reich to further atomic research despite a personal version to the Nazis. Predictably enough it is Heisenberg's and Weizsäcker's writings on the philosophy of science to which Marcuse pays most attention. But despite this, there is no evidence to suggest that the vast majority of atomic scientists who accepted in principle what Arthur Koestler called “the vanishing act of modern physics” were in any way Heideggerian. Jeans and Eddington were members of a totally different philosophical tradition; Bertrand Russell, who recognised at a very early stage the philosophical difficulties created by mathematical physics, was a sceptical empiricist and Einstein, a fugitive from Nazism, was a pacifist and a humanist. In fact the evidence points the other way. Heidegger tried to claim support for his own philosophical position from the philosophy of science. In 1934 he wrote: “The present leaders of atomic physics, Nils Bohr and Heisenberg, think in a thoroughly philosophical way and only therefore create new ways of posing questions and above all hold out in the questionable”. One thinks of Jünger and Heidegger as attempting to apply modernistic models of natural science to their anti-humanistic view of man in a technological era, and like many nineteenth century writers such as Comte and Spencer, being attracted by the power of analogy. But their interpretation of the findings of modern science is itself controversial and open to question, as is their attempt to apply it to human nature. There is no good reason to assume that natural philosophy does provide a basis for the philosophy of man, though any account of the history of modern thought would tend to demonstrate their inseparability. For further discussion, see Koistler, Arthur, The Sleepwalkers (London 1959), pp. 528 sqqGoogle Scholar; SirJeans, James, The Mysterious Universe (London 1937), pp. 122 sq.Google Scholar; Heisenberg, Werner, The Physicist's Conception of Nature (London 1958), pp. 32 sqq.Google Scholar, and Physics and Philosophy (London 1959)Google Scholar; von Weizsäcker, Carl, Beziehungen der theoretischen Physik zum Denken Heideggers, in Martin Heideggers Einfluß auf die Wissenschaften, pp. 172 sqqGoogle Scholar.

(59) Marcuse, , One-Dimensional Man, op. cit. p. 229Google Scholar.

(60) Ibid. pp. 231–232.

(61) Ibid.