Friedrich Georg Jünger Quotes

Mechanical work processes have grown immensely, both in number and in scope, and it is obvious that their automatism, controlled and watched as it is by man, in turn has its effect on man. The power that man gains by his automatic tools gains power over him. He is compelled to give them his thought and his attention. Inasmuch as he works with automatic tools, his work becomes mechanical and repetitious with machinelike uniformity. Automatism clutches the operator and never relinquishes its grip on him. To the consequences of this we shall return again and again.

Obviously, the discovery of ferments, hormones, and vitamins is not only a scientific but also a technical advance. [...] This whole pharmaceutical arsenal is the product of technical specialists who think of the human body as a machine.

The tale becomes utopian only when the writer leaves the sphere of technical organization – when, for instance, he tries to make us believe that these cities are inhabited by better and more perfect human beings; that envy, murder, and adultery are unknown; that neither law nor a police force is needed. For in so doing he steps outside the technical scheme within which he is spinning his fantasies, and combines it in a utopian manner with something different and alien which can never be developed out of the scheme itself.

In every healthy economy the substance with which it works is preserved and used sparingly, so that consumption and destruction do not overstep the limit beyond which the substance itself would be endangered or destroyed. Since technology presupposes destruction, since its development depends upon destruction, it cannot be fitted into any healthy economic system; one cannot look at it from an economic point of view. The radical consumption of oil, coal, and ore cannot be called economy, however rational the methods of drilling and mining. Underlying strict rationality of technical working methods, we find a way of thinking which cares nothing for the preservation and saving of the substance.

These much admired mechanisms, like the automatons of Albertus Magnus, Bacon, and Regiomantus, were ingenious toys; nothing more serious. They evoked not only wonder, but also fear. The robot of Albertus Magnus, which could open the door and greet the visitor (the fruit of decades of effort), was smashed by the startled Thomas Aquinas with a blow of his stick. The intellectual fascination which machines have held for man from the earliest times is coupled with a presentiment of the uncanny, an almost unaccountable feeling of horror.

Kant believed that there was a science only in so far as there was mathematics. The same error can be encountered among many mathematicians and physicists who believe that they alone possess exactness. However, they possess it only within their field. There is exactness also in the movements of animals and in the emotions and passions of man. Homeric hexameter or a Pindaric ode has as much exactness as any causal relation or mathematical formula. But this rhythmic, metrical exactness is of another, higher order. That it cannot be calculated is no reason to call it less exact than the results of this or that quantitative measurement.

And the rational mind which stands behind the machine and keeps watch over its automatic, mechanical motion–it too is hungry, and hunger follows it everywhere. It cannot shake off hunger; it cannot free itself from it; it cannot be stilled, however hard it may try. And how, indeed, could that be possible! This mind itself is consuming, gluttonous, and it has no access to riches; it cannot conjure up abundance. No effort of ingenuity, not all the inventive power that is brought to bear here can do it. For rationalization only sharpens hunger and actually increases consumption. This growing consumption is a sign not of abundance but of poverty; it is bound up with worry, want, and toil.

In the early days of the machine age, the days when the amount of work done mechanically was small, it was not recognized that mechanization must lead to a new organization of work, a planning to which man himself would be forcibly subjected. But with the advance of technology, the consequences of increasing mechanization of work become more and more apparent. Not only are more and more men employed mechanically, but their work also becomes more and more specialized. To scientific specialization is added technical specialization. The growing specialization of the sciences, which creates artificial isolation and departmental walls, has its counterpart in technology as it breaks down and cuts up human work.

As mechanisms gain ground, springing up wherever lifeless time is waiting for them, we can observe how lifeless time has invaded life time. Just as technology has changed our idea of space by making us believe that space has become scarcer, that the earth has shrunk, just so has it has changed our idea of time. It has brought about a situation where man no longer has time, where he is destitute of time, where he is hungry for time. I have time when I am not conscious of time which presses in on me in its empty quality, as lifeless time. He who has leisure thereby disposes of boundless time; he lives in the fullness of time, be he active or at rest. This is what distinguishes him from the man who is merely on leave or on vacation and who, therefore, can dispose of a limited time only. The technological organization of work no longer permits leisure; it grants to the tired laborer only the meager measure of vacation and spare time that is absolutely necessary to maintain his efficiency.

The natural scientist will always exhibit a tendency to delimit his science as sharply and as narrowly as possible, to make it completely methodical, to systematize it. Natural science thus limits itself to what can be proved mathematically, or to that to which the law of causality applies, or to the purely functional.

The exploitation of the factory worker (about which socialism is indignant only so long as it is in the opposition) is an inevitable symptom of the universal exploitation to which technology subjects the whole earth from end to end. Man no less than ore deposits belongs to the resources subject to consumption by technology. The ways in which the worker tries to evade this exploitation – associations, labor unions, political parties – are the very methods which tie him forever closer to the progress of technology, mechanical work, and technical organization.

Universities decline in the degree that technical progress spreads into them from the secondary schools. The university becomes a technical training center and servant of technical progress.

If the universe were to be conceived as a big clock and every movement in it as mechanically measurable and predictable, then the high goal of scientific-technical thinking would be the comprehension of this central mechanism. And the application of that knowledge would mean the complete mechanization of man.

But all technology is of titanic mold, and man the maker, is always of the race of the Titans. And so we meet him first of all in volcanic landscapes. From his titanic kinship stems his love for the enormous, the gigantic, the colossal; his delight in towering works that impress by their quantity and mass, the vastness of their piled-up matter. That trait, incidentally, explains why man the technician so often lacks a sense of beauty and proportion; he is not an artist.

Leisure is the prerequisite of every free thought, every free activity. And this is why only the few are capable of it, since the many, when they have gained time, only kill it.