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from each man, in the face of death, the starkness of his destiny. Sartre
was later to argue, in
What is Literature?,
that all vital modern writing
had to focus on such existential moments, such end-situations, in which
man has to choose the authenticity of his being (or to flee from it)
with a liberty so close to nihilism t4at it is difficult to distinguish be–
tween them. And Ernst Jiinger was the one writer in modern literature
who
had
chosen, who accepted this nihilism with diabolic abandon, and
who transformed it, not only into a philosophy of life, but into a pro–
gram for political action.
No doubt if by some miracle the two had met-if Sartre could have
forgotten his deadly detestation of the enemy, and if Jiinger, to ingrati–
ate himself, could have put aside his patronizing arrogance-they would,
strange as it may seem, have found a number of things to agree about.
Like Jiinger after the First World War, though for different reasons,
Sartre had become convinced that all the values in terms of which man
had hitherto acted were meaningless. Nothing was so ridiculous for
Sartre as l'
esprit de serieux,
the delusion of taking the reason for one's
action as an absolute value. The root of man's being was precisely a
ne-ant,
a nothingness constantly transcending itself toward the future;
to identify one's life with a specific goal to be attained is to commit
Sartre's cardinal ontological sin-to degrade man's precious and unique
consciousness to the status of a thing.
Junger indeed, with true German thoroughness, had zealously ac–
cepted the full consequences of this attitude when Sartre was still a
schoolboy.
If
man's being is nothing but an infinite transcendence to–
ward the future, a self-perpetuating activity whose only aim is to keep
itself in motion, then why not accept this activity as the only and
ultimate value? The purpose of man's activity is to dominate the uni–
verse, and
in
a famous (or infamous) book called
Die Arbeiter,
pub–
lished in 1932, Jiinger foresaw a future in which man would be reduced
to an anonymous cog in a vast machine dedicated to this task. Such
an image had been the bogeyman of old-fashioned humanists since the
Industrial Revolution, but it was greeted by Jiinger with prophetic
pathos as the logical culmination of the destruction of bourgeois values.
For if man's activity alone has value, not any of the ends for which he
acts, then his essence is definable solely as a function, exactly like Sartre's
consciousness-as-neant;
and the blind will-to-power on the vastest scale
becomes the ultimate goal of all human aspiration.
Sartre would certainly recoil with horror from this conclusion; yet
it is difficult to see on what philosophical ground he could take his
stand
in
opposition. True, Sartre's view of man is conceived as a defense
