Mechanized Bodies: Heidegger and Jünger on Humanity’s Answer to the Technological World

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger’s work on the body in modernity and the very different answers each gives to the questions posed by the technological age continue to inform contemporary discussions. From a biographical standpoint, Heidegger and Jünger share some important similarities that inform their understanding of the modern human condition: Both lived during the same historical era (roughly the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century), both were prominent German academics, and both served in the First World War, a catastrophic event whose unprecedented and indiscriminate brutality changed people’s thinking in a fundamental way. Using Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning the Essence of Technology” (1954) and “Traditional Language and Technological Language” (1962) and Jünger’s On Pain (1934), I will examine the accounts each thinker gives of the body in modernity and compare Heidegger’s and Jünger’s opinions regarding how we ought to respond to the given-ness of the technological world. I will begin by analyzing Heidegger’s definition of the essence of technology as an enframing of the world, one way out of many of understanding the beings presented to us but erroneously given as final. I will emphasize that time and place, rather than individual will, determines the enframing of the world that confronts the individual. I will then offer Jünger’s response to this condition and his conviction that the liberal individual has become extinct, replaced by the worker who must suspend his own will and submit to the conditions of his time, becoming one with the machinery of the state and contributing to totalitarian ideology. Finally, using Heidegger’s idea of thought as the space of freedom, I will critique Jünger’s fatalism in favor of a more nuanced and historically informed approach to a technological society by which we might resist its totalizing tendencies.

The events of World War I triggered a crucial change in the philosophical discussion of technology. Twentieth-century philosophies of technology tended to depart from the naively optimistic light of the previous century, when discussions of technology proposed that historic advancements in science, medicine, transportation, and overall quality of life could lead to utopian societies. Later, the intellectual community, including philosophers like Heidegger and Jünger, began to treat technology more critically following the horrifying realization that, for all its benefits to society, advanced technology is what made the atrocities of WWI possible. The rise of the technological age also revealed that the moral and political ideals of previous centuries had become extinct, or at least severely endangered. Jünger addresses this question in On Pain, recounting that, in the past, there was at least the illusion that the noble knight would survive the battle. From the time of the Ancient Greeks, highly ritualized military traditions that emphasized honor (for example, hand-to-hand combat, jousting, cavalry, marching formations, and the duel) had served as the model for Western military activity. However, modern technology completely altered the nature of war. With trench warfare, machine guns, and biological weapons like mustard gas, there was no longer any sense of discrimination in destruction. Whole lines could be annihilated with a speed and totality that were previously unthinkable, forever changing how combat was understood. A private and a general are both killed in the same way in a hail of gunfire: Jünger writes, “In (modern) war, when shells fly past our bodies at high speeds, we sense clearly that no level of intelligence, virtue, or fortitude is strong enough to deflect them, not even by a hair” (On Pain § 3). One no longer loses a battle because of lack of skill, foresight, or discipline, but because of a single tripwire.

In response to the need to understand the technological age and its effect on society, both Heidegger and Jünger attempt to pinpoint in what crucial ways human experience has changed. For Heidegger, the goal of understanding technology by identifying its essence is to diagnose what sort of world we find ourselves in in order to determine a “free relationship” to it (“The Question Concerning Technology” 3). Jünger shares the goal of understanding the technological age, but with the very different goal of determining how we can integrate ourselves with it as closely as possible, rather than trying to assign it a moral or humanistic value. So what is technology and how do we encounter it, or rather, how does it encounter us? In the first place, Heidegger firmly believes that “We shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 4). In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger seeks to understand technology in the truest sense by getting to the bottom of what it is, rather than how it is used or what it does. Rejecting the instrumental definition of technology, which defines technology according to “the manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 4-5), he instead identifies the essence of technology as an “enframing.” This “enframing” is a way of revealing a truth about the world to us: “Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 20). Specifically, technology is a way of revealing the world to us as standing-reserve.

Although “modern technology is viewed, like any earlier technology, as something human, invented, realized, developed, steered and secured by humans for humans” (“Traditional Language and Technological Language” 133), technology acts on us as much (if not more) as we act on it. By “[placing] the unreasonable demand on nature that it supply energy” (“Traditional Language and Technological Language” 136), technology causes beings to appear to us as purely the energy that can be extracted from them at a moment’s notice, to the exclusion of other truths about them (“The Question Concerning Technology” 17). Heidegger offers the example of mining, writing that when set aside for the purpose, “The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 15). It is true that iron- and mineral-rich land is rich ground for extracting these deposits; however, a danger of technology is that this is only one out of many ways of understanding the beings presented to us, but it is erroneously given as final. There are other truths about that same tract of land, but technology changes which of those truths counts as real. Heidegger warns of a general flattening of experience into its quantifiable characteristics when he writes: “There is a decision concerning the character of the reality of nature. Max Planck, the founder of quantum physics, has expressed this decision in a short sentence: ‘Real is that which can be measured.’ Only what is calculable in advance counts as being” (“Traditional Language and Technological Language” 136). Heidegger outlines the possibility that essential aspects of human experience could be lost when he criticizes the declaration “real is that which can be measured” as the ultimate truth.

In contrast, Jünger is more interested in describing the state of the world as it is, focusing on the demands that the technological age poses to human life and connecting technology primarily with military activity, surveillance, and standardization, writing, “The growing objectification of our life appears most distinctly in technology, this great mirror, which is sealed off in a unique way from the grip of pain. Technology is our uniform. Yet we are too deeply immersed in this process to comprehend it to its full extent” (On Pain § 11). Jünger recognizes the same phenomenon Heidegger describes concerning the move towards defining what is real in terms of what is quantifiable and dismissing other ways of understanding the world as less real, but he describes it in a much more positive light: “The age of security has been superseded with surprising speed by another, in which the values of technology prevail. The logic and mathematics now governing life are extraordinary and awe inspiring” (On Pain § 16). Jünger identifies the technological age as necessitating a new lifestyle which brings the human increasingly under its control: “In all these events we are dealing less with technical changes than with a new way of life. This is seen most clearly in the fact that the instrumental character of these changes is not restricted to the zone of technology but strives to place the human body under its command” (On Pain § 15). Crucially, both Heidegger and Jünger agree that the technological world is something that is given to us, emphasizing a character of helplessness in the human to oppose it. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger writes, “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (4). Heidegger emphasizes that time and place, rather than individual will, determines the enframing of the world that confronts the individual: “Man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws… the thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 18). These changes take place without our awareness or our consent, so it is not possible to simply change one’s mind. By virtue of living in the technological age, “The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 18). Clearly, the technological world is inescapable and changes the very way we think without our knowing it.

Where Heidegger and Jünger part ways is in how each believes we ought to respond to the given-ness of the technological age. Jünger’s response to this condition is very simple: we must integrate ourselves as closely as possible with the machine-state. Jünger’s 1932 essay The Worker, referenced in On Pain, describes how the nineteenth century ideal of the liberal individual has become extinct, replaced by a new form: the worker. The worker must suspend his own will and individuality, submit to the conditions of his time, become one with the machinery of the state and contribute to totalitarian ideology: “In the mass industrial societies of the twentieth century, individual liberty, security, and pacifism are replaced by authority, discipline, and militarism… one no longer speaks of individual rights or private life, but of duty and service to the state” (Translator’s Introduction, On Pain). The correct response to the totalizing tendencies of technology is to submit to it, perhaps exactly the sort of “ordering”  Heidegger is afraid of when he writes, “The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing-reserve” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 33). Jünger’s conviction bristles against Heidegger’s emphasis on freedom, a subject on which Jünger spends considerably fewer words. Jünger gave this statement on freedom in May of 1933: “The ideal of individual freedom has become meaningless over against a spirit that sees happiness in rigorous discipline and service for great deeds” (Translator’s Introduction, On Pain). When Jünger does speak about freedom, he does so very differently, connecting “freedom” with “pain” to draw out the illusory qualities of freedom with sentences like: “Indeed, even the individual is not fully free from pain in this joyful state of security. The artificial check on the elementary forces might be able to prevent violent clashes and to ward off shadows, but it cannot stop the dispersed light with which pain permeates life” (On Pain § 6). According to Jünger, freedom is not something we have lost, but rather something we never had. All the technological age has done is make this apparent where the liberal societies of the past had tried to cover it up. 

For Heidegger, freedom and thought are inextricable and absolutely essential. In a statement almost directly opposing Jünger, Heidegger writes, “For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained to obey” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 25). Jünger counters this within the context of perpetual war, arguing that free thought and the ability to question has become obsolete: “Free inquiry is impossible wherever its essential purpose is preparation for war, because, like a blind man, free inquiry opens all doors arbitrarily. Yet today the only door to unlock is the one to power. Free inquiry is pointless once it becomes clear what should be known and what should not” (On Pain § 9). However, Heidegger seems to resist this “all-in” sort of thinking, which might be called fatalistic. Heidegger is aware of the totalizing tendency of technology, using words like “threatens” and “danger” to describe the enframing which only presents beings to us in one way: “It is precisely in Enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the supposed single way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence—it is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the coming to presence of technology” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 32). For Heidegger, to see the world as Jünger does is to deny all else that is real about the world. Heidegger seems to believe that fundamental human character and human needs have not changed, and the technological world threatens to encroach on humans’ ability to understand the world in a broad sense. Heidegger wants to present a more nuanced and historically informed approach to a technological society by which we might resist its totalizing tendencies.

“Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing?” Again parting with Jünger, who seems to consider art part of the bourgeoisie value system’s illusory protection from pain, Heidegger wonders if other modes of revealing, such as art and poetry, are part of the realm of thought that offers freedom from a single way of understanding the beings that are presented to us (“The Question Concerning Technology” 35). Through a poetic rather than technological revealing, art may help to avert the “extreme danger” of losing sight of truth itself, where “the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 35). The crucial point is that technology is not neutral, and seeing it as such blinds us to the dangers it poses (“The Question Concerning Technology” 4). Although we can stop neither the technological age nor its effects on the human experience, we must be keenly aware that “technology, correctly understood, reigns throughout the whole realm of our reflection” (“Traditional Language and Technological Language” 132). Still, the world has not always been revealed through technology, and may not always be. “Whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 35), but Heidegger is cautiously optimistic that art may help by temporarily presenting beings in a different light, revealing other truths about them so that we understand there is more to their reality than their quantity.