The Will

by Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger argues that the experience of war teaches the initiated that will is fate.

This article was originally published in the journal Standarte on 6 May 1926.

Every experience should be a commitment for us! When we begin to utilize our experiences after clarifying them, to make them useful for serving future goals, we move from a landscape of examination and contemplation into the harsher landscape of will. The values that have been quietly examined, weighed, and acknowledged internally are set into motion externally to realize themselves in struggle. Actions should grow from feelings, weapons from convictions, and a proclamation from faith.

When we raise the question of what we can determine through our will, we do not intend to engage in the debate about the freedom of the will that has accompanied the history of religions and systems of thought to this day. This debate has been countless times dismissed or acknowledged without ever altering reality by a hair’s breadth. Its affirmation or denial is merely an expression of the life sentiment dominating an era. As such an expression, we note that the science of our time, in its current branches, increasingly tends to deny the freedom of the will. Whether the philosophy of history presupposes large, compelling, impersonal forces that seize living entities, or whether modern biology, in neovitalism, presents a doctrine that denies the individual contingencies of Darwinism by assuming a creative and likewise impersonal life force: this should merely be a sign to us. We do not ask whether this or that is inherently true but rather how we want to assert ourselves in our given world. We agree with Karl Marx that it is primarily not about interpreting the world but about changing it. We do not ask as merely thinking beings but as active and willing beings. We do not rely on what we can know. Intellectual understanding is part of our overall stance, which should be in harmony with the others, but it is by no means the essential part.

When we first ask about the possibilities of our will, it is not reason but a compelling feeling that drives us to do so. It arises from a feeling of inner collapse that has accompanied external collapses. We all have willed as humans can will, and at the end of this will stood failure. We have experienced elemental phenomena, wars, and revolutions that trampled over our joys, sufferings, and wishes with the ruthless indifference of natural events. We saw a victory fall to the other side, which we had believed for years to be a certain reward for our will power. And we experience it day by day that the good, true, and just is enthusiastically proclaimed without life deviating even slightly from its great, eternal, predetermined fundamental laws. We have searched for personal guilt in this or that, but if this search had any value for us at all, it was that it convinced us of the necessity, inevitability, and inner logic of what happened. We have asked for the meaning of our experience and could only determine that this meaning must be entirely different from what we then thought, that we indeed willed, but this will was bent into paths entirely different from those it wanted to take. All this has made us very skeptical and justifies us in asking to what extent we can exercise determination at all. For to will more strongly than then is an impossibility.

We are a generation that may already claim great achievements and need not be ashamed before the fathers. But at the end of these achievements stands failure. This throws us into deep conflict, shakes our inner security, and thus our external strength. How firmly our fathers stood in the world! Sons of victory and enlightenment, they dared to see the cause of determining the future in man. In his insights, his expressions of will lay the essence; every movement emerged from them, and the sum of these movements was given the positive sign of progress. Progress, a beautiful word, and so filled with the entire content of belief that even a materialistic generation is capable of that one should not ridicule it afterward. This stance has a unified coherence that is not to be despised. But what good does this acknowledgment do us; we are no longer capable of such a stance due to our profound experience, and from our mouths, such a word is nothing more than a phrase.

Progress — the word has lost its resonance for us. If we used it, we would not only look down on the heroes and saints of past times, but we would also deny our own achievements. And surely we do not want that, even if it led to failure? Rather, we want to be proud of it. Whoever has been abandoned by fortune should not also abandon himself. We would rather relinquish the security of our fathers, the intellectual security. Yes, even if we did not want to — we would have to. We must believe in a higher meaning than the one we are capable of giving to events, and in a higher determination within which what we think we determine takes place. Otherwise, the ground on which we stand will be ripped from under our feet with a jerk, and we will stumble into a senseless, chaotic, random world. What good is it if reason clings to things and seeks to master them when these things are not fundamentally secured and thoroughly ordered? We must believe that everything is meaningfully ordered, otherwise, we will end up among the ranks of the inwardly oppressed, the discouraged, or the world-improvers, or we will live like animals, enduring the day.

Awakening from deep shocks to our innermost being, we sense that we have gained a new center around which this being revolves. It is still a premonition, a dull feeling that unsettles an entire generation and does not let it rest. Prophets appear, truths are proclaimed, every word seems to have become new and triggers strange excitements. A generation weary of enlightenment begins to take religion very seriously again, all somehow significant books of our and foreign cultures are reprinted and understood differently than they were ten years ago, and everywhere, so much is spoken, read, and written about all things that even the most indifferent must feel the great unrest that has awakened. New communities are founded, old ones are revitalized, and the feeling that the logical structure of the world has loosened in our consciousness directs people to engage with the supernatural, an engagement that reveals itself around us from its highest elevations and deepest plunges to the follies and hucksterings that fill the columns of newspapers. The war is the great turning point, it manifests itself from the history of metaphysics to that of medicine and from our conception of the soul and the state to that of money or civil law. Everything is still in the stage of groping and attempting, but a little more faith, a little more seriousness — and we stand in a different world.

The belief in a hidden meaning also fills us, a generation tempered in many ways, born in the glowing womb of the trenches and proud of its past. That this past borders on the present with a failure should not lead us to conclude that it was meaningless, as we can hear today from every shopkeeper and at every street corner. What men die for can never be meaningless. Even a downfall is not without meaning. Today, placed in the same situation again, we would, wiser from experience, do this or that differently, but in essence, which lies before all experience, our stance would hopefully be exactly the same. One may accuse us of being unteachable: we know that there are things that cannot be learned because they are innate. We do not want to judge by success or failure, as is the way of the rabble of all strata, but we want to ask what is necessary to do. Whether this action will be successful, we do not know, but we know that it fulfills a meaning.

We want to call the great source and cause of this necessity fate. In fate, we see nothing blind and random, but a creative force whose goals we do not know and whether it has goals at all or is nothing but a pure, divine movement, equally powerful and equally perfect in one moment as in another. However, we can recognize the trend of fate, which manifests itself as a feeling for the necessary, as a compulsion that often leads us to act against our own interest, against peace, happiness, and life itself. Our will should be directed by this necessity. We have all experienced moments when fate seized us with its full power. We know that these are dramatic moments, not revealed to every generation, from which a long chain of joys and sorrows begins. But these joys should not entice us, and these sorrows should not frighten us from doing the necessary and wanting what fate wants. It is a great affirmation from the joy of conception to the pains of birth and from a declaration of war that is necessary to the end of the struggle by which it must be sealed. Whether fate makes its demands ours or we make our demands its own, that is a professor’s question that does not concern us. We see no separation here, but a highest unity, a centaur-like fusion of rider and horse.

So we want the necessary. Why? Because it is necessary! What will we achieve with it? Meaning. And that is the essential, the absolutely attainable, even if this meaning should be our downfall. But we, old soldiers raised in the habit of war, have never made our happiness or unhappiness, our being or our downfall the dominant question. What does it matter to us?

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)