From Culture Warriors to Agrarians

Discussion of Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Jünger is no longer confined to idiosyncratic philosophy departments or German studies. Billy Graham might be shocked that conservative Protestants were now debating how to deal with Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. Heady but strange stuff. What hath Freiburg to do with Jerusalem?

Quite a lot, as these dissidents are thinking. The various pieces written in recent years suggest the interest in these thinkers is foremost political: Late modern liberalism tolerates everything except intolerance, here meaning everything that demands an exclusive commitment. All particular loves—home, kin, religion—must be dissolved into the general and exchange-able. Liberalism thus enforces its own friend-enemy distinction: between the universally tolerable and the intolerably particular. So what should those committed to particular loves—kith and kin, particular God or American way—do? Make friends and enemies of their own, following Schmitt. And this means forming and acknowledging distinct identities, casting off notions about an everyone-included public life, all to will oneself to be in and for oneself, a self with friends and enemies—and power, to take and enforce. Can a Christian be such a particular, political, aggressive, powerful self? Can a Christian community be so? To the thymotic spirits active on social media, the fate of the West depends on the answer ‘yes.’

I will not intervene in these political debates, except to note that, as his American biographer once warned me, Schmitt’s book Political Theology has very little to do with theology. What I do have to share comes from some years of reading the later writings of Schmitt, Heidegger, and Jünger. And what will start us down the meandering path of this essay is what both Heidegger and Leo Strauss judged of Schmitt, and what Schmitt admitted was an accurate accusation: “he thinks like a liberal.”

Now that’s a paradox for those trying to fight liberalism, just as for those trying to defend it. The ‘sides’—as the friend-enemy distinction demands, there must be sides; and that is tiresome—get switched. The Schmittians trying to beat liberal modernity are the liberals, and the liberals must look in the mirror and see Schmitt staring back at them. Why?

The later Schmitt might have the answer in “The Tyranny of Values.” The essay, which was published along with another essay by the theologian Eberhard Jüngel, deals with the rise of global politics by way of values: nations and alliances now fight, not over such quaint things as land and resources, but over ‘values,’ civilizational identities, ideologies that decide what really matters, as crystallized in systematized ‘worldviews.’ And there are quite a few unsettling ironies about these new geopolitics: ‘Worldviews’ imply someone taking the whole world, not just their own humble orchard, into view and command. Values always imply a valuer, and not a divine one—after all, we’re the ones deciding whether God is the highest value or not. For value depends not on truth but upon will, and the will may decide whatever it wants, exchanging whatever it wants whenever, so long as it gets what it wants, which, ultimately, is only for the will to decide. Thus the great battle of values—even if they be traditional or anti-modern, reactionary or conservative or Christian, over and against the progressive or the mandarin or the materialistic—turns out to be itself modern and subjective. Both sides in the value war are taking their stands in the global marketplace of ideas, because a global marketplace is the only way any of us knows how to think about this world anymore. And here in this marketplace,

the old gods emerge from their graves and fight their old battle again, but they are disenchanted and… fight with new instruments of battle that are no longer weapons, but rather frightful means of destruction and eradication, horrible products of value-free science and the industry and technology served by it.

Sound familiar?

Schmitt did not offer any escape from the battle. But his critique of the tyranny of values applies to his own former distinction between friend and enemy just as well as to the modern liberals he was complaining about. For a return to simple brute force, us vs. them politics would not escape the tyranny of values. In fact, as we see now, that same friend-enemy distinction is being used by those who would wish to wage a global war of values, even if that global war is meant to be won for the sake of the local or regional or, heaven forbid, the Christian.

Schmitt must have known this. After all, he admitted that Strauss and Heidegger (from whom he took his critique of values) “saw right through” him: he had been thinking like a liberal. It is telling that he, the broken Catholic (thanks to an early divorce) would let this late essay be published along with the Protestant Jüngel’s “Value-Free Truth.” Here Jüngel called for a re-orientation away from values and toward truth: interruptive truth, the kind where the global valuing of the subject cor curvum se is broken through by none other than Jesus Christ, the Divine Word made flesh. This Word justifies, it does not value, and thus it breaks the tyranny of values, not by going back, but by going forward in love. For the truth is love, and love makes things, even unvalued things, true, self-evidently true, and good. As Jüngel concludes, the Christian ethic “not only does the self-evident, but it also creates new self-evident realities,” one being, namely, that we all should love our neighbors, even our enemies, as ourselves. Maybe Schmitt himself couldn’t admit that truth. But he did let the theologian follow him and say it.

Late in Martin Heidegger’s life, he once told that same Jüngel: “God—that is the most worthy object of thought. But that’s where language breaks down.” That same Heidegger, who had once been a Catholic seminarian, had lambasted the Catholic and Confessing Church during the Reich and lamented “world Jewry” some years before in the privacy of his notebooks, which, to his shame, have now been published. In an irony that he—one of the least ironic thinkers in modernity—must have missed, Heidegger used the most abstract tropes to condemn the uprooted life of abstraction and placelessness he feared was overtaking the late modern West.

Perhaps he learned his own lesson these years later. He, Schmitt, and Jünger thought about starting a journal together. When intellectuals want to change the world, they start journals. But that was just the problem, Heidegger realized: we keep trying to change to the world that doesn’t satisfy our desires. We do not let the world be, we always keep trying to fix and secure it for ourselves, and only ourselves. So how to change the world that’s suffering from too much changing by human hands? The later Heidegger recommended a different approach: by not changing it, by letting the world be, for itself. He would come to call this non-action Gelassenheit, which he took from the Christian preacher Meister Eckhart. And they never founded that journal.

By this time, Heidegger had decided to stay put in his beloved Schwarzwald. For the rest of his life, he would entertain friends, locals, and fellow thinkers, give occasional seminars, and walk—and walk, and walk, through the woods and countryside. On hikes with a friend, the Catholic philosopher Max Müller, he would genuflect whenever they came to a church or chapel. Müller once asked him why, given his ambivalence to the faith. Heidegger answered, “where there has been so much praying, there the divine is present in a very special way.” 

In a late interview, a reporter asked Heidegger what philosophy can do to help change the world. He replied, “only a god can save us.” Which god? Who knows. I suspect Heidegger never came to feel quite at home with the Christianity of his youth. Perhaps he never could forgive Christianity for separating human beings from the world, the ultimate co-inherence of human being and world, world and human being having been one of his most original insights. But as the Orthodox Christian philosopher Charles Malik, who studied under Heidegger and felt a great passion for the man, warned in a speech celebrating the latter’s 85^th birthday:

this is the whole point, for it belongs to Christ to make people—all people and not the Germans alone—not feel at home in their home. Because he ever reminds them of their true home, namely the heavenly Jerusalem, of their desperate need for being near, not only their soil and their earth and their roots and their forests and their hearth and their folk and their gods, but for being near him, which is the surest way—indeed the only way—of enabling them to be truly near all these other things.

Heidegger might’ve gotten a sense of that advice. After all, he came to suggest that there might be a God who comes between us humans, with our vain notions of fixing and changing and ruling, and that world we fail to let be. And that coming would be our salvation. A year later, Heidegger asked his hometown friend, Fr. Bernard Welte, for a Catholic burial in their home village of Meßkirch. Heidegger’s last written words were to Welte: “there is need for contemplation whether and how, in the age of a uniform technological world civilization, there can still be such a thing as home.” Malik attended Heidegger’s final homecoming, alongside Ernst Jünger.

Now for Jünger. Of the three, he undoubtedly lived the most interesting life. He first achieved fame as a memoirist of WWI, his Storm of Steel captivating the public in 1920. He then turned to gnomic interpretations of the high modern west: The Worker and On Pain both were mesmerized analyses, at once ambivalent and awestruck, of the organization culture that was the apex of the twentieth century. No longer was life about people but about machines, wars no longer won by heroes but by processes, individuals melding into one technological action as ants building the colony. In this new world, Jünger had only one word of advice: “Prepare for war.”

War would come, although Jünger, as typical of him, remained ambivalent. He opposed the Nazi party from the start, though Hitler liked his public persona too much to persecute him. Yet he opposed Nazism as an aristocrat against hoi polloi—which never earned him admirers among liberals, then or since. When WWII broke out, he reported for duty, serving as an intelligence officer in Paris, where he would dine with Picasso and correspond with intellectuals and aesthetes—and other discontents with the Nazi regime. On one “significant date,” June 7, 1942, he recorded in his diary, he abhorred seeing for the first time a little girl wearing the Jewish yellow star. Perhaps this moment was significant because he now saw the dehumanizing effect of the organization principle. A human being replaced by a symbol, a technical sign really, of ‘them,’ denoting for this assigned specimen of ‘enemy’ an eventual track toward extermination. In this moment, he recorded, “I was immediately embarrassed to be in uniform”—a symbol this aesthetic warrior had always taken great pride in donning.

As the war was turning for the worse in 1943, Jünger began secretly distributing Die Friede (The Peace), a manifesto for a united postwar Europe based on Christian values. Conspirators against Hitler used it as a guide. (To speculate: one of them, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, may have had read Jünger’s work and wrote Ethics as his own try.) In contrast to earlier work, which dwelled on the types of the factory worker and modern soldier, he dwelled on die Opfer, the sacrificial victim—the civilian, who, for the first time in modern warfare, bore the brunt of destruction. He called for a unified Europe that would prize the freedom and dignity of this sacrificed individual and shun the totalitarianism of the collective state, whether communist or fascist. His son was killed, likely by the SS for conspiring against Hitler.

Jünger didn’t seem to have taken spiritually to the ‘values’ he wanted to build the world back with, at least not for many years—a good illustration of why Christians should remain skeptical of values-talk. After the war, Jünger removed himself from politics, partly due to suspicion from the Allies, while he drew closer to fellow writers, among them Schmitt and Heidegger. He moved to a secluded village in Swabia, experimented with LSD, kept up his lifelong love of studying beetles, and eventually wrote over fifty books.

As the years passed, his work increasingly criticized bureaucracy’s totalitarian form and dwelled on the possibility of freedom in this world of mass democracy, technology, and market commodification. He expected the rise of a Weltstaat, which would be a disaster—precisely because it would bring total order and organization. It is interesting that, as his work continued, his treatment of the Christian Church and its theologians gradually shifted from generous but diffident camaraderie to genuine interest—and that in tandem with his agrarian way of life. Jünger came to embody the veteran who returned home to the fields, a far different figure from that bellicose dandy who had gotten famous so many years before. At 101 years old, Jünger was received into the Catholic church and began taking the sacraments, and one year later he died.

Today, these three men and their writings are getting renewed attention for their political potential: how they can help certain groups—among them, Christians—get and maintain power. But the course of life that Schmitt, Heidegger, and Jünger took suggests that, in the end, what came to concern them was not merely what to do about the crisis of the West. It would be a shame today if the Christians were the ones to miss the real wisdom these men found instead. They found that the crisis of civilization is not so much whether the righteous can defeat their enemies, but whether, in the present, each person will submit himself to the Eternity that transcends him, ever and always. To this Eternity, political action, culture warring, whether with words or weapons, could not compare. And in the face of this Eternity, what could be done? Waiting, watching, yearning, even praying, perhaps.

And besides that: tending to one’s garden, walking the trails, cataloguing beetles, recusing oneself from ‘the discourse.’ While we can’t speculate much more over their spiritual states, neither can we deny the form of life they chose to take in their later years: quiet contemplation with devoted family and friends and attention to the places and people that made their homes. Conviviality, in a word.

Can the rest of us afford such inaction? Yes—and that’s the point. For the travesty of modernity is its constant demand—from left or right—for action, control, and efficiency. But the first step into an agrarian attitude is to step back from such demands. Instead, let the world be. Let God’s Providence be. Look to the lilies, look to the birds—or the beetles, as Jünger preferred. Only afterward will you know what little God has given you to do, for then you shall have come to know, at least a little, of what is.

Yes, yes, all this is interesting, but what must we do about these odd and dangerous theorists, then and now? Especially us Christians, who must maintain the faith against the radical left or the radical right? What do I recommend to those dissidents promoting Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger? Or to those unsettled by such figures flowing into the mainstream, to help them fight these dissidents?

Keep reading, right to the end. And don’t stop searching. For he who seeks shall find, and to him who knocks the door shall be opened.

Further Reading:

Carl Schmitt, The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts

Eberhard Jüngel, “Value-Free Truth,” in Theological Essays II

Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations

Charles H. Malik, “A Christian Reflection on Martin Heidegger”

Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs

Image via Picryl