Re: Gary's criticism of EJ

[03643518060-0001@t-online.de (Brown)]

Rebing wrote:
> 
> Gary, it seems to me that you are at odds with EJ about a short life being fulfilled in
> spite of its brevity because his Erkenntnisinteresse, his motive for asking his questions
> and probing the answers, is different from yours. He seeks meaning and sense in death, you
> refuse to see meaning anywhere else than in the visible achievements a human being brings
> about during his lifetime. Another important factor determining EJ's Erkenntnisinteresse
> might be his sheer age. It is old men who tend to say, "Wie es auch sei, das Leben, es ist
> gut", as Goethe wrote when he was 74, and he meant life in general, not only his own, which
> was, certainly by your criteria, a fulfilled one even before he wrote those lines. Günter R

Gary, Günter and the rest,

This raises the important question of meaning in Jünger's work which is
also one of the points where people tend to criticize EJ. Jünger is
often attacked for his "fatalism" (a bad term) which is often
misunderstood. The fact alone that Jünger sees a sort of higher &
inescapable force at work does not reduce the meaning of any given life.
We know that there are various examples, the short life compared with
the long life, the genius and the peasant and so on. But because the
world is meaning for Jünger he sees a deeper relation of things to each
other. Although we might look at them for their achievements we can be
deceived as to their roll within say the scope of events and Being. Take
for example the roll of the tartar peasant finding, saving and healing a
crashed Sturzkampf pilot, who goes on to be one of the most important
artists of the twentieth century. Is it fate? Is there meaning in it?
Who has the greater roll the tartar peasant or Joseph Beuys? One
certainly would not exist without the other. And who is in the position
to give judgement as to the greater of the two? So all the factors
contribute to the work of the artist. Without it his work might not have
been so interesting.*

My point is that Jünger's view of existence take in the smallest details
as meaning and therefore the difference of the short life compared with
the long life has little difference when the interrelatedness of
creation and Being are taken into perspective. This is the point Jünger
does not look at things solely for their material value and he does not
derive meaning from achievement in the sense we are commonly used to.
His approach is certainly not empirical.


*For those of you who might not be familiar with the work of Beuys, it
is almost all autobiographical and draws a great degree from his
experience of being saved by the Tartars after a crash of his
dive-bomber. He would have died if they had not coated his body with fat
and wrapped him in felt, two of his favorite artist materials.

All ze best,
Abdalbarr