«For the fight against nihilism to be successful, it must take place in the heart of the individual. Everyone is involved in it and no one can do without the treatment that has been prepared by the world of pain ». “So he expressed it Peace (1945) Ernst Jünger, Solitary Contemplator of that short century which nevertheless was so enduring with that heavy burden of ideologies and narratives that our contemporaneity struggles to shake off, and rather reworks in the postmodern forms of pastiche and collage.
Today, 127 years after the birth of this multifaceted dandy, capable of facing the temperatures of steel storms and total mobilization with the same deep and detached gaze exercised in the contemplation of the forms of the sacred and in the examination of nihilism, his work does not ceases to offer ideas of extraordinary relevance.
“Peace”
In particular, it seems fruitful to us to evoke, in the current geopolitical context, some ideas offered by “La pace”, an essay now out of print in Italy, erroneously considered minor, which instead summarizes many of the great insights of Jünger’s work. Written in the rubble of a Europe torn apart by a fratricidal clash, “Peace” is an imaginative yard of utopian – but not utopian – intuitions for a “restructuring” of European civilization. The starting point for this enterprise, according to Jünger, is not placed in the balance between powers, but in the fabric of the individual: it is in the differentiated man, capable of overcoming nihilism by informing him and subjecting him to his own inner disposition, who reveals himself to be the possibility of founding a Europe that is the fruit of the “marriage of its peoples”, aimed at “higher freedom” by means of a “spiritual act”.
Jungian’s ruthless critique of “red” and “black” totalitarianism
This project is possible “only if men are strengthened from the metaphysical point of view”: this is why the merciless Jüngerian critique of “red” and “black” totalitarianisms does not leave the liberal perspective unscathed – “in the polemic against the nihilists, the liberals they resemble fathers who complain about unsuccessful children, without realizing that the fault lies with wrong education “: in short, no political form of modernity is exempt from nihilism. The check against the “disturbing guest” of Europe will take place through the harmony of the sovereign decision of the individual with the manifestation of a “New Theology”, suitable for an organic re-symbolization of reality: only here, in the “spirits who live in the totality of creation There can be peace. Peace imposed by law, coercion, threats, is only external, authentic peace is an “internal” exercise, more courageous than that of war. It will be achieved, Jünger prophesies, only if “we are able to free ourselves from hatred and its splits. The individual is similar to the light which, by flaring up, forces the darkness to retreat ». At one hundred and twenty-seven, Jünger is more alive than many dead-to-life.
