#ernst junger

“Yes, the soldier in his relationship with death, in his personal commitment to an idea, knows very little about philosophers and their values. But in him and his deed, life expresses itself more poignantly and more deeply than any book could ever do.”

« La manie égalitariste des démagogues est encore plus dangereuse que la brutalité des hommes en redingote. [...] Un homme qui a été égalisé est ruiné physiquement et moralement. »

Heroes, lovers and believers don´t extinguish: they are rediscovered in every age, and in this sense myth always emerges. The situation in which we find ourselves resembles an interlude in which the curtain has fallen whilst a disconcerting mutation of the workers and accessories is taking place.

—Max Stirner, “The Owner,” The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“When all institutions have become equivocal or even disreputable, and when open prayers are heard even in churches not for the persecuted but for the persecutors, at this point moral responsibility passes into the hands of individuals, or, more accurately, into the hands of any still unbroken individuals. The forest rebel is the concrete individual, and he acts in the concrete world. He has no need of theories or of laws concocted by some party jurist to know what is right. He descends to the very springs of morality, where the waters are not yet divided and directed into institutional channels. Matters become simple here—assuming something uncorrupted still lives in him. We already saw that the great experience of the forest is the encounter with one’s own Self, with one’s invulnerable core, with the being that sustains and feeds the individual phenomenon in time. This meeting, which aids so powerfully in both returning to health and banishing fear, is also of highest importance in a moral sense. It conducts us to that strata which underlies all social life and has been common to all since the origins. It leads to the person who forms the foundation beneath the individual level, from whom the individuations emanate. At this depth there is not merely community; there is identity. It is this that the symbol of the embrace alludes to. The I recognizes itself in the other, following the age-old wisdom, “Thou art that.” This other may be a lover, or it may be a brother, a fellow sufferer, or a defenseless neighbor. By helping in this manner, the I also benefits itself in the eternal. And with this the basic order of the universe is confirmed.”

The Glass Bees