1 Duty is a great desire, desire a small duty.
2 What you have to do vs. what you want to do: duty is something you «might» want to do, that is: you can align yourself with it. But you can’t avoid it; it’s your lot, your destiny, your talent.
3 Much of what gets chalked up to desire is a command from duty.
4 Desires as misaligned duty.
5 It’s duty that laughs best.
6 Well-being is the healthy unfolding of that law you are.
7 If we say desire is the branches, and that we can «find the way in» to duty so it interests us, that is how, from the branches, «perfect roundnesses sprout.» Desire is the most exoteric part of duty; hence the fruit of duty hangs from desire.
8 From that kind of relation to the law we are, the heroic appears. It is at once what sets us apart from the rest and what all kinds of greatness have in common; it is also what surprises us in others, in their «faults as much as their virtues.»
9 The union between the parts comes from duty; and from the overvaluing of desire over duty comes doubt about those relations.
“Guidelines are, of course, enough for the execution of great efforts, but not for the execution of lasting efforts; within the undivided current of the world's tide, breath is far too scarce.”
Jünger wrote this before 1964; it still seems to hold true 62 years later.
“The question of the entrusted mission is a question suited only to confuse the man of action. «He who goes farthest is the one who does not know where he is going». In the Promethean workshop, with its countless fires, the light that prevails is more telluric-Plutonic than Apollonian. In the places where a world is being born amid enormous convulsions, one will look in vain for the mission assigned by the gods, the heroic ethos, paternal right. Between two birth pangs fear and blindness reign - whoever wishes to stand firm will have to exchange transcendental optimism for fundamental optimism. Then, in the real world too, the necessary forces will be supplied to him.”
10 Some of this is starting to show up in physics; little by little, explanation is gaining value over prediction (David Deutsch1).
11 «Inside, everything is done»; outside, that same thing is better expressed with pauses, with commas and periods. Is this just a matter of speed? Maybe.
12 Is the principate coming back? Has the page turned? Has the direction in which character moves now shifted from diastole to systole? And what radius does that change of direction have? Is it one of those shoots that stay on the margins, or will it be with us for the next thirty years?
13 When you look at the American left, you get the feeling it's running out of breath. And in Trump, do we see a first, premature figure of the new direction we're all moving in?
Even in technology, it wasn't only the left that had reached an extreme; today the conservative seems to have more presence than before.
14 «The courts of the muses are for princes who have time»2. Will spiritualization inevitably grow?
15 Stupidity understands the same thing, but takes it literally; it lacks an inner force that would make it speak of something else even when it gets things wrong?
16 If we accept that we are still in a titanic and Promethean stage, we also have to accept that we are in a transitional stage; then the hero and the Dionysian would be possible, at least in an unleashed and titanic way.
This would be a fundamental hero but not yet a transcendental one, a creator of branches and branching points, but he would not yet bear fruit beyond the bridges he builds in his workshops.
17 The fruit of duty hangs from desire. But desires today are not enough. By this we don’t mean that we need more radical desires, but something more radical than desires.
We need to create “new” desires; what the world lacks is the advent. This has already happened several times throughout human history. The Greeks saw stages like ours as titanic; Nietzsche saw it as the death of God, especially the Christian God, Bloy as his withdrawal.
18 No matter how one wants to interpret it, what’s missing today is the creation of “new” desires, and in the meantime: goodwill: not blaming each other for what happens to all of us, not blaming others for what we ourselves also cause.
19 How to create new parables today, like drawing a bow and shooting an arrow farther beyond. Is it enough to remind ourselves, in an age that by its nature values the road more than the goal, to build bridges? Maybe yes.
You never know who will later cross them, so there are plenty of dangers—but wasn’t it always like that? What does it mean today to create bridges?
References
- David Deutsch — This Is The World - Proof the Multiverse Is Real (Interference & AGI)
- Ernst Jünger — Máximas y mínimas a El Trabajador
- Ernst Jünger — Máximas y mínimas a El Trabajador
Guidelines are, of course, enough for the execution of great efforts, but not for the execution of lasting efforts; within the undivided current of the world's tide, breath is far too scarce.
- Ernst Jünger — Máximas y mínimas a El Trabajador
The question of the entrusted mission is a question suited only to confuse the man of action. «He who goes farthest is the one who does not know where he is going». In the Promethean workshop, with its countless fires, the light that prevails is more telluric-Plutonic than Apollonian. In the places where a world is being born amid enormous convulsions, one will look in vain for the mission assigned by the gods, the heroic ethos, paternal right. Between two birth pangs fear and blindness reign - whoever wishes to stand firm will have to exchange transcendental optimism for fundamental optimism. Then, in the real world too, the necessary forces will be supplied to him.