“It is important to note that it is precisely the most vigorous life that sacrifices itself most willingly. It is better to go down like a bursting meteor than to go out trembling.”

Ernst Jünger.

We say: let work return to the servants. Let Action be known, be willed, be affirmed beyond work. Let the furrow be dug anew, harshly, rigidly: where there is “work” there is no spirit, where there is spirit there is no work. Let the scorn for the contaminating “myth” and for its counterpart—profit, gain, “compensation”—be nourished anew in an elite.

Return to pure activity, to that which—yes—“serves no purpose”, because its value lies within itself, because it itself is “value”, and does not produce things, does not produce illusory conquests of an illusory reality, does not produce new links for the sinister chain of the social aggregate excited by an ever-increasing artificial need, but instead produces luminous culminations of beings who tear themselves away from the mass and from the dark law of the earth.

Who is still capable of heeding the call of this “ethic”? Of the sole aristocratic ethic?

In his speech for his brother’s 70th birthday, Ernst Jünger addressed the civilizational crisis: “It was not this or that war that was lost, but war itself, the warrior’s war.” Jünger characterizes this crisis as “not merely world‑historical but cosmic in nature.”

https://erenyesilyurt.com/index.php/2025/07/12/ernst-jungers-speech-on-the-70th-birthday-of-his-brother-friedrich-georg-junger/

"If we were ever to be reproached for having come from an age of harshness and violence, we would reply: we fought knee-deep in the mud and in blood, but our faces were turned towards things of high and great value."

Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel.

Even in a religious context, one can attend church and allow the scripture to enter one ear and exit the next much as it came; instead, it is only through zeal, relentless honing, and commitment that one clambers onto the next rung of closeness to the absolute.

One can pontificate, absorb, and write forever, yet find the man who can match all three in his climb.

Nietzsche on dueling.

The Worker in the Thought of Ernst Jünger
Julius Evola

This essay presents and analyzes Jünger's main work from his early period, "Der Arbeiter," in which the echoes of his existential experiences as a highly decorated combatant were still alive, and which essentially addresses the problem of vision and the meaning of life in the modern age, and especially in the age of technology. For Junger, the worker is not a social class, and even less so the proletarian worker. He is a symbol.

In the 1950s, Evola tried unsuccessfully to have a translation of the book published; failing in his attempt, he decided to produce a long annotated paraphrase with updates necessary for the post-World War II period, in order to make it an autonomous and personal work. This new edition includes other of Evola's writings on Jünger published between 1943 and 1974, documenting the evolution of his point of view, and an extensive bibliography.

https://tradition.st/the-worker-in-the-thought-of-ernst-junger/

"Three good resolutions. First, "Live moderately", because almost all of the difficulties in my life have been caused by a lack of moderation.

Second, "Always keep an eye out for the unfortunate". Man's inability to perceive real misfortune is one of his innate tendencies, and even more than this: he turns away from it. Compassion lags behind.

Finally, I want to banish the desire for individual salvation in the vortex of possible catastrophes. It is more important to behave with dignity. We secure ourselves only on the surface points of a whole that remains hidden from us, and the very evasion that we devise can kill us."

"The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology."
—Carl Schmitt.

“The only thing that matters is the silent endurance of a few, whose impassible presence as “stone guests” helps to create new relationships, new distances, new values, and helps to construct a pole that, although it will certainly not prevent this world inhabited by the distracted and restless from being what it is, will still help to transmit to someone the sensation of the truth — a sensation that could become for them the principle of a liberating crisis.”
—Julius Evola.

And, ultimately, the “Olympic” ideal is a value, a value of clarity, order, hierarchy, of a cosmos in the original Greek sense, sovereignty that has resolved chaos and transcended the purely human element, just as the cold clarity of the peaks overlooks the uncertain mists of the valley.

“Before my eyes, there slowly emerged a giant snake coiled about the earth a snake that by constantly swallowing its own tail vanquished polarities; the ultimate huge snake that mocks all opposites.

Opposites carried to extremes come to resemble each other; and things that are farthest removed from each other, by increasing the distance between them, come closer together. This is the secret that the circle of the snake expounded.

The flesh and spirit, the sensual and the intellectual, the outside and the inside, will remove themselves a pace from the earth, and high up, higher even than the where the snake-ring of white clouds encircling the earth is joined, they too will be joined.”
—Yukio Mishima.

“When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically…when a boxer counts as a great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a spector over all this uproar the question: what for?-where to?-and what then? The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.”
—Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics.

“His apartment was a long sequence of rooms. At the end was his library, in the center of which hung the Stieler portrait of Goethe, and beyond it his study. Nothing ‘genius-like’ or chaotic in this home. Next to his desk hung the death masks of Napoleon and Frederick the Great. And in the first room stood the grand piano on which he played old Italian music, Verdi, and Wagner. This fondness for Wagner, which had often brought him to Bayreuth, was probably more for the last musical genius than for the artist. Here, too, there was something of wistfulness and longing.”

—Fritz Behn describing the apartment of his friend Oswald Spengler.