The Berlin Review of Books | Life, ‘Technics’, and the Decline of the West

“Through much of our history, ‘technics’ was manifested mainly in natural forces and processes, but with the age of technology – of Jünger’s world of ‘totally mobilised’ Arbeiter – we enter a new stage in the history of our species. Indeed, ours is the final stage, the dramatic point of culmination. ‘The creature is rising up against its creator’, warns Spengler, since under loathsome bourgeois influence we are ‘becoming the slave of the Machine’. Seeking comfort, profit, and utility, we are being lulled to sleep, dominated by ‘technics’, surrendering our vital power and spirit. Man and Technics contributes to a ‘philosophy of life’, then, by awakening in us a sense of our ‘doom’…”