§14 Choose your Idols with Great Care + Genius
A Swedish documentary from 1998 called 102 Years in the Heart of Europe is a rare treat and proper gem in the genre (or any genre, really). The journalist Björn Cederberg and producer Jesper Wachtmeister deserve recognition for their cultural contribution. What the documentary* offers is namely a portrait of the German writer, warrior and collector, Ernst Jünger (1895–1998). Without prior arrangement, the Swedes manage to persuade Jünger to conduct an interview in his home in Wilflingen.
Jünger had met some of the most influential people in Europe during the 20th century: Hitler, Goebbels, Niekisch, Brecht, Albert Hoffman (the inventor of LSD), Heidegger, Kohl, Salvador Dali and Mitterand.
The interviewer invited the centenarian, Jünger, to gauge the quality of the people he had met.
Cederberg: “After all those years are there any names or persons that have made a special impression [eindruck] on you? ”
Jünger:
“Mostly the impression has been negative. I was associated with Goebbels. He was a very intelligent man, but what did it lead to? Suicide and being forced to shoot his children. I’ve never met anyone like Leonardo da Vinci, anyhow. [laughs]. But it’s always possible. The absolute genius… Genius is not dependent [hängt nicht] on the epoch [zeitalter]. Genius makes the epoch.” (22m:17s — 23m:40s)
Compare this conception of ‘genius’ with the one offered by Harold Bloom (in his book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, 2002), as quoted in ANow Note §5. Bloom is concerned — writing in 2002 — that the internet, given its ‘great ocean of texts’ will undermine the proper discernment of ‘a work of transcendent eminence’. Sixteen years on and a slightly larger web we can question how and if Bloom would have reformulated the question with even greater emphasis. Nonetheless, if we follow Jünger’s conception of the idea of genius in relation to the epoch or ‘age’ might we be less worried, given that the emergence of a genius is independent of the time or age? Yes, if the detection (or ‘discerning’ in Bloom’s terms) of his (or her, some might think it apt to add) output is necessary for the making of the age (paraphrasing Jünger). No, if the creation of the age or epoch (zeitalder) is independent from the detection and identification of the ‘work of transcendent eminence’.
In this connection we might explore in a future note the importance of the following three or four important and related moves:
1. Heidegger once drew attention to the possibility that there might be Supermen (ubermensch) in our midst.
2. The heroic Ian Hamilton took the burden of responsibility for making it his task to make available before a present audience and posterity great works of poetry and literature, notably through The New Review (through which Philip Larkin became famous), his near-perfect biography on Robert Lowell and other poetry collections. Hamilton was acutely aware and articulate about the importance of this task.
3. Nietzsche indicated that it is the task of a philosopher to lay bare the truth but not to engage in the political practice of repeating it until it is understood: after all, Zarathustra returned to the mountains having realized that the people were not ready for his words. The time, however, might come. Nietzsche anticipated that there will be chairs in his Zarathustra…
4. Enoch Powell emphasized the point (in his interview with Frost) that sometimes a speech is heard only when it is listened many times. The possibility remains, presumably, that it will never be heard at all (although the eternal recurrence of the same would suggest otherwise…) (see ANow Note §10).
/Fred Weibull
*More details about the film here
Originally published at anowmedia.com on April 13, 2018.
