Controversies and Viewpoints

by Alain de Benoist

  Against the Modern World

  Born in Rome on 19th May, 1898, Julius Evola experiences his first literary encounters with the works of Nietzsche, Michelstädter186 and Otto Weininger187 (Sex and Character). During World War I, he serves as an artillery officer on the battle front. Next, he participates in the avant-garde cultural movements that were, at the time, developing in Italy: Dadaism with Tristan Tzara and Futurism with Marinetti. Several poems and paintings thus see the light of day. In 1920, he publishes a brochure on Abstract Art, as part of the Dada collection of Zürich. The event is a consecration.

  His scientific education, however, drives him to look beyond such endeavours. A first series of essays expresses his interest in philosophy (The Theory of the Absolute Individual, 1920), esotericism (The Hermetic Tradition, 1931), and the movement of ideas (The Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism, 1932).

  From 1927 to 1929, he runs the Ur magazine and, a year later, takes charge of La Torre. He explains:

  The term ur is an ancient denomination of “fire”, but it also relates to what is “primordial” and “original” (a meaning that has been preserved in German).

  The year of 1934 is marked by the publication of a crucial work: Revolt Against the Modern World. The book is a sort of manifesto in which Evola describes, in an effort to contrast them, ‘two universal types, two a priori categories of civilisation’: the modern world and the world of tradition, a tradition that associates Western esotericism (the Templar adventure and the mystery of the Grail) with a return to the sources of pre-Christian antiquity and a ‘hyperborean’ past.

  The notion of progress is rejected from the very outset:

  Nothing seems more absurd than this idea of progress which, alongside its corollary of modern civilisational superiority, has created “positive” alibis for itself by falsifying history, injecting minds with pernicious myths and proclaiming its own superiority within the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it, in fact, stems.

  In Evola’s eyes, the modern world is ‘a petrified forest with chaos at its very centre’. The history of the past two millennia has therefore not been one of progress, but one of involution.

  Evola compares the West to a body:

  Having previously been alive and endowed with mobility, the organisms are overcome by rigidity, transforming the body into a cadaver. Then commences the terminal phase of decomposition.

  He then adds:

  We have entered the final state of a cycle. The reign of the machine, the thriving of materialism and invasive egalitarianism are its clear signs. The noose of Bolshevism and Americanism, both of which are founded upon an economistic conception of life, tightens around European culture. We are living in the dark age of the ancient Indians (the Kali-Yuga), the iron age of the classical tradition, and the age of the wolf of the Nordic world. Tradition lies forgotten.

  Having thus inverted the historical perspective, Evola makes no effort to conceal this methodological bias:

  The questions with which we concern ourselves most are those in which all materials of “historical” and “scientific” value matter least; those in which all that is devoid of historical truth and demonstrative power, whether myth, legend or saga, acquires, for this very reason, superior validity and thus becomes the source of a more genuine and more certain knowledge. […] It is in this way that the Rome of legends shall speak to us in a clearer language than the worldly Rome, and the legends of Charlemagne shall enable us to gain a better understanding of what it meant to be king among the Franks than the period’s chronicles and positive documents ever could. One shall thus not concern themselves much with discussions and “demonstrations”. The truths which enable us to comprehend the traditional world are not those that are “taught” and “discussed”. They either are or are not: one can only remember them.

  He concludes:

  Only a return to tradition within a new, unitary European consciousness will be able to save the West.

  Immediately upon its release, the book causes a great deal of commotion. Having read it, poet Gottfried Benn declares himself ‘transformed’. In Evola’s Italian homeland, however, the reactions are mixed. Despite his connection to Mussolini, Julius Evola has a large number of adversaries among the ranks of the Fascist Party. Philosopher Giovanni Gentile also adopts a hostile attitude. The aristocratic pessimism that emanates from Evola’s work does not suit an era that practices make-to-order triumphalism, and his Pagan Imperialism, published in 1928, still causes severe teeth-grinding in concordatarian188 milieus.

  Evola continues to show his interest in esotericism. Following The Hermetic Tradition, he publishes The Doctrine of Awakening, which focuses on the asceticism of Buddhism, and The Yoga of Power. In his Mystery of the Grail (1937), he proceeds to study the foundations of ‘the Empire’s Ghibelline tradition’. He also paves the way for ‘spiritual anthropology’ and, abiding by the example of Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (Rasse une Seele,189 1933), undertakes to define race in accordance with criteria that are not strictly biological (The Myth of Blood, 1937; Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race, 1941).

  In 1945, Evola finds himself in Vienna at a time when the city suffers a violent bombardment. With his spinal column injured, he is hospitalised for several months; his legs would remain paralysed.

  He returns to Italy in 1948. Two years later, in an essay entitled Orientations, he presents novel ideas that would later be developed in Men Among the Ruins (1953). Next in line are The Metaphysics of Sex (1958), Ride the Tiger (1961), The Path of Cinnabar (1963), The Bow and the Club (1968), and others.

  The Organic State

  In Men Among the Ruins, Evola touches upon the political question in a most straightforward manner. Addressing himself to rightist Italian youths, he proposes that they embrace ‘a general vision of life and a rigorous doctrine of the state’. He contrasts the modern state with the ideal of the organic state previously praised by both Vico190 and Fustel de Coulanges:191 it is a state in which each has his own place, just as, in an organism, every organ has its own. He says that the state represents a whole that is as spiritual as it is ‘physical’ and is not the ‘reflection’ of society. What it is, instead, is the agent that transforms and structures society and, by assigning a certain destiny to it, turns a cohesionless aggregate into a genuine ensemble that has been raised to the level of political dignity.

  The foundation of every genuine state lies in the transcendence of its principle, meaning of the principle of sovereignty, authority and legitimacy. It is thus to the sphere of the sacred that the ancient Roman notion of Imperium essentially belongs, which, in its specific sense preceding the expression of a system of supranational territorial hegemony, designates the pure power of command, the almost mystical force and auctoritas assumed by whoever exercises leadership functions and possesses the quality of a leader, whether in the religious and military sphere or that of the patrician family (the gens) and, pre-eminently, that of the State (the res publica).

  The state thus comes across as an essentially masculine notion. Its relations with the people (the fatherland, the nation) are analogous to those of a man with a woman or of a pater familias with his own family, and, within Indo-European beliefs, even those between heaven and the earth:

  In ancient Rome, the notion of state and imperium, of sacred power, was thus closely connected to the symbolic worship of virile heavenly divinities, of the light and of the superior world, which embodied the opposite of the obscure region of Mothers and chthonic divinities.

  It was only when the imperium’s resources had been depleted, when the population was no longer in a state to perceive its meaning, that, unable to draw their legitimacy ‘from above’, heads of state took it upon themselves to claim it ‘from below’. Such was democracy, Caesarism, dictatorship and tyranny — different systems whose power was, however, drawn from a single source (the demos) and which all lead to communism, whose openly declared objective is the very suppression of the state.
<
br />   In the process, Julius Evola denounces the egalitarian illusion as mere logical absurdity:

  Several equal beings would no longer be “several” but one. To desire “the equality of many” thus implies a contradiction in the very terms used.

  In a hierarchised society, by contrast, one could easily envision different ‘levels of equality’:

  With the hierarchic idea enjoying recognition, the notion of “peer” and “equal” was, in the past, oftentimes aristocratic. In Sparta, the title of omoioi, of equals, was exclusively applied to the elite that held the reins of power and was subject to revocation in the event of indignity. Likewise, in ancient England, the “peer” title was, as we all know, the exclusive prerogative of lords.

  Giambattista Vico, who inspired Montesquieu, had already stated:

  Initially, what men desire is bodily liberty, then the liberty of their souls, meaning freedom of thought, and equality with others; thereafter, they long to surpass their equals; finally, they strive to place their superiors beneath themselves. (Scienza nuova, II, 23)

  Simultaneously, Julius Evola displayed great care in distinguishing between the elitism of Bonapartism and that of Machiavellianism. He viewed Bonaparte as the successor of the condottieri of the Renaissance, of the tribunes of the Roman plebeians and the ‘popular tyrants’ that emerged in ancient Greece following the decline of aristocracies. One is faced with Bonapartism whenever the leader derives his authority from someone other than himself, whenever he presents himself as a ‘son of the people’ and not as the ‘representative of a more accomplished humanity that affirms a superior principle’.

  Evola writes:

  Whereas the traditional concept of sovereignty and authority implies distance and it is this feeling of distance which, among the inferior, awakens veneration, natural respect and an instinctive disposition to obedience and loyalty towards the leader, what takes place here is the very opposite: on one side of power, one witnesses the abolition of distance, and on the other, an aversion for it. The Bonapartist leader […] disregards the principle according to which the wider the foundation becomes, the higher the summit must be located. A succubus of the “popularity” complex, he is fond of all manifestations that could bestow upon him the feeling, however illusory, of being granted popular support and approval. In this case, it is the superior that is actually in need of the inferior to experience a feeling of worthiness, and not the other way around, as would be the norm.

  Evola thus comes down in favour of ascetic power:

  It is right for superiority to be associated with power, but only under the condition that power is founded upon superiority and not superiority upon power.

  He then quotes Plato:

  Genuine leaders are those that only assume power out of necessity, since they know no equals or superiors who could be entrusted with such a task. (Republic, 347 c)

  The Right to Bear Arms and Military Duty

  Likewise, ‘military style’ (which is but one of the aspects of heroic values) must not be confused with militarism or war:

  The notion of war cannot be reduced to materialism, nor is it synonymous with an exaltation of the brutal use of force and destructive violence. The calm, conscious and controlled shaping of one’s inner being and behaviour, one’s love of distance, hierarchy, order, and the faculty to subordinate one’s own passionate and individual element to higher principles and ends, especially under the sign of honour and duty, are among this idea’s essential elements and constitute the foundation of a precise style that was bound to substantially vanish whenever nationalistic democracies, in which the duty to do one’s military service superseded the right to bear arms, replaced states where all those elements corresponded to a long, strict and caste-like tradition.

  Julius Evola reminds us that, nowadays, wars have by no means disappeared. On the contrary, they have become total wars. In addition to impacting all civilians, they now affect the entire population which, by virtue of the egalitarian principle, finds itself compelled to wear the military uniform.

  In Evola’s eyes, the elite man is thus not an exceptional man, a brilliant leader or even a genius, but ‘the one that bears within himself the expression of a tradition and “spiritual race” that owes its grandeur not to man himself but to a principle, an idea — as part of a certain sovereign impersonality’. Here, the decisive criteria are character and spiritual type, far more so than intelligence itself. For ‘the worldview (Weltanschauung) of an uneducated man can indeed be more accurate than that of a writer, and that of a soldier, a member of the aristocratic class or a peasant who remains faithful to his land more resolute than a bourgeois intellectual’s, a professor’s or a journalist’s’.

  One’s ‘worldview’ is not an individual matter either but, instead, the result of a tradition. It is the ‘organic resultant of the forces to which a given type of civilisation owes its own form’.

  Evola adds:

  Culture only ceases to be a source of danger to the one who already possesses a worldview, specifically because he is endowed with an inner configuration that serves as a reliable guide to him and allows him to discern, as is the case with all organic assimilation processes, what can be assimilated from what is to be rejected. […] One of the worst consequences of the “free culture” that has been made accessible to all is that the minds which are incapable of discriminating in accordance with sound judgement, those that do not yet have a shape of their own, find themselves fundamentally disarmed on the spiritual level when faced with all kinds of influences.

  Once again, Julius Evola reaffirms the fact that it is not the masses that he is addressing but the Egregoroi: the ones who bear within themselves the idea of regeneration; those who, having ‘crystalised’ themselves in history, remain forever standing (‘All that is left is for us to see how many men shall indeed manage to remain standing among so many ruins; in order to understand’). Evola tells these well-born men that it is pointless to strive to directly resist the surrounding chaos, for the current is far too strong to be contained. A better option is for them to endeavour to take control of a process deemed inevitable. This is what he writes:

  One must determine to what extent one can take advantage of destructive upheavals; to what extent, thanks to inner resoluteness and orientation towards transcendence, the non-human aspect of the modern world could foster the experiences of a superior life and superior liberty instead of leading towards the subhuman (as is the case with most of its current forms).

  A Far Eastern formula summarises his advice: ‘Ride the tiger’, so that you can avoid being bitten and perhaps also direct its course.

  To Successfully Transcend from Above

  What Evola thus proposes is indeed a radical opposition to bourgeois society, yet one that reverses the contestation whose expression we are witnessing today (and which only embodies its relative antithesis). Moreover, it is not the bourgeoisie as a social class that he targets but the bourgeoisie as a spiritual type, meaning ‘all that relates to bourgeois mentality, with its conformism, its psychological and romantic extensions, its moralism and its concern to lead a petty, safe life in which fundamental materialism is counterbalanced by humanitarian and democratic sentimentalism and grandiloquence’.

  He then goes on to specify that just ‘as in traditional civilisations the bourgeoisie occupied an intermediary social position between the military-political aristocracy and the people, so are there two ways, a positive and a negative one, to transcend it as a category, to take position against the bourgeois type, civilisation, values and mindset. The first possibility consists in following a direction that leads lower still, meaning towards Marxist social values that contrast with what is termed “bourgeois decandentism”. […] The result could only be a new regression: one heads towards something that is located beneath one’s person, not above it’.

  There is, however, another possibility, namely that of a struggle and requirement to fight against the bourgeois spirit, against an
individualism and false idealism that are even more determined than those of leftist movements, but with a direction which, in this case, leads upwards. This second possibility is connected to a revival of heroic and aristocratic values that are assumed in a natural and clear manner, without any rhetoric or grandiloquence. For one can keep their distance from all that is merely human and especially subjective; despise bourgeois conformism with its petty egoism and moralism; espouse a style of active impersonality; love all that is both essential and real in the superior sense, unhindered by the mists of sentimentality and intellectualistic structures; and dedicate oneself to radical “demystification”. One can do all of that while still standing on one’s own two feet, being affected by the obviousness of all which, in life, reaches beyond the latter and drawing specific rules of action and behaviour from it.

  A Member of the ‘Polar Star’ Party

  At the time of his passing, Julius Evola had been living reclusively for a period of thirty years, unable to move his legs and surrounded by his paintings, his books and the friends that still dropped by to visit him. Having become the thought leader of a certain part of the Italian Right, and particularly that of a growing number of youths, he never ceased to be attacked by an extreme Left that claimed to see in him the ‘occult’ ideologist of a new ‘Holy Vehm’ Order.192 Evola remained impassive, however, having decided once and for all not to allow himself to be dragged into the field of polemics.

  Quoting Lao Tzu, he says: ‘A man of virtue does not argue’.193

  Testimonianzie su Evola,194 a tribute book published in 1973 and edited by Mr Gianfranco de Turris, is evidence of the great influence Evola exerted.

  Mr Pierre Pascal likens Evola’s grave and haughty personality to that of Montherlant: each was a solitary giant. He says: ‘They were both members of the “Polar Star” party’.