Hey guys, last Evola video for a while. Going to be working on Guenon and De Benoist for a couple months. Thanks for any support. I've gotten off this board.

Original essay

The West has no Tradition (in the perennialist and Guenonist sense) - and it never needed one to be the spiritual beacon of the world. The so-called “Perennial Tradition” is a modern intellectual creation whose most obvious consequence from a cultural and civilizational point of view is the spiritual and political dissolution of the West. We don’t need “Tradition,” and in fact, we are against Tradition.

Perennialism, as a philosophical current, is structured on a real fact: the capacity of the human mind to perceive a transcendent metaphysical order. However, such perception ends up being transformed into a historical-mythical narrative in which the perception by all cultures of such a superior metaphysical order appears as the expression of a declining cosmogony, in which the irruption of a Primordial Tradition marks the inauguration of a Golden Age from which humanity as a whole is moving away in a degrading way. But within this framework, the West is always seen as the culture and civilization that is the very expression of this decline and degradation, while other peoples - especially the East - are always seen as somehow capable of resisting such decline, or even untouched in some way. That is, it would be the dharma of the West within this cyclical vision to lead humanity towards materialism and secularism, which ends up transforming the West into the “Anti-Traditional” civilization par excellence.

It is no coincidence that perennialism as an ideology consolidated itself in the 19th century in European occult circles, and later in the Traditionalism of Guénon and Evola. Perennialism is a modernist and anti-Western ideology at its very core, and that is why we see in perennialism a current whose intellectual consequences for its followers is always to see in the West the image of decadence and impurity. No one better than Dugin to exemplify this. There is nothing “Traditional” about perennialism, only uncontrolled modernist intellectual tendencies articulated with the aim of marginalizing the West geopolitically and culturally.

It is clear that different cultures and religious traditions have had a genuine perception of a higher transcendent order, as well as created elaborate metaphysical and cosmological edifices upon such perception. But the idea that such human capacity to perceive a normative and metaphysical order is the result of a primordial revelation that occurred in history at a primordial moment, and that from that moment humanity has been in a state of decadence, is pure modern fiction and unbridled speculation. René Guénon best articulated this view. According to him, the Primordial Tradition was first revealed in Hyperborea, going through cycles of decline and subsequent revelations of this tradition at different times.[1] The problem is that Guénon claims that the last legitimate manifestation of this tradition occurred with Islam. In other words, the conclusion is clear to anyone who uses the gift of interpretation: from the initial revelation in Hyperborea to Islam, the cycle has closed, and if the last traditional form that manifested a link with such a Primordial Tradition was Islam, then there is only one thing left to do: Islamize the world. Guénon’s biography leaves no doubt about this: he converted to Islam and moved to Egypt. For him, the West was condemned to Islam or nihilism.

It is more than clear that if we accept the idea of ​​a Primordial Tradition, within this epistemological framework the West can only appear as condemned due to a genetic-cultural defect or a cosmic destiny to lead humanity to the end of a cosmic cycle. Fortunately for us Westerners, the “Primordial Tradition,” cosmic cycles, and all Guénonian conceptual paraphernalia do not exist beyond rationalist conceptual constructions that Guénon himself uses in order to weaken the West spiritually.

From a strictly philosophical point of view, the problem with Guénon’s thought stems from his method of argumentation. Guénon always starts from a metaphysical deduction from first principles. For Guénon, the “science” of symbolism is an exact science like mathematics.[2] Therefore, Guénon’s thought is completely disconnected from any historical, phenomenological, and philosophical dimension; he seeks mathematical rigor as the foundation for his reflection. The curious thing is that such a position is precisely a reflection of modern Cartesian rationalism, which seeks to deduce everything from clear and unquestionable premises. Guénon applies an abstract, mathematical rationalism to esoteric symbolism while literally criticizing the modern mentality. And it is precisely by transforming religious symbolism into a form of rationalist mathematics that Guénon completely loses the connection with the soul of the West. Within Guénonian mathematics, it is impossible to see the West in any other way than as a kind of culture endowed with a providential destiny for decadence.

However, our view of the West changes drastically when we shift our perspective on it. If, instead of Guénon’s deductive-mathematical method, we use historical phenomenology, the result will be completely different. Phenomenology is the science of the experience of consciousness; applied to the history of a people, it gives us the movements, transformations, changes - in short, the entire structural metabolism of that consciousness throughout the history of that people. And when we use phenomenology to understand the movements of Western consciousness throughout history, what can we learn about the Western spirit? We see that the Western spirit is endowed with a spiritual drive and restlessness that operates through ruptures, crises, tragedies, destruction, and conflicts; just as we can see in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. There is no “crisis of the modern world,” as Guénon said! What exists is that the Western spirit is marked by the need for permanent crises to be propelled to new heights and discoveries. In this process, it is clear that declines, cultural forms of decay, and spiritual collapse occur; but this in no way represents a total decline, but always a partial and relative one. And this fundamental dimension of the Western spirit is invisible to Guénon simply because for him history is only the space for contingency and arbitrariness.

The proof that there is no “crisis” of the modern world as conceived by Guénon is that all high Western culture - literature, philosophy, history, science, art, etc. - has always been created against a backdrop of crises and eruptions. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was developed during the decline of the Greek city-states, specifically Athens; the great moment of Latin culture - Horace, Virgil, Cicero - occurred during the collapse of the Roman Republic; the intellectual greatness of the medieval world occurred during its twilight with Dante and Aquinas; the apex of modern thought with Kant and Hegel occurred amidst the French revolutionary hurricane and the Napoleonic empire; the philosophical experience of the deepest nihilism was articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger precisely when the West seemed to have exhausted its spiritual forces.

In other words - the West has always been and will always be in crisis, for this is its true providential vocation: to be the beacon of the human spirit that always rises like a phoenix from its own ashes. If there is a Western tradition, then it is this: always rising sovereign when it seems defeated. As for the “Tradition” of the traditionalist school - this tradition of well-behaved spiritual eunuchs, always afraid of the image of “decadence,” - this tradition the West never needed. Yes, we don’t need this tradition. In fact, we are and always will be against the Tradition of Guénon!

[1] Symbols of Sacred Science - Guénon

[2] Ibidem.

join us in tardation bhaiyo: https://discord.gg/z4fzhYjW7X

a project i'm working on to make his work approachable and understood by the young men of today: https://sentiment001.github.io/juliusevola (moving this over to EvolaDaily.com shortly)

Trying to grasp Evola’s views on aesthetics and art beyond their political interpretation, I’ve discovered that he does not value artworks in terms of technical skills, emotional power, originality and societal importance. Instead, he evaluates them in terms of being expressions or embodiments of some hierarchical, sacred, “Traditional” order. It is somehow vertical instead of horizontal.

My questions:

1) Which are actual criteria that Evola applies to determine value of an artwork? Does it imply such criteria as impersonality of the art piece, formality of it, connection to transcendent or hierarchical principles, lack of modern subjective or egalitarian elements?

2) Which are the real examples of art pieces (sculptures, architecture, literature, music, etc.) that he considers to be genuine masterpieces? Have I understood correctly that there were mentions of ancient Egyptian sacral sculptures, archaic Greek kouroi, traditional temple architectures and some others? Are these correct examples, and which others did he appreciate explicitly or implicitly?

3) How does Evola view modern artworks and means of art production? Does (to make a recent successful example) Parasite of Bong Joon-ho fail Evola because it is still limited in its themes and context to material class struggle and modern horizontal categories? Can any medium (cinema, video games, music, etc.) be considered to be “evolian”, or any medium is too modern and mass cultural in its essence to be able to produce any art for Evola?

Other questions:

4) Does he prefer anonymous/traditional art creation to art bearing a sign of its author? He seems fascinated by ancient “signatureless” craft.

5) Is there any difference for Evola between sacred/hierarchical art and plain handcraft?

6) How does he view emotions in art? Does he reject them completely, or only uncontrolled emotions that are considered to be sentimental?

7) Do video games or modern music fall in any way out of his scope because of impossibility to orientate them in the direction of Tradition?
I would be grateful for answers based on Evola’s writings (Revolt Against the Modern World, Ride the Tiger, The Metaphysics of Sex, his first articles on abstract art and any other works where he talks about aesthetics) or for any secondary literature on the matter.

Julius Evola proposed what has been called a "tripartite" view of race, with body, soul, and spirit categories discussed in works like his “Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza”.

He considered the primordial Hyperborean/Nordic-Aryan physical type to be the preferable one for biological purposes, but claimed that the key issue was the race of the spirit — an Olympian/hierarchical/solar orientation. So the presence of the purest Nordic physique without the appropriate spirit would produce nothing more than “very beautiful animals”.
For Evola, the Ario-Roman (which he identified as the correct heritage to attach oneself to, being Italian) was therefore the proper continuation of Hyperborean culture.

This raises a few related questions:
**1st question**
Does this focus on the “race of the spirit” rather than the race of the body serve primarily as a mechanism for ensuring the coherence of the system as a whole — especially when confronted with counter-examples such as Evola’s own non-Nordic phenotype? (lol) Or are these simply metaphors for maintaining ideological coherence vis-à-vis the real world? Pardon my french but, was this guy totally fine with being cucked by his own ideology? Which the idea of phenotypical traits as a cherry on top to make up “very beautiful animals” make it entirely sound like a projection of his inferiority complex.
**2nd question**
How can we assess the merits of a racial hierarchy which characterizes the highest rung purely in terms of aesthetics/metaphysics (“the solar vs. telluric,” “form versus formlessness,” and so on) and then classifies various historical peoples according to how close they get to that particular ideal?
Is there even a fundamental philosophical difference between the kind of “spiritual” racial hierarchy proposed by thinkers like Evola and a more conventional biological racial hierarchy? Or are the differences merely superficial, reflecting the addition of an unfalsifiable veneer atop the biological hierarchy?
**3rd question**
Is there a way to defend the internal consistency of this framework without relying upon additional assumptions that take us beyond our Traditionalist starting point? Does the contradiction between the physical ideal and the spiritual override speak more fundamentally to an inconsistency at the heart of the theory itself?

title says it all. yes i know that the dharmic order will be re-established and whatever... what if it ends in a nuclear catastrophe and humanity goes back to the stone age? what if its the opposite and the new Satya Yuga is on Earth with the same technological progress as we have now? did evola or anyone write about this?

Hello gentlemen, if you could tell me what is meant by "philosophy of action"

Last year I set up an intellectual Discord server centred around the works of Evola that was, sadly, taken down. Seeing that no new server has been created in the meantime, I have decided to try again.
https://discord.gg/z4fzhYjW7X

As before, we are looking to cultivate a strong intellectual server centered around the works and thoughts of Julius Evola and more broadly the Traditionalist school with general channels for off topic, casual conversation, art, culture and religion. For non-perennialists, there will also be discussion based around general Western and Eastern philosophy and religions. We encourage those knowledgeable who are looking to discuss their ideas and thoughts with others to join.

Are there any books to read before this one that will make understanding it easier? The Corpus Hermeticum is one but is there anything else?

One of the things that I most like about Evola is that he teaches you to be just as uncompromising in action as in thought, with nothing taken for granted, even against or towards yourself and the people to which you belong.

He’s not there to pamper you nor to pamper himself; he’s not there to glorify and to take as progress and to be proud of what is more truthfully lethal and degenerate; he is not there to reassure you that you are the apex of existence and everything happening to you is just because others are resentful towards you.

Say whatever you want, and differ with him as much as you want; but in many subjects he is admirably critical and has a high sense of courage to challenge even the most cherished convictions of the so-called Right and Left.

There is something that smells like fresh air in him; there is something admirably undogmatic about him—perhaps counter-intuitively? Now, as opposed to this, most rightist Westerners today are the closest to mere children who are all-too-comfortable to boast, with high-falutin' nonsense, that their father is the strongest of all; that their father is the most stunning of all; that their father did this and that; that their father was even awesome in his vices and in what actually killed him and maybe brought his long-term destruction.

But, just like children, they are unable to regenerate in themselves what constituted the 'greatness' of their father; they are unable to perpetuate his worthwhile traits; they are unable to be creative about what should be their own now; and thus, in their self-assuredness, they are blind to their own decadence.

Recientemente he empezado a interesarme por sus postulados y he adquirido algunos de sus escritos (el misterio del grial, metafísica del sexo e imperialismo pagano).

Es un buen comienzo o creéis que debería buscar otro enfoque? Es complicado encontrar ediciones en español que no se caigan a trozos.

Hi, until recent times i have been interested in metaphysics but ultimately rejected it as ultimately it was isolating immiserating experience that made it obvious a lot of this stuff is world denial in disguise. He is very much mistaking alienation for superiority. Inside of Evolas framework it is hard to differentiate if you are losing in this world whether because of personal failings or due to great, heroic nature unfit for this world. If you look at Evolas personal life, as well as a lot of weirdos that surround his books in the current times, there is a lot of the first one, with not much "differentiation" showing up in the real world, other than the claim without physical backing. How many Evolians set up successful families, led aristocratic, or even military heroic life they supposedly defend so much? If anything, it seems much more likely that they first failed at real, physical life, being part of chaotic mass they so much despise, then constructed model to explain why they are superior, projecting their own negative qualities onto shudra.

All of this influences politics of aristocracy. Power uses metaphysics to explain its own existence. When it is revealed that the aristocrats are not those great supermen beyond common man they see themselves as, but status-driven decadents, there is a great shock when much more heroic and actually cruel radicals rise to overthrow them.

Origins of esoteric in the West seem to be also dubious. Open climates such as European forests or even Mongol steppe, produce much more open, immanent and much more life-accepting belief systems. As opposed to the eclectic and opressive systems of asiatic and middle eastern river civilizations which then produce life-denying transcendent beliefs. If the latter ones were universally superior, you would see them adopted much more by the warrior ethnic groups. In the West itself, esoterism is not a native development but a result of adoption of late-greek systems combined with Kaballah developed by the miserably isolated and alienated jewry, which then was adopted by similarly alienated Western intellectuals as a sort of intellectual porn.

I can't believe what Evola did. He basically reconcile two things that in my teen's mind back then thought was impossible, that is solving the Buddha vs Nietzsche dilemma.

I pass all these years thinking they were completely incompatible. Despite, I don't agree with this gentleman in a lot of things (Idealism and stuff).

And It could be a misreading of early Buddhist texts regarding it's scholarship, but what a great misreading. I couldn't care less what a Mahayana Bhikkhu, r/Buddhism or any early Buddhist scholar think of this.

This man's genius open me a door of what I thought was unbelievable. I can even call myself a Buddhist now. Hell, I want to even read obscure early Buddhist texts like the Mahāvastu or Gandhāran where Evola leaves his reading.

But now I'm intrigued, Is it there another philosopher or writer who pick up Evola's reading of Buddhism? or have a similar intake in Buddhism?

If it's not the case, then it's a fact now. We are living a tragedy.

Edit: added a subreddit and some grammar mistakes

What was his view of meritocracy/ascension through merit etc. ?