/lit/ - Literature

>>10922717
Who's Evola?

>>10922717
Does that get you laid pretty much?

>>10922720
Italian esotericist.

>>10922722
I don't judge the value of knowledge on whether or not it gets me laid.

Was going to read this guy but he looks like an absolute jackass and I feel I know everything has to say just by looking at it him.

what would evola think of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MIVvnQHxeM

Explain Evola's argument for traditionalism as simply as possible please

>>10922771
everything after the French Revolution was a mistake

Doesn't his "metaphysics of sex" sound super weird to you? Particularly for a traditionalist

>>10922771
Man used to look beyond the world, now he can't take his eyes off it.

>>10922741
He didn't like art that wallowed in its own subjectivity.

>>10922782
No, ontologized gender is the foundation of Evola's philosophy (and tradition). The lunar/solar dichotomy is indispensable to not only understanding his thought but the larger trends in practically every field of human endeavor.

>>10922792
>Man used to look beyond the world, now he can't take his eyes off it.

Why is that a bad thing?

>>10922801
because spooks

>>10922801
Because the world is the circle of consumption and excretion, birth and death. Flux. Becoming. Chaos. The tree grows so it can die so it can propagate this same cycle through its offspring. I can go into more detail if you'd like.

>>10922717
you’re a fucking narcissist stop posting threads you sick fuck

>>10922735
BASED pseud

>>10922815
I take pleasure in effectively communicating complex ideas. So sue me.

>>10922815
nah op keep posting, i'm curious about Evola but probably wouldn't ever pay for his brand of esotericism.

>>10922813
Please do

Do I need to read anything in particular before revolt against the modern world or can I just jump right in?

>>10922717
ok evolanon what is the difference between evola and say a guy like jung, or campbell, who understand metaphysics through a developmental and anthroplogical lens respectively.

i mean, if everything is a mistake nowadays, what's the point? his philosophy is as useful as land's accelerationism, which would have us all just fuck off and die or be eaten by the spectacle already.

i mean to say: is there a useful next step? a next stage of social development that we should progress to, rather than welcoming the bombs and taking a step back?

(i have a sneaking suspicion it resembles some sylvan, aegean fictional past)

>>10922823
Man. Revolt is not a very good introduction to his thought. He goes full bore with the mythological references to his ideal of solarity right out the gate that's just as likely to put you in a boredom-induced coma as it is to enlighten you. Revolt is more a narrativized compilation of his ideas than a true introduction. That isn't to say he doesn't go into detail.

If you have a philosophical background (not all that deep desu), go with Ride the Tiger. Clean, concentrated, digestible.

If you have more an esoteric background, Introduction to Magic lays out the major themes cleanly, beautifully, and evocatively. It's not very systematized, though, but it's fantastic introduction to the tenor of his philosophy, what he's trying to do, what he's interested in.

>>10922819
no you’re an attention seeking shallow faggot dilettante who schizos and soft skulls are feeding from, regurgitating nonsense into their mouths, weak little chicks, fetid mother
>>10922821
he already made two threads, one was ok, the other was bad, they were backtoback and now he wants more attention. this should be banned

>>10922844
>no you’re an attention seeking shallow faggot dilettante who schizos and soft skulls are feeding from
don't click on the thread next time, then, leftypol. and stop projecting so hard, it's embarrassing. if you have nothing to contribute, then click that [x] and gtfo thread thanks.

>>10922855
i was banned off of /leftypol/ 6 times for talking about HBD, occultism, Hegel and homo-pederasty epidemic fuck off nigger. this is garbage, all of you are muttering in corners miming dead retards. Evola is shallow, prose is awful, he’s not well read, you’d get more out of Deleuze, Emerson, Bruno and just reading the fucking primary source texts. Evolafaggot knows Evola is popular with low iq redditors and young /pol/acks, made two threads in two days and this is the 3rd thread in 3 days. Complete narcissist. Shameful that you would enable that kind of shit

>>10922822
Okay. So Evola makes the distinction between Being and Becoming. Those Who Are and Those Who Become. I don't know how much of a philosophical background you have so instead of diving into the deep end I'll just say:

there's a state of being that is self-determined, unconditioned, and there's a state of being that is determined, conditioned. Do you depend on others, or are you your own principle? The world is the latter: a complex system of reciprocally determined relations between actors, who mistake their own will and volition for the passage of external forces through them.

The person you become after a couple shots of tequila isn't you, not wholly, it is a product of the complex interplay between your "default" brain chemistry and the effect of ethanol on said brain chemistry. What you experience as your drunk self is just what the physiological effects of ethanol feel like on the side of your consciousness.

In drinking (in hunger, in thirst, in lust, in pining for the Other's approval), you are becoming-other, identifying your sovereign individuality with some physiological force ("you're thinking with your little head"...). This is true for all beings, at all times. I experience hunger to eat because as a biological system I must consume matter to maintain myself. I eat to persist in time. I live, to continue to live. Until I die. And the circle is closed.

The world is this unconscious will-to-existence this senseless and unconscious self-perpetuation. And so your self is just the product of forces outside you, and at death the aggregate that you are is dissolved and these energies return to their respective sources. You were nothing but self-consciousness of their unity, for a time, before the Reaper.

Which is why the ancient symbolized reality as the Ouroboros: the One as desiring-force eats itself because it desires something to eat, to eat it and that's all. It just is. Reality is a movement in the void for the sake of that movement. We're not going "anywhere".

People who recognize the futility of desire and the tragedy of existence (through times of extreme suffering and despair) then are compelled to find something beyond it, to desire the self-negation of desire. And that's the Path.

>>10922828
The praxis. Well, Jung has a praxis but it's psychologized. "Academic" interpretations of these phenomena are almost always dry, sterile, devoid of that charge I look for in thinkers. What's the difference? I sense a fullness of life and being in Evola I don't get from university mole-men.

>>10922835
Inevitable degeneration and collapse. Look to your soul, that's all you have for all eternity. You're alone. Collective solutions are non-solutions. We're not talking apathy and reclusivity. He even says in Ride the Tiger you should throw yourself headlong into the flux. But never identify with it.

As for some particular idea of what's coming, no, Evola never proposed anything like that. And that's why it's so refreshing, I don't have to slog through some utopian daydreaming to get to the good stuff. He doesn't have any idea what the next stage of social development should look like. It will proceed of its own accord, if everyone becomes the Crowleyian star they're supposed to be.

>>10922844
You mock what you don't understand. and this is only the second thread I've made.

>>10922928
I understand exactly his entire schtick because ive read the agamas, tibetan buddhist tantras, spare, crowley, Land, Bataille all superior beyond measure to a hack like Ebola, a thief, a fascist, an ugly LARPing innumerate idiot, and a beacon for weak willed, shrimp shouldered, underwhelming spiritual pretenders for years to come. You made 2 threads in 3 days and namefagged in 2 trad threads in 3 days. Fucking retard who can’t argue with materialists, an admitted atheist, a perennialist pseud and horrible diction, equally horrendous prose to your instructor. Embarassing that you would make a fucking AMA about an obscure idiot we already had a bump limit thread on 2 days ago. Fucking ant

>>10922944
You're so mad dude. Oh my god.

So have you actually crossed the Abyss and activated the latent Spark of Gnosis in your heart, or are you merely another pseud?

>>10922948
You still talk like a 17 year old weed dealer, you’re unimpressive and inconsequential to the zeitgeist get over yourself and stop being an attention seeker on an anonymous image board

>>10922962
I don't know about the Abyss but the spark, definitely.

>>10922975
Okay.

>>10922928
good post. evola doesn't seem particularly helpful to me, or his work is only secondarily informing present cultural upheaval. more fuel than fire. even his selection seems to be by lottery, as there are others who would be more useful in shaping culture (and to some extent are working, like Campbell) but don't fit the needed mold the plebs wanted.

>Crowley
yuck. please tell me that fraud didn't affect evola's writings.

>>10922985
Crowley's fantastic. The edgelord persona is just a misdirection. Nuit and Hadit are the lunar and solar respectively: the extensive, peripheral self and the monadic, principial self. Crowley's praxis is a reconciliation of individual with the universal without a melting into either, as Evola's is between the lunar and solar elements. But they both borrow this from the alchemical marriage, obviously, and other sources.

>>10922999
>disguised satanic trips
>crowley's fantastic
ITT: evolanon exposes himself as a brainlet.

Crowley was a permanently buttfrustrated reactionary against the Church. His entire corpus is dressed in queer exotic furniture and the man himself was a swindler. His philosophy such as it was took the style of ancient mysteries and portayed only his own babby tier understanding of God.

I must admit he qualifies as a theurgist and his work is not invalid, it's just cringeworthy and useful only to humans who are similarly wounded-and-wounding as he was.

the question still stands, how much did evola take from crowley?

Who do i have to read first if i want to study evola?

>>10923022
I don't have a taste for occult in-fighting. It puts me to sleep. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're not. I sense in Crowley the same wisdom I sense in other thinkers I admire. I just look at ideas and move on with my life.

>>10923024
I know you're memeing but the "monistic consciousness of the King" in one of the Liber AL commentaries is identical to Evola's conception of the kingdom of Those Who Are in eternity after death.

>>10923030
You can dive right in by starting with Introduction to Magic, it isn't heavy-duty philosophy. As for who? Eh. Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Plotinus' Enneads, Corpus Hermeticum, Gnostic Gospels. Not to necessarily understand Evola as much as building a good esoteric foundation.

>>10923032
it's nothing personal, of course. i just find crowley loathsome. like blavatsky or gurdjieff. thanks for the cite, i'll look into it.

>>10922912
>to desire the self-negation of desire. And that's the Path

Isn't this just Buddhist thought? What makes Evola different from Buddhists

>>10923078
Buddhism is just a re-formulation of these truths for what the Buddha considered a decadent and spiritually unmoored time

>>10922912
So basically Gurdjieff’s teaching? Pretty interesting how, in very different ways, they said the same thing. Although I guess it’s from a shared source of Buddhist and Hindu influence, and I guess the whole idea of perennial philosophy is that it’s — perennial, flowering up in different places in all times.

wat religion shud i join

>>10923112
Yeah, it's not so much these guys had similar views as it is they hit on the same truths. I know what these guys are talking about, I can see it in my own life, which is why I start rolling my eyes at all the dribbling about an evidence?? proof?? from the peanut gallery.

>>10923131
Labels, identities, denominations, waste of time. You can't take them with you into death. The only true religion is fullness of self.

>>10923131
>saved as spurdoebola.jpg

You should become a mystic. Unless you are sub-130 IQ, then become a Catholic.

>>10923138
doesnt sound trad

Evola is a Spenglerian and Spengler was a Nietzschean.
Though Evola enters into a dialectic with Nietzsche in "..ruins" he nonetheless can't escape his brand of nihilism because he essentially reverts back to a circular perception of time reminiscent of the Kali/Yuga (Another quasi-Spenglerian idea re: Cultural birth/death)

What this Evola guy doesn't realise (nor this person summarising him for you, though he does a good job), is that Evola has committed the same error all pre-Girardians has. He is, in a way, a Romantic in believing that desire is an individual phenomenon (to desire the self-negation of desire)

Unfortunately for him, had he been made aware of mimetic desire and the mechanisms with which it works, he would realise that ones desires are always, perpetually mediated by the "other" who is bound to become a rival. The only way to overcome this is to "imitate" a model who stands completely outside of desire i.e. Christ.

>>10923160
>i.e. Christ
But that doesn't suffice. The imitation of Christ is worthy but imperfect, and losing its place because we're replacing him anyway. Today we imitate Taytay. Or insta-thots, or BLM protestors, or Gonzalez and Hogg... whoever the media box puts in front of us.

What then.

>>10922771
history is cyclical and there are also forces that will always be and patterns that can't break without being worse

>>10923151
Then I'm afraid you don't know what trad is. I don't even identify myself as a Traditionalist. If I do I compulsively tip a non-existent fedora. It's just cringe.

>>10923160
I don't mind people who disagree with me as long as they open my mind about why. This sounds fascinating. I'm somewhat familiar with Girard and his idea of metaphysical desire. And I also doubt Evola's idea of an absolutely self-sufficient selfhood, since like Hartmut Lange says re: Heidegger: "What I am not is the pre-condition of what I am" [paraphrase]

There is also another criticism leveled at Evola and his ilk that the unconditioned is dependent on/conditioned by the conditioned to be itself, the unconditioned. A criticism the alchemists anticipate, but still an interesting one.

Could you point to me in the proper direction regarding Girard's conception of Christ? What does Christ in Girard's view do differently compared to other Traditionalist models that have transcended desire (like the Buddha)? What do you mean by desire not being an individual phenomenon?

>>10922801
Ecclesiastes

>>10923186

I'm assuming you're unfamiliar with Girard's work which is why you'd write something so obviously misguided.

Besides, I had just written above that our desire is always "mediated by the other" (in your case Tay Tay or whoever else).
What you also must understand is Girard's study of myth which succeeded his thesis on mimetic desire, the one which shows the complete uniqueness of the Gospels (when read as "myth") in comparison to all other myths which preceded it.

I mean, I don't want to write a whole dissertation here but if you like I can go into this in a little more detail, but for your sake I would read some introductory works of his or, at the very least, some youtube videos to get the most basic understanding.
His theories really are the turning point in the humanities.

>>10923160
You think this means something, but it doesn't.

critique lobsterman from an evolian view

>>10923224
I'd love to. (additional note: Girard provides a monumental argument against post Nietzsche Nietzscheans like Heidegger/Adorno et al.)

Girard started his academic career by studying great literature (Shakespeare, Dost. etc) and rather than trying to see what was "different" about each writer (to further underscore their great individual genius), he set out to see what underlying theme tied most of the great novels together throughout time. He noticed that it was "desire".
What he discovered through looking at each writers treatment of desire was that in each case, in varying ways, the desire of a literary character was always triggered by the desire of another (Dostoevsky, The Eternal Husband, for example - there are too many examples to go through but this should suffice if anyone has read it).
How did desire operate here? For Girard it worked in a triangular fashion. i.e. A, the subject, notices B, his model, reaching for C the object. In observing B reaching for C and investing that object with heightened lustre, A's desire is triggered for the same Object.
Let me use an example (from Bailie's "Violence Unveiled")
There sits a single child in day care surrounded by toys. He is not interested in of them per se, but lazily and detachedly reaches for a toy.
Enter child two, surrounded by the same toys. Which toy will he desire? Naturally that toy which Child A has. Any parent will tell you this.
Child A, seeing Child B reaching for the object he had previously so carelessly picked up, all of a sudden jerks back and grips the toy as if it were the most precious object in the world.
In seeing Child A invest so much desire to keep the object, Child B wants more than ever to attain it.
A Rivalry ensues.
Shall i continue?

>>10923255
Don't know what that is.

>>10923132
I agree, and I haven’t even read Evola. I’m more of a Gurdjieff scholar, and have also done my own readings on mysticism and world religions, but reading through your threads, i see essentially the same realizations Gurdjieff and others came to and made me come to. So it’s great to see this sharing of wisdom. Thank you.

>>10923261
Go nuts, this isn't a thread for pseuds.

>>10923201
sorry. see>>10923261

>>10923224
I am familiar with Girard, and agree his understanding of desire and Christ is the correct approach to harmlessly advancing humanity. That is, assisting it through the difficult decades to come. I'd like to hear you go more in depth anyway. My comment was a criticism of modern culture (which Evola and supposedly his readers stand against), not Girard. We do not want Christ anymore. Most people can't comprehend something that stands outside desire. In what form can the scapegoat that Christ embodies come to us and teach us, the morloks of 2018, how to be better humans?

Honestly I'm stumped. Maybe some Pixar movies or something.

Will I be able to read Evola if I have an intense hatred of everything Indian?

>>10923287
You'll learn to disassociate the culture from the content. Where do you think Indians live? In Dimension 44-X5 or something? We're all trying to understand the same reality.

>>10923262
Jordan Peterson

>>10923271

This triangular desire ALWAYS begins a rivalry between both subject and model.
Each tries to get closer to the object and in each attempt the rivalry is heightened.
Here, a strange phenomenon is observed, one that Girard called "Undifferentiation".
What does he mean by this?
In a strange way, the subject begins to "mimic" the model in his trying to get the object. He begins to "mirror" the actions of the model and vice versa.
Think of two guys in a bar when they are in the rivalry phase:
"What are you looking at?"
"What are you looking at?"
"You started it"
"No, you started it"

This is in the case of a quick bar fight however. Now imagine in the case of say, a woman.
The two rivals will begin to dress like the other, to assume the same posture, the same mannerisms. Many times the rival is often a friend, sometimes your best friend. The object itself may even be metaphysical (i.e. fitness).
If anyone has a "gym buddy" you would know what i'm talking about.
You push yourself harder with your gym buddy not for his benefit so that you can "one up" him. You are each desiring the object of an aesthetic body and in so doing you both work out the same, lift the same, use the same supplements. Slowly you are become completely undifferentiated and it is not friendship that spurs you on but an underlying triangle of desire - a rivalry. You know what I'm talking about. You see your gym buddy take of his shirt and you study him and compare him to yourself and, in the spirit of competition, work harder to try and look better and vice versa.
This is a case of mimetic desire being positive.

>>10923293
Oh, right. I don't follow him really. But what he has to say about "feminized discourse", this liberal longing for the womb of the Mother is actually spot-on. The left is extremely lunar, so is the alt-right themselves, since they haven't overcome the identitarian tug-of-war that both birthed them and is tearing them from the inside (hey, another constitutive impossibility! thanks Zizek).

That's about all I know about him.

>>10922731
>I don't judge the value of knowledge on whether or not it gets me laid.

Fuckin nerd.

>>10923301
Makes sense to me, for example the typical /r9k/ incel gets down on himself for not being able to achieve the same sexual and financial success the rest of his society hungers for. Go on.

But what about the man who idealizes the feminine? What is he desiring through her? Eternity, like Weininger says?

>>10923317
Does he idealise or desire it?

To continue my spiel:

There exists two types of mimetic desire:
one with "internal mediation" and the other with "external mediation"
External is easy - Look at the billboard of *insert rich basketball player/hot pop starlet* holding a shoe. We want the shoe (triangular desire). Do we want the shoe because we individually desire it or because we desire to be the baller/starlet?
Either way, in this case we can never enter into a true rivalry with the starlet for the object because we will never meet them. This does not, however, stop the subject from "mirroring" the mediator of their desire. Notice all the Kardashian lookalikes, the people wearing basketball jerseys and buying shoes. Each trying desperately to undifferentiate themselves from their model. Peter Thiel (CEO of PayPal) explains this stuff fairly well.

Internal Mediation is when we come into direct contact with the model/rival. i.e. a co-worker, friend etc. This rivalry always has the potential to lead to extreme conflict.

Ok.. So what does this mean historically?

In one of his master strokes, Girard decided to apply this new idea of desire to anthropology and what he discovered was, on an intellectual level, truly genius. Namely, he realised that mimetic desire, naturally leading to conflict (mostly violent) would end in the phenomenon of the Scapegoat.

>>10923085
Wouldn't nietzsche have hated this brand of ascetism? that's what I always found confusing

>>10923261
>>10923301
This all sounds very Hegelian.

>>10923358

Let me take you back to that day care center with the two children, if i may.

Child A and Child B are now in rivalry, each begins mirroring the other. One cries, the other cries. One runs to mummy, the other runs to mummy. One blames the other for all their woes and vice versa.
The mimetic conflict, ever escalating, is completely magnetic. It pulls all observers into itself. Let me explain.

Mother of Child A now looks at mother of Child B
A: What's wrong with your son?
B: My son? excuse me? If yours knew how to share this wouldn't have happened
A: THat's no excuse to let your kid act the way it does
.... and on it goes.

Let's continue
Mother A goes back home and tells her husband, calls her neighbour, her sister
Mother B does the same

Before we know it, the rivalry of two individuals has now become that of two rival factions.

I must say at this point as well that at some stage the object originally desired become unimportant. More important becomes the need to dominate and subdue the rival. This is what leads to the intensification of undifferentiation.

>>10923358
Can you idealize something without desiring it?

>>10923370
Well, Evola distinguishes his thought from Nietzsche's but the two share in common their conception of the self. Early on in Zarathustra there is a description of "unknown sage" of the Self that could be lifted straight out of esoteric doctrine.

For Evola, Nietzsche is "more-life", he characterizes his own thought as "more-than-life".

>>10923386
Now we have two rival factions, each essentially a "double" of the other. They both hurl the same insults at each others. They both use the same tactics to discredit each other etc.
Suddenly the whole community attached to the Child Care center is involved.

Ok.. that analogy has taken us far enough.
Now let us go where Girard meant for this to go.
Imagine this is a pre-cultural society where a conflict for a female mate, or a water source or whatever leads us to this stage of all against all.
In this scenario this paroxysm can only lead to extreme violence, apocalyptic violence which would destroy the entire community (Space odyssey 2001?). It is here where a mechanism makes itself known, unconsciously, which is able not only to stop the conflict, but to save and bring the community together.
The Scapegoat mechanism.

>>10923413
>The Scapegoat mechanism
And both factions burn down the daycare center?

>>10923413
Someone who is close to the society, but just far enough outside of it (say, an albino or a cripple, someone with a speech impediment, a vagabond/vagrant, a traveller...anything of the like) becomes the center of the crisis.
The community instantaneously transfers all violent energy towards the individual. A war of all against all becomes all against one, or, what Girard called "unanimity minus one".
He is violently murdered due to the belief that this "outsider" is the one who brought this crisis to the community.
Something happens at this stage. All the violence which was threatening to destroy the community is transferred to the scapegoat. After the scapegoats murder, the violent mob all of a sudden experiences catharsis. The crisis is ended and, even more surprising, those who were once ready to kill each other are now brought closer than they had ever been before through this act of communal murder/sacrifice.

Another one of Girard's momentous discoveries happens here.

This catharsis and social cohesion is now also seen to have been "given" to the community from the now murdered scapegoat. He/She who was at once the focal point of all their problems, the bringer of the violent plague, is now also the bringer of social togetherness and a cathartic "high" which bonds the community in solidarity.
This scapegoat could only have been a Deity!

>>10923432
haha! You got it!! It was Nancy the receptionist! She should have been watching all along!! What kind of daycare center is this?!?
Friendship post-scapegoating ensues. Mother A and Mother B become best of friends.

Read >>10923446

Evola is a false prophet and an agent of the archons. Do no believe his lies.

Any concept of "metaphysical racial purity," "transcendence through war", etc. are utter fucking nonsense and have no basis in any legitimate spiritual path seeking the Divine Truth. His insidious usage of flowery spiritual terminology only makes him more detestable, not less.

Abandon egoism-disguised-as-liberation. Forsake the comforting lies of hateful oppression. You either annihilate yourself, or annihilate the world. Make the choice.

>>10923160
>>10923224
>>10923261
>>10923301
>>10923358
>>10923413
>>10923446
>>10923449
You seem to *really* like Girard. Though I appreciate the exposition, I think that you might want to diversify your thought.

>>10923451
That's cool and all anon but you're making claims without arguments. And really, bud? Evola uses flowery language?

>Abandon egoism-disguised-as-liberation.

A criticism they already anticipated and defused. Why do you mock thinkers you haven't read?

Also, keep going girardanon

>>10923451
>You either annihilate yourself, or annihilate the world. Make the choice.
Alright, I choose to annihilate the world, starting with you, faggot!

>>10923451
>There are literal gnostic larpers on /lit/

>>10923446
>>10923449

To go on - because Girard isn't finished yet. In fact, he's only just begun.

This pre-cultural society is brought together in unity after the death of the scapegoat who is now deified due to its also bringing the cathartic effect and social cohesion.
Suddenly, taboos and prohibitions are installed in order for the crisis not to be repeated. For example, if it was an incestual relationship which caused conflict between brothers that started the crisis, a taboo on incest is installed. The site of the murder becomes holy and prohibitions against entering the sacred territory come into being.

Nevertheless, mimetic desire never stops, and desire NEVER BEING INDIVIDUAL, but always being mediated by the other always manages to bring to the surface new conflicts which begin to boil.
If the taboos and prohibitions fail to stop mimetic desire from taking hold, eventually the "ritual" comes into itself.

What is a ritual in most archaic societies but the turning over of all rules and taboos?
For one day, as a "steam valve", members are permitted drunkenness, orgies, violence (think of the Dionysian rituals) and what Charles Taylor calls the "Carnival".
And how do most if not all of these rituals end? With a sacrifice. Either human or animal.

What is this entire ritual but the re-enactment of the original mimetic crisis? A "going back in time" in order to re-capture the cathartic and socially cohesive pay-off?

It is identified by Girard as Pharmakos. That which heals before it poisons. And i will now go into the most important part of his thesis.

>>10923453
I'm writing a dissertation on him. I better *really* like him.
Additionally, I came to him late after having studied, at length, Nietzsche, Weber, Spinoza and the Greeks.

>>10923489
Interesting. What field? What's your thesis?
Also: Are you a Christian? Why do you think Girard got it right? How wide of an application do you think Girard's theories have?

>>10923482
The reason this ritual is successful is because what underlies it all is a "Myth".

This is the key to understanding all of Girard's thought.
You see, the Myth serves to "shroud" (myth<muthos<mu [to close off]) the purely human violence caused by mimetic desire.

Rather than the society recognising that it has simply murdered an innocent victim, a myth is created around this murder which throws a veil over the murder and turns it into a tale of divine origins etc.

In fact, Girard, in studying Frazer's "Golden Bough" (in the chapter titled Scapegoat nonetheless) finds that every culture across the world, has some version of the same myth, that is, the death and subsequent resurrection of a divine king. Think of the Greeks, the Aztecs or any other myth you can (or just read Frazer).

The myth reinforces the ritual and vice versa.
But what has happened here is that man has, in a sense, made a deal with violence TO EXPEL violence. They have deified a lesser violence (the murder of one) in order to stave off a greater violence (apocalyptic, the murder of all). They have, in the words of Christ, used "Satan to expel Satan".
This whole enterprise, ever recurring since the dawn of man, Girard has called the "Ur-Scenario" of every culture with subsequent birth of its myth.

Is everyone still with me? Because now he drives the hammer home.

>>10923523
Yeah honestly I'm hype af on Girard rn, keep it up my guy

>>10923523
This is actually extremely fascinating, you and Evolanon have made my evening.

>>10923523
According to Girard, is *all* desire mimetic? I find that hard to believe.

>>10923514
Philosophy of all things!

Yes, I am a Catholic Christian.
I believe Girard got it right because he extends his thought of the mythical veiling of truth to Philosophy itself. He does this in a chapter from his book "Things hidden since the foundation of the world" (his magnum opus) where he directly takes on Heidegger's comparison of the two Logoi (that of Heraclitus and John). His argument was so compelling that, try as i might, i couldn't fault him (apart from a few very minor points re: Plato but that doesn't change the validity of his overall argument)
Additionally, I myself "lived" a Nietzschean philosophy for almost a decade and came out of it, in as gently as I can put it, pretty fucked up. You could say i was in Dostoevsky's Underground (interestingly enough Girard has a book called "resurrection from the underground). And having read Girard and his theories on desire and having spent much time in self-reflection i recognised that my Romantic ideals of autonomous, individual desire had all been a crock of shit. It was quite a trying period.

As for his application, i sincerely believe that they can be applied to all, if not most disciplines of the Humanities from Psychiatry to Anthropology to Sociology etc.
When his book "Violence and the Sacred" came out a review in Le Monde said that an asterisk needs be placed next to the year of its release to mark how monumental this theories were.
He has subsequently been "silenced" due to his later vehemence that the Christian message is the only one that can save us. This, of course, in the atmosphere of modern academia is not a very popular stance to take.

>>10923552
All desire can't be an imitation or an imitation of an imitation (and so on). There has to be a primary source where desire manifests.

>>10923536
>>10923537

Cheers guys will continue after i answer

>>10923552
No, instinctual/appetitive desire i.e. the desire to eat because i'm hungry, to sleep because i'm tired, to drink because i'm thirsty etc are not mimetic.
However, the choice of what you eat/drink, may very well be to a certain degree.

>>10923555
Very interesting. I'm currently a philosophy undergrad, and find your dedication to such a relatively unconventional figure in philosophy to be fascinating.

>>10923564
Who do the emulated emulate?

>>10923555
Nice trips. I've noticed there are striking similarities between Mimetic Theory and Hegel's dialectic. Was Rene Girard a Hegelian?

>>10923552
Not informed girard anon so he'll probably fuck me with his superior knowledge of the subject - but from the little I've read it SEEMS like it and that's been a criticism levied at him.

Which, for a person who has analogized with the old testament so much, doesnt really explain Eve's desire for the Apple to me?

Or, with evolutionary novelty being such a motivator to humans - how all desire could be mimetic when you could very well be the first person to desire something. If you create something wholly new and then other people desire it, their desire may be mimetic - but your desire in the creation of wasn't, right?

I guess you could say (this is shit tier logic) that the man who invented the snuggie, for example, may have never heard anyone else desire a blanket with arm-holes and that that desire was wholly unto-himself; you could still argue that his desire to market an as-seen-on-tv product is a mimetic desire though and maybe he has no feelings at all towards a blanket with sleeves.

>>10923561

He even has a ethological account of it by having studied it in apes. Read "Evolution and Conversion".
Most apes will reach for the object that another ape reaches for. In this sense Girard can be seen as a kind of Darwinian, believe it or not. Imitation is an evolutionary requirement for survival (The ape that never learns to stick a branch down an ant hole or break open nuts with a rock through imitation is not as "Fit" as the one who does)

>>10923572
Fantastic observation. He has been called a Hegelian (though never admits it outright) on many occasions. Girard never called himself a philosopher.
However, within the "Girardian Community" there has been much work to match the two.

>>10923523
This actually relates to Lacan/Zizek's formulation of this kind of ritualized violence as a "sanctification" of an originary violence that established the civil order. So, a corollary here: so instead of just the violence that threatens the social order, the ritual is a (dramatized re-enactment) of the violence that established it. In other words, the transgression against the transgression (the original state of lawless chaos) is constitutive of orderly society. Good stuff.

As for Girard's metaphysical desire - where I desire to be the mediator of my desire more than I do the object - Lacan says we don't desire the Other as much as we desire the desire of the Other.

What was his opinion of Christianity? The little bit of Revolt I skimmed made pretty clear he wasn't Christian, but he threw a few bones to the Catholic church for maintaining dregs of tradition. What do you believe he would think about using the church as a method to revitalize tradition?

>>10923597
Not a fan. Found it passive, naively theistic, devotional, absolute comes to you instead of you going to it. If you ask me? I'm not a fan of his views on Christianity either. I don't see any difference between his reaction to suffering/evil and Christ's cry on the Cross, except that the latter is impassioned and the former detached. His views on Christianity are under-developed imo. I don't think he had any hope for the Church salvaging any kind of traditionalist spirit in Europe, but he did recognize it carried the last few vestiges of the solar light.

>>10923523

Ok... I'll continue this and answer questions because i'm getting bogged down in trying to get through them all and I need to finish this story.
This is the part some of you may very much dislike but i am just the messenger

As you very well know, Frazer, and most comparative mythologists lump Christianity in with all the other myths.

Girard thought this as well at first (he was a cradle catholic but his first two works were atheistic to the bone). It was when he read the Bible that he was completely shocked by what he read, especially when it came to the Lord's Passion.

What he found in the Bible was unlike anything he had found in any other "mythical" text because he saw, for the first time, a complete dismantling of the myth which aims to throw a shroud over human violence.

While in the Old Testament the very first seeds of this dismantling are seen, it is not until the Lord's Passion that the entire mechanism is "unveiled". What do I mean by this?

Let us look at the myth of Romulus and Remus (the birth of Rome) and Cain and Abel.

Two exceptionally similar stories - Both containing brothers with one murdering the other. What is the major difference here?
In the Roman story, Romulus murders Remus and his murder is celebrated! This is the birth of Rome! Remus is condemned for having stepped outside the perimeters of the city.

Now, in the Biblical text we see Cain murder Abel, and it is Cain who is condemned and Abel celebrated as the innocent and glorious one more pleasing to God.

In the story of Abraham we see Human sacrifice "downgraded" to animal sacrifice etc, however, the fact of the matter is, the God of the Old Testament is still, in a very real sense, a sacrificial God. Girard calls the Old Testament a "text in travail". The Jews of the time are slowly, through the prophets, hearing the call of the true God (as opposed to the violent God of all myth), but still fall prey to the same mechanism which man has relied on since time immemorial.
But what happens in the Passion?

cont.

>>10923603
Interesting. I would be curious to see someone formulate a working synthesis of the two, but that much /pol/ would probably collapse into a black hole.

>>10923576
I'm the Anon you replied to. This is one of the more obvious questions to ask, and I would like it addressed.

>>10923607
All this stuff about scapegoating seems plausible when applied to more ancient societies, but what about later periods? Who's the scapegoat in the Enlightenment? The period of German idealism? Existentialism? Marxism? atheism in general? Why should people in these movements care about this theory?

>>10922717
REFUTE THIS OBLIGATORY POST:

Shelves: philosophy, society-culture-anthropology-etc, nonfiction
Who is Julius Evola? What does he want? Why does he matter? Do Fascists shit in the woods?

Ride the Tiger starts with some standard criticisms of the Liberal-Democratic-Capitalist-Constitutional world, as well as the Materialist-Marxist-Soviet-COMINTERN world, again noting their focus on material conditions while ignoring 'spiritual' or mental processes. He briefly discusses a few contemporary philosophers in this early stage of analysis. Most of his time is spent wrestling with Nietzsche, his implications from "God is dead", a Zarathusthra, the Apollonian-Dionysian dualism of society, and so forth. He makes a few brief criticisms of Heidegger, Marx and Stirner, and notes the 'new nihilism' of existentialism, and takes a good whack at Sartre.

So what does Evola propose instead? He starts with Nietzsche's view of what must come after nihilism, after God has died, and proposes his new society from there. He advocates something called 'radical traditionalism', with emphasis on the old institutions of Europe which existed before 1789, or perhaps before 476.

Evola is anti-cosmopolitan, anti-financial, anti-Marxist, anti-rational, anti-scientific, anti-pacifist, anti-materialist, anti-feminist, anti-egalitarian, anti-Christian, anti-individual, anti-modern, anti-democratic, anti-bourgeois.

This leaves us with tribal nationalism, agrarianism, neo-paganism, traditional family organization, an aristocratic caste system (with people like him on top, naturally - he was born into Italian nobility) as well as a bit of Eastern Mysticism thrown in, especially the 'Kali Yuga', the 432,000 year long age of darkness and sin in Hindu theology.

He is not solely an ordinary 'traditionalist', with reference to familial customs or little traditions. Instead he wants to throw out all of the changes over the past few hundred years and start again 'anew' with older traditions, a grand mystical warrior existence, 'riding the tiger'. Before the French Revolution, before Marxism, before 'human rights' or 'democracy'.

This is where Evola shows his true inner self - not in his criticism, but what he does advocate. He snarls at modern society, but perhaps because it has passed him by. He is frightened of the 'degeneracy' of the world, and such is made very clear.

He advances a few tentative points against 'scientific rationalism', but these are laughably muddled. For example, because he does not understand atomic theory, it is therefore 'useless knowledge' and to be discarded.

1/?

>>10923607

Here, in the figure of Christ, the Word made Flesh, we see, through his own willing sacrifice, the scapegoat mechanism revealed in full.

Our imperfect nature has made us constantly fall back on the scapegoat mechanism in order to receive the Pharmacological benefit of sacrifice

Edit: I forgot to mention that with the ritual of sacrifice, since it is Pharmacological (Pharmakos - that which heals before it poisons), more and more sacrifice is eventually needed in order to stave off the chaotic violence which is always threatening. Think of the Aztecs - they went from 1 murder a year to roughly 10000 in 3 days in its twilight). Like a drug addict, a higher dose of sacrifice if always required until the whole body shuts down.

So Christ came to us, again, to WILLINGLY become the scapegoat. Think of the time in which he came, historically. There were mimetic crises everywhere between Gentile and Jew, Pharisee and Roman etc.
What are the requirements of a Scapegoat?
That he be within the society but just outside of it. Here comes a guy saying to all people that they are wrong, both Pagan and Jew. That he is the way and that they are following their father "the devil":

"You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

In the Passion, Girard says, we have see, for the first time in any myth, the point of view of the VICTIM. We see for the first time that he is not the harbinger of the violent crisis but merely an innocent victim and, most importantly, the victim of human violence. Nothing more than human violence caused by mimetic desire.

>>10923663
On culture, he is insipid. His rants are that of a grumpy racist grandfather complaining that 'new music' rap jazz is intellectually bankrupt because it is from 'primitive' peoples. I quote:

One can deduce that modern man, especially North American man, has regressed to primitivism in choosing, assimilating, and developing a music οf such primitive qualities as Negro music, which was even originally associated with dark forms οf ecstasy.


Women? Their best place is raising a family. Men are suited for war and should thus kill. The modern world is wholly bosh and should be tossed.

So - the big question: is Evola a fascist? Perhaps, although not necessarily - he was a 'Radical Traditionalist', and gives himself a substantial intellectual covering to prevent himself from being mistaken for a fascist immediately. Though not all traditionalists are fascists, all fascists are traditionalists.

Evola, here, comes across as a man who wants so desperately, so futilely, for the world to be simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil, with himself naturally on the side of good. He wants a return to simplicity, with some people naturally in power (such as himself), and all of the annoying complaints of others (women, people not in his ethnicity, people who aren't 'superior') to be sidelined. Everything else can go. Agriculture, technology, politics, art, all of it which cannot be controlled or changed for the better (and very little can) is to be eliminated. The simple fact is that our modern world is pluralistic, save for a few isolated locals in the Amazon, the Sentinel Islands, and the militias of North Midwest, and this cannot be changed very easily.

One of the core tenets of fascism - at least, fascism in its 20th century unholy incarnations, is the cult of tradition. Hitler had his imagined Aryan race, the restoration of German glory, as well as his 'cult of pastoral life' - his view was for Germany to be a nation of soldier-peasants after the war, gleefully exterminating the brutish Poles and Russians. Mussolini made plain his ambitions for the New Roman Empire, as well as his rejection of democracy. Francisco Franco imagined himself to be a new Crusader of Spain's glory days in the 16th century.

Of course, the poisonous ideas of fascism still endure. Most recently, Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Utoya massacre imagined himself to be a Crusader, a defender of traditional Europe and its Values, as he bombed civilians.

As such, he is to be pitied as much to be held in contempt for his intellectual garbage, and providing a pleasing lie for the radical traditionalists who complain about 'foreign invasion' on one day, and shoot children in the head and beat homosexuals and immigrants the next.


2/2

>>10923663
>>10923668
>Thread about Evola's metaphysics
>"Oh yeah? Well he said mean things about jazz!"

>>10923681
thats not a refutation and i didnt ask you pleb

>>10923663
>>10923668
>the "he's just AFRAID of modernity" meme
>the "le stupid grandpa" meme
>Evola, here, comes across as a man who wants so desperately, so futilely, for the world to be simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil, with himself naturally on the side of good.
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHH

>>10923664
Not only has Christ revealed the Scapegoat mechanism, that is, that we merely sacrifice an arbitrary and innocent victim for the sake of social cohesion, but he also provides us with a NEW model to mediate our desires, Himself, who stands outside of violence and one with whom one cannot enter into rivalry (how can one become a rival with agape? Pure love?)
St. Paul was the first to recognise this when he says "Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ."

>>10923663
Child's play.

>So what does Evola propose instead? He starts with Nietzsche's view of what must come after nihilism, after God has died, and proposes his new society from there. He advocates something called 'radical traditionalism', with emphasis on the old institutions of Europe which existed before 1789, or perhaps before 476.

He specifically says pining for the past would regressive, and that Tradition as some specific set of practices situated in historical time has come and went, but Tradition as such (as an intrinsic superiority of soul) always survives. I mean, the title of the book itself refers to this - Ride the Tiger. Who can do this but the individual? There are no social solutions to ontological problems.

>This is where Evola shows his true inner self - not in his criticism, but what he does advocate. He snarls at modern society, but perhaps because it has passed him by. He is frightened of the 'degeneracy' of the world, and such is made very clear.

No, in the section on drugs, he says you could do heroin if you wanted to, as long as you had the requisite loftiness of soul to conquer its effects, which he advises against since it would require an extreme amount of training. A man who accepts that modernity can provide unique opportunities for the prospective initiate isn't one who is frightened of the world. Evola would say go the house party, just don't lose your head.

>Women? Their best place is raising a family. Men are suited for war and should thus kill.

Typical modern whinging that betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of gender dynamics. A woman wants nothing more than to devote herself to a (worthy) man. That there are little, if any, worthy men today doesn't mean this isn't true.

If you don't think men want to conquer and dominate themselves, if not the other, then I don't know what to tell you. Or the author of this article. It's a garbage article, by the way. No engagement with ideas, just the throwing around of a lot '-isms' the modern uses as a substitute for actual thought.

Ride the Tiger doesn't even advocate fascism ffs.

>>10923657
That is where it gets most interesting and, perhaps, most worrying in terms of a Girardian concept of a modernity in crisis. Would you like to hear it?

>>10923687
There's nothing to refute. You have presented him and his views in a negative, mocking tone and mistaken that for a logical critique. Quintessentially leftist and modern, you have proven his point about how vapid current intellectualism is in your flailing attempt to discredit him. I simply paid you the same courtesy of discourse that you paid me.

>>10923668
>Evola, here, comes across as a man who wants so desperately, so futilely, for the world to be simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil, with himself naturally on the side of good.

he specifically rejects simplistic moralist dichotomies between good and evil in the first half of the book.

The person who wrote this article never read the book and I can't believe something like this is published while I'm on here shitposting on 4chan.

>>10923704
not him but i would

Is /lit/ on the verge of an /Evola/ General?

>>10923704
I am the same anon with the 'pls explain Original Sin if desire is mimial' and I am honestly so into your explanations of this stuff that I would listen to you do a podcast if you had a nice voice even and I hate podcasts, please continue.

I'm also really into the etymology of pharmakos and pharmacology if you know or want to say any more about it than "that which poisons before it heals" - but I understand that you've already taken on a lot of expository work out of 'love of the game' and you are not my professor.

Pic related because I have absolutely no fucking idea what any of this means and I figured you might be able to give me a brainlet explanation or point me in a good direction.

>>10922944
yikes

>>10923708

Basically, for better (or worse) Christ has dismantled the mechanism on which humanity has relied on since time immemorial.

The "plight of the victim" has become known to all cultures who have been touched by the Gospels (imagine a Greek, or one of Nietzsche's "Blonde Lions" caring about a slave, a victim, or someone outside of the polis).

No longer can we sacrifice someone in order to receive the pharmacological effects because, due to Christ, we now recognise that we are victimising.

This hasn't solved the problem, though, since the real challenge, of humanity following Christ's example, has not been undertaken. Rather, we move further and further away from him and, particularly in modern philosophy, we continue to "veil" and obscure the truth by scapegoating Christianity.
Try as we may, the mechanism continues to work on us since it is what we have always relied on.
Nietzsche was correct when he stated that Christianity has afforded the victim with a status he had hitherto never enjoyed. The victim and the meek are the ones being praised. Nietzsche was incredibly observational of this particular fact, however he merely wanted to resurrect the old Pagan reliance on sacrifice. He could not accept the "new way" which was revealed by Christ.
Nietzsche, to his credit, was also the only one who KNEW that there was something remarkably different about Christianity as opposed to every other Pagan myth which preceded it. It is why he signed his letter "Dionysus vs the Crucified" at the end of the life, with "Dionysus" standing in for all myths except Christ. This is what the new Nietzscheans forget. This is where they are silent. This difference for Nietzsche literally drove him insane because he could not accept the way of Christ because he worshipped a Will directed towards victimisation.

However, with this new status that the "victim" now enjoyed (and former victim) each clamours for that status and, rather than forgive (as taught by Christ "forgive them for they know not what they do") the victim now, paradoxically, victimises his former persecutor.
The mimetic mechanism continues to function however now, without the outlet with which to relieve it (sacrifice of a scapegoat) we have entered a territory wherein a true apocalyptic violence at a Global level is a very real chance.
Christ, has freed us from the deal we had made with violence, but in so doing has taken away the one thing we had always relied on to curb apocalyptic violence.
It is either that we follow his example or the crisis will become so fierce that we could see a true apocalypse.

>>10923160
Spengler got a good portion of his philosophy right, except his metaphysics.

>>10923702
Jajajahahaahahahahajjahajaahhajajahahahahahahahhahahaahahah pseud

>>10923767
This has been a really fascinating and informative read. I learned something today. Ain't philosophy fuckin' grand? Every thread in /lit/ should be like this thread.

>>10923767
Honestly when I read an analysis like this I sometimes think that it the mere process of seeking an explanation acts as a reduction of the complete picture. Christians are capable of creating victims too, aren't they? Isn't Ulysses a sort of victim?

>>10923664
Good post. And a good summary of Girard, and why we need him now.

This piece is especially interesting to me:
>"You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires.
>When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."
Look up the Greek for satan/satanas. It means accuser, or adversary. Plug that into the triangle of mimetic desire. And what are sins, but those prohibited acts which we most desire to commit. Satan is in everyone and every thing we can see to covet.

And you're dead on about the uniqueness of the Christ figure. I took pic related from /pol/ while arguing for Girard there the other day. Look at the iron age gods: murderous, tribal, hurling thunder, calling young men to imitate them. Socrates was correct in replacing Homer, the hero of poetry, with a new hero of philosophy. And similarly Christ was correct in replacing these national gods which call men to the charnel house. He is a god for all men, who cuts the chains of cyclical violence and sets men free. Rather than espousing something like Roman virtus, the Christ figure outright rejects it. And this is in line with the Scripture, when Jesus and the apostles speak of a reversal of power. The evidence for this effort is plain: Christian forgiveness has given us thousands of years of relative peace and technological advancement. Compare with tribes and nations that acquired technology but never left their shamanic/animalism roots.

>>10923729
Thanks for the compliment. Today has been good practise for me merely to try and communicate this stuff in a way that's easily digestible.

I found you some information on the Derrida/Girard pharmakos divide. Ill paste it for you and provide a link for further reading if you're interested.

"The Greek pharmakon gives us, in fact, a clear contrast between the methods of Derrida and those of Girard. Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" (in Dissemination) and Girard's second major work, Violence and the Sacred, were both published in the original French in 1972, and both deal with the Greek pharmakon. According to Derrida, Plato in the Phaedrus is arguing for the primacy of speech over writing and uses the word pharmakon for the latter, thus portraying it with the ambiguous double meaning of remedy-poison. The related word pharmakos was the designation for the human scapegoat who, on occasions of crisis in Greek city-states, would be ritually expelled or sacrificed. Derrida calls attention to the pharmakos in arguing that Plato is performing a similar operation on writing. The human scapegoat provides a secondary support for Derrida's primary concern with the violence in Plato's text of expelling writing in favor of speech.

Girard agrees with Derrida's textual analysis but turns his method around to emphasize what Derrida takes to be secondary, namely, the violence to real human scapegoats. The expulsion of the pharmakos matters more than the expulsion of writing. Girard is concerned with dead human bodies, while Derrida seems concerned more with dead letters. Andrew McKenna comments:

The effect on human bodies is disproportionate to that on dead letters -- indeed, incommensurate -- but the structure of the operation is the same. If this is not mere coincidence, a fluke, it is a warrant for the victimary hypothesis [i.e. Girard's theory] as a unified theory of cultural institutions, philosophy among them. It is thus not surprising that "Plato's Pharmacy" reads like an allegory of this theory, a symbolic representation of institutional occurrences. Philosophy is an institution like many another; if the origin of culture and cultural institutions is sacrificial, philosophy will not be immune to sacrificial mechanisms. Rather, philosophy is accomplice to them when it thematizes thepharmakon while remaining silent about the pharmakos. (McKenna 1992, 37)"

http://girardianlectionary.net/girard_postmodern_literary_criticism.htm

>>10923261
>>10923301
I FUCKING HATE THESE GODDAMN HEGELIANS. MY DESIRES AREN'T PREDICATED ON MY INTERACTIONS WITH OTHER PEOPLE. IF I WENT AND LIVED IN A FUCKING WOODS I WOULD STILL WANT THINGS

>>10923799
Hi There,
Thanks for the compliment, I could honestly talk about this stuff for days. I need help!

I've brought up Girard over at /pol/ as well and its like barking at the moon. They don't realise how "undifferentiated" they are to the "left" who they hate and the way in which their actions merely mirror the other.
One does "punch a nazi"
the other does "punch antifa"

The same reaction occurs here in /lit/ too unfortunately. Too many people prefer to cling to older philosophical notions that, under the weight of Girard, don't seem to hold much water anymore.
I think in another century or so his true genius will be recognised.
Truth can only be Truth and nothing else, and the truth has a way of being found.

>>10923837
>posting philosophy in /pol/

ya dun goofed

>>10923795
This. Aren't these theories incredibly reductionist?

>>10923806
Lmao Girard =/= Hegel

>>10923894
Hegelians=/=Hegel

Evola was a literal Nazi "superfascist".

He was a piece of shit human and he was proud about it!

>>10923803
I just finished reading this and really enjoyed it!! If you have any more suggestions don't be afraid to share, I've really learned a lot from you tonight!

Congrats /lit/, I'm impressed. You guys lived up to your name. I learned something today as I hope you all did. The questions are slowing to a trickle so girardanon can take over or whoever else. I'll still answer any questions that come my way.

Cheers.

>>10923837
>>10923784
Is it possible to reach an Evolian-Girardian synthesis?

>>10922731
>I don't judge the value of knowledge on whether or not it gets me laid.
You could've just said "no"

>>10924016
I'm sure girardanon has his own views, and although their areas of interest are pretty divergent, I'd say: where the Girardian identifies with Christ as the figure outside the circle of mediated desire, the traditionalist identifies with an impersonal absolute as manifested in his own (transcendental) self.

Do you know what I think? From what I can tell here, one externalizes this principle, the other internalizes it. I believe girardanon was incredulous not so much about the negation of desire as such, but its self-negation. That I can do it on my own.

So I don't believe on these grounds a synthesis is possible. Girard can accuse Evola of relying on a desire to transcend that is mediated by an idealized notion of the self-sufficient ariyan hero as received through others, Evola would accuse Girard of not having the intestinal fortitude to cut the circle on his own. In addition, Evola's views on the sacrificial economy aren't as grim as Girard's, owing to his Nietzschean sympathies.

>>10923702
>A man who accepts that modernity can provide unique opportunities for the prospective initiate isn't one who is frightened of the world. Evola would say go the house party, just don't lose your head.
Would Evola consider the Amish Rumspringa a legit initiatic rite?

>>10923668
>Though not all traditionalists are fascists, all fascists are traditionalists.
but the original fascists were explicitly futurists

>>10923729
>I am the same anon with the 'pls explain Original Sin if desire is mimial' and I am honestly so into your explanations of this stuff that I would listen to you do a podcast if you had a nice voice even and I hate podcasts, please continue.
there's a radio program in 5 parts of 1 hour each with Girard himself explaining his stuff

you can get it here:
The Scapegoat: The Ideas of René Girard, Part 1
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-scapegoat-the-ideas-of-ren%C3%A9-girard-part-1-1.3474195

and it's probably somewhere in youtube as well

>>10922717
Can you please leave this board and never come back?

>>10922944

>>10924234
Yeah. Marinetti who wrote both the futurist and fascist manifesto was rabidly antitraditionlist

>Life = aggression. Universal Peace = the decrepitude and death throes of races. War = bloody and necessary trial of a people's strength. What needs to be killed off and must die is Teutonic traditionalism, which is composed of mindless conformity, pedantic, professorial dullness, obsession with culture, and slavish imitation, with rustic pride

Quote is from Critical Writings

Girardanon, if you're still here I'd like to make a few comments and ask some questions....
>I am also a Catholic and a student of philosophy. Having lived a "Nietzschean" lifestyle before as well, I found Plato quite instrumental in overcoming my existentialism. I ask, what does Girard make of Platonism? Particularly its adaptation by the Church. Is Socrates a scapegoat?
>You mention that Jesus comes between Gentile and Jew as an outsider who reconciles. Is this not like in Sikhism whose founder decided there was "no longer Hindu and Muslim but God and his people (men and women, rich and poor)". I guess I have problems reconciling the "uniqueness of Christ" after over-esposute to Frazer and Campbell and the like... of course, he (founder of Sihkism) wasn't sacrificed though.
>Lastly, what's a good suggested reading order for Girard? (Open to secondary sources as well)

>>10922717
aren't you the dude who published Evola articles in a couple of mediocre magazines but never got any recognition for it, and ended up ruining your life because literally no university would hire you and no one would publish your biography about him?

>>10923224

To this anon, or anyone else on this thread:

How is Girard's little book on Shakespeare? Good? Worth reading?

>>10925881
from what i've read, very tepid. ac bradley and harold goddard have a greater understanding of the plays-as-dramas, and since girard offers 0 linguistic insight, it's difficult to recc him over them.
read if you want to see (some of) the plays from a unique world-model, but not if you want to learn anything unique about shakespeare himself.

>>10925802
To expand on this:
>To me, and certain scholars as well, it seems the christian mystical path is heavily indebted to neoplatonism. I see Evola as mistaken in some ways, of course, but dedicated to a certain universal path that I respect. What matters if your model of selflessness is selfless due to being the son of God or the enlightened one? Both are allegedly in touch with higher realities. Christ as kerygma resembles buddha nature as ontological grounding. What then is unique if the path for individuals is so similar? Is it the social program? Do not other religions do charity for the downtrodden? Is it stitching together various paganisms under a universalism? As a Hegelian influenced individual, then, I wonder if there is a need for a new synthesis, a post-christianity to stitch together the various splinter churches and newly competing in the west eastern religions...

>>10922944
I'd take this over a Peterson thread any day

>>10923386
If then the object of the Mother's becomes the need to dominate and subdue the rival, then what of the purposes those ends serve? Does the object then shift itself to something like peace (steady or unsteady)? These sorts of things seem to only be able to occur to the degree that the participants are unconscious. Are those further processes, in this view, only available after sufficient undifferentiation, or is undifferentiation more of a status or state of being than a process toward something (intuitive I would suppose it being "undifferent")?

Ignoring the difficult questions, girardanon?

>>10926932
I don't think evola and girard anons are here atm.

if im a dumb when it comes to philosophy (all I've read is the republic and the prince) would I be able to jump in and read revolt against the modern world?

>>10926945
Oh. My mistake. Bumping for life. And the possibility of return...

>>10927292
You can dive right in depending on how resonant themes of transcendence and self-overcoming are for you. Revolt is a meme introduction to Evola, go with Introduction to Magic. The philosophical cat-wrangling is secondary to the presentation of esoteric ideas.

>>10925874
What, no, you guys got issues. When an obscure Italian thinker inspires this kind of vitriol you have to wonder.

>>10924124
I don't know a thing about it, but likely he'd recognize the echoes of tradition that are present.

>>10925939
Thanks for this, I appreciate it.

>>10922912
>Man used to look beyond the world, now he can't take his eyes off it.

you're such a fucking retard, it honestly is dreadful to watch your incessant posting about nonsense

you did not describe at all why it might be bad to view the world like this

>then are compelled to find something beyond it

or you know, are not

>>10925874
This sounds about right, seeing that the guy keeps making threads about the worthless infantile guy ("Ama's") whilst wondering how it could create this kind of ""vitriol"" on an anonymous imageboard (I mean, he did seem rather empty-headed from the get-go, but Christ)

>>10927553
Projecting much? Evolanon has been nothing but informative, respectful and courteous so far, within reason. The people spouting vitriol here are /leftypol/. How about you actually try forming an argument, instead of spouting ad hominem means? Also, reddit doesn't have a monopoly on AMA's.

>>10927523
I believe his definition of the concepts of Being & Becoming were his answers to Man's attitude to the world, as the world of becoming, and the world beyond as the unconditioned world of being, where Evola designates the realm of metaphysical principles. So then to focusing merely on the world of becoming and taking it as all there subjects the will of the individual to the interplay of various external forces. Being compelled to find something beyond it is something that not all will take up, for various reasons, though many will probably recognise the futility of desire and tragedy of existence to varying degrees throughout their lives.

>>10927523
>you did not describe at all why it might be bad to view the world like this

Basically to always be conscious of your experience as a center, instead of a flux or continuum. A center mysteriously consolidated by our disidentification with this flux.

I am a begginner to these topics and was reccomend to get books on zen. From my research I came across a book called Three pillars of Zen. Is this a good book to buy and if so what author/version should I get because I see several versions of this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Pillars-Anniversary-Updated-Revised/dp/0385260938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522546042&sr=8-1&keywords=three+pillars+of+zen

it's very good

>>10926405
How about instead of being a nigger and being happy to live in project housing instead of fields, you take some responsiblity for that Self you niggers LARP about all the time and have some HIGH standards instead of typical peasant bug standards for the discourse you maintain. Think about it, every single mediocre, nigger animal thought, inconsequential waste of time, second spent in line being ass raped by government regulations, paying taxes, taking fake classes, reading pointless books, you get NONE of that back. You know why I want evolanon to drop dead? You know why I really hate most internet spiritualists? they do not fear Time, they do not have any concept of morality or death. they naively fritter away their limited trip on Earth, they take whatever slop is in front of them, none of them have the decency to seriously differentiate their diction, their thoughts, their style from others, they suck off weak, ugly, failed souls long passed into the grave, they sit here like children, waiting to have their asses wiped and to be fed gruel for their big growing boy souls. Its degrading to even look at. Your entire self worth can be insulted by ugliness and parasitic behavior associated with your field of activity. They do not take any of this seriously, its just an identity, its merely a displacement activity, that kind of EVIL existence, that's something Peterson has in common with Varg, with Heartiste and Roosh, with the frog niggers on twitter, with the LARP leftists, with the /r9k/ /v/edditors, with the wannabe frat chad /pol/yps, all of you do not give a fuck, you do not feel the flames tonguing against your spirit and soon you will be consumed, you will pass from this place, and you will have this on your head when you are released. This is your great rite, sitting in evola threads wide eyed, waiting to be fed third-hand information about dead half-wit spiritualist cults that were mostly propaganda to control people. Have you ever wondered why traditionalists emphasize the social and intellectual aspects of religion? Isn't it weird how poor of poets, how impoverished the aesthetics of these people are? How ugly their prose, how degraded their novel insights are? You aren't alarmed by the smell of these circles? I am, I won't tolerate it. Peterson shit is YT chandala thought, I'm not even looking at that and if I do its to protect people from it.

>>10928109

You don't know me dude. Take a seat already.

>>10928109
ok, then what do you suggest people do?

>>10922778
Can recommend material (not just Evola) on this.

>>10928109
Watch this. It should be more to your liking :^)
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14

>>10924063
Above my depth but thoroughly enjoyed this explanation.

My question is, inputting this into practice and modeling self after Christ; What are Christians to do about the violent forces who wish to destroy them? Are they all to willfully perish as a continuation of the sacrifice?

>>10923668
>>10923663
>Instead he wants to throw out all of the changes over the past few hundred years and start again 'anew' with older traditions, a grand mystical warrior existence, 'riding the tiger'. Before the French Revolution, before Marxism, before 'human rights' or 'democracy'.
I haven't even read Evola and I know this isn't even close to what "riding the tiger means". Painfully inaccurate and attempting to speak authoritatively. Never post this again.

>>10922844
I've enjoyed the 1st. Missed the 2nd. But like the 3rd. Let natural hive selection work you fuckin idiot.

>>10928715
The second thread was general esoterism made by a tripfag. You didn't miss much.

>>10922717
what team is he on?

>>10929235
I'm guessing Evola would be on Team Creme since it's the most Aryan of toppings/spreads.

>>10923663
>>10923668
>he actually typed all of this garbage out
wew

>>10928496
fucking hell i didn't realize we had reached such levels of rick and morty ideology in this world

>>10929750
what'a a mini?

>>10928109
fucking based

>>10929766
Of course, Team Nigger would would compliment a /leftypol/ troll.

>>10928109
>waiting to be fed third-hand information about dead half-wit spiritualist cults that were mostly propaganda to control people

Couldn't have summed up the people in this thread better

>>10928142
>>10928241
>>10928496
>>10929766
>>10930231
The slop they wanted has been found.

>>10923576
i think this is a cool line of questioning. i'd argue that desire in the creation of something new is always related to personal utility somehow (e.g. i'm cold on the TV... wait a second, snuggie) and conceptions of what is 'good' for you are either based in biology (btw, not sure about girardanon's views here... in one comment they say it's mimetic by virtue of evolution, in another they say that it's instinctual/not mimetic but w.e) or socially constructed desires. Basically, I don't think there is such thing as an original desire to create for the sake of creation (also think this is a point that can only be argued by way of example and counter example imo rather than rigorously proven but down to hear more)

I think it's also important not to conflate the desire with the mechanism that satisfies the desire. I think the mechanism of 'i will become rich by selling blankets with armholes' is truly original but each individual component of this plan can be traced to a mimetic desire? dunno if an original combination of desires qualify as non-mimetic mega-desires themselves

girardanon please send help

>>10930350
not that Girard guy, but mimetic desire doesn't have to look the same from the outside, like for example you may see a cool guy in your group who is very unique in his style, and your mimetic desire will drive you to be unique too, which obviously means that you will try to look different to how he looks, but the desire underlying this search for individuality is still mimetic

i think i heard or read Girard expound about this, it may have been in the radio program linked on this post >>10924559 but i'm not sure

>>10923799
don't really appreciate your final thoughts on societies and 'Christian forgiveness'... i think there is a clear counterexample in the modern world of a society advanced in 'peace and technological advancement' (China), as well as very well-established effects from colonialism in the more shamanic/animalist cultures which have imo far more direct explanatory power than 'Christ's forgiveness'.

also, wasn't the entire point of engagement with these other tribes/nations to bring them the gospel? What's your take on why that didn't work out? If you think it's because of internal resistance against the gospel, then I'd say Jesus Christ is not really a persuasive Scapegoat when it comes to dispelling violence/harm (we see modern society's rejection of Christ reflect this as well). I think the facts, however, point towards an alternative explanation - the cruelty inflicted upon colonized nations by European, 'Christian' nations suggest that the Christ figure... didn't end up making these people any less violent or exploitative or greedy.

>>10922717
Hayden?

proof that the divine exists? if not proof, tell me why i should believe in it?

>>10930962
direct insight

>>10931006
but that's just like saying "because that's the way it is"

>>10931077
pretty much, it is what it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NVsyMalJXo

>>10931077
yes, in other words; revelation

anyway you shouldn't listen to anything these inbred mongrels say regarding evola or anything else, they're full of shit

>>10931910
Why didn't you let this thread die if you hate it so much?

How do I train myself to become better at visualising things?

*stares disapprovingly*

>>10931943
look at that beautiful elongated face

>>10930962
your daemon of rationality is not proof enough?

>>10930350
>>10930385
I am the same guy who mentioned snuggies as a very passing thought and I've really enjoyed how both of you expounded on it actually, thanks buds!
I would say something like "shout out to my minis" here but I am phoneposting and I'm afraid I'm not a mini on my phone like I am on my pc and will look like a fraud

>>10932694
Saging myself so-as to not spam-bump this to the top but once a mini, always a mini.
Shout out to my minis!

Did Evola praise any historical/heroic figures?

What hobbies/should one eliminate before embarking on the path?

>>10932722
>What hobbies/should one eliminate before embarking on the path?

>>10932804
Vidya, tv, and movies for starters.

>>10928584
Really depends on your interpretation of 'turn the other cheek'. Whether you have to fight evil in this world or embody a level of detachment that makes it immaterial. I can't do the latter, so until then I'm going to defend myself. Regarding Evola himself you know I can't recall a single passage about self-defense besides the general heroic idealism. Fair to say some of Nietzsche's "to some people you may not give your hand, only a paw" applies.

>>10930962
"Intrinsic identifiability". Shestov for example thinks there really do exist metaphysical classes of men, that some people are just constitutionally blocked from gnosis. The same way a frog is. You look at reality and these long evolutionary genealogies and it hits you that consciousness really is a gradient and that gradient continues into the human. Like the idea that Nietzsche is farther from his last man than the average Joe is from a chimpanzee. I believe it. The best you can do is train yourself towards the highest perspective you know. That's the divine.

>>10932722
I can't rattle off names the way he does in Revolt but he admired Frederick II for being the last echo of an Ouranian spirituality in Western Europe. Dante himself was also a supporter, and Evola saw in his poetic ontology a Traditional substrate.

As for hobbies: anything strictly passive and consumptive. Ascesis is one-pointed will towards liberation. Anything that doesn't serve this is extraneous and wasteful. We're talking a unification of energy. But here's the thing: nothing is really prohibited, so even a video game that resonates with this ideal could be worth your time. But I'm not telling you to play video games. You're gonna quickly find out that certain mediums are dead-ends. You begin to self-select your hobbies. Besides all that, exercise, meditation, and a clean physical and mental diet are a no-brainer.

>>10928109
I can tell just from the way you write writes you're sharper than most. Kinda bums me out when I turn off a bright mind. I know what I'm talking about but I still LARP and fall down every day. This has been a great thread.

>>10927553
You're painfully childish. If you don't like these threads just don't look into them.

>>10932907
For sure porn is the first habit to get rid of in its entirety ?

>>10932907
In regards to your hobbies comment are we not allowed to occasionally engage in some of those activities if it doesn't impact our life significantly?
Personally in my life I never watch tv and the only movies I watch are old classics, like Jason and the Argonauts and Seven Samurai. I also occasionally play games on my 3ds when I'm bored and have nothing else to do. These activities take up maybe 2-6 hours a week at most so it completely necessary to abandon them?

>>10932907
>You look at reality and these long evolutionary genealogies and it hits you that consciousness really is a gradient and that gradient continues into the human

how is consciousness a gradient within species? I see lots of evidence of differing levels of consciousness between different species, but not within them. Differing intelligence, yes - but i don't think intelligence is a prerequisite to achieving the sense of direct insight/revelation

OP, what do you think of military service? I am not versed well in Evola, but I see it as some type of initiation that still exists in the modern world. Will I find what I am looking for in joining the military?

>>10933381
Yeah.

>>10933391
Not about right or wrong but about the consequences patterns of behavior have on this one-pointedness of will. You develop this will and the rest happens naturally. Certain things teach you to desire something beyond them more than other things. You're really supposed to unravel every behavioral loop you can. Anything that doesn't contribute to this drive is jettisoned. It's self-propulsive.

>>10933472
Short answer is always look into the eyes. Long answer is that it's in man that this discrepancy between consciousness and ground is most visible. But you see it in animals too. It's always the eyes. Look into Schelling's ontology.

>>10933728
If you don't you'll be alone somewhere that could mean your death so it'll make a man out of you one way or another. I think the brotherhood and camaraderie is universal throughout time but I don't think you wanna die for the leaders of a system you might profoundly disagree with

Evola

>>10933472
>how is consciousness a gradient within a species
Compare a serial killer to an average man on the street to the Buddha.

>>10933853
But I don't know any other place that can facilitate such an intense feeling of brotherhood and camaraderie (besides joining a monastery). Military forces ordinary men into great stress to create men of bronze. Military was a necessary institution of traditional societies, therefore I should enlist if I were to be a traditionalist, no? And what of all the time lost marching instead of reading?

>>10933887
This has been the most informative thread in ages, fuck off with your memeposting.

>>10934002
I don't think anything else can. In that case enlist for the rare opportunity of confronting the radical void of dying for a cause you don't believe in. But without even depending on that surplus-jouissance you usually get from renouncing something, cause all of these words are smoke in a life-or-death situation. But then again the point is to expose yourself to elemental terror and overcome it. It's radical voids all the way down bruddo.

>>10923663
>>10923668
For someone who has read so much Hadrian is kind of a dolt (although he really just has heavy biases). He used to post here as well, don't know if he does anymore.

>>10933472
there is current neurological research being done on consciousness as a gradient, scaling up with more architectonic complexity in that person's connectome. Essentially less complex cortical connectivity means less higher cognitive activity, which means "consciousness" which is a new advent in the history of neurological evolution, is found at lower levels in those with lower cortical interconnectivity. I do not have the studies nearby, but maybe if I see this thread again today I will find them for you. The Buddhists and Hindus are correct, in their esoteric assumption that some people are less alive than others, or less human.
>I see lots of evidence of differing levels of consciousness between different species, but not within them.
not looking carefully

>>10934104
i mean, i can see why that would imply higher intelligence - but the extension of intelligence to being less 'human' or being less able to feel/live by a divine truth is a much larger jump. My basic contention is that it's easy to compare human beings based on intelligence, but I really don't see why that means less human or less able to live according to a divine truth. I mean, there are probably many highly intelligent human beings with more 'architectonic complexity' who are unhappy but unwilling to look for truth, but probably just as many unintelligent people who are genuinely happy/living according to a divine truth without necessarily being cognizant of it.

>>10934229
Precisely because those "unintelligent" you're talking about are compensated by this consciousness. Not all but some.

>>10928109
>let me tell you why what youre doing is wrong and wasted but not tell you what you should be doing instead

ah the ol razzle dazzle

God is a stomach, everything eats everything to hopefully make something with it. The parable of the Master and his 3 Servants: what God hates the most is not the self that loses but the self that doesn't play the game.

>>10934002
Just join a boxing club, much more to the point with a lot less shitty bureaucracy, from what I can gather you’ll be disappointed. I thought about joining many times myself, but modern militaries are nothing compared to the older ones, unless maybe you’re in very elite units.

>>10935099
Evola would probably recommend fencing, but good luck finding an intact aristocratic fencing club that takes unknown members

What are some good hobbies that Evols would of approve of? Besides obvious ones like reading, meditating, and combat sports.

>>10935506
Mountaineering

>>10935506
Don't forget a creative outlet

>>10935518
This. Evola was very fond of rock climbing (see Meditations on the Peaks) for the "thrill of the ascent," and the feeling of dominance by meticulously moving the body to conquer gravity. That said, he makes the distinction sports involving the descent like skiing (and today skydiving and bungie jumping) don't fall into this category for the pleasurable feeling one gets out of fear when one falls (ie the need for speed), and because it only requires mastery of the reflexes instead of the entire body.

esotericism. Alas, it is already in the archives (I am a lazy phoneposter) but in it, before deletion and time for me to respond, an anon asked me about why I recommend this guy's (pic related [Algis Uzdavinys: Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth]) book.

First of all, I will say it is a work for the advanced student and not the novice. That said, it is a brilliant example of traditionalism as applied to the western tradition. Do not expect any analytic arguments. This is evokative work. Symbolism and imagery are weaved together into a beautiful continental tapestry. Sloterdijk mentions in his book on the three monotheisms, how perhaps we need to go back to Egypt and Babylon to reconcile our modern faiths. This is the book which does this.

If you are a novice philosopher, I suggest cutting your teeth on his easiest work, Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism -- which examines philosophy in the context of the Orphic mystery tradition. It is perhaps his magnum opus, and a succint crystalization of his thought. Then I would move onto Ascent to Heaven and Philosophy and Theurgy and Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth. All of these assume some familiarity with traditionalism as understood by Eliade and Evola and Jung and Guenon. Plato and commentaries, Aristotle and commentaries, and (Neo-)Platonists and commentaries might also help. The Egyptology might require some note taking too. I started with Crowley for Egyptology but do not recommend him unless you are a degenerate occultist. Instead I would suggest Assmann and Lubicz. Aaron Cheak has also written nicely on alchemy and magical Egypt in his two edited compilations on Occult Traditions and Alchemical Traditions.

In any case, I like to believe in a hermetic underground. An alchemical initiation is available to all within all religions and yet only selected by the few within every religion. No need to seek out Sufis or Yogis...

To expand, a person mentioned a train of transmission from Plato to Plotinus. No such physical train existed. Only the vehicle of soul.

>>10935819
*I recently created a thread on esotericism

>>10935819
Are any of his works available online?

>>10935824
I believe you can find some by searching his name + pdf on google. Idk about pirating books.

>>10925802
>>10925881
>>10926022
>>10926945
>>10927345
>>10930350
>>10930385

OK guys, I'm back. As you can imagine Easter for me was quite an important period so I had to spend a little time with family etc.
Hope you all had a wonderful and blessed Easter too!
I can't stay too long. I live by myself and need to start making dinner but I'll answer what I can.

P.S: I don't want to give the assumption that I am in any way an authority on Girard. I've read all his works and am writing a dissertation on him, yes, but mimetic theory is so broad and complex that my knowledge within this theory has been narrowed extensively in order to accommodate my thesis.
Yes, I've read all his works and the works of many "Girardians", but this in no way makes me up to the task of answering all questions with the precision they might require. But i will do my best OK?

I'll first answer the anon who asked about plato>>10925802

>>10935944
Happy Easter!

>>10935944

You can find the Girard's main polemic against Plato in the opening chapters of "Things hidden..." but the basic gist is this:

In Plato's "Idea-World" his main goal is to establish a key difference between the "original" and the copy. Mimesis can only produce a copy and, as we know, a copy for Plato is of no inherent worth. The only worth, or value, is that of the model of the copy. In this sence, imitation is good so long as the model is good and, conversely, bad if the model is bad. In an of itself, though, mimesis has no value whatsoever since it can only produce copies which have no "essence". All essence and authenticity is in the hands of the model, so to speak.

As i discussed earlier in the thread, Girard dismisses autonomy outright and it is this dismissal which is the original starting point for Girards conception of the mimetic principle. For Girard there is no qualitative difference between the Model and the Copy since everyone is just copying each other anyway. The qualities of the model (that is, of authenticity etc.) should merely be seen as themselves having been developed through imitation. The models role of model can NOT be seen as a priori more substantial than the copy. In essence, Girard is REVEALING THE ORIGINAL AS A COPY (sorry don't know how to italicise, but thats the important part.

On a probably even more important note, Plato also never links mimesis with desire and, rather, limits mimesis only to copy and representation. For Girard, the phenomenon of the "double" (as discussed above) reveals a "repetition" in mimesis by the fact of the doubles each repeating each others desire, whereas for Plato, repeition of mimesis is more or less an illusion.

>>10936002
These two differences, that of the repetitive nature of mimesis, and its connection to desire are where most arguments against Plato begin. Again, this is found in far more detail in "Things hidden..."

>>10935819
I'm that anon you're responding to. I'm sorry, but saying it's "too advanced" doesn't defend his reaching claims. His writing is also very disparate and illogical, which isn't to say it's wrong but laid out very poorly. Though, in the sense of wrongness, he drops a foreign basket of facts, usually to do with highly reaching etymologies and invoking other religious concepts, when his sources can't account for the argument.

Outside of his scholarship, but which obviously colors his scholarship, he has quite the unchecked prejudice for the Occident in general. He imagines that philosophy is a "magical tool" wielded by the West to destroy pagan religions, whereas philosophy in a primitive (and supposedly, superior) sense was a ritualized method of crafting a "psychic reality" in order to deal with existence. Naturally, the decline of those societies was the conspiracy of Jews and Christians with their superior "monotheism," tacitly inherited by the Enlightenment, to establish a preliminary truth/falsity and subsequently enforce their "truths" on everyone. Connaturally, the Islamic civilization are the true inheritors of supposed ancient wisdom.

I think it's much more appropriate that the ancient wisdom is really the pipe-dream of an eccentric, anti-Western scholar whose last page of his last book suggests his obsession with these ideas destroyed his sense of identity.

>>10923576
I feel the need to come back to this question re: Eve's desire for the Apple. You are right when you say that Girard analogised very much with the Old Testament but never really got around to this little pickle. Luckily, this is the job of all Girardians now! To continue his work.
Gil Bailie has just released a book titled "God's Gamble" which deals precisely with "The Fall" from a mimetic perspective so I'd like to transcribe some of what he wrote re: the first person to desire and how could the first desire happen mimetically (if you're the first person) here goes:

"The story of the serpent's seductive suggestion as to the desirability of the forbidden fruit and the promptness with which the beguiling desire is imitated is proof that the author of the Fall story had both an intuitive understanding of mimetic desire and the literary ingenuity required to provide the dramatis persona requisite to its elucidation. One indication of this is that the desire to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree does not occur to Eve independently. Her desire for the fruit will have to be aroused mimetically, but the paradisal world would hardly have provided for that had not the Genesis authorinserted a nefarious creature into the story for this purpose...It is the Bible's first recognition of the mimetic reality of the human condition...It was not until the biblical journey comes within two centuries of the Christian era that the serpent in the Fall story is identified with the devil...Alas, when we humans look around we do not immediately see the Logos in who image we are made. Rather, our eagerly imitative glance falls (pun intended) - if not on the Serpent himself - in any case on our neighbour, a neighbour who is himself dazzled and confused by the plethora of models to which he himself is enthralled. The gift of free will - intrinsically ordered to the true, the good, and the beautiful - thus dissolves into a cacophony of mimeticism, from which - if one inhabits a modern or postmodern world - one struggles to extricate himself by mimicking the gestures of autonomy and individuality by which so many of his neighbours are attempting to convince themselves of their social independence and existential authenticity. But to attempt to find one's way out of the mimetic labyrinth by mimicking gestures of individuality or striving to be different is to enter into more interior chambers where the dismembering minotaur awaits..."

>>10923131
Islam

>>10924043
that thought wouldn't occur to a pseud

>>10922912
Actually made me think

Why do evola fags and traditionalists tend to be so disinterested in things such as economics and foreign policy? I know that they have their heads so far up their asses they dismiss anything that doesn't relate to metaphysics as irrelevant hogwash, but don't you think that's a shortcoming on their part? How can you criticize the modern world if you're not well versed in it?

>>10922912
>are you your own principle
no, of course not. that's not how humans operate. ask girard.

evola btfo.

>>10937072
What exactly is there to be versed in? Economics tries to be a science of the laws of wealth production, exchange and conversion. As far as its laws are even valid, it merely has to do with efficiency. What are we prepared to throw away to achieve efficiency?

>>10922717
>"Evola was not just a theoretician, he also practiced sexual magic rites himself. There are unmistakable statements from him about the “tantric female sacrifice” and the transformation of sexuality into political power. Like almost no other, the Italian has openly named the events that unfold in the mysteries of the yogis and then confessed to them: “The young woman,” he writes, “who is first ‘demonized’ and then raped, ... is essentially... the basic motif for the higher forms of tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic” (Evola, 1983, p. 389). In dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini he saw the precursors of future Maha Siddhas who would one day conquer the world with their magic powers: “The magician, the ruler, the lord”, he proclaims in regard to Tantrism, “that is the type of the culture of the future!” (Evola, 1926, p. 304). He recommends Tantrism as “the way for a Western elite” (Evola, East and West, p. 29)."

In other words, Evola the cuck tried to absolve himself of his emasculated by raping women and appealing to fascists. Boy, what a surprise!

>>10937146
Did he ever have a wife or gf?

>>10937146
Yeah, he never supported rape. If that quote is real that is taken from his description of a foreign rite. Often in Tantrism there are grotesque elements that are usually adopted from the lower caste. Some scholarship even disputes the crudeness of the supposed action itself, comparable to Christian cannibal myths. And transform sexuality into "political power"? Please.

As for the commonly cited quote on Wikipedia:

"If man in general finds pleasure in defloration and rape, everything that in that pleasure can be related to the instinct or pride of first possession is only a surface element; the deepest factor is the feeling, even if only illusory, that the physical act gives him of violating the inviolable and of possessing her whom, in her ultimate root, in her "nakedness," will never be possessed by the lusts of the flesh; it is the desire to possess this "virgin" that acts obscurely in the desire to possess the physically intact woman or the woman who resists [. . .] There is a wish to "kill" the hidden and absolute woman contained in every female being, and a futile sadistic desire for "possession." It is for this reason, too, that, as a rule, nothing stirs a man more than feeling the woman utterly exhausted beneath his own hostile rapture in coitus." (Metaphysics of Sex 164)

"Woman always and decisively has the upper hand over any man who desires, that is, over mere masculine sexual need [. . .] Thus priapic man is quite deluded when he assumes and boasts that he has "possessed" a woman just because he has been lying with her [. . .] Man knows it, and often owing to a neurotic unconscious overcompensation for his inferiority complex, he flaunts before woman an ostentatious manliness, indifference, or even brutality and disdain [. . .] passivity of man increases the more the material aspects of the "male" and the instinctive violent and sensual traits of manhood are predominant in him. As a rule, the man poorest in inner manliness is the very type that the Western world has adopted as the ideal of manhood." (166-167)

>>10937181
Whoa! The old bore contradicts himself, consider me puzzled!

> “who is first ‘demonized’ and then raped, ... is essentially... the basic motif for the higher forms of tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic”

His own words. But continue your biblical explanations of a man who believed in spooky ghosts and left his butt-buddy Mussolini because there as a lack of magic in his doctrine.

>>10936012
Thank you for responding. Glad you're still here. Don't know too many others aware of Uzdavinys so nice to meet someone who does. Didn't mean to handwave by saying it was "advanced". I think you are mostly correct about his scholarship. His writing is quite disparate and illogical, etc. I suppose that is what I euphemistically described as his "continental" style. Nevertheless, he is one of the few scholars I am aware of who writes about the relation between mystery cults and ancient philosophy. I think his essential thesis on ancient philosophy being a lived practice is supported by Hadot, for a more legit scholarly example. The initiatic element is not too much of a stretch, IMO, and supported by certain readings of Plato.
>anti-occidentalism
This is a common problem with the traditionalist school. Even Eliade's condemnation of Christianity as a "historical religion" reeks of fascism and anti-semitism despite the fact that he is a academically approved scholar. It is a shame. But I can largely overlook it fortunately. If philosophy died as a lived practice in the academic setting it survived as a lived practice in Christian mysticism.
>Islam as true inheritor of the ancient wisdom
This is one of my issues with Guenon. I am not terribly impressed with Islam and sincerely hope that is not the best that traditionalism can offer. I myself am a Christian for all intents and purposes and like my religion. However, I do recognize that Christianity has had some imperialistic and cololonial aspirations which have been damaging to primitive cultures contacted. But the same could be said of the Islamic occupation of India and destruction of Arabian polytheism and so on. We are not alone in such guilt at least.
>obsession destroyed his sense of identity
Don't recall this. Can you summarize or post the excerpt?

>>10923767
>It is either that we follow his example or the crisis will become so fierce that we could see a true apocalypse.

Or societies will find new scapegoats to direct violence on, which is already somewhat happening (look at the rise of fascism.)

>>10935518
>>10935530
>>10935718
Thanks for the replies! Sadly I live in Florida and I there are no hilly areas in my part of the state so I might just do hiking in the woods near my area. In regards to a creative outlet I want to write stories/poems based off mythology, mainly European and East Asian, but I am not well read enough to do this yet. If were not well read enough what are some things I can do that will improve my writing skills?

>>10922944
oh no no

>>10937772
>Islam as true inheritor of the ancient wisdom
>This is one of my issues with Guenon

To be fair he does talk about how Islam is separated into the esoteric and exoteric, with the truly metaphysic being only found in the esoteric traditions reserved for the intellectual elite. He rightfully states that because of this Islam is the closest to Christianity and the West compared to the other eastern traditions (the difference being that the esoteric metaphysical teaching in Christianity isn't continuing as it is in Islam except in small scattered groups).

>>10938145
Read and study writers you like, write a lot, interact with other writers. That's what my dad who is a writer told me.

what do the gods even do? just sit around being divine all day?

Oh, here's the thread. Ill paste what I posted in the other thread. Hopefully evolanon is still around, but feel free to respond if it pleases you.

Hey evolanon. I'm liking your presence on this board lately and I have an odd question. What do you think a fellow like Evola would have thought about more recent cultural phenomenon like metal music?

People around here in my social circle were introduced to philosophy, esotericism, elitism, occultism, traditionalism etc., through the edgelord flirtations with luciferianism/satanism that you'll find expressed in black metal. Do you like black-metal, or metal in general? I find it amusing that people in these weird subcultures are often into thinkers like Evola, Nietzsche, Guenon. I cant imagine they'd have anything but contempt or an amused indifference for something like black-metal.

>>10938463

Asking that question itself is presuming a personification and anthropomorphisation of god, which is a mistake since the eastern Traditions teach that they exist as metaphysical principles and not as literal beings.

>t. Adi Shankara

>>10938460
Your dad, who is an insignificant little toad. Croak.

What's his beef with natural law?

>>10938596
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj5IpjIFiM

>>10939019
Hah. I take issue with how Varg communicates stuff, but he is really very likeable all in all. I mean, how can one not like him?

Id love a lyre like that myself.

>>10938596
metal is pop music for ugly and/or angry people

>>10939339
Its not pop music, but its certainly music for angry people. I listen to it less now that I'm less angry.

>>10939384
99/100 metal bands are abject popshite and even for the 1/100 with novel/worthwhile compositions the distortion paradigm is emblematic of the decay of mankind's eye for transcendent beauty. All genre of rock music are degenerate

>>10937324
>the basic motif for the higher forms of tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic

"Shadowy forms of Tantrism are found in rites bordering on witchcraft, whereby, to obtain special powers, man sought certain elementary female entities, yakshini, yogini, dakini, sometimes considered the goddess Durga and at other times her emanations. The Tantrist often interpolated animistic themes and used spells on those entities to subjugate them by incantations in the person of an actual woman, intoxicating himself and possessing that woman carnally in wild places, in a graveyard or a wood. . . . The young woman who had first to be "demonized" and then violated not only constitutes the basis of the shadowy rites just mentioned but is also the fundamental theme of the higher forms of Tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic."

Here is the actual quote. I see no mention of rape. In fact it looks like that word was completely fabricated. Demonization?:

"To be qualified for the sexual practice, a young woman must be duly initiated and trained in the art of magical positions. Her body is aroused and made living by nyasa, a sacramental procedure by which a "divine fluid" is laid upon, emitted into, or aroused in various parts of the body (in her "points of life"). This is an equivalent of the "demonization" of the woman belonging to the shadowy practices mentioned earlier, intended t strength the natural fluid that feeds the sexual magnetism of a normal woman and is the basis for her fascination."

I imagine it's hard for a woman to be raped when the man has to lie "completely still" like Shiva and the woman must perform contorted and complex positions of the body. Oh, but you don't care about that. You're a vitriolic person who wants to demonize anyone who doesn't agree with you. Sad man.

>>10937772
I do like Uzdavinys and find his insights meaningful. I think it's more appropriate to see him in the chain of Perennialist writers than another classicist. Besides, he is definitely correct that academic philosophy has nothing to do with ancient philosophy. It was much more of a way of life. He also has an extremely impressive command over the metaphysics of Neoplatonism. As far as we see the Greeks as proto-scientists, we must understand it was much more restricted to certain circles than as supposed. And even then.

I too dislike the condemnation of Christianity found throughout all of the Traditionalist writers. All in all, Evola and Uzdavinys are the most caustic of them in attacks. Evola attacks the progressivist myth of Christian culture and the later desacralized, colonialist economic exploitation of the white race. I can't help but feel Uzdavinys' is in a way more radical as he suggests Christianity's rites are a fabrication or adoption of theurgical procedures while turning on paganism.

As for the passage I was referring to, it's the last page of Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism:
"This writer must confess to knowing very little as well - about either early Orphism or late Pythagoreanism. But I know that He-of-Heseret benefited my knowledge through madness, by diminishing it to such an extent that I cannot answer his question, "Who are you?" Perhaps I am the mummy-like jackal who has come from the four corners of Nun and wishes to bark among the dogs of Seshat."

A gloomy and obscure passage, to be sure. From what I can gather, he is saying that his scholarly obsessions are a gift from Thoth.

I like threads like this. I hope Uzdavinys and Evola are talked more about on this board. I also know of no one who reads Uzdavinys.

>>10938596
The other guy you've been seeing is LARPing as me. Evola brings all the kooks out.

Metal is masculine but black metal is too wide a channel for darker influences to seep through. There's definitely something like a black metal literati who use its sound and aesthetics to investigate these influences but there is little to no solarity in the genre that I see.

>>10938999
Too easily reduced to egalitarian/humanist pap. The real doesn't grant anything inalienable. Even this body is borrowed.

>>10939402
99/100 of anything in our society is abject popshite though. Every market is oversaturated

>>10939551
>"This writer must confess to knowing very little as well - about either early Orphism or late Pythagoreanism. But I know that He-of-Heseret benefited my knowledge through madness, by diminishing it to such an extent that I cannot answer his question, "Who are you?" Perhaps I am the mummy-like jackal who has come from the four corners of Nun and wishes to bark among the dogs of Seshat."
I always assumed this was his way of saying he had taken psychedelics or had some religious experiences through other means. A sort of inner knowing which allows him to speculate meaningfully on mystery rites despite the lost knowledge.

I do see the argument for Christian liturgy being an adaptation of theurgy but I do not see it as something merely stolen and then backstabbed. I see it as a natural evolution. A simplification of star lore.

>>10939765
John Milbank is a current writer who tries to rehabilitate Iamblichean theurgy into the Church's metaphysics. I haven't read his material as of yet, but he wrote the foreword to Gregory Shaw's Theurgy and the Soul. Might be someone to look into.

While I have the chance, I want to ask you what your thoughts are on "noesis," a non-discursive perception or intellectual intuition, the Eye of Horus, wrote about by the Neoplatonists. What is your take on this faculty? I cannot find anything in Uzdavinys that really elucidates it for me. Same for Rene Guenon, who mentions its importance but leaves it obscure.

>>10939780
>John Milbank is a current writer who tries to rehabilitate Iamblichean theurgy into the Church's metaphysics

I'd like to know more about this. Milbank is a dense writer but I like what I've read so far.

>>10922944

>>10922717
Can you prove he wasn't just making all of this shit up?

>>10939864
It's a bit strange, really. He welcomes a kind of synthesis of theurgy and mnemonics in the form of Bernard Stiegler, where ritual is seen as a kind of technology. Ritual is the "technology of technology," that serves a mnemonic purpose in moral, religious and political education. From Stiegler, ritual is a kind of epi-genetics, not to be confused with the contemporary term used in biology, that allows man to transcend himself and evolve through the organization and standardization of technology, which is a bearer of information.

You can see how material like this could be brought into a sort of reactionary view, where the iconographic paraphernalia of the Empire is crucial to the conservative apparatus. How we articulate the world has a lot to do with how we behave in the world, and as Milbank says, habit is the proto-artifice of nature.

>>10939780
I enjoy Gregory Shaw a lot on the Practical Neoplatonism podcast. The podcaster is gay and jewish though so it's definitely not likely to be appreciated by /pol/-types (possibly a great thing). Been meaning to read Milbank for years since a recommendation from a grad school friend but my back catalog is long and arduous and I haven't gotten around.

What do I think of noesis? Well, it has to do with nous, right? Lol. Noetics too, noetic archetypes... I think it probably depends on which (neo-)platonist(s) you ask, but I have always assumed it was a sort of "creative understanding" for lack of a better term. Like when you experience an epiphany. Something clicks and you see that this is like that in some essential way that is meaningful on a personal level. And this realization is primarily interior, illuminated by the nous' "noetic light" of creative understanding, an understanding which descends from above. In other words, it is a form of inner vision which re-arranges the inner cosmos making you more virtuous, conscious, enlightened, etc. Discursive reasoning may have led to it partly, perhaps via aporia before noesis (speculation), but it is essentially intuitive, as you mentioned.
>>10939864
Agreed. Title would be nice.

>>10939940
Interesting. According to Rene Guenon, it is through this intuitive knowledge that the being realizes the eternal metaphysical states, that is, the domain of principles and angelic states.

>>10939935

Here is a little summary of Milbank's point of departure, as I understand it.

>>10939935
This seems very akin to Sloterdijk. Maybe with some Giordano Bruno mixed in. Fascinating!

You know, Foucault was a student of Hadot who really promoted this view of ancient philosophy and supposedly Foucault's lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject deals with these issues explicitely. I hope to cop it soon.

>>10939962
Yes. I do believe that once one achieves this sort of understanding, it works to illuminate certain myths and archetypes that were previously unintelligible. Perhaps this is why Plato slips into myth at the apogee of his dialectics.

>>10939978
>Giordano Bruno

Yes, interestingly enough he believes the Church's metaphysics could learn a lot from what he would call a kind of Renaissance magic.

I do not know how much this kind of material compliments the Perennialist school. However, Rene Guenon's Perspectives on Initiation delves a lot into the theory of rites, where gesture is given a lot of importance as 1) a symbol of extra-corporeal modalities and 2) as a way to influence those modalities.

In Tantric Buddhism, the deity is a model to be imitated by various asanas (postures) and mudras (hand gestures). Mudra is ambiguous and also means "seal," and is synonymous in this sense with sakti, "power." Similarly, in Egyptian iconography, the deity descends onto the image, "sekhem." Sekhem normally is understood as "power," but is homonymous with the icon once it is consecrated. And last, Plato considers the body (soma) to be a tomb (sema) in Gorgias. Sema is homoynous with, again, "sema" which forms "semainei" (indicates) and informs our current word, "semantics." If Algis Uzdavinys is correct, this derives from the Egyptian practice of mummification, where the body is a temple that the initiate knows "how to read."

Some food for thought on the insoluble link of the public gesture and iconography.

>>10940026
Reminds me much of Michael Martin's Radical Catholic Re-Imagining of Everything or Sophianic Turn. I've actually only read one book of his but he talks about learning from christian theosophy...

>>10940143
Angelico Press sure is putting out some interesting works these days. I'll have to look into Michael Martin

Great discussion. I was hoping someone would ask me about Evola's views on death. What do you all think about it?

>>10940239
I do not believe in eternal punishment for the many. And I believe in eternal life for the few. Those who do not achieve eternal life are condemned to a shadowy life of repetition as the wheels of the cosmos make their endless turning. The ubermensch transcends and is immanent to the eternal recurrence.

Lol jk idk wtf. Hwat's Evola think?

>>10940239
It's very obscure.

"[T]rue immortality . . . corresponded to participation in the Olympian nature of a god." (Revolt 47)

Immortality is the possession of metaphysical states that are supra-individual and do not admit of manifestation. The initiates who perform the rites always do it in participation of the gods. It is therefore the gods who are immortal. Aside from the psychical effects, which are cosmological, there is an esoteric understanding of the rite. As all symbolical supports, the true understanding cannot be taught or told. As I cannot "tell you" what my words mean, one cannot tell the initiate what the rites mean. They are by no means psychological. The symbol, and the symbol enacted or rite, is the transmission of initiatic knowledge par excellence, as unlike language it is not limited in scope and admits of indefinite applications that are simultaneous in the unity of the symbol. It is for the initiate to understand these principles, and following the principle that being is knowledge, therefore possess them. As release cannot be gotten from action, that is, from karma, it must be realized through understanding. See Ananda Coomaraswamy's paper on Self-Sacrifice.

Strictly speaking, the human individual does not survive at all. For those who are saved, Guenon suggests a psychic continuity, a paradise of sorts. This is still, ultimately, conditioned. The initiate therefore seeks to go beyond.

For Evola, the "glory" or agathos daimon seems to be a purified or transformed daimon that acts as a kind of "inherited" initiation. Though, it always falls on posterity to keep this glory, lest the descendants fall into Hell and are therefore cut off from spiritual influence.

Though, "it was still possible to create certain causes through the way one conducted oneself in thought, word, and deed. These causes, by virtue of the analogy with the principle or with the hierarchy to which one was subjected, could produce a new way of being that corresponded to that principle or hierarchy." (Revolt 98)

and

"By the powers of their seed and their asceticism, in age after age these castes are pulled up or pulled down in birth among men here on earth." (98n19)

Therefore, there is no room for excuses. It is important to maintain oneself in a strict moral discipline. See the The Hermetic Tradition chapter on the Dry Path and Evola's Doctrine of Awakening.

What's Guenon's best? Crisis of the Modern World or Reign of Quantity? I might get the first, the latter seems pretty dense.

Is anyone here familiar enough with the Eastern Orthodox church and how it would fit with Guenon's views?

>>10940407
Crisis of the Modern World is short and a good introduction. You can read it within a day. Most people say Reign of Quantity. I suggest Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines and Symbolism of the Cross. The former is only partly to do with Hinduism (Guenon deplored the name), and is his demonstration of the principles of Tradition. You should read it carefully as his guide to understanding all of his other works.

Symbolism of the Cross is his advanced demonstration of how symbolism can have various applications across multiple orders of existence. It is informative in that it demonstrates the kind of surplus of meaning hidden in orthodox symbols and as a general case of how understanding of symbolism ought to be approached, that is, it is not mere aesthetic expression.

Save Reign of Quantity for after those three above. If you find Symbolism of the Cross simply too difficult to get through, you can skip it.

Rene Guenon didn't have much of a developed opinion on the Eastern Orthodox church as far as I know. Having personally talked to a Sufi in the vein of Perennialism, they seem to highly respect it. I was actually pointed toward it after expressing concerns about Islam being too foreign for me.

>>10940439
>>10940407
The important thing of the Introduction is that he demonstrates how, what the West sees as, seemingly opposed philosophical schools of thought are really all expressions of the same doctrine, which itself transcends particular areas of focus on it. The Veda itself, therefore, is infallible in the sense that it transcends all of the particular points of views that find their principle and origin in it, such as the Vedangas or branches of the Veda. And as the only way to understand a particular point of view is to transcend the view itself and understand the principles behind it, these principles are the same as the Veda, occupying a position simultaneously with all of the other principles. The Veda itself is therefore the beginning and end of all points of view, and even life itself, but in itself is inexpressible. This is true metaphysics.

>>10922944
>a thief, a fascist,
*"super fascist" mkay

>>10923358
>Each trying desperately to undifferentiate themselves from their model.
It's here.

>>10923603
>views on Christianity under-developed imo.
Italian anti-clericism, from Gramsci to Mussolini. Not uncommon.

>>10923663
>after God has died, and proposes his new society from there.
Died: Descended, Cthonic, Lunar.
We have killed: the Rev. 3:9 Synagogue of Satan

~Recognition of one's self as the agent of mimetic desire/violence; contrition; Christ arisen.

>>10923607
>the God of the Old Testament is remains a sacrificial God ... The Jews of the time are slowly, through the prophets, hearing the call of the true God, >>10923664
>the victim of human violence. Nothing more than human violence caused by mimetic desire.
Rome's Luwian (Troy) credentials in the Cain & Abel = Romulus & Remus should be unnerving.

>>10923668
>[Marx, Lennin, Trotsky], here, comes across as a man who wants so desperately, so futilely, for the world to be simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil, with himself naturally on the side of Good. He wants a return to simplicity, with some people naturally in power (such as himself), and all of the annoying complaints of others (women, people not in (((his ethnicity,))) people who aren't 'egalitarian') to be sidelined.
>Everything else can go. Agriculture, technology, politics, art, all of it which cannot be controlled or changed for the better (and very little can) is to be eliminated [Starve the kulaks, class war now.] The simple fact is that our [rootless consumerist, cosmopolitan,big tent imperial circus sideshow clown] world is pluralistic, save for a few isolated locals in the Amazon, the Sentinel Islands, and the militias of North Midwest, [Hello, bad conscious flyover state Ameriburger.] and this cannot be changed very easily.
>One of the core tenets of [Communism] - at least, [revolutionary socialism] in its 20th century [godless athiestic] incarnations, is the cult of [labor]. [Lenin] had his imagined [world socialist revolution, the restoration of [pre-feudal society], as well as his '[workers' paradise]' - his view was for [the USSR] to be a soviet of [proletarian party commissars] after the war, gleefully exterminating the brutish [kulaks and reactionaries. Stalin] made plain his ambitions for the New [Holy] Roman Empire, as well as his rejection of [the 4th International]. [Iosif Stalin] imagined himself to be a new [Rurik] of [Imperial Russia's] glory days in the 16th century. Of course, the poisonous ideas of [socialism] still endure..

>As such, [you] is to be pitied as much to be held in contempt for his intellectual garbage, and providing a pleasing lie for the radical [leftists] who complain about '[the patriarchal, white phallocentric ideological capitalist superstructure of NeoLiberal global capital]' on one day and shoot [Boer] children in the head and beat [off] and [MLP] the next

Clean your room over on /leftypol/ next time shabbos anon

can you make an evola reading order list...something ilke pic related

>>10940945
with philosophy you need to read preceding and influencing lit to get anything out of it otherwise you're a pseud following the word of someone you can neither support or refute based on your own knowledge. Especially so considering that you are likely diving into evola because he is a /lit/ meme

>>10923767
>he merely wanted to resurrect the old Pagan reliance on sacrifice.
Man: half-beast. The Social (Political) Animal.
>"To live alone one must be a beast or a god, Aristotle said. Leaving out the third case: one could be both -- a philosopher."
Philosopher: both God and Beast
Man: the sacrificial bridge of bodies through the generations to cross over, from the Social/Political Beast

>>10923799
>satanas. It means accuser, or adversary.
Juridical, litigious especially. Ressentiment-as-tort claim in Nietzsche

>>10924626
>What needs to be killed off and must die is Teutonic traditionalism, which is composed of mindless conformity, pedantic, professorial dullness, obsession with culture, and slavish imitation, with rustic pride
Nietzsche's warning of "White Mandarins" (and Euro-Chan Buddhism to go with in "pax Last Man") be Sorbonne, Royal Society, or Junkers

>>10931077
>but that's just like saying "because that's the way it is"
They don't think it be like it is, but it do (pic related.)

>>10935819
>I like to believe in a hermetic underground.
>No need to seek out Sufis or Yogis
Still under the Indo-european aegis,-- jumping into others' shamanic traditions and entheogeic abysses is what's potentially hazardous, consciously self-alienating.

>>10938596
>edgelord flirtations with luciferianism/satanism that you'll find expressed in black metal.
Contrarian, insincere (mostly fine.)

>>10939487
Drukpas gonna Druk, man

>>10940832
>mkay
god...

>>10940945
You should just be reading everything at all times. The German idealists, Aquinas, Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, the Corpus Hermeticum, Nag Hammadi, Chaldaean Oracles, Islamic metaphysics, psychoanalysis, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buddhist tripitaka, Christian mysticism, mythology as esoteric allegory, Taoism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Thelema, Christian mysticism (Boehme, St. John, Eckhart, Silesius, Weil), Christian existentialism (Shestov), Kabbalah (and the Qlippoth), achemy (Fludd, Paracelsus), the Kyoto School (Nishida, Kiritani), Badiou, Serrano, Dugin, Schuon, Coomaraswany, Land, Brassier, Radical Orthodoxists (Milbank, Cunningham), William Desmond, Kazantzakis, Nasr, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, the Stoics, the Pre-Socratics...

Evola's just good for keeping your eye on the metaphysical ball.

>>10938290
>the difference being that the esoteric metaphysical teaching in Christianity isn't continuing as it is in Islam except in small scattered groups
Where does Guénon talk about this in detail, if I may ask? This is an interesting subject to me. I recently met a scholar named Alain Pascal who claims there is no esoteric component to Catholicism, but I doubt that.

>>10922735
I do it too. Stop assuming your philosophical reading is giving you godly transcendental intuition you scrublord

>>10941195
>Serrano
Gross...

>>10941724
Guenon literally wrote a book called "Insights into Christian Esoterism", so I guess that one, even though i haven't read it and can't confirm

>>10922837
Have you read Guénon? If yes, how do they compare?

>>10943184
Not very deeply.

http://www.juliusevola.net/ariyabuddhism/ariyaawaken.html

This is the best distillation of Evola's principles you'll find anywhere

As far as based traditionalists go, where does one start with Culianu?

Hey op I have a few more questions
1. Does Evola recommend learning multiple languages? If so what are some useful languages to learn.
2. What are some useful skills a new initiate should strive to learn to better themselves in life?
3. Do followers of tradition need to identify as a particular religious group? I consider myself a weird pagan in that I believe that every culture has their own unique gods, but i personally view gods as higher dimensional entities.

>>10940407
The Orthodox Nationalist did a podcast on Guenon a bunch of years ago. I'm sure you can find it in his archive.

>>10944430
>languages
Pick one:
>if Jewish: Hebrew
>if Catholic: Latin
>if Orthodox: Greek
>if Hindu: Sanskrit
>if Muslim: Arabic

>>10922944
legitimately Mad Online™

>>10941724
>scholar
>claims there is no esoteric component to Catholicism

Kek, I can relate though. I met a famous poet, also recently, in a book store. He recommended me lucretius - on the nature of things. I read the first 50 pages and cringed so hard that I decided to return it.

Posting The Book You Need^tm.

Bump to kill thread!

>>10946265
what's a shape?

>>10947777
In this case, an outline.

Does Evola recommend taking sugar in your tea? If so, how many teaspoons?
Is Arch Linux okay as a main OS or should I switch to something else?

>>10950845
What is Evola's opinion on prostate orgasms, traps, and hash?

>>10950912
Degenerate, degenerate, and degenerate in all cases that are not consumed within a religious ceremonial and initiatic setting.

>>10951206
So light some incense and put on some Ravi Shankar before I smoke weed and wear a buttplug and fuck a ladyboy, got it.

>>10944430
1. Can't hurt.
2. Nothing matters but what exposes you to desert you are trying to overcome. Everything that keeps you small is out. Video games, escapism, these things have a centripetal pull on your psyche, they suck you into four walls. Even nature can be like this if your only idea of nature is the sanitized bougie pastoral. Your nature should be primordial nature, the Hyperborean sublime, wide, unbroken horizons, a nonzero chance of death just for being there.
3. Nah, self-initiation might be your only route. Don't associate with traditions unless you found a guru or can resist the gravity of the collective.

>>10950845
>>10950912
Reddit questions.