/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6213683]

Let's talk evola. How useful is his fascist traditionalism today? Is he considered a legit successor of Nietzsche? Where do I start with his work?

[Anonymous No.6213686]

/POL/ HERE TELL ME ABOUT EVOLA

[Anonymous No.6213690]

>>6213683

[Anonymous No.6213691]

Evola isn't a fascist, fascism is extremely critical of traditionalism, and vice versa.

He's hardly a successor to Nietzsche, Evola wants a priestly aristocracy, whereas Nietzsche hates that and instead likes a warrior aristocracy and is sympathetic toward Bonaparte (which I certainly don't think Evola was), and a critic of labor for another as dehumanizing.

[Anonymous No.6213724]

>>6213686
>>6213690

I thought Spengler was pol shitlord.

[Anonymous No.6213763]

>According to Evola, the more recent Northern, White and Indo-European peoples (despite racial mixing) implicitly preserved more of the primordial Arctic Hyperborean blood-memory and are objectively spiritually superior to the archaic, matter-obsessed degenerate remnants of the races of the South. Flowering forth in the Greek, pre-Celtic, Indo-Aryan, Aryo-Persian, Armenic, Roman, Germanic, Tiwanaku, Teotihuacán, early Chinese, Aztec-Nahua, Inca and first Egyptian dynasties' representatives, with more or less ethnic but great spiritual purity, the "Northern Light" was considerably lost to the Atlantean offshoot which defiled itself through spiritual integration into the spiritual lunar sphere of the world of the "Mother" or "Earth" of the "Southern Light" and further miscegenation with bestial, dark Lemurian stocks. Revolt Against the Modern World presents world-history to be the saga of dualistic conflict between the "Northern Light" and the "Southern Light": on one side stand the Uranian, patriarchal stocks of purer Hyperborean lineage, climatically harshly conditioned and heroic-minded celebrators of the winter solstice; on the other stand the chthonic and titanized inferior races and the spiritually/ethnically bastardized heirs of the fallen Atlantean civilization captured by the "Southern Light" and its sacerdotal and naturalistic-pantheist religion of promiscuous vegetal and animal fertility.

Is Evola's thought just one forced dichotomy after another? Are his spiritual theories too syncretic to be coherent?

[Anonymous No.6213829]

>>6213763
Jesus he sounds like a dick. Hyperborean uranians versus catholics. And he was from Italy too, for Christ sake.

[Anonymous No.6213836]

>>6213829
italians are the worst man
i'd prefer a nigger any day

[Anonymous No.6213893]

>>6213683
> Evola
> Fascism

Pick one, the guy had to walk around with a bodyguard because he openly declared himself an anti-fascist in Fascist Italy.

>>6213691
Actually Evola and Guenon had their biggest point of disagreement over how much power Evola assigned the Kshatriya in comparison to the Brahmen. He believed that the path of the warrior had legitimate spiritual practices and that Kshatriya should not be under direct control of the Brahman, were Guenon claimed that they should be.

>>6213763
It makes more sense if you read up on Bachofen, it's basically spiritual patriarchy versus spiritual matriarchy at it's core.

>>6213829
He considered the Roman tradition to be Hyperborian and of " The Northern Light" ( since the actual Romans were Indo-European invaders from the North initially before mixing with the southern peoples), including those Pagan elements passed on through Catholicism, which he converted to before he died. He had a major fondness for Medieval Catholicism.

[Anonymous No.6213901]

>>6213683
>How useful is his fascist traditionalism today?
As useless as ever.
>Is he considered a legit successor of Nietzsche?
No.
>Where do I start with his work?
You don't.
And now get back to /pol/, plebshit.

[Anonymous No.6213917]

>>6213901
Wow thanks for that erudite analysis Mr. Patrician. You must be some kind of genius. You really told it good. Good job.

[Anonymous No.6213923]

>>6213917
It's all in a day's work for Mr Patrician.

[Anonymous No.6213924]

>>6213683
>Where do I start with his work?
His shorter essays. Then you can read Man among the Ruins and Revolt Agains the Modern World. Ride the Tiger after those two, but you can dive right into it if you've read Nietzsche, Jaspers and the other philosophers he tries to critique in it.


>http://www.juliusevola.com/julius_evola/texts/american_civilization.txt
>The structure of history is, however, cyclical not evolutionary. It is far from being the case that the most recent civilizations are necessarily ‘superior’. They may be, in fact, senile and decadent. There is a necessary correspondence between the most advanced stages of a historical cycle and the most primitive. America is the final stage of modern Europe. Guénon called the United States ‘the far West’, in the novel sense that the United States represents the reductio ad absurdum of the negative and the most senile aspects of Western civilization. What in Europe exist in diluted form are magnified and concentrated in the United States whereby they are revealed as the symptoms of disintegration and cultural and human regression. The American mentality can only be interpreted as an example of regression, which shows itself in the mental atrophy towards all higher interests and incomprehension of higher sensibility. The American mind has limited horizons, one conscribed to everything which is immediate and simplistic, with the inevitable consequence that everything is made banal, basic and leveled down until it is deprived of all spiritual life. Life itself in American terms is entirely mechanistic. The sense of ‘I’ in America belongs entirely to the physical level of existence. The typical American neither has spiritual dilemmas nor complications: he is a ‘natural’ joiner and conformist

[Anonymous No.6213928]

>>6213924
Or you could read Burroughs "Cities of the Red Night" which makes far more sense.

[Anonymous No.6213939]

>>6213928
Did you just admit to being to pleb to understand evola? So pleb in fact you need to read a fictional novel as a proxy for the philosophy you can't apprecuate?

[Anonymous No.6213944]

>>6213939
Maybe I think Transbaikal gay reincarnation hanging cults causing misandristic nazi AIDS is a more credible world system and explanation of the last 100000 years of world culture.

[Anonymous No.6213952]

>>6213893
Relative to Nietzsche, Evola certainly support a priestly ruling class. Nietzsch championed warrior aristocracies such as Sparta, the Vikings, Athens (where even at the high point of democracy, when non-property owners could vote, one still had to serve in the military to be to have citizenship), and Napoleonic France. In all of these societies, the priests had virtually no political power, and there was no divine ordination as a basis of legitimacy (which Nietzsche was rather critical of). The closest thing was descent from a divine source, such as the dual kings in Sparta, but their situation was very different from divinely ordained kings because they could be exiled or executed for incompetence, and were on a few occasions. This is not an aristocracy in line with Louis XIV, a decadent leader such as him, who used God's ordination as his primary claim to legitimacy, would be castigated in any of those societies.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.6213954]

>>6213763
What is this gibberish. Are there really people who take this schizo seriously?

[Anonymous No.6214111]

>>6213683
Would it be fair to say he is the opposite of stirner?

[Anonymous No.6214127]

>>6213954
It's basically Yin and Yang applied to human history.
Yin is lunar, Yang is solar, Yin is feminine, Yang is masculine, Yin is yielding, Yang is aggressive.

[Anonymous No.6214129]

>>6213763
>Teotihuacán, early Chinese, Aztec-Nahua, Inca
What?

[Anonymous No.6214132]

>>6214111
Moral Aesthetes are identical.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.6214133]

>>6214127
So it's primitive Oriental mysticism applies to primitive Western mysticism? My question stands.

[Anonymous No.6214151]

>>6214133
Mysticism isn't affected by scientific progress, so I don't think primitive is the right word.
Basically, he is saying that there is good, and there is evil, and observes that all he considers good seems to emanate from far northern Eurasia, and all he considers bad seems to emanate from the area of the Indian Ocean.
Was he a schizo? I don't think that matters: it's a useful myth.

You'd have to read Bachofen and Coulanges to get an idea of the history he has in mind. And also have a basic understanding of the Indo-European migrations that began with the domestication of the horse and the discovery of the wheel by our ancestors. To judge by the genetic spread of lactose tolerance, we also domesticated cattle.

[Anonymous No.6214164]

There's only one confirmed twentieth century shitlord worth reading and his name ain't Ebola.

[Anonymous No.6214167]

>>6214151
I fail to see how the myth is useful in any way.

[Anonymous No.6214170]

>>6214167
because without it, we'd be stuck with only reality

[Anonymous No.6214171]

>>6214164
I actually studied Carl Schmitt in a course.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6214176]

>>6214170
There are plenty of other myths, I think Hegel's case for the usefulness of Christian myth as the product of Greek mysteries is far more useful than Evola's mythology.

[Anonymous No.6214179]

>>6214171
Yes so did I. He's treated with extreme seriousness by intellectual historians at Cambridge.

[Anonymous No.6214195]

>>6214167
It's useful as the Marxist nonsense about the inevitability of the revolutionary apocalypse and the ensuing paradise. Or the Christian nonsense they took off from. You just have to be a fascist to find it useful.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6214207]

>>6214195
I'm a fascist, and I find Marxist analysis considerably more useful than Evola's New Age crap.

[Anonymous No.6214224]

>>6214207
Evola isn't fascist anyway, he's traditionalist. Fascism is modernist.

[Anonymous No.6214227]

>>6214207
You're hardly a proper fascist, it's very obvious you're just trying to be edgy. Case in point: fascists don't value useful analysis over mythology, because fascists do not believe in objective truth.

[Anonymous No.6214233]

>>6214224
I'd say it is rather post-modernist, but yeah, in it's italian subspecies, fascism and traditionalism don't fit well with each other.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6214238]

>>6214224
Fascism isn't really modernist, because as per Marx, it considers modernism the natural evolution of the prior system (which it also rejects). I guess "modernist" is a good description to a point, but it needs certain qualifications, since fascism is in dissonance with the things the modernism is based on, as well as trying to turn back the clock.

>>6214227
Fascists believe in truth which exists outside of perception, they just don't think it's a good idea to overestimate its relevance.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6214245]

>>6214233
Fascism isn't postmodernist in any way.

[Anonymous No.6214253]

>>6213683
>How useful is his fascist traditionalism today?
Fascist Traditionalism is somewhat of an oxymoron. Evola was highly critical of both Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. I recommend you read his critiques of the two ideologies in 'Fascism Viewed from The Right' and 'Notes on the Third Reich'. They are the only critiques of Fascism from the point of view of a far-right wing Traditionalist Conservative I'm aware of. His critique is based upon both the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of the ideologies and their inability to realise Traditionalist goals.

>Is he considered a legit successor of Nietzsche?
Hardly, although he was heavily inspired by Nietzsche and even wrote a study of his philosophy from a Traditionalist perspective in 'Ride the Tiger'. Like most things he was critical of some of Nietzsche's ideas, but praised others.

>Where do I start with his work?
I'm going to assume you're interested in his politics and not in his studies of Esotericism. I recommend starting with his core trilogy: 'Revolt Against the Modern World' (in which he sets out his political ideology, Traditionalism in plain words, supported by a scholarly examination of Traditionalist civilizations), 'Men Among the Ruins' (in which he expands upon the ideas of Revolt, applying those ideas to post-WWII political trends) and 'Ride the Tiger' (in which he provides a "survival manual" for the Traditionalists of Modernity, and expands further on his Traditionalism in relation to contemporary social trends like the Beat Generation, Surrealism and so forth)

[Anonymous No.6214259]

>>6214111
He briefly mentions Stirner in 'Ride the Tiger' in his outline of the developments of individualism and Egoism. Unsurprisingly, he glosses over Stirner's philosophy, commenting that it lacks "spiritual substance" or "exhausts itself" before moving on.

[Anonymous No.6214273]

>>6214259
That's a valid critique

[Anonymous No.6214277]

>>6214207
That's because Marxist analysis is based on logic, reason and evidence unlike Evola's theories which are entirely based in spiritualism and vague concepts which he constantly fails to define. The only useful element of Evola's conception of history is his view that everything post-French Revolution can be understood as a response to a collapse of all higher values (collapse of hierarchy, collapse of castes, collapse of aristocracy) and an attempt to locate surrogates for this lost higher meaning (the Beat Generation subculture, hippie subculture, Fascist metanarratives). But this is something which Nietzsche already explored years before Evola.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6214285]

>>6214277
I find Nietzsche pretty useful as well, not in any rigorous sense, but something everyone should read to make them seriously consider the validity of everything they believe. He's a lot more nuanced than Evola, though, since he believes in going beyond good and evil, as well as trying to examine multiple perspectives.

[Anonymous No.6214293]

>>6213893
This is another problem with Evola. He clearly focuses on European civilization throughout his writings then draws upon the Indian philosophy and spiritualism of Hinduism, a tradition which is entirely separate from the West in order to support his ideology. Furthermore he is intent on rejecting and criticising seemingly everything within Modernity as being anti-traditional and degenerate. He rejects Jazz music in Ride the Tiger because it is too "Negro", he rejects Psychoanalysis on equally specious grounds always glossing over these things but never actively engaging with them because he doesn't have the space or the time.

[Anonymous No.6214303]

>>6214285
I agree. He isn't inexorably tied to any political ideology which allows him a greater degree of intellectual and philosophical freedom in exploring various ideas. Evola, on the other hand must constantly relate everything back to Traditionalism no matter how difficult this task might be. Jonathan Bowden, a self described "Nietzschean" has a good view of Evola too.

>My view is that people who accept Evola straight out aren’t living in the modern world. That’s not a criticism. It’s a description of where they are. I think for people to become illiberal they have to become illiberal first within the modern world. Some people would say you have to go outside of it. You know, the culture of the ruins and the revolt against the modern world, per se. But I personally think that we’re in modernity.

>The difficulty with Evola is that it’s a very great leap for the modern mind. Although in his sensibility, I agree with his sensibility, really. I agree with him going out amidst the bombings, not caring. I agree with that sort of attitude towards life, which is an aristocratic attitude towards life. But we’re living in a junk food, liberal, low middle class society. You’ve got to start where you are. I think Nietzsche is strong enough meat for most people and is far, far, far too strong for 80% now.

[Anonymous No.6214309]

>>6213683
It would be nice to see an intellectual and academic push towards Traditionalist ideas of the same popularity and rigor of something like Marxism. It's just unfortunate that the sorts of thinkers who have pushed these ideas are so unpopular in contemporary discourse, partially because they are so unrealistic and inaccessible.

[Anonymous No.6214313]

>>6214303
>He isn't inexorably tied to any political ideology
Way is queer politics and university liberalism?

[Anonymous No.6214321]

>>6214313
What?

[Anonymous No.6214330]

>>6214245
>>6214238
>Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth … then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.


- Mussolini, Diuturna (1921)

[Anonymous No.6214345]

>>6214293
There is nothing arbitrary about his criticism of those things.
He saw Tradition as being a patriarchal, and male-dominated, based on ancestor worship but also spiritual fatherhood, leaving room for adoption in the Roman sense. Psychoanalysis is not a science, it is an anti-traditional outlook being pushed as a science. One may as well claim that gender studies is a science.

Jazz was directly based on West African syncopation.
It forces a state of bodily excitement by acceleration and de-acceleration, in much the same way...
That...
Slowing suddenly in a sentence causes a pique of attention which... will...
Force the raising of the heartbeat and the pumping of the blood.
Evola may have been no music critic, but I believe he would have seen syncopation as something that belongs only in military marches, not in the music of a debauched dancefloor.

Recall that Africa has no place in his vision of the scattered Solar civilisations of Eurasia. Modern genetics tells us that Eurasians are far more closely related than African tribes, and have less genetic diversity, meaning that there is indeed a close link between Eurasian civilisations. The Aztecs and Incas split off from this group during the Ice Age via the Alaskan-Asian land bridge, so his appreciation of them is not as random as it seems.

Recall that the upper castes of India are descended from northern invaders who spoke a language closely related to Latin and Greek, a central asian branch of the Indo-European language family. Some upper-caste members still carry the genes for blue eyes.

[Anonymous No.6214361]

>>6214207
Useful in hyping people up to join unions or something?

>>6214277
Allegory is based on logic. You can relate the early history of the city of Rome to the rise and fall of a gas station. Logic is cheap.
But cheap and convenient logic is too much for most common Marxists - the useful lummocks who do most of the shooting and flag waving. Like any commoner, all they need is peptalk and a slogan they may not even understand. Abrakedabra. Alakazam. Nothing to lose but your chains, and I guess maybe your food supply and the chance of personal independence.

[Anonymous No.6214385]

>>6214321
All the Nietzscheans I know are liberals using his aphorisms to justify homosexuality and atheism.

[Anonymous No.6214388]

>>6214277
>That's because Marxist analysis is based on logic, reason and evidence

[Anonymous No.6214430]

>>6214385
They must not have read the passages in which he rallies against equality then.

[Anonymous No.6214441]

>>6214430
They pretty much skim him and use whatever's useful without ever allowing contrary ideas to penetrate their skulls. They have wonderful integrity, those leftists.

[Anonymous No.6214449]

>>6214430
No, probably not. It's ideological appropriation but that kind of liberalism is the only ideology that can stomach Nietzsche.