/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14067676]

Based or cringe?

[Anonymous No.14067681]

>>14067676
pretty based desu

[Anonymous No.14067685]

haven't read it

[Anonymous No.14067696]

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.

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.

[Anonymous No.14067704]

>>14067696
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.

1 star.

[Anonymous No.14067715]

There's a syntesis

https://youtu.be/kMj11pLGkaU

[Anonymous No.14068395]

>>14067704
Although I agree with you for finding some of his positions exaggeratedly affected, you have to consider the real implication (or on the other hand, the multifarious implications) of the term ''Traditionalism''.
Fascism is a product of modernity, and, as it is evident in your examples of ''cult of tradition'', all of those attempts at restoring the ''traditions'' are but distortions of the real significance and complexity that involves tradition (''traditional traditionalism'' to make it more clear). Tradition is outwardly a complex, univocal and interdependent structure. You can't just pick up certain elements of a particular tradition and think that it is legitimately fitting or adaptative. Hitler is the most striking example of poor understanding of the intricacies that compose a Tradition.

[Anonymous No.14068425]

>>14067676
wasn't his best but he did convince me not to ever get married

[Anonymous No.14068832]

>>14068425
How so ?

[Anonymous No.14068894]

>>14067676
Based.

[Anonymous No.14068954]

>>14068832
He basically says women no longer value femininity in the traditional sense, and all they want to do is sleep around, fight for more "equal" rights, all the while destabilizing traditional family forms. This is all mostly due to the sexes now being viewed in reductive materialist terms. I'm not 100% sure on all of this. It's been a couple years since I've last read RtT.

[Anonymous No.14069034]

>>14067696
>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.
sounds based to me, i can see why that tranny is seething

[Anonymous No.14069054]

>>14068832
he says most women would ruin your kids so there is no point in marrying unless you really find someone special

[Anonymous No.14069089]

>>14067696
Good first half, then nosedives into seethe.
The rootless liberal cries out as he strikes you.

[Anonymous No.14069098]

>>14067696
>anti-Christian
i can definitely get down with that

[Anonymous No.14069371]

>>14067676
based

[Anonymous No.14069545]

[Anonymous No.14069872]

>>14067676
Both honestly

I liked the last section where he talked about people having access to beaches and the mountains as the age of the plebian

[Anonymous No.14069886]

>>14067696
>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.
yeah this is 100% true compared to the institutional tradition of classical music

[Anonymous No.14070521]

>>14067704
>briefly commenting on what he says in each chapter without providing proper analysis or criticism whatsover
>same basic reddit tier talking points on evola regurgitated
>going on an autistic tangent poorly relating evola with the same leftist myopic view of fascism


anon this is embarrassing

[Anonymous No.14070538]

>>14067676
cringe
>become a virtuous elite, never stop fighting for your cause. your death should affirm and exemplify your virtue and thus your life
>oh nvm, we lost and so we should stop holding on to our culture and virtues entirely. just become a rootless degenerate and moan about the degeneracy of Leviathan (on imageboards) without doing anything and actively partaking
mega cringe even
only good parts are where he quotes N
he should have been bullied more tbqhfamalam

[Anonymous No.14070549]

>>14067704
>So - the big question: is Evola a fascist?
nigger he literally started the School of Mythical Fascism and taught Mussolini
He literally (for a very minor part) shaped what the word Fascism means
Doesn't get more fascist than that

Stopped reading after that, you're full of shit

[Anonymous No.14070623]

>>14068954
>This is all mostly due to the sexes now being viewed in reductive materialist terms.

The rise of trans has caused this viewpoint to recede and we have in fact entered a new era of essentialism.

[Anonymous No.14071028]

>>14070549
Not the leftard but Evola did declare himself above fascism at his trial.

[Anonymous No.14071041]

>>14071028
and most racist sexist neonazis say they are just above it and fighting for free speech; your point?

[Anonymous No.14071046]

>>14071041
All I'm saying is that the man himself considered himself as having ascended beyond fascism.

[Anonymous No.14071064]

>>14071046
Well that's bullshit

[Anonymous No.14071074]

>>14071046
So he's more racist, more homophobic, more misogynistic than literal fucking fascists. Do you even read what you're saying? Nobody should waste their time reading this ideological propaganda. Indeed whoever reads it is likely a nobody

[Anonymous No.14071082]

>>14071074
>So he's more racist, more homophobic, more misogynistic than literal fucking fascists. Do you even read what you're saying? Nobody should waste their time reading this ideological propaganda. Indeed whoever reads it is likely a nobody

[Anonymous No.14071092]

>>14071046
>I have literally the same ideals as Fascism but yeah I am above politics because God and tradition or some shit so I am technically not a Fascist lol

[Anonymous No.14071193]

>>14071046
Only quads can stop the ultragigafascist

[Anonymous No.14071254]

>>14067704
It’s really revealing how people just can’t get past Evola’s minor association with fascism and perfectly displays just how low philosophical discourse has sunk when politics is no longer subject to philosophical thought, but philosophy subject to politics. The guy wrote a book criticizing fascism even, but it’s blatantly ignored for the sake of modern politics. It can be claimed that Nietzsche inspired the Nazis and Heidegger himself joined the Nazi party. Nietzsche once claims that women’s sole purpose is the procreation of warriors. Would you rate their work 1 star on the basis of misogyny or political wrong think? Why then, is it rational to measure Evola against the yard stick or modern leftist politics whereas we refrain from doing so with both Nietzsche and Heidegger?

Ride the Tiger is possibly Evola’s least political work. He states in the book that the audience he is targeting will likely have no interest in what passes for modern politics and advises them to circumvent it altogether. It’s true that one would probably have to be right wing in the classical sense or at least a Nietzschean to derive as much value as possible out of Evola’s work since being otherwise would fundamentally place the reader in a worldview incapable of understanding his premise, but the same can be said for plenty of other thinkers both on the right and inversely, on the left. Further, this can’t diminish the actual dialectic provided in Ride the Tiger. The fact remains that Evola offers a striking critique of modern intellectual society and offers an alternative path to Nietzsche for the souls who find modernity lacking in existential meaning or any existential basis for that matter. Where leftist critique fails to offer anything near an answer to the quest for existential meaning, Evola tackles it head on and does so with impressive rigor.

I don’t know if this is your review or someone else’s, but it really shines a light on leftist dogma and the pure arrogance a left that believes the only morality of the post-Christian post-Democracy modern world can be held up as true.

Or perhaps the modern left is simply acutely aware of their own inferiority and lacking any aristocratic nature of the sort displayed by both Nietzsche and Evola, would desperately attempt to discredit such thinkers from the start so as to preserve their bourgeois and proletarian worldview since to dismantle it would surely require nothing short of ideological fracture or submission.

[Anonymous No.14071259]

>>14071074
Another pleb-reddit-fag here. How many so far?

Evola was a traditionalist. He wanted to see the rise of the Solar Empire. Something that would overcome even the Roman Empire or Maurya Empire. He had a more profound view about human relations and tradition. It wasn't a matter of how society should be build, but of how society should be prepared to build even knowing it may never be built.

[Anonymous No.14071283]

>>14070549
This isn’t true at all. Mussolini tasked Evola with drafting fascist doctrine on race, which he did, and it was largely rejected by many Italian fascist and especially by National Socialist Germany for not being biologically racialist enough. Later, Evola was tasked by Heinrich Himmler of the SS with reviewing the mystical an esoteric documents they recovered from across Europe so that the Nazis could identify what was valuable and integrate it into their doctrine. Evola, being deeply rooted in such things obliged, and was dismissed when it was discovered that his ideology opposed the fascist sort of the Nazis and the SS.

Evola found praise worthy elements in fascism, namely the emphasis on the State over the individual, but he was also harshly critical of it. He was influenced by mystical fascist thinkers, but his own work was only partially rooted in it.

He neither created fascist ideology nor was he devoutly supportive of it. To imply so, is blatant misinformation or pure ignorance.

[Anonymous No.14071285]

>>14071254
French postmodern "Left" thinkers liked Nietzsche, and French left modernist thinkers liked Heidegger, so therefore they're ok.
Same with Schmidt because Hardt and Negri wrote based off him.

[Anonymous No.14071293]

>>14071074
Imagine not actively wanting to experience thought alien to your place and time, but similar enough that at least some connections can be made.
Imagine not wanting to gain a more accurate view of history by understanding the thinking of groups of people.

>>14071041
You wrap your mediocrity in claims of ascetic virtue. You "think" in buzzwords. Kill yourself.

[Anonymous No.14071294]

>>14071074
read at least one book before coming in here you shit dribbling moron

[Anonymous No.14071296]

>>14070549
Cringe and didn't read the author pilled.

[Anonymous No.14071305]

>>14071285
That’s my point. If you actually read their work, they’re nether identifiably right or left, but they definitely espoused ideas that would be considered right wing by modern standards. Is Evola not the same?

Evola’s views on race could easily be co-opted by the left, but it’s not because he is simply too identifiably right wing and in a worldview where everything must be measured by the metrics of modern leftist progress, they would rather dismiss him altogether.

Evola is rejected for the simple reason that his thinking is difficult to be integrated into leftist ideology. It’s apparent that it’s not philosophy which influences modern leftist politics, but the other way around.

[Anonymous No.14071320]

>>14071283
It's become a lefty talking point since Bannon mentioned that he read Evola.

[Anonymous No.14071334]

>>14071254
Nietzsche hated reactionaries and Heidegger is bunk so who gives a shit. The Nazis Nietzsche inspired were brainded and didn't even read him.
Also see
>>14071092
Your daddy figures Guenon and Ebola are not some transcendental beings that are above politics.

[Anonymous No.14071354]

>>14071334
Nietzsche was critical of reactionaries to nearly an identical extent that Evola was critical of fascism and the comment you quoted is just blatantly false. It claims he held the exact ideals of fascism yet he wrote a book harshly critiquing fascism. You lack any nuance and in truth, you don’t deserve a response beyond pointing out how low IQ of a take this is.

[Anonymous No.14071581]

>>14071305
t. Retard