Is this guy worth giving a read?

>muh empirical proofs

did you expect to find photos from archaelogical excavations to prove his hyperborean "hypothesis"?

you're reading evola for the entirely wrong reasons

feels > reals

Jesus Christ at least read Plato first good god.

He's pretty based.

not necessarily.
He's a fatalist. He works a lot with the idea of fate and destiny, as conceptualized by Goethe.
If anything, from reading his work you're bound to get a somewhat stoic outlook

read spengler, nietzsche, and rene guenon before reading Evola, then his meme trilogy: revolt against the modern era, man among the ruins, ride the tiger (in that order preferably)

Nobody actually reads men among ruins. The new trilogy should be Path of Cinnabar, Revolt, Ride the Tiger.

I don't get why he is so interesting. His psychology is so obvious from reading his work.

You're dealing with someone who is clearly suffering from massive amounts of depression and anomie from society, and tries to mask it in some kind of heroic "overcoming" adventure, just like Nietzsche did.

Because I suffer from the same things user.

Then you should see a shrink and get help user.

So you will fetishize a life that you will never actually live and pretend it makes you a man?

I'm preparing myself to die in a world that I don't belong in user.

Good list, Path of Cinabar is very under rated

Part of his works are on Youtube. If you like audiobooks,go for it.
>Revolt against the modern world
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrHG_aAvxl-na1bPH-sexeuJSu4AelZ26
> Men amongst the ruin
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS8UswvQNy5EztQ_9oUSHhbM7QY-pxOxB
>Ride the tiger
youtube.com/watch?v=go22wxBDvj0

Here it is.

>Muh objective proof
Go read Comte.

I actually started with the doctrine of awakening, because of my interest in Buddhism. Never could stop from there.

>le depression

Lol no

If you are critical of something, you must be insane and depressed. I mean how can anyone not like modernity and its vibrant """culture"""???

He's not a traditionalist, but traditionalists often cite his work.

As a youth he was depressed, but exposure to buddhism changed that. He's actually a pretty jolly dude, and not quite as "serious" as his books make him sound. See vid related:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=QiCtdi5nCoA

A /pol/itician created a website that hosts most of his works.

juliusevola.co/library/

You also have to account for the fact that he was born a nobleman in a time when being a nobleman still meant something, and considered his class to be the core component of his identity, then lived to see the rise of fascism and socialism strip away all the significance that this had had in his youth. Then he was blown up by a bomb in WWII that left him paralyzed (and apparently impotent as well). He spent the next 30 years in a wheelchair watching Communism spreading across the world as the hippie revolution swept away the last of the vestiges of the moral/cultural paradigm he held dear.

If that wouldn't make someone bitter, I don't know what would.

He really wasn't very bitter tho. He had been advocating apoliteia since pretty early on in his career.

It's also the best place to start imo.

>some idealist philosopher says something that makes Evola butthurt
>at this point most idealist philosophy was not available in Italian
>so Evola teaches himself German, reads all the major idealist philosophy, and familiarises himself with all idealist terminology
>just so he could get back at idealist philosophers in an argument
Nobody can deny he's a genius but he must have had some form of severe autism too.

threadly reminder

Jesus Christ I fucking laughed out loud. Where is this from?

Intro to Men Among the Ruins

Does anyone know how many languages Ebola spoke fluently? Just going by intuition alone, he knew Italian, French, German, Pali, and Sanskrit pretty well.

>Rene Gueno

holy fuck, his fwhr ratio is off the charts bad

Have any other philosophers or politicians attacked fascism for being too democratic?

He's still right.

Evola did not attack Fascism for being democratic, if anything it was precisely because of its totalitarianism that he opposed it

Maybe democratic isn't the word, but didn't he dislike how fascism represented the interests of the collective populace rather than a feudal elite? It emerges from the liberal principles he despised.

Visibility is a trap.

About what?
Yeah, Moldbug did.

Most of his body of work is correct.

Fascist parties (especially in Italy) emerged from the futurist movement, which was itself the most extreme wing of the progressive movement.

While it eventually took on the trappings of traditionalism, with all of the aesthetic references to the Roman empire, the core of fascist policies remained materialistic. Evola saw it as a sort of fraud; just another flavor of leftist progressivism concealing itself as a right-wing alternative.

I'm reading Revolt right now, on page 30 something
is this something you even can get through if you have only a vague familiarity with buddhism/ hinduism and so on?

It's all references to stories i have not read
and references to ideas within religions I do not understand really.

To be fair, Evola really was a notorious sorcerer in Italy's occult circles in the 1920s, before he settled into the slightly more respectable role of a reactionary philosopher.

It was partly this reputation that lead the SS to hire him to hunt down Freemasons.

Evola definitely writes in the context of assuming his audience also has the same frame of reference that he does. He never wrote to introduce concepts to new minds, he wrote to expand the understanding one already has of them

Besides that, did Evola ever have a real job?

Nope. NEET for life.

But he was rich as fuck thanks to his family fortune and plenty of cultists to leach off of.

He was a metaphysical wizard. Why would he ever have a "real job"?

Start with Rene Guenon

He didn't have much in the way of possessions though. He would even give away his books when he was done with them. He lived very frugally.

what books?

Wikipedia has this list on the Guenon page

Metaphysical core

The exposition of metaphysical doctrines, which forms the cornerstone of Guénon's work, consists of the following books:[41]

Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines,
Man and His Becoming according to the Vedânta,
The Multiple States of the Being,
Symbolism of the Cross,
Oriental Metaphysics.

This looks pretty good to me. I've read them all with the exception of the the Symbolism of the Cross, because I'm saving to read together with Esotericism of Dante, his other great "Christian" work.

Start with Crisis of the modern world, and reign of quantity

introduction to the study of hindu doctrines is good but difficult.

Thanks guys

>he was blown up by a bomb in WWII
That was entirely his own fault. The crazy bastard would literally go walking around the streets during bombardments as some sort of test of his power.

That's metal

To the 2 guys on Veeky Forums who have actually read Evola and know what he's talking about:

So what do you guys make of the initiatic view that there is no guaranteed immortality after death, only a unique co-incidence of consciousness and body (and from there one secures his immortality through spiritual askesis and aligning oneself to the transcendent as opposed to identification with only what is ephemeral and earthly) compared to the notion found in Ride the Tiger that one made a prenatal decision to experience this particular life?

What's going on? Did his views evolve? Can these perspective be reconciled? Did he never buy the first view in the first place? pls respond

Ride the Tiger, like most of Evola's later works, isn't really that good and is not consistent with his earlier writings.

After Evola became a cripple, he began to drift away from his adherence to a heroic/initiatic worldview in favor of one that emphasized a purely internal personal struggle and transformation. One could assume this was an effort to avoid the inevitable conclusion deriving from his earlier view, that his own worth was now diminished by his weakened state. What started out as contempt for modernity and materialism in his earlier writings became a sort of defeatism and rejection of this life in his later writing.

The reading list for understanding Evola's philosophy in its purest state begins and ends with Revolt Against the Modern World.

Interesting, I guess I forgot the emphasis he placed on the physical aspect of spirituality.

So it goes from an inner and outer struggle towards the Absolute to just an inner one?

Thank you user that clears that up. I always thought the initiatic, heroic view was much more intuitive and made perfect sense. The prenatal stuff is beautiful but Idk sounds a little too good to be true for me, I hope I'm wrong

Let me try this.

First of all neither Evolar nor Guenon (nor Coomaraswamy, a less famous, but not lesser, traditionalist) believed in reincarnation. They maintained that this was misinterpretation of the ancient texts. On the part o Coomaraswamy, he believed that the doctrine was not shruti or scriptural. On the part of Guenon, it was metaphysically untenable (see l'Erreur Spirite). And on the part of Evola, it was due to admixture and mutual influence between the ancentral Aryan solar and celestial religions with lesser, demonic, lunar, matriarchical and cthonic fertility cults, such as those of the aboriginal peoples that inhabited Greece and India before the arrival of the Aryans. These cults mantained that the soul underwent cycles of death and rebirth analogous to the cycles of nature and agriculture. On the contrary, the ancient Aryan doctrine maintained that the soul or the true self never undergoes these kinds of passions, but remains forever impassive and exempt. It is only the false ego that identified itself with the ultimately illusory phenomena of nature that experiences suffering, death and rebirth. (Plotinus has a remarkably similar view of the soul, but let's leave that for another time.)

>being chained by the ideologies carried from the beliefs and cultures of the past

Now what does it mean to say that the soul makes a prenatal decision to experience this particular life (this and none other!)? According to Guenon, the ultimate reality must be understood as the sum total of all possibilities. Nothing can be said or thought about with certainty, because that would mean to limit it and thus to fail to grasp it. It is above every possible determination, good, evil, even being (thus it is above Aristotle's and Aquina's God, that is "merely" being). Only by means of the via negativa or apophatic theology can it be approached by the human intellect. Very well, one of these infinite possibilities is the possibility of being, and one of the infinite possibilities of being is the possibility of manifestation, and one of manifestation, that of manifestation, material manifestation, and of it, mineral, plant, animal, etc. down to the individual manifestation at a particular time and space. Hence why, for Guenon, it wouldn't make sense for the same individual to return in another body, because the already fulfilled his possibility of manifestation in the full scheme of things. And hence the mystery of the "prenatal decision" or a "will" of the soul to be only this particular individual,at a particular space and time, with his particular sufferings and joys, and no one else, a sort of Nietzschean amor fati:

>What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [The Gay Science, §341]

Hence why you must be content and love this life and nothing else, to accept it stoically, because it's the only one you will ever have.

I understand this, my point was why would Evola turn his back on this truth? Unless he meant prenatal in some wonky "I must affirm this life wholly and utterly as it is the only life for which the "I" of this life will exist". In that sense, I get it

Now you may ask, what is the difference, then, between being an ascetic and a hedonist, a nun and a whore, a noble and an ignoble person, if everyone is just fulfilling his or her role in the total manifestation? Here we enter into the realm of mystery, and I don't claim to know the answer. Guenon alludes to the possibility of passive, unconscious absortion into the ultimate reality and an active, conscious unification with it (Plotinian henosis). Evola seemed to think that one could retain one's individuality after "death", but one had to earn it. Hence heroic struggle, ascesis, etc. The Buddhist Heart Sutra says that the ultimate secret is that there is no Samsara and no Nirvana, no purity or impurity, no liberation and no bondage. Evola was familiar with this text, and he quoted a similar saying by the esoteric Hashashin sect: "nothing exists; everything is permited."

>my point was why would Evola turn his back on this truth?
I don't understand, why do you think he turned his back on this truth?

I mean the truth of having to earn one's immortality, if he also believed in his prenatal soul. But your posts are clearing it up. Good stuff.

According to the Vedanta there is no difference between the soul (Atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman). The many individual "souls" are like refraction of a single light through a prism. But could one of those colorful lights be worthy keeping? Aristotle thought (in a very Vedantic fashion, I might add) that there was a particular and a universal intellect, and that the particular intellect *might* survive the dissolution of the body. Similarly, the Stoics (again very Hinduistically) believed that nothing besides Zeus was immortal, and that everything was destroyed and recreated anew in periodical universal conflagrations, everything except Zeus or the Logos and maybe, just maybe, the soul of the "sage". But who was the Stoic sage? Well I don't need to teach Veeky Forums what the Stoics believed: the Stoic sage is practically the Western equivalent of a Buddhist monk or Hindu ascetic.

I understand all this actually. It's good to know there are erudite anons on Veeky Forums like you but I still don't understand why Evola believes in a prenatal individuality while espousing the path of askesis in other books, besides just chalking it up to an evolution of views

>erudite
Lol thanks. I honestly think prenatal individuality is a metaphor.

Ah gotcha, another way of saying armor fati, cool brah thanks

Tbh didn't Butthole-Aids man say we should try to implement the good things from earlier parts of history?

please stop saying libertarians are right-wing proprietarians
t. libertarians

Ehh most traditional conservatives see democracy as the basis of totalitarianism ( Evola included). Totalitarianism is just the logical conclusion of democracy when you realize that there is no " will of the people" in an organic society to organize it around. Totalitarianism is about fixing this by forging a concrete "will of the people" through political control.

Except Evola, what other philosophers made a case for(or at least endorsed) traditional despotism?

I'm a deep admirer of Russia solely for that reason, since in each stage of its history(Byzantine autocracy(Ivan the Terrible) -> Illuminist Autocracy(Peter the Great) -> Stalinism -> Putinism) it only changed forms while keeping its despotic essence.

>Didn't Gandalf have a "real job"

Carl Schmitt and Joseph De Maistre really nailed it on that front. Check out Schmitt's "Political Theology" and De Maistre's political works, especially "Considerations on France".

Thank you, good user.

I thoroughly enjoyed Ride the Tiger and I'm not even that much into philosophy. I've been meaning to pick up Revolt against the Modern World, but I haven't had much time to read lately.

I especially enjoy his treatises on the iron guard and his reports from when he went to their headquarters

It's amazing how some shitlibs think he was "against fascism", they have no fucking clue whatsoever what they're even talking about and have read none of his pieces and the kind of topics he dealed with. The guy was an aryanist through and through.

I have an archive of his most important works saved but it's all in german so yeah

Well ,he did explicitly and publicly call himself an "anti-fascist" in fascist Italy. The Romanian Iron Guard hit all the right chords for him because they had a more mystical,virile warrior mentality than any of the other "fascist" movements. He thought that German Nationalism Socialism's emphasis on biological race made them pleb tier, but he did what he could to try to salvage these kinds of movements from their democratic and collectivist foundations to something more fitting to the perennial tradition. His "aryanism" was all about a mystical orientation, it had nothing to do with German racial theories.

>GUYS HE WAS ACTUALLY A RACIST ARYANIST COMMIE

Have you taken your meds yet today pal?

Evola was natsoc in spirit. His writings are literally and unmistakably permeated with this spirit, deal with it

He really didn't care about biological race all that much compared to "spiritual race" though m8

Evola understood the humanity identity in the context of a threefold manifestation of the body, soul and spirit. Physical characteristics of race were exterior aspects that had little importance in his conception of the idea.

Evola was a proponent of actual physical racial purity aswell. All this "DUDE IT WAS JUST MEANT SPIRITUALLY" nonsense from shitlibs is dead wrong:

"Preservation of biological racial purity is one of the most favorable conditions intended, to preserve its original power and purity also the"spirit"of a race. Also, the health and integrity of the body form the guarantee for the full effect of his higher skills in particular. [...]“

No

See

All of you see
toqonline.com/blog/julius-evolas-concept-of-race-a-racism-of-three-degrees/
It's a decent summary of his racialist views.

Why would you accuse liberals of misinterpreting Evola? Liberals wouldn't give a fat rat's ass about him, because he's an inconsequential authoritarian thinker.

Traditionalists are often fans of his work.
Speaking for myself (Evolian Traditionalist), I find that reading Spengler gives me a sort of "perspective" that grounds the headiness of Evola.

Contributing to the thread, Guillame Faye and Alaine De Benoist are french "New Right" thinkers who have made interesting contributions to the continuum that Traditionalism exists in.

I actually enjoyed Men Among the Ruins

Kekd Heartily

Yet just as the alt right, they are kosher out of pragmatism, thus their works are from the very start if not outright intellectually dishonest, at least 'incomplete' in their outlook.

Speaking of such, I'd recommend Mircea Eliade. He had the same thing going on, borrowing from the likes of Evola and Guenon while trying to maintain his academic integrity(which in his case is not as bad given the 'technical' nature of his works).

I felt that so hard it hurt.

National Socialism is closer to Communism than Evolian traditionalism. You actually make him out to be more "left wing" than he actually is by linking him to NS and national Socialism. Why don't we take a look at his own words.
This is from Evola's Self Defense Statement when he was accused of "Glorifying Fascism" and trying to bring it back.

"Thus, I countered the racism that was materialistic and vulgarly anti-semitic with a spiritual racism, introducing the concept of 'the race of the spirit' and developing an original doctrine on that basis."

"Now, in regard to myself this is absolutely not the case. I have defended, and still defend, 'fascist ideas' not inasmuch as they are 'fascist' but in measure that they revive ideas superior and anterior to fascism".

" I am opposed to totalitarianism, counterposing to it the ideal of an organic, differentiated State, and considering 'fascist hierarchism' as a deviation...totalitarianism represents a wrong direction and the abortion of the need for a virile and organic political unity: 'Hierarchy is not hierarchism -- the latter an evil that is trying to flourish in a minor mode today -- and the organic conception conception has nothing to do with sclerotic statolatry or a leveling centralization... I oppose the totalitarian solution, in which there is not a spiritual, super-elevated, and transcendent principle, but rather the brutal political will to tyrannically enslave and unify the culture, of which we see the ultimate result in Sovietism."

" Concerning the problem of sovereignty, I reject every demagogic, dictatorial solution. The true authority--as I say--cannot be that of "a tribune or chief of the people, holder of a simple, unformed spiritual power devoid of any chrism from above, resting his precarious prestige on the irrational energies of the masses."

National Socialism is mostly about crude biological racism, collectivism, and tapping into the "irrational energies of the masses" with demagogery.

Not that guy, but the description of leadership he gives there sounds vaguely like the "emergent leadership" that anarchists are so fond of, in which a leader emerges naturally as a course of their capabilities, rather than through political imposition.

>" I am opposed to totalitarianism, counterposing to it the ideal of an organic, differentiated State, and considering 'fascist hierarchism' as a deviation...totalitarianism represents a wrong direction and the abortion of the need for a virile and organic political unity: 'Hierarchy is not hierarchism -- the latter an evil that is trying to flourish in a minor mode today -- and the organic conception conception has nothing to do with sclerotic statolatry or a leveling centralization... I oppose the totalitarian solution, in which there is not a spiritual, super-elevated, and transcendent principle, but rather the brutal political will to tyrannically enslave and unify the culture, of which we see the ultimate result in Sovietism."
Which falls in line perfectly with Italian Fascism given that from their perspective the totalitarian state was a means of reinstating the organic state, not an end in itself.

In regards to German National Socialism I agree, though. It was born out of a sterile Prussian culture that was built on top Protestantism.