Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

Part 1: Orientations

The Modern World and Traditional Man

The book addresses a specific human type—the man who belongs spiritually to the world of Tradition but finds himself stranded in modern dissolution—arguing that this man cannot rely on bourgeois survivals or traditional institutional frameworks, but must maintain his essential orientation purely as an inner disposition while accepting maximum external liberty.

• The book is addressed not to ordinary modern men but to a specific type who, though immersed in today’s world, belongs inwardly to a different race and recognizes the world of Tradition as his true homeland.
  • This man finds himself among the ruins of civilization still standing, belonging more or less consciously to that other world of Tradition.
  • The desert encroaches, and he can find no further support from without—no organizations or institutions remain to allow him to realize himself wholly.
• The present crisis strikes bourgeois civilization—the world born of the revolution of the Third Estate and the first industrial revolution—not the world of Tradition itself, which was already the antithesis of bourgeois values.
  • The forces once set to work against traditional European civilization have rebounded against those who summoned them, carrying the general process of disintegration further.
  • The obvious relationship between the bourgeois revolution and successive socialist and Marxist movements shows that the first revolution simply prepared the way for the second.
• The differentiated man must sever every link with what is destined to collapse, refusing to associate traditional values with bourgeois survivals, because doing so exposes tradition to the attacks legitimately mounted against the bourgeois order.
  • To defend bourgeois residues using traditional values would demonstrate either a feeble grasp of those values or drag them into a deplorable and risky compromise.
  • The solution is continuity maintained on an essential, inner plane as an orientation of being, beside the greatest possible external liberty.
• The only positive tactical option for differentiated men may be to contribute to the fall of what is already wavering rather than propping it up, thereby preventing the final crisis from being solely the work of subversive opposition.
  • The advice ‘Don’t go to the place of defense, but to the place of attack’ might be adopted by the group of differentiated men.
  • The crisis of the modern world could represent, in Hegel’s terms, a ’negation of a negation’—a double negative that might end in chaos or might create a free space for future formative action.

The End of a Cycle—“Ride the Tiger”

Drawing on traditional cyclical doctrines and the concept of the Kali Yuga, this chapter argues that the present epoch is the terminal phase of a civilizational cycle in which all previously binding norms dissolve, and the correct response is not resistance but riding the tiger—letting destructive forces exhaust themselves while remaining inwardly firm.

• The traditional doctrine of cycles, shared across Eastern and Western antiquity, identifies the present epoch as the Kali Yuga or Iron Age—a terminal phase of dissolution in which forces previously held in check by higher law are released into chaos.
  • In the Hindu teaching, the Dark Age is characterized by a climate in which the goddess Kali, symbolizing elementary and primordial forces in their lower aspects, is ‘wide awake’ and active.
  • The present epoch stands under the zodiacal sign of Aquarius, in which everything turns to a fluid and formless state, making ancient predictions strangely timely.
• The principle of ‘riding the tiger’ means not directly opposing the overwhelming forces of a closing cycle but remaining firm while they run their course, ready to intervene when the tiger is exhausted—an attitude that abandons direct action for a more internal position.
  • When a cycle of civilization is reaching its end, direct resistance is futile because the current is too strong; the essential thing is not to be impressed by the apparent triumph of epoch forces, which are in fact on a short chain.
  • The Christian injunction ‘Resist not evil’ may have a similar meaning if taken in a particular way: one abandons direct action and retreats to a more internal position.
• The ‘myth of the East’ as a refuge from Western dissolution is a fallacy, because Eastern civilizations are following the same trajectory of modernization and are simply at an earlier stage of the same decline.
  • China traveled in two decades from an imperial, traditional civilization to a materialistic and atheist communist regime—a journey that Europeans took centuries to accomplish.
  • What still survives of Eastern traditions is steadily losing ground, and the liquidation of colonialism is closely accompanied by ever more blatant subjection to Western secular and materialistic forms of life.
• The line of conduct in the present epoch must have autonomous and immanent individual value, independent of positive future prospects, because the point at which a cycle reaches its extreme is also the point at which it turns—but the timing and form of that reversal cannot be predicted.
  • Using Hoffmansthal’s image, the positive solution would be a meeting between those who stayed awake through the long night and those who appear the next morning—but this cannot be guaranteed.
  • The possibilities offered by a new movement beyond the zero point might concern others coming after us, who will have held equally firm without awaiting direct results.

Part 2: In the World Where God Is Dead

European Nihilism—The Dissolution of Morals

Tracing the internal logic of European nihilism through Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ this chapter argues that the collapse of transcendent moral authority passes through sequential stages—from theistic morality to autonomous rational ethics to utilitarian social codes to anarchic dissolution—each stage having been inherent in the prior one’s abandonment of its transcendent root.

• Nietzsche’s proclamation that ‘God is dead’ describes not a theological claim but a total historical process—the desacralization of existence and rupture with the world of Tradition beginning in the Renaissance—which produces nihilism as its inevitable logical conclusion.
  • “Dostoyevsky expressed the same idea as the consequence of the death of God: ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted.’” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • “Nietzsche’s personality and thought have a symbolic character: ‘a struggle for the sake of modern man, that man who no longer has any roots in the sacred soil of tradition, wavering in search of himself between the peaks of civilization and the abysses of barbarism.’” —Robert Reininger
• Autonomous rational morality—the Kantian categorical imperative—is the first phase after the death of God, attempting to ground ethics in pure reason after it has lost its transcendent root, but it produces only an empty command whose content cannot be justified without circular appeal to arbitrary premises.
  • Once morality has lost its root in the effective relationship of man with a higher world, critics soon gain the upper hand, because there is no support for those capable of thinking it through to the end.
  • In Kantian ethics there is no ‘imperative’ that does not imply presumed axiomatic values depending simply on a personal equation or the accepted state of affairs in a given society.
• The sequence from ethical rationalism to utilitarian social morality to anarchic individualism represents a logical unfolding in which each stage dissolves what remained of the previous one, until Sartre’s formulation—’even if God existed, nothing would change’—marks the terminal point where existence is reduced to itself without any external reference.
  • Max Stirner saw in all morality the ultimate form of the divine fetish to be destroyed, denouncing the ‘beyond within man’ as the insidious transposition of the external theological beyond.
  • “Sartre’s existentialism says that ’even if God existed, nothing would change’: existence is reduced to itself in its naked reality, without any reference point outside itself.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

From the Precursors of Nihilism to the “Lost Youth” and the Protest Movement

Tracing nihilism from literary precursors like Rimbaud and Dadaism through the postwar Beat generation and global protest movements, this chapter argues that what appears as rebellion is actually the symptomatic living-out of nihilism’s final stages—distinguished from earlier revolts by the complete absence of any positive cause or belief.

• The fracture of nihilism has extended from the moral to the existential plane, so that the immoralist pathos of yesterday’s rebels now seems old-fashioned—large portions of Western humanity have come to regard meaninglessness as natural, arranging life with anesthetics and surrogates.
  • A Hemingway character catalogs the opiates of modernity: religion, economics, patriotism, sexual intercourse, drink, radio—‘a sovereign opium of the people.’
  • Where the sensation of the void is most acute there occur forms of existential trauma: ’the spectrality of events,’ ’the degradation of objective reality,’ ’existential alienation.’
• Dadaism, surrealism, and the postwar Beat generation represent successive stages in which nihilism passed from isolated artistic experiment to collective existential stance, culminating in a rebellion ‘without a flag’ that negates not only bourgeois society but the very values of the rebels themselves.
  • André Breton declared that the simplest surrealist act would be to go out into the street and shoot passersby at random—anticipating what happened more than once after World War II.
  • “The hipsters showed ‘a destructive, voiceless rage’ and ‘contempt for those incomprehensible characters who are capable of being seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.’” —Norman Podhoretz
• Henry Miller exemplifies a collective phenomenon of the epoch—not simply a writer but an incarnation of the anguish and despair behind the crumbling façade of civilization—whose sensation of chaos as the medium of modern life prefigures the generalized nihilism of subsequent generations.
  • “Miller wrote: ‘From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills.’” —Henry Miller
  • Miller has been described as ‘a prophet who proclaims the end of a world at the very moment when it is flowering and radiating, at the apogee of its grandeur and its pestilential contagion.’
• The decisive difference between the current nihilistic rebellion and all previous revolts is the total absence of any social-revolutionary motive or belief that organized action can change things—the end result at which the left’s revolution has practically arrived after its triumph.
  • Camus made it plain after his communist illusions that the revolution betrayed its origins with the constitution of new yokes and a new conformism, more obtuse and absurd than ever.
  • ‘Work, read, prepare in groups, believe, then have your back broken—no thanks, that’s not for me,’ says one of Kerouac’s characters.

Disguises of European Nihilism—The Socioeconomic Myth and the Protest Movement

Both Western prosperity ideology and Marxist communism are exposed as disguised forms of nihilism—massive anesthetics that interpret the meaninglessness of modern existence as a problem of material distribution, while the global protest movement represents nihilism’s further stage as an irrational, anarchic ‘revolution of the void’ lacking any higher principle.

• Both Western capitalism and Marxist communism share the same fundamental error: the assumption that existential misery is caused by material want and can be resolved by economic reorganization, ignoring that the meaning of existence can be lacking equally in poverty and in prosperity.
  • Statistics show that suicide is much rarer in poor countries than in rich ones, demonstrating that the problematic life is felt more in prosperous conditions.
  • The Buddha Shakyamuni, who radically denounced the emptiness of existence, was not a victim of oppression and hunger but was of the race of princes, in all the splendor of his power and youth.
• The communist myth performs a psychic lobotomy on any form of higher sensibility, reducing all human questions to the socioeconomic—making it the worst opiate yet administered to a rootless humanity, indistinguishable in essence from the myth of Western technological prosperity.
  • “Marx praised communism as ’the real appropriation of the human essence on the part of man and for the sake of man, the return of man to himself as a social being.’” —Karl Marx
  • Nietzsche’s ’last man’ who has ‘invented happiness’ and ‘abandoned the lands where life is hard’ is the type toward which the socioeconomic myth is driving humanity.
• The global protest movement, having recognized the convergence between advanced communist and capitalist consumer societies, represents a ‘hysterical revolution of the void’—irrational, anarchic, calling on abject minorities and the Third World as the only remaining revolutionary potential, but standing under the sign of nothingness.
  • The protest movement is ‘maddened wasps trapped in a glass jar, who throw themselves frenetically against the walls’—confirming the nihilistic character of the epoch but on a much larger scale than earlier individual crisis.
  • Psychoanalysis extends nihilism through ‘scientific’ means, recognizing in the irrational subsoil of the unconscious the essential motive force of the soul and reducing its upper world to illusion, while identifying as essential only Lustprinzip and Todestrieb.

Active Nihilism—Nietzsche

Rather than being a passive victim of nihilism, the differentiated man can take an active stance—accepting nihilism’s destructions as a trial of strength—and Nietzsche’s work, while ultimately offering only a pseudosolution, provides the most serious attempt to define what comes after God’s death, particularly through the concepts of the will to power, the eternal return, and the imperative to become what one is.

• Nietzsche identified ‘European nihilism’ as a pathological but transitional stage whose full living-through is necessary before any genuine postnihilist position can be established, making him the first to distinguish passive victimhood from active assumption of nihilism.
  • “Nietzsche considered himself ’the first perfect nihilist in Europe, because he has already overcome nihilism, having lived it in his soul—having it behind himself, beneath himself, outside himself.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • The realization that ‘God is dead’ presents a decisive test: ‘The weak shatter, the strong destroy what does not shatter them, while those stronger still go beyond the values that once served them.’
• The Zarathustran challenge—‘Free from what? Free for what?’—identifies the core of modern man’s failure: freedom without a self capable of bearing it produces not liberation but the sensation of condemnation, as Sartre’s ‘we are condemned to be free’ reveals.
  • “Zarathustra warns: ‘Are you one who deserved to escape from bondage? There are many who threw away their only worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? Free for what?’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • For Sartre, man takes absolute freedom for himself but can only feel it as a condemnation—the most characteristic evidence of the specific negative sense freedom has assumed in the nihilistic epoch.
• Nietzsche’s solution—the superman, the will to power, the affirmation of immanence—is a pseudosolution because it stops halfway, erecting a new table of values without genuine foundation in pure immanence, leaving even the distinction between supermen and sheep-men unjustifiable.
  • In function of a mere will to power, all distinctions vanish: there are no supermen or sheep-men, neither affirmers nor negators of life, only techniques for making one class prevail over another.
  • Nietzsche’s proposal of the superman as humanity’s goal reproduces, mutatis mutandis, the Marxist-communist eschatology in which a mirage of future humanity gives meaning to everything inflicted on the man of today.
• What survives Nietzsche’s own critique is the myth of the eternal return—the unconditional affirmation of what one is and of all that is—which approaches a genuine opening beyond immanence toward a ‘world of being,’ and constitutes a test of strength rather than a metaphysical doctrine.
  • “Nietzsche wrote: ‘For everything to return is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being,’ and ’to impose the character of being upon becoming is the supreme test of power.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • The eternal return opens toward the feeling that ‘all things have been baptized in the font of eternity and beyond good and evil’—corresponding to what the world of Tradition also taught.

“Being Oneself”

The postnihilist principle of ‘being oneself’—making one’s own specific nature into an absolute law replacing heteronomous morality—is presented as a valid elementary orientation for the differentiated man, but its insufficiency is revealed when applied to the fragmented, dividual nature of most modern individuals who lack the unified inner core that would make this principle operative.

• After all superstructures have collapsed, what remains as a valid orientation is the ancient imperative ‘Become what you are’—translated by Nietzsche into the principle that one’s own specific nature, not any external law, constitutes one’s absolute guide.
  • “Nietzsche said: ‘They call you destroyers of morality, but you are only the discoverers of yourselves,’ and ‘We must liberate ourselves from morality so that we can live morally’—meaning according to one’s own law.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • The ‘Self’ (das Selbst) that Nietzsche posits as the ‘powerful lord’ directing the I is not the physical being but ‘being’ in the full ontological significance—recalling the traditional distinction between the supra-individual principle and the physical I.
• Guyau’s attempt to found a morality ‘without sanctions or obligations’ on the life impulse fails because he furtively reintroduces restrictions—limiting the life impulse to expansion, altruism, and social orientation—that return to the old morality he claimed to supersede.
  • Guyau posited a duty deriving from power: ‘I can, therefore I must’—but he endowed the expansive life impulse exclusively with a positive, social character, making pure self-affirmation against others appear a self-contradiction of life.
  • The elimination of every presupposition also causes a crisis for the Nietzschean doctrine of the superman, which is no less unilateral in its emphasis on will to power and hardness.
• The principle of ‘being oneself’ becomes problematic precisely where it is most needed—in modern individuals who lack any basic internal unity—as shown by Dostoyevsky’s characters Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, who collapse when thrown back on their naked will because they discover no stable self beneath it.
  • “Nietzsche admitted: ‘One should not assume that many men are persons. There are also men composed of several persons, but the majority possess none at all.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “Stavrogin’s testament: ‘I have tested my strength everywhere. . . . What I have never seen, and still do not see, is what I should apply my strength to. My desires lack the energy. . . . One can cross a river on a log, but not on a splinter.’” —Stavrogin (Dostoyevsky)

The Transcendent Dimension—“Life” and “More Than Life”

The principle of ‘being oneself’ is only a first-grade solution; the definitive foundation requires a constitutive dimension of transcendence—‘more than life’—which explains why Nietzsche’s positive claims about life are only valid for beings who already possess this dimension, and why its absence as a recognized principle ultimately destroyed Nietzsche himself.

• The dimension of transcendence—what Georg Simmel calls mehr-als-leben, ‘more than living’—is the hidden presupposition of all of Nietzsche’s most positive claims about life, and without it his philosophy collapses into arbitrariness.
  • To say that life ‘always surpasses itself’ or ‘wants to ascend’ is merely the result of an unusual vocation projecting itself into a worldview—it reflects a certain nature, not the general or objective character of every existence.
  • The foundation that really prevails in existence is closer to Schopenhauer’s will to live as eternal and inexhaustible desire, not Nietzsche’s will to power in the true, ascending sense.
• The positive elements of Nietzsche’s ethics—the capacity to make a law for oneself, natural asceticism as a test of strength, the principle of not obeying passions but holding them on a leash, the superiority to happiness and pain as ends—are comprehensible and attainable only for beings in whom there is ‘something else, and something more, than mere life.’
  • “Nietzsche’s maxim ‘Spirit is the life that cuts through life’ (Geist ist das Leben, das selber ins Leben schneidet) expresses a reaction to life that cannot arise out of life itself but only from a principle superior to it.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • The recognition that superior types are defined by their ‘intrepidity’ and ‘defiance of unhappiness,’ and that ‘it is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle,’ depends on the transcendent dimension being present.
• Nietzsche’s personal tragedy resulted from experiencing transcendence passively—as its victim and object rather than its subject—so that the energy acted through him in the closed circuit of immanence, generating a higher voltage than the circuit could sustain and ultimately causing his collapse.
  • “By 1881 Nietzsche wrote to Gast: ‘I have the feeling of living a life that is risky to the highest degree—I am one of those machines that might explode.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • The key to Nietzsche’s experience is a passive experience of transcendence: ‘advancing with a devouring fire that leaves nothing behind itself’—but the fact that this energy remains in the closed circle of immanence generates a circuit overload.
• The transition from mere ‘Dionysism’ to integrated ‘Dionysian Apollonism’ represents the only non-regressive solution: the stability of the Dionysian experience must be held not as a goal before oneself but behind oneself, combined with Apollonian lucidity and calm.
  • The positive solution is a transition from the plane of ‘Dionysus’ to that of spiritual superiority known in antiquity under the Apollonian or Olympian symbol—the antithesis of any religious or devotional regression.
  • The Dionysian way was a way of the Mysteries—an experience of life raised to particular intensity that emerges, overturns, and frees itself in something more than life through an ontological rupture of levels.

Beyond Theism and Atheism

The ‘God’ that died was only the moral God of theism—a projection of human social and moral values—not the metaphysical Absolute of the great traditions, which remains untouched by nihilism and opens a genuine horizon of freedom for the differentiated man who can identify transcendence as a presence within rather than as an external object of belief or doubt.

• Christianity’s lack of an esotericism—an inner metaphysical teaching beyond dogmatic faith for the common people—made it uniquely vulnerable to nihilistic critique, allowing ‘free thought’ to demolish it where a complete tradition with higher-level teachings would have been immune.
  • The mutilated character of Christianity compared to other traditional forms made the work of demolition easy; in a different, complete tradition the presence of a body of teachings above the simply religious level would probably have prevented it.
  • Nietzsche himself replies to the question of what God has died: ‘Only the god of morality has been conquered.’ He also asks ‘Is there sense in conceiving of a god beyond good and evil?’—to which the answer must be affirmative.
• The great traditions before and beside Christianity recognized a principle anterior and superior to all antitheses—including immanence and transcendence—that conferred supreme justification on all existence including its problematic and ’evil’ aspects, a justification Nietzsche sought but could not articulate.
  • The Hindu symbol of Shiva’s dance, the Buddhist doctrine of the transcendent identity of samsara with nirvana, the Neoplatonist’s impersonal One, and the Mediterranean mystery saying ‘Osiris is a black god’ all point to the same metaphysical horizon.
  • The dying ascetic’s words to his European murderer—‘Don’t deceive me! You too are God!’—represent one of the most drastic proofs of this nondualist wisdom.
• For the differentiated man, transcendence ceases to be a ‘problem,’ a God to believe in or deny, and becomes instead a calm inner presence and possession—a point of invulnerability from which negating God would be equivalent to negating oneself.
  • Using Meister Eckhart’s image: to anchor oneself in the dimension of transcendence within is to be ’the hinge that stays immobile even when the door slams.’
  • In this state, the terms ‘believer,’ ‘atheist,’ and ‘freethinker’ appear nonsensical—one has gone beyond both attitudes, because ‘divinity consists in precisely this: that the gods exist, but no God.’

Invulnerability—Apollo and Dionysus

Building on the dual structure of the differentiated man, this chapter argues that proving oneself—through self-knowledge experiments that reveal one’s true nature and confirm transcendence as one’s real center—leads to invulnerability: a state of lucid intoxication in which one can open oneself to every experience without losing oneself, combining Dionysian fullness with Apollonian stability.

• True self-knowledge requires actions that arise from the depths—not peripheral reflexes or emotional reactions—because only engagement from one’s deepest being can reveal what that being actually is, as opposed to what secondary impulses project.
  • The discipline of self-remembering or self-awareness—described by Gurdjieff as the contrary of being ‘breathed’ or ‘sucked’ into ordinary existence without awareness—is a key traditional practice corresponding to this demand.
  • The maxim of amor fati—interpreted by Jaspers not as passive submission but as facing each experience with the feeling that one is always following one’s own path—belongs to this orientation of transcendental confidence.
• The second degree of self-proving concerns the transcendent dimension itself: after discovering one’s determined nature, one must face the void and the formless to verify that the supra-individual, unconditioned nucleus of being is genuinely present, since without this verification any unity of the self risks pathological regression from below.
  • The Ismaeli initiatic order used the phrase ‘Nothing exists, everything is permitted’ but applied it only to the highest grades, preceded by four degrees of unconditional blind obedience taken to limits inconceivable to the Western mind.
  • The absolute meaning of existing in an ambience lacking any support ‘can spring only from a direct and absolute relationship between that being and transcendence’—not from anything extrinsic or external.
• The state of integrated Dionysian Apollonism—where one has the Dionysian experience behind rather than before oneself—produces a ’lucid inebriation’ that is the vital element for existence in the free state, absolutely opposed to passive ecstatic opening to elementary forces.
  • The Dionysian soul is ’the soul that, having being, plunges into becoming’; it ‘can run beyond itself and find itself in a vaster sphere,’ and by transfiguring itself, ’transfigures existence’ in all its aspects without withdrawal, exception, or choice.
  • A passage in the Upanishads marks the extreme limit, speaking of him against whom death is powerless because it has become part of his being—outside events that might affect him become the stimulus for ever greater freedom.

Acting without Desire—The Causal Law

The integrated man’s orientation toward action is defined by two traditional maxims—acting without regard to fruits and action without acting—which describe an engagement where the transcendent principle acts through the individual without being stirred or depleted by it, while the moral concept of ‘sin’ is replaced by the objective concept of ’error’ grounded in the causal law of karma.

• Pure action—the action of the man rooted in transcendence—involves not less but more application than conditioned action, carried out impersonally and ‘doing what needs to be done,’ without being determined by pleasure, pain, success, failure, or the approval of others.
  • Péguy stated a principle of broad application in the world of Tradition: a work well done is a reward in itself, and the true artisan puts the same care into a work to be seen and into one that remains unseen.
  • The distinction is between naturalistic pleasure tied to the satisfaction of desire, and ‘heroic’ pleasure that accompanies decisive action arising from ‘being’—the latter blending with the special intoxication mentioned earlier.
• The moral concept of ‘sin’ is replaced by the objective concept of ‘fault’ or ’error’: rather than moral sanctions imposed by a personal God, all consequences follow from the causal law of karma—natural, neutral, devoid of moral content, operating on all planes as the effects already contained in the causes.
  • A Spanish proverb expresses this objectively: ‘God said: take what you want and pay the price’; similarly the Koranic saying: ‘He who does evil, does it only to himself.’
  • “Schuon’s observation that Hindus and Far Easterners distinguish actions not by intrinsic moral value but by their opportuneness in view of cosmic or spiritual reactions and social utility—without being ‘moralists’—captures the attitude perfectly.” —Frithjof Schuon

Part 3: The Dead End of Existentialism

Being and Inauthentic Existence

Existentialism is examined not as a philosophical system to be evaluated speculatively, but as an indirect testimony of the existential condition of a particular human type in crisis; its valid insights—the affirmation of concrete individual being, the critique of inauthentic existence, and the recognition of a dual structure—are undermined by its overvaluation of situationality and its failure to locate the center of gravity in transcendence.

• Philosophical existentialism has value as a sign of the times, reflecting the climate of the nihilistic world through the abstract and discursive medium of academic philosophy—with the important caveat that its professors’ petit bourgeois lifestyle contradicts the practical implications of its positions.
  • Practical existentialists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés may be at an advantage over philosophical existentialists who are ‘professors, mere armchair intellectuals whose lifestyle, aside from their so-called problems and positions, has always been of the petit bourgeois type.’
  • Jaspers represents the limitations of the existentialists: he makes superficial references to ‘metaphysics,’ exalts ‘rational illumination’ and ’liberty and independence of the philosophical,’ and is intolerant of spiritual authority—typical horizons of the intellectual of liberal-bourgeois origin.
• Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ as an essential, not accidental, constituent of Dasein is only valid for a human type different from the differentiated man, in whom an inner detachment limits situational conditions and relativizes ‘being-in-the-world’ to contingency.
  • Heidegger speaks of the state of inauthenticity—‘swooning,’ ‘covering’ oneself, ‘being flung’ into the anodyne existence of everyday life with its platitudes, chattering, lies, and escapist diversions—which authentically recognizes the absurdity of modern life.
  • What is valid in existentialism’s first motif—that only an ’elucidation’ of ideas on the basis of their existential foundation avoids nihilism—confirms the direction already established regarding fidelity to one’s own being.

Sartre: Prisoner without Walls

Sartre’s theory of nihilating freedom—while correctly demonstrating that man cannot escape his freedom even in passivity or surrender—reveals existentialism’s deepest failure: freedom is experienced not as claimed sovereignty but as condemnation, a ‘prison without walls,’ because the modern man who ‘finds himself’ free lacks the constitutive transcendence that would make freedom a foundation rather than a burden.

• Sartre correctly shows that freedom is absolute and inescapable—even not choosing is a choice, obedience is a choice, surrender to instinct is a choice—but his philosophical analysis merely describes the specific condition of the modern man who has been delivered to his freedom rather than having claimed it.
  • “Sartre writes: ‘We do not have behind or before us the luminous realm of values, justifications, or causes.’ Man is abandoned to his freedom and responsibility without refuge.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  • “‘Freedom, choice, nihilation, and temporalization are one and the same thing’ for Sartre—a ’nihilating rupture with the world and with oneself,’ pure negation of the given, is his definition of freedom.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
• The introduction of ‘responsibility’ in Sartre’s system reveals a covert residue of heteronomous morality: a truly radical nihilation of the integrated type would not tolerate the word ‘responsibility’ in any moral sense, since the man who has transcendence as his center has no one outside himself to be responsible to.
  • Modern man is not free, but ‘finds himself’ free in the world where God is dead—‘he is delivered up to his freedom,’ and from this his deep suffering comes, producing the sensation of freedom as condemnation.
  • The Heideggerian concept of ‘weight’ (Last) characterizing the sensation of being ‘hurled’ into the world—very alive to the sense of ‘being-here’ but in the dark as to ‘whence’ and ‘whither’—is the authentic emotional content of this position.

Existence, “A Project Flung into the World”

Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as a ‘project flung into the world’—a mere possibility of being that must be realized in time—and Sartre’s ‘fundamental project’ are examined as confused reflections of the traditional doctrine of preexistence; existential angst arises not from the human condition as such but from a fractured will that cannot identify with its own transcendent origin.

• Existential angst—distinguished by Heidegger from ordinary fear—arises from the sense that one’s being is a mere uncertain possibility that may or may not be realized, a conception entirely incomprehensible to the integrated human type who is ignorant of angst.
  • For Heidegger the basis of Dasein is nothingness: one is only flung into the world as a mere possibility of being, and the metaphysical question concerns whether one will attain or fail to attain one’s own being.
  • The logical consequence of admitting no religious opening is that existence becomes purely horizontal in character—man ’exists only in time’ in a ‘horizontal ecstasy in the temporal,’ able to be solely within becoming.
• Sartre’s ‘fundamental project’—a pretemporal, timeless choice that is the unitary synthesis of all one’s possibilities and remains latent until circumstances bring them to light—is an unwitting echo of the traditional doctrine of preexistence and svadharma, but is then negated by his comparing the original choice to throwing a ball onto a roulette wheel.
  • Sartre compares the original choice to ’the act of throwing the ball onto the roulette wheel, an act with which everything is already potentially decided’—revealing the paradox of an absolute freedom whose bets are already laid.
  • Traditional doctrines accepted a predetermination that is timeless, precosmic, and prenatal—the Hindu svadharma, the ‘original face’ of Far Eastern philosophy—on which grounds one can justify fidelity to oneself and the sense of one’s own law.
• The existentialists’ sensation of Dasein as ‘fall,’ ‘debt,’ and ‘being flung’ derives from a false conception of the Absolute as a substantialized totality from which any determination is a negation—whereas the truly infinite is free self-determining power, and determination is not negation but affirmation.
  • Spinoza’s axiom Omnis determinatio est negatio (every determination is a negation) lurks behind existentialism’s sense that Dasein is ‘guilty just by the simple fact of existing,’ since any determined existence excludes all infinite possibilities of pure being.
  • Classical Greece offers the contrary view: in limit and form it saw the manifestation of perfection, a completion, and a reflection of the Absolute—the absurdity of treating finite existence as a fall or fault from this standpoint is obvious.

Heidegger: “Retreating Forwards” and “Being-for-Death”—Collapse of Existentialism

Heidegger’s conception of existence as a ‘retreat forward’ pursuing being that always escapes before one, with death as the only point where non-totality might be overcome, is identified as a ‘frenetic desire to live at any price’—the ultimate result of existentialism without religious opening; Jaspers’s solution of ‘authentic failure’ reveals the collapse into a covert Protestant religiosity.

• Heidegger’s conception of ‘authentic temporality’ as ‘horizontal ecstasy’—pursuing being that always runs ahead of existence—corresponds to what Bernanos called a ‘retreat forward’: life as a process of chronic, irremediable privation driven by the sensation of nontotality.
  • Someone has spoken of a ‘frenetic desire to live, to live at any price, which is not the result of the rhythm of life within us, but of the rhythm of death’—this is the ultimate existential content of Heideggerian thought without religious opening.
  • Heidegger speaks of existence as ‘Being-towards-death,’ making death the only point where non-totality is overcome—the individual’s anguish at death is anguish before ‘its very own possibility, unconditioned and insuperable.’
• Jaspers’s solution of ‘authentic foundering’—desiring one’s own defeat, recognizing failure as the opening to transcendence—represents the collapse of existentialism into a crypto-Protestant religiosity, in which transcendence is experienced as the stone guest that paralyzes rather than liberates.
  • Jaspers concludes: ‘The will to eternity, far from refusing failure, recognizes there its own goal’—the tragic collapse of the self is identified with the epiphany of transcendence, reproducing the Gospel principle of losing one’s life to find it.
  • When Jaspers asserts that without transcendence freedom would be purely arbitrary without sense of blame, he confirms how existence senses transcendence: as a paralyzing ‘stone guest,’ projected outside, resulting in a relationship that is off-center, exterior, and dependent.
• Existentialism’s fundamental failure is that it acknowledges the structural duality of existence and transcendence but locates the center of gravity on the existent rather than the transcendent side, whereas the integrated man conceives his determined Dasein as ‘other’ to his true Self, which is transcendence.
  • The differentiated man who has rediscovered the Self through crises, tests, errors, and destructions finds existential philosophy absolutely alien: ‘He is reestablished in the Self, in Being, in a calm and unshakable mode.’
  • The existentialists are men who have failed to be ‘burned out’ or beyond good and evil in their actual existence—their speculations reflect modern man in crisis rather than modern man beyond crisis.

Part 4: Dissolution of the Individual

The Dual Aspect of Anonymity

The modern ‘crisis of personality’ is reframed: bourgeois individualism has led to the very massification it claims to oppose, while the true ‘person’ in the traditional sense is a mask that expresses and manifests a higher principle—and thus genuine de-individualization, achieved actively from above through the transcendent dimension, results not in the anonymous mass but in the ‘absolute person.’

• The defense of ‘personality’ against modern collectivism is self-undermining because it is individualism itself—the atomization of persons into numerical units—that historically produced the mass society it now opposes.
  • Modern Western humanism, from the Renaissance onward, conflated individualism, subjectivism, and ‘personality’ in a development that was simultaneously a more or less conscious separation from transcendence.
  • “Schuon observes: ‘In the sacred [work of art], it is as if the genius is concealed; what predominates is an impersonal, vast, mysterious intelligence. The sacred work of art has a perfume of infinitude, the imprint of the absolute.’” —Frithjof Schuon
• The original meaning of ‘person’ as mask—something precise and structured that expresses a higher principle—defines a being that is not closed to the above, distinguishing it from the mere individual; the person has himself rather than being himself, in the relation of actor to part.
  • Typicality de-individualizes: the person essentially incarnates an idea, law, or function, so that individual characteristics disappear before a meaningful structure that could reappear almost identically wherever the same perfection is reached.
  • The Far Eastern saying ‘The absolute Name is no longer a name’ captures the result: the person becomes anonymous in the higher sense—universalized and eternalized by the presence of the supra-individual principle.
• Two concepts of impersonality exist as polar opposites: the inferior anonymity of the mass (individual reduced to numerical unit) and the superior anonymity of the absolute person (individual whose work is more visible than the creator, in whom the transcendent principle acts through a perfect form).
  • A ‘civilization of anonymous heroes’ is possible: the style of anonymity is realized in the speculative domain where what is thought according to truth cannot be signed with an individual’s name, and in customs of abandoning one’s name for a function-name.
  • In the modern world only the essential orientation can be preserved: the dissolution of bourgeois ‘values of the personality’ may be not a negative phenomenon but, for the differentiated man, the freeing of a space for higher impersonal action.

Destructions and Liberations in the New Realism

Drawing on Ernst Jünger’s analysis of modern total warfare and the concept of the Neue Sachlichkeit, this chapter argues that the objective depersonalizing processes of technology and war—though producing a squalid mass uniformity in most cases—can for a small minority with the transcendent dimension serve as an active essentialization, burning out individual dregs and revealing the absolute person.

• Jünger observed that in modern technological warfare, those who survive spiritually do so by passing into a new form of existence characterized by extreme lucidity, objectivity, and a capacity to act drawn from forces beyond individual categories—an anonymity of the ‘unknown soldier’ that is not defeat but a new type.
  • The ’new type’ contains the destruction within himself and is no longer comprehensible in terms of the ‘individual’: he is outside the values of humanism, with faces that take on the appearance of ‘metallic masks’ in men and ‘cosmetic masks’ in women.
  • Jünger was mistaken in thinking this active depersonalization is the main trend—the prevalent tendency is passive destructive processes producing squalid uniformity at an existential level lower than even the individual.
• The Neue Sachlichkeit (’new objectivity’) current between the world wars—with its slogan of coolness, clarity, detachment from subjectivism and melodrama, and objectivity toward things—reflects a style of active impersonality that has potential value for the differentiated man, though its social manifestations remain mostly negative.
  • “Matzke wrote: ‘We are objective, because for us the reality of things is great, infinite, and everything human is too small, limited, and polluted with soul.’” —F. Matzke
  • The style of objectivity should not be confused with disanimation: it can be taken along the lines of impersonal perfection in every work—the machine itself symbolizing a form born from exact, objective adjustment of means to end, with the exclusion of everything superfluous or arbitrary.

The “Animal Ideal”—The Sentiment of Nature

The ‘animal ideal’—the reduction of modern man to pure biological well-being, physical comfort, and athletic vitality—is critiqued as a regressive phenomenon; simultaneously, an authentic ‘sentiment of nature’ is defined for the differentiated man not as sentimental escape or primitivist communion but as a school of objectivity, distance, and impersonal presence that reflects transcendence in the language of elemental things.

• The ‘animal ideal’ prevalent especially in North America—biological well-being, comfort, optimistic euphoria, physical vigor, and material success as the summit of human existence—represents the practical realization of the regression of Western man to the level of a natural species, prepared theoretically by Darwinism.
  • Any ‘return to nature’ is a regressive phenomenon, including protest in the name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, and life uninhibited by the intellect: ‘The man who becomes “natural” in this way has in reality become denatured.’
  • The theological doctrine that a purely natural state for man has never existed retains legitimacy: at the beginning he was placed in a supranatural state from which he has fallen, so the ‘origins’ to which one returns were never simply ’natural.’
• The authentic sentiment of nature for the differentiated man is not sentimental, lyrical, or restorative but a school of objectivity and distance—the language of the inanimate that speaks of transcendence precisely by its radical nonhumanity, its self-containment beyond personal joys and sorrows.
  • “Matzke wrote: ‘Nature is the great realm of things, which demands nothing of us, which neither pursues us nor asks for sentimental reactions, which stands mutely before us as a world to itself, external and alien. This is exactly what we need.’” —F. Matzke
  • Nietzsche spoke of the ‘pure atmosphere of the Alps and ice fields’ as a ‘supreme clarification of existence’ where ’the elementary qualities of things are revealed naked and uncompromising but with absolute intelligibility.’
• The Zen experience of satori—sudden illumination in which pure reality acquires an absolute meaning just as it is, without goals, intentions, or justifications—represents the horizon toward which the authentic sentiment of nature points, where ’the immanent makes itself transcendent and the transcendent immanent.’
  • Among the maxims of Zen pointing in this direction: ‘The pure and immaculate ascetic does not enter nirvana, and the monk who breaks the rules does not go to hell,’ and ‘You have no liberation to seek from bonds, because you have never been bound.’
  • The ancient traditional saying ‘The infinitely distant is the return’ converges with these Zen maxims in pointing to the coincidence of extreme objectivity and inner transcendence.

Part 5: Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism

The Procedures of Modern Science

Modern science has no value as knowledge in the proper sense—its driving force is not the ideal of knowledge but the will to power over nature—producing ever-greater practical control at the cost of an ever more complete alienation from the real, culminating in algebraic physics where man ‘only meets himself’ and the definitional liquidation of knowledge is complete.

• Modern science is not a form of knowledge but a system of hypotheses and formulae for predicting and controlling phenomena, whose concept of ‘certainty’ is irreducibly statistical and whose concept of ’truth’ has been replaced by what best satisfies a practical human need of the intellect.
  • Bertrand Russell recognized that science, from being a means to know the world, has become a means to change the world—following the program explicitly laid out by Karl Marx.
  • Heisenberg explicitly admitted that for modern science ’the object of research is no longer the object in itself, but nature as a function of the problems that man sets himself,’ so that ‘henceforth man only meets himself.’
• Einstein’s theory of relativity represents not a spiritualization of physics but its furthest extension into formal absolutism: replacing all sensible intuitions with purely algebraic functions produces certainties ‘absolute’ only through mathematical flexibility, leaving reality itself more inaccessible than ever.
  • Whether Earth moves around the Sun or the Sun around Earth is from the Einsteinian standpoint more or less the same—one alternative only requires more complicated calculations, but both are equally ’true.’
  • The alleged ‘spiritualization’ from replacing matter with energy is an absurdity: mass and energy are made interchangeable by an abstract formula, and no actual experience changes because space is described as curved rather than Euclidean.
• Quantum physics represents a falsification of the traditional concept of intellectual catharsis: it purifies experience of sensory content not to reach a higher intelligible world but to arrive at pure mathematical abstraction—the spectral world of undifferentiated quantity opposed to quality and living forms.
  • In subatomic physics, statistical certainty has replaced causality, experimental results are found to vary depending on the act of measurement itself, and the pure algebraic ‘wave function’ replaces experimental proof as the source of ‘absolute values.’
  • The latest algebraic entities of modern physics ‘spring forth in full irrationality’ but are ‘ordered in a completely formal system of algebraic production’—this is the intellectual background to the atomic era’s inauguration, parallel to the definitive liquidation of all knowledge in the proper sense.

Covering up Nature—Phenomenology

Modern science has made nature more alien and inaccessible than ever while covering it with spectacular technological power; Husserl’s phenomenology is examined as an involuntary reflection of traditional teachings about direct knowledge of essences, but is ultimately a parody—confined to the existential plane of modern man and incapable of the inner awakening required for genuine multidimensional experience of reality.

• Modern science has produced a prodigious increase of information about phenomena while distancing man further from the depths of reality than even materialism did—desacralizing the world so that even Kant’s appeal to the starry sky loses all resonance for the scientifically educated modern man.
  • The basic limitation of modern science is its invariable starting point in the dualistic and exteriorized relationship between the I and the not-I—all its instruments are extensions of the physical senses, not instruments of another kind of knowledge.
  • After it has been said that energy not matter exists, that space is curved and four-dimensional, and so forth, ‘my actual experience has not changed a whit, and the significance of what I see—light, the sun, fire, seas, sky, flowering plants, dying beings—the ultimate significance of every process and phenomenon is no more transparent to me.’
• Husserl’s phenomenology represents a superficial reflection of traditional teachings about the disclosure of reality through the light of the transcendental I—its ‘phenomenological destruction’ corresponds to the traditional symbol of the eye in the middle of the forehead that burns up appearances—but remains confined to academic philosophy and the existential plane of modern man.
  • Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’ applied to the inner world leads to the ’transcendental I’—a center of clear and immobile light that, projected onto phenomena, reveals in them a ’living presence’ or ‘immanent content of meaning.’
  • ‘Understanding coincides with vision, intuition with meaning’—what Husserl calls an ’eidetics’ or knowledge of intellectual essences corresponds to what medieval philosophers called intuitio intellectualis.

Part 6: The Realm of Art—From “Physical” Music to the Drug Regime

The Sickness of European Culture

Following Steding’s diagnosis, European culture’s ‘sickness’ is identified as its dissociation from any formative center of existence—the disappearance of the Empire as a political-spiritual principle—producing a ’neutral’ culture of autonomous partial realms (art, science, politics) that no longer belong to an organic whole and therefore lack objective character.

• Steding’s thesis identifies the genesis of modern European culture in the dissolution of the Empire and its political theology of high Ghibellinism as the center of gravity—producing a ‘Swissifying’ and ‘Dutchifying’ fragmentation into national states and a correspondingly neutral, objectless culture.
  • In Europe, the process had two connected causes: first, a paralysis of the idea of European tradition as a center of gravity corresponding to the obscuration and decline of the Empire; second, the centrifugal motion of the parts, their dissociation and autonomization conditioned by the weakening of that originating force of gravity.
  • The antipolitical pathos of ’neutral’ art and culture—its insistence on having nothing to do with great historic and political forces—though historically justified by the degradation of the political sphere, has become a constituent feature of modern culture.

Dissolution in Modern Art

Modern art’s dissolution—from intimate subjectivism to avant-garde dissolution to Marxist ‘social realism’—reflects the general processes of cultural disintegration, yet for the differentiated man this dissolution can be useful: it opens a potential void in which a new objective style might have emerged, and corrosive ‘immoral’ literature, while targeting mostly unworthy objects, does trace an existential line of demarcation.

• The extreme avant-garde—Dadaism, surrealism, and their successors—has value as evidence of the times rather than as artistic achievement; having exhausted its revolutionary phase, it typically retreats to a new academicism or abstract formalism rather than completing the self-dissolution of art that might have created space for a new ‘grand style.’
  • “Nietzsche defined the ‘grand style’ as the mastery of chaos: ‘To make himself master of the chaos that one is, to force his own chaos to become form, mathematics, law—that is the grand ambition. Around such despotic men a silence is born, a fear, similar to what is felt at a great sacrilege.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Such a grand style is impossible in the present world, which ’lacks any center, any meaning, any objective symbol that could give soul, content, and power to this grand style.’
• Corrosive and ‘immoral’ contemporary literature, while lacking higher goals and often merely reflecting its authors’ squalid horizons, has value as evidence that helps define a distance—the differentiated man is not scandalized but adopts an attitude of understatement, recognizing that its targets are mostly not worth defending.
  • The difference between depraved and positive realism lies in the latter’s affirmation that certain values—spiritual courage, honor, straightforwardness, truth, fidelity—are absolute realities for a given human type, not mere fictions, and that an existence ignoring these is sub-real rather than realistic.
  • Moralizing reactions to this literature stem from undue confusion of the essential and the contingent—the incapacity to conceive of substantial values beyond limited forms of expression that have already become alien and ineffective.

Modern Music and Jazz

The trajectory of Western music from Romantic pathos through intellectualization and physical ‘primitivism’ to twelve-tone dissolution and jazz reflects the same nihilistic processes as the other cultural domains; jazz in particular—derived from African polyrhythmic ecstatic techniques—represents the resurfacing of elemental possession-inducing forces in a desacralized context where they produce only diffuse, formless dissolution.

• The development of Western music from Romantic pathos toward twelve-tone abstraction and serial dissolution represents an ‘active musical nihilism’—abandoning the tonal system as the ‘bourgeois’ common chord and arriving, in Webern, at compositions of extreme rarefaction whose dissolution into the formless is contained only by pure algebraic composition.
  • While Adorno could state ‘The twelve-tone technique is our destiny,’ others justly spoke of a musical ‘ice age’: worlds analogous to modern physics’ pure algebraic entities, where technical perfection is accompanied by the same emptiness, soullessness, and chaos.
  • The limit is crossed by John Cage, who explicitly declares his compositions are ’no longer music,’ mixing music with pure noise, electronic sound effects, long pauses, and random insertions to produce disorientation as in dadaism.
• Jazz derives from African polyrhythmic techniques designed to induce possession by ecstatic entities—its syncopated structure generating uninterrupted ecstasy through static and ecstatic accent alternation—but in the desacralized modern environment, stripped of its sacred context, it produces only diffuse, formless collective possession.
  • Dauer and Ortiz identified the characteristic of African music as its polyrhythmic structure, where static accents act as ecstatic accents to ‘feed an uninterrupted ecstasy’—the same structure preserved in all syncopated jazz, originally used in African rites to induce possession by the Orisha or Loa.
  • The latest beat groups—with obsessive reiterated rhythms causing paroxysmal contortions, hysterical mass screaming, and collective states similar to Dervish sects or Macumba—confirm that jazz’s ecstatic potential operates as a ‘diffuse and formless possession, primitive and collective in character.’

Excursus on Drugs

Drugs—like syncopated music—were originally used in sacred contexts for non-profane ends, and the increasing spread of drug use among modern youth represents a symptomatic search for ecstatic escape from existential emptiness; a positive use is theoretically possible only if the Self responds to the drug’s stimulus with its own doubled energy rather than being passively submerged, but this condition is almost never met.

• The increasing use of drugs among modern youth reflects a symptomatic response to the emptiness of modern existence—an attempt at ecstatic escape similar to other compensation mechanisms—but in almost all cases the effect is a collapse and lesion of the Self rather than a genuine opening beyond the individual.
  • “Dr. Laennec writes: ‘In our lands, the most widespread category of drug addicts is represented by the neurotics and psychopaths for whom the drug is not a luxury but an essential food, the response to anguish.’” —Dr. Laennec
  • The drug’s effect is too strong, rapid, unexpected, and external for the being to simply experience it; the process cannot involve the ‘being’—the person is submerged in the new state and ‘acted on’ by it, producing not an ecstatic opening but a collapse of the Self.
• A positive use of drugs is theoretically possible only if, at the moment the drug releases energy x, the Self responds with its own doubled energy x+x—as a skilled swimmer uses a wave to propel himself further—but this requires a degree of spiritual preparation and active inner constitution almost never present.
  • Drugs in many traditions were originally used for ‘sacred’ ends—peyote in Central American secret societies, extracts of coca and mescal in ritual contexts, alcohol in ancient Taoism as ’life essences’ inducing a ‘magical state of grace’—all preceded by periods of purification and guided by the contemplation of symbols.
  • Hallucinogens like mescaline may project contents of the individual unconscious or activate dark influences finding an ‘open door’—reduction of these experiences to psychoanalytic projection is both misleading and incomplete.

Part 7: Dissolution in the Social Realm

States and Parties—Apoliteia

In a world of representative administrative systems, demagogic party politics, and mass democracy devoid of any legitimacy from above, the differentiated man’s proper principle is apoliteia—inner detachment from the political world—which does not exclude political activity performed as pure impersonal action but excludes any pledge of one’s true being to contemporary political causes.

• No true states, sovereigns, or leaders exist today: modern ‘states’ are administrative and representative systems whose primary element is ‘society’ conceived democratically, while parties are regimes of petty politicians serving financial and corporate interests—none possessing any principle of true, inalienable authority.
  • Donoso Cortés stated more than a century ago that no kings existed capable of proclaiming themselves as such except ‘by the will of the nation,’ and that even if any had existed, they would not have been recognized.
  • “Nietzsche’s words remain true: ‘I turned my back on the rulers when I saw what they called ruling: bartering and haggling with the rabble. . . . Among all the hypocrisies, this seems to me the worst: that even those who commanded feigned the virtues of the serfs.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
• Apoliteia is essentially an inner attitude of detachment that does not recognize any moral claim requiring inclusion in today’s absurd system—it does not necessarily entail practical abstention, since the differentiated man can act politically as impersonal pure action while remaining inwardly uninvolved.
  • The differentiated man could show the qualities of a soldier who, in order to act and accomplish a task, does not request in advance a transcendent justification—this is a ‘voluntary obligation that concerns the persona, not the being, by which even while one is involved, one remains isolated.’
  • Between the democratic capitalist West and the communist East there is no spiritual problem—only a practical one: the margin of material freedom that democracy still leaves for external activity would certainly be abolished in a communist regime.

Society—The Crisis of Patriotic Feeling

Modern society is an organic void—classes reduced to fluid economic categories, associations determined solely by material interests, and a vicious cycle of demographic growth feeding overproduction feeding conditioning—while the concepts of homeland and nation, far from representing traditional values, are products of the bourgeois revolution whose present crisis is ambivalent: potentially liberating if replaced by unity through shared ideas rather than naturalistic collectivism.

• The words ‘homeland’ and ’nation’ in their modern political sense are essentially bourgeois and revolutionary inventions—‘patriot’ first appeared between 1789 and 1793 to indicate supporters of the revolution against monarchies—and their current crisis should not be lamented but may indicate a potential liberation from naturalistic collectivism.
  • In the traditional world, nationalities and ethnicities were natural facts devoid of specific political value—they represented primary material differentiated by hierarchies, where the elevated principle of political sovereignty was the primary element and the nation the secondary and derived one.
  • The formation of nations ran parallel with the revolutionary idea: in France of Philip the Fair, the move toward national state went hand in hand with anti-aristocratic leveling and the constitution of centralized ‘public powers.’
• The vicious circle of modern economy—overproduction requiring mass consumption requiring demographic growth requiring more production—combined with uncontrolled sexual reproduction, represents the most visible expression of the absurdity of modern existence driven by a blind, subhuman necessity.
  • Sombart’s formula captures this perfectly: Fiat productio, pereat homo! (Let there be production! Let man perish!)—private capitalism’s necessity for capital reinvestment and the necessity to combat unemployment both drive overproduction beyond any sensible boundary.
  • The procreative pandemic is the principal force feeding the entire modern economic system—‘man, the creator of machines, this dominator of nature, this inaugurator of the atomic era, is not far above an animal or a savage when it comes to sex.’
• The only positive replacement for dissolving national unities would be transnational groupings determined by shared ideas and free, strongly personalized connections to leaders with supreme authority—analogous to imperial epochs and the Holy Alliance—but today’s blocs are determined solely by material and economic factors.
  • The prospect is that of an invisible unity, in a world without frontiers, of those few individuals associated by their very nature—‘almost in the same terms as Plato used, speaking of the true state, which idea was then taken up by the Stoics.’
  • Apoliteia’s detachment contains this eventual possibility for tomorrow: being from the same country would be replaced by being, or not being, for the same cause.

Marriage and the Family

The modern family has lost every suprapersonal foundation—cemented only by inertia, convention, and weakness—and the differentiated man can recognize nothing in this institution worth his engagement; the only potentially valid alternative to physical procreation is spiritual paternity, in which those who awaken others to a higher orientation create a continuity of being more essential than any continuity of blood.

• The modern family has long since lost its higher meaning because its essential center—the primarily spiritual authority of the father as pater (lord, sovereign) and as transmitter of a spiritual tradition—has disappeared, leaving only inertia, convention, practical convenience, and sentimental factors.
  • The interrelation between the disappearance of paternal authority and the unleashing of individualism manifests in the ever-worsening gap between generations: the dissolution of organic links in space corresponds to a dissolution in time, in the breaking of spiritual continuity between fathers and sons.
  • Charles Péguy spoke of being a father as ’the great adventure of modern man,’ given the utter uncertainty of what offspring may be—the improbability that in our day the child might receive anything more than mere life from the father.
• Catholic indissoluble marriage has been reduced to a religious sanction for a profane unbreakable contract—a case of making the sacred profane—because the Church applied to any couple what is only conceivable as a genuine mystery in exceptional cases of absolute, heroic dedication.
  • The Church that does not allow divorce does permit widows and widowers to remarry—breaching faithfulness and admitting only a materialistic premise (that the indissolubly united dead has simply ceased to exist)—showing that Catholic religious law has made the sacrament a simple social convenience.
  • Catholicism has recognized no higher value in the sexual experience taken in itself—presenting marriage as a lesser evil for those who cannot choose chastity—and thereby lacks any basis for the ‘sacralization’ of union that would constitute a real effect of the rite.
• The only alternative to meaningless physical procreation in an epoch of dissolution is spiritual paternity—the awakening of qualified individuals to a higher orientation—which creates a more essential continuity than heredity, since in today’s conditions blood no longer carries spiritual transmission.
  • The traditional world accorded priority to spiritual paternity over biological: the relationship between teacher and student, initiator and initiate, created a more intimate tie than any that could unite to the physical father, family, or naturalistic community.
  • What is authentic and valid in this spiritual succession ‘is accomplished under the guidance of a higher, inscrutable wisdom, with the external appearance of casuality, rather than through a direct initiative willed by any individual.’

Relations between the Sexes

The present sexual revolution liberates sex from bourgeois moralism but not from sex—producing pandemic erotic intoxication and a gynocratic tendency—while the authentic possibility for the differentiated man lies in using the elementarity of sexual polarity as nourishment for the special intoxication of the Dionysian state, an exceptional and fragile possibility given the general deterioration of both feminine and masculine types.

• The contamination of ethics by sexuality—reducing ‘virtue’ to sexual matters, making honor depend on anatomical integrity—is an aberration of Western religious moralism that the processes of dissolution are removing, and this removal could in principle allow ethical values to be liberated from their sexual connections.
  • Pareto coined the term ‘virtuism’ for the nineteenth-century ‘sexual religion’—with its taboos, dogmas, and intolerance, especially virulent in Anglo-Saxon countries—which reduced the ancient meaning of virtus (force of soul, virile quality) to a purely sexual category.
  • Continence and chastity have their proper place only in the framework of a certain type of ascesis and uncommon vocations—contrary to puritanical opinion, a free sexual life in the case of persons of a certain stature tells us nothing about their intrinsic value.
• The sexual revolution produces not liberation from sex but sex as dominant force—chronic erotic intoxication and gynocratic tendency—while its practical outcome is either neurotic forms when only outer inhibitions are removed, or insipid naturalism and promiscuity when fully ’emancipated.’
  • The process is toward ‘a freeing of sex, but in no way a freeing from sex’—sex and women become dominant forces in present society, an evident phenomenon that is part of the general phenomenology of every terminal phase of a civilization’s cycle.
  • Modern female ‘stars’ with their fascinating features are ’like jellyfish with magnificent iridescent colors that are reduced to a gelatinous mass and evaporate if brought out of the water into sunlight’—the water corresponding to the atmosphere of diffuse and collective sexuality.
• For the differentiated man, the authentic possibility lies in certain sporadic and exceptional encounters where the elemental quality of sexual polarity—the ‘absolute woman’ as spiritually dangerous presence recognized in many traditional sagas—can be engaged as nourishment for the Dionysian intoxication without becoming slavery.
  • If there is no need to ‘possess’ another human being, the woman will not be a mere object of pleasure: that which can be gained from sexual polarity adequately used can provide one of the principal materials to feed the special active and living intoxication of the Dionysian experience.
  • “Nietzsche’s saying from Zarathustra—‘Are you going to women? Don’t forget your whip!’—may, incidentally, find appropriate application in cases where the old woman’s warning reveals that the capacity for true erotic elementality demands an active masculine sovereignty.” —Friedrich Nietzsche

Part 8: The Spiritual Problem

The “Second Religiosity”

The proliferating neospiritualist movements of the modern world are not signs of a genuine spiritual revival but phenomena of ‘second religiosity’—symptomatic of terminal civilizational decay, representing escapism and confused compensation rather than counterforces to materialism, and often more dangerous than materialism in opening ‘fissures in the Great Wall’ to dark forces beneath ordinary consciousness.

• Spengler’s concept of ‘second religiosity’—the sporadic forms of spirituality and mysticism that appear on the margins of civilizational grandeur in its terminal phase—describes the modern neospiritualist movements as symptoms of decay rather than renewal, developed outside both positive religion and the principal currents of existence.
  • Guénon adds that after nineteenth-century materialism closed man to what was above him, twentieth-century ‘spiritual’ currents tended to open him to what was beneath him—corresponding to Aldous Huxley’s ‘self-transcendence downwards’ as opposed to ‘self-transcendence upwards.’
  • Neospiritualism may be even more dangerous than materialism because it opens ‘fissures in the Great Wall’—dangerous faults in the protecting barrier that, despite limiting, protects every normal person from the action of genuine dark forces hidden behind the sense-world.
• What traditional texts and doctrines in neospiritualism are genuine is almost always reduced to counterfeits, fragments mixed with Western prejudices—and the human material of its practitioners (mediums, popular ‘maguses,’ dowsers, exalted mystics, a high percentage of ‘past it’ women) confirms its regressive character.
  • While the ancient sciences had the prerogative of a superior humanity drawn from royal and priestly castes, today’s antimaterialist gospel is bandied about by Anthroposophists, newspaper astrologers, Theosophists, popularizers of Americanized yoga—‘mystification and superstition are constantly mingled.’
  • The fundamental texts of various great traditions have been published by academic scholars of religions in versions free from neospiritualism’s distortions—providing a materia prima for those with the discrimination to use them without mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
• Initiation in its strict metaphysical sense—a real ontological change of state, an opening to transcendence—is virtually excluded as a practical possibility in the present epoch; the three theoretical cases (natural dignity, violent breakthrough, transmission by qualified initiatic organizations) are all near-impossible given modern conditions.
  • The individualistic and democratic view of the ‘self-made initiate’ must be negated: ’through his own strength alone, the human individual cannot go beyond human individuality, and any positive result in this field is conditioned by the presence and action of a genuine power of a different, nonindividual order.’
  • Guénon’s introduction of ‘virtual initiation’ and his faith in surviving initiatic organizations are questioned: there is good reason to suppose that the spiritual power constituting their center has withdrawn, leaving behind only a psychic cadaver.
• The most realistic spiritual task for the differentiated man today is not initiation but the progressive induction of the transcendent orientation into his being—like magnetizing iron so that it always returns to point toward the pole—so that this orientation pervades not only his intellect but his existential life force.
  • The Zen saying applies even here: ‘He who seeks the Way, leaves the Way’—a realistic view and honest self-evaluation indicate that the only serious task today is to give ever more emphasis to the dimension of transcendence in oneself.
  • When the orientation toward the transcendent no longer has a merely mental or emotional character but has come to penetrate a person’s being, ’the most essential work is done, the seed has penetrated the earth, and the rest is, in a way, secondary and consequential.’

Death—The Right over Life

A positive contemplation of death—dwelling on it daily without anguish, as a touchstone of inner strength—is the differentiated man’s ultimate measure of integration; the right over life is examined through Stoic and Buddhist precedents, ultimately pointing beyond the person to the pretemporal choice of one’s existence, wherein death appears not as condemnation but as one episode in a continuum the being has freely chosen to traverse.

• The correct attitude toward death for the differentiated man is not Heidegger’s ‘courage to have anguish’ but a positive contemplatio mortis—living every day as if it were the last without changing anything in thought or action—that leaves death behind one and produces a higher, free, and lucidly intoxicated form of living.
  • The kamikaze suicide pilots who had vowed to die and might be called to their mission at any moment did not exclude ordinary occupations, training, and recreation, nor was their existence weighed down by a dismal sense of tragedy—this is the correct model of the positive contemplation of death.
  • The traditional doctrine of preexistence means that the differentiated man cannot think his being begins with physical birth and ends with death; birth and death are both changes of state, and the human condition is only a restricted section in a continuum traversing many other states.
• Both Stoicism and Buddhism permit suicide only in the exceptional case of a being who has already achieved a virtual separation of the Self from life—never when driven by passions, emotional motives, or social pressures—making Seneca’s maxim ’the path of exit is open’ an enhancement of inner freedom for the man already capable of facing everything.
  • “Seneca makes divinity say: ‘Wherever you do not want to fight, it is always possible to retreat. You have been given nothing easier than death’—patet exitus—but this applies only to the superior man for whom every possible ordeal has already been internally mastered.” —Seneca
  • Buddhism censures suicide when one is driven to renounce life in the name of life itself—because such an act is not liberation but the extreme, negative form of attachment to life—while permitting it for the ascetic type in whom the Self has been virtually separated.
• The ultimate resolution of the problem of death and the right over life lies in the possibility of ‘interrogating destiny’ through forms of intense and risky existence—where the borderline between life and death coincides with the extreme limit of a life’s fullness—connecting the contemplation of death to the formula of a change of polarity from living to more-than-living.
  • If one assumes the predetermination of the essential course of individual existence, even suicide could be thought of as one of the particular acts already contemplated—its decision illuminated by the degree of effective integration attained, the sovereignty being not of the person but over the person.
  • The ultimate possible meaning of finding oneself in a world contrary to Tradition—a world inimical to one’s own nature—may be the choice made by a being that ‘wanted to measure itself against a difficult challenge,’ making even the worst conditions of dissolution into a freely accepted trial.