Saturday 21 March 2009
Among the thinkers to whom Julius Evola referred in each of the successive moments of his intellectual activity and his personal spiritual and doctrinal search, Giovanni Perez says, Nietzsche is certainly prominent.
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Saturday 05 April 2008
Especially in his early writings, Evola continually emphasized the idea of auctoritas, a kind of 'recognized authority.'
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Saturday 29 March 2008
In Ride the Tiger, Evola contends that in the modern world, man lacks the ability to become fully realized. The traditions and transcendent values that upheld the nation in ancient times are either gone, decayed, or have become corrupted. The traditional man must project himself into something that is greater than himself—but in our age, there exists nothing but the abyss of existentialism, the delirium of narcotics, and the decadence of materialism. In former decades we could add collectivism to the above, but Marxism continues its rightful decline into obscurity, kept on life-support only by nostalgic college professors.
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Wednesday 19 March 2008
Ethics is seldom reducible to complex mathematical formulations or empirical axioms. The most obvious effort to base ethics on such formulations is utilitarianism, which seeks the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number—or the least amount of misery. Happiness here can mean pleasure as well, and it is in this way that Mill’s philosophy is hedonistic, not eudaimonistic.
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Wednesday 12 March 2008
The staff at Corrupt.org are organizing an Evola hiking trip--in the Swiss Alps!
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Wednesday 05 March 2008
We see unfolding in the first few months of 2008 a crisis in what Evola calls the “Judeo-Protestant plutocracy.” Asset deflation in the residential housing market, a credit “crunch,” and the dollar crisis, have made our cadre of plutocrats and technocrats nervous.
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Friday 22 February 2008
In Robert A. Heinlein’s controversial novel Starship Troopers, Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois remarks, “violence has settled more issues in history than has any other factor." This of course justifies the existence of the soldier, and points out an uncomfortable fact of politics—the necessity of violence. Americans have a somewhat conflicted idea of the nature of war. While we maintain war is only a “last resort” to be declared in the spirit of defense, and when all other diplomatic avenues have been exhausted, we nevertheless deploy our forces around the world, ever vigilant—watching and waiting for hostilities to erupt.
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Friday 15 February 2008
Oswald Spengler points out in Decline of the West, that “the word that stands in the Classical [that is to say Latin] vocabulary where ‘personality’ stands in our own is persona—namely, role or mask ... it means the public aspect and mien of a man, which for the Classical man is tantamount to the essence and kernel of him.” Man speaks from the aspect of a soldier, a priest, or a politician. While we can know the personality and perhaps the psychology of the modern man (or even what Spengler calls the “Faustian” man), the Classical man remains obscured by a mask, the theatrical mask of antiquity.
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Tuesday 05 February 2008
Following WWII, the world found itself divided between Bolshevism, and what Evola and others termed “Americanism.” In each, the State is considered an expression or manifestation of the collective will of the populace. In Bolshevism, this is communal, and in a democratic republic, it is “social” (or even individual).
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Friday 01 February 2008
From a traditionalist perspective, there are two fundamental problems within Democratic society from which lesser problems emerge: false representation and the idea that the marketplace in itself can be considered an ethos.
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Saturday 26 January 2008
As the United States contends with asset deflation (falling home values), rising unemployment, a weakening dollar, and hyper-inflation in the food and natural resources sectors, we once again see vivid illustrations of what Evola terms the politicization of socioeconomic forces. The electorate, desperate for relief, demands the politicians enact measures that are against the long-term interests of the nation—bailouts for real estate speculators, new entitlement programs, “rebate” checks for exhausted consumers. One fears (as did Evola) that the State no longer acts as a custodian of the economy, but rather that the economy dictates the direction of the State.
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Friday 25 January 2008
Evola remarks in “On the Secret of Degeneration,” “Europe’s formidable ‘activists’ no longer know what war is, war desired in and of itself as a virtue higher than winning or losing ... they know not warriors, only soldiers.” I would suggest that since this was written, things have become worse; Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963) remarks in Ideas Have Consequences, that the term “soldier” has now been replaced by “serviceman.” The ancient archetype of the warrior, risking life and liberty in an attempt to achieve something beyond himself has been replaced by the concept of a bureaucrat with a gun.
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Friday 25 January 2008
Welcome to juliusevola.com! The following entries are an attempt at exploring the social, historical, political, philosophical, metaphysical, and rhetorical implications of Julius Evola’s (1898-1974) many writings. My approach is largely analytical, and I will attempt to be as objective as possible; therefore, what follows is not a critique or an evaluation, but rather a study of Evola “as he is.” I welcome comments and feedback. -C. Higgins 1-25-08
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