>never abandon the principle of struggle
I have never read Evola and only know him from the /pol/ memes but for some reason that quote has stuck with me. Can somebody give me a non-meme answer: what is the context for it? Does he explain what exactly the "principle of struggle" is?
Never abandon the principle of struggle
Benjamin Allen
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Brody Powell
whats the context?
Gavin Brown
Cast your gaze upon Carlyle's Sartor Resartus.
Landon Smith
„The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful. “ I have read Evola and one of his core beliefs is that struggle and in certain contexts war is essential to the realization of men. His book are great you should read them.
Btw that quote isnt originally from him but he uses it alot.
Jonathan Peterson
what book is the quote from
Justin Thomas
>one of his core beliefs is that struggle and in certain contexts war is essential to the realization of men.
makes sense, since how are you supposed to reach full realisation of human potential without going beyond what is necessary
regarding your image, it is important and good info no doubt, but evola spoke more of an inward attitude toward life, which would be more a strength of character, following higher values and not held back by emotionality or passion, which are more feminine. this implies an inner detachment to the outer and a devotion (although he was generally against this, perhaps devotion is not the right word) to a higher law, which is taken to be real, or hypra-real.
Joseph Ramirez
I don't know where that quote is from but in the context of his thought it makes sense. Like all Traditionalists and fascists he's against systems of thought that see man as overdetermined by "mundane" forces, whether through the reduction of human thought and behavior to biological, psychological (as opposed to mental in a spiritual and rational sense), or material forces, like unconscious Freudian drives or animal urges that have merely evolved language as another means to serve their ends, or through "amoral" political theories like the British "negative liberty" tradition that view the aim of politics as essentially the minimum necessary mediation of conflict between fundamentally selfish, atomised individuals.
Both fascists and Traditionalists counter these secular, mundane, reductionist views of the human being (which are usually mixed together and have various manifestations) with (1) normative structures, like metaphysical and moral hierarchies or systems of natural law, in which man has (2) responsibilities and duties, like the duty to be pious and moral, the duty to serve the nation, the duty to live one's life as an "imitatio" of a divine model, to seek mystical transcendence, to enable others to seek such transcendence, etc. There are thus (3) modes and attitudes proper to man in his natural habitat (i.e. within some normative structure like the nation, the volk, or the balanced hierarchy). For example it could be man's duty, because of the moral and metaphysical framework of his society, to both despise evil and promote good, to be charitable and/or to promote strength and self-reliance among his fellow men, etc.
The contrast with the purely secular, mundane system lies in the fact that men in a hierarchically and normatively conceived society can be told, asked, or encouraged to do things for reasons other than self-interest. In a "negative liberty"-based liberal democracy, one has to appeal to vague humanitarianism, but in a universalist way where excluding degenerates and freaks and exploitative outsiders becomes difficult because applying such STANDARDS to people is a form of restricting their liberty. In very scientistic societies, smart people often view the democratic process as something that has to be manipulated in order to ensure good outcomes, because people are (according to them) fundamentally just semi-rational, mostly irrational and selfish, animals. The whole game of politics is different: we simultaneously have to leave people to their liberty to be freaks and parasites sometimes, while also viewing them as cattle who need constant nudging.
Evola as both a Traditionalist and a fascist is free to reject all these premises and insist that it is possible to organise a society fundamentally "on the back of" transcendent value structures.
Eli White
Liberalism itself used to do this, as Evola notes - it used to be the optimistic bourgeois liberalism of the Enlightenment, which took traditional Christian morality (which sees the purpose of life as ultimately a striving toward knowledge of, and thus imitation of, the divine, which is conceived as the platonic triune One: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful), cloaked it in rationalism and scientism (knowledge begets more knowledge exponentially until life is made perfect), creating a form of modern Pelagianism. The Enlightenment believed that the only thing stopping everybody from being Star Trek utopia was the irrational arbitrariness of accumulated institutions, orthodoxies, self-interested feudal magnates (up to and including kings), etc. So if you just knock down all those decrepit structures, which man is always yearning to break free from anyway, the natural divine life will flow forth, exponentially compounding upon itself until heaven on earth is achieved (Pelagianism). “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains" (Rousseau). Kant:
>Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. ... It is [possible], however, for the public to enlighten itself; indeed, if it is only given freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable.
This optimism died with the French Revolution, reaction, romanticism, and the long 19th century. Liberalism shifted by WW1 to being the ideology of Churchill's famous quote, "democracy is the worst system we have, except all others that have been tried." The reason for this is that the true optimism of the Enlightenment was itself a belief in a transcendent, normative order: all the things that moral religions like Christianity had elevated to their highest ideals (morality, longing for knowledge of ultimate reality, compassion and brotherly love), those things are actually just the essence of man and the natural outcome of rational thought once it is freed from irrational fetters. This positive liberty lapsed into the negative liberty of an entrenched bourgeoisie, the philistine and hypocrite class critiqued by both the left and the right for holding society in a kind of stasis that only benefits itself.
Reactionaries like de Maistre and de Bonald are more pessimistic, and conservatives like Burke, are part of the pessimistic reaction to the results of Enlightenment optimism (like The Terror). Burke insists that "reason" by itself basically creates autistic harebrained schemes that inevitably results in Jacobin terror, and that human beings exist in hard-earned matrices of essentially evolved customs, human societies are made liveable in the same way the Grand Canyon was eroded, by a continuous intergenerational smoothing of roughness. De Maistre and de Bonald don't elevate "accumulated custom" like Burke does, they instead say "see? this is why y'all need Jesus," basically unless you have a moral structure that is accepted a priori by the populace, the populace will act like shit.
Samuel Campbell
What's interesting is that this isn't a simple reversion to medieval Christian optimism about the naturalness of virtue, it's more like saying "we should go back to when people believed in virtue a priori, because virtue isn't a priori, and only making average joes believe it is a priori will make them behave virtuously." Burke would agree that the matrix of virtue is important, he would just disagree (aggressively) that it has to be Catholic or that Catholicism is the best model for it.
De Bonald and de Maistre are advocates of both natural law (the idea that human reason unaided does not create virtue, but DISCOVERS a natural order of moral virtue), and virtue ethics (see Alisdair McIntyre for example). You could say the optimistic Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were believers in a natural law doctrine (although it's complicated in Kant's case, but effectively natural law).
The problem is how to determine which natural law is the correct one. Obviously you can't both believe that nature reveals the truth of Catholicism and that the Enlightenment revealed that the Catholic church is an irrational evil institution. So the question becomes one of who gets to decide, and thus who gets to impose the "correct" natural law on people whether they happen to agree or not. This is why the bourgeoisie and bourgeois liberalism continue to dominate politics, because while de Maistre and others like him may agree that a return to virtue ethics based on a priori faith in natural law would be ideal, the cat is already out of the bag, and we can't go back to this except by theocratically imposing it on a lot of secularised people who will resist the imposition. Of course, de Maistre and de Bonald will say that they only resist the imposition because they are being progressively corrupted by a lack of morality and virtue, making them regress more and more into selfish animals and neurotic messes who can't be reasoned with.
So there is an impasse, and because "possession is 9/10ths of the law," democratic liberalism maintains its position of dominance. It tends to absorb any system of values that doesn't violently oppose it, because any system of values that isn't violent in opposition to the bourgeoisie, i.e. that wants to TALK to the masses and CONVINCE them of a different system of values (whether that system is Catholicism communism), is necessarily agreeing with the bourgeois liberal that it is illegitimate to impose anything on anyone unless they consent to it (negative liberty). So these nonviolent dissidents form pockets of protest and get slowly rotted by liberalism like everything else does.
Cooper Flores
Fascism is one strain of violent, transgressive, revolutionary rebellion against bourgeois liberal ideology. It says that reasons of "national" or "volkisch" health are legitimate provocations, legitimate casus belli. To do this it has to elevate "The Nation" or "The Volk" and its "health" above the rights of individuals to negative liberty, which is a natural law doctrine: the nation or volk is a natural, normative structure, and the preservation of its health is a natural, normative act.
Evola goes even further in that he he believes in a form of natural law that is literally metaphysical and transcendent, and he believes all societies stand in various relations to this metaphysical "backbone" of the world. Like the fascist he acknowledges the necessity of "integral" polities and the maintenance of their health, but this isn't an end in itself as it would be for a "secular" or "scientific" fascist, like a fairly vulgar atheistic scientistic Nazi whose only reason for defending Germany is that he vaguely elevates the Spencerian "survival of the fittest (races)" or the Nietzschean "will to power" to a political first principle, which is ultimately just as nihilistic as the scientistic liberal's universalist "diversity" fetish.
For Evola, just as all people are naturally oriented toward, and feel an unconscious yearning for, the objective metaphysical structure of the world, and ultimately for knowledge of the divine and participation in the Good, the organic unity of a people is itself just one hypostatic element of this larger orientation. The same impulse that motivates you to disdain degeneracy in your own life is the impulse that ultimately causes nations to form, to ground themselves in virtue, and to manifest moral tendencies and behaviours that overflow in artistic and cultural expression. Unlike Burke who sees nations as fortuitously stable complexes, or de Maistre who sees people as essentially ignorant and stupid unless Catholicism is imposed on them, Evola acknowledges the nihilism and degeneracy that led to the Terror and that is now rotting all European nations from the inside, but he sees attunement toward the metaphysical backbone of the world as a perennial possibility.