Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola

Author:Julius Evola [Evola, Julius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, fascism, society, spirituality
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Published: 2017-04-23T10:33:43+00:00

Chapter 18: The “Animal Ideal”

The Sentiment of Nature

The transcendent dimension may also become active in reaction to

the processes responsible for a steady erosion of many ties to nature,

leading to a rootless state. It is evident, for example, that the stay-at-

home bourgeois lifestyle is increasingly and irreversibly affected by the

progress of communication technology, opening up great expanses on

land, sea, and air. Modern life takes place ever less in a protected, self-

contained, qualitative, and organic environment: one is immersed in

the entire world by new and rapid travel that can bring us to faraway

lands and landscapes in little time. Hence, we tend toward a general

cosmopolitanism as “world citizens” in a material and objective sense,

not an ideological, much less a humanitarian one. At least the times of

“provincialism” are over.

To see what positive effect such situations can have on the devel-

opment of the differentiated and self-possessed man, it is enough to

glance at the ideas of certain traditional spiritual disciplines. In them,

the metaphysical idea of the transience of earthly existence and the

detachment from the world have had two characteristic expressions,

whether symbolic or actual: the first in hermit life, living alone in

desert or forest, the second in the wandering life, going through the

world without house or home. This second type has even occurred in

some Western religious orders; ancient Buddhism had the characteristic

concept of “departure,” as the start of a nonprofane existence, and in

traditional Hinduism this was the last of the four stages of life. There is

a significant analogy with the idea of the medieval “knight errant,” to

which we might add the enigmatic and sometimes disconcerting figures

of “noble travelers” whose homeland was unknown, who did not have

one, or must not be asked about it.

Although our case is different from that of ascetics who remove

themselves from the world, the situation of the latest technological civi-

lization might offer the incentive for commitments of this kind. In a

large city, in mass society, among the almost unreal swarming of face-

less beings, an essential sense of isolation or of detachment often occurs

naturally, perhaps even more than in the solitude of moors and moun-

tains. What I have hinted at concerning recent technology that annihi-

lates distances and the planetary spread of today’s horizons, feeds inner

detachment, superiority, callm transcendence, while acting and moving

in the vast world: one finds oneself everywhere, yet at home nowhere.1

In this way, the negative can again be turned into positive. The experi-

ence increasingly offered, and often imposed on our contemporaries,

of going to other cities, across frontiers, even to other continents, out-

side the sphere of a secure existence with its peculiarities can be banal,

matter-of-fact, touristic, utilitarian, and in our day almost always is.

Alternatively, it can be an integrated part of a different, liberated life,

with a more profound meaning in the above-mentioned terms, but only

if the proper capacity of reaction is present in oneself.

Given that the speed factor has an essential role in the modern, tech-

nical mastery of distances, a passing allusion could be made to the value

of the experience of speed itself. It is well known that today it is used by

many men,

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