Evola heidegger

 Part 1

They both are anti-modernists who dream of uncovering a lost primordial way of being that is the true authentic spiritual essence or lost tradition of a "people/Volk" that will understand itself as the embodiment of "assertion" or free imposition of will on the world, as having a relationship to history. In other words, a racism of the spirit where people come to understand themselves as distinct racial collectives who have a historical destiny to become the true masters of the world by reuniting with an old esoteric philosophical worldview.

They both undertake a deconstruction of the western metaphysical-liberal-materialist-rationalist tradition i.e. world jewry, bolshevism, enlightenment, democracy, modern technological industrial society-- all shoved into one vague blob: "modernity/the modern world, nihilism, the darkening, the reign of the Everyman,  the age Kali yuga or decay". Although Evola will often proclaim the return to the tradition of platonic metaphysics is rational. 

They both basically reverse the whiggish progressive staircase model of history. For the progressive liberals, history is tending more and more towards freedom as "man" (the liberal bourgeois man who sees everything as a resource or opportunity, as a business opportunity, and values nothing in itself) gains control over nature through the scientific materialist conception of nature. He reduces the world to interchangeable dead "matter" that he is able to observe and measure, to turn into abstract "quantity" and formula. He is thereby able to subdue the earth and treat it as a "standing reserve", a stock of resources from which he can create modern bourgeois "culture". He then turns the whole world into a standardized grey mass of factories, storefronts, and row houses, commodities. Newspapers, radio (instant communication), and mass events. People of different cultures and ways of life mix more and more and the old folkways and traditions are lost to time forever. This all happens at a faster and faster speed. The modern world cancels distance and space. What was once "a stone's throw away", or done according to the rising and setting of the sun is now measured precisely by a clock, done under a florescent light, and reduced by motor cars and air travel or instant electric communication. What was once a walking path, an ardous journey, is now reduced to a fraction of minutes where one cannot find the time to think even though everything is about saving time supposedly to develop one's personality. Now man is a slave to the clock, the economy, technology. Everyone slowly becomes "das man", or the untermensch-- an indistinguishable mass of automatons and robots who no longer possess the ability to think for themselves, but who are brainwashed by the liberals and socialists, by the lying media and foreigners, by cosmopolitan poison spiders who put their venom into the herd. (Globalization). By the modern world and its democratic mass culture.

These outside agitators, these foreigners both inside and outside the nation, the people's community, trick the good hardworking men and women by convincing them that it is ignoble to submit to their plight, so that they can overthrow it and take control of it, and then they can be like Goethe, Hegel , Wagner, or Kant if only they wrest the machines away from the great men who have built civilization with their genius. They try to destroy the racial and national unity by telling workers they have more in common with an African who works a cotton ginny and doesn't speak your language than they do with a fellow German who also loves Goethe and Wagner, who attends the same church, who lives in the same block, who you grew up with, but who happens to give you a job. (Fascist minimization and dismissal of "class reductionism").

In other words: these egalitarian communists and materialists have sinned against one of the first sacred truths of the authentic tradition that must be preserved: the law of aristocracy and rank order. There are qualitatively superior beings, gods and angels, who preside at the top of the hierarchy because they are perfection. Then there are men, and within these men there is a hierarchy once again. Evola looks at Plato's Republic, specifically the sections about the different kinds of metals men are made from. In short, traditional roles, class hierarchy, social differentiation within the organism. All are equal, all are the same, all can easily be replaced because no one is truly exceptional. This is a horrible destruction of a harmonious community of people who have a rational division of labor. Of course some make more, but it's simply because they are harder working, more intelligent, have an exceptional personality! But, hey, we're all a part of the people-- and we won't tolerate envy and jealousy towards fellow Germans! Likewise, any business man who does not treat his fellow Germans who happen to be workers with respect will also get a slap up side the head. Any business man who doesn't pay his workers so they can live a decent life will also be rebuked for failing his duty to the Volk.

Modernity makes technology better and better, perfecting this or that, and builds more and more McDonalds all over the world. But he does not make true qualitative leaps, but only quantitatively chips at this or that. Nothing is built by small craftsman or true artisans, but everything is mechanically reproduced and standardized. Nothing is dwelled up on or worked over, but pumped out as efficiently and thoughtlessly as possible. Man is reduced to a uniform mass of mindless consumers only concerned about their own happiness and material satisfaction-- no great spiritual ideals inspire them to face death, the ultimate end that gives human life its true meaning.

The revolutionary conservatives, traditionalists, reactionaries-- they saw it the opposite way as the progressives. The world in the beginning, as it was originally, was perfect, the highest height of civilization, a true garden of eden. The primordial origin of certain volks was superior to modern life. Not because they had "more stuff" and technology or productive forces, but precisely because they didn't. Their austere lives put them closer to true Being. They had only their own inner spiritual strength, blood and sweat. Precisely because technology and modern life was not distorting and mediating their way of life, because they were so limited and constrained to their isolated parochial existence, confined to a pure homogenous way of life, they were able to exist in a "clearing" where being as being could present itself, where authentic primal originary man could achieve spiritual enlightenment and awakening to the true meaning of existence and life. For Heidegger, this clearing only appears with the fragments of pre-socratic thinkers. For Heidegger this clearing reveals being -- it is a deadly, awe-inspiring struggle for existence against a vast unknowable and mysterious world where the Gods reign. That it is chaos, polemos, agon, uninhibited passion, being-with-others, changing, historical-- man stealing from the gods to assert order in a hostile world that reminds man of his finitude, his small and limited place. But he has a place, a home, his soil and blood, his kin-folk and tribe, and he does not need anything else, he does not know what is going on in Japan or even that Japan exists-- he is present in the here and now as being immediately reveals itself to him. He does not seek to be everywhere, to know everything, to be universal and global, to fit in anywhere and thus nowhere at all. This premordial man knew where he belonged. He belongs somewhere-- in this forest, with this Volk, this tribe, speaking this language, doing what his people have done for eternity. They have true meaning and spirit.

But the world has been corrupted from its spiritually pure beginnings, the essence of man has been lost in the mists of time, for Heidegger starting with platonic metaphysics, the ontology of static constant presence that gives rise to a whole string of dualities Heiddeger wants to overcome and which he sees culminating in Descartes mind body dualism giving way to mechanical materialism and scientific socialism. Evola thinks this corruption was ushered in by losing contact with plato and the tradition of Greek rational political philosophy. (Leo Strauss agrees here with Evola, as an aside). 

Only a select few spiritual masters or exceptionally gifted and talented artists and poets, ascetic warrior philosophers, heroic great men, titans, leaders, who  learn to "ride the tiger" can occasionally commune with this premordial way of existing that has been lost to modern man. Modern life is fallen from its original grace, its original racial spiritual communion, harmony and unity. So, the history of the world is a history of Being's originary meaning, of the true ancient wisdom as contained in mythology, being progressively obscured and hidden under layers and layers of obscurity. History is not progressing, but regressing. It is the decline of civilization, not progress. Getting worse and worse as time goes on further and further away from the golden dawn of civilization. Man becomes weaker and weaker, more and more domesticated and pampered, further away from his true beastly wild warrior nature. History is decaying and reaching its death throes because men are pacifists who see no glory in battling among men like themselves against a true enemy, the nihilistic cosmopolitan brown horde of leveling egalitarians. History is like a man, he is born, lives and dies. History has an organic movement: it naturally tends towards decay, decadence and death. It is nothing but decline, each new epoch and modern invention signalling the death of the current sickly age and the birth of the coming age that will start the cycle of rise and fall of empires over again. Every profession of progress is nothing but a sign of its opposite: a growing wasteland of nihilistic death and destruction where man is deprived of his highest purpose or meaning that allows him to make sense of his place in the world and history.

 So these fascists say the progressives do not understand the true path of history, the disastrous course it has been on for thousands of years. For H. this is since Plato introduced a metaphysical conception of truth and being that which is eternal and unchanging.  But the primordial conception of being as constant flux, movement. Evola thinks the proper return must go to the spiritual tradition of Plato, the neo-platonists and Christian mystics, as well as the sufi Islamic mystics. For Evola, flux, change, uncertainty, chaos-- this is a symptom of decline. The true spiritual emphasis must be on the eternal metaphysical essence which is well-ordered and unchanging, not contingent and subject to historical whim. Where this line is drawn is always rather arbitrary for reactionaries. 

What is the "revolutionary" aspect of the conservative revolutionaries and revolutionary traditionalists? A national revolution to restore the true tradition that will bring a new age that will revitalize the primal forces latent within European man because he has within him the blood and spirit of the fierce god-like ancestors, the blonde haired blue eyed beasts, free from contamination with lesser peoples. This total revolution will transform the world outlook creating a new kind of man. It's task is to unite the people as a people who understand themselves as a distinct, as united by not only blood, but more importantly a noble spirit, i.e. that sees itself as a superior warrior-farmer  community, as a Volk, a race. This newly awakened fighting spirit and unity must purify itself, must seek fulfilment in its highest right and honor: selflessly sacrificing for the community. Giving one's life, doing one's duty, to secure the status of the community: as masters of the universe and as the superior race who will usher in a new age and crush all the evil progressive forces who want to destroy the community and people.

So, to try to make it short (I'm trying to summarize two extremely verbose esoteric books into a single post-- a task I'm bound to fail at)-- where they differ comes down to this. Evola's traditionalism is too platonic and rigid for Heidegger. They both have this reactionary understanding of history and civilization being a decline into modern barbarism and shallow forgetfulness, into the disgusting and unnatural modern world. Evola's traditionalism wants to return to Plato, to the idea of a fundamental duality of existence: spirit and nature, soul and matter, physics and metaphysics, mortal/immortal, being/becoming, the visible changing world of materials and the invisible eternal world of spirit.  Heidegger wants to burst these dualisms apart and show how they test on a third even more primordial thing (the clearing which reveals the fourfold-- I'm not going into that).

Heidegger thinks Plato was the start of the modern technological calculating worldview, and he hates platonic-christian metaphysics and says it is the first stage on the decline of the West, especially in the figure of Socrates whose rationalism Heidegger couldn't stand.

Evola = the race declines when it loses touch with eternal (Platonic) being. Eternal truth and being is rational and good-- change, flux, lack of order= unmanly, not very romantic, irrational.

Heidegger = hell nah dawg, the race starts declining as soon as it got involved with this platonic metaphysics bullshit. We gotta go back even deeper to the pre-socratic thinkers like heraklitos. Being is fundamentally irrational and changing, all we can do is foster a modest appreciation for how baffling it all is and how little we actually know.