My long-term ongoing project involves reading backwards into the critique of modernity, resurrecting from the archive writers who fifty, seventy-five, or even one hundred years ago, intuited prophetically where such trends as democracy, utilitarianism, and the technocratic conception of science were taking mankind – and who foresaw accurately just how deformed morally and socially Western civilization was likely to become. The writers in question, with a few exceptions, are today largely forgotten or are remembered under a false image or for spurious reasons. The names of Karen Blixen, Gustave Le Bon, Jorge Luis Borges, Julius Evola, René Guénon, Hermann Keyserling, Peter Ouspensky, Oswald Spengler, T. Lothrop Stoddard, and Sigrid Undset, among others, have appeared in a series of articles, most of them at The Brussels Journal. I wish, however, to devote the present occasion to a renewed discussion of the Russian writer-philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874 – 1948), whom the encyclopedias of ideas classify variously, not to say confusingly, as a Christian Existentialist, a Russian Nietzschean, a Neo-Platonist, a follower of Vladimir Solovyev, or an out-and-out mystic and subjectivist. Berdyaev is perhaps a bit of each of these, while being also much more than any of them. Academic philosophers have either never heard of Berdyaev or, knowing of him at second hand, perhaps from an encyclopedia article, and being unable to fit him into any Positivist or Postmodern framework, dismiss him summarily.
One might fairly assert that Berdyaev did himself little good publicity-wise by cultivating a style of presentation which, while often resolving its thought-processes in a brilliant, aphoristic utterance, nevertheless takes its time, looks at phenomena from every aspect, analyzes every proposition to its last comma and period, and tends to assert its findings bluntly rather than to argue them politely in the proper syllogistic manner. In Berdyaev’s defense, a sensitive reader might justifiably interpret his leisurely examination of the modern agony as a deliberate and quite appropriate response to the upheavals that harried him from the time of the 1905 Revolution to the German occupation of France during World War II. If the Twentieth Century insisted on being precipitate and eruptive in everything, without regard to the lethal mayhem it wreaked, then, by God, Berdyaev, regarding his agenda, would take his sweet time. Not for him the constant mobilized agitation, the sloganeering hysteria, the goose-stepping and dive-bombing spasms of modernity in full self-apocalypse. That is another characteristic of Berdyaev – he is all at once leisurely in style and apocalyptic in content. Berdyaev was quite as apocalyptic in his expository prose as his idol Fyodor Dostoevsky was in his ethical narrative, and being a voice of revelation he expressed himself, again like Dostoevsky, in profoundly religious and indelibly Christian terms. Berdyaev follows Dostoevsky and anticipates Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his conviction that no society can murder God, as Western secular society has gleefully done, and then go its insouciant way, without consequence.
The titles of Berdyaev’s numerous books, especially when taken in chronological order, tell a story all by themselves: The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916), The Meaning of History (1923), The End of Our Time (1924), Christianity and Class War (1931), The Destiny of Man (1931), The Fate of Man in the Modern World (1934), Christianity and Anti-Semitism (1938), Slavery and Freedom (1939), Spirit and Reality (1946), and The Beginning and the End (1947), among many others. There is also a posthumous Truth and Revelation (1954). I call attention to the earliest of the listed titles, The Meaning of the Creative Act. Berdyaev began his career as a philosophical writer (he never completed his doctorate) with an ambitious study of aesthetics, his theory of which locates the purest manifestation of the highest value of his worldview, freedom, in the labor that generates the work of art and beyond that in all the highest effects of the artwork in its context. At the end of Berdyaev’s life, he wrote the essays that constitute Truth and Revelation,one of his several ventures into the philosophical-theological sub-genre of theodicy, in which he invokes a “creative response to the appeal of God.” Whereas in the Catholic and even more so in the Lutheran and Calvinist variants of Christianity there is, according to Berdyaev, a strong “sociomorphic” or “legalistic” distortion of Christian doctrine; in Russian Orthodox commentary, by contrast, “the coming of the Christ has been understood not as a reparation for sin, nor as the offering of a ransom, but as the continuation of the creation of the world and the appearance of the New Adam.” In Berdyaev’s view, “What God expects from man is not servile submission, not obedience, not the fear of condemnation, but free creative acts.” Berdyaev adds in an aside that, “I wrote on this subject some while ago in The Meaning of Creativeness,” that is, The Meaning of the Creative Act. Thus Berdyaev’s work exhibits a remarkable closure, returning at the end to its beginnings, linking as it were its omega with its alpha.
By the mid-1930s, in the extended aftermaths of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, and in the context of the ideological dictatorships, the conviction had impressed itself on Berdyaev that the existing Western arrangement, pathologically disordered, betokened the dissolution of civilization, not its continuance. In The Fate of Man in the Modern World, Berdyaev summarizes his discovery. In modernity, a brutal phase of history, the human collectivity must endure the effects of ancestral decisions, which subsequent generations might have altered but chose instead to endorse, and live miserably or perhaps die according to them. Modernity is thus history passing judgment on history, as Berdyaev sees it; and modernity’s brutality, its nastiness, and its inhumanity all stem from the same cause – the repudiation of God and the substitution in His place of a necessarily degraded “natural-social realm.” Berdyaev writes, “We are witnessing the socialization and nationalization of human souls, of man himself.” Some causes of this degeneracy lie proximate to their effects. “Modern bestialism and its attendant dehumanization are based upon idolatry, the worship of technics, race or class or production, and upon the adaptation of atavistic instincts to worship.” Again, “Dehumanization is… the mechanization of human life.” With mechanization comes also the “dissolution of man into… functions.”
But what of the radical cause, or causes, that conceals itself, or that conceal themselves, behind these immediate ones? Towards the end of The Fate, Berdyaev divulges, almost in passing, his sense that “the end of the Renaissance is approaching.” The formula might strike a person as odd. Have not several distinguishable phases passed since the Renaissance? And was not the Renaissance precisely an era of those “free creative acts” that Berdyaev so values? For Berdyaev, however, the prevailing disorder of the contemporary world would stem from that selfsame conscious reorientation in existence that modernity delights in celebrating, in the most fulsome and effusive terms, as its own bright dawn after the supposed long darkness of the Middle Ages. The tragic despiritualization of the West began, in Berdyaev’s historical analysis, with the bold proclamation of emancipatory humanism in the artistic and philosophical audacity of Fourteenth Century Italian city-states, whose hubris only now smashes headlong into its proper nemesis. Berdyaev omits to detail this claim in The Fate, but readers might access his full argument in two of his other titles, The Meaning of the Creative Act and The Meaning of History.
One of the pleasures of reading backwards into the dissentient discussion of modernity is the discovery of contrarian judgments, such as Berdyaev’s concerning the Florentine revival of classicism, that stand in refreshing variance with existing conformist opinion. Will Durant sums up the standing textbook view of the Renaissance in Volume 5 (1953) of his Story of Civilization. When “the humanists captured the mind of Italy,” as Durant writes, they “turned it from religion to philosophy, from heaven to earth, and revealed to an astonished generation the riches of pagan thought and art.” Having accomplished all that, according once again to Durant, the umanisti reorganized education on the premise that “the proper study of man was now to be man, in all the potential strength and beauty of his body, in all the joy and pain of his senses and feelings, [and] in all the frail majesty of his reason.” Durant’s tone implies something beyond mere description; it implies laudatory approval. Before turning back to Berdyaev, it is worth remarking how obviously wrongheaded Durant is in so few words. Insofar as the umanisti adopted Platonism – or rather late Neo-Platonism – they cannot exactly be said exclusively to have “turned” the general attention “from heaven to earth.” Rather, they refocused that attention from the transcendent God of the Bible and the Church Doctors to the celestial powers of Porphryian cosmology, the ones who might be manipulated by magical formulas to serve their earthly masters. Now in adopting Protagoras’ maxim that, man is the measure, the umanisti did, in fact, “terrestrialize” thinking. They achieved their end, however, only at the cost of swapping a cosmic-teleological perspective for an egocentric-instrumental one. It was an act of self-demotion. Had Berdyaev lived to read Durant’s Renaissance, he himself would inevitably have remarked these easy-to-spot misconceptions.
“There is a profound contrast,” Berdyaev writes in The Meaning of the Creative Act, “between pagan art and Christian art,” or at any rate “the art of the Christian epoch.” Pagan art, in Berdyaev’s judgment, is “canonic art”; it remains “immanent in this world, rather than transcendent.” Like the sociomorphic-legalistic forms of religion, canonic art “is still in the law” and still adheres to “obedience.” Classicism, another word for the canonical, “leaves one in this world, giving only hints of another.” In Berdyaev’s summary: “The heavens are closed above pagan art and the ideals of perfection are of the here and now, rather than of the beyond.” Finally, Christian art “is of another spirit.” Where paganism conceived the world under the form of “a complete and closed dome, beyond which there was nothing,” for Christianity “Heaven opened above the… world and revealed the beyond.” It follows for Berdyaev that because the essence of the Christian world-orientation is “a transcendental intention towards another world,” a “romantic longing,” as he puts it; then “romantic incompleteness and imperfection of form characterize Christian art.” Of course, both the pagan and the Christian impulses in art contain within themselves the possibility of self-stultification. Thus, “Antique classicism,” as Berdyaev writes, despite its attestation of “a structure of this world,” is subject to deformation into “dead academicism.” Thus, too, Christian art is prone to be “romantically ailing,” making a theme of its yearning, which degenerates into alienation and melancholy, while going blind to the lodestar that makes it to yearn in the first place. Nevertheless, the Christian consciousness and Christian art represent a revelation of being well beyond what Antiquity could conceive. Infinity, lying at the heart of Christian sensibility and provoking it into motion, remained unimaginable to the ancients.
If a reader were to guess, respecting the artistic legacy, that Berdyaev preferred the period stretching from St. Francis of Assisi and Dante Alighieri to Cimabue and Giotto (say) to (say) the period stretching from Filippo Brunelleschi and Marsilio Ficino to Michelangelo Buonarroti and Pico Della Mirandola, he would have guessed correctly. I would caution, however, that Berdyaev’s comparative judgment never constitutes anything like a blanket-condemnation of the yoked Quattrocento and Cinquecento. Far from it – his appreciation runs high, but it runs to the critical. Berdyaev sees what these latter two centuries, in their creativity, portended, and he regards them as a derailment of the Western spirit antecedent to his own century’s deepened plight: “The world crisis of creativity is the crisis of canonic art.” When Berdyaev writes that “canonic art is the adaptation of the creative artist’s energy to the conditions of this world,” his construction superficially resembles Durant’s while at the same time diametrically contradicting it. An art that had remained Christian would have continued to concern itself with the problem how the spirit might “break out through ‘this world’ to another world, out of the chaotic, heavy, and deformed world into the free and beautiful cosmos.” In this way it can be so, portentously, that “the end of the Renaissance is approaching.” What about actual cases? What does Berdyaev say in respect of this or that poet, painter, sculptor, musician, or philosopher?
In The Meaning of the Creative Act, Berdyaev takes Benvenuto Cellini – a much-romanticized figure, using the adjective “romanticized” in its populist connotation – for one signal specimen of the “Renaissance Man.” Berdyaev is fully aware that describing the Renaissance simply as a revival of paganism amounts to inexcusable naïvety. “The great Italian Renaissance,” he writes, “is vastly more complex than is usually thought.” Berdyaev sees the so-called rebirth of classical letters and art as a botched experiment in dialectics, during which “there occurred such a powerful clash between pagan and Christian elements in human nature as had never occurred before.” The tragedy of the Renaissance consists in the fact, as Berdyaev insists, that, “the Christian transcendental sense of being had so profoundly possessed men’s nature that the integral and final confession of the immanent ideals of life became impossible.” Cellini embodies the conflict. In his life, no matter how declaredly “pagan,” “there is still too much of Christianity.” Cellini could never have been “an integral man,” as his moral degeneracy and spasmodic repentance attested. In Berdyaev’s argument, Christianity has effectuated, however imperfectly, a theurgic alteration in being towards a higher level. Cellini’s life illustrates the point. The attempt to return to being at a lower level must fail, as it failed for Cellini; it can bring only suffering to the subject and in the milieu that attempts it.
Even in the case of another, earlier specimen of the “Renaissance Man,” Sandro Botticelli, the artistic creativity betokens something, as Berdyaev says, “beautiful but painfully divided.” Berdyaev regards Botticelli, that essential nature of the Quattrocento, as “the most beautiful, the most deeply moved, the most poetic artist of the Renaissance, and as the most divided and unsound.” The division in Botticelli manifests itself in the crosswise ambiguity of his Venuses and Madonnas: “His Venuses always resembled his Madonnas, just as his Madonnas resembled his Venuses.” The crossing implies a disaster because for the Venus to be raised up from the elements the Madonna must be brought down from infinity. The gesture flatters Venus but it contradicts the essence of the Madonna. Botticelli can create a vernal image of surpassing grace and yet fail to break through to the other world because “classic immanent perfection can no longer be the portion of the Christian soul which has been touched by transcendent longing.” Botticelli’s career ends in a paroxysm of self-denial under the puritanical influence of Savonarola. The “secret of the Renaissance,” as Berdyaev writes, “is that it did not succeed.” The rebirth of pagan innocence implied in Botticelli’s Primaverapromised much but reached a terminus short of patency in Botticelli’s own “renunciation” and thereafter in the “dead academicism” of later artists – most notably for Berdyaev Raphael and Michelangelo. Berdyaev writes: “Raphael’s classicism in the Christian world produces an impression of deadly rigidity, almost as though it were superfluous, a failure more complete and fatal than the imperfection and division of men in the Quattrocento.” After Raphael and Michelangelo comes the Baroque.
Berdyaev emphasizes the drastic diremption of the Quattrocento by reminding his readers of the earliest, purely Christian phase of the Renaissance. “It was in mystic Italy, in Joachim de Floris, that the prophetic hope of a new world-epoch of Christianity was born, an epoch of love, and epoch of spirit.” The pre-perspective painters also loom large in Berdyaev’s appreciation: “Giotto and all the early religious painting of Italy, Arnolfi and others, followed St. Francis and Dante.” Where Raphael and Leonardo, as Berdyaev intimates, worked in a realm of literalism – copying from nature in a mechanical way – these earlier figures exercised their genius on the level of “symbolism.” In Berdyaev’s view, “mystic Italy” prefigures late-Nineteenth Century Symbolism, a movement that he found rich in meaning and hopeful in implication. Joachim, Dante, and St. Francis all violated what Berdyaev calls “the bounds of the average, ordered, canonic way”; their “revolt” precludes “any sort of compromise with the bourgeois spirit,” as did the later revolt of Charles Baudelaire, Henrik Ibsen, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Whether it is Giotto or Baudelaire, the theurgic impulse aims, not to “create culture,” but to create “new being.”
A parallel discussion, revisiting some of the purely aesthetic topics, occurs in The Meaning of History, where however Berdyaev, twenty years on from The Meaning of the Creative Act,sharpens his argument. He now recognizes in the latter phases of the Renaissance not merely a misguided attempt to reinstate classicism as a kind of corrective supplement to Christian civilization but rather a distinctly “anti-Christian” animus. Berdyaev now discovers in the pagan and Christian anti-dialectic – in their agon – “the theme of man’s destiny” and “the fundamental theme of the philosophy of history.” Always critical, Berdyaev never blankly praises the Middle Ages. On the contrary, he allows that, “the defects of the mediaeval consciousness lay in that it did not allow for the free play of man’s energies.” The Christian-Gothic world emphasized discipline, the suppression of natural urges, and the glorification of purely spiritual striving through the cultivation of prayer in hopes of angelic apparition. When the Renaissance staged its revolt against religious “ascetism,” however, it took an impossible counter-model in the classical world, which also suffered limitation although of another kind whose significance its immediate post-medieval subscribers tragically failed to see. The men of the Renaissance rightly sought to explore and realize “man’s potentialities,” but they wrongly put themselves in a polemical relation with Christianity by seeing in classicism the liberating opposite of Christianity.
Gothic Christianity, Berdyaev argues, “held man in subjection to a spiritual authority and thus centralized all human culture.” Modernity, beginning in the Renaissance, would be centrifugal – a dispersion from the abandoned and partially suppressed spiritual center. On the positive side, as Berdyaev remarks, “spiritual de-centralization” brought about “the differentiation of all the spheres of social and cultural life,” so that men might now develop them separately, as specialized endeavors. Yet that same “differentiation,” however necessary, was nevertheless “synonymous with [a transition] from the divine to the human aspects of the world, from the divine depths, interior concentration and the inner core, to an exterior cultural manifestation,” in which predictably over the centuries “the spiritual bond with the center of life grows gradually weaker.” Other impulses of the Renaissance exacerbate this trend of spiritual attenuation. Where the Middle Ages had suppressed natural man, the Renaissance rediscovered and exalted him. Humanism thus “released man’s natural forces and at the same time severed his connection with spiritual authority, divorcing the natural from the spiritual man.” Shakespeare’s figure of Caliban in The Tempest comes to mind as illustrative, in an observant and knowing way, of one part of Berdyaev’s assertion. So of another part and in a less observant and knowing way does Francis Bacon’s technocratic utopia in The New Atlantis(1628), where the differentiated sciences come under methodical development with the aim of practical application.
Caliban and emergent mechanical mastery taken together might well form an image to make one skip a breath. For once the “ebullience” of liberation-from-religion neutralizes “spiritual authority” and stimulates the “differentiation,” natural man, ego-driven and undisciplined, is bound to end up in possession of the Neo-Atlantean instrumentality, whereupon the prospect opens out on no end of mischief. Berdyaev’s historical diagnosis indeed runs in this direction. He even formulates the law of what he calls “the strange paradox”: “Man’s self-affirmation leads to his perdition; the free play of human forces unconnected with any higher aim brings about the exhaustion of man’s creative powers.” The Protestant Reformation of the German North and the so-called Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century in France and the German states represent, in Berdyaev’s scheme, ever-lower stages of this descent into dissolution rather than the steps-upward of the ready version of Progress. The paradox of humanism consists in its having “affirmed man’s self-confidence” while also having “debased [man] by ceasing to regard him as a being of a higher and divine origin.”
Whereas the Renaissance began with a quest for “perfect natural forms” and a plan “to regenerate and naturalize man’s social life,” it eventuated having “separated man still more irrevocably from nature than had been done by the Middle Ages.” Man would become doubly alienated – from spirit and nature. Berdyaev traces this process through the theoretical work of da Vinci to the practical work of the early Industrial Revolution (foreshadowed by Bacon) and then again through the final stages of cosmic alienation in the renewed theorizing of Marx and Nietzsche. Omitting Berdyaev’s details and coming to his conclusion, “humanist disintegration” leaves all institutions damaged and can itself generate no replacement-idea that might salvage them. Berdyaev feels the disaster most especially in modern moral life: “There can be no shadow of doubt that we are living in an epoch marked by the bankruptcy of that humanist morality which had been the guiding light of modern history.” Modern man faces a “volcanic eruption of historical forces” with “his sensibility… disrupted” and while enduring a state of “divorce and isolation from natural life.”
It is against this rich genealogical background to the modern condition that Berdyaev’s harrowing description of Twentieth-Century contemporaneity in his otherwise-abstract Fate of Man in the Modern World begins to take on its full meaning. Speaking for none other than myself, while expecting that some few might nevertheless agree with me, it strikes me as even more true today than it was in 1936, when Berdyaev wrote it, that “Man,” in the depth of his spirit, “has lost his worth,” not metaphysically (that would be impossible), but from the point of view of a prevailing drastically restricted and entirely utilitarian consciousness. Man indeed, as Berdyaev writes, “has been torn to tatters.” In the European Union, for example, and in the Federal Imperial dispensation in the United States, as it seems to me, “masses of men,” quite as Berdyaev put it, “have dropped out of the organized order and harmony of life”; they have “lost the religious sanction for their lives” and “they now demand obligatory organization as the sole means of avoiding final chaos and degeneration.” And again: “It is noteworthy that at a time when every religious sanction of authority has vanished, we live in a very authoritarian epoch.”
What are the characteristics of this “bestial” world, in which “inhumanity has begun to be presented as something noble, surrounded with an aureole of heroism” and in which also “man, in making himself God, has unmanned himself”? It is first of all a world dominated, not by “the human personality, or the value of truth,” but rather by “such values as power, technics, race-purity, nationality, the state, the class, the collective” and in which also “the will to justice is overcome by the will to power.” Berdyaev sees in these phenomena something other than “the triumph of base instincts,” those having been always present, because they are elements of human nature, without exercising the same extreme distortion in the overlapping social, cultural, and political environments. He sees them rather as the outcome of fatally attractive errors made five hundred years ago and steadily compounded over time. If there were a return of “idolatry,” for example, that would be precisely what one would expect in a society almost totally visually mediated whose orientation to simulacra of reality began with the obliteration of symbolism in the dominance of perspective in painting. If there were a destruction of politics and law in an upheaval of “instincts of revenge,” that would be precisely what one would expect in a society that has consummated the rejection of the Biblical morality that began in Humanist skepticism. Berdyaev sees, in sum, “a return of the human mass to the ancient collective with which its history began.”
Berdyaev certainly never stood alone in his diagnosis of modern despiritualization. Similar if not identical insights occur under the scrutiny not only of the other writers mentioned at the outset (from Blixen to Undset) but more recently in the work of Jacques Barzun (especially in his great late-career book, From Dawn to Decadence), Roberto Calasso, Jacques Ellul, René Girard, Paul Gottfried, Kenneth Minogue, Roger Scruton, and Eric Voegelin, to name but a few more or less at random. Yet however many names one crowds together in a sentence, the shared judgment remains in the minority and under exclusion. In the prevailing liberal-progressive view, the world is monistic and one-dimensional: Everything is race, class, gender, or the state. In Berdyaev’s dissenting view, the world is dualistic and three-dimensional: “Christianity reveals and confirms man’s belonging to two planes of being, to the spiritual and to the natural-social, to the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Caesar.” It is the first dimension – actually a double dimension – of height and depth that guarantees freedom in the second dimension. The denial of the realm of height and depth is therefore the essence, a totally negative essence, of the Kingdom of Caesar intransigent. Berdyaev values man over society because he values spirit over matter,” the sole concern of men on the “natural-social” plane. The existing society indeed values matter exclusively, to the extent of having fixated itself on the finished product – the latest cell phone or handheld electronic game-player or that contradiction-in-the-adjective, the smart car – while deputizing foreign nations to produce these things. This same society, a kind of super cargo-cult, deracinated, demoralized, despiritualized, badly educated, deluged in pornography and ideology, and as conformist as any primitive tribe, vigorously denies the spirit, where not explicitly as articulate theory then in behavior.
Hope, as Berdyaev saw it, lay in a pending reversal – that at the nadir of “de-Christianization” the core of Christianity might once again stand forth as “revealed in its pure form.” That such a revelation will happen, I say with Berdyaev is inevitable; but when it will happen and how much misery it will entail in order to happen, I confess even now at a date more than sixty years after Berdyaev’s death to lie beyond my small power of discernment.
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« Walter Laqueur l’a montré : une vie accélérée remplace l’atmosphère calme et recueillie de l’avant-guerre. De cent mille voitures particulières au sortir de la guerre, l’Allemagne passe à un million deux cent mille dix ans plus tard.
Conclusion apocalyptique :
Votre publication a eu récemment l’occasion de faire écho de façon favorable au livre de Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Testament de Dieu, publié aux Éditions Grasset dans la collection « Figures ». Je pense que votre bonne foi a été surprise. [Il suffit, en effet, de jeter un rapide coup d’œil sur ce livre pour s’apercevoir que loin d’être un ouvrage majeur de philosophie politique, il fourmille littéralement d’erreurs grossières, d’à-peu-près, de citations fausses, ou d’affirmations délirantes. Devant l’énorme tapage publicitaire dont bénéficie cet ouvrage, et indépendamment de toute question politique et notamment de la nécessaire lutte contre le totalitarisme, 
Il est bon pourtant d’analyser les arguments de Bernard-Henri Lévy. Il y en a de quatre types : 
Mais Fustel décrit la corvée démocratique au jour le jour (pp.451-452) :
For those seeking something like a “how to” guide for living as a Traditionalist, it is mainly the second division of the book (“In the World Where God is Dead”) that offers something, and chiefly it is to be found in Chapter Eight: “The Transcendent Dimension – ‘Life’ and ‘More than Life.’” My purpose in this essay is to piece together the miniature “survival manual” provided by Chapter Eight – some of which consists of little more than hints, conveyed in Evola’s often frustratingly opaque style. It is my view that what we find in these pages is of profound importance for anyone struggling to hold on to his sanity in the face of the decadence and dishonesty of today’s world. It is also essential reading for anyone seeking to achieve the ideal of “self-overcoming” taught by Evola – seeking, in other words, to “ride the tiger.”
Still, through this gloom one may detect exactly the position that Evola correctly attributes to Nietzsche. Like Kant, Nietzsche demands that the overman practice autonomy, that he give a law to himself. However, Kant held that our self-legislation simultaneously legislates for others: the law I give to myself is the law I would give to any other rational being. The overman, by contrast, legislates for himself only – or possibly for himself and the tiny number of men like him. If we recognize fundamental qualitative differences between human types, then we must consider the possibility that different rules apply to them. Fundamental to Kant’s position is the egalitarian assertion that people do not get to “play by their own rules” (indeed, for Kant the claim to be an exception to general rules, or to make an exception for oneself, is the marker of immorality). If we reject this egalitarianism, then it does indeed follow that certain special individuals get to play by their own rules.
As with the passions, the average man “owns” his moods: “this unhappiness is mine, it is me,” he says, in effect. The superior man learns to see his moods as if they were the weather – or, better yet, as if they were minor demons besetting him: external mischief makers, to whom he has the power to say “yes” or “no.” The superior man, upon finding that he feels unhappiness, says “ah yes, there it is again.” Immediately, seeing “his” unhappiness as other – as a habit, a pattern, a kind of passing mental cloud – he refuses identification with it. And he sets about intrepidly conquering unhappiness. He will not acquiesce to it.
If we consult the context in which the quote appears – an important section of Twilight of the Idols – Nietzsche offers us little help in understanding specifically what he means by “the distance that separates us.” But the surrounding context is a goldmine of reflections on the superior type, and it is surprising that Evola does not quote it more fully. Nietzsche remarks that “war educates for freedom” (a point on which Evola reflects at length in his Metaphysics of War), then writes:
Evola’s very long sentence about the superior man now ends with the following summation:
First, a few words about Spengler’s writing in this book, which I found to be terrible: like Heidegger, overly dense and sometimes nearly incomprehensible in the pompous old school German style (in contrast, Nietzsche, particularly apart from Zarathustra, was exceedingly comprehensible and easily understandable). Contrary to all of Spengler’s breathless fans, I did not find his magnum opus to be very well written. It’s a terribly boring, turgid compilation of rambling prose. I can only imagine the full-scale version is worse (and if memory serves, it was). Another point is that Spengler’s deconstructivism is highly annoying to the more empiricist among us, his idea that Nature is a function of a particular culture. Well (and the same applies to some of Yockey’s [plagiarized] rambling on the subject), for some cultures, Nature apparently is a more accurate “function” of reality than for others, and this more accurate representation of objective reality has real world consequences that cannot be evaded.
The sections “Race is Style” and “People and Nation” are of course relevant from a racial nationalist perspective, and reflects Spengler’s anti-scientific stupidity, this time about biological race. Those of you familiar with Yockey’s wrong-headed assertions on this topic will see all the same in Spengler’s work (from which Yockey lifted his assertions). This has been critiqued by many – from Revilo Oliver to myself – and it is not necessary to rehash all of the arguments against the Spenglerian (Boasian) deconstructivist attitudes toward biological race. We can just shake our heads sadly about Spengler’s racial fantasies – that is as absurd as that of any hysterical leftist SJW race-denier – and move on to other issues.
Those are mere details however. Important details, but not the fundamental, the main thesis. So, what about the main thesis of his work? The overall idea of cyclical history? Yockey’s lifting of that idea in his own work? Rereading Spengler’s major thesis hasn’t changed my mind about it in any major way, but there are some further points to make.
Let’s get back to Spengler’s content, and some of my objections alluded to above. Thus, as far as content goes, my “take” on it remains the same; I agree with much but I disagree with much as well, particularly the “pessimistic” inevitability of it, and the smug arrogance in suggesting, or implying, that disagreement with that aspect of the work implies some sort of mental weakness, delusion, or cowardice on the part of the reader. Spengler himself suggests that he “truth” of the book is a “truth” for him, a “truth” for a particular Culture in a particular time, and should not necessarily be viewed as an absolute truth in any or every sense (indeed, it everything from science to mathematics is, according to Spengler, formed by the Culture which creates it, and is thus no absolute in any universal sense, then we can quote Pilate ‘“what is truth?”). Therefore, my “truth” in the current year leads me to conclusions different from Spengler; one can again assert that Spengler himself, by writing the book and outlining he problem, himself undermined his assertion of inevitability, since know we can understand the trajectories of Cultures and, possibly, how to affect those trajectories.
That is related to an important deficit in the work of Spengler that I have read. He describes the lifecycle of High Cultures, but never really dissects why the cultures inevitably (or so he says) move from Culture to Civilization to Fellahdom. What actually are the mechanistic causes of Spring to Summer to Fall to Winter? I guess that Spengler (and Yockey) would just say that it is what it is, that the Culture is life an organism that grows old and dies. The problem is that this analogy is just that, an analogy. A Culture is composed of living organisms, humans, but is itself not alive. And esoteric rambling about a “cosmic beat” explains nothing. If ones buys into the Spenglerian premise, then some rigorous analysis as to why High Cultures progress in particular ways is necessary. We need an anatomical and molecular analysis of the “living organism” of the High Culture. Does Frost’s genetic pacification play a role? The cycle, noted by Hamilton, of barbarian invasions, the influx of altruism genes, followed by the aging of the civilization at which point fresh barbarian genes are required to spark a renaissance in the depleted fellhahs? The moral decay that occurs with too much luxury, too much wealth, too much power? A form of memetic exhaustion? 
I maintain that those of us in the interregnum between High Cultures have the power to shape 
Speaking of Russia, another part of Spengler’s work that I found reasonably well argued and somewhat convincing (as well as fairly novel) is his idea of applying the concept of pseudomorphosis to human populations. In particular, one cannot really dispute some of his points about the Magian and Russian cultures in this regard, but when he says that Antony should have won at Actium – what nonsense is that? So, that Rome should have become more tainted with Near Eastern cults and ideas even more than it was? What’s the opposite of pseudomorphosis – where a Civilization becomes memetically conquered by a meme originating from a young Culture? How did the memetic virus of Christianity infect the West? Wouldn’t it have been worse if Actium was won by the East? When Spengler writes of “syncretism” he begins to touch upon this reversal, which eventually goes in both directions (and as Type I “movement” apologists for Christianity like to tell us, that religion was eventually “Germanized” in the West).
And if Spengler’s main thesis is flawed by its own self-realization, what can one say about his side ideas? Those, particularly dealing with science, are absolute hogwash. In that sense, Spengler is over-rated, never mind his poor writing, including his horrifically turgid style. Yockey may have been offended by this “blasphemy” against his idol – “The Philosopher of History” – but it is nevertheless warranted.
Ronald Beiner is a Canadian Jewish political theorist who teaches at the University of Toronto. I’ve been reading his work since the early 1990s, starting with What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (1992). I have always admired Beiner’s clear and lively writing and his ability to see straight through jargon and cant to hone in on the flaws of the positions he examines. He is also refreshingly free of Left-wing sectarianism and willing to engage with political theorists of the Right, like Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus, although I was delighted that a theorist of his caliber had decided to write a book on the contemporary far Right, I was also worried that he might, after a typically open and searching engagement with our outlook, discover some fatal flaw.
Beiner doesn’t offer a very clear account of why Nietzsche thinks liberalism undermines human nobility. The short answer is that it is simply the political application of the slave revolt in morals, in which the aristocratic virtues of the ancients were transmuted into Christian and eventually liberal vices, and the vices of the enslaved and downtrodden were transmuted into virtues.
In Heidegger’s later terminology, Nietzsche and National Socialism were both “humanistic,” premised on the idea that the human mind creates culture, whereas in fact culture creates the human mind. No genuine belief can be chosen. It has to seize us. This is one of the senses of Heidegger’s later concept of Ereignis, often translated “the event of appropriation”: the beginning of a new historical epoch seizes and enthralls us. This is the meaning of Heidegger’s later claim that “Only a god can save us now” — as opposed to a philosopher-dictator.
Beiner is even more blatant in his advocacy of self-censorship in Heidegger’s case:
Dans cette optique, la résistance autochtone peut mener une multitude d’actions non-violentes : blocages momentanés de certains nœuds routiers, autoroutiers ou ferroviaires ; résistance fiscale ; boycott des élections ; lobbying ; constitution de ZAD identitaires ; interpellation d’élus républicains ; sit-in ; occupation d’écoles ; manifestations ; harcèlement ; etc. Il n’y a de limites que notre imagination… et l’étendue du Grand Rassemblement, c’est-à-dire des forces disponibles.
Ludwig Klages was a one-of-a-kind brilliant man who is firstly known for his graphology work. But it is his philosophical work especially which deserves our attention. In fact, Klages belongs to what used to be called Lebensphilopsohie, a term that applies to Nietzsche’s. One thing they share is this dionysiac view on life which is often called « biocentric » when applied to Klages’ philosophy. His anti-christianity is another common point with Friedrich Nietzsche, and the same goes for a genre of paganism, or pantheism, shared by both philosophers.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian are two cognitive states in which art appears as the power of nature in man.[6] Art for Nietzsche is fundamentally not an expression of culture, but is what Heidegger calls “eine Gestaltung des Willens zur Macht” a manifestation of the will to power. And since the will to power is the essence of being itself, art becomes “die Gestaltung des Seienden in Ganzen,” a manifestation of being as a whole.[7] This concept of the artist as a creator, and of the aspect of the creative process as the manifestation of the will, is a key component of much of Nietzsche’s thought – it is the artist, the creator who diligently scribes the new value tables. Taking this into accord, we must also allow for the possibility that Thus Spake Zarathustra opens the doors for a new form of artist, who rather than working with paint or clay, instead provides the Uebermensch, the artist that etches their social vision on the canvas of humanity itself. It is in the character of the Uebermensch that we see the unification of the Dionysian (instinct) and Apollonian (intellect) as the manifestation of the will to power, to which Nietzsche also attributes the following tautological value “The Will to Truth is the Will to Power”.[8] This statement can be interpreted as meaning that by attributing the will to instinct, truth exists as a naturally occurring phenomena – it exists independently of the intellect, which permits many different interpretations of the truth in its primordial state. The truth lies primarily in the will, the subconscious, and the original raw instinctual state that Nietzsche identified with Dionysus. In The Gay Science Nietzsche says:
Myths of Dionysus are often used to depict a stranger or an outsider to the community as a repository for the mysterious and prohibited features of another culture. Unsavory characteristics that the Greeks tend to ascribe to foreigners are attributed to him, and various myths depict his initial rejection by the authority of the polis – yet Dionysus’ birth at Thebes, as well as the appearance of his name on Linear B tablets, indicates that this is no stranger, but in fact a native, and that the rejected foreign characteristics ascribed to him are in fact Greek characteristics.[13] Rather than being a representative of foreign culture what we are in fact observing in the character of Dionysus is the archetype of the outsider; someone who sits outside the boundaries of the cultural norm, or who represents the disruptive element in society which either by its nature effects a change or is removed by the culture which its very presence threatens to alter. Dionysus represents as Plutarch observed, “the whole wet element” in nature – blood, semen, sap, wine, and all the life giving juice. He is in fact a synthesis of both chaos and form, of orgiastic impulses and visionary states – at one with the life of nature and its eternal cycle of birth and death, of destruction and creation.[14] This disruptive element, by being associated with the blood, semen, sap, and wine is an obvious metaphor for the vital force itself, the wet element, being representative of “life in the raw”. This notion of “life” is intricately interwoven into the figure of Dionysus in the esoteric understanding of his cult, and indeed throughout the philosophy of the Greeks themselves, who had two different words for life, both possessing the same root as Vita (Latin: Life) but present in very different phonetic forms: bios and zoë.[15]
Wagner was born in 1813, two centuries ago last year; he died in 1883, more than one hundred and thirty years ago. Wells was born in 1866; he died in 1946, nearly seventy years ago. To most college students, dates such as 1813, 1883, 1866, and 1946 are so many meaningless references, number-conglomerations about as significant from their perspective as the number-designations before the course-descriptions in the college catalogue. I was born in 1954. I can report accurately that I first read Wells, his War of the Worlds, in 1965, when I was a fourth-grader at Toland Way Elementary in Highland Park, California. I believe it was my brother, sixteen years my elder from my father’s first marriage, who recommended it. My father needed to check out the Wells omnibus from the Colorado Street branch of the Los Angeles Public Library because the institution shelved it in the adult section and I held borrowing privileges only in the children’s section. I first heard music by Wagner in 1970 or 71, when a quirky, German-born English teacher at Santa Monica High School, who went by the name of Gary Johnston, decided to enliven his summer “Myth and Folklore” course, or lighten the burden of his instruction, by providing us with mimeographed sheets of the libretto and playing for us on a portable stereo in the classroom excerpts from The Ring of the Nibelung.
A good deal of contemporary education at all levels resembles just what Arendt describes, as 
Whereas Arendt expresses concern for the direction that education takes in a world, that of the late 1950s, dominated by technocratic convictions, Weaver frankly condemns “the progressive movement in education” for being a type of “apostasy,” and its advocates and practitioners for being “attackers and saboteurs” of actual education. Beginning with the same conception of education, Weaver departs from Arendt in his diagnosis of existing educational arrangements. Among their important traits, these progressives are epistemological nihilists who “do not have faith in the existence of knowledge” and whose real aim is “the educationally illicit one of conditioning the young for political purposes.” The revolutionary educational regime is also, in Weaver’s scrutiny of it, utopian and therefore totalitarian. It proposes “to substitute a subjective wishfulness for an historical reality.” Weaver omits to quote directly from the prescriptions of the radical educators, preferring to distill them in the form of his own summary. It is easy, however, to find textual support for that summary. In 
Très tôt, le mot « habit » est associé dans notre langue à l’idée de « maintien » de « tenue », au sens de « tenir sa place et son rang ».
A l’inverse, toute manifestation de démesure (ὕϐρις), chez les hommes comme chez les dieux, entraîne une catastrophe. Nous sommes ici aux antipodes de ce que le philosophe Heidegger décèle dans la modernité occidentale, à savoir la « métaphysique de l’illimité » — l’appétit du « toujours plus », auquel nous devons opposer la logique du « toujours mieux ».
A l’époque moderne, la figure du gentilhomme représente la synthèse et l’aboutissement de ces divers héritages, à travers l’équilibre entre les talents de l’homme d’épée et de l’homme d’esprit, alliant élégance morale, distinction, courage et maîtrise de soi. Tel est l’idéal, largement partagé à travers toute l’Europe, que s’efforcent d’atteindre le Junker prussien et le gentleman britannique.
A toutes ces formes d’abandon de soi-même, il faut précisément opposer la notion de « tenue ». Celle-ci constitue une ascèse — ce qui n’implique pas nécessairement une vie « ascétique » : au-delà de son acception religieuse, passée dans le vocabulaire chrétien par l’intermédiaire du latin chrétien asceta, le mot est apparenté au grec ἄσκησις (« exercice »), qui désigne à l’origine divers types d’activités artistiques ou physiques, en particulier l’
Tout le monde a oublié Henri Lefebvre et je pensais que finalement il vaut mieux être diabolisé, dans ce pays de Javert, de flics de la pensée, qu’oublié. Tous les bons penseurs, de gauche ou marxistes, sont oubliés quand les réactionnaires, fascistes, antisémites, nazis sont constamment rappelés à notre bonne vindicte. Se rappeler comment on parle de Céline, Barrès, Maurras ces jours-ci… même quand ils disent la même chose qu’Henri Lefebvre ou Karl Marx (oui je sais, cent millions de morts communistes, ce n’est pas comme le capitalisme, les démocraties ou les Américains qui n’ont jamais tué personne, Dresde et Hiroshima étant transmuées en couveuses par la doxa historique).
C’est dans l’ère des masses. On peut rajouter ce peu affriolant passage :
Les pays comme la Chine qui ont renoncé au marxisme orthodoxe aujourd’hui avec un milliard de masques sur la gueule, de l’eau polluée pour 200 millions de personnes et des tours à n’en plus finir à vingt mille du mètre. Cherchez alors le progrès depuis Marco Polo…
« La révolution… crée le genre d’homme qui lui sont nécessaires, elle développe cette race nouvelle, la nourrit d'abord en secret dans son sein, puis la produit au grand jour à mesure qu'elle prend des forces, la pousse, la case, la protège, lui assure la victoire sur tous les autres types sociaux. L'homme impersonnel, l’homme en soi, dont rêvaient les idéologues de 1789, est venu au monde : il se multiplie sous nos yeux, il n'y en aura bientôt plus d’autre ; c'est le rond-de-cuir incolore, juste assez instruit pour être « philosophe », juste assez actif pour être intrigant, bon à tout, parce que partout on peut obéir à un mot d'ordre, toucher un traitement et ne rien faire – fonctionnaire du gouvernement officiel - ou mieux, esclave du gouvernement officieux, de cette immense administration secrète qui a peut-être plus d'agents et noircit plus de paperasses que l'autre. »
In his Parmenides, Martin Heidegger contributed an interesting remark in regards to the Greek term “polis”, which once again confirms the importance and necessity of serious etymological analysis. By virtue of its profundity, we shall reproduce this quote in full:
Gustave Le Bon affirme que l’évolution des institutions politiques, des religions ou des idéologies n’est qu’un leurre. Malgré des changements superficiels, une même âme collective continuerait à s’exprimer sous des formes différentes. Farouche opposant du socialisme de son époque, Gustave Le Bon ne croit pas pour autant au rôle de l’individu dans l’histoire. Il conçoit les peuples comme des corps supérieurs et autonomes dont les cellules constituantes sont les individus. La courte existence de chacun s’inscrit par conséquent dans une vie collective beaucoup plus longue. L’âme d’un peuple est le résultat d’une longue sédimentation héréditaire et d’une accumulation d’habitudes ayant abouti à l’existence d’un « réseau de traditions, d’idées, de sentiments, de croyances, de modes de penser communs » en dépit d’une apparente diversité qui subsiste bien sûr entre les individus d’un même peuple. Ces éléments constituent la synthèse du passé d’un peuple et l’héritage de tous ses ancêtres : « infiniment plus nombreux que les vivants, les morts sont aussi infiniment plus puissants qu’eux » (lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples). L’individu est donc infiniment redevable de ses ancêtres et de ceux de son peuple.
La dilution des religions dans l’âme des peuples
Ainsi, l’art de l’Egypte ancienne a irrigué la création artistique d’autres peuples pendant des siècles. Mais cet art, essentiellement religieux et funéraire et dont l’aspect massif et imperturbable rappelait la fascination des égyptiens pour la mort et la quête de vie éternelle, reflétait trop l’âme égyptienne pour être repris sans altérations par d’autres. D’abord communiqué aux peuples du Proche-Orient, cet art égyptien a inspiré les cités grecques. Mais Gustave Le Bon estime que ces influences égyptiennes ont irrigué ces peuples à travers le prisme de leur propre esprit. Tant qu’il ne s’est pas détaché des modèles orientaux, l’art grec s’est maintenu pendant plusieurs siècles à un stade de pâle imitation. Ce n’est qu’en se métamorphosant soudainement et en rompant avec l’art oriental que l’art grec connut son apogée à travers un art authentiquement grec, celui du Parthénon. A partir, d’un matériau identique qu’est le modèle égyptien transmis par les Perses, la civilisation indienne a abouti à un résultat radicalement différent de l’art grec. Parvenu à un stade de raffinement élevé dès les siècles précédant notre ère mais n’ayant que très peu évolué ensuite, l’art indien témoigne de la stabilité organique du peuple indien : « jusqu’à l’époque où elle fut soumis à la loi de l’islam, l’Inde a toujours absorbé les différents conquérants qui l’avaient envahie sans se laisser influencer par eux ».
La genèse des peuples
Ojakangas’ book has served to confirm my impression that, from an evolutionary point of view, the most relevant Western thinkers are found among the ancient Greeks, with a long sleep during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, a slow revival during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and a great climax heralded by Darwin, before being shut down again in 1945. The periods in which Western thought was eminently biopolitical — the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and 1865 to 1945 — are perhaps surprisingly short in the grand scheme of things, having been swept away by pious Europeans’ recurring penchant for egalitarian and cosmopolitan ideologies. Okajangas also admirably puts ancient biopolitics in the wider context of Western thought, citing Spinoza, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, and others, as well as recent academic literature.
While Rome had also been founded as “a biopolitical regime” and had some policies to promote fertility and eugenics (120), this was far less central to Roman than to Greek thought, and gradually declined with the Empire. Political ideology seems to have followed political realities. The Stoics and Cicero posited a “natural law” not deriving from a particular organism, but as a kind of cosmic, disembodied moral imperative, and tended to emphasize the basic commonality of human beings (e.g. Cicero, Laws, 1.30).
L'homme est au centre de l'univers selon Charbonneau, qui ouvre son texte de bien belle façon en affirmant qu'avant «l'acte divin, avant la pensée, il n'y a ni temps, ni espace : comme ils disparaîtront quand l'homme aura disparu dans le néant, ou en Dieu» (1). Si l'homme se trouve au centre d'une dramaturgie unissant l'espace et le temps, c'est qu'il a donc le pouvoir non seulement d'organiser ces derniers mais aussi, bien évidemment, de les déstructurer, comme l'illustre l'accélération du temps et le rapetissement de l'espace dont est victime notre époque car, «si nous savons faire silence en nous, nous pouvons sentir le sol qui nous a jusqu'ici portés vibrer sous le galop accéléré d'un temps qui se précipite», et comprendre que nous nous condamnons à vivre entassés dans un «univers concentrationnaire surpeuplé et surorganisé» (le terme concentrationnaire est de nouveau employé à la page 31, puis à la page 50), où l'espace à l'évidence mais aussi le temps nous manqueront, alors que nous nous disperserons «dans un vide illimité, dépourvu de bornes matérielles, autant que spirituelles». 
Hélas, l'homme moderne ne semble avoir de goût, comme le pensait Max Picard, que pour la fuite et, fuyant sans cesse, il semble précipiter la création entière dans sa propre vitesse s'accroissant davantage, la fuite appelant la fuite, bien qu'il ne faille pas confondre cette accélération avec le «rythme d'une existence humaine [qui] est celui d'une tragédie dont le dénouement se précipite». Ainsi, la «nuit d'amour dont l'aube semblait ne jamais devoir se lever n'est plus qu'un bref instant de rêve entre le jour et le jour; du printemps au printemps, les saisons sont plus courtes que ne l'étaient les heures. Vient même un âge qui réalise la disparition du présent, qui ne peut plus dire : je vis, mais : j'ai vécu; où rien n'est sûr, sinon que tout est déjà fini» (p. 22).
Porque a fines del siglo XX España podía presumir de poseer su propia tradición filosófica. Y no lo queríamos ver. Desde sus aulas de Oviedo yo tuve el privilegio de aprender de don Gustavo Bueno que la lengua castellana era tan buena como la que más, buena para el cultivo de la filosofía. De mi maestro aprendí que había que rebajar ínfulas al predominio editorial y académico del inglés, del francés o del alemán. 
En el caso de Trías, y su "filosofía del límite" también contamos con una expresión del quehacer filosófico español de gran calidad, de enorme altura, aunque muy distinta de la obra buenista en formato, lenguaje y preocupaciones si la comparamos con la obra de Bueno. Triunfa el Arte y la Metáfora como recursos y temas en el pensador barcelonés, mientras que la Lógica y la Ciencia son ineludibles en el ovetense. Pero, como no hay espacio ni ocasión para analizar a estos dos gigantes, no quiero cerrar mi reflexión, sin conducir la mirada del lector hacia el tercer sistema filosófico que ahora, muy acallado por los medios, viene lanzando a la palestra hispana el profesor Fernández Lorenzo.