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Julius Evola, Paesaggio interiore, apertura del diaframma (Inner landscape, aperture), 1921
In my 'thought piece' Evola - formless to formed, I made the point that Evola stood against Theosophy and its variants because they end up promoting an ideal of unity understood as immanence of the ‘One Life’ in every being.
Evola believed that the ‘One life’ should not be the end point, but rather the starting point i.e. the ‘undifferentiated substrate’, the forest out of which the individual carves his own clearing of ‘formed individuality’; it is not – as the Theosophists misunderstood it – a final state of perfection in which distinct individuals dissolve themselves, losing their identity in a pantheistic fusion with the Whole.
This esoteric position of Evola’s crossed seamlessly into his political standpoint
I quote from Evola's Fascism Viewed from the Right.
In truth, personality and liberty can be conceived only on the basis of the individual’s freeing himself, to a certain degree, from the naturalistic, biological and primitively individualist bonds that characterise the pre-state and pre-political forms in a purely social, utilitarian and contractual sense. Then it is possible to conceive that the true state, the state characterised by the ‘transcendence’ of the political level that we have discussed, furnishes a propitious environment for the development of personality and true liberty in the sense of virtues, according to the Classical understanding. With its climate of high tension, it issues a continual appeal to the individual to carry himself beyond himself, beyond simple vegetative life.
Freedom is a kind of transcendence. The higher self should transcend the lower self and the state should encourage this impulse. This is the transcendence that results from a rising up out of the vegetative ‘One life’.
There is also a downward self-transcendence where the individual transcends himself in the direction of collectives and demagogic movements. This results in a descent into the ‘One life’ with the concomitant loss of identity - the death of the self.
To use the term totalitarianism correctly, the substantial difference could be briefly expressed by saying that totalitarianism of the Right is ‘anagogic’, while that of the Left is ‘catagogic’, and that only because both are equally opposed to the limited and hollow regime of the bourgeois individual could a myopic mindset think that they have anything in common.
Left and right are totally opposed. They transcend individual bourgeois consumer-based culture but in opposite directions.
© John Dunn.
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