Comments on: European Vedism

By: Kgaard

Kgaard — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 01:39:55 +0000

@kgaard
Yes … poor word choice. Better to say something like “critical eye.” I can see where he may be open to potential attack, but it’s not necessarily in the areas that interest me. For example, he makes a fairly sweeping statement that existentialism has the nature of the existential problem exactly backwards. It’s an interesting argument … I kind of dig it but am not qualified to critique it. And it doesn’t really impact the aspects of his thought that grab me …

By: admin

admin — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 01:11:22 +0000

I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but if I had a connection with Evola that was working for me, I’d be asking for something a little more substantial than the criticisms we’ve seen in this thread before turning a “jaded eye” to it.

By: kgaard

kgaard — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 23:19:50 +0000

Before this thread goes completely cold I want to make one last defense of Evola, particularly in light of all the abuse he’s taking here. The only way I can really do this is to give a sort of personal testament. I figure I read 50 books a year and outline one. I then throw it on my stack of outlines, which over the past 25 years has grown to a height of about 4 inches. This year I have read two Evola books and was so taken by “Ride the Tiger” that I highlighted it, outlined it, highlighted the outline, re-outlined the highlighting and sent the refined high points out to friends. I wanted to internalize every last morsel of wisdom from this book.

As a result I’ve made a couple of major life changes, mostly having to do with art. What I really got from the book was the absolute necessity to reject all Democratic forms of art. I played guitar almost every day for 25+ years until about 5 years ago, when one day I had the realization that guitar was a dead art form and basically dropped it cold. Evola inspired me to dust off my violin and transfer my musical interests in that direction. Since then I’ve been discovering mountains of great classical music. It’s clearly more suited to my ear at this stage of life. And guitar transfers over to violin very easily so I’m making great strides. It’s opened a whole new world.

Anyway … one minor example. But I am a total Evola convert. Just in today’s mail arrived Evola book #3, “The Path of Cinnabar,” his intellectual biography. Granted I will read it with a more jaded eye in light of the comments here …

By: pseudo-chrysostom

pseudo-chrysostom — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 19:52:57 +0000

i respect campbell and his work (after all, however many else were doing the same these days?), but i must also recognize what people are ultimately on about. certainly his character is genuine, certainly he loved people, the heroic, antiquity, with all its mythic lesions. but enough to contradict modernity? in the end, no, he made his lesions compatible with the gnostic sentiments of the age. like the modern masons, the symbols are all there, throughout the works you get the sense that theres *something* greater, that could be grasped if one were perhaps more elite, more transcendent. but the explicit message? what else, but more hedonism.

which is of course the wrong message, especially in the absence of received traditions, as you yourself point out. it is up to the hero to create a new tradition for people. direct, and bliss will follow.

By: Kgaard

Kgaard — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 15:33:01 +0000

“Follow your bliss is a patently solipsistic proposition.”

That may be true … but it’s also damn good advice. In a world where the aristocratic ordering of reality has already broken down, there is no payoff for following an established program. In a democracy you’ve got to go with your best strength. Otherwise you will surely end up following somebody ELSE’s bliss — and that’s the worst scenario of all in industrial capitalism. Guys like Campbell and Pirsig (Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance) and Camus had a huge impact in shaping my life, especially in my 20s. Philosophy doesn’t have to be complicated to be useful.

When I read your comment, the first thing I thought of was Springsteen’s line, “And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat.” Many lives used to be like that. Perhaps it worked in a tradition-laden farm-based aristocracy, but in a democracy you just get despair, Schlitz, an assembly-line job and television. Campbell was a good dude.

By: pseudo-chrysostom

pseudo-chrysostom — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 14:37:04 +0000

workers like campbell (or even jung for that matter) can really be only thought of as the theme-park version of perennialism. products of the same mentality leads to such things as the ‘secular’ humanist rationals for taxing churches or the like, who can only conceive of such things as ‘places of entertainment’. limp wristed appeals to the ‘metaphorical’ nature of such things, because such denatured metaphor excuses one from coming to terms with their implications.

‘follow your bliss’ is a patently solipsistic proposition.

By: spandrell

spandrell — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 07:14:25 +0000

I am inclined to agree. I really don’t understand why anybody would take that seriously.

By: kgaard

kgaard — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 01:35:06 +0000

Well, technically you may be right. But there is more to philosophy than “serious” philosophy. Heidegger is the only philosopher I needed a college course to understand — and without that course I probably never would have figured him out. There are plenty of authors who are not serious philosophers who nevertheless have a lot to say that is worthwhile. Does Evola even claim to be a serious philosopher? Isn’t he really more of a Joseph Campbell sort of figure?

By: fotrkd

fotrkd — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 23:46:36 +0000

If language is a technology you’d be free to rework this narrative to interesting effect…

By: Joh

Joh — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 23:18:55 +0000

Yes, they’re different. There’s no comparison. Evola is terrible. Evola is like a parody of what a Dungeons & Dragons or anime geek would think is serious philosophy.