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6SURVIVALMANUALFOR THEARISTOCRATSOF THE SOUL
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8Contents
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10Part 1: Orientations
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12 . The Modern World and Traditional Man
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142. The End of a Cycle — “Ride the Tiger”
15Part 2: In the World Where God Is Dead
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173. European Nihilism — The Dissolution of Morals
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194. From the Precursors of Nihilism to the “Lost Youth”and the Protest Movement
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215. Disguises of European Nihilism —
22The Socioeconomic Myth and the Protest Movement
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246. Active Nihilism — Nietzsche
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267. “Being Oneself”
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288. The Transcendent Dimension —
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30“Life” and “More Than Life”
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329. Beyond Theism and Atheism
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3410. Invulnerability — Apollo and Dionysus
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3611. Acting without Desire — The Causal Law
37Part 3: The Dead End of Existentialism
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3912. Being and Inauthentic Existence
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4113. Sartre: Prisoner without Walls
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4314. Existence, “A Project Flung into the World”
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4515. Heidegger: “Retreating Forwards” and “BeingforDeath” —Collapse of Existentialism
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48Part 4: Dissolution of the Individual
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5016. The Dual Aspect of Anonymity
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5217. Destructions and Liberations in the New Realism
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5418. The “Animal Ideal” — The Sentiment of Nature
55Part 5: Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
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5719. The Procedures of Modern Science
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5920. Covering up Nature — Phenomenology
60Part 6: The Realm of Art —
61From "Physical" Music to the Drug Regime
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6321. The Sickness of European Culture
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6522. Dissolution in Modern Art
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6723. Modern Music and Jazz
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6924. Excursus on Drugs
70Part 7: Dissolution in the Social Realm
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7225. States and Parties — Apoliteia
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7426. Society — The Crisis of Patriotic Feeling
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7627. Marriage and the Family
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7828. Relations between the Sexes
79Part 8: The Spiritual Problem
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8129. The “Second Religiosity”
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8330. Death — The Right over Life
84Notes 229Index
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87RIDE m TIGER
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90Part 1
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92Orientations
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97The Modern Worldand Traditional Man
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99This book sets out to study some of the ways in which the present ageappears essentially as an age of dissolution. At the same time, it addressesthe questio« of what kind of conduct and what form of existence areappropriate under the circumstances for a particular human type.
100This restriction must be kept in mind. What I am about to say doesnot concern the ordinary man of our day. On the contrary, I have inmind the man who finds himself involved in today’s world, even atits most problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belonginwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels himself, inessence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelmingmajority of his contemporaries.
101The natural place for such a man, the land in which he would notbe a stranger, is the world of Tradition. I use the word tradition in aspecial sense, which I have defined elsewhere .  It differs from the common usage, but is close to the meaning given to it by Rene Guenon inhis analysis of the crisis of the modern world .  In this particular meaning, a civilization or a society is “traditional” when it is ruled by principles that transcend what is merely human and individual, and whenall its sectors are formed and ordered from above, and directed to whatis above. Beyond the variety of historical forms, there has existed anessentially identical and constant world of Tradition. I have sought elsewhere to define its values and main categories, which are the basis forany civilization, society, or ordering of existence that calls itself normalin a higher sense, and is endowed with real significance.
102Everything that has come to predominate in the modern world isthe exact antithesis of any traditional type of civilization. Moreover, the
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110circumstances make it increasingly unlikely that anyone, starting fromthe values of Tradition (even assuming that one could still identify andadopt them), could take actions or reactions of a certain efficacy thatwould provoke any real change in the current state of affairs. After thelast worldwide upheavals, there seems to be no starting point either fornations or for the vast majority of individuals — nothing in the institutions and general state of society, nor in the predominant ideas, interests, and energies of this epoch.
111Nevertheless, a few men exist who are, so to speak, still on theirfeet among the ruins and the dissolution, and who belong, more or lessconsciously, to that other world. A little group seems willing to fight on,even in lost positions. So long as it does not yield, does not compromiseitself by giving in to the seductions that would condition any success itmight have, its testimony is valid. For others, it is a matter of completelyisolating themselves, which demands an inner character as well as privileged material conditions, which grow scarcer day by day. All the same,this is the second possible solution. I would add that there are a very fewin the intellectual field who can still affirm “traditional” values beyondany immediate goal, so as to perform a “holding action.” This is certainly useful to prevent current reality from shutting off every horizon,not only materially but also ideally, and stifling any measures differentfrom its own. Thanks to them, distances may be maintained — otherpossible dimensions, other meanings of life, indicated to those able todetach themselves from looking only to the here and nojv.
112But this does not resolve the practical, personal problem — apart fromthe case of the man who is blessed with the opportunity for material isolation — of those who cannot or will not burn their bridges with currentlife, and who must therefore decide how to conduct their existence, evenon the level of the most elementary reactions and human relations.
113This is precisely the type of man that the present book has in mind.To him applies the saying of a great precursor: “The desert encroaches.Woe to him whose desert is within!”  He can in truth find no further support from without. There no longer exist the organizations andinstitutions that, in a traditional civilization and society, would haveallowed him to realize himself wholly, to order his own existence in aclear and unambiguous way, and to defend and apply creatively in his
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119own environment the principal values that he recognizes within himself. Thus there is no question of suggesting to him lines of action that,adequate and normative in any regular, traditional civilization, can nolonger be so in an abnormal one — in an environment that is utterly different socially, psychically, intellectually, and materially; in a climate ofgeneral dissolution; in a system ruled by scarcely restrained disorder,and anyway lacking any legitimacy from above. Thence come the specific problems that I intend to treat here.
120There is an important point to clarify at the outset regarding theattitude to be taken toward “survivals.” Even now, especially in WesternEurope, there are habits, institutions, and customs from the world ofyesterday (that is, from the .bourgeois world) that have a certain persistence. In fact, when crisis is mentioned today, what is meant is preciselythe bourgeois world: it is the bases of bourgeois civilization and societythat suffer these crises and are struck by dissolution. This is not what Icall the world of Tradition. Socially, politically, and culturally, what iscrashing down is the system that took shape after the revolution of theThird Estate and the first industrial revolution, even though there wereoften mixed up in it some remnants of a more ancient order, drained oftheir original vitality.
121What kind of relationship can the human type whom I intend totreat here have with such a world? This question is essential. On itdepend both the meaning to be attributed to the phenomena of crisisand dissolution that are ever more apparent today, and the attitude tobe assumed in the face of them, and toward whatever they have not yetundermined and destroyed.
122The answer to this question can only be negative. The human typeI have in mind has nothing to do with the bourgeois world. He mustconsider everything bourgeois as being recent and antitraditional, bornfrom processes that in themselves are negative and subversive. In manycases, one can see in the present critical phenomena a kind of nemesis or rebound effect.  Although I cannot go into details here, it is thevery forces that, in their time, were set to work against the previous,traditional European civilization that have rebounded against thosewho summoned them, sapping them in their turn and carrying to afurther degree the general process of disintegration. This appears very
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127clearly, for example, in the socioeconomic field, through the obviousrelationship between the bourgeois revolution of the Third Estate andthe successive socialist and Marxist movements; through democracyand liberalism on the one hand, and socialism on the other. The firstrevolution simply prepared the way for the second, whereupon the latter, having let the bourgeoisie perform that function, aimed solely ateradicating them.
128In view of this, there is one solution to be eliminated right away:the solution of those who want to rely on what is left of the bourgeoisworld, defending and using it as a bastion against the more extremecurrents of dissolution and subversion, even if they have tried to reanimate or reinforce these remnants with some higher and more traditional values.
129In the first place, considering the general situation that becomesclearer every day since those crucial events that are the two worldwars and their repercussions, to adopt such an orientation signifiesselfdeception as to the existence of material possibilities. The transformations that have already taken place go too deep to be reversible.The energies that have been liberated, or which are in the course ofliberation, are not such as can be reconfined within the structures ofyesterday’s world. The very fact that attempts at reaction have referredto those structures alone, which are void of any superior legitimacy,has made the subversive forces all the more vigorous and aggressive. Inthe second place, such a path would lead to a compromise that wouldbe inadmissible as an ideal, and perilous as a tactic. As I have said, thetraditional values in the sense that I understand them are not bourgeoisvalues, but the very antithesis of them.
130Thus to recognize any validity in those survivals, to associate themin any way with traditional values, and to validate them with the latterwith the intentions already described, would be either to demonstratea feeble grasp of the traditional values themselves, or else to diminishthem and drag them down to a deplorable and risky form of compromise. I say “risky” because however one attaches the traditional ideasto the residual forms of bourgeois civilization, one exposes them to theattack — in some respects inevitable, legitimate, and necessary — currently mounted against that civilization.
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136One is therefore obliged to turn to the opposite solution, even ifthings thereby become still more difficult and one runs into anothertype of risk. It is good to sever every link with all that which is destined sooner or later to collapse. The problem will then be to maintainone’s essential direction without leaning on any given or transmittedform, including forms that are authentically traditional but belong topast history. In this respect, continuity can only be maintained on anessential plane, so to speak, as an inner orientation of being, beside thegreatest possible external liberty. As we shall soon see, the support thatthe Tradition can continue to give does not refer to positive structures,regular and recognized by some civilization already formed by it, butrather to that doctrine that contains its principles only in their superior, preformal state, anterior to the particular historical formulations:a state that in the past had no pertinence to the masses, but had thecharacter of an esoteric doctrine.
137For the rest, given the impossibility of acting positively in the sense ofa real and general return to the normal system, and given the impossibility, within the climate of modern society, culture, and customs, of molding one’s whole existence in an organic and unitary manner, it remainsto be seen on what terms one can accept situations of utter dissolutionwithout being inwardly touched by them. What in the current phase —which is, in the last analysis, a transitional one — can be chosen, separated from the rest, and accepted as a free form of behavior that is notoutwardly anachronistic? Can one thus measure oneself against what ismost advanced in contemporary thought and lifestyle, while remaininginwardly determined and governed by a completely different spirit?
138The advice “Don’t go to the place of defense, but to the place ofattack,” might be adopted by the group of differentiated men, late children of the Tradition, who are in question here. That is to say, it mightbe better to contribute to the fall of that which is already wavering andbelongs to yesterday’s world than to try to prop it up and prolong itsexistence artificially. It is a possible tactic, and useful to prevent thefinal crisis from being the work of the opposition, whose initiative onewould then have to suffer. The risks of such a course of action are morethan obvious: there is no saying who will have the last word. But in the
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143present epoch there is nothing that is not risky. This is perhaps the oneadvantage that it offers to those who are still on their feet.
144The basic ideas to be drawn from what has been said so far can besummarized as follows:
145The significance of the crises and the dissolutions that so manypeople deplore today should be stated, indicating the real and directobject of the destructive processes: bourgeois civilization and society.But measured against traditional values, these latter were already thefirst negation of a world anterior and superior to them. Consequentlythe crisis of the modern world could represent, in Hegel’s terms, a
146“negation of a negation,” so as to signify a phenomenon that, in itsown way, is positive. This double negation might end in nothingness —in the nothingness that erupts in multiple forms of chaos, dispersion,rebellion, and “protest” that characterize many tendencies of recentgenerations; or in that other nothingness that is scarcely hidden behindthe organized system of material civilization. Alternatively, for the menin question here it might create a new, free space that could eventuallybecome the premise for a future, formative action.
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151The End of a Cycle
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154“Ride the Tiger”
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156The idea just mentioned refers to a perspective that does not really enterinto the argument of this book, because it is not concerned with inner,personal behavior, but with outer* circumstances; not with presentdayreality, but with an unpredictable future upon which one’s own conductshould in no wise depend.
157This is a perspective already alluded to, which sees that the presenttime may, in the last analysis, be a transitional epoch. I will say only alittle about it before approaching our principal problem. The referencepoint here is given by the traditional doctrine of cycles and by the ideathat the present epoch, with all its typical phenomena, corresponds tothe terminal phase of a cycle.
158The phrase chosen as the title of this book, “ride the tiger,” mayserve as a transition between what has been said hitherto, and thisother order of ideas. The phrase is a Far Eastern saying, expressing theidea that if one succeeds in riding a tiger, not only does one avoid having it leap on one, but if one can keep one’s seat and not fall off, onemay eventually get the better of it. Those who are interested may bereminded of a similar theme found in the schools of traditional wisdom,such as the “oxherding” episodes of Japanese Zen; while in classicalantiquity there is a parallel in the trials of Mithras, who lets himself bedragged by the bull and will not let go until the animal stops, whereupon Mithras kills it.
159This symbolism is applicable at various levels. First, it can refer toa line of conduct in the interior, personal life; then to the appropriateattitude in the face of critical, historical, and collective situations. Inthe latter case, we are interested in the relation of the symbol to the
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167doctrine of cycles, with regard to both the general structure of historyand the particular aspect of it that refers to the sequence of the “FourAges.” This is a teaching that, as I have shown elsewhere,  bears identical traits in the East and in the ancient West. (Giambattista Vico simplycaught an echo of it.)
168In the classical world, it was presented in terms of humanity’s progressive descent from the Golden Age to what Hesiod called the IronAge. In the corresponding Hindu teaching, the final age is called theKali Yuga (Dark Age). Its essential quality is emphatically said to bea climate of dissolution, in which all the forces — individual and collective, material, psychic, and spiritual — that were previously held incheck by a higher law and by influences of a superior order pass into astate of freedom and chaos. The texts of Tantra have a striking imagefor this situation, saying that it is the time when Kali is “wide awake.”Kali is a female divinity symbolizing the elementary, primordial forcesof the world and of life, but in her “lower” aspects she is also presentedas a goddess of sex and orgiastic rites. In previous ages she was “sleeping,” that is, latent in the latter aspects, but in the Dark Age she is saidto be completely awake and active.
169Everything points to the fact that exactly this situation has beenreached in recent times, having for its epicenter the civilization and society of the West, from which it has rapidly spread over the whole planet.It is not too forced an interpretation to link this with the fact that thepresent epoch stands under the zodiacal sign of Aquarius, the waters inwhich everything turns to a fluid and formless state. Thus predictionsmade many centuries ago — for these ideas go back that far — appearstrangely timely today. One finds here an analogy to what I have saidabove regarding the problem of what attitude is proper to the final age,associated here with riding the tiger.
170In fact, the texts that discuss the Kali Yuga and the Age of Kalialso declare that the norms of life, valid during epochs in which divineforces were more or less alive and active, must be considered as cancelled in the final age. During the latter there lives an essentially different human type who is incapable of following the ancient precepts.Not only that, but because of the different historical and even planetarycircumstances, such precepts, even if followed, would not yield the same
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176results. For this reason, different norms apply, and the rule of secrecy islifted from certain truths, a certain ethic, and particular “rites” to whichthe rule previously applied on account of their dangerous character andbecause they contravened the forms of a normal existence, regulated bythe sacred tradition. No one can fail to see the significance of this convergence of views. In this as in other points, my ideas, far from having apersonal and contingent character, are essentially linked to perspectivesalready known to the world of Tradition, when abnormal situations ingeneral were foreseen and analyzed.
177We shall now examine the principle of “riding the tiger” as appliedto the external world and the total environment. Its significance canbe stated as follows: When a cycle of civilization is reaching its end, itis difficult to achieve anything by resisting it and by directly opposingthe forces in motion. The current is too strong; one would be overwhelmed. The essential thing is not to let oneself be impressed by theomnipotence and apparent triumph of the forces of the epoch. Theseforces, devoid of connection with any higher principle, are in fact ona short chain. One should not become fixated on the present and onthings at hand, but keep in view the conditions that may come aboutin the future. Thus the principle to follow could be that of letting theforces and processes of this epoch take their own course, while keepingoneself firm and ready to intervene when “the tiger, which cannot leapon the person riding it, is tired of running.” The Christian injunction
178“Resist not evil” may have a similar meaning, if taken in a very particular way. One abandons direct action and retreats to a more internalposition.
179The perspective offered by the doctrine of cyclical laws is implicithere. When one cycle closes, another begins, and the point at whicha given process reaches its extreme is also the point at which it turnsin the opposite direction. But there is still the problem of continuitybetween the two cycles. To use an image from Hoffmansthal, the positive solution would be that of a meeting between those who have beenable to stay awake through the long night, and those who may appearthe next morning. But one cannot be sure of this happening. It is impossible to foresee with certainty how, and on what plane, there can be anycontinuity between the cycle that is nearing its end and the next one.
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184Therefore the line of conduct to be followed in the present epoch musthave an autonomous character and an immanent, individual value. Imean to say that the attraction of positive prospects, more or less shortterm, should not play an important part in it. They might be entirelylacking right up to the end of the cycle, and the possibilities offered bya new movement beyond the zero point might concern others comingafter us, who may have held equally firm without awaiting any directresults or exterior changes.
185Before leaving this topic and resuming my principal argument, itmay be useful to mention another point connected to cyclical laws. Thisconcerns the relationship between Western civilization and other civilizations, especially those of the East. Among those who have recognizedthe crisis of the modern world, and who have also abandoned the ideathat modern civilization is the civilization par excellence, the zenith andmeasure of all others, some have turned their eyes to the East. Theysee there, to a certain degree, a traditional and spiritual orientation tolife that has long ceased to exist in the West as the basis for the effective organization of the various realms of existence. They have evenwondered whether the East might furnish useful reference points for arevival and reintegration of the West.
186It is important to have a clear view of the domain to which sucha proposition might apply. If it is simply a matter of doctrines and
187“intellectual” contacts, the attempt is legitimate. But one should takenote that valid examples and points of reference are to be found, atleast partially, in our own traditional past, without having to turnto nonEuropean civilizations. Not much is to be gained by any ofthis, however. It would be a matter of conversations at a high levelbetween isolated individuals, cultivators of metaphysical systems. Ifone is more concerned with real influences that have a powerful effecton existence, one should have no illusions about them. The East itselfis now following in our footsteps, ever more subject to the ideas andinfluences that have led us to the point at which we find ourselves,
188“modernizing” itself and adopting our own secular and materialisticforms of life. What is still left of Eastern traditions and character issteadily losing ground and becoming marginalized. The liquidation of
189“colonialism” and the material independence that Eastern peoples are
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195acquiring visavis Europe are closely accompanied by an ever moreblatant subjection to the ideas, the mores, and the “advanced” and
196“progressive” mentality of the West.
197Based on the doctrine of cycles, it may be that anything of valuefrom the point of view of a man of Tradition, either in the East orelsewhere, concerns a residual legacy that survives, up to a point, notbecause it belongs to areas that are truly untouched by the principle ofdecline, but merely because this process is still in an early phase there.For such civilizations it is only a matter of time before they find themselves at the same point as ourselves, knowing the same problems andthe same phenomena of dissolution under the sign of “progress” andmodernity. The tempo may even be much faster in the East. We havethe example of China, which in two decades has traveled the whole wayfrom an imperial, traditional civilization to a materialistic and atheistcommunist regime — a journey that the Europeans took centuries toaccomplish.
198Outside the circles of scholars and specialists in metaphysicaldisciplines, the “myth of the East” is therefore a fallacy. “The desertencroaches”: there is no other civilization that can serve as support;we have to face our problems alone. The only prospect offered us as acounterpart of the cyclical laws, and that only hypothetical, is that theprocess of decline of the Dark Age has first reached its terminal phaseswith us in the West. Therefore it is not impossible that we would also bethe first to pass the zero point, in a period in which the other civilizations, entering later into the same current, would find themselves moreor less in our current state, having abandoned — “superseded” — whatthey still offer today in the way of superior values and traditional formsof existence that attract us. The consequence would be a reversal ofroles. The West, having reached the point beyond the negative limit,would be qualified to assume a new function of guidance or command,very different from the material, technoindustrial leadership that itwielded in the past, which, once it collapsed, resulted only in a generalleveling.
199This rapid overview of general prospects and problems may havebeen useful to some readers, but I shall not dwell further on these matters. As I have said, what interests us here is the field of personal life;
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204and from that point of view, in defining the attitude to be taken towardcertain experiences and processes of today, having consequences different from what they appear to have for practically all our contemporaries, we need to establish autonomous positions, independent ofanything the future may or may not bring.
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209In the WorldWhere GodIs Dead
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214European Nihilism
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218For the symbolic expression of the complex process that has led to thepresent situation of crisis in matters of morals and the vision of life, thebest formulation is that of Nietzsche: “God is dead .”
219For our purposes, we can take Nietzsche’s theme as our point ofdeparture, because it has lost nothing of its validity and relevance. Ithas been rightly said that Nietzsche’s personality and thought also havea symbolic character. Robert Reininger writes: “This is a struggle forthe sake of modern man, that man who no longer has any roots in thesacred soil of tradition, wavering in search of himself between the peaksof civilization and the abysses of barbarism, trying to find a satisfactorymeaning for an existence completely left to itself .”
220Friedrich Nietzsche is the one who best foresaw “European nihilism” as a future and a destiny “which proclaims itself everywhere bythe voice of a thousand signs and a thousand presages.” The “greatevent, obscurely suspected, that God is dead,” is the principle of thecollapse of all values. From this point, morality is deprived of its sanction and “incapable of maintaining itself,” and the interpretation andjustification formerly given to all norms and values disappear.
221Dostoyevsky expressed the same idea in the words, “If God doesnot exist, everything is permitted .”
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223“The death of God” is an image that characterizes a whole historical process. The phrase expresses “unbelief turned to daily reality,” adesacralization of existence and a total rift with the world of Traditionthat, beginning in the West at about the period of the Renaissance andhumanism, has increasingly assumed the character of an obvious andirreversible state of affairs for presentday humanity. This state is no
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231less real where it is not yet clearly visible, owing to a regime of doublesand surrogates of the “God who is dead.”
232We must distinguish various stages of the process in question. Theelementary fact is a fracture of an ontological character, through whichhuman life loses any real reference to transcendence. All the developments of nihilism are already virtually contained in this fact. Moralityrendered independent from theology and metaphysics and founded onthe sole authority of reason — socalled “autonomous” morality — is thefirst phenomenon to take shape after the death of God, trying to hideit from consciousness. When the level of the sacred is lost, the absoluteprinciple descends to the level of pure human morality. This defines therationalistic phase of the “stoicism of duty” and of “moral fetishism,”which, incidentally, is one of the characteristics of Protestantism. Inspeculative philosophy, this phase has as its sign or symbol the Kantiantheory of the categorical imperative, ethical rationalism, and “autonomous morality.”
233But once morality has lost its root, which is the original and effective relationship of man with a higher world, it ceases to have anyinvulnerable foundation, and the critics soon have the better of it. In
234“autonomous morality,” which is secular and rational, the only resistance to any natural impulse is an empty and rigid command, a “thoushalt” that is a mere echo of the ancient, living law. Then at the pointwhere one tries to give this “thou shalt” some firm content and to justify that content, the ground gives way.^There is no support for thosecapable of thinking it through to the end. This is already the case withKantian ethics. In reality, there is no “imperative” at this stage thatdoes not imply the presumed, axiomatic value of certain unexplainedpremises that depend simply on a personal equation or on the acceptedstate of affairs in a given society.
235The phase of dissolution that follows that of ethical rationalism isdefined by utilitarian or “social” ethics. Renouncing any intrinsic orabsolute basis for “good” and “evil,” the justification proposed forwhat is left of moral norms is whatever suits the individual for his ownadvantage and for his material tranquility in social life. But nihilism isalready visible behind this morality. When there is no longer any internal restraint, every action and behavior appears licit so long as the outer
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241sanctions of society’s laws can be avoided, or if one is indifferent tothem. Nothing any longer has an intrinsic norm and an imperative character. It is just a matter of adjusting to society’s codes, which take theplace of the superseded laws of religion. After Puritanism and ethicalrigorism, this is the orientation of the bourgeois world: toward socialidols and conformism founded on convenience, cowardice, hypocrisy,or inertia. But the individualism of the end of the nineteenth centurymarked in its turn the beginning of an anarchic dissolution that rapidlyspread and intensified. It had already prepared the chaos hiding behindthe facade of apparent orderliness.
242The previous phase, limited in its extent, had been that of theRomantic hero: the man who feels himself alone in the face of divineindifference, and the superior individual who despite everything reaffirms himself in a tragic context. He breaks accepted laws, but not inthe sense of denying their validity; rather, he claims for himself exceptional rights to what is forbidden, be it good or ill. The process exhaustsitself, for example, in a man like Max Stirner, who saw in all morality the ultimate form of the divine fetish that was to be destroyed. Hedenounced the “beyond” that exists within man and that tries to givehim rules as being a “new heaven” that is merely the insidious transposition of the external, theological beyond, which has been negated .  Withthis conquest of the “interior god” and the exaltation of the “Unique”that is free from rules and “rests its cause on nothingness,” opposingitself to every value and pretense of society, Stirner marks the end ofthe road trodden by the nihilistic social revolutionaries (to whom theterm nihilism was originally applied) — but trodden in the name of utopian social ideas in which they always believed: ideas such as “justice,”
243“liberty,” and “humanity,” as opposed to the injustice and tyranny thatthey saw in the existing order.
244Turning to Nietzsche, the European nihilism that he predicted asa general, not just a sporadic, phenomenon attacks not only the fieldof morality in a strict sense, but also that of truth, of worldviews, andof ends. The “death of God” is associated with this loss of any meaning to life, any superior justification for existence. Nietzsche’s themeis well known: that a need for evasion and a surrender of life havebrought about the invention of a “world of truth” or a “world of val
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249ues” separate from, and in opposition to, this world, now characterized as false and worthless. Another world has been invented: a worldof being, goodness, and spirit as a negation or condemnation of theworld of becoming, of the senses, and of living reality. But that constructed world dissolved, once it was discovered that it was an illusion. Nietzsche revealed its genesis and pointed out its human — “all toohuman”— and irrational roots. His contribution to nihilism as a “freespirit” and “immoralist” has been precisely his interpretation of certain
250“superior” and “spiritual” values not only as simple vital impulses, butin most cases as the results of a “decadent” and enfeebled life.
251On these terms, all that remains real is what had been negatedor rejected from the point of view of that other, “superior” world of
252“God” and “truth” — the world of what ought to be, not of what is. Theconclusion is that “what ought to be is not; what is, is what ought notto be.” This is what Nietzsche called the “tragic phase” of nihilism. Itis the beginning of the “misery of man without God.” Existence seemsdevoid of any meaning, any goal. While all imperatives, moral values,and restraints have fallen away, so have all supports. Once more wefind a parallel in Dostoyevsky, where he makes Kirilov say that maninvented God just to be able to go on living:  God, therefore, as an
253“alienation of the I.” The terminal situation is given in drastic formby Sartre, when he declares that “existentialism is not an atheism inthe sense of being reduced to proving that God does not exist. Ratherit says that even if God existed, nothing would change.” Existence isreduced to itself in its naked reality, without any reference point outsideitself that could give it a real meaning for man.
254Thus there are two phases. The first is a sort of metaphysical ormoral rebellion. The second is the phase in which the very motives thathad implicitly nourished that rebellion give way and dissolve. For a newtype of man, they are empty. That is the nihilistic phase in the propersense, whose chief theme is the sense of the absurdity, the pure irrationality of the human condition.
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262A current of thought and a “historiography” exist that represent thisprocess of rebellion and dissolution, or at least its first phases, as having been something positive and as a victory. It is another aspect ofcontemporary nihilism, whose undeclared basis is a sort of “shipwreckeuphoria.” It is well known that the phases of dissolution, beginningwith illuminism and liberalism and proceeding gradually to immanentist historicism (first “idealistic,” then materialist and Marxist), havebeen interpreted and celebrated as those of the emancipation and reaffirmation of man, of progress of the spirit, and of true “humanism.”We shall see later how Nietzsche’s program for the postnihilist periodarose, in its worse aspects, out of this very mentality. For the present,there is just one point to be made.
263No God has ever controlled man. Divine despotism is a fantasy,and so is most of that to which, in the illuminist and revolutionaryinterpretation, the world of Tradition owes its ordering from aboveand its orientation toward the above, its hierarchical system, its various forms of legitimate authority and sacral power. No — the true andessential foundation of this whole system is the particular inner structure, the capacity of recognition, and the various inborn interests of atype of man who nowadays has virtually disappeared. Man, at a givenmoment, wanted to “be free.” He was allowed to be so, and he wasallowed to throw off the chains that did not bind him so much as sustain him. Thereupon he was allowed to suffer all the consequences of
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271his liberation, following ineluctably up to his present state in which
272“God is dead” (or “God has withdrawn,” as Bernanos says), and existence becomes the field of absurdity where everything is possible andeverything is allowed. Nothing has acted in all of this but the law thatis known in the Far East as the law of actions and reactions, which isobjectively “beyond good and evil” and beyond any petty morality.
273In recent times, the fracture has extended from the moral plane tothe existential and ontological. Values that were previously questionedand shaken only by a few precursors in relative isolation now lose allrelevance for general consciousness in everyday life. One is no longerdealing with “problems” but with a state of affairs in which the immoralist pathos of yesterday’s rebels seems increasingly oldfashioned andincongruous. For some time, a good part of Western humanity has considered it a natural thing for existence to lack any real meaning, and forit not to be ordered by any higher principle, arranging their lives in themost bearable and least disagreeable way they can. Of course this hasits counterpart and inevitable consequence in an inner life that is moreand more reduced, formless, feeble, and elusive, and in a growing dissolution of any uprightness and character. Another aspect of the sameprocess is a regime of compensations and anesthetics that is no lessdeceptive for not being recognized as such. A character in Hemingwaysummarizes it when he says:
274Religion is the opium of the people . . . And now economics is the opiumof the people; along with patriotism . . . What about sexual intercourse;was that an opium of the people? . . . But drink was a sovereign opium ofthe people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio,another opium of the people, a cheap one . . .*
275But once this sensation occurs, the facade may start to waver, theassemblage to collapse, and the dissolution of values is followed bythe denial of everything one has resorted to in order to make up for thesenselessness of a life henceforth reduced to itself. Then comes the existential theme of nausea and disgust, of the void that is sensed behind thewhole system of bourgeois life, the theme of the absurdity of the wholenew, earthbound “civilization.” Where the sensation is most acute thereoccur forms of existential trauma and states that have been called “the
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280spectrality of events,” “the degradation of objective reality,” “existentialalienation.” One also notices that the sporadic experiences of intellectuals and artists of the past become modes of behavior occurring in thenatural course of things for certain groups of the younger generation.
281Only yesterday it was a matter of writers, painters, and “damnedpoets” living on the edge, often alcoholics, mingling their talents withthe climate of existential dissolution and with irrational rebellion againstestablished values. Typical in this regard is the case of Rimbaud, whoseextreme form of rebellion was the renunciation of his own genius,poetic silence, and immersion in practical activity. Another is the caseof Lautreamont, driven by existential trauma to the morbid exaltationof evil, horror, and formless elementarity (Maldoror, the personage ofhis poems, says that Tie has “received life like a wound, and forbiddenthe suicide from curing his injury”). Then there are those isolated individuals given to adventure, like Jack London and the early Ernst Jiinger,who seek new horizons on distant lands and seas; while for the otherseverything seems in order, safe and sound, as under the banner of science they hymn the triumphal march of progress, scarcely troubled bythe noise of anarchist bombs.
282Already after World War I, processes of this type had begun tospread, announcing the final phases of nihilism. At first such harbingers remained at the margins of life, on the frontierzone of art. Themost significant and radical of them all was perhaps Dadaism, the endresult of the deepest impulses that had nourished the various movements of avantgarde art. But Dadaism negated the very categories ofart, showing the transition to the chaotic forms of a life deprived of anyrationality, any restraint, any coherence; it was not just the acceptancebut the exaltation of the absurd and the contradictory, of nonsense andpointlessness taken just as they are.
283Surrealism took up some similar themes, in part, when it refusedto adapt life to the “derisory conditions of all existence down here.”Sometimes the path was in fact followed to the very end, as withthe suicide of surrealists like Vache, Crevel, and Rigault; the latterreproached the others for being able to do nothing but literature andpoetry. Indeed, when the young Andre Breton declared that the simplestsurrealist act would be to go out into the street and shoot passersby
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291at random ,  he was anticipating what happened more than once afterWorld War II, when some of the younger generation passed from theoryto practice. By absurd and destructive actions, they sought to attain theonly possible meaning of existence, after rejecting suicide as the radicalsolution for the metaphysically abandoned individual.
292With the further traumatization brought about by World War II,and with the collapse of a new set of false values, the same currentwas effectively diffused in characteristic and endemic fashion amonga youth that regarded itself as burnedout or lost. Its broad margin ofinauthenticity, pose, and caricature does not lessen its value as a livingsign of the times now approaching their final nadir.
293On the one hand there were the “rebels without a cause,” the “angryyoung men” with their rage and aggression in a world where they feltlike strangers, where they saw no sense, no values worth embracingand fighting for. As we have seen, that was the liquidation, in the worldwhere God is dead, of those previous forms of revolt that, despite everything — and even in utopian anarchism — still had a fundamental beliefin a just cause to defend, at the price of any destruction and at the sacrifice of one’s own life. “Nihilism” there referred to the negation of thevalues of the world and of the society against which one was rebelling,not to those of the rebels themselves. But in its current forms, the rebellion is a sheer, irrational movement “without a flag.”
294This trend appeared with the “teddy boys,” with their German analogs the Halbstarken, and the generazione delle macerie [generation ofrubble]. Their style was one of aggressive protest, expressed throughvandalism and lawless actions valued as “pure acts” in cold witnessto their otherness. In the Slavic countries there were the “hooligans.”More significant was the American counterpart, the “hipsters” and theBeat generation. Rather than intellectual attitudes, these were existential positions lived out by the young, of which a certain type of novelis merely a reflection. Compared to the British types, they were morecold and unadorned, more corrosive in their opposition to everythingpseudoorderly, rational, and coherent — everything that was “square,”meaning solid, justified, and safe. They showed “a destructive, voiceless rage,” as somebody put it, a contempt for “those incomprehensiblecharacters who are capable of being seriously involved with a woman, a
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300job, a cause” (Norman Podhoretz ).  The absurdity of what is considerednormal, “the organized insanity of the normal world,” seemed all themore evident to the hipsters in the climate of industrialization and frenetic activity that, despite all the triumphs of science, was meaningless.Alienation from their surroundings, absolute refusal to collaborate orto have any defined position in society were the rule in this milieu,which did not only include the young, and which recruited its membersnot only from the lower classes but from all social levels, including thewealthy. Some preferred a new form of nomadic existence; others, tolive at the most elementary level. The methods used by the hipsters tosurvive the existential void through strong sensations included alcohol, sex, negro jazz, high speed, drugs, and even acts of gratuitouscriminality like those suggested in Breton’s surrealism. They did notfear experiences of any kind, but sought them out to “receive tremendous blows on their own selves” (Norman Mailer). The books of JackKerouac and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg were inspired in part by thisclimate .
301But it had already been announced by some authors who wererightly called the Walt Whitmans, not of the optimistic and hopefulworld of the young American democracy, but of a world in collapse.Beside Dos Passos and others of the same group, the early Henry Millermay be called the spiritual father of the currents under discussion. Ithas been said of him that he is “more than a writer or an artist, a kindof collective phenomenon of his epoch — an incarnate and vociferousphenomenon, a raw manifestation of the anguish, the furious despair,and the infinite horror extending behind the crumbling facade .”  It isthe sense of a tabula rasa, the cosmic silence, the void, the end of awhole epoch, “in a prophet who proclaims the end of a world at thevery moment when it is flowering and radiating, at the apogee of itsgrandeur and its pestilential contagion.”
302Miller himself wrote these characteristic words: “From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which envelopedme, which I breathed in through the gills .”  “A stone forest the centerof which was chaos ”  is the sensation of the ambience in which today’sman moves. “Sometimes in the dead center, in that very heart of chaos,I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended someone,
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307or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopelessand bewildering .”
308A partly convergent testimony from another direction is that whichHermann Hesse puts into the mouth of one of his characters: “I’d ratherfeel burned by a diabolic pain than to live in these sanely temperatesurroundings. A wild desire flares up in me for intense emotions, sensations, a rage against this whole toneless, flat, normal, sterilized life,and a wish to destroy something — perhaps a warehouse, a cathedral,or myself — and to commit outrageous follies. . . . This in fact is whatI have always most hated, abhorred, and cursed: this satisfaction, thiscomplacent healthiness, this plump bourgeois optimism, this life ofthe mediocre, normal, common man .”  Paul van den Bosch, in his Lesenfants de I’absurde, wrote: “We are the ghosts of a war that we havenot fought. . . . Having opened our eyes on a disenchanted world, weare more than any others the children of the absurd. On certain days,the senselessness of the world weighs on us like a deformity. It seemsto us that God has died of old age, and we exist without a goal. . . . Weare not embittered; we start from zero. We were born among the ruins.When we were born, the gold was already transmuted into lead .”
309The heritage of the precursors of European nihilism has largelybeen translated, in these movements of ruined youth, into the crudeforms of life as it is lived. An important trait here is the absence ofany socialrevolutionary motive and the belief that no organized actioncan change things. That is the difference from the leftwing intellectuals who condemn bourgeois society, and from the nihilists of the past.
310“Work, read, prepare in groups, believe, then have your back broken —no thanks, that’s not for me,” says one of Kerouac’s characters. This isthe end result at which the “revolution” of the left has practically arrivedafter its triumph, after passing the phase of simple revolt. Camus madeit quite plain after the period of his communist illusions: The revolutionhas betrayed its origins with the constitution of new yokes and a newconformism, more obtuse and absurd than ever.
311It is not necessary to dwell any further on these testimonies of atraumatized existence, nor on those whom one might call the “martyrsof modern progress.” As I have said, all that interests us here is theirvalue as symptomatic indices of the times. The forms mentioned here
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316have also degenerated into extravagant and ephemeral fashions. Butthere is no denying the causal and necessary connection that unitesthem to the world where “God is dead” and no substitute has yet beenfound for him. When these forms pass, others of the same type willcertainly crop up, according to circumstances, until the present cycleis exhausted.
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322The Socioeconomic Mythand the Protest Movement
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324It is an important fact that some of the young people in crisis haveshown such indifference to the prospects of social revolution. But nowit is time to broaden our horizons by showing the particular type ofevasion and anesthetization, on the part of a humanity that has lostthe meaning of existence, that lurks behind the varieties of the modern socioeconomic myth, both that of Western “prosperity” and thatof Marxistcommunist ideology. In both cases, we still find ourselveswithin the orbit of nihilism, and a nihilism of far more spectacularproportions than those of the extremist groups where the crisis remainsacute and undisguised .
325I have already shown that the actual basis'of the myth in questionis the interpretation, on the part of a wellorganized historiography, ofthe processes that prepared for European nihilism as constituting progress. This basis is essentially identical both in the “Western” myth andin that of communism. But the two of them are in a kind of dialecticalrelationship, which reveals their true existential significance.
326It is easier to find the elements that betray this ultimate sense inthe communist myth, because of its blatant coarseness and its moreexplicit reference to the basic motive: the economy. As is well known,the communist myth takes the form of a violent polemic against allthe phenomena of spiritual crisis that I have treated up to now. Thesephenomena are recognized, certainly, but are blamed on bourgeois
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334decadence, the fin de siecle, and anarchic individualism: the symptomsof bourgeois elements alienated from reality. These are supposed to bethe terminal stages of decomposition of a doomed economic system,that of capitalism. The crisis is thus presented exclusively as one of values and ideals serving as superstructure to that system, which, having become hypocritical and deceptive, have nothing more to do withthe practical conduct of individuals or with the driving forces of theepoch. Humanity’s existential lesion is generally explained as an effectof material, economic organization in a society such as the capitalistone. The true remedy, the start of a “new and authentic humanism,” ahuman integrity and a “happiness never known before,” would then befurnished by the setting up of a different socioeconomic system, by theabolition of capitalism, and by the institution of a communist societyof workers, such as is taking place in the Soviet area. Karl Marx hadalready praised in communism “the real appropriation of the humanessence on the part of man and for the sake of man, the return of manto himself as a social being, thus as a human man,”  seeing in it theequivalent of a perfect naturalism and even a true humanism.
335In its radical forms, wherever this myth is affirmed through thecontrol of movements, organizations, and people, it is linked to a corresponding education, a sort of psychic lobotomy intended methodicallyto neutralize and infantilize any form of higher sensibility and interest,every way of thought that is not in terms of the economy and socioeconomic processes. Behind the myth is the most terrible void, whichacts as the worst opiate yet administered to a rootless humanity. Yetthis deception is no different from the myth of prosperity, especiallyin the form it has taken in the West. Oblivious of the fact that they areliving on a volcano, materially, politically, and in relation to the struggle for world domination, Westerners enjoy a technological euphoria,encouraged by the prospects of the “second industrial revolution” ofthe atomic age.
336I have mentioned a type of dialectic that leads to the demolitionof this theory from the inside, insofar as in the communist world themyth has drawn most of its energy from a misrepresentation. The ideaof states in which “individual” problems and “decadent” crises no longer exist is presented as something only to be attained in the future,
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340whereas these are the very conditions that already obtain in the Westand the Nordic countries. It is the fascination of a goal that vanishes atthe moment one reaches it. In fact, the future socioeconomic ideal ofproletarian humanity already exists, spiritually bought and paid for, inWestern society, where, to the shame of Marx and Engels’ prognosis,a climate of prosperity has spread to vast social strata in the form of aplentiful, easy, and comfortable existence — a condition that Marxismdoes not condemn as such, but only because it thinks of it as the privilege of an upper class of capitalist “exploiters,” not as the commonproperty of a homogenized society. But the horizons are essentially thesame, and in regard to recent developments, we shall see what conclusions the socalled protest movement has drawn from them.
341At all events, the error and the illusion are the same in both socioeconomic ideologies, namely the serious assumption that existentialmisery can be reduced to suffering in one way or another from material want, and to impoverishment due to a given socioeconomic system. They assume that misery is greater among the disinherited or theproletariat than among those living in prosperous or privileged economic conditions, and that it will consequently diminish with the “freedom from want” and the general advance of the material conditionsof existence. The truth of the matter is that the meaning of existencecan be lacking as much in one group as in the other, and that thereis no correlation between material and spiritual misery. Only to thelowest and dullest levels of society can one preach the formula for allhuman happiness and wholeness as the wellnamed “animal ideal,” awellbeing that is little better than bovine. Hegel rightly wrote that theepochs of material wellbeing are blank pages in the history book, andToynbee has shown that the challenge to mankind of environmentallyand spiritually harsh and problematic conditions is often the incentivethat awakens the creative energies of civilization .  In some cases, it isnot paradoxical to say that the man of good will should try to make lifedifficult for his neighbor! It is a commonplace that all the higher virtuesattenuate and atrophy under easy conditions, when man is not forcedto prove himself in some way; and in the final analysis it does not matter in such situations if a good number fall away and are lost throughnatural selection. Andre Breton was right when he wrote that “we must
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347prevent the artificial precariousness of social conditions from concealing the real precariousness of the human condition.”
348But to avoid straying too far from my argument, the point is that themost acute forms of the modern existential crisis are appearing today atthe margin of a civilization of prosperity, as witness the currents in thenew generation that have been described. One sees there rebellion, disgust, and anger manifesting not in a wretched and oppressed subproletariat but often in young people who lack nothing, even in millionaires’children. And among other things it is a significant fact, statisticallyproven, that suicide is much rarer in poor countries than in rich ones,showing that the problematic life is felt more in the latter than in theformer. Blank despair can occur right up to the finishingpost of socioeconomic messianism, asln the musical comedy about a utopian islandwhere they have everything, “fun, women, and whiskey,” but also theeverrecurrent sense of the emptiness of existence, the sense that something is still missing.
349There exists, therefore, no correlation, except possibly a negativeone, between the meaning of life and conditions of economic wellbeing. There is a famous example, not recent but from the traditionalworld, of the Buddha Shakyamuni. He who on a metaphysical planeradically denounced the emptiness of existence and the deceptions ofthe “god of life,” pointing out the way of spiritual awakening, was nota victim of oppression and hunger, not a representative of social stratalike the plebeians of the Roman empire, to whom the revolutionarysermons of Christianity were first addressed; no, he was of the raceof princes, in all the splendor of his power and all the fullness of hisyouth. The true significance of the socioeconomic myth, in any of itsforms, is as a means of internal anesthetization or prophylaxis, aimedat evading the problem of an existence robbed of any meaning and atconsolidating in every way the fundamental insignificance of modernman’s life. We may therefore speak either of an opiate that is much morereal than that which, according to the Marxists, was fed to a humanity as yet unillumined and unevolved, mystified by religious beliefs, or,from another point of view, of the organized method of an active nihilism. The prospects in a goodly part of today’s world are more or lessthose that Zarathustra attributed to the “last man”: “The time is near
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354of the most despicable of men, who can no longer despise himself,” thelast man “of the tenacious and pullulating race.” “We have inventedhappiness, say the last men with a wink,” having “abandoned the landswhere life is hard .”
355In this context, there is another more recent phenomenon that isheavy with significance: that of the socalled global protest movement.It took its rise in part from the order of ideas already mentioned. Inthe wake of theories such as Marcuse’s, it came to the conclusion thatthere is a basic similarity, in terms of technological consumer society,between the system of advanced communist countries and that of thecapitalist world, because in the former, the original impulse of the proletarian revolution is much diminished. This impulse has now beenrealized, inasmuch as the working class has entered the consumer system, being assured of a lifestyle that is no longer proletarian but bourgeois: the very thing whose absence was the incentive for revolution.But alongside this convergence there has become visible the conditioning power of one and the same “system,” manifesting as the tendencyto destroy all the higher values of life and personality. At the level moreor less corresponding to the “last man” foreseen by Nietzsche, the individual in contemporary consumer society reckons that it would be tooexpensive, indeed absurd, to do without the comfort and wellbeingthat this evolved society offers him, merely for the sake of an abstractfreedom. Thus he accepts with a good grace all the leveling conditionings of the system. This realization has caused a bypassing of revolutionary Marxism, now deprived of its original motive force, in favor ofa “global protest” against the system. This movement, however, alsolacks any higher principle: it is irrational, anarchic, and instinctive incharacter. For want of anything else, it calls on the abject minorities ofoutsiders, on the excluded and rejected, sometimes even on the ThirdWorld (in which case Marxist fantasies reappear) and on the blacks, asbeing the only revolutionary potential. But it stands under the sign ofnothingness: it is a hysterical “revolution of the void and the ‘underground,’” of “maddened wasps trapped in a glass jar, who throw themselves frenetically against the walls.” In all of this it confirms in anotherway the general nihilistic character of the epoch, and indeed on a muchlarger scale, for the current protest is no longer that of the individuals
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361and small groups mentioned earlier, whose intellectual level was indubitably higher.
362Another point should be mentioned, at least cursorily, in the current climate of dissolution. The collapse of superstructures — of all thatcan henceforth only be regarded as superstructures — did not manifestonly in the sociological form of denouncing the lies and hypocrisy ofbourgeois life (as in Max Nordau, or as in the words of Relling toGregers in Ibsen: “Why do you use that odd word ‘ideals’? We have ourown perfectly good word: ‘lies’”)  or in moral and philosophical nihilism. It is prolonged and completed today by means of a science that,though false and contaminating if applied to men of other times andother civilizations, has the power of persuasion when applied to traumatized modern man; this science is none other than psychoanalysis. Theimpassioned effort of that philosopher who sought out the secret origin,the “genealogy” of predominant moral values at the very roots of allthose vital impulses that morality avoids or condemns, who sought thusto “naturalize” morality by denying it any autonomous or preeminentdignity, this impassioned effort has given place to the cold, cynical, and
363“scientific” methods of “depth psychology,” of the exploration of thesubconscious and the unconscious. In the latter, the irrational subsoilof existence, it has recognized the motive force essential to the wholelife of the soul; from that it deduces the proofs that make an illusionof the upper world of moral and social conscience with all its values,all its inhibitions and prohibitions, and its hysterical will to dominate.Meanwhile, in the subterranean zone nothing is at work but a mess ofcompulsions toward pleasure and death: Lustprinzip and Todestrieb.
364This, as everyone knows, is the essence of Freudianism. Other psychoanalytic currents that diverge in part from Freud are not substantially different. The evident theme in all of them is the regression to thepsychic subsoil, together with a profound traumatization of the humanpersonality. It is one further aspect of contemporary nihilism, and,moreover, the symptom of a sickly consciousness, too weak to hold incheck the lower regions of the soul with their socalled archetypes, andwhich might well be compared to Goethe’s “world of the Mothers.”
365It is hardly worth pointing out how these destructions convergewith the atmosphere of another typical genre of contemporary litera
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369ture, in which the sense of the “speciality of existence” is associatedwith that of an obscure, incomprehensible destiny, a fatality, and anabsurd condemnation hanging over man’s eternal solitude, taken to bethe actual human condition. It is like the sense of an incomprehensiblefoundation of human life that fades into impenetrable and anguishfilled darkness.
370This theme, shown in its typical form by Kafka, is not foreign tospeculative existentialism, to which I shall return in due course. WhatI wish to underline at this point is that we are not dealing with atruth discovered by someone who “has been able to feel more and seemore deeply”; it is merely what is perceived in the very atmosphere ofEuropean nihilism, and of a humanity that has taken shape after thedeath of God.
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378We can now return to the problem that really interests us. In all thecritical situations treated up to now, their predominant trait is that ofbeing the objects, indeed the victims, of the destructive processes set inmotion: processes which are simply suffered by current humanity. Thisholds good both for those who have adapted to a life based on nothing and lacking any true direction, helping themselves with a system ofanesthetics and surrogates, and eventually resorting to the survivingforms of a secure bourgeois existence, and for those who feel the existential crisis of modern man in all of their being, and are consequentlydriven toward the kinds of revolt or risky existence that were mentionedabove.
379This applies, therefore, to the vast majority of our contemporaries.In contrast, there is a different and much smaller category of modernmen who, instead of submitting to the nihilist processes, seek to acceptthem actively. In particular, there are those who not only admit thatthe processes of dissolution are irreversible and that there is no goingback, but who would not want to follow that path even if it existed.They willingly accept their condition of being without support or roots.Then the problem arises of how far the negative can be transformedinto something positive.
380To someone who has the necessary character to assume such anattitude, the possibility opens of a new interpretation of the adventureof mankind wanting to be free, and of the crisis that is the consequenceof this adventure. Thus arises the idea of a trial, and of destructionsthat are simply the consequence of not being equal to it, or as one mightsay, not being equal to one’s own action. Those who are interested may
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388recall the ancient myths concerning an audacious sacrilege in which itis not the sacrilege in itself that brings about the ruin of some symbolicpersonage, but lack of the necessary dignity or strength to accomplishan act that frees one from the divine bonds.
389The special human type who concerns us here and who partially fitsthe category in question may adopt the same point of view. As we recall,his differentiated character consists in facing the problems of modernman without being a “modern man” himself; he belongs to a differentworld and preserves within himself a different existential dimension.Unlike the others, his problem is not the dramatic search for a basis (inprinciple, he already possesses one), but that of his own expression andconfirmation in the modern epoch, in his life here and now.
390With this human type in mind, let us examine the theme of “positivenihilism,” or, if one prefers, the transition to the postnihilist stage. Sinceit is better to do so from a standpoint inside the modern world, ratherthan outside it, we can take as a provisional basis some of Nietzsche’sfundamental ideas, to test their solidity. We may find, in fact, that themore recent exponents of modern thought have gone little further thanNietzsche in their search for a new meaning of life, despite all that isinconsistent and negative in his philosophy.
391Nietzsche considered himself “the first perfect nihilist in Europe,because he has already overcome nihilism, having lived it in his soul —having it behind himself, beneath himself, outside himself.”  Havingseen that “nihilism is the final, logical conclusion of our great valuesand ideals,” and having asserted that “we must pass through this nihilism in order to grasp the true nature of the Values’ of the past,”  henevertheless considered nihilism as “a pathological, transitional stage” 3and proclaimed the “countermovement” that was destined to supplantit, without giving up the ground already won.
392Nietzsche showed that the point at which one realizes that “God isdead,” that the whole world of “spirit,” of good and evil, is only an illusion, and that the only true world is that which was negated or rejectedin the name of the former, is the crux of a decisive test. “The weak shatter, the strong destroy what does not shatter them, while those strongerstill go beyond the values that once served them.”  Nietzsche calls thisthe “tragic phase” of nihilism, which leads to a reversal of perspectives;
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397nihilism at this point appears as a sign of strength, signifying “that thepower to create, to will, has developed far enough that one has no further need for this general interpretation (of existence), of this introduction of a meaning (into it).”  “It is a measure of one’s strength of willto know how far one can do without a meaning to things, how far onecan bear to live in a meaningless world: for then one will organize partof it.”  Nietzsche calls this positive pessimism, or “the pessimism ofstrength,”  and makes it the premise of a higher ethic. “If at first manneeded a god, now he is thrilled with a universal, godless disorder, witha world of chance, where the fearful, the ambiguous, and the seductiveare part of his very existence.” In this world once again made “pure”and uniquely itself he stands erect, “conqueror of God and of nothingness.”  The problem of the meaning of life is thus resolved with theaffirmation that life is and can be a value in itself.
398This brings us to the precise point made above. The significanceof all the crises of recent times can be summarized as follows: a manwanted to be free, for whom a life of freedom could spell only ruin. Tosay “God is dead” is only an emotional way of stating the basic factof the epoch. But Nietzsche himself remarks that having “killed God,wasn’t that perhaps rather too grand of us? Shouldn’t we become godsin order to be worthy of it?”  After recognizing that “nothing exists,all is permitted,”  and the “freedom of the spirit,” the inevitable consequence is the challenge: “Now prove the nobility of your nature.”
399A famous passage of Zarathustra gives the most pregnant formulation to the essence of the crisis. “You call yourself free? Let me hearyour ruling thoughts, and not that you have escaped bondage. Are youone who deserved to escape from it? There are many who threw awaytheir only worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what?Why should Zarathustra care? Your eyes should answer plainly: freefor wbat?” u And Zarathustra warns that it will be terrible to be alone,without any laws from above oneself, alone with one’s own freedomin a desert place and an icy air, judge and avenger of one’s own law.For him who only acquires any worth by serving, for him who had inhis bonds not a cause of paralysis but a support, solitude appears as acurse; he loses courage and his initial pride deflates. These are the sentiments, continues Zarathustra, that then assail the free man, and that
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404will not fail to kill him if he does not kill them first. In precise terms,and from a higher point of view, this is the essential ground of modernman’s unhappiness.
405Dostoyevsky points out the same thing in analogous fashion: it isKirilov’s doctrine. The framework is identical: “Man only inventedGod so that he could live without killing himself. And this is the history of mankind from its origins up to the present day,” says Kirilov . 12The implication is plain: it is a necessity for man to have a center, abasic value. When he did not find it within himself, he placed it outsidehimself, projecting it onto God, whom he supposed to exist, certainly,but incarnated in an “other,” and faith in this other provisionally solvedthe existential problem. Naturally this is not really, as Kirilov says, thewhole meaning of the history of mankind; it is only that of the devotional phase of a theistic religion, a phase that already represents a disintegration of the world of Tradition and precedes the critical pointof metaphysical breakdown of which I have spoken. The eyes of the
406“free man” Kirilov are open: “I don’t want to believe. I know that Goddoesn’t exist, and can’t exist.” The consequence is therefore “If Goddoes not exist, I am God. ... To recognize that there is no God and notto recognize at the same time that one has become God is an absurdityand an incongruity, because otherwise one would not fail to kill oneself.” One can dispense with the suicide that is an obsession of Kirilov’slucid folly, and speak simply of breakdown, disintegration, becominglost in meaninglessness. In the face of this situation, terror and anguisharise: “He’s like a wretch who has received a legacy but takes fright andwon’t set his hand to it, because he doesn’t think himself worthy of it.”We should not take seriously the act with which Kirilov thinks he candestroy his terror in the face of the divine legacy that he should accept,demonstrating at the same time “his divinity.” And we can set aside allthis emphatic talk of God and being God, for the real problem posedhere is one of values, and of “being free for what?”
407Nothing better characterizes failure in the crucial test, the negative result of the nihilistic experience, than the sentiment expressed bySartre in these words: “We are condemned to be free .”  Man takesabsolute freedom for himself, but he can only feel this freedom as acondemnation. Metaphysical anguish is its counterpart.
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413Later we shall examine the specific themes of existentialism. Fornow, we shall see what can be retained of Nietzsche’s views, not as anihilist but as one who thought that he had left nihilism behind him,and thus created the premises for a higher existence and a new state ofhealth.
414Once the idols have fallen, good and evil have been surpassed,along with all the surrogates of the old God, and the mist has liftedfrom one’s eyes, nothing is left to Nietzsche but “this world,” life, thebody; he remains “faithful to the earth.” Thereupon, as we know,the theme of the superman appears. “God is dead, now we want thesuperman to come .”  The superman will be the meaning of the earth,the justification of existence. Man is “a bridge, not a goal,” “a ropestretched between the brute and the superman, a rope stretched abovean abyss .”  This is not the place for a deep analysis of the manifoldand divergent themes that crystallize in Nietzsche’s work around thiscentral motif. The essential can be spelled out as follows.
415The negative, destructive phase of Nietzsche’s thought ends withthe affirmation of immanence: all transcendent values, systems of endsand of higher truths, are interpreted as functions of life. In its turn, theessence of life — and more generally of nature — is the will to power.The superman is also defined as a function of the will to power anddomination. One can see from this that Nietzsche’s nihilism stops halfway. It sets up a new table of values, including a good and an evil.It presents a new ideal with dogmatic affirmation, whereas in reality this ideal is only one of many that could take shape in “life,” andwhich is not in fact justified in and of itself, without a particular choiceand without faith in it. The fact that the fixed point of reference setup beyond nihilism lacks a true foundation so long as one insists onpure immanence is already apparent in the part of Nietzsche’s thoughtthat deals with historical criticism and sociology. The entire world of
416“higher” values is interpreted there as reflecting a “decadence.” But atthe same time these values are seen as the weapons of a hidden willto power on the part of a certain human group, which has used themto hamper another group whose life and ideals resemble those of thesuperman. The instinct of decadence itself is then presented as a specialvariety of the will to power. Now, it is obvious that in function of a
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421mere will to power, all distinctions vanish: there are no more supermen or sheepmen, neither affirmers nor negators of life. There is onlya variety of techniques, of means (far from being reducible to sheerphysical force), tending to make one human class or another prevail;means that are indiscriminately called good in proportion to their success. If in life and the history of civilization there exist phases of riseand decline, phases of creation and destruction and decadence, whatauthorizes us to ascribe value to one rather than to the others? Whyshould decadence be an evil? It is all life, and all justifiable in termsof life, if this is truly taken in its irrational, naked reality, outside anytheology or teleology, as Nietzsche would have wished. Even “antinature” and “violence against life” enter into it. Once again, all firmground gives way.
422Nietzsche moreover wanted to restore its “innocence” to becoming by freeing it from all finality and intentionality, so as to free manand let him walk on his own feet — the same Nietzsche who had justlycriticized and rejected evolutionism and Darwinism because he couldsee that the higher figures and types of life are only sporadic and fortuituous cases.  They are positions that man gains only in order to losethem, and they create no continuity because they consist of beings whoare more than usually exposed to danger and destruction. The philosopher himself ends with a finalistic concession when, in order to givemeaning to presentday humanity, he proposes the hypothetical futureman in the guise of the superman: a goal worth dedicating oneself to,and even sacrificing oneself and dying for. Mutatis mutandis, thingshere are not very different from the Marxistcommunist eschatology,in which the mirage of a future human condition after the worldwiderevolution serves to give meaning to everything inflicted on the man oftoday in the areas controlled by this ideology. This is a flagrant contradiction of the demands of a life that is its own meaning. The secondpoint is that the pure affirmation of life does not necessarily coincidewith the will to power in the strict, qualitative sense, nor with the affirmation of the superman.
423Thus Nietzsche’s solution is only a pseudosolution. A true nihilismdoes not spare even the doctrine of the superman. What is left, if onewants to be radical and follow a line of strict coherence, and what we
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429can accept in our investigations, is the idea that Nietzsche expressedthrough the symbol of the eternal return. It is the affirmation, now trulyunconditional, of all that is and of all that one is, of one’s own natureand one’s own situation. It is the attitude of one whose selfaffirmationand selfidentity come from the very roots of his being; who is not scaredbut exalted by the prospect that for an indefinite repetition of identicalcosmic cycles he has been what he is, and will be again, innumerabletimes. Naturally we are dealing with nothing more than a myth, whichhas the simple, pragmatic value of a test of strength. But there is anotherview that in fact leads beyond the world of becoming and toward aneternalization of the being. Nietzsche differs little from Neoplatonismwhen he says: “For everything to return is the closest approximation ofa world of becomingto a world of being .”  And also: “To impose thecharacter of being upon becoming is the supreme test of power .”  At itsbase, this leads to an opening beyond immanence unilaterally conceived,and toward the feeling that “all things have been baptized in the font ofeternity and beyond good and evil .”  The same thing was taught in theworld of Tradition; and it is uncontestable that a confused thirst for eternity runs through Nietzsche’s works, even opening to certain momentary ecstasies. One recalls Zarathustra invoking “the joy that wills theeternity of everything, a deep eternity ”  like the heavens above, “pure,profound abyss of light .”
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437For now we must set aside such allusions to a higher dimension of experience of a liberated world in order to define more precisely what such avision of existence offers us in realistic terms. It is, in fact, the principleof purely being oneself. This is what remains after the elimination ofwhat philosophy calls “heteronomous morality,” or morality based onan external law or command. Nietzsche said this about it: “They callyou destroyers of morality, but you are only the discoverers of yourselves”;  and also: “We must liberate ourselves from morality so thatwe can live morally.”  By the latter phrase, he means living according toone’s own law, the law defined by one’s own nature. (This may result inthe way of the superman, but only as a very special case.)
438This is on the same lines as the “autonomous morality” of Kant’scategorical imperative, but with the difference that the command isabsolutely internal, separate from any external mover, and is not basedon a hypothetical law extracted from practical reason that is valid forall and revealed to man’s conscience as such, but rather on one’s ownspecific being.
439Nietzsche himself often presented these issues as though they wereequivalent to naturalism. One frequently finds in him the simplisticallyphysiological and materialistic interpretation of human nature, but itis basically inauthentic, accessory, and prompted by his wellknownpolemic against “pure spirit.” In fact, Nietzsche saw deeper than that,and did not stop at the physical being when he spoke of the “greaterreason”  contained in the body and opposed to the lesser reason: thatwhich “does not say I, but is I,” and which uses the “spirit” and eventhe senses as “little tools and toys.” It is a “powerful lord, an unknownsage that is called oneself ( Selbst )” “the guiding thread of the I thatsuggests all its ideas to it,” which “looks with the eyes of the senses and
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448listens with the ears of the spirit.” He is not speaking here of the physisbut of the “being” in the full ontological significance of the word. Theterm he uses, das Selbst, can also be rendered by “the Self” as opposedto the I ( Ich ): an opposition that recalls that of the traditional doctrinesalready mentioned between the supraindividual principle of the personand that which they call the “physical I.”
449Once the crude physiological interpretation is cleared away, thereemerges a valid attitude for the man who must stay standing as a freebeing, even in the epoch of dissolution: to assume his own being intoa willing, making it his own law, a law as absolute and autonomous asKant’s categorical imperative, but affirmed without regard for receivedvalues, for “good” or “evil,” nor for happiness, pleasure, or pain.
450(Nietzsche too regarded hedonism and eudaemonism, the abstract,inorganic search for pleasure and happiness, as symptoms of weakening and decadence.) The man in question affirms and actualizes hisown being without considering rewards or punishments, either hereor in an afterlife, saying: “The way does not exist: this is my will, neither good nor bad, but my own.”  In short, Nietzsche hands on theancient sayings “Be yourself,” “Become what you are,”  as propositions for today, when all superstructure has fragmented. We shall seethat the existentialists take up a similar theme, albeit less confidently.Stirner is, however, not to be counted among its antecedents, becausein his idea of the “Unique” there is virtually no opening of the deepestdimensions of existence. One has to go back to M. Guyau, who equallyposed the problem of a line of conduct beyond any sanction or duty; hewrote: “Authoritarian metaphysics and religion are leadingstrings forbabies: it’s time to walk by oneself. . . . We should look for revelationin ourselves. Christ is no more: each of us must be Christ for himself,and be joined to God as far as he will or can be, or even deny God.”  Itis as though faith still existed, but “without a heaven waiting for us ora positive law to guide us,” as a simple state. Strength and responsibility must be no less than they were long ago, when they were born fromreligious faith and from a given point of support, in a different humantype and a different climate. Nietzsche’s idea is identical.
451For our part, if this system is to be made acceptable as valid forthe problem in hand, every unspoken but limiting implication has to
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456be eliminated from it, everything from which one might draw a new,illusory support.
457PostRousseau anarchic doctrines were already characterized bypremises of this kind: the nihilism of the anarchist classics had as itscounterpart the supposition of the fundamental goodness of humannature. Guyau, who has just been quoted, offers another example. Hesought to found a morality “without sanctions or obligations,” a “free”morality, on “life.”  But his notion of life was not the naked, authenticlife free from attributes, but rather a life conceived as preventively andarbitrarily moralized or sterilized, a life in which certain tendenciesare taken for granted: expansion, altruism, superabundance. Guyauformulated a new idea of duty, a duty that derived from power, fromthe life impulse, from the sense of one’s own strength “that demands tobe exercised”  (“I can, therefore I must”). Its limitation becomes obvious when Guyau endows the expansive life impulse with an exclusivelypositive, even a social character, while presenting pure selfaffirmation,expansion not toward others and for others but against them, as a selfnegation and a contradiction of life, opposed to its natural expressivemotion of increase and enrichment. It is enough to ask what could everprevent a life that wanted to “negate” or “contradict” itself from doingso, and what would be censurable if it decided to take this route, to realize that Guyau has by no means made a tabula rasa, but has furtivelyintroduced restrictions that more or less return to one of the systems ofthe old morality that he intended to supersede, because he recognizedtheir vulnerability to nihilist criticism.
458The elimination of every presupposition also causes a crisis formuch of the Nietzschean doctrine of the superman, which is no lessunilateral because of its frequent emphasis on aspects of life contraryto those just posited by Guyau: will to power, hardness, and so on. Inall strictness, to be purely oneself and to have a fully free existence, oneshould be able to accept, will, and say an absolute “yes” to whateverone is — even when there is nothing in one’s nature that approaches theideal of the superman; even if one’s own life and destiny do not presentheroism, nobility, splendor, generosity, and altruism, but decadence,corruption, debility, and perversion. A distant reflection of this pathis to be found even in the Christian world, in Calvinism. It is the
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463doctrine of fallen man, broken by original sin but redeemed through
464“faith”; of man simultaneously justified and a sinner, in the face of theAbsolute. But in the world without God, the result of such an attitudeis to leave one to oneself in an extreme trial of strength and denudation of the I. Hence the Nietzschean claim of having “rediscoveredthe way that leads to a yes and a no: I teach you to say yes to all thatstrengthens, that gathers energy, that justifies the feeling of vigor .” 9This claim is justified only when the corresponding command is transposed, internalized, and purified, detached from any specific contentand especially from any reference to a greater or lesser vitality. It israther a matter of either being capable or incapable of holding firmwithin, in one’s own naked absolute being, with nothing to fear andnothing to hope forr
465At this level, the words about the liberation from every sin maybecome valid: “There is no place, no aim, no sense, in which we canbe in any way unburdened of our own being”  — not in the physicalworld, nor in society, nor in God. It is an existential mode. As for thecontent of one’s own law, as I have said, that remains and must remainundetermined.
466We can now summarize the positive gains to be made from thesystems of Nietzsche and other thinkers along the same lines as his. Forour purposes, however, we should remember that this analysis is notbeing made in the abstract, but in view of what may have value, not foreveryone but for a special human type.
467This requires some extra considerations, because without thispremise it is easy to see that even the solution of “being oneself” cannotreally serve as a solid foundation. We shall see in due course that it isonly a “firstgrade solution,” but before that there is a difficulty to bedealt with.
468It is clear that the rule of being oneself implies that one can speakof a “proper nature” for everyone, whatever it may be, as somethingwell defined and recognizable. But this is problematic, especially at thepresent time. It may have been less difficult in societies that did notknow individualism, in traditional societies organized along groups andcastes where the factors of heredity, birth, and environment favored ahigh degree of internal unity and the differentiation of types, and where
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473the natural articulations were reinforced and nurtured by customs, ethics, laws, and sometimes even by no less differentiated religious forms.All this has long ceased to exist for modern Western man, and has longbeen “superseded” along the road of “liberty”; thus the average modernman is changeable, unstable, devoid of any real form. The Pauline andFaustian lament, “two souls, alas, live in my breast ,”  is already anoptimistic assumption; all too many have to admit, like a typical character in Hesse, that they have a multitude of souls! Nietzsche himselfadmitted this state of affairs when he wrote: “One should not assumethat many men are ‘persons.’ There are also men composed of severalpersons, but the majority possess none at all .”  And again: “Becomeyourself: an injunction addressed only to a few, and which to an evensmaller number appears redundant .”  One can see now how problematic is the very point that has hitherto seemed fixed: fidelity tooneself, the absolute, autonomous law based on one’s own “being,”when it is formulated in general and abstract terms. Everything issubject to debate — a situation accurately exemplified by characters inDostoyevsky, like Raskolnikov or Stavrogin. At the moment when theyare thrown back on their own naked will, trying to prove it to themselves with an absolute action, they collapse; they collapse preciselybecause they are divided beings, because they are deluded concerning their true nature and their real strength. Their freedom is turnedagainst them and destroys them; they fail at the very point at whichthey should have reaffirmed themselves — in their depths they findnothing to sustain them and carry them forward. We recall the wordsof Stavrogin’s testament: “I have tested my strength everywhere, as youadvised me to do in order to know myself. . . . What I have never seen,and still do not see, is what I should apply my strength to. My desireslack the energy; they cannot drive me. One can cross a river on a log,but not on a splinter .”  The abyss wins out over Stavrogin, and hisfailure is sealed by suicide.
474The same problem evidently lurks at the center of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power. Power in itself is formless. It has no sensewithout the basis of a given “being,” an internal direction, an essentialunity. When that is wanting, everything slides back into chaos. “Hereis the greatest strength, but it does not know what it is for. The means
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479exist, but they have no end.” We shall soon see how this situation isaggravated when the transcendent dimension is activated in it.
480For the moment, we note that in general, the phenomenon of remorseis closely linked to the situation of a divided and selfcontradictorybeing. Remorse occurs when, despite everything, a central tendencysurvives in the being and reawakens after actions that have violated ordenied it, arising from secondary impulses that are not strong enoughto completely supplant it. Guyau speaks in this sense of a morality “thatis none other than the unity of the being,” and an immorality that, “onthe contrary, is a splitting, an opposition of tendencies that limit oneanother.” We know Nietzsche’s image of the “pale criminal,” a truemirror of the Dostoyevskian character just mentioned, “whose actionhas paralyzed his poor reason, as a chalk line paralyzes a chicken .”
481We have clearly reached the point at which one must go beyond the
482“neutral” posing of the problem. To continue our agenda, I will nowconsider a line of conduct during the reign of dissolution that is notsuitable for everyone, but for a differentiated type, and especially forthe heir to the man of the traditional world, who retains his roots inthat world even though he finds himself devoid of any support for it inhis outer existence.
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490Only this kind of man can use those positive aspects gleaned fromthe preceding analysis as his elementary basis, because when he lookswithin himself, he does not find a changeable and divided substance,but a fundamental direction, a “dominant,” even though shrouded orlimited by secondary impulses. What is more, the essential thing is thatsuch a man is characterized by an existential dimension not present inthe predominant human type of recent times — that is, the dimensionof transcendence.
491The problems raised by these last considerations can be exemplifiedwith reference to Nietzsche himself, for the tacit assumption of manyof his attitudes is no different: it is the action, albeit unconscious, of thetranscendent dimension. This alone can explain the otherwise arbitraryand contradictory quality of some of his statements; only this point ofview also offers the possibility of integrating and consolidating them bynot taking the wrong path of “naturalism.” On the one hand, Nietzschereally felt the vocation of the particular human type just mentioned,both in his destructive role and in his effort to get beyond the zero pointof values. On the other hand, rather than consciously taking up theexistential dimension of transcendence, he was, as it were, its victim,the object rather than the subject of the corresponding energy in action.This gives one a sure guide for orientation throughout Nietzsche’s philosophy, for recognizing both its limitations and its high value for ourpurposes.
492No less evident here is the solution given by turning the tragic andabsurd vision of life into its opposite. Nietzsche’s solution of the problemof the meaning of life, consisting in the affirmation that this meaning
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501does not exist outside of life, and that life in itself is meaning (fromwhich derive all the themes already mentioned, including the myth ofthe eternal return), is valid only on the presupposition of a being thathas transcendence as its essential component.
502This is no place for the detailed proof of this thesis, which wouldbelong in a special study of Nietzsche. We have already seen with regardto the “will to power” that it is not so much the general characteristic oflife, but one of its possible manifestations, one of its many faces. To saythat life “always surpasses itself,” “wants to ascend, and to regenerateitself by rising and surpassing itself,”  or that the life’s secret is “I amthat which must always conquer itself”  — all that is simply the result ofa very unusual vocation projecting itself to the dimensions of a worldview. It is merely the reflection of a certain nature, and by no means thegeneral or objective character of every existence. The foundation thatreally prevails in existence is much closer to Schopenhauer’s formulation than to this one of Nietzsche’s; that is, the will to live as eternaland inexhaustible desire, not the will to power in the true sense, or thepositive, ascending drive to dominance.
503It is only, in fact, through the other dimension, that of transcendence, that life presents those characteristics that Nietzsche mistakenlygeneralizes and thinks he can attribute to it when he sets up his newvalues. His imperfect understanding of what was going on inside himexplains not only the oscillations and limitations of his philosophy, hutalso the tragic side of his human existence. On the one hand, we havethe theme of a pure, naturalistic exaltation of life, albeit in forms thatbetray a surrender of being to the simple world of instincts and passions; for the absolute affirmation of the latter on the part of the willruns the danger of their asserting themselves through the will, makingit their servant. On the other hand, many and indeed prevalent arethe testimonies to a reaction to life that cannot arise out of life itself,but solely from a principle superior to it, as revealed in a characteristicphrase: “Spirit is the life that cuts through life” (Geist ist das Leben,das selber ins Leben schneidet)d
504All the positive aspects of the way of the superman belong to thissecond aspect: the power to make a law for oneself, the “power torefuse and not to act, when one is pressed to affirmation by a prodi
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509gious force and an enormous tension”  ; the natural and free asceticismmoved to test its own strength by gauging “the power of a will according to the degree of resistance, pain, and torment that it can bear inorder to turn them to its own advantage ”  (so that from this pointof view everything that existence offers in the way of evil, pain, andobstacles, everything that has nourished the popular forms of saviorreligions, is accepted, even desired); the principle of not obeying thepassions, but of holding them on a leash (“greatness of character doesnot consist in not having such passions: one must have them to thegreatest degree, but held in check, and moreover doing this with simplicity, not feeling any particular satisfaction thereby”  ); the idea that
510“the superior man is distinguished from the inferior by his intrepidity,by his defiance of unhappiness ”  (“it is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle”  ); the respondingwith incredulity to those who point “the way to happiness” in order tomake man follow a certain behavior: “But what does happiness matterto ms?”  ; the recognition that one of the ways to preserve a superiorspecies of man is “to claim the right to exceptional acts as attemptsat victory over oneself and as acts of freedom ... to assure oneself,with a sort of asceticism, a preponderance and a certitude of one’sown strength of will ,”  without refusing any privation; to affirm thatfreedom whose elements include “keeping the distance which separates us, being indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privations, evento life itself ” n the highest type of the free mgji being seen in “he whoalways overcomes the strongest resistances . . . great danger makinghim a being worthy of veneration”  ; to denounce the insidious confusion between discipline and enfeeblement (the goal of discipline canonly be a greater strength — “he who does not dominate is weak, dissipated, inconstant”) and holding that “indulgence can only be objectedto in the case of him who has no right to it, and when all the passionshave been discredited thanks to those who were not strong enough toturn them to their own advantage”  ; to point the way of those who,free from all bonds, obeying only their own law, are unbending inobedience to it and above every human weakness; all those aspects, infine, in which the superman is not the “blond beast of prey ”  and theheir to the equivocal virtus of Renaissance despots, but is also capable
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516of generosity, quick to offer manly aid, of “generous virtue,” magnanimity, and superiority to his own individuality  — all these are thepositive elements that the man of Tradition also makes his own, butwhich are only comprehensible and attainable when “life” is “morethan life,” that is, through transcendence. They are values attainableonly by those in whom there is something else, and something more,than mere life.
517This is no place to go into detail about all the finer shades of meaning in the mass of Nietzsche’s thought concerning these main points, norinto the confusions and deviations of which one must beware when onepasses the point at which most of Nietzsche’s admirers, as well as hisdetractors, have stopped. Life and transcendence are continually muddled in his philosdbhy, and of all the consequences of his antiChristianpolemic, this confusion has been one of the worst. He characterizesthe values negated by Christian ideals — the ideals of the pariah, thechandala — and which supposedly constitute the opposite, affirmative,antinihilistic ideals, as follows: “dignity, distance, great responsibility,exuberance, proud animality, the martial and victorious instincts, theapotheosis of the passions, of revenge, cunning, anger, voluptuousness,the spirit of adventurous knowledge”  ; then he enumerates among thepositive passions “pride, happiness, health, love between the sexes, hostility and war, reverence, beautiful attitudes, good manners, strong will,the discipline of higher intellectuality, the will to power, respect for theearth and for life — all that is rich, which wants to give and to justifylife, eternalize it, divinize it .”  The muddle is evident; it is a confusionof the sacred and the profane.
518But there is another point, and for us it is an even more importantone. Even if one extracts from all this the effective forms of a selftranscendence, one faces an awkward situation when trying to speak ofan “ascesis as a goal in itself” and when the superman is presented asthe utmost limit of the human species, rather than as “more than man”and a being of a different nature, wielder and witness of a different dignity. One danger is that all the experiences not marked by a simple adherence to the pure, irrational, and instinctive substratum of life, in whichthe simple will to power is surpassed and the path is not that of a dominator of men and of external forces, but rather a dominator of oneself,
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522remain closed off in the field of mere sensation. There is a significantpassage in Nietzsche concerning this, in which the “saying no” to allthe force surging within oneself is presented as a “Dionysism,”  whereasa more fitting term would perhaps be autosadism. A lifelong disciplineand an asceticism pursued inexorably for better or worse, throughextreme trials, regardless of oneself and others, may have the mere valueof an increased and exasperated sensation of “life,” of an “I” whosesense of itself comes only from this savage and embittered sensation. Alltoo often, it is in such terms that Nietzsche interpreted his own experience and the way that he proclaimed. For our purposes it is all the moreimportant to signal this wrong turning, because, all theory aside, it iseasy to see that it lies at the basis of many extreme experiences on thepart of those contemporary generations who courted disaster, as mentioned above.
523As for the internal, “esoteric” interpretation of Nietzsche’s personal experience, taken as a whole beyond this pseudosolution, I havealready indicated that the key to it is given by a passive experienceof transcendence and of its activation. The cutting of all bonds, theintolerance of all limits, the pure and incoercible impulse to overcomewithout any determined goal, to always move on beyond any givenstate, experience, or idea, and naturally and even more beyond anyhuman attachment to a given person, fearing neither contradictionsnor destructions, thus pure movement, with all that that implies of dissolution — “advancing with a devouring fire tl^at leaves nothing behinditself,” to use an expression from an ancient wisdom tradition, thoughit applies to a very different context — these essential characteristicsthat some have already recognized in Nietzsche can be explained precisely as so many forms in which the transcendent acts and manifests.But the fact that this is not recognized and admitted as such, the fact,therefore, that this energy remains in the closed circle of immanenceand of “life,” generates a higher voltage than the circuit can sustain.This fact, moreover, may be the true and deeper cause of the finalcollapse of Nietzsche the man. Besides, he always had a sensation ofliving dangerously. By  he was writing to Gast: “I have the feelingof living a life that is risky to the highest degree — I am one of thosemachines that might explode.”  At other times he spoke of a “continual
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528proximity to danger,” and it was surely from this that he drew thegeneralization that “superior men find themselves in continual innerand outer peril.”
529It is clear, even in this particular respect, how important Nietzscheis as a symbolic figure for our entire investigation. His case illustratesin precise terms what can, and indeed must, occur in a human type inwhich transcendence has awakened, yes, but who is uncentered withregard to it. We shall see that the essential themes of existentialism areto be interpreted no differently.
530This is not the way of the man we have in mind, who has quiteanother constitution. A clean line of division must be drawn. But first itis useful to see what is to be expected in the case of those who remainon this side of the lifle, that is, in those who follow the way of immanence unflinchingly, without turning back, without lowering their level,but also without the capacity to reach the turning point that alone canmake good their lack, from the very start, of the quality I have indicated in the man of Tradition, in the man who is constitutionally notmodern. Once they have entered on the way of absolute affirmation,and have mastered all those forms of “ascesis” and the activation of ahigher intensity of life that we have mentioned, their only saving solution is in a conscious change of polarity; in the possibility that at agiven point, in given situations or environments, by a kind of ontological rupture of level, their life would be turned upside down, as it were,and transformed into a different quality — the mehr leben [living more]would give place to a mehralsleben [more than living], to use the neatexpression suggested in another context by Georg Simmel .
531This is a possibility that can be entertained even in this presentepoch. The few who can accomplish it may achieve, even under currentconditions, a qualification analogous to what was inborn in the typeunder consideration. Certain gropings toward openings of the kind arenot unknown today, alongside the traumatization of existence. Onetypical sign, for example, is the interest in Zen felt by some membersof the Beat Generation. The condition for it is something like a suddenillumination — the satori of Zen. Without it, the path of those who haveundergone experiences like Nietzsche’s — and, in general, of those inwhom, for one reason or another and with or without their volition.
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536transcendence has awakened in the human circuit as an energy in theworld where God is dead — is a path that leads to the abyss. It is coldcomfort in such cases to speak of “the damned saints of our time” or of
537“angels with the face of a criminal or a pervert”; that is pure, gratuitousromanticism.
538In the contrary and positive case, the result might be expressed as atransition from the plane of “Dionysus” to that of a spiritual superiority, known in antiquity under the Apollonian or Olympian symbol. Itis of capital importance to recognize that this is the only solution thatdoes not involve a regression, and that it is the antithesis of any solution of the religious or devotional type. The “conversion” of certaincontemporaries who found themselves unable to sustain the tension ofthe nihilistic climate, or who faced the experiences in question superficially, as mere intellectuals, represent cases of surrender that are devoidof any interest for us.
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545Following on from this, and before taking up the positive part of oursubject, I should return to what was said earlier when specifying whathad reached, or was reaching, the point of crisis in the modern world.
546I have explained that the crisis on the social plane concerned bourgeois society and civilization. From the spiritual point of view, I spokeof the double aspect of the process of “emancipation” that has led to thepresent situation: first of its solely destructive and regressive aspect, thenof how it faces a differentiated human type with the risky ordeal of a complete internal liberation. Pursuing the latter aspect, I would make anotherpoint, namely that one of the causes favoring the processes of dissolutionhas been the confused sense of a true fact: the sense that everything inthe recent West of a religious nature, especially Christianity, belongs tothe “all too human” and has little to do with really transcendent values,beside being fairly incompatible, as a general climate and an internal attitude, with the dispositions and vocations proper to a higher human type.
547In particular, an important factor has been the mutilated character of Christianity when compared to the majority of other traditionalforms; mutilated, because it does not possess an “esotericism,” an innerteaching of a metaphysical character beyond the truths and dogmas ofthe faith offered to the common people. The extensions represented bysporadic experiences that are simply “mystical” and little understoodcannot make up for this essential lack in Christianity as a whole. Thisis why the work of demolition was so easy with the rise of socalled freethought, whereas in a different, complete tradition the presence of abody of teachings above the simply religious level would probably haveprevented it.
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555What is the God whose death has been announced? Nietzsche himself replies: “Only the god of morality has been conquered.”  He alsoasks: “Is there sense in conceiving of a god beyond good and evil?”  Thereply must be affirmative. “Let God slough off his moral skin, and weshall see him reappear beyond good and evil.”  What has disappearedis therefore not the god of metaphysics, but the god of theism, the personal god who is a projection of moral and social values and a supportfor human weakness. Now, the conception of a god in different termsis not only possible but essential within all the great traditions beforeand beside Christianity, and the principle of nonduality is also evidentin them. These other traditions recognized as the ultimate foundation ofthe universe a principle anterior and superior to all antitheses, including those of immanence and transcendence considered unilaterally. Thisconferred on existence — on all of existence, including that part of it thatappears problematic, destructive, and “evil” — the supreme justificationthat was being sought through a liberated worldview, to be affirmedbeyond the demolitions of nihilism. Zarathustra in fact announces nothing new when he says: “Everything that becomes seems to me divinedance and divine whim, and the liberated world returns to itself”  ; itis the same idea that Hinduism casts in the wellknown symbol of thedance and play of the naked god Shiva. As another example, we mightrecall the doctrine of the transcendent identity of samsara (the worldof becoming) with nirvana (the unconditioned), that ultimate peak ofesoteric wisdom. In the Mediterranean region, the saying of the finalmystery initiation, “Osiris is a black god,” refers to a similar level; andone could also include the teachings of Neoplatonism and of a few mystics of high stature concerning the metaphysical, impersonal, and superpersonal One, and so forth — right up to William Blake’s allegory of the
556“Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and the Goethean idea of the God ofthe “free glance” who does not judge according to good and evil, anidea encountered from the ancient West right up to Far Eastern Taoism.We see one of the most drastic proofs of this wisdom in the words of anascetic on the point of being murdered by a European soldier: “Don’tdeceive me! You too are God!”
557In the course of the involutional process described in the introduction, such horizons have gradually vanished from view. In cases like
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563Buddhism and Taoism it is very evident that they have passed from themetaphysical plane to the religious and devotional one, in terms of aregression due to the diffusion and profanation of the original innerdoctrine, which most people are incapable of understanding and following.  In the West, the conception of the sacred and the transcendent indevotional and moral terms, which in other systems belonged only to thepopular or regressive forms, became predominant and all but exclusive.
564We should mention, however, that even in the Christian world therehave been some allusions on the margins of Johannine mysticism to afuture epoch of a higher freedom. Joachim de Flore gave out that the
565“third age,” the age of the Spirit following those of the Father and theSon, would be that of freedom; and the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,”along similar lines, protlaimed an “anomie,” a liberty from the Law,from good and evil, in terms that even Nietzsche’s superman would nothave dared to profess. Echoes of these anticipations are to be foundin Jacopone da Todi himself, when in his Hymn to Holy Poverty andIts Threefold Heaven  he tells us “do not fear Hell, do not hope forHeaven,” and that one should “not rejoice in any good, nor mourn anyadversity”; when he refers to a “virtue that asks not why” and goes sofar as to dispense with virtue itself, possessing all things “in freedomof spirit,” this being for him the inner and symbolic sense of true “poverty.”
566The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that a group of concepts considered in the Christian West as essential and indispensable forany “true” religion — the personal god of theism, the moral law with thesanctions of heaven and hell, the limited conception of a providentialorder and a “moral and rational” finalism of the world, faith resting ona largely emotional, sentimental, and subintellectual basis — all of theseare foreign to a metaphysical vision of existence such as is well attestedin the world of Tradition. The God who has been attacked is God conceived as the center of gravity of all this merely religious system. But infact this may open the horizon of a new essentiality for those who acceptas a trial of their strength — one might even say, of their faith in thehigher sense — all the dissolving processes brought about by the direction that civilization has taken in recent times. The “moral skin” falls offa God who has finished up as opium of the people, or as the counterpart
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571of the petty morality that the bourgeois world substitutes for the greatermorality. But the essential core, represented by metaphysical teachingssuch as those just mentioned, remains inviolate for those who can perceive and live them, remains inaccessible to all those nihilistic processes,and withstands any dissolution.
572After this essential clarification and widening of perspectives, weare now ready to gather up everything from the themes consideredhitherto that may have a positive value today for the human type withwhom we are concerned.
573As far as worldviews are concerned, we are dealing with a conception of reality freed from the categories of good and evil, but with a metaphysical foundation, not a naturalistic or pantheistic one. Being knowsnothing of good or evil, nor do the great laws of things, nor the Absolute.A good or an evil exists solely in function of an end, and what is the standard by which to judge this end and thereby fix the ultimate legitimacyof an action or a being? Even the theology of Providence and the effortsof theistic theodicy to prop up the concept of the moral God cannot doaway with the idea of the Great Economy that includes evil, in whichevil is only a particular aspect of a higher order, transcending the littlehuman categories of the individual and the collectivity of individuals.
574The “other world” attacked by European nihilism, presented by thelatter as sheer illusion or condemned as an evasion, is not another reality; it is another dimension of reality in which the real, without beingnegated, acquires an absolute significance in the inconceivable nakedness of pure Being.
575In an epoch of dissolution, this is the essential basis of a vision oflife that is appropriate for the man reduced to himself, who must provehis own strength. Its counterpart is to be central or to make oneself so,to know or discover the supreme identity with oneself. It is to perceivethe dimension of transcendence within, and to anchor oneself in it,making of it the hinge that stays immobile even when the door slams
576(an image from Meister Eckhart). From this point on, any “invocation”or prayer becomes existentially impossible. The heritage of “God” thatone dared not accept is not that of the lucid madness of Kirilov; it is thecalm sense of a presence and an intangible possession, of a superiorityto life whilst in the very bosom of life. The deeper sense of what has
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582been said about the “new nobility” is no different: “Divinity consistsin precisely this: that the gods exist, but no God.” We could use theimage of a ray of light proceeding with no need to turn back, and carrying its luminous energy and the impulse from the center from whichit originated. It is also the absolute claim to one’s own position in termsthat exclude the theme of religious crisis, “feeling oneself abandoned byGod.” In such a state, that would be equivalent to a God who had abandoned himself. Similarly, no negation of God is possible: to negate ordoubt God would be to negate or doubt oneself. Once the idea of a personal God has disappeared, God ceases to be a “problem,” an object of
583“belief,” or a need of the soul; the terms “believer,” “atheist,” or “freethinker” appear nonsensical. One has gone beyond both attitudes.
584Once this point 4s grasped, we can indicate the terms in whichto deal with the existential challenge in relation to life’s negativity,tragedy, pain, problems, and absurdities. Seneca said that no spectacle is more pleasing to the gods than that of the superior man grappling with adversity. Only thus can he know his own strength — andSeneca adds that it is the men of valor who are sent to the riskiestpositions or on difficult missions, while the spineless and feeble areleft behind. There is the wellknown maxim: “That which does notdestroy us makes us stronger.”  In our case, the basis for this couragerefers to the dimension of transcendence in oneself: it is attested andconfirmed in all situations of chaos and dissolution, thus turning themto our own advantage. It is the antithesis of an arrogant hardening ofthe physical individuality in all its forms, whether unilaterally Stoicor Nietzschean. Instead, it is the conscious activation in oneself of theother principle and of its strength, in experiences, moreover, that arenot merely undergone but also sought, as I shall explain later. Thismust be kept firmly in mind.
585In some cases nowadays, the shock of reality and the consequenttrauma may serve not to validate and increase a strength that is alreadypresent, but to reawaken it. These are the cases in which only a thinfilm separates the principle of being in a person from that of the merelyhuman individuality. Situations of depression, emptiness, or tragedywhose negative solution is the return to religion may through a positivereaction lead to this awakening. Even in some of the most advanced
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590modern literature one finds curious testimonies of moments of liberation realized in the midst of disintegration. One example will suffice,from an author already cited. Henry Miller, after all the signs of thechaotic disintegration of a meaningless life, after stupefaction at “thegrandiose collapse of a whole world,” speaks of a vision that justifieseverything as it is — “a sort of eternity in suspense in which everythingis justified, supremely justified.” One looks for a miracle outside, hesays, “while a counter counts within and there is no hand that canreach it or stop it.” Only a sudden shock can do it. Then a new currentarises in the being. This makes him say: “Perhaps in reading this, onehas still the impression of chaos but this is written from a live centerand what is chaotic is merely peripheral, the tangential shreds, as itwere, of a world which no longer concerns me .”  This brings us back,in a way, to the rupture of levels mentioned above, which has the virtueof instilling a different quality in the circuit of mere “life.”
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599Up to now we have been establishing the rule for being oneself. Nowwe must bring to light the rule for proving oneself, then unite andspecify the two principles with particular reference to the human typethat concerns us. Just as this type is dual in its essential structure —in its determination as an individual, and its dimension of transcendence — being itself, and knowing itself through proving itself, presenttwo quite distinct degrees.
600With regard to the first degree, we have already noted the difficulty,especially in our times, that the principle of being oneself encounters inthe vast majority of individuals, given their lack of a basic unity or evenof one predominant and constant tendency among a multitude of others. Only in exceptional cases are these words of Nietzsche’s valid: “Onedoes best never to speak of two very lofty things, measure and mean.A few know their powers and their signs, thanks to the mystery pathsof inner experiences and conversions. They venerate something divinein them, and abhor speaking out loud .”  But in an age of dissolution, itis difficult even for one who possesses a basic internal form to know it,and thereby to know “himself,” otherwise than through an experiment.Hence we recall the line already mentioned, to be understood now as thesearch for, or the acceptance of, those situations or alternatives in whichthe prevailing force, one’s own “true nature,” is compelled to manifestand make itself known.
601The only actions that can be valid for this purpose are those thatarise from the depths. Peripheral or emotional reactions do not qualify, for those are like reflex movements provoked by a stimulus, arising “long before the depth of one’s own being has been touched or
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609questioned ,”  as Nietzsche himself said, seeing in this very incapacityfor deep impressions and engagement, and in this skindeep reactivityat the mercy of every sensation, a deplorable characteristic of modernman. For many people it is as though they have to relearn how to actin the true sense, actively, as one might say, and also typically. Evenfor the man whom we have in mind, taken in his worldly aspect, thisis an essential requirement today. We might note the correspondingdiscipline that is so important in traditional “inner teachings”: that ofselfremembering or selfawareness .  G. I. Gurdjieff, who has taughtsimilar things in our time, describes the contrary state as that of being
610“breathed” or “sucked” into ordinary existence without any awareness of the fact, without noticing the automatic or “somnambulistic”character that this existence has from a higher point of view. “I amsucked in by my thoughts, my memories, my desires, my sensations, bythe steak I eat, the cigarette I smoke, the love I make, by the sunshine,the rain, by this tree, by that passing car, by this book.” Thus one isa shadow of oneself. Life in a state of being, the “active act,” “activesensation,” and so on are unknown states. But this is not the place todigress further about this special method of realization .
611This trial through selfknowledge under the stimulus of variousexperiences and various encounters with reality may be associated in acertain sense with the maxim of amor fati (love of fate ).  Karl Jaspershas rightly said that this is not so much a precept of passive obedience to a necessity presumed to be predetermined and knowable, asan injunction to face each experience and everything in one’s existencethat is uncertain, ambiguous, and dangerous with the feeling that onewill never do anything other than follow one’s own path. The essentialthing in this attitude is a kind of transcendent confidence that givessecurity and intrepidity, and it can be included among the positive elements in the line of conduct that is gradually being delineated.
612The problem of being oneself has a particular and subordinate solution in terms of a unification. Once one has discovered through experiment which of one’s manifold tendencies is the central one, one sets aboutidentifying it with one’s will, stabilizing it, and organizing all one’s secondary or divergent tendencies around it. This is what it means to giveoneself a law, one’s own law. As we have seen, the incapacity to do this,
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619“the many discordant souls enclosed in my own breast,” and the refusalto obey even before one is capable of commanding oneself are causesof the disaster that may well end the path of a being driven toward theboundary situation in the world without God. There is a relevant saying:
620“He who cannot command himself must obey. And more than one cancommand himself, but is still far from being able to obey himself.”
621There is an example from the world of Tradition that may be ofinterest here. In Islam, long before nihilism, the initiatic Order of theIsmaelis used the very phrase “Nothing exists, everything is permitted.”  But it applied in this order exclusively to the upper grades of thehierarchy. Before attaining these grades and having the right to adoptthis truth for oneself, one had to pass four preliminary grades thatinvolved, among other" things, a rule of unconditional, blind obedience,taken to limits that are almost inconceivable for the Western mentality.For example, at a word from the Grand Master one had to be preparedto throw one’s life away without any reason or purpose.
622This brings us to the consideration of the second degree of the trialthrough selfknowledge, which belongs to the transcendent dimension and which conditions the final solution of the existential problem. With the first degree, in fact, with the recognition of “one’s ownnature” and the making of one’s own law, this problem is only resolvedpartially, on the formal plane. That is the plane of determination, or, ifone prefers, individuation, which furnishes one with an adequate basefor controlling one’s conduct in any circumstances. But this plane hasno transparency for one who wants to get to the bottom of things;absolute meaning is not yet to be found therein. When the situationremains at this stage, one is active in wanting to be oneself, but notwith regard to the fact of being thus and not otherwise. To a certaintype, this can seem like something so irrational and obscure as to set inmotion a crisis that endangers everything he has gained hitherto alongthe lines indicated. It is then that he must undergo the second degree ofselfproving, which is like an experimental proof of the presence withinhim, in greater or lesser measure, of the higher dimension of transcendence. This is the unconditioned nucleus that in life does not belong tolife’s sphere, but to that of Being.
623It depends on this last trial to resolve, or not to resolve, the problem
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628of the ultimate meaning of existence in an ambience lacking any supportor “sign.” After the whole superstructure has been rejected or destroyed,and having for one’s sole support one’s own being, the ultimate meaningof existing and living can spring only from a direct and absolute relationship between that being (between what one is in a limiting sense)and transcendence (transcendence in itself). This meaning is not givenby anything extrinsic or external, anything added to the being when thelatter turns to some other principle. That might have occurred in a different world, a traditionally ordered world. But in the existential realmunder consideration, such a meaning can only be given by the transcendent dimension directly perceived by man as the root of his being andof his “own nature.” Moreover, it carries an absolute justification, anindelible and irrevocable consecration, which completely destroys thestate of negativity and the existential problem. On this basis alone does
629“being what one is” cease to constitute a limitation. Otherwise everypath will be limited, including that of “supermen” and any other kindof being that serves with its outward traits to deflect the problem of ultimate meaning, thereby hiding its own essential vulnerability.
630This unity with the transcendent is also the condition for preventing the process of selfunification from taking a regressive path. Thereis in fact a possibility of a pathological unification of the being frombelow, as in the case of an elementary passion that takes over the wholeperson, organizing all his faculties to its own ends. Cases of fanaticismand possession are no different in kind. One must consider this possible reduction to absurdity of “being oneself” and of the unity of theself. This is a further reason to require our particular type of man toundergo the trial of selfknowledge at the second degree, which concerns, as we have said, the presence of the unconditioned and the supraindividual as his true center.
631It is easy to see how this requires one to surpass and prove oneself,beyond one’s own nature and one’s own law. The autonomy of himwho makes his own will coincide with his own being is not enough.Moreover, it requires a rupture of levels that can sometimes have thecharacter of violence done to oneself, and one has to be sure to remainon one’s feet even in the void and the formless. This is positive anomie,beyond autonomy. In less qualified types, in those in which the original
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637inheritance, as I called it, is not sufficiently alive existentially, this trialalmost always requires a certain “sacrificial” disposition: such a manhas to feel ready to be destroyed, if need be, without being hurt thereby.The result of trials or experiences of this kind remains undetermined,and has always been so, even when the ultimate consecration of innersovereignty was sought within the institutional frameworks providedby Tradition. It is all the more so in today’s social climate, in circumstances where it is almost impossible to create a magical circle of protection in this confrontation with transcendence, with that which is infact not human.
638But we repeat: In a meaningless world, the absolute sense of beingdepends almost exclusively on this experience. If it has a positive outcome, the last limit falls'away; transcendence and existence, freedomand necessity, possibility and reality coincide. A centrality and invulnerability are realized without restriction in any situation, be it dark orlight, detached or apparently open to every impulse or passion of life.Above all, the essential conditions are thereby created for adapting,without losing oneself, to a world that has become free but left to itsown devices, seized by irrationality and meaninglessness. And this isexactly the problem with which we began.
639Having established this basic point regarding the ultimate clarification of oneself, I turn now to some special aspects of the integratedman’s orientation within current experience.
640If we follow the method used up to now and take some of Nietzsche’scategories as our provisional reference point, we might immediatelyrelate this to “Dionysism.” But in fact, the philosopher of the supermanhas given this term differing and contradictory meanings. One of thesigns of his incomprehension of ancient traditions is his interpretation ofthe symbols of Dionysus and Apollo on the basis of a modern philosophy like Schopenhauer’s. As I have already pointed out, he uses the term
641“Dionysus” for a sort of divinized immanence, an intoxicated and frenetic affirmation of life in its most irrational and tragic aspects. On theother hand, Nietzsche makes Apollo into the symbol of a contemplationof the world of pure forms, as though taking flight to free oneself fromthe sensations and tensions of this irrational and dramatic substratum ofexistence. All of this is without foundation.
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646Without entering into the special field of the history of religions andancient civilization, I will limit myself to recalling that the Dionysianway was a way of the Mysteries, apart from a few decayed and spurious popular forms. Just like other Mysteries that correspond to it inother cultural areas, it can be defined in the terms already used: anexperience of life raised to a particular intensity that emerges, overturns, and frees itself in something more than life, thanks to an ontological rupture of levels. But this conclusion, which is equivalent to therealization, revival, or reawakening of transcendence in oneself, canequally well be referred to the true content of the symbol of Apollo;hence the absurdity of Nietzsche’s antithesis between “Apollo” and
647“Dionysus.”
648This serves as a preliminary to our real intention, which can onlyconcern a “Dionysism” that is integrated, as one might say, withApollonism. Here one possesses the stability that is the result of theDionysian experience not as a goal before oneself, but in a certain sensebehind oneself. Or else we can speak of a “Dionysian Apollonism,” anddefine in these terms one of the most important ingredients of the attitude of the modern human type in his encounter with existence, beyondthe special domain of his trials.
649Naturally, we are not dealing here with normal existence, but withthose possible forms of it that are already differentiated, that have acertain intensity, while still being defined in a chaotic ambience, in thedomain of pure contingency. They are not infrequent today, and in thetimes to come they will surely proliferate. The state in question is thatof the man who is selfconfident through having as the essential center of his personality not life, but Being. He can encounter everything,abandon himself to everything, and open himself to everything withoutlosing himself. He accepts every experience, no longer in order to proveand know himself, but to unfold all his possibilities in view of the transformations that they can work in him, and of the new contents thatoffer and reveal themselves on this path.
650Nietzsche often spoke in similar terms of the “Dionysian soul,”albeit with his usual dangerous confusions. It was for him “the soulthat, having being, plunges into becoming”  ; that which can runbeyond itself, almost fleeing from itself, and find itself in a vaster
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656sphere; the soul that feels the need and joy of adventuring in the worldof chance or even the irrational. In the process, “by transfiguring itself,it transfigures existence”  : existence here to be taken in all its aspects,just as it is, “without withdrawal, exception, or choice .”  The domainof the senses is not excluded, but included. The Dionysian state “is thestate in which the spirit rediscovers itself right down to the senses, whilethe senses rediscover themselves in the spirit .”  This concerns superiortypes in which even experiences largely tied to the senses “end by turning into the image and inebriation of the highest spirituality .”
657One could show many correspondences between the latter pointand the doctrines, paths, and very elaborate practices of the world ofTradition .  One of the aspects of Dionysism in the broad sense canin fact be seen in its capacity to overcome the antithesis of spirit andsenses, an antithesis typical of the previous Western religious moralitythat is now in crisis. That which enables this antithesis to be overcomeis the other quality, introduced into the sense domain to transform itsmotive force as it were catalytically.
658Moreover, the capacity to open oneself without losing oneself takeson a special importance in an epoch of dissolution. It is the way tomaster every transformation that may occur, even the most perilousones. A passage in the Upanishads marks its extreme limit, speakingof him against whom death is powerless, because it has become part ofhis being .  In this state, outside events that might affect or upset hisbeing can become the stimulus that activates an ever greater freedomand potential. The transcendent dimension, which holds firm throughall turns of the tide, all ups and downs, will also play the part here ofa transformer. It prevents any intoxicated selfidentification with thelife force, not to mention what might be induced by a thirst for life,or by the disorderly impulse to seek in mere sensation a surrogate forthe meaning of existence, and to lose oneself in actions and “achievements.” Detachment coexists with a fully lived experience; a calm
659“being” is constantly wedded to the substance of life. The consequenceof this union, existentially speaking, is a most particular kind of lucidinebriation, one might almost say intellectualized and magnetic, whichis the absolute opposite of what comes from the ecstatic opening to theworld of elementary forces, instinct, and “nature.” In this very special
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664inebriation, subtilized and clarified, is to be seen the vital element necessary for an existence in the free state, in a chaotic world abandonedto itself.
665Later on, I may have occasion to enter into more detail about thisinebriation. The important point here is to grasp the essential oppositionbetween this state and attitudes that have taken shape in the modernworld alongside the rebellion against rationalism or puritanism. It oftencalls itself a new “paganism” and follows a path like that of Nietzsche’sworst “Dionysism” (“exuberance, innocence, plenitude, the joy of life,”the agape , ecstasy, eros, cruelty, intoxication, springtime ,  “a wholescale of lights and colors going from semidivine forms, in a sort ofdivinification of the body, to those of a healthy semianimality andthe simple pleasures of uncorrupted natures”  — as he wrote with particular reference to the ancient world). We have noticed a similar spiritpervading much of the modern cult of action, despite the mechanicaland abstract traits often present in it. But the perspective that interestsus here is one of clarity and presence of mind in every encounter andevocation, and a calm that coexists with movement and transformations. It imparts stability to every step of the way, and a continuity thatis also that of invulnerability and an invisible sovereignty.
666This also demands a kind of freedom from the past and the future,the intrepidity of a soul free from the bonds of the lesser I, the “being”that manifests itself in the form of “being in action.” The naturalnessrequired by this mode of being prevents ns from using the term “heroism” to describe some of its incidental features, for there is nothing init of the pathos, romanticism, individualism, rhetoric, and even exhibitionism that nearly always accompany the current idea of heroism.And we hardly need underline the difference between this use of theword “act” and a certain empty academic philosophy, an outmodedneoHegelianism that took the concept as its center .
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672I now address a particular aspect of the attitude in question, applicableto a wider and less exclusive field: that of life seen as the field of works,activities, and achievementsJn which the individual deliberately takesthe initiative. We are not dealing now with simple, lived experiences,but with procedures aimed at a goal. The character of the human type Ihave been describing must result in a certain orientation whose essencewas defined in the traditional world by two basic maxims.
673The first of these is to act without regard to the fruits, without beingaffected by the chances of success or failure, victory or defeat, winningor losing, any more than by pleasure or pain, or by the approval ordisapproval of others. This form of action has also been called “actionwithout desire.” The higher dimension, which is presumed to be presentin oneself, manifests through the capacity to act not with less, but withmore application than a normal type of man could bring to the ordinary forms of conditioned action. One can also speak here of “doingwhat needs to be done,” impersonally.
674The necessary coexistence of the two principles is even more distinct in the second traditional maxim, which is that of “action withoutacting.” It is a paradoxical, Far Eastern way of describing a form ofaction that does not involve or stir the higher principle of “being” initself. Yet the latter remains the true subject of the action, giving it itsprimary motive force and sustaining and guiding it from beginning toend .
675Such a line of conduct obviously refers to the domain in which one’sown nature is allowed to function, and to that which derives from theparticular situation that one has actively assumed as an individual. This
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683is the very context in which the maxims of “acting without regard tothe fruits” and of “doing what needs to be done” apply. The content ofsuch action is not what is given by initiatives that arise from the void ofpure freedom; it is what is defined by one’s own natural inner law.
684Whereas the Dionysian attitude mainly concerns the receptive sideof the testing and confirmation of oneself while in the midst of becoming, and perhaps when facing the unexpected, the irrational, and theproblematic, the orientation of which I have been speaking concernsthe active side, in the specific and, in a way, external sense of personalbehavior and expression. Another saying from the world of Traditionmay apply here: “Be whole in the broken, straight in the bent .”  I havealready alluded to it when evoking a whole category of actions that arereally peripheral and “passive,” which do not engage the essence butare automatic reflexes, unreflecting reactions of the sensibility. Eventhe supposed plenitude of pure “living,” which is largely biologicallyconditioned, does not belong to a much higher plane. Very differentis the action that arises from the deep and in a way supraindividualcore of being, in the form of “being inasmuch as one acts.” Whatevertheir object, one is involved in these actions. Their quality never varies,divides, or multiplies: they are a pure expression of the self, whetherin the humblest work of an artisan or in precise mechanical work, inaction taken in situations of danger, of command, or of controllingpowerful material or social forces. Charles Peguy was only stating aprinciple of broad application in the world of Tradition when he saidthat a work well done is a reward in itself, and that the true artisan putsthe same care into a work to be seen, and into one that remains unseen.I will return to this theme in a later chapter.
685A particular point that deserves to be highlighted concerns the realsignificance of the idea that neither pleasure nor pain should enter asmotives when one must do what must be done. It might easily makeone think along the lines of a “moral stoicism,” with all the aridityand soullessness inherent in that concept. In fact, it will be difficult forsomeone who is acting from a basis in “life” and not from “being” toimagine the possibility of this kind of orientation, in which one obeysno abstract rule, no “duty” superimposed on the natural impulse ofthe individual, because his impulse would instead be to seek pleasure
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691and avoid pain. This, however, is a commonplace derived from thefalse generalization of what only applies to certain situations, wherepleasure and pain are rightly viewed as detached ideas, which a preliminary rational consideration transforms into goals and motives ofaction. Situations of this kind are rarer than one might think in any
692“sane” nature (and the expression rightly applies here); there are manycases in which the starting point is not a reflection, but a vital motionthat resonates as pleasure or pain as it develops. One can in fact speakof a vital “decadence” when values of hedonism and comfort take firstplace in one’s conduct of life. It implies a splitting and a loss of soulthat are analogous to the form sexual pleasure takes for depraved andvicious types. In them, what otherwise arises naturally from the motionof eros and concludes with the possession and embrace of the womanbecomes a separate end, to which the rest serves as a means.
693In any case, the important thing is to make the distinction, wellknown to traditional teachings, between the happiness or pleasure thatis ardent, and that which is heroic — using the latter term with due reservation. The distinction corresponds to that between two oppositeattitudes and two opposite human types. The first type of happinessor pleasure belongs to the naturalistic plane and is marked by passivity toward the world of impulses, instincts, passions, and inclinations.Tradition defines the basis of naturalistic existence as desire and thirst,and ardent pleasure is that which is tied to the satisfaction of desire interms of a momentary dampening of the fire that drives life onward.Heroic pleasure, on the other hand, is that which accompanies a decisive action that comes from “being,” from the plane superior to that oflife, and in a way it blends with the special inebriation that was mentioned earlier.
694The pleasure and pain that are not to be taken account of, according to the rules of pure action, are those of the first type, the naturalistic. Pure action involves the other kind of pleasure or happiness,which it would be wrong to imagine as inhabiting an arid, abstracted,and soulless climate. There, too, there can be fire and vigor, but ofa very special kind, with the constant presence and transparency ofthe higher, calm, and detached principle — which, as I have said, is thetrue acting principle here. It is also important in this context not to
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698confuse the form of action (that is, its inner significance, the mode ofits validity for the I) with its content. There is no object of ardent orpassive pleasure that cannot in principle be also the object of heroic orpositive pleasure, and vice versa. It is a matter of a different dimension,which includes everything but which also includes possibilities that falloutside the realm of natural, conditioned existence. In practice, thereare many cases in which this is true and possible on the sole conditionof this qualitative change, this transmutation of the sensible into thehypersensible, in which we have just seen one of the principal aspects ofthe orientation of an integrated and rectified Dionysism.
699Finally there is an analogy between positive or heroic pleasure andthat which, even on the empirical plane, accompanies any action inits perfection, when its style shows a greater or lesser degree of diligence and integrity. Everyone has experienced the particular pleasureobtained from the exercise of an acquired skill, when after the necessary efforts to develop it (without being driven by the idea of “ardentpleasure”) it becomes an ability, a spontaneity of a higher order, a mastery, a sort of game. Thus all the elements considered in this paragraphcomplement each other.
700There are some further observations to be made in a more externalfield: that of the interactions to which the individual is exposed, evenif he is integrated in our sense, by virtue of being placed in a specificsociety, a civilization, and a cosmic environment.
701Pure action does not mean blind actiom The rule is to care nothingfor the consequences to the shifting, individualistic feelings, but not inignorance of the objective conditions that action must take into accountin order to be as perfect as possible, and so as not to be doomed to failure from the start. One may not succeed: that is secondary, but it shouldnot be owing to defective knowledge of everything concerning the conditions of efficacy, which generally comprise causality, the relations ofcause to effect, and the law of concordant actions and reactions.
702One can extend these ideas to help define the attitude that the integrated man should adopt on every plane, once he has done away withthe current notions of good and evil. He sets himself above the moralplane not with pathos and polemics but with objectivity, hence throughknowledge — the knowledge of causes and effects — and through conduct
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706 In the World Where God Is Dead
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708that has this knowledge as its only basis. Thus for the moral conceptof “sin” he substitutes the objective one of “fault,” or more precisely
709“error .”  For him who has centered himself in transcendence, the ideaof “sin” has no more sense than the current and vacillating notions ofgood and evil, licit and illicit. All these notions are burnt out of himand cannot spiritually germinate again. One might say that they havebeen divested of their absolute value, and are tested objectively on thebasis of the consequences that in fact follow from an action inwardlyfree from them.
710There is an exact correspondence with traditional teachings here,just as there was in the other behavioral elements suggested for an epochof dissolution. To name a wellknown formula that is nearly always misunderstood, thanks to overblown moralizing, there is the socalled lawof karma .  It concerns the effects that happen on all planes as the resultof given actions, because these actions already contain their causes inpotentiality: effects that are natural and neutral, devoid of moral sanction either positive or negative. It is an extension of the laws that arenowadays considered appropriate for physical phenomena, laws thatcontain no innate obligation concerning the conduct that should follow once one knows about them. As far as “evil” is concerned, there isan old Spanish proverb that expresses this idea: “God said: take whatyou want and pay the price”; also the Koranic saying: “He who doesevil, does it only to himself.” It is a matter of keeping in mind the possibility of certain objective reactions, and so long as one accepts themeven when they are negative, one’s action remains free. The determinism of what the traditional world called “fate,” and made the basisof various forms of divination and oracles, was conceived in the sameway: it was a matter of certain objective directions of events, whichone might or might not take into account in view of the advantage orrisk inherent in choosing a certain course. By analogy, if someone isintending to make a risky alpine climb or a flight, once he has hearda forecast of bad weather he may either abandon or pursue it. In thelatter case, he accepts the risk from the start. But the freedom remains;no “moral” factor comes into play. In some cases the “natural sanction,” the karma, can be partially neutralized. Again by analogy: onemay know in advance that a certain conduct of life will probably cause
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715harm to the organism. But one may give it no thought and eventuallyresort to medicine to neutralize its effects. Then everything is reducedto an interplay of various reactions, and the ultimate effect will dependon the strongest one. The same perspective and behavior are also validon the nonmaterial plane.
716If we assume that the being has reached a high grade of unification,everything resembling an “inner sanction” can be interpreted in thesame terms — positive feelings will arise in the case of one line of action,negative in the case of an opposite line, thus conforming to “good”or “evil” according to their meanings in a certain society, a certainsocial stratum, a certain civilization, and a certain epoch. Apart frompurely external and social reactions, a man may suffer, feel remorse,guilt, or shame when he acts contrary to the tendency that still prevailsin his depths (for the ordinary man, nearly always through hereditaryand social conditioning active in his subconscious), and which has onlyapparently been silenced by other tendencies and by the dictate of the
717“physical I.” On the other hand, he feels a sense of satisfaction andcomfort when he obeys that tendency. In the end, the negative “innersanction” may intervene to cause a breakdown in the case mentioned,where he starts from what he knows to be his deepest and most authentic vocation and chooses a given ideal and line of conduct, but thengives way to other pressures and passively recognizes his own weaknessand failure, suffering the internal dissociation due to the uncoordinatedplurality of tendencies.
718These emotional reactions are purely psychological in character andorigin. They may be indifferent to the intrinsic quality of the actions,and they have no transcendent significance, no character of “moralsanctions.” They are facts that are “natural” in their own way, on whichone should not superimpose a mythology of moral interpretations ifone has arrived at true inner freedom. These are the objective termsin which Guyau, Nietzsche, and others have treated in realistic termssuch phenomena of the “moral conscience,” on which various authorshave tried to build a kind of experimental basis — moving illegitimatelyfrom the plane of psychological facts to that of pure values — for anethics that is not overtly founded on religious commandments. Thisaspect disappears automatically when the being has become one and
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723his actions spring from that unity. In order to eliminate anything implying limitation or support I would rephrase that: when the being hasbecome one through willing it, having chosen unity; because a choiceis implied even here, whose direction is not obligatory. One might evenaccept and will nonunity, and in the same class of superior types thatwe are concerned with here, there may be those who permit themselvesto do so. In such a case their basal unity does not cease to exist, butrather dematerializes and remains invisibly on a deeper plane.
724Incidentally, in the same tradition to which the doctrine of karmabelongs there is the possibility not only of eliminating the emotivereactions mentioned above (through “impeccability,” inner neutralitytoward good and evil), but also of the “magical” neutralization of karmic reactions in the case of a being who has really burnt out his naturalistic part, and thereby become actively deindividualized.
725This partial digression may serve to clarify how the “moral”plane can be eliminated impersonally, without any pathos, throughconsidering the law of cause and effect in its fullest extension. Earlieron, I examined the field of external actions in which this law mustbe taken into account. In the inner realm it is a question of knowingwhat “blows to one’s own self” may result from certain behaviors,and of acting accordingly, with the same objectivity. The “sin” complex is a pathological formation born under the sign of the personalGod, the “God of morality.” The more metaphysical traditions, on theother hand, are characterized by consciousness of an error committed,rather than by the sense of sin; and this is a theme that the superiorman of our own time should make his own, beyond the dissolution ofreligious residues, by following the course I have described. An additional clarification comes from these observations of Frithjof Schuon:
726“The Hindus and Far Easterners do not have the notion of ‘sin’ in theSemitic sense; they distinguish actions not according to their intrinsic value but according to their opportuneness in view of cosmic orspiritual reactions, and also of social utility; they do not distinguishbetween ‘moral’ and ‘immoral,’ but between advantageous and harmful, pleasant and unpleasant, normal and abnormal, to the point ofsacrificing the former — but apart from any ethical classification — tospiritual interests. They may push renunciation, abnegation, and mor
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731tification to the limits of what is humanly possible, but without being
732‘moralists’ for all that .”
733With that we can conclude the principal part of our investigation.To sum up, the man for whom the new freedom does not spell ruin,whether because, given his special structure, he already has a firm basein himself, or because he is in the process of conquering it through anexistential rupture of levels that reestablishes contact with the higherdimension of “being” — this man will possess a vision of reality strippedof the human and moral element, free from the projections of subjectivity and from conceptual, finalistic, and theistic superstructures. Thisreduction to pure reality of the general view of the world and of existence will be described in what follows. Its counterpart is the return ofthe person himself to pure being: the freedom of pure existence in theoutside world is confirmed in the naked assumption of his own nature,from which he draws his own rule. This rule is a law to him to thedegree that he does not start from a state of unity, and to the degreethat secondary, divergent tendencies coexist and external factors try toinfluence him.
734In the practical field of action, we have considered a regime ofexperiments with two degrees and two ends. First there is the provingknowledge of himself as a determined being, then of himself as a beingin whom the transcendent dimension is positively present. The latter isthe ultimate basis of his own law, and its supreme justification. Aftereverything has collapsed and in a climate of dissolution, there is onlyone solution to the problem of an unconditioned and intangible meaning to life: the direct assumption of one’s own naked being as a functionof transcendence.
735As for the modes of behavior toward the world, once a clarification and confirmation of oneself has been achieved as described, thegeneral formula is indicated by an intrepid openness, devoid of ties butunited in detachment, in the face of any possible experience. Wherethis involves a high intensity of life and a regime of achievement thatenliven and nourish the calm principle of transcendence within, theorientation has some features in common with Nietzsche’s “Dionysianstate”; but the way in which this state should be integrated suggests that
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741a better term would be “Dionysian Apollonism.” When one’s relationswith the world are not those of lived experience in general, but of themanifestation of oneself through works and active initiatives, the stylesuggested is that of involvement in every act, of pure and impersonalaction, “without desire,” without attachment.
742Attention was also drawn to a special state of lucid inebriation thatis connected with this entire orientation and is absolutely essential forthe type of man under consideration, because it takes the place of thatanimation that, given a different world, he would receive from an environment formed by Tradition, thus filled with meaning; or else from thesubintellectual adhesion to emotion and impulses at the vital base ofexistence, in pure bios. Finally, I devoted some attention to the realityof actions and the regime of knowledge that should take the place of themythology of inner moral sanctions and of “sin.”
743Those who know my other works will be aware of the correspondence between these views and certain instructions of schools andmovements in the world of Tradition, which almost always concernedonly the esoteric doctrine. I repeat here what I have said already: thatit is only for incidental and opportune reasons that I have taken intoconsideration themes from modern thinkers, especially Nietzsche. Theyserve to create a link with the problems that preoccupy Europeans whohave already witnessed the arrival of nihilism and of the world withoutGod, and have sought to go beyond these in a positive way. It mustbe emphasized that such references could have been dispensed withaltogether. With the intention of creating a similar link to what somecontemporary thinkers have presented in a more or less muddled way,it seems useful to treat briefly that contemporary current known asexistentialism, before proceeding to some particular sectors of today’sculture and lifestyles, and to the proper attitude to take toward them.
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747— — Part 3
748The Dead End ofExistentialism
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753Being and
754Inauthentic Existence
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756It is well known that there are two different types of existentialism.The first belongs to a group of philosophers by trade, whose ideasuntil recently were unknown outside their narrow intellectual circles.Second, there is a practical existentialism that came into vogue afterWorld War II with groups that borrowed a few themes from the philosophical existentialists. They adapted them for literary purposes oras grounds for anticonformist, pseudoanarchist, or rebellious behavior, as in the wellknown case of yesterday’s existentialists of SaintGermaindesPres and other Parisian locales, inspired above all byJeanPaul Sartre.
757Both types of existentialism have value essentially as signs of thetimes. The second type, for all its forced and snobbish nature, still hasthis value no less than the “serious,” philosophical existentialism. Infact, the practical existentialists are presented, or present themselves,as a variety of that “generation at risk,” victims of the final crisis of themodern world. Thus they may actually find themselves at an advantageover the philosophical existentialists, who are mostly professors, andwhose academic table talk certainly reflects some motifs of the crisis ofcontemporary man, but whose lifestyle has remained petit bourgeois,far from the practical, personal, anticonformist conduct that the secondexistentialist current displays.
758Nevertheless, it is the philosophical existentialism that concerns ushere. Let it be understood that I certainly do not intend to discuss itspositions “philosophically,” to see if they are speculatively “true” or
759“false.” Apart from the fact that this would require a much longer treatment than I can give it here, it would be of no interest for our purposes.
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766I will examine instead a few of the more typical motives of existentialism in terms of their symbolic and, indeed, “existential” significance,that is, as indirect testimonies on the abstract and discursive level of thesensation of existence belonging to a certain human type of our time.Moreover, this examination is necessary for drawing the line betweenthe positions defined so far and the existentialists’ ideas, which is all themore important since my usage of a certain terminology could give riseto the mistaken idea of nonexistent affinities.
767Apart from their systematizing and their more elaborate philosophical apparatus, the philosophical existentialists’ situation is analogousto Nietzsche’s: they too are modern men, that is, men severed fromthe world of Tradition and devoid of any knowledge or comprehensionof that world. They work with the categories of “Western thought,”which is as much as to say profane, abstract, and rootless. Noteworthyis the case of Karl Jaspers, perhaps the only one among the existentialists to make a few superficial references to “metaphysics,”  confusedby him with mysticism; at the same time he exalts “rational illumination,” “the liberty and independence of the philosophical,” and isintolerant of any form of spiritual and secular authority, and of anyclaim to obedience for men “believed to be God’s microphones” — asif nothing else were imaginable.  These are the typical horizons of theintellectual of liberalbourgeois origin. I, on the contrary, even though Ihave considered and will be considering modern problems, will not usemodern categories to clarify or dismiss them. Moreover, even when theexistentialists partially follow the right path, it happens as if by chance,not based on sound principles but with inevitable waverings, omissions,and confusions, and above all in a state of internal surrender. Worseyet, philosophical existentialists use an arbitrary terminology that theyhave specially invented, and which, especially in Heidegger, is of aninconceivable abstruseness, both superfluous and intolerable.
768The first point to be emphasized in existentialism is the affirmationof the “onticontological” primacy of that concrete and irreplicable beingthat we always are. This is also expressed by saying that “existence precedes essence.” The “essence” here is equivalent to everything that canbe judgment, value, and name. As for existence, it is immediately relatedto the “situation” in which every individual locates himself concretely in
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774space, time, and history. The expression used by Heidegger for this elementary reality is “beingthere” or “beinghere” (Dasein )  He connectsit closely to “beingintheworld,” to the extent of seeing it as an essentialconstituent element of the human being. To recognize the conditionalityimposed by the “situation” in the treatment of every problem and thevision of the world is necessary, he says, in order not to fall into mystification and selfdeception.
775Whatever value they may have, the consequences of this first basicexistentialist motif add little to what we have already establishedregarding the affirmation of one’s own nature and one’s own law, andregarding the rejection of all doctrines and norms that claim universal,abstract, and normative validity. Obviously it confirms the direction inwhich to seek the onlysupport in a climate of dissolution. Jaspers, especially, brings to light the fact that every “objective” consideration, whendetached from the context of the problems and visions of the world,leads inevitably to relativism, skepticism, and ultimately to nihilism.The only viable path is that of an “elucidation” ( Erhellung ) of the ideasand principles on the basis of their existential foundation, or of the truthof the “being” that each one is. It is like enclosing oneself in a circle.Heidegger, however, says of this, and not unjustly, that the importantthing is not to leave the circle, but to remain there in the right way.
776The relation between this orientation and an environment bynow devoid of meaning is given by the existential opposition betweenauthenticity and inauthenticity. Heidegger speaks of the state of inauthenticity, of swooning, of “covering” oneself or fleeing from oneself tofind oneself, of “being flung ”  into the anodyne existence of everydaylife with its platitudes, chattering, lies, entanglements, expedients, itsforms of “tranquilization” and “dejection,” and its escapist diversions . 5Authentic existence is seen and sought when one senses the emptinessunderlying that existence and is recalled to the problem of one’s owndeepest being, beyond the social I and its categories. Here we have arecapitulation of all the critiques that conclude by showing the absurdity and insignificance of modern life.
777The affinity of these ideas with the positions already defined hereis, however, relative, because existentialism is characterized by an unacceptable overvaluation of “situationality.” “Dasein” for Heidegger is
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782always “beinginthe world.”  The destiny of the “boundary situation” 7is, for Jaspers as well as for Marcel, a liminal fact, a given in the faceof which thinking halts and crashes. Heidegger repeats that the characteristic of “beingintheworld” is not accidental for the Self: it is not asthough the latter could exist without it, it is not that man firstly is, andthen has a relation with the world — a causal, occasional, and arbitraryrelationship with that which is. All this might well be the case, butonly for a human type different from that which concerns us. As weknow, in this human type an inner detachment, albeit coupled with anabsolute assumption of his determined nature, limits any “situational”conditions and, from a superior point of view, minimizes and relegatesto contingency any “beingintheworld.”
783There is an evident incongruence in the existentialists, since at thesame time they generally consider a rupture of that “enclosure” of theindividual, and an overcoming of that simple immanence, which, as wehave seen, gravely prejudice the positions of Nietzsche. Already in SorenKierkegaard, considered as the spiritual father of the existentialists,
784“existence” is presented as a problem; with a special use of the Germanterm Existenz, different from current usage, he defines Existenz as aparadoxical point in which the finite and the infinite, the temporal andthe eternal, are copresent, meeting but mutually excluding each other.So it would seem to be a matter of recognizing the presence in man ofthe transcendent dimension. (Following the abstract habit of philosophy, the existentialists too speak of man in ggieral, whereas one shouldalways refer to one or another human type.) Still, we can accept theconception of Existenz as the physical presence of the I in the world,in a determined, concrete, and unrepeatable form and situation (cf. thetheory of one’s own nature and law in chapter 7) and, simultaneously, asa metaphysical presence of Being (of transcendence) in the I.
785Along these lines, a certain type of existentialism could also lead toanother point already established here: that of a positive antitheism, anexistential overcoming of the Godfigure, the object of faith or doubt.Since the center of the I is also mysteriously the center of Being, “God”
786(transcendence) is a certainty, not as a subject of faith or dogma, butas presence in existence and freedom. The saying of Jaspers: “God is acertainty for me inasmuch as I exist authentically,”  relates in a certain
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792way to the state already indicated, in which calling Being into questionwould amount to calling oneself into question.
793From this first dissection of existentialist ideas we can reckon onthe positive side its highlighting of the dual structure of a given humantype (not of man in general) and the piercing of the plane of “life” toadmit a higher type of presence. But we shall see the problem that allthis entails, and that existentialism does not resolve.
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796Sartre:
797Prisoner without Walls
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799Of all the existentialists, Sartre is perhaps the one who has most emphasized “existential freedom.” His theory essentially reflects the movementtoward detachment that has led to the nihilistic world. Sartre speaks ofthe nihilating (neantisant) act of the human being, which expresses hisfreedom and constitutes the essence and the ultimate meaning of everymotion directed at a goal, and, in the final instance, of his whole existence in time. The speculative “justification” of such an idea is that “inorder to act it is necessary to abandon the plane of being and resolutelyattack that of nonbeing,” because every goal corresponds to a situation not yet in existence, hence to a nothingness, to the empty space ofthat which is mere possibility. Freedom in action introduces, then, the
800“nothingness” into the world: “the human being first rests in the bosomof being, then detaches himself from it with annihilating recoil” (reculneantisant). This occurs not only when freedom calls being into question by doubting, interrogating, seeking out, and destroying it, but alsoin any desire, emotion, or passion, without any exception. Freedom isthen presented to us as “a nihilating rupture with the world and withoneself,” as pure negation of the given: not being that which is, but beingthat which is not .  Through repetition, this process of rupture and transcendence that leaves nothing behind itself and goes forward towardnothing, gives rise to the development of existence in time (to “temporalization.”) Sartre says precisely: “Freedom, choice, nihilation, andtemporalization are one and the same thing .”
801This view is shared by other existentialists, especially by Heidegger,
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810when he locates in “transcendence” the essence, the fundamental structure of the subject, the self, the ipseity, or whatever else one wants to call
811“the entity that we always are.” But it is Sartre who is responsible forrelating such views to their “existential” underpinning, made from thespecific experience of the last man who, having burned every support orbond, finds himself consigned to himself.
812Sartre employs every subtle argument to demonstrate “objectively”that the final ground of any human action is absolute freedom, thatthere is no situation in which man is not compelled to choose, having noother basis in his choice outside of himself. Thus Sartre points out thateven not choosing is a choice, so that basically the act of volition entailsno more freedom than the impassioned act, than surrendering oneself,obeying, or giving way t instinct. Referring to “nature,” “physiology,”
813“history,” and so on, is not a valid excuse, because according to thegiven terms one’s own fundamental freedom and one’s own responsibility still subsist. Thus what in Nietzsche was an imperative — that thesuperior man should know nothing to which to consign his responsibility and sensation of living — is here posited as a given fact proven byphilosophical analysis. But Sartre’s state of mind is very different. Forhim, man is like someone in a prison without walls; he cannot find,either in himself or outside himself, any refuge from his freedom; he isdestined, is sentenced to be free. He is not free to accept or refuse hisfreedom; he cannot escape it. I have already mentioned this state of themind as the most characteristic evidence of the specific, negative sensethat freedom has assumed in a certain human type in the epoch ofnihilism. Freedom that cannot cease to be such, that cannot choose tobe or not to be freedom, is for Sartre a limitation, a primordial, insuperable, and distressing “given.”
814In his philosophy, everything else, including the outside world, thetotality of limitations belonging to men, things, or events, is supposedly never a real constriction; every impotence, every tragedy, evendeath itself, can be assumed, in principle, within freedom. In mostcases, everything will be reduced to factors that one must still take intoaccount, but that are not internally binding (as if following the objectiveline of conduct considered below in chapter 16). Here Sartre has takenfrom Heidegger the concept of “instrumentality” ( Zuhandenheit ), of
815
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817Sartre: Prisoner without Walls
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819the character of “mere usable means” that everything that comes to usfrom the outside, from people and things, may present to us: it alwayspresupposes not only my particular structure or formation, but also anyattitude, goal, or direction selected or accepted by me alone, to whichthe external factors cease to have a neutral character and make themselves known as favorable (usable) or adverse. Any of these charactersmay be inverted to the point at which they change my position, theorder of my goals and tendencies. Once again, there is no exit from theenclosed circle of one’s own basic freedom. “[Man] has only done whathe willed; he has only willed what he has done.”
820I will not digress here over the details of Sartre’s often paradoxical arguments on this subject. It is more interesting to realize that allthese describe the specific image of the free, “nihilating” man, alonewith himself. Sartre writes: “We do not have behind or before us theluminous realm of values, justifications, or causes.” I am abandoned tomy freedom and responsibility, without refuge in or outside of me, andwithout excuse.
821As for the emotional tone, it amounts to feeling absolute freedom not as a victory, but as a burden. Heidegger even uses the term
822“weight” (Last) to characterize the sensation that one feels, once finding oneself “hurled” into the world: one is very alive to the sense of
823“beinghere” but in the dark as to “whence” and “whither.” Moreover,the introduction of the concept of responsibility already reveals one ofthe principal flaws of all existentialism: to whom is one responsible?A radical “nihilation,” when interpreted with regard to our specialhuman type as an active manifestation of the dimension of transcendence, should not tolerate anything that could give the word “responsibility” such a sense: naturally, we mean a “moral” sense, aside fromthe consequences, external repercussions, either physical or social,that can be expected for a given act, internally free. One finds oneselfalready faced with the wellknown situation of a freedom that is suffered , rather than claimed, modern man is not free, but finds himselffree in the world where God is dead. “He is delivered up to his freedom.” It is from this that his deep suffering comes. When he is fullyaware of this, anguish seizes him and the otherwise absurd sensationof a responsibility reappears.
824
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826Existence, “A Project Flunginto the World”
827
828We now consider another characteristic and symptomatic theme ofexistentialism: that of the problematical nature of “Dasein .”  ForHeidegger, the basis of JDasein is nothingness; one is only flung intothe world as a mere possibility of being. In existence, for the entitythat I am, the metaphysical question concerns my own being: I mayeither attain it, or fail to do so. Heidegger’s odd definition of what theindividual represents is “an existent potentiality of being,” and also “aproject flung into the world” (and a mere project is not necessarily realized). Sartre: “The I which I am depends, in itself, on the I that I havenot yet become, precisely as the I that I have not yet become depends onthe I that I am .”  Here we meet the existential angst , which Heideggerrightly distinguishes from fear. Fear arises in the face of the world, dueto external, physical situations or perils; it would not exist if angst didnot exist, caused by the feeling of the generally problematic nature ofone’s own being, and by the feeling that one not yet is; that one mightbe, but also might not be. This theory is another witness to the climateof modern existence and to a basic traumatization of being. It goeswithout saying that it would be absolutely incomprehensible in an integrated human type, who is ignorant of angst , hence also of fear.
829In the existentialism that knows no openings on a religious basis,a grave but logical consequence of the conception of the Self as a mereuncertain possibility of being is the temporality or historicity of existence. If I am nothing, if I lack a preexistent metaphysical basis, if I onlyam if that mere project of myself becomes realized, evidently I exist onlyin time, wherein that actuation of my project of being will unfold — ornot, as the case may be. Thus the eventual process of “transcendence”
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835Existence, “A Project Flung into the World”
836
837envisaged by this type of existentialism is purely horizontal, not verticalin character. As we shall see, Heidegger speaks of a “horizontal ecstasyin the temporal,”  meaning that the entity of each of us is not temporal because it happens to find itself within history, but because it is soin its own basic nature: it is able to be solely within time. Given thisanguished resort to becoming for the source of one’s being, and alsogiven the recognition of the insignificance of “inauthentic” existencein a life that is socialized, superficial, and anodyne, we have evidentlyreached the extreme limit of a true “philosophy of crisis,” which wecould have included among the varieties of modern nihilism.
838Quite obviously, we cannot harvest anything worthwhile fromthese existential themes to bear on the problems and orientation of theman who concerns us. Just as we have excluded the intrinsic and fundamental value of “beingintheworld,” we must also exclude, for theintegrated man, temporality in the limiting sense used up to now. Theidea of the simple possibility of being, of my being ontologically myown project, realizable or otherwise, is only acceptable to us withinprecise limits. What is in question is not “being,” but one of its determined modalities: recognized, willed, and assumed. Since being in thetranscendent dimension is not at stake, the sense of one’s own problematic nature is relativized and defused, and one does away with the metaphysical angst that the existentialists’ man, having a different internalconstitution, feels, and indeed is bound to feel.
839Turning to another point, existentialism, by introducing the concept of a “project,” finds that it has to admit a nondeducible act thattook place before individual existence in the world: a mysterious decision that has determined the scheme of this existence. Yes, it is only apossibility of existence, but it is always determined and incontrovertiblein the case when it is realized. We can see here how a motif belongingto traditional metaphysics, in both East and West (for the latter, seePlotinus) has fallen onto most unsuitable soil. Traditional doctrinesaccepted a predetermination that is in a way timeless, precosmic, andprenatal, and connected with it the concept of one’s “own nature” (theHindu svadharma, the “original face” of Far Eastern philosophy). Theythereby justified within certain limits the precepts of fidelity to oneself,selfelection, and responsibility. But on these grounds one can no longer
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842 The Dead End of Existentialism
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844hold to the existentialist principle: “existence precedes essence.” Essenceshould rightly refer to the preformation that contains potentially thatwhich is to be realized in human existence if one follows a path of
845“authenticity,” that is, of profound unity with oneself.
846Even Sartre, for all his emphasis on the “nihilating” freedom of theI, arrives at this order of ideas without ever suspecting that they belongto a millenary wisdom. He speaks of a “fundamental project,”  due toan original freedom, which is the basis of all the particular plans, goals,and passional or voluntary motions that may take form in my “situation.” Even for him there is a pretemporal, timeless choice, “a unitarysynthesis of all my present possibilities,” which remain in the latentstate in my being until “particular circumstances bring them to light,without thereby suppressing tHfeir membership in a whole.” We mightthink of an analogy of such ideas with what was said about the testingselfknowledge, the amor fati, and even the Dionysian state, but alwaysas limited to that part of my being that is tied to form. There is, however, an essential difference in the fact that for existentialist consciousness the way leading “back” is blocked: it strikes against somethingthat seems impenetrable, unjustifiable, indeed fatal to it. Sartre evensays drastically that any particular use of that inescapable freedom,whether in voluntary or passionate, rational or irrational decisions,occurs “when the bets are already laid.” Thus he compares the originalchoice to the act of throwing the ball onto the roulette wheel, an actwith which everything is already potentially decided.
847We therefore face a curious contrast between two distinct themes:that of formless freedom having nothingness as its basis, and that ofa species of destiny, a primal determination that basically annuls theformer or renders it as illusory as ever. This mirrors an inner sensationtypical of a period of dissolution.
848Against this background, two motifs of Heidegger’s seem fairlyinsignificant, which might otherwise correspond to the elements alreadymentioned for the attitude of the integrated man. One is his concept ofdecision (Entschlossenheit), which corresponds to acts that are true toone’s own Self and awaken one from the state of anodyne and semiconscious living among others. The other is the concept of the instant as anactive and continuous opening in time to circumstances as they present
849
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851Existence, “A Project Flung into the World”
852
853themselves, as chances for realizing one’s own possibilities. The correspondence is only an outward one. In fact, the existentialist perspectives do not seem much different from those of theistic theology whenit talks about the “freedom of the creature,” meaning the freewill thatGod has given to man while leaving him the sole alternatives of eitherrenouncing it, or else being banished and damned if he makes real useof it by deciding and acting in any way but to accept and follow thedivine will and law.
854This religious framework is obviously lacking when existentialismreflects the climate of the world without God, but the same situationexists in covert form, with the same emotional complexes. It is directlyadmitted in the existentialism that has deviated in the religious direction (Jaspers, Marcel, Wust, not to mention the Italian epigones of thistrend). Jaspers, for example, ends by limiting existential freedom to thatwhich enables the project presented as a given possibility to be actuatedor not actuated, but not changed. He draws from this a moral imperative in these terms: “This is how you must be, if you are faithful toyourself.”  Evil, the nonvalue, is referred instead to the will that deniesitself because it contradicts itself, because it does not choose that whichit has already chosen to be. This may again appear to be partly the paththat we have traced, until we reach the moment of divergence, which isJaspers’s passivity in the face of a “boundary situation” whose opaqueness causes him to swerve and abdicate. He even cites the Christiansaying: “Thy will be done,” and adds: “I feel with certainty that in myfreedom I am not free by virtue of myself, but that I am therein givento myself; I can even fail in myself and not attain my freedom.”  Forhim, the supreme freedom is to be “aware of oneself as freedom fromthe world and as supreme dependence on the transcendent,” and he alsomentions the “hidden and ever uncertain demand that comes from thedivinity.”
855Heidegger also speaks of having oneself before one as “an inexorable enigma,”  of the possible being (of the I) delivered or entrustedto itself, involved in a given possibility about which freewill can nolonger be indifferent. Yet this author denies that there is any entity fromwhich to derive “Dasein,” that is, my concrete and determined beingin the world and in time. Worse yet, Heidegger can find nothing better
856
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859 The Dead End of Existentialism
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861than to revive the concept of the “voice of conscience,”  interpreted as
862“a call that comes from myself, and yet from above me” w when I amdeafened by the din of inauthentic, anodyne, exterior life, and have noheart for the choice already made. The fact that Heidegger sees in thevoice of conscience an objective, constitutional phenomenon of Daseinand abstains, following his phenomenological method, from interpreting it in a religious or moral sense, does not in the least affect the passivity of the experience and the relative transcendence (“above me”) of thisvoice. Thus he treats as nonexistent the critical effort of the nihilisticperiod, which showed how indeterminate and relative this “voice” is,lacking any normative, objective, or unequivocal value.
863When Sartre treats the “original project” and says “I choose thewhole of myself in the*whole of the world,”  he admits the possibility ofa change affecting the original choice, but in terms of a breakdown, anabyssal menace that looms over the individual from birth till death. We,on the other hand, have seen that it is only through such awakeningsthat the norm of absolutely being oneself can receive its confirmationand its supreme legitimization as freedom, unconditionality, and transcendence. It is the second degree of the testing knowledge of oneselfthat was considered earlier. How distant it is from the existentialists’horizons will become clear from once more addressing Jaspers.
864Jaspers speaks of the “unconditioned demand” through which ismanifested “the Being, the eternal, or whatever one likes to call theother dimension of being.” It is a command to act in a way that has nomotive or justification in objective, rational, or naturalistic terms. Onemight almost think that it was the detached, “pure action” that I havedescribed.
865The framework, in itself, is acceptable: “The loss of positions falselybelieved to be safe opens up a possibility of wavering that reveals not anabyss but a realm of freedom; that which appeared to be nothingnessmanifests as the place from which the most authentic being speaks.”But when we try to see what Jaspers means by “the hidden unconditioned, which only in extreme situations governs the course of lifewith tacit decision,” we find the categories of “good” and “evil” reappearing, at three levels. At the first level, what appears as “evil” isthe existence of the man who remains in the conditioned state where
866
867
868Existence, “A Project Flung into the World”
869
870animal life unfolds, ruly or unruly, mutable, and void of decision. Upto this point I might agree, if Jaspers did not add that such an existencemust be subject to “moral values” (where do these come from? whatjustifies them?), and if he would make it clear that this is not a matter ofthe particular contents of action, but of the various forms in which anyaction whatever, without restrictions or exclusions, can be lived. Thusit would not necessarily exclude those actions that in a different humantype would belong to “naturalistic” or conditioned life.
871At Jaspers’ second level, “evil” is human weakness in the face ofwhat ought to done; it is the selfdeception and impurity of motiveswith which we justify certain actions and behaviors in our own eyes.Here too I find nothing to object to. But at the third level, “evil” isthe “will to evil ,”  defined as “the nihilistic will to destruction for itsown sake,” the impulse to cruelty, “the nihilistic will to destroy all thatis and has value.” On the other hand, “good” is love, which carriesone toward being and creates a relationship with transcendence thatin the opposite case would be dissolved in the egotistic affirmation ofthe I. No comment is needed to indicate how little unconditioned is the
872“unconditioned demand” of which Jaspers speaks. One does not haveto go as far as Nietzsche in exalting the opposite kind of behavior, suchas lawlessness, cruelty, and “superhuman” hardness, in order to realize that Jaspers has fallen headfirst into the orbit of religious or socialmoralizing, and that the case of a deconditioning rupture that I havedescribed, which incurs the extreme test of one’s own ontological statusand the verification of one’s sovereignty, has no place in his system.
873To conclude this part of my analysis, it can be said that existentialism leaves the fundamental problem unresolved: that of a specific, positive, and central relationship with the transcendent dimension. For it isonly the place of transcendence within us that can decide on the valueand ultimate sense of the existential tasks relating to the absolute mastery of Dasein, that is, what I am or can be in a determinate way. Thatwe have to call a draw in this regard is evident from the way the existentialists conceive of the pretemporal act (if they do conceive of it, and notsimply leave it to the oblivion of absurdity), which they have rightlyposited as the origin of individuation, real or possible as the case maybe. We see motifs here that seem to replicate those of Orphic or
874
875
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877 The Dead End of Existentialism
878
879Schopenhauerian pessimism: existence, Dasein, is felt not only as expulsion and as “being flung” (Geworfenheit) irrationally into the world,but also as a “fall” (Heidegger’s Abfallen, Verfallen) and even as a debtor a fault (which is the double meaning of the German word Schttld).Existential angst, then, is caused by the act or choice with which oneobscurely willed to be what one now is, or what one ought to be (if onecan); it is caused by the use made of a freedom that is in a way transcendent, for which there is no meaning or explanation but for which oneremains responsible.
880None of the philosophical efforts of the existentialists, especiallyHeidegger and Sartre, have managed to give meaning to such notions,which really derive from a covert, tenacious residue of an extrovertedreligious attitude, specifically from the offshoot of the idea of originalsin as given in Spinoza’s axiom: Omnis determinate est negatio (everydetermination is a negation). This comes down to saying that Daseinis blameworthy “just by the simple fact of existing”; existence, bothin fact and as a simple project, is in every case determined and finite,hence it necessarily excludes all the infinite possibilities of pure being,which might equally well have been the object of the original choice.That is why it is “guilty.” Jaspers in particular underlines this point: Myguilt lies in the destiny of having chosen (and of not having been ablenot to choose) only the one direction that corresponds to my real orpossible being, and negating all the others. This is also the source of myresponsibility and “debt” toward the infinite and the eternal.
881Such an order of ideas could obviously only appeal to a humantype who was so off center with regard to transcendence as to feel thatit was external to himself. This makes him incapable of identificationwith the principle of his own choice and his own freedom before time;and hence, as counterpart, the Sartrean sensation of freedom as something alien to which one is condemned. A further and more particularimplication appears in a rigid, false, substancebound concept of transcendence — of the Absolute, Being, the Infinite, or whatever one prefersto call the principle in which occurred the original individualizing andfinalizing act that is presented as a fall. The absurdity of this view canbe illustrated by a parallel from everyday life. It is as though I had beenleft entirely to myself in deciding how to pass the evening — going to a
882
883Existence, “A Project Flung into the World”
884
885concert, staying at home to read, going out to dance or drink, and soon — and then made to feel guilty and indebted simply because I haddecided for one of these possibilities and excluded the others. Someonewho is really free, when he does what he wants, has no “complexes”or soulsearching of this kind, nor does he feel “finalized” and fallenbecause he thereby excludes other possibilities. He knows that he couldhave done otherwise, but only a hysteric or neurotic would be driven bysuch a thought into “existential anguish.” Admittedly, the transparencyin oneself of one’s own original basis, the Grund, may be of very different degrees, but it is the orientation that counts here. Measured by thistouchstone, existentialism condemns itself.
886Making a short digression to the abstract, metaphysical plane, Ifind false and constricting the conception of an absolute and an infinite that are condemned to indetermination and to fluctuation in themerely possible. Rather, the truly infinite is free power: the power of aselfdetermination that is not at all its own negation, but its own affirmation. It is not the fall from a sort of substantialized “totality,” butthe simple use of the possible. Arising from this idea, one can see theabsurdity of speaking of existence as a fault or sin, merely by virtue ofbeing a determined existence. Nothing prevents us from adopting thecontrary point of view, for example, that of classical Greece, which seesin limit and form the manifestation of a perfection, a completion, anda kind of reflection of the Absolute.
887The human type to whom all these existentialist ideas appeal ischaracterized by a fractured will and remains so; the will (and the freedom) of the “before” to which the mystery of Dasein refers, and thewill (and the freedom) of this same Dasein in the world and in the
888“situation,” are not rejoined (rejoining the two parts of a broken swordwas an esoteric theme used in the symbolism of medieval chivalric literature).  When Jaspers asserts that knowing my own origin as an existence determined by a choice does not “possibilize” me, that is, doesnot release the obscure bonds and the irrationality that this representsand thereby give me freedom (or the presentiment of freedom), this evidently derives from the fact of feeling separated from that origin, cut offfrom the transcendent dimension, sundered from the original being. Forthe same reason, Kierkegaard conceived the coexistence of the temporal
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892 The Dead End of Existentialism
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894and the eternal, of the transcendent and the unrepeatable individuation in existence, as a paradoxical “dialectic” situation, anguishing andtragic, to be accepted as it is rather than overcome by posing the secondterm in function of the first, so as to restore to unity that which in man
895“is fragment and mystery and terrible chance.”
896When Jaspers himself says that without the presence of transcendence, freedom would be purely arbitrary without any sense of blame,he confirms in the clearest way possible how existence senses transcendence — namely, as a species of paralyzing and anguishing “stoneguest.” By projecting it outside oneself, one’s relationship to transcendence is off center, exterior, and dependent. This is so much like therelationship in religious consciousness that one might well accuse thisphilosophy of making a lot of fuss about nothing, and of being just aprolongation of the religious world in crisis, not a space that can openitself affirmatively beyond that world. Transcendence, like freedom,ought to furnish existence with a foundation of calm and incomparable security, with a purity, a wholeness, and an absolute decisivenessin action. Instead, it feeds all the emotional complexes of the man incrisis: angst, nausea, disquiet, finding his own being problematical, thefeeling of an obscure guilt or fall, deracination, a feeling of the absurdand the irrational, an unadmitted solitude (though some, like Marcel,fully admit it), an invocation of the “incarnate spirit,” the weight of anincomprehensible responsibility — incomprehensible, because he cannot resort to overtly religious (and hence coherent) positions like thoseof Kierkegaard or Barth, where angst refers to the sentiment of the soulthat is alone, fallen, and abandoned to itself in the presence of God. Inall of this, feelings appear like those that Nietzsche warned about inthe case of a man who has made himself free without having the necessary stature: feelings that kill and shatter a man — modern man — if heis incapable of killing them.
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900
901Heidegger:
902
903“Retreating Forwards”and “BeingforDeath”
904Collapse of Existentialism
905
906To complete this “existential” analysis of the basis of existentialism,it will be useful to return to Heidegger, who, like Sartre, excludes the
907“vertical opening” of religion and claims to be “phenomenologically”agnostic.
908We have seen that the obscurity already inherent in existentialism isexacerbated in Heidegger by his view of man as an entity that does notinclude being within itself (or behind it, as its root), but rather beforeit, as if being were something to be pursued and captured. Being isconceived here as the totality of possibilities, with regard to which oneis to blame, or, taking the other meaning of Schuld , in debt. The existentialists never explain why this is the case, or why one should feelthis destiny of seizing a pandemic totality at all costs. We can explain itwith reference to what I have already said: that it is all symptomatic ofsomeone who suffers the unfolding or activity of the transcendent as acoercive force, with no feeling of freedom. It is as though the possibilities necessarily excluded from a finite being (finitude being negation,as explained in chapter 14) were projected onto goals and situationsdeployed in time; as though man had being before him, running aheadof him (the term used is actually Sichvorwegsein) in a process that cannever lead to a real possession, in a “horizontally ecstatic”  succession
909(ecstasy here in the literal meaning of exit from a stasis) that constitutes “authentic temporality.” This is how Heidegger presents things;
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913
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915 The Dead End of Existentialism
916
917no other meaning is permitted for man’s being, as long as he is alive,because he always suffers from nontotality.
918The prospects could not be darker. Dasein, the I, which is nothing in itself, pursues being that is outside and before it, and thus runsthrough time, in the same dependent relationship as the thirsty manseeking water — with the difference that it is inconceivable that he willever reach Being, when he does not already possess it (as the Eleaticphilosophers said, no violence can make that to be which is not). Theview of life in Heideggerian existentialism could well be characterizedby Bernanos’s expression: a retreat forward (une fuite en avant). It alsounderlines the absurdity of speaking of a “decision” ( Entschlossenheit ),in a really affirmative sense, for any action or moment in which the
919“horizontal ecstasy” is developing, whereas that is exactly what appliesto the human type who interests us: becoming and existing in time aresubstantially transformed in their structure and significance. The darkdownward pull, the neediness, compulsion, and unquiet tension aredestroyed, and existence takes on a character of acting and living decisively, arising from an existing principle that is detached and free withregard to itself and its determined action. This happens naturally whenthe accent falls away from the I, or is transferred to the transcendentdimension — to Being.
920Someone has spoken of a “frenetic desire to live, to live at anyprice, which is not the result of the rhythm of life within us, but ofthe rhythm of death.” This is one of the principal traits of our time.One would not be rash in saying that this is the ultimate meaning ofHeidegger’s existentialism, when thought through to its foundations,that is, of existentialism that admits no religious opening. This is itseffective “existential” content, however it may seem to the philosopherhimself.
921This significance seems to be confirmed by the ideas one meetswith in Heidegger concerning death, which are otherwise fairlystrange. Basically, it is only in death that he sees, and problematicallyconfines, the possibility of capturing this that is always escaping andfleeing before us in time. Therefore Heidegger speaks of existence ingeneral as a “Beingtowardsdeath,” as a “Beingfortheend .”  Deathovercomes being because it halts its constant, irremediable privation
922
923
924Heidegger: “ Retreating forwards” and “BeingforDeath”
925and nontotality, and offers it “its very own possibility, unconditionedand insuperable.” And the individual’s anguish in the face of death,which deals the deathblow to Dasein, is the anguish in the face of thispossibility. This emotional coloring is again typical and significant,showing how the condition of passivity persists even here, in the faceof that “end” that represents the “accomplishment,” as in the dualsense of the Greek word telos, in the context of the traditional doctrineof mors triumphalis (triumphal death). Heidegger proceeds with anaccusation of a form of “inauthenticity” and diversionary tranquilization aimed not only at the stupid indifference to death but also atthe attitude that judges the preoccupation with death, and anguish inthe face of it, as effeminate and cowardly, preferring to face it withimpassibility. He speaks of the “courage to have anguish in the face ofdeath,”  which is absolutely inconceivable, not to say ridiculous, for anintegrated human type.
926The negative character of the whole existential process, whichincludes death and gravitates around it, is once again confirmed byHeidegger’s talk of “dying as being flung into one’s very own possibility of being, unconditioned and insuperable.”  It sounds like a destinyof the most somber kind. And just as what lies before Dasein, the priorstate of what we are, falls outside the zone illuminated by Heideggerian
927(and nonHeideggerian) existential awareness, so everything “afterdeath” is left in obscurity, including the problems of survival and posthumous states, of a higher or lower existence after this mortal one.Even less attention is given to that “typology of death” that ha? hadsuch an important part in traditional doctrines: they have seen in thevarious ways of approaching death a most important factor regardingwhat death itself might represent, and, moreover, what may occur postmortem in each case.
928The few positive motifs casually touched on by Heidegger are thusneutralized by an essential limitation. Remarks such as that freedom “isthe foundation” (that is, the basis of “that being which is our truth”)
929“and as such is also the bottomless abyss of Dasein,” turn out tolack any real significance, no more than the need to “free oneselffrom Egoity [ lebbeit , the quality of being an 1} to conquer oneselfin an authentic selfhood” (which would return to that abyssal free
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932 The Dead End of Existentialism
933
934dom). Replying to the accusation of affirming an “anthropocentric”freedom, Heidegger hastens to recall that for him the essence of Daseinis “ecstatic, hence eccentric ” (sic!), and that thus the feared freedom isan error; so that after all there remains the simple alternative of inauthentic existence, which is fleeing from oneself and dissolving in theirrelevant and anodyne life of everyday society, or else the obedienceto the demand of being that translates into accepting one’s “Beingtowardsdeath,” after spending one’s life in the vain pursuit of thatfata morgana, the totality of being; that is, after having experiencedtranscendence solely as that which unfolds and urges from within theindividual and his becoming, acting almost as a vis a tergo (force frombehind).
935As a last point, I would mention the final collapse of existentialism as seen in Jaspers’s views on foundering, defeat, and failure (dasScheitern). One must first accept two fairly incompatible conditions.One concerns that free realization of the being that we are not, but areable to be — and strictly speaking, we could stop here and resolve theexistential problem in these terms, which is the elementary or partialsolution that I have repeatedly considered. At the same time, Jaspers,like Heidegger, speaks of man’s impulse to embrace being, not as thisor that particular being, but as pure and total being. This impulse isdestined to fail in all its positive forms. Pure being may present itselfoutside us through a “ciphered language,” by means of symbols, butin its essence it is “transcendent” in the negative sense, thus impossible to be attained in any way. This character of the object of ourdeepest metaphysical impulse manifests itself in the “boundary situations” against which we are powerless. For Jaspers, examples of theseare guilt, chance, death, the ambiguity of the world, and being taken bysurprise. In the face of all these situations that “transcend” us, one cansupposedly react either inauthentically with selfmystifications, deceptions, and attempted evasions, or else authentically, facing up to realitywith desperation and anguish.
936It is hardly necessary here to point out the absolute falsity of thesealternatives, because there are other reactions possible, such as those Ihave defined for the integrated man — not to mention everything Sartrehas discovered about the fundamental freedom and intangibility of the
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938
939Heidegger: “Retreating forwards” and “Beingfor Death ”
940I. But it is interesting to see what solution appears to Jaspers as the
941“authentic” reaction. This solution consists of recognizing one’s owndefeat, one’s own checkmate or foundering, even in the effort of gainingor somehow attaining being: only at that point, as the negative somersaults into the positive, does one enter the presence of being, andexistence opens itself to being. “It is decisive how man lives defeat (orfailure or foundering — Scheitern ): whether it remains hidden in orderto crush him in the end, or whether it appears unveiled, placing itselfin front of the inescapable limits of his own Dasein; either he seekssolutions and palliatives that are inconsistent and fantastic, or else hefrankly keeps silence on account of the presence of the inexplicable.”At that point, nothing is left but faith. For Jaspers, the way consistsprecisely in desiring one’s own defeat, one’s foundering, more or lesslike the Gospel principle of losing one’s life in order to find it. Let go,quit the game: “the will to eternity, far from refusing failure, recognizesthere its own goal.” The tragic collapse of the self is identified with theepiphany or opening to transcendence. At the very moment when I, asmyself, see Being escaping me, it reveals itself to me, and thereupon Iattain the supreme enlightenment of the existential duplicity in itself —the point of departure for all existentialism since Kierkegaard — whichis supposed to clarify the relationship between my finite existence andtranscendence. It is a sort of ecstatic and believing opening, in defeat.This is the price of superseding the anguish and disquiet of living, seeking, and striving, with a state of peace, of which one can hardly missits basis in Christianity, and specifically in the dialectical theology ofProtestantism.
942Jaspers’s only attempt to go beyond this truly creaturely level concerns the concept of the “Allencompassing” (das Umgreifende). Thisis a far echo of ideas that also belong to traditional teaching. The problem is posed by that dual consciousness that is always led to objectivize, to juxtapose an object to the I as subject, and can therefore nevergrasp the ultimate root of being, the reality in which we are contained,which is anterior and superior to this duality. Jaspers seems to allow thepossibility of overcoming the subjectobject division and experiencingunity, the “Allencompassing.” It is necessary for every object (anythingjuxtaposed to myself as I) to disappear, and for the I to dissolve. But
943
944
945 The Dead End of Existentialism
946
947given the sentiment of oneself that, as we have seen exhaustively, is theonly one known to the human type considered by this philosopher, it isnatural that everything would be reduced to another sort of foundering,to the simple mystical experience of “diving into the Allencompassing”
948(these are Jaspers’s words). It is the equivalent of Heidegger’s confused,passive, and ecstatic bursting into Being through death, after “livingfor death.” It is just as antithetical to any positive, clear, and sovereignrealization or opening to the transcendent as the true ground of beingand of Dasein, in an effective and creative conquest of the dual state.
949With this, we can conclude our analysis of existentialism. To summarize it, existentialism takes over some of the Nietzschean demands, but
950 cannot go beyond them except as concerns the point highlighted in thepreceding examination: by including transcendence as a constitutiveelement. Only here can existentialism relate to the human type whoconcerns us; and the logical consequence should have been the breakwith all naturalism and with every immanent religion of life. Includingthis dimension in existentialism, however, causes it to fall right into crisis, and none of the solutions offered on the grounds of emotional andsubintellectual complexes — anguish, guilt, destiny, extraneity, solitude,disquiet, nausea, the problem of Dasein, and so on — go beyond thepoint one could have reached by developing and rectifying the postnihilist positions of Nietzsche, or even go as far as that.
951As we have seen, in Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Marcel, not to mention other exponents of a “Catholic existentialism” that passes for
952“positive existentialism,” the transcendent in question ends up as theobject of faith and devotion. It makes little difference that they use anovel, abstract, and abstruse terminology instead of the more honestone of orthodox theistic theology. The “free” man again looks backward to the abandoned earth, and with an “invocation” (the actualterm used by Marcel) tries to reestablish a tranquilizing contact withthe dead God.
953Taken as a whole, the existential balance adds up to a negative. Itacknowledges the structural duality of existence and transcendence,but the center of gravity of the I does not fall on the transcendent,but on the existent side. Transcendence is basically conceived as the
954
955
956Heidegger: “Retreating forwards” and “ Being forDeath”
957
958“other,” whereas one ought rather to conceive it the other way around,with one’s own determined, “situational” being, one’s Dasein, as
959“other” to the true Self that one is. The former represents a simplemanifestation in the human state, and is subject to the corresponding conditions, which are relative because they often act in variousways according to the attitudes one assumes. (As I have said, this isthe positive contribution of Sartre’s analysis.) Even though the relationbetween the terms may often seem obscure and problematic— and thatis the only real problem of the inner life — it does not destroy the feelingthat the integrated man has of centrality, calm, sovereignty, superiorityover himself, and “transcendent confidence.”
960This confirms the fundamental difference between the human typewho finds his reflection in existential philosophy, and the one whostill preserves, as an indelible character, the substance of the man ofTradition. Existentialism is a projection of modern man in crisis, ratherthan of modern man beyond crisis. Anyone who already possesses thatinner dignity described above, as natural as it is detached, or who “haslong wandered in a strange land, lost among things and contingencies,”finds this philosophy absolutely alien to him. Through crises, tests,errors, destructions, and successes he has rediscovered the Self, and heis reestablished in the Self, in Being, in a calm and unshakable mode.Equally distant is the man who has learned to give a law to himselffrom the heights of a superior freedom, so that he can walk on that ropestretched over an abyss, of which it is said: “It is perilous to cross fromone side to the other, perilous to find oneself in the middle, perilous totremble or to stop.”
961It is perhaps not so unkind to think that little else was to be expectedfrom the speculations of men who, like almost all the “serious” existentialists (as distinct from those of the new “generation at risk”), areprofessors, mere armchair intellectuals whose lifestyle, aside from theirsocalled problems and positions, has always been of the petit bourgeoistype. They are far from being “burned out” or beyond good and evil intheir actual existence, which is conformist except in the few cases thatflaunt a political plumage, sometimes liberal, sometimes communist.
962Men in revolt within the chaotic life of the great cities, or men whohave passed through the storms of steel and fire and the destructions of
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964
965
966 The Dead End of Existentialism
967
968the last total wars, or have grown up in the bombedout zones, are theones who possess in greater measure the premises for the reconquest ofa higher sense of life and for an existential overcoming, not theoreticalbut genuine, of all the problems of man in crisis; and these are also thepoints of departure for any corresponding speculative expressions.
969In conclusion, it may be interesting to give an example of the valuethat some themes touched on in existentialism may have, when assimilated to a different human type and integrated into traditional teaching.The example is offered by the idea of that sort of transcendent decisionor choice that, as we have seen, many existentialists place at the foundation of every individual’s Dasein in the world. It underlies his havinga certain range of possibilities and types of experience, and not others,
970■“and his awareness of having come from far away; thus it also supplieshim at least with a line of less resistance, and maybe even with the basisfor authentic existence and fidelity to himself.
971I have already mentioned the presence of a similar teaching in thetraditional world. I would add that it is not only part of the esotericdoctrine of that world, but often of the general, exoteric view of life,where it takes the form of the doctrine of preexistence (not to be confused with that of reincarnation, which is only a popular symbolic formulation, and absurd if taken literally). The rejection of the doctrine ofpreexistence must be counted among the limitations of the theistic andcreationist theology that has come to predominate in the West. On theone hand, this has mirrored, and on the other, it has furthered a suppression or silence about the prehuman and nonhuman dimension ofthe person, of Dasein.
972Now, we have seen that existentialism often exhibits a presentiment of this ancient truth, giving rise either to the anguishing sensation of an insuperable limitation that is obscure if not absurd, or elseto the abdication and retreat into a creatural attitude in a more or lessreligious sense. In the differentiated type who interests us, on the contrary, the same presentiment can only act as it has always acted in theupper strata of the traditional world, being a most essential part of theattitude required for staying on one’s feet and “riding the tiger.” Asan opening to the doctrine of preexistence, it generates an unequalledforce. It reawakens the consciousness of one’s origins and of a higher
973
974
975Heidegger: “Retreating forwards” and “ Being forDeath”
976freedom in the heart of the world, the awareness of having come fromfar away, thus also that of a distance. The natural effects will be alongthe lines indicated: the relativization of everything that seems so important and decisive in human existence as such, but in terms absolutelyopposed to indifference, sloth, and alienation. It is only on the basis ofthis sensation that the dimension of Being can open up more and more,beyond the physical I, thereby strengthening the capacity for involvingand giving one’s whole self, not for the sake of exaltation, ecstasies,or a merely vital task, but according to the duality already mentionedwhen speaking of pure action. In fact, the ultimate criterion of beingable to be destroyed, even, without thereby being wounded — which caneasily present itself in an epoch such as we live in, and such as willvery likely continue — is closely related to the lived experience of preexistence, which indicates the direction in which the “two parts of thesword” may be reunited.
977
978Part 4
979
980Dissolution ofthe Individual
981
982
983
984
985The Dual Aspectof Anonymity
986
987Turning to a more concrete realm than that of the last chapter, I shallnow examine the problem of the personality and the individual in thecontemporary world. There are many today who deplore the “crisis ofthe personality,” and while they still pose as defenders of Western civilization, they often appeal to the “values of the personality,” holdingthem to be a most essential part of the European tradition.
988Thus a problem presents itself, one that cannot simply be solved bythe facile polemic against the collectivism, mechanization, standardization, and soullessness of modern existence. Moreover, we must makeit very clear: What exactly is to be saved? Today’s intellectuals whohave at heart the “defense of the personality” give no satisfactory reply,because they hold on to what I have called the regime of residual forms
989(see chapter 1), and, almost without exception, they think and evaluatein terms of liberalism, natural law, or humanism.
990The true point of departure should instead be the distinctionbetween person and individual. Strictly speaking, the concept of theindividual is that of an abstract, formless, numerical unity. As such,the individual has no quality of its own, hence nothing that really distinguishes it. Considered simply as individuals, one can assume thatall men and women are equal, so that we can ascribe equal rights andresponsibilities to them and presumably equal “dignity” as “humanbeings” (the concept of “human being” is only a dignified version ofthat of the individual). In social terms, this defines the existential levelproper to “natural rights,” liberalism, individualism, and absolutedemocracy. One of the principal and most apparent aspects of moderndecadence refers, in fact, to the advent of individualism as a conse
991
992
993
994
995
996The Dual Aspect of Anonymity
997
998quence of the collapse and destruction of the former organic and traditionally hierarchical structures, which have been replaced primarily bythe atomic multiplicity of individuals in the world of quantity, that is tosay the masses.
999The “defense of the personality” appears insignificant and absurdwhen measured on any individual basis. It makes no sense to positiononeself against the world of the masses and of quantity without realizing that it is individualism itself that has led to it, in the course of oneof those processes of “liberation” that historically have ended by takingthe opposite direction. In our epoch this process has already had irreversible consequences.
1000When we turn from the social to the cultural arena, things only seemto present themselves in a different way. The cultural field has remainedsomewhat isolated, detached from the larger forces in motion today, andthat is the only reason the misunderstanding exists. Although atomizedindividualism is not in question here, the idea of the personality is stillbound to a subjectivism based on the individual, in which the poverty,or even the nonexistence of a spiritual basis is concealed by literary andartistic talent, by an intellectualism and rootless originality, and by acreativity devoid of any profound significance.
1001In fact, in the West there has been a collusion between individualism, subjectivism, and “personality” that goes back to the Renaissanceperiod and which developed in the light of that “discovery of man”exalted by antitraditional historiography. Historians have carefullyignored, or considered as positive, the counterpart, that is, the moreor less conscious and complete separation from transcendence. All thesplendor and power of “creativity” of that period should not blind usto this basic tendency. Schuon has clarified the true state of affairsregarding the artistic realm as follows: “Speaking in human terms, certain Renaissance artists are without a doubt great, but their grandeurbecomes insignificant when faced with the grandeur of the sacred. Inthe sacred, it is as if the genius is concealed; what predominates is animpersonal, vast, mysterious intelligence. The sacred work of art has aperfume of infinitude, the imprint of the absolute. The individual talentis there disciplined; it mingles with the creative function of the entiretradition, which cannot be substituted, much less surpassed by the mere
1002
1003
1004
1005 Dissolution of the Individual
1006
1007resources of man .”  One can say the same regarding selfaffirmation onother levels of the “personality” in that epoch: from the MachiavellianPrince type, with its more or less perfect historical incarnations, to thecondottieri and demagogues and, in general, all those who receivedNietzsche’s approbation for their prodigious yet unformed accumulation of power.
1008Later, the emphasis on the human and individual I, the basis ofhumanism, would survive only in the byproducts of the nineteenthcentury bourgeois cult of the I, associated with a certain aesthetic cultof heroes, geniuses, and “nobility of spirit.” But to meet many of thecurrent defenders of “personality” one must descend yet another degree,to where all the vanity of the I predominates: its exhibitionism, worship
1009"of one’s own “inferiority,” the craze of originality, the boastfulness ofbrilliant literati and ambitious belletrists. Even with regard to art alone,this “personalism” almost always appears joined to an inner impoverishment. Lukacs, though generally opposed to our position, madethis legitimate remark: “The presentday practice of overestimating andexaggerating the importance of creative subjectivity actually betraysthe weakness and poverty of the writers’ individuality. They distinguishthemselves merely by ‘eccentricity,’ either spontaneous or painstakinglycultivated; their worldview is at such a low level that any attempt theymake to go beyond subjective immediacy threatens to leave their ‘personality’ completely flat. The more that this is the case, the more weightis placed on pure, immediate subjectivity, which sometimes is in factidentified with literary talent .”  The character of “normative objectivity” that was proper to true, traditional art is altogether lacking. Thecategory that Schuon has effectively characterized as “intelligent stupidity ”  includes almost all the intellectual efforts in this area. But Iwill not dwell further on considerations at this level — I will return tothe subject later — beyond pointing out that in contemporary celebrityworship we can see the popular, updated edition that takes the former
1010“cult of the personality” to ridiculous lengths.
1011Whether one is speaking of social individualism, artistic individualism, narcissistic individualism, or humanistic individualism, it is certainthat manifold, objective processes of recent times tend to eliminate anddissolve these forms of the individualistic personality. In view of the only
1012
1013The Dual Aspect of Anonymity
1014
1015human type who concerns us, and of the general situation, we cannotsee this as a negative phenomenon, but on the contrary, I would even saythat the further the dissolution of the “values of the personality” goes,whether due to intrinsic or extrinsic causes, the better it will be.
1016This is the premise. In order to go further in our analysis, we needto leave ambiguity behind and clarify its terms, which is only possibleif we restore the original and proper meaning to the term “person.”Originally persona signified “mask”: the mask that ancient actors worein playing a given part, in incarnating a given personage. Thereby themask possessed something typical, nonindividual, especially in the caseof divine masks and even more clearly when used in many archaic rites.
1017At this point I can resume and apply the ideas of the preceding chapterabout the dual structure of the being: the “person” is that which theman presents concretely and sensibly in the world, in the position heoccupies, but always signifying a form of expression and manifestationof a higher principle in which the true center of being is to be recognized, and on which falls, or should fall, the accent of the Self.
1018A “mask” is something very precise, delineated, and structured.
1019So man as person (= mask) is already differentiated thereby from themere individual; he has a form, is himself, and belongs to himself.Consequently, whenever a civilization has had a traditional character,the values of the “person” have made of it a world of quality, diversity,and types. And the natural consequence has been a system of organic,differentiated, and hierarchical relationships: something that cannot be *said of mass regimes, but also not of regimes of individualism, of “values of the personality,” or of real or pretended democracy.
1020Like the individual, the person itself is in a certain sense closedto the external world, and in relation to it, all the existential situations whose legitimacy we have already recognized can be of value inthe present age. Unlike the individual, the person is not closed to theabove. The personal being is not himself, but has himself (like the relation between the actor and his part): it is presence to that which he is,not coalescence with that which he is. Moreover, a kind of antinomyis brought to light: in order to be truly such, the person needs a reference to something more than personal. When this reference is absent,the person transforms itself into an “individual,” and individualism and
1021
1022
1023
1024 Dissolution of the Individual
1025
1026subjectivism come into play. Then, in a first phase, the impression mayeven arise that the values of personality have survived and are evenstronger, because the center, so to speak, is more displaced toward theoutside, is more externalized — and this is in fact the position of thecultural and creative humanism just mentioned, and in general of thesocalled great individuals. One can see, however, that the “defense ofthe personality” at this level is a precarious thing, because it has alreadypassed into the realm of contingency; nothing acts anymore that hasdeep roots and the force of the original. Henceforth, that which is personal loses its symbolic value, its value as a sign of something that transcends it and by which it is sustained; it loses also, little by little, thetypical characteristics, that is, the positively antiindividualistic onesdue solely to that higher reference. Where an independent and distinctform still subsists, it affirms itself in a disordered, arbitrary, and purelysubjective regime.
1027As a last aid to orientation, I shall now define the meaning of
1028“typicality” in a traditional environment. It represents the meetingpoint between the individual (the person) and the supraindividual, theboundary between the two corresponding to a perfect form. Typicalitydeindividualizes, in the sense that the person then essentially incarnates an idea, law, or function. In such a case, one cannot speak of theindividual in the modern sense; the individual disappears in its casualfeatures, when faced with a meaningful structure that could even reappear almost identically wherever the same perfection is reached. Theindividual is in fact made “typical,” that is to say suprapersonal. Byvirtue of the Far Eastern saying, “The absolute Name is no longer aname,” 4A he is likewise anonymous. Traditionality in the higher sense isa type of confirmation of such anonymity, or an approach to it within aparticular field of action. One could even speak of the universalizationand eternalization of the person; but these expressions have deteriorated through rhetorical and abstract usages that have concealed anypossible concrete or existential meaning. It would be better to definethe situation in question as that of a being in which the supraindividualprinciple — the Self, transcendence — remains conscious, and gives tothe developing “part” (the person) the objective perfection corresponding to a given function and a given meaning.
1029
1030
1031The Dual Aspect of Anonymity
1032
1033As a result, two concepts of impersonality exist, related throughanalogy and at the same time through opposition: on the personal level,one is inferior, the other superior. One has for a limit the individual, inthe formlessness of a numerical and undifferentiated unity that throughmultiplication produces the anonymous mass; the other is the culmination typical of a sovereign being, the absolute person.
1034The latter possibility rests on a foundation of active anonymitythat appears in traditional civilizations, defining a position opposedto every activity, creativity, or affirmation based merely on the I. Andthe aforementioned conversion, apparently paradoxical, of the personalbeing into an impersonal being, makes itself known in the fact that agrandeur of the personality indeed exists, in which the work is morevisible than the creator, the objective more than the subjective; wherein the human field something is reflected of that nudity and purity thatbelongs to the grand forces of nature: in history, art, politics, spiritualdisciplines, and in all the degrees of existence. One could speak of a
1035“civilization of anonymous heroes”; but the style of anonymity is alsorealized in the speculative domain, where it goes without saying thatwhat is thought according to the truth cannot be signed with the nameof an individual. One also recalls the custom of abandoning one’s ownname and taking another that no longer refers to the individual, to theman, but to the function or superior vocation, where the personality issummoned to a higher obligation (for instance, royalty and pontificate,monastic orders, and so on).
1036All this finds its full significance in a traditional environment. Jnthe modern world, in an epoch of dissolution, even in this regard onlythe essential orientation can be preserved. And we find that its principalaspect faces us with an alternative, and a test.
1037
1038
1039
1040
1041Destructions and Liberations inthe New Realism
1042
1043It is said that the crisis of individual and personal values seems destined to become an irreversible process throughout the modern world,despite the existence of residual oases or reservations that withdrawinto “culture” and empty ideologies, and still accord to these valuesa semblance of life. In practice, the mortal blow to the individual hasnot been dealt by materialism alone, by the world of the masses andmodern metropolises, but even more by the realm of technology: byelementary energies reawakened and controlled in objective processes.Also the existential effects of collective, catastrophic experiences, suchas total warfare with all its cold destruction, have acted in a dehumanizing way, eliminating everything from the old bourgeois world thatwas varied, personal, subjective, arbitrary, and intimate.
1044The best illustration of these processes is that of Ernst Jiinger, inhis work Der Arbeiter.  I can certainly agree with Jiinger when he saysthat these processes of the current world have caused the individual tobe superseded by the “type,” together with an essential impoverishment of his traits and ways of life, and a dissolution of cultural, human,and personal values. In the vast majority of cases, the destruction issuffered passively: the man of today is the mere object of it. The resultis an empty, massproduced human type, marked by standardizationand flat uniformity; a “mask” in the negative sense; an insignificant,multiple product.
1045The deindividualization that stems, however, from these verycauses, this environment, these spiritual ravages, may actually take anactive and positive course. This is the case that concerns us, and whichthe differentiated type of man whom we have in view should consider.
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1047
1048
1049
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1051Destructions and Liberations in the New Realism
1052
1053Jiinger himself refers to that which sometimes manifested in recenttimes in extreme, lifethreatening situations, mainly in modern warfare. In the material battle, in which technology seems to turn againstman with its systematic destruction and its activation of elementaryforces, the individual as combatant cannot face it without being blownapart — not only physically but spiritually — unless he passes into a newform of existence. This form is characterized by two things: first, by anextreme lucidity and objectivity, and second, by a capacity to act andstay upright that is drawn from profound forces, beyond the categoriesof the individual, of ideals, of values, and of the goals of bourgeoiscivilization. What is important here is a natural union of life with risk,beyond the instinct of selfpreservation, including situations in whichone’s own physical destruction is parallel to the attainment of the absolute sense of existence, and actualizes the “absolute person.” We mightcall this the ultimate case of “riding the tiger.”
1054Jiinger believed that he could recognize a symbol of this style inthe “unknown soldier” (adding that there are not only unknown soldiers, but also unknown officers). Apart from situations of which noreport ever comes to light, anonymous actions at the limits of the lifeof the physical individual that remain without spectators and haveno pretence to recognition or glory, nor are attributable to romanticheroism — apart from these, Jiinger showed that through processes ofthis kind men of a recognizably new type often tend to take form anddifferentiate themselves, not only by their behavior but by their actualphysical traits, their “mask.” This modern type contains the destruction within himself and is no longer comprehensible in terms of the
1055“individual”: he is outside the values of humanism. But the essentialthing is to recognize the reality of processes that, if they act in extrememode during modern total warfare, may repeat in other forms andother degrees of intensity when they encounter a suitable substance.This can even occur in peacetime, in all of today’s highly mechanizedexistence, striking the individual and supplanting him with an impersonal “type” marked by a certain uniformity. The faces of men andwomen take on the appearance of masks, “metallic masks in the one,cosmetic masks in the other.” In their gestures and expressions thereis a sort of “abstract cruelty,” correlating with the everincreasing
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1059 Dissolution of the Individual
1060
1061space in today’s world that is taken up by technology, quantity, geometry, and everything that refers to objective relationships.
1062These are indubitably some of the essential aspects of contemporaryexistence, in view of which people have spoken of a new barbarism. Butwhat, then, is the culture that might oppose it and serve as refuge forthe person? There is truly a lack of valid reference points. Jiinger wascertainly mistaken in thinking that the active process of depersonalization is the main trend in the postbourgeois world; and later he himself had to return to a very different order of ideas. The prevalent anddetermining trends are, and will be increasingly in future, the passivedestructive processes from which can only arise a squalid uniformity, areduction to types that lack the dimension of depth and any metaphysical quality, defining themselves at an existential level even lower thanthe already problematic one of the individual and the person.
1063The positive possibilities can only apply to a small minority: tothose beings in whom the transcendent dimension is preexistent or canbe awakened. This brings us back, of course, to the one problem thatconcerns us. These are the only ones who can give new values to a soulless world of machines, of technology, of modern megacities, and ofall that is sheer reality and objectivity, which appears cold, inhuman,menacing, devoid of intimacy, depersonalizing, and barbaric. By fullyaccepting this reality and these processes, the differentiated man canessentialize and form himself according to a valid personal equation,activating the transcendent dimension within, burning out the dregs ofindividuality, and thus revealing the absolute person.
1064For this it is not necessary to consider only exceptional and borderline situations. It is a matter of the general style of a new activerealism that opens up pathways even in the midst of chaos and mediocrity. Among other things, the machine itself may appear as a symbol,and everything that has taken form in certain sectors of the modernworld in terms of pure functionality, especially in architecture. Themachine symbolizes a form born from an exact, objective adjustmentof the means to the end, with the exclusion of everything superfluous,arbitrary, irrelevant, or subjective. It is a form that precisely realizes anidea: the idea, in this case, of the purpose for which it is made. On itsown plane, it reflects in a way the same value as the classical world
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1067Destructions and Liberations in the New Realism
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1069knew through geometrical form, number as entity, and the whole Doricprinciple of “nothing in excess.” Some have spoken of a metaphysics ofthe machine, and of new archetypes heralded in the perfect functionalforms of our time. If this is meaningless on the prosaic plane of everyday modern reality, it may have meaning on its own, symbolic plane,where one certainly does not envisage mechanization, rationalization,and utility, but rather the value of form and the love of form. Here thestyle of objectivity should not be confused with that of disanimation,but can be taken along the lines already mentioned: of impersonal perfection in every work.
1070It is interesting to notice an orientation of this kind among the currents of the postWorld War I period, whose slogan was “new objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit). Books like F. Matzke’s Jugend bekennt: sosind wir! (Youth admits: That’s how we are!) do not deal with demandssatisfiable on the artistic and literary plane, but with the inner formthat a human type of the new generation involuntarily finds itself with,simply as the effect of the general objective processes of the times. Onthis plane one can define a realism that signifies coolness, clarity, seriousness, and purity; detachment from the world of sentimentalism, ofego problems, of melodramatic tragedy, of the whole legacy of twilightromanticism, idealism, and expressionism: a realism that entails thesense of the vanity of the I and of believing oneself important as anindividual.  Matzke wrote: “We are objective, because for us the reality of things is great, infinite, and everything human is too small, limited, and polluted with ‘soul’.”  He spoke of the language of things andactions, to be substituted for that of feelings; of an inner form that hasnothing to do with books, culture, or science, so that it can be muchmore precise in the “barbarian” than in the “civilized” being of thebourgeois world. Hence the term “objective asceticism” has been usedof this attitude; and one may also recall the expression of Stravinsky:
1071“to freeze things.”
1072I must emphasize that this attitude is based neither on pessimismnor on a concealed philosophy of desperation. It is not concerned withvalues and goals that it now recognizes as illusory, or with its impotenceto control reality, or its own inadequacy. The very sense of these valuesand goals is nonexistent, leaving action to be free, in a pure and cool
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1076 Dissolution of the Individual
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1078atmosphere. Drawing an analogy from the world of the arts, Matzkerefers to the criteria that Albrecht Schaeffer followed in translatingHomer: he wanted to convey “the loftiness of the faroff, the different, the strange,” and to highlight “not the episodic or sentimental, buta laconic monumentality, rigid rather than moving, enigmatic ratherthan familiar, obscure and weighty rather than smooth and polished .” 5The essential traits of the new attitude were well described as distance,otherness, loftiness, monumentality, a laconic quality, and the revulsionagainst all that is warm proximity, humanity, effusiveness, expressionism; the line of objectivity in figures, of coolness and grandeur in forms.
1079But apart from art, we are dealing with the general elements of aconduct and sentiment of existence, because the thesis that art standsamong the supreme capabilities of man and reveals the essence of theuniverse rightly appeared to these writers as tired and anachronistic.The love of clarity is part of the style of objectivity: “Better ugly andclear, than beautiful and veiled .”  The world must return to its stable,calm, clear, and naked state. “In the last analysis, even the life of thesoul has value for us only as a thing, as a given of existence, with equalcharacteristics of objectivity and fatality ,”  wrote Matzke. “Rather thanlooking at the world from the point of view of the soul, we look at thesoul from the point of view of the world .  And then everything seems tous clearer, more natural, more evident, and that which is merely subjective appears to us ever more irrelevant and laughable .”
1080Between the two world wars, functional architecture receivedimpulses from currents analogous to those of the Neue Sachlichkeit.The theme of a new classicism generally surfaced in them, understoodprecisely in the sense of a tendency toward form and simplification,toward a linear and essential “Doricism,” affirmed in opposition tothe arbitrariness, fantasy, and “gracefulness” of the preceding art ofbourgeois individualism. One may also recall in France the socalledesprit nouveau that was closely related to the exponents of functionalarchitecture. And at the time when Bontempelli launched his “novecentismo ,”  a parallel demand, though on a merely dilettantish planeof literati and unrealized intentions, was proclaimed in Italy. ThenBontempelli opposed to “the romantic era, that lasted from Jesus Christto the Ballets Russes” (!) the new era, which was supposed to unfold
1081
1082Destructions and Liberations in the New Realism
1083
1084under the sign of a magical realism and a new classicism, just as otherswere speaking of the new Doricism of the skyscraper era, of white metaland crystal.
1085Despite its limited pertinence to our concerns, this motive of a newrealism contains values that are susceptible to transposition onto ahigher, spiritual plane, in view of the task of turning what one experiences in the modern world into something positive. There are objectiveprocesses today that certainly involve an impoverishment compared tothe preceding world of the individual and the person, and to its survival. But in him who can maintain the inner tension proper to thetranscendent dimension, such an impoverishment may acquire the positive value of a simplification and essentialization of being, in a spiritualworld in dissolution.
1086I have treated the new realism with the reservation that what is ofvalue in it is generally out of sight. But now that this is pointed out, itis best to draw a clear demarcation between the realism that may contain this potential significance, and its subproducts of neorealism andMarxist realism that belong to the ambitus of pure nihilism, not leastbecause there have been collusions between the different types.
1087Generally speaking, the second type has manifested almost exclusively in the domain of art and literary criticism, and as a function ofpolitics. It is hardly worth dwelling on the neorealism that surfaced afterWorld War II. It was characterized by the tendency in the artistic fieldto present as human reality only the most trivial and wretched sides ofexistence, mostly relating to the lowest and most vulnerable social strata.The whole pose exhausted itself in a single phase; it appeared wanting inany dimension of depth, even virtual depth, and served as a sophisticatedformula for certain intellectuals disguised as common folk. When it wasnot reiterating banalities about the pathos of wretched people, it oftentook pleasure in ugliness and in masochism, in the complacent depictionof everything most abject, corrupt, and defeated in man. There is a wholegenre of novels, unnecessary to name by title, in which this tendencyappears undisguised, sometimes in combination with the most irrationaland dark side of existentialism. That which in actual life is only a sectorof a complex reality is here characterized as reality itself: a misrepresentation too obvious to require further comment.
1088
1089
1090 Dissolution of the Individual
1091
1092More noteworthy is the tendentious use made of something that isless a realism than a narrowranged verismo on the part of the Marxist
1093“new realism,” which realistically depicts the negative aspects of existence for purposes of propaganda and sociopolitical action, startingfrom the wellknown formula that “the damage done to humanity isthe consequence of the bourgeois and capitalistic socioeconomic structure.” We have already mentioned the kind of “human integrity” that isoffered as an alternative: it is that of Nietzsche’s “last man,” a humanintegrity traded for that which might suit socialized cattle. The corresponding realism and antiidealism is to be judged accordingly. Its antibourgeois and antiindividualist polemic takes for granted a regressionof the human unit to a purely collective (“social”) existence determined
1094* by material and economic values: a regression that is given out to be an
1095“integration” and a “new proletarian humanism.” (At one point Lukacslets slip its true name, when he speaks of “plebeian humanism.”) Hererealism seems to be synonymous with a banal primitivism, which wehave mentioned as the formula for one type of existential anesthetization in the world where God is dead.
1096The truth, as we know, is that the realism in question draws itsspecific character from the theory of historical materialism and fromother conceptions that, while they aspire to being objective and scientific, in fact contain just as much “mythology” and mere social ideology as is found in those great despised words, written in capital letters,of bourgeois idealism. Words of this kind are not eliminated from theunderpinnings of the Marxist new realism, but replaced by others ofa still lower level; they form the center of a mystic nihilism sui generisthrough their translation into energized ideas, made to work on thesubintellectual strata of the masses. This is enough to deprive Marxistrealism of any “realistic” character, and to show that it is far from having reached the zero point of values. That zero point may become thestart of a clear, detached, objective vision of existence, and of a positive,existential incapacity to submit to “myths” of any kind whatsoever. Thislast trait belongs rather to the deepest demand of the “new realism” discussed above, the Neue Sachlichkeit and kindred tendencies, in whichwe can find something of positive value from our point of view. It is a
1097
1098
1099Destructions and Liberations in the New Realism
1100
1101simplification that may well involve an impoverishment and a lack ofcolorfulness compared to the “values of the person,” but that does notnecessarily descend to a lower level, and that may give rise to a kind ofconduct in the free man that fits the objective structures of the contemporary world.
1102
1103
1104
1105
1106The “Animal Ideal”
1107
1108The Sentiment of Nature
1109
1110The transcendent dimension may also become active in reaction tothe processes responsible for a steady erosion of many ties to nature,
1111* leading to a rootless state. It is evident, for example, that the stayathome bourgeois lifestyle is increasingly and irreversibly affected by theprogress of communication technology, opening up great expanses onland, sea, and air. Modern life takes place ever less in a protected, selfcontained, qualitative, and organic environment: one is immersed inthe entire world by new and rapid travel that can bring us to farawaylands and landscapes in little time. Hence, we tend toward a generalcosmopolitanism as “world citizens” in a material and objective sense,not an ideological, much less a humanitarian one. At least the times of
1112“provincialism” are over.
1113To see what positive effect such situations can have on the development of the differentiated and selfpossessed man, it is enough toglance at the ideas of certain traditional spiritual disciplines. In them,the metaphysical idea of the transience of earthly existence and thedetachment from the world have had two characteristic expressions,whether symbolic or actual: the first in hermit life, living alone indesert or forest, the second in the wandering life, going through theworld without house or home. This second type has even occurred insome Western religious orders; ancient Buddhism had the characteristicconcept of “departure,” as the start of a nonprofane existence, and intraditional Hinduism this was the last of the four stages of life. There isa significant analogy with the idea of the medieval “knight errant,” towhich we might add the enigmatic and sometimes disconcerting figures
1114
1115
1116
1117
1118
1119The “Animal Ideal ”
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1121of “noble travelers” whose homeland was unknown, who did not haveone, or must not be asked about it.
1122Although our case is different from that of ascetics who removethemselves from the world, the situation of the latest technological civilization might offer the incentive for commitments of this kind. In alarge city, in mass society, among the almost unreal swarming of faceless beings, an essential sense of isolation or of detachment often occursnaturally, perhaps even more than in the solitude of moors and mountains. What I have hinted at concerning recent technology that annihilates distances and the planetary spread of today’s horizons, feeds innerdetachment, superiority, calm transcendence, while acting and movingin the vast world: one finds oneself everywhere, yet at home nowhere. 1In this way, the negative can again be turned into positive. The experience increasingly offered, and often imposed on our contemporaries,of going to other cities, across frontiers, even to other continents, outside the sphere of a secure existence with its peculiarities can be banal,matteroffact, 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 abovementioned terms, but onlyif the proper capacity of reaction is present in oneself.
1123Given that the speed factor has an essential role in the modern, technical mastery of distances, a passing allusion could be made to the valueof the experience of speed itself. It is well known that today it is used bymany men, and even women, almost like alcohol, to obtain a physicalintoxication that feeds an essentially physical I, needing distraction fromunpleasant thoughts and drugging itself with strong emotions.
1124Like the machine itself, some situations of speed in the technologized world can have a virtual, symbolic, and realizable dimension,often involving risk: the greater the speed, the more it requires a superior lucidity, bringing into play a higher type of calmness and internalimmobility. In this context the intoxication of speed can even changeits nature; it can pass from one plane to another and have some traits incommon with the type of intoxication of which I have spoken describing the state of integrated Dionysism. If this were the proper place, Icould develop this theme much further.
1125Returning to what was mentioned earlier, the expression “nomad
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1127
1128
1129 Dissolution of the Individual
1130
1131of the asphalt,” although scathing, is significant of the negative anddepersonalizing effect on life of the destruction of natural ties in large,modern cities. Also in this regard, I am not concerned with those formsof revolt or protest that, with the idea of defending “human values,”end up going “back to nature,” starting from the antitheses betweencity and nature, between “civilization” and nature. That theme alreadybelonged to the nineteenthcentury bourgeois repertory. But today itoccurs in the context of what we might call the “physical” primitivization of existence.
1132Here is one effect of that regression, through which in the course ofhis “liberation” Western man has come to feel ever less as a privilegedbeing of creation, and ever more as one of so many natural species —
1133“Sven as an animal. The defining and spread of Darwinism and evolutionism were already barometric indicators of this inner attitude. Butapart from the domain of theories and science, in the field of ordinary, modern life, it has manifested in terms of behavior, giving rise towhat has been called the “animal ideal,” especially referring to NorthAmerica, where it was first realized.
1134The term applies to that ideal of biological wellbeing, comfort,optimistic euphoria emphasizing everything that is sheer health, youth,physical vigor, security, and material success, primitive satisfaction ofhunger and sexual desire, athletic life, and so forth, whose counterpart is the atrophy of every superior form of sensibility and interest. Ihave already treated this .  The kind of man who is thus elevated to thesummit of “modern” civilization is evidently one who has developedonly the aspects through which he belongs to an animal species. It goeswithout saying that this idea finds its counterpart in the nihilism thatunderlies many of today’s predominant sociopolitical currents. Here Ionly want to emphasize the “back to nature” idea as an instance of thephysical cult of the personality.
1135It is not a matter of mere forms, legitimate but banal, of organiccompensation. It is no wonder that today’s man feels a need for physicalreintegration, relaxation of nerves, and invigoration of the body awayfrom the environment of large, modern cities. For this reason, naturalliving, the culture of the body, and even certain types of individual sportmay be useful. Things appear otherwise, however, when people start to
1136
1137The “Animal Ideal”
1138
1139claim that some kind of spiritual factor is involved; that is, when it isthought that natural surroundings and physical strength make a manfeel closer to himself than in the experiences and tensions of civilizedlife, and above all when it is supposed that physical sensations of wellbeing and comfort have any profound significance, or anything to dowith human integrity considered from a higher point of view.
1140Apart from that position, which leads to the “animal ideal” andmodern naturalism, I deplore the general confusion of a “return to origins” with a return to Mother Earth and even to Nature. Although ithas often been misapplied, that theological doctrine that holds that apurely natural state for man has never existed is still legitimate; at thebeginning he was placed in a supranatural state from which he hasnow fallen. In fact, for the true type of man, it can never be a questionof those origins and that “mother” wherein the individual cannot differentiate himself from his fellow men, or even from the animals. Everyreturn to nature is a regressive phenomenon, including any protest inthe name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, the flesh, life uninhibited by the intellect, and so forth. The man who becomes “natural” inthis way has in reality become denatured.
1141Here I must return to an earlier point: a consequence of rejectingthis view is the overcoming of the antithesis between city and nature inthe behavior that should be “natural” for the human type who concernsus. It is the attitude of him who feels in place as little in nature as inthe city, for whom it is normal and honest in a higher sense to keep hisdistance with respect to both; he sees the need and pleasure of surrender, expatiation, and feeling in animal, physical terms as an evasion, asymptom of fatigue and internal inconsistency. The body is part of the
1142“person” as a definite instrument of expression and action in the situation actually lived; therefore it is obvious that one must also extend toit discipline and control, in order to assure completeness of being. This,however, has nothing to do with the cult of the physical personality,much less with the mania for sports, especially for team sports, one oftoday’s most vulgar and widespread opiates of the masses.
1143As for the “sentiment of nature,” in general, the human type thatconcerns us must consider nature as part of a larger and more objectivewhole: nature for him includes countrysides, mountains, forests, and
1144
1145
1146
1147 Dissolution of the Individual
1148
1149seacoasts, but also dams, turbines, and foundries, the tentacular systemof ladders and cranes of a great modern port or a complex of functionalskyscrapers. This is the space for a higher freedom. He remains free andselfaware before both types of nature — being no less secure in the middle of a steppe or on an alpine peak than amid Western city nightlife.
1150The counterpart of the “animal ideal” occurs when the sentiment of nature and landscape is made banal. This was already thecase with idyllic nature, which was made into a myth in the period ofthe Encyclopedie and by Rousseau. Later, along these lines, there wasthe nature beloved by the bourgeois: Arcadian or lyric nature characterized by beauty and grace, by the picturesque, the restful, by thatwhich inspires “noble sentiments”; nature with its brooks and groves,the romance of sunset and the pathos of moonlight; nature to whichone declaims verses, weaves idylls, and evokes the poets who speak of
1151“beautiful souls.” Though sublimated and dignified, the mood immortalized by Beethoven’s Pastorale is no different.
1152In the end, the phase of nature for the plebeians arrives, with thebreakout of the masses, the common people everywhere with or without their automobiles, the travel agencies, the dopolavori ,  and all therest; nothing is spared. The naturists and nudists form the extreme ofthis phenomenon. The beaches — teeming insectlike with thousandsand thousands of male and female bodies, offering to the glance aninsipid, almost complete nudity — are another symptom. Still anotheris the assault on the mountains by cable cars, funiculars, chair lifts,and ski lifts. All this is part of the regime of final disintegration of ourepoch. There is no point in dwelling on it.
1153I prefer to clarify the function that authentic contact with naturecan have for the active, impersonal attitude, starting with some notionsalong the lines of the Neue Sachlichkeit, which can only acquire a fullsignificance in our differentiated human type.
1154Matzke said of this: “Nature is the great realm of things, whichdemands nothing of us, which neither pursues us nor asks for sentimental reactions, which stands mutely before us as a world to itself, external and alien. This is exactly what we need . . . this reality, alwaysgrand and distant, resting in itself, beyond all the little joys and thelittle sorrows of man. A world of objects, enclosed in itself, in which we
1155
1156
1157The “Animal Ideal ”
1158
1159ourselves feel like an object. Completely detached from everythingmerely subjective, from every personal vanity and nullity: this is whatnature is for us .”  It is a question of restoring to nature — to space, tothings, to landscape — those characteristics of distance and foreignnessto mankind that were hidden in the epoch of individualism, when manprojected his feelings, his passions, his lyrical ardor, onto reality tomake it closer to him. It is a question of rediscovering the language ofthe inanimate that cannot manifest until the “soul” has ceased toimpose itself on things.
1160This is the sense in which nature can speak to us of transcendence. Our attention automatically shifts from some principal aspectsof nature to others that are more propitious for opening us up tothe nonhuman and the nonindividual. Nietzsche also spoke of the
1161“superiority” of the inorganic world, calling it “spirituality withoutindividuality.” For a “supreme clarification of existence” he refersas an analogy to the “pure atmosphere of the Alps and ice fields,where there are no more clouds or veils, where the elementary qualities of things are revealed naked and uncompromising but with absolute intelligibility” and one hears “the immense, ciphered languageof existence,” “the doctrine of becoming made stone .”  To returnthe world to a calm, stable, clear, and cool state; to restore to it itselementarity, its selfcontained grandeur — this was also said to be thedemand of the “new objectivity.” Here prominence was justly givennot to insensibility, but to a different kind of sensibility. Also for us,it is a matter of a human type whom nature no longer interests byoffering him what is “artistic,” rare, characteristic; he who no longerseeks in nature the “beauty” that merely feeds confused nostalgiasand speaks to fantasy. For this human type, there can be no landscape more beautiful than another, but some landscapes can be moredistant, boundless, calm, cool, harsh, and primordial than others. Hehears the language of things of the world not among trees, brooks,beautiful gardens, before oleographic sunsets and romantic moonlight, but rather in deserts, rocks, steppes, glaciers, murky Nordicfjords, the implacable, tropical sun, great ocean currents — in fact, ineverything primordial and inaccessible. It naturally follows that theman with this sentiment of nature relates to it more actively — almost
1162
1163
1164
1165 Dissolution of the Individual
1166
1167by absorbing its own pure, perceived force — than in a vague, lax, andrambling contemplation.
1168If for the bourgeois generation nature was a kind of idyllic Sundayinterlude of smalltown life, and if for the latest generation it is thestage for acting out its vacuous, invasive, and contaminating vulgarity,it is for our differentiated man a school of objectivity and distance; it issomething fundamental in his sense of existence, exhibiting an absolutecharacter. At this point one can clearly speak of a nature that in itselementarity is the great world where the stone and steel panoramas ofthe metropolis, the endless avenues, the functional complexes of industrial areas are on the same level, for example, as great, solitary forestsas symbols of a fundamental austerity, objectivity, and impersonality.
1169With regard to the problems of inner orientation in our epoch, I havealways valued ideas present in traditional esoteric doctrines. This alsoapplies to what I have just said. The liberation of nature from the human,the access to it through the language of silence and the inanimate seemscongenial to one who would turn the objective, destructive processesof the modern world to his own advantage. But the direction is no different from that which schools of traditional wisdom, like Zen, knewthrough a real cleansing and transparency of the glance or an openingof the eye, an enlightening revelation of the consciousness that has overcome the fetters of the physical I, of the person, and his values.
1170The result here is an experience that already belongs to a differentlevel from that of ordinary consciousness. It does not exactly concernthe matter of this book, but it is still interesting to point out its relationship with the vision of the world centered on free immanence, whichwas mentioned in an earlier chapter (in which a fleeting allusion toZen itself was made) and which I now reconsider as the limit of a newrealism. Ancient tradition has a saying: “The infinitely distant is thereturn.” Among the maxims of Zen that point in the same directionis the statement that the “great revelation,” acquired through a seriesof mental and spiritual crises, consists in the recognition that “no oneand nothing ‘extraordinary’ exists in the beyond”; only the real exists.Reality is, however, lived in a state in which “there is no subject of theexperience nor any object that is experienced,” and under the sign of a
1171
1172
1173The “Animal Ideal”
1174
1175type of absolute presence, “the immanent making itself transcendentand the transcendent immanent.” The teaching is that at the point atwhich one seeks the Way, one finds oneself further from it, the samebeing valid for the perfection and “realization” of the self. The cedarin the courtyard, a cloud casting its shadow on the hills, falling rain, aflower in bloom, the monotonous sound of waves: all these “natural”and banal facts can suggest absolute illumination, the satori. As merefacts they are without meaning, finality, or intention, but as such theyhave an absolute meaning. Reality appears this way, in the pure state of
1176“things being as they are.” The moral counterpart is indicated in sayings such as: “The pure and immaculate ascetic does not enter nirvana,and the monk who breaks the rules does not go to hell,” or: “You haveno liberation to seek from bonds, because you have never been bound.” 7The extent that these peaks of the inner life can be attained, in theframework already indicated, remains undetermined. I merely wish topoint out a convergence of themes and a direction.
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1178
1179Part 5
1180
1181Dissolution ofConsciousnessand Relativism
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1183
1184
1185
1186The Proceduresof Modern Science
1187
1188One of the principal justifications for Western civilization believingitself, since the nineteenth century, to be the civilization par excellenceis natural science. Based on the myth of this science, preceding civilizations were judged to be obscurantist and infantile; prey to superstitionsand to metaphysical and religious whims. Apart from a few casual discoveries, they were ignorant of the path of true knowledge, which canbe reached only with the positive, mathematicalexperimental methodsdeveloped in the modern era. Science and knowledge have been madesynonymous with experimental “positive science,” while the epithet
1189“prescientific” has come to signify a disqualification beyond appeal ofany other type of knowledge.
1190The apogee of the myth of physical science coincided with thatof the bourgeois era, when positivist and materialist scientism was infavor. Then there was talk of a crisis of science, and an internal critiqueoccurred, resulting in a new phase inaugurated by Einstein’s theory. Asan offshoot of this, the scientistic myth has revived recently with anappraisal of scientific knowledge that in certain cases has had curiousdevelopments. Among them, it is claimed that the latest science, havingnow passed the phase of materialism and cleared the field of old, useless speculations, has reconciled its conclusions about the nature of theuniverse with metaphysics, presenting themes and views that agree withthe certainties of philosophy, and for some, even of religion. Besidesthe popularizers of Reader’s Digest, certain scientists like Eddington,Planck, and even Einstein have made informal pronouncements of thiskind. Hence there is a kind of euphoria, confirmed by the prospects of
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1196The Procedures of Modern Science
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1198the atomic era and the “second industrial revolution,” whose very pointof departure was modern physics.
1199All these are only developments of one of the great illusions of themodern world, one of the mirages of an epoch in which, in reality, thedissolving processes have besieged the field of knowledge itself. In orderto realize this, it is enough to look beyond the facade. If it is not a matter of popularizers, but of the scientists themselves, and if it is not a caselike the knowing smiles between mystifying augurs, which Cicero speaksof, it reveals a naivete that only an unequaled limitation of horizons andintellectual interests could explain.
1200None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge; rather,it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense.The driving and organizing force behind modern science derives nothing at all from the ideal of knowledge, but exclusively from practicalnecessity, and, I might add, from the will to power turned on thingsand on nature. I do not mean its technical and industrial applications,even though the masses attribute the prestige of modern science aboveall to them, because there they see irrefutable proof of its validity. It isa matter of the very nature of scientific methods even before their technical applications, in the phase known as “pure research.” In fact, theconcept of “truth” in the traditional sense is already alien to modernscience, which concerns itself solely with hypotheses and formulae thatcan predict with the best approximation the course of phenomena andrelate them to a certain unity. And as it is not a question of “truth,”but a matter less of seeing than of touching, the concept of certaintyin modern science is reduced to the “maximum probability.” That allscientific certainties have an essentially statistical character is openlyrecognized by every scientist, and more categorically than ever in recentsubatomic physics. The system of science resembles a net that drawsever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends.
1201These practical ends only secondarily concern the technical applications; they constitute the criterion in the very domain that belongs topure knowledge, in the sense that here, too, the basic impulse is schematizing, an ordering of phenomena in a simpler and more manageableway. As was rightly noted, ever since that formula simplex sigillum veri
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1205 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
1206
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1208(simplicity is the seal of the true), there has appeared a method thatexchanges for truth (and knowledge) that which satisfies a practical,purely human need of the intellect. In the final analysis, the impulseto know is transformed into an impulse to dominate; and we owe to ascientist, Bertrand Russell, the recognition that science, from being ameans to know the world, has become a means to change the world.
1209I will not dwell further on these commonplace considerations.Epistemology, that is, reflection applied to the methods of scientificresearch, has honestly recognized all of them already, with Bergson,Leroy, Poincare, Meyerson, Brunschvicg, and many others, to saynothing of what Nietzsche himself had seen perfectly well. They havebrought to light the altogether practical and pragmatic character of scientific methods. The more “comfortable” ideas and theories become
1210“true,” in regard to the organization of the data of sensorial experience.A choice between such data is made consciously or instinctively, excluding systematically those that do not lend themselves to being controlled;thus also everything qualitative and unrepeatable that is not susceptibleto being mathematized.
1211Scientific “objectivity” consists solely in being ready at any momentto abandon existing theories or hypotheses, as soon as the chanceappears for the better control of reality. Thereupon it includes in thesystem of the already predictable and manageable those phenomena notyet considered, or seemingly irreducible; and that, without any principle that in itself, in its intrinsic nature, is valid once and for all. Inthe same way, he who can lay his hands on a modern longrange rifle isready to give up a flintlock.
1212Based on the above, one can demonstrate that final form of dissolution of knowledge corresponding to Einstein’s theory of relativity.Only the profane, in hearing talk of relativity, could believe that thenew theory had destroyed every certainty and almost sanctioned akind of Pirandellian “thus it is, if you think so.” In fact, it is quite adifferent matter, in the sense that this theory has brought us even closerto absolute certainties, but of a purely formal character. A coherentsystem of physics has been constructed to keep all relativity in check,to take every change and variation into account, with the greatest independence from points of reference and from everything bound to obser
1213
1214
1215The Procedures of Modern Science
1216
1217vations, to the evidence of direct experience, and to current perceptionsof space, time, and speed. This system is “absolute” through the flexibility granted to it by its exclusively mathematical and algebraic nature.Thus once the “cosmic constant” is defined (according to the speed oflight), the socalled transformation equations suffice to introduce a certain number of parameters into the formulae used to account for phenomena in order to get over a certain “relativity” and to avoid anypossible disproof from the facts of experience.
1218A simpleminded example can make this state of affairs plain.Whether Earth moves around the Sun, or the Sun around Earth, fromthe point of view of Einstein’s “cosmic constant” is more or less the same.One is no more “true” than the other, except that the second alternativewould involve the introduction of many more elements to the formulae,thus a greater complication and inconvenience in the calculations. Forthe person unconcerned with one system being more complicated andinconvenient than another, the choice remains free; this person could calculate the various phenomena starting either from the premise that Earthrevolves around the Sun, or from the opposite premise.
1219This banal and elementary example clarifies the type of “certainty”and knowledge to which Einstein’s theory leads. In that regard, it isimportant to point out that there is nothing new here, that his theory represents only the latest and most accessible manifestation of thecharacteristic orientation of all modern science. This theory, though farfrom common or philosophical relativism, is willing to admit the mostunlikely relativities, but arms itself against them, so to speak, from thestart. It intends to supply certainties that either leave out or anticipatethem, and thus from the formal point of view are almost absolute. Andif reality should ever revolt against them, a suitable readjustment ofdimensions will restore these certainties.
1220It would be good to look further into the kind and presuppositionsof this “knowing.” The cosmic constant is a purely mathematical concept; in using it to speak of the speed of light, one no longer imaginesspeed, light, or propagation, one must only have in mind numbers andsymbols. If someone were to ask those scientists what is light, withoutaccepting an answer in mathematical symbols, they would look stupefied and not even understand the request. Everything that in recent
1221
1222
1223 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
1224
1225physics proceeds from that stronghold participates rigorously in itsnature: physics is completely algebraized. With the introduction of theconcept of a “multidimensional continuum” even that final sensibleintuitive basis that survived in yesterday’s physics in the pure, schematic, categories of geometrical space is reduced to mathematical formulae. Space and time here are one and the same; they form a
1226“continuum,” itself expressed by algebraic functions. Together withthe current, intuitive notion of space and time, that of force, energy,and movement also disappears. For example, in terms of Einstein’sphysics the motion of a planet around the Sun only means that in thecorresponding field of the spacetime continuum there is a certain
1227“curvature” — a term that, to be sure, cannot have made him imagine
1228'anything, dealing again with pure, algebraic values. The idea of amotion produced by a force is reduced to the bare bones of an abstractmotion following the “shortest geodetic line,” which in our universewould approximate an ellipse. As in this algebraic scheme nothingremains of the concrete idea of force, even less so can there be roomfor cause. The “spiritualization” alleged by the popularizers of modern physics, due to the disappearance of the idea of matter and thereduction of the concept of mass to that of energy, is an absurdity,because mass and energy are made interchangeable values by anabstract formula. The only result of all this is a practical one: theapplication of the formula in order to control atomic forces. Apartfrom that, everything is consumed by the fire of algebraic abstractionassociated with a radical experimentalism, that is, with a recording ofsimple phenomena.
1229With quantum theory one has the impression of entering into acabalistic world (in the popular meaning of the term). The paradoxical results of the MichelsonMorley experiment provided the incentivefor the formulation of Einstein’s theory. Another paradox is that of thediscontinuity and improbability discovered by nuclear physics throughthe process of expressing atomic radiations in numerical quantities. (Insimple terms: it deals with the evidence that these quantities do notmake up a continuous series; it is as if in the series of numbers, threewere not followed by four, five, etc., but skipped to a different number,without even obeying the law of probability.) This new paradox has led
1230
1231The Procedures of Modern Science
1232
1233to a further algebraizing of the socalled mechanics of matrices, usedto explain them away, beside a new and entirely abstract formulationof fundamental laws, like the energy constant, action and reaction, andso on. Here one has not only relinquished the law of causality, replacing it by statistical averages, because it seemed to have to do with purechance: in addition, in the latest developments of this physics one seesthe paradox of having to relinquish experimental proofs because theirresults were found to be variable. The very doing of an experimentallows that one may have one result now and another later, becausethe experiment itself influences the object; it alters it due to the interdependent values of “position” and “motion,” and to any description ofthe subatomic phenomena another, just as “true,” can be opposed. It isnot the experiment, whose results through this method would remaininconclusive, but rather the pure, algebraic function, the socalled wavefunction, that serves to provide absolute values in this domain.
1234According to one most recent theory, which integrates Einstein’srelativity, purely mathematical entities that on the one hand magicallyspring forth in full irrationality, but on the other are ordered in a completely formal system of algebraic “production,” exhaustively accountfor everything that can be positively checked and formularized regarding the ultimate basis of sensible reality. This process was the intellectual background to the atomic era’s inauguration — parallel, therefore,to the definitive liquidation of all knowledge in the proper sense. Oneof the principal exponents of modern physics, Heisenberg, has explicitly admitted this in his book: it is about a formal knowledge enclosedin itself, extremely precise in its practical consequences, in which, however, one cannot speak of knowledge of the real. For modern science, hesays, “the object of research is no longer the object in itself, but natureas a function of the problems that man sets himself”; the logical conclusion in such science being that “henceforth man only meets himself.”
1235There is an aspect in which this latest natural science represents atype of inversion or counterfeit of that concept of catharsis, or purification, that in the traditional world was extended from the moral andritual field to the intellectual; it referred to an intellectual discipline that,through overcoming the perceptions furnished by the animal senses andmore or less mixed with the reactions of the I, would lead to a higher
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1239 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
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1241knowledge, to true knowledge. In effect, we have something similar inmodern algebraized physics. Not only has it gradually freed itself fromany immediate data of sense experience and common sense, but evenfrom all that which imagination could offer as support. The current concepts of space, time, motion, and causality fall one by one, so to speak.Everything that can be suggested by the direct and living relationship ofthe observer to the observed is made unreal, irrelevant, and negligible.It is then like a catharsis that consumes every residue of the sensory, notin order to lead to a higher world, the “intelligible world” or a “worldof ideas,” as in the ancient schools of wisdom, but rather to the realm ofpure mathematical thought, of number, of undifferentiated quantity, asopposed to the realm of quality, of meaningful forms and living forces:a spectral and cabalistic world, an extreme intensification of the abstractintellect, where it is no longer a matter of things or phenomena, butalmost of their shadows reduced to their common denominator, grayand indistinguishable. One may well speak of a falsification of the elevation of the mind above human senseexperience, which in the traditionalworld had as its effect not the destruction of the evidences of that experience, but their integration: the potentizing of the ordinary, concreteperception of natural phenomena by also experiencing their symbolicand intelligible aspects.
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1246Covering up Nature
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1248Phenomenology
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1250This, then, is the state of affairs: Modern science has led to a prodigiousincrease of information about phenomena in formerly unexplored orneglected fields, but in so doing it has not brought man any closer tothe depths of reality, but has rather distanced and estranged him fromthem; and what nature “really” is, according to science, escapes anyconcrete intuition. From this point of view, the latest science has noadvantage over earlier, materialistic science. The atoms of yesteryearand the mechanistic conception of the universe at least allowed one torepresent something, in however primitive a fashion; but the entities ofthe latest mathematical physics serve to represent absolutely nothing.They are simply the stitches of a net that has been fabricated and perfected not for the sake of knowing in a concrete, intuitive, and livingsense— the only sense that would matter to an undegenerate humanity — but in order to gain an ever greater power, yet still an externalone, over nature, whose depths remain closed to man and as mysteriousas ever. Nature’s mysteries have simply been covered over, and attention diverted from them by the spectacular successes of technology andindustry, where one no longer tries to know the world, but to change itfor the purposes of an earthbound humanity — following the programexplicitly laid out by Karl Marx.
1251I will repeat that it is a fraud to speak of a spiritual value in today’sscience, just because instead of matter, it talks about energy, or becauseit sees mass as “coagulated radiations” or a sort of “congealed light,”and because it considers spaces of more than three dimensions. Noneof that has any existence outside the theories of specialists in purelyabstract mathematical notions. When these notions are substituted for
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1258 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
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1260those of earlier physics, they still change nothing of modern man’seffective experience of the world. This substitution of one hypothesisfor another does not concern real existence, but only interests mindsgiven to pointless divagations. After it has been said that energy, notmatter, exists, that we live not in a Euclidean, threedimensional spacebut in a curved space of four or more dimensions, and so forth, thingsremain as they were; my actual experience has not changed a whit, andthe significance of what I see — light, the sun, fire, seas, sky, floweringplants, dying beings — the ultimate significance of every process andphenomenon is no more transparent to me. One cannot begin to speakof transcendence, of a deepened knowledge in spiritual or truly intellectual terms. One can only speak of a quantitative extension of notionsabout other sectors of the external world, which aside from practicalutility has only curiosity value.
1261In every other respect, modern science has made reality more alienand inaccessible to men of today than it ever was in the era of materialism and socalled classical physics. And it is infinitely more alien andinaccessible than it was to men of other civilizations and even to primitive peoples. It is a cliche that the modern scientific vision has desacralized the world, and the world desacralized by scientific knowledge hasbecome one of the existential elements that make up modern man, allthe more so to the degree that he is “civilized.” Ever since he has beensubject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with “positive” scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively. What, forexample, could the symbol of the sunset of a dynasty, like the Japanese,mean to him when he knows scientifically what the sun is: merely a star,at which one can even fire missiles. And what is left of Kant’s patheticappeal to “the starry sky above me,” when one is educated by the latestastrophysics and its equations about the constitution of space?
1262The boundary that defines the range of modern science from thevery start, whatever its possible developments, appears in the fact thatits constant and rigid point of departure has been and is based onthe dualistic and exteriorized relationship between the I and the notI, which is proper to simple senseknowledge. This relationship is theimmutable foundation of all modern science’s edifices: all its instru
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1265Covering up Nature
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1267ments are just like so many extensions, improvements, and refinementsof the physical senses. They are not instruments of another kind ofknowledge, that is, of true knowledge. Thus, for example, when modern science introduces the idea of a fourth dimension, it is always asanother dimension in the physical world, not as that of a perceptionthat goes beyond physical experience.
1268Given this basic situation of a limitation exalted to a method, onecan well understand that the consequence of all scientific and technological progress is an inner stagnation or even a return to savagery.Such progress is not accompanied by any inner progress but developson a plane apart; it does not intersect with man’s concrete, existentialsituation, which instead is left to itself. It is hardly worth mentioningthe absurdity or the disarming naivete of that modern social ideologythat makes science a sort of substitute for religion, giving it the task ofshowing man the way to happiness and progress, and sending him onthat way. The truth is that man has gained nothing from the progressof science and technology, neither in regard to knowledge (and I havealready spoken of that), nor in regard to his own power, and still less inregard to any higher law of conduct. At best, one could make an exception for medicine, but still only on the physical level. As for power, letno one claim that the ability of the hydrogen bomb to destroy an entiremetropolis, or the promise of nuclear energy that heralds the “secondindustrial revolution,” or the games for grownup children that arespace exploration, have made a single person more potent and superiorin himself, in his concrete being. These forms of a mechanical, external,and extrinsic power leave the real human being untouched; he is nomore powerful or superior using space missiles than he ever was whenusing a club, except in its material effects; apart from those he remainsas he was, with his passions, his instincts, and his inadequacies.
1269As for the third point, the laws of action, obviously science has putat man’s disposal a prodigious system of means, while leaving the problem of ends altogether indeterminate. The image of the modern world’ssituation mentioned above is again appropriate: “A petrified forest, having chaos at its center.” Some have tried to argue a finalistic view ofthe unprecedented accumulation of energy in the atomic era. TheodorLitt, for example, has suggested that man might realize his own nature
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1272 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism.
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1274in the face of a crisis situation by using his free will, deciding in fullresponsibility, taking the risk, in one direction or the other. Currentlythe decision is over the destructive and military use of atomic energy, orits “constructive,” peaceful use.
1275In an epoch of dissolution, such an idea seems completely abstractand fantastic, typical of intellectuals with no sense of reality. First itpresupposes the existence of men who still possess an inner law andsure ideas about what course should really be followed — and this,beyond anything that relates to the purely material world. Second, itpresumes that these hypothetical men are the very ones entrusted withthe use of the new means of power, in one direction or the other. Bothsuppositions are chimerical, especially the second. Today’s leaders arecaught in a tangle of actions and reactions that evade any real control;they obey irrational, collective influences, and are almost always at theservice of special interests, ambitions, and material and economic rivalries that leave no room for a decision based on an enlightened freedom,a decision as an “absolute person.”
1276In fact, even the alternative suggested above, over which our contemporaries agonize so much, may present itself in terms very differentfrom those advanced by a pacifist, progressivist, moralizing humanitarianism. I truly cannot say what the person who still has hope forman should think of the imminence of quasiapocalyptic destruction.It would certainly force many to face the existential problem in all itsnakedness, and subject them to extreme trials; but is this a worse evilthan that of mankind’s safe, secure, satisfied, and total consignment tothe kind of happiness that befits Nietzsche’s “last man”: a comfortableconsumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all thediscoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically ina squirming, catastrophic crescendo?
1277These are the terms in which questions about modern science andits applications must clearly appear to the differentiated human typewhom we have in mind. It remains to add a few considerations on theconsequences that he can draw from this field for his own conduct.I will not dwell further on the world of technology, having alreadyspoken of how the differentiated man can let it act on him. I havementioned the machine as symbol; and among the challenges that may
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1280Covering up Nature
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1282serve, in crisis situations, to activate the transcendent dimension inhim, we may also include everything that, after the total wars alreadyexperienced, the atomic era may hold for us, thanks to the “miracles ofscience.” One need only emphasize that the state of affairs is given andirreversible, to be accepted and turned to one’s own advantage, as onemight do, for example, when faced with a cataclysm. Apart from that,my verdict on the intrinsic value of science and technology remainsvalid, and what I have said on the subject should be kept in mind.
1283A different point of view may enter into consideration regardingthe scientific method in itself. Modern science in no way reveals theessence of the world, and has nothing to do with real knowledge, butmore often puts the seal on its dissolution. Still, scientific activity hasan ideal of clarity, impersonality, objectivity, rigor, and the exclusionof personal sentiments, impulses, and preferences. The scientist thinksthat he can exclude himself and let objects speak for themselves; he isconcerned with “objective” laws that have no respect for what pleasesor does not please the individual, and nothing to do with morality.Now, these are also traits of the realism that I have included among theelements valid for the integrated man. In classical antiquity, after all,mathematics was recognized as a discipline for cultivating intellectualclarity. The practical character with which I have reproached modernscience does not prejudice this: I am speaking of the orientation or basicformula of every science of the modern type, and not of the direct andarbitrary interventions of individuals in the course of research that proceeds on this basis, and that will not tolerate them. Scientific activitythus reflects in its own way something of that ascesis of active objectivity mentioned earlier, having a symbolic value similar to that which themachine possesses on another plane.
1284Anyone endowed with real clarity of vision, however, cannot fail tosee the part played by irrational elements in the scientist’s makeup,quite aside from his formal research methods, especially regarding hischoice of hypotheses and interpretive theories. There is a substratum ofwhich the modern scientist is unaware: a substratum in regard to whichhe is passive and subject to precise influences that originate in part fromthe forces that have shaped a civilization at one or another point of itscycle. In our case it is the terminal and twilight phase of the Western
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1287 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
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1289cycle. One gains a presentiment of how important this substratum isfrom the criticism of science and its “superstition of the fact” (as Guenonputs it  ), showing that the fact means little in itself, but that the essentialfactor is the system into which it fits and on whose basis it is interpreted. This also indicates the limitations that prejudice the ideal ofclarity and objectivity in the modern type of scientist. The secret andtrue history of modern science is still waiting to be written.
1290It may seem contradictory that in the previous chapter I approvedof an attitude of distance and the detachment of the I from things,whereas now I have disapproved of the dualistic system in which the I isjuxtaposed to the notI of the external world, nature, and phenomena,which is the basic premise of all modern science and also the origin ofa system where true knowledge is out of the question. This contradiction vanishes with insight into the inner formation, the attitude, andthe possibilities of someone who faces things and nature after havingceased to project feelings and subjective, emotional, and imaginarycontents onto them. It is because the inner being is extinct in the modern scientist, leaving him with only gross physical perceptions and anabstract, mathematical intellect, that the relationship between the I andthe notI grows rigid and soulless, so that his detachment can only actnegatively. His science is only good for grasping and manipulating theworld, not for understanding it or for enlarging his knowledge in aqualitative way.
1291As for the integrated man, his situation is quite different; the visionof naked reality imposes on him no limits of this kind. The very latestscience, as in a reductio ad absurdum, has made painfully visible thecharacteristics belonging to all of modern science, which must thereforeadd up to a negative balance; but this signifies for him the end of equivocation. He will put it aside as meaningless, abstract, and purely pragmatic, devoid of any interest or any “scientific” theory of the world. Hewill judge it, in Othmar Spann’s words, as “knowledge of that which isnot worth the trouble of knowing.” Having made a tabula rasa, whatremains is Nature, the world in its original state. Thus he arrives at anatural relationship, just as described at the end of chapter 19. Only inthe present context, to dissipate completely the apparent contradiction,it is well to introduce a further idea: that of the multidimensional nature
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1293Covering up Nature
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1295of experience. This multidimensional ity is quite distinct from the mathematical and merely cerebral one of the latest physics. For a summaryexplanation I again follow the method of not referring directly (as wellI might) to traditional teachings, but of examining one of the moderncurrents in which it is detectable as a sort of involuntary reflection. Iwill take for this the “phenomenological ontology” of Edmund Husserl,which has sometimes been confused with existentialism itself.
1296Husserl’s philosophy also seeks to liberate the direct experienceof reality from all the theories, problems, apparently precise concepts,and practical ends that hide it from our minds; also from any abstractidea about what might be behind it, either in philosophical terms (like
1297“essence” or Kant’s “thing in itself”) or in scientific ones. From theobjective viewpoint, this almost revives the Nietzschean aspiration tobanish any “beyond,” any “other world,” while from the corresponding subjective viewpoint, it revives the ancient principle of the epoche,that is, the suspension of any judgment, any individual interpretation,any application of concepts and predicates to experience. In addition,one seeks to overcome all current opinion, the sense of false familiarity,false obviousness, and habit that one may have about things, in shorteverything that has overlaid the primordial surprise in the face of theworld. That is the initial phase.
1298Next, one is meant to let the facts or “presences” of experiencespeak for themselves, in direct relation to the I. The phenomenologicalschool uses the unfortunate term of “intentionality” for this relation,whereas it is really the opposite of any intention in the current sense;
1299(See chapter 18, where it is explained that at this degree there cannot beany more “intentions,” either in reality or in the I.)
1300I must explain here what the movement in question really means bythe “phenomenon” from which it takes its name. It has restored theoriginal meaning to the word, connected to a Greek verb that means tobe manifested or revealed. Thus it is supposed to mean “that which isdirectly manifested,” that which is offered directly as a content of consciousness. It is far removed from the usage of the term “phenomenon”prevalent in modern philosophy, where the phenomenon has been givenan implicitly or overtly denigratory meaning, for instance, that of a
1301“mere phenomenon” as opposed to what really is, or as hiding what
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1304 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
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1306really is: on the one hand is being, on the other appearance, the “worldof phenomena.” This antithesis is now rejected, with the idea that beingcan manifest itself as it truly is, in its essence and its significance. Hencethe expression “phenomenological ontology” (that is, the doctrine ofbeing, based on the phenomenon) is not a contradiction in terms.
1307“Beyond the phenomena as phenomenology understands them, therecan be nothing else.”
1308The next stage is to explain that, if being is not hidden but manifested in the phenomenon, such manifestation has various degrees.The lowest is the obtuse, opaque state of simple sensible presences. Buta “disclosing” (Erschliessung) of the phenomenon is possible, whichmay relate in a certain way to the idea I have mentioned of the livingpluridimensionality of the real. Knowing, from the point of view ofphenomenology, means to proceed with this disclosure: a procedurethat, however, is not logical or inductive, scientific, or philosophical. Ifanything, Husserl’s idea of what is involved reproduces — even plagiarizes — a traditional teaching. His “reduction” (a technical term of thisschool) or “phenomenological destruction” with regard to the externalworld is, as I have said, the stripping of all the conceptual and discursive accretions that cover up the pure and direct experience. Whenapplied to the inner world, this “reduction” or “destruction” is said tolead, as though to an altogether original element, to the perception ofthe pure I, or, as Husserl calls it, the “transcendent I.” This would constitute that one point of certainty, that original evidence, already soughtby Descartes after doubting everything else. Using our terminology,this element or residuum that is left after applying phenomenologicalreduction to the inner world, and that manifests nakedly, is the “being”within us, the superindividual “Self.” It is a center of clear and immobile light, a pure luminous source. When its light is projected onto phenomena, it determines their disclosure, that is, it reveals in them a moreprofound dimension, the “living presence” that the phenomenologistsalso call “the immanent content of meaning” ( immanenter Sinngebalt ) .Thereupon the inner and the outer meet.
1309There is a further aspect of phenomenology that at least pretends toreflect a traditional view. One is supposed to overcome the antithesis orhiatus that usually exists between the data of direct experience and its
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1312Covering up Nature
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1314significances. The school in question seeks to distinguish itself both fromthe irrational and vitalistic, and from the positivistic and empiricalschools. What remains in those schools, after they have made a tabularasa after their fashion, is the simple, “positive,” sensible reality (thepoint of departure for correspondingly “positivist” science), or the pureexperience lived as something instinctive, irrational, and subintellectual.In contrast, the disclosure or animation of the phenomenon when thelight of the Self, of Being, is projected onto it causes to appear in thephenomenon itself, as its ultimate essence, something one might call
1315“intellectual” (intelligible), if intellectuality did not nowadays mean thatwhich belongs to the rational and abstract mind. One can clarify theidea by saying that what intervenes, beyond the stage of direct experience, certainly, but disanimate and opaque, is a “vision of the sense ofthings as a presence.” “Understanding coincides with vision, intuition
1316(direct perception) with meaning.” Whereas normally the world is givenus in the form of sensible presences (“phenomena”) without significance,or else as merely subjective meanings (ideas of thought) without a sensible presence (without a real intuitive basis), the two things are supposedto coincide in the “phenomenological deepening” on the plane of ahigher objectivity. In this way, phenomenology does not present itself asirrationalism or positivism, but as an “eidetics”: a knowledge of intellectual essences. It aims toward an “intellectual” transparency of thereal, of which naturally there are very different degrees.
1317When medieval philosophers spoke of intuitio intellectuals (intellectual intuition), they were not referring to anything different. On thewhole, and keeping strictly to the essential points that have been raisedso far, and to the way in which I have raised them, the assumptionsof phenomenology would seem to correspond to those that I have formulated. Nevertheless, such a correspondence between the phenomenologists’ motives and traditional teachings is superficial and illusory,though as I have said, one sometimes wonders whether it is a case ofplagiarism pure and simple. The phenomenological school of Husserland his followers deals with simple philosophy; it is like the parody ofthings belonging to an absolutely different world. The whole of phenomenology, being the invention of modern thinkers and academic specialists, has as its sole basis the existential plane of modern man, for
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1321 Dissolution of Consciousness and Relativism
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1323whom the disclosure of phenomena, that is, the concrete, living pluridimensionality of the real presented in its nakedness (Nietzsche would sayin its “innocence”) is and must be mere fancy. Everything in this schoolis confined to more or less abstruse books, with the usual vain criticalexaminations of various systems of the history of profane philosophy,with logical analyses and the usual fetishism for “philosophy,” not tomention the mixture of the valid motives that I have isolated here withmany suspect ideas. Among the latter are the significance attributed totime, to history, and to becoming; the misuse of the term Lebenswelt
1324(world of living) for that of pure experience; another misuse, alreadymentioned, of the concept of “intentionality”; the naive and irrelevantpictures of a world of “harmony” and “rationality,” and so forth. Butthis is not the place for a critical analysis or any further discrimination,given that phenomenology has served us no better or worse than existentialism as a simple, incidental point of reference.
1325I have now pointed out a direction, and the only direction possibleonce one has realized the great illusion and the spiritual irrelevancy ofeverything that passes for “knowledge” today, at the end of a cycle. Irepeat: This direction was well known to the traditional world, andanyone with the chance of referring to it directly can do perfectly wellwithout Husserl and all the rest. Thus he will avoid from the start theerror of “mistaking the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself,”to use a Far Eastern expression. “Phenomenological destruction” rigorously applied cannot spare phenomenology itself; and one can saythe same of this recently fashionable movement as of the others of ourtime: vu, entendu, interre (seen, heard/understood, buried). Nothinghas changed: we have not arrived at any real transcendence.
1326In traditional teachings, the symbol of the eye in the middle of theforehead, whose glance burns up all appearances, corresponds preciselyto the idea of “phenomenological destruction.” Similarly, the traditionalesoteric doctrine concerning the multiple states of the being has alwaysadmitted an “essence” or a “being” that is not the hypothetical counterpart, purely thought or believed in, of the phenomena, but the objectof an “intellectual” experience as direct as the common sensorial type.The same doctrine also speaks, not of an “other reality” but of otherexperienceable dimensions of the one reality. Incidentally, the socalled
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1329Covering up Nature
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1331symbolic conception of the cosmos has the same significance: it is thepluridimensionality of the degrees of significance that reality may present in a differentiated experience, obviously conditioned by the natureof the experiencer (at whose limit there may be that which Husserl callsthe “transcendental I”). The final dimension of the object of such anexperience might correspond to the views of Zen Buddhism that I havementioned: pure reality that acquires an absolute meaning just as it is,when it knows no goals, when no intentions are attributed to it, when ithas no need of justifications or proofs, and manifests the transcendentas immanent.
1332I have already treated the echo of such views in Nietzsche’s andJaspers’ ideas about the “language of the real.” But it is as well to repeatthat in speaking of these ideas in order to warn of their errors and offeralternatives, I do not mean to present any of this as an actual possibility, either for my contemporaries in general, or even for the type ofman I always have in mind. One cannot ignore everything that modernprogress and culture have created, and that is now an established factin modern man’s makeup, largely neutralizing the faculties necessaryfor an effective “opening” of the experience of things and beings — anopening that has nothing to do with the philosophical lucubrations oftoday’s phenomenologists.
1333The sensation of the current dissolution of knowledge and of thecharacter of that which now passes as knowledge may be a helpfulpremise; but to go any further, the essential thing is not a simple mentalorientation but an inner awakening. Given that throughout this book Ihave chosen not to consider the differentiated type who wants to, andcan, isolate himself from the modern world, but one who lives in thethick of it, it is difficult for him to get beyond a certain limit on thepath of knowledge that leads through the multiple dimensions of reality. Apart from the forms of conduct and opening already mentionedin connection with the new realism (forms that remain valid and possible), perhaps only special and traumatic situations can momentarilyovercome this limit. And I have already spoken of those.
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1336Part 6
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1338The Realm of Art
1339From "Physical" Musicto the Drug Regime
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1344The Sickness ofEuropean Culture
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1346In my discussion of personal values and the new realism, I have mentioned the nature of culture and art in the modern world. I return to thatsubject but from a slightly different point of view, in order to define thepotential significance of this realm for the differentiated human type.
1347When speaking of the relationship between recent art and cultureand the entire dissolutive process, one can call upon the principal thesisexpounded by Christoph Steding in The Empire and the Sickness ofEuropean Culture  — a good study of the genesis of the cultural characteristics that took form in Europe after the decline of its traditionalunity. Steding emphasizes that present culture had its point of departure in the dissociation, neutralization, emancipation, and absolutization of particular realms, which therefore ceased to be more or lessorganic parts of a whole. He refers especially to a formative center ofall existence that gave a meaning to life, a center that also guaranteeda sufficiently organic character to the culture. The positive and necessary manifestation of this center on the political level corresponded tothe principle of the Empire, not only in its secular significance (that is,political in a limited sense), but spiritual as well, which it preserved inthe medieval European ecumene and which was marked by a politicaltheology of high Ghibellinism, as supported by Dante himself.
1348In Europe, this process of dissolution, which always follows the disappearance of any higher point of reference, had two connected causes.The first was a kind of paralysis of the idea of European tradition as acenter of gravity — which also corresponded to an obscuration, materializing, and decline of the Empire and its authority. Then, as if bycounterpoint, there ensued the second cause: the centrifugal motion of
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1353The Sickness of European Culture
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1355the parts, the dissociation and autonomization of partial areas, conditioned precisely by the weakening and disappearance of the originatingforce of gravity. From the political point of view, there was the wellknown consequence that we need not dwell on: the end of the unifiedwhole that the preceding European world still presented politically andsocially, despite a system of ample regional autonomies and multipletensions. Steding calls this a “Swissifying” and “Dutchifying”  of areaspreviously organically included in the complex of the Empire, and thefragmentation consequent on the rise of national states. But on theintellectual level the effect was necessarily the formation of a divided,
1356“neutral” culture, devoid of any objective character.
1357This is indeed the genesis and the predominant character of culture, science, and art that have come to prevail in the modern era. It isnot necessary to make a detailed examination of that realm here. If Icontinued the discussion of modern science and its technical applications, it would be easy to highlight this process of increasing autonomy, a process neither checked nor restrained by any higher limits orguidance: hence one often has the impression that technicalscientificdevelopment takes man in hand and faces him with difficult, unexpected situations full of unknowns. I need not dwell on the specializedfragmentation, the lack of a higher and unifying principle of modernknowledge, as it is quite evident. These are the consequences of oneof the dogmas of progressive thought, the unassailable “freedom ofscience” and of scientific research, which is a simple, euphemistic wayto indicate and legitimize the development of one activity dissociatedfrom the whole.
1358That “freedom” is not unlike the “freedom of culture” celebrated asa victory, with which the active processes of dissolution likewise manifest in an inorganic civilization (as opposed to what Vico recognized asproper to all the “heroic periods” of preceding civilizations). One of themost typical expressions of the “neutralization” of such a culture is theantithesis between culture and politics: pure art and pure culture aresupposed to have nothing to do with politics. In the direction of literaryliberalism and humanism, separation has often turned into overt opposition. There is a wellknown intellectual and humanist type who fostersan almost hysterical intolerance for anything referring to the political
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1363world — state ideals and authority, strict discipline, war, power, anddomination — and denies them any spiritual or cultural value. Accordingly,there are those who have dealt with a “cultural history” carefully separated from “political history,” making it a realm in itself. Naturally, theantipolitical pathos and alienation of this “neutral” art and culture havebeen largely justified by the degradation of the political sphere, by thelow level to which political values have fallen in recent times. But it ismore a case of an orientation on principle, which excludes any consideration of how anomalous this situation is: in modern culture the “neutral” character has in fact become a constituent feature.
1364Here, to anticipate any misunderstanding, it is prudent to emphasize that the opposite condition, the normal and creative one, is notthat of a culture at the service of the state and of politics (politics inthe degraded, modern sense). It is that in which a unique idea, thebasic and central symbol of a given civilization, shows its strength andexerts a parallel, positive action, often invisible, both on the politicalplane (with all the values, not just the material ones, that should concern every true state) and on that of thought, culture, and the arts: itexcludes any major schism or antagonism between the two realms, aswell as any need for outside interventions. Precisely because an organictype of civilization no longer exists, precisely because the processes ofdissolution have penetrated every realm of existence, all of that hasceased to exist. Today we seem fated to have the alternative, false anddeleterious in itself, of either a “neutral” art and culture devoid ofevery higher warrant and meaning, or of an art and culture subject topure and simple, degraded political forces, as is the case in totalitariansystems, and chiefly in those informed by the theories of “Marxist realism” and the corresponding polemic against the decadence and alienation of bourgeois art.
1365The separation of art and culture is a direct consequence of subjectivism, the disappearance of any objective and impersonal style, and thegeneral lack of the dimension of depth, following what has already beenstated in broad terms about the “values of the personality” and overcoming them. What remains to be added is a summary examination ofthe most recent forms that “neutral” art has given rise to, in order totake stock of the situation.
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1371When speaking of modern art, the first thing to mention is its “intimate” quality, typical of a feminine spirituality that wants nothing todo with great historic and political forces; out of morbid sensitivity
1372(sometimes brought about by a trauma), it retreats into the world ofthe artist’s private subjectivity, valuing only the psychologically andaesthetically “interesting.” The works of Joyce, Proust, and Gide markthe extreme of this tendency in literature.
1373In some cases, the trend with “pure art” as its slogan is associatedwith the above specifically in the sense of a pure formalism of expressiveperfection; the “subject” becomes irrelevant, so that any intrusion of it isdeemed a contamination. (Benedetto Croce’s aesthetics, if it were not soinsipid, could be cited here.) In these cases an even greater degree of dissociation is present than in the fetishism of the artist’s own interiority.
1374There is no point in speaking of the current desire to hold on toa “traditional art.” Today no one has any idea of what can rightly becalled traditional in a higher sense. We find here only academicismand the withered reproduction of models, which lack — and must needslack — any original creative force. It is a variety of the “regime of residues”; the socalled great art relegated to the past is merely the stuff ofrhetoric.
1375In the opposite, avantgarde trend, value and meaning are reducedto those of a revolt and an illustration of the general process of dissolution. Its works are often interesting, not from an artistic point of viewbut rather as indices of the climate of modern life. They reflect the critical situation already alluded to in speaking of European nihilism, butgive rise to nothing constructive, permanent, or durable. We should noteamidst the chaos of styles the cases of rapid retreat from the most
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1384advanced positions: almost all those avantgardists who were most revolutionary in an existential situation that was originally authentic haveaccepted a new academicism, a new conventionality, and the commercialization of their work. Equally typical is the subsequent turn, on thepart of some of these artists, in an abstract, formal, and neoclassicaldirection, which is an evasion that puts an end to the relentless tensionof their former, more authentic, revolutionary phase. One could speakhere of an “Apollonism,” in the admittedly arbitrary sense in whichNietzsche used the term in The Birth of Tragedy.
1385Nonetheless, from the differentiated man’s point of view the processof dissolution found in the most extreme art (I will address music later),with its atmosphere of anarchic or abstract freedom, may actually have
1386“a liberating value, as opposed to much of yesterday’s bourgeois art.Aside from this, after the exhaustion of expressionism as a shapelesseruption of dissociated, psychic contents, and after the exhaustion ofdadaism and surrealism, if their attitudes had persisted we would havewitnessed the selfdissolution of modern art, which would have left anempty spiritual space. In a different epoch, it is precisely in that spacethat a new “objective” art might have taken shape, in that “grand style”to which Nietzsche referred: “The greatness of an artist is not measuredby the beautiful sentiments that he arouses — only girls can think alongthese lines — but by the degree to which he approaches the grand style.This has in common with great passion the disdain of pleasure; he forgets to persuade, he wills ... To make himself master of the chaos thatone is, to force his own chaos to become form, mathematics, law — thatis the grand ambition. Around such despotic men a silence is born, afear, similar to what is felt at a great sacrilege .”  But to think this wayin the present world is absurd: our epoch lacks any center, any meaning,any objective symbol that could give soul, content, and power to this
1387“grand style.”
1388Similarly, in the field of fiction what is of interest today belongsto the documentary genre, which, with more or less expressive power,makes us aware of the state of contemporary existence. Only here, andin a few cases, is subjectivism overcome. But in the majority of literary works, in short stories, dramas, and novels, the regime of residuespersists, with its typical forms of subjective dissociation. Their constant
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1392background, rightly called the “fetishism of human relationships,” consists of the insignificant, sentimental, sexual, or social problems ofinsignificant individuals, reaching the extreme of dullness and banalityin a certain epidemic type of American novel.
1393Having mentioned “social problems,” I must also squelch the claims,or more accurately, the aesthetic and artistic ambitions, of “Marxistrealism.” The Marxist critic condemns the “bourgeois novel” as a phenomenon of alienation, but as I have already said, the intent of giving asocial content or interpretation to the narrative, specifically mirroringthe dialectic evolution of classes, the impulse of the proletariat, and soon, is merely a simian parody of realism and the organic integration of adivided and neutral culture. Here one kind of dissociation is replaced byanother more serious one: that of making the socioeconomic element anabsolute, detached from the rest. “Social” problems are, in themselves,of as little interest and importance as those of personal relationships andfetishist sentimentalities. None of these touches the essence; they fallfar short of what might be the object of fiction and of a high art in anorganic civilization. The few fictional writings brought to a difficult andartificial birth under the sign of “Marxist realism” speak for themselves;they are coarse material forced into a straitjacket by the demands of purepropaganda and “communist edification.” One cannot speak here eitherof aesthetic criticism or of art, but rather of political agitation in thelowest meaning of the term. However, the present world is such thateven where there was a demand for “functional art,” for a “consumerart” (Gropius’s expression) that was not “alienated,” it was obliged moreor less to end at the same level. The only sector that was preserved wasperhaps architecture, because its functionalism does not require referenceto any higher meanings, which are nonexistent today. When a Marxistcritic like Lukacs writes: “In recent times art has become a luxury itemfor idle parasites; artistic activity, in its turn, has become a separate profession with the task of satisfying those luxury needs,”  he sums up whatart is practically reduced to in our day.
1394This reductio ad absurdum of an activity sundered from everyorganic and necessary context parallels the other forms of internal dissolution that are present today, and as such facilitates the radical revision that the differentiated human type is forced to make concerning
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1400the importance of art in the earlier period. I have already mentionedhow, in the climate of the present civilization and its objective, elementary, even barbaric tendencies, many people have discarded the notionof the period of bourgeois romanticism that art is one of the “supremeactivities of the spirit,” revealing the meaning of the world and of life.The man whom we have in mind can of course agree with this devaluation of art today. The fetishizing of art in the bourgeois period, connected with the cult of the “creative personality,” the “genius,” is aliento him. Even when it comes to some of the socalled great art of yesterday, he may feel no less distant than certain men of action today, whopay no attention to appearances, not even for “recreation,” but are interested in other things. We may well share and approve this attitude —based, however, on the higher realism of which I have spoken, and onthe sentiment of the “merely human” that is the constant basis of thatart, in all its pathos and tragedy. It may even be that a differentiatedman finds himself more comfortable with certain very modern art,because in itself it represents art’s selfdissolution.
1401Incidentally, this devaluation of art, justified by the latest consequences of its “neutralization” and the new, active realism, had somegeneral precedents in the traditional world. Art in a traditional andorganic civilization never occupied the central spiritual position thatthe period of humanist and bourgeois culture accorded to it. Before themodern era, when art had a true, higher meaning, this was thanks toits preexisting contents, superior and prior to it, neither revealed nor
1402“created” by it as art. These contents gave meaning to life and couldexist, manifest, and act even in the virtual absence of what is called art,in works that sometimes might seem “barbaric” to the aesthete and thehumanist who have no sense of the elementary and primordial.
1403We can draw an analogy with the attitude toward art in general thatthe differentiated man, looking to a new freedom, can assume in thisperiod of dissolution. He is very little interested in, or preoccupied with,the current “crisis of art.” Just as he sees no valid, authentic knowledge inmodern science, similarly he recognizes no spiritual value in the art thathas taken shape in the modern era through the processes mentioned atthe beginning of this chapter; he sees no substitute for the meanings thatcan be kindled by direct contact with reality in a cool, clear, and essential
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1406Dissolution in Modern Art
1407climate. Upon objective consideration of the processes at work, one hasthe distinct feeling that art no longer has a future: that it is relegated toan ever more marginal position with respect to existence, its value beingreduced to a luxury, in accord with Lukacs’s criticism quoted above.
1408It is helpful to return for a moment to the particular realm of modern fiction, where one deals with works that are corrosive and defeatist,so as to anticipate the same possibility of misunderstanding as in thecase of neorealism. Clearly, my position has nothing in common withjudgments based on bourgeois points of view, thus the accusation of the
1409divided and neutral character of art must not be confused with moralizing, or with the censuring of art on the part of current petty morality.In the artistic works in question, it is not a matter of those “existentialtestimonies” pure and simple, to which one can apply this saying aboutSchoenberg: “Ail his happiness lay in recognizing unhappiness; all hisbeauty in forbidding himself the appearance of beauty .”  It concerns aparticular art that directly or indirectly works to undermine any idealism, to deride any principles, to attack institutions, to reduce to merewords ethical values, the just, the noble, and the dignified — and all thiswithout even obeying an explicit agenda (hence its difference from acorresponding literature of the Left, or the use and political exploitation of that literature on the part of the Left).
1410We know which groups raise an indignant protest against a similar,popular type of art. This is not the correct reaction, in my view, becauseit disregards its potential significance as a touchstone, especially for thedifferentiated man. Without anticipating coming chapters, I shair justsay here that the difference between depraved and mutilated realism,and positive realism, lies in the latter’s affirmation that there are valuesthat, for a given human type, are not mere fictions or fantasies, butrealities — absolute realities. Among these are spiritual courage, honor
1411(not in the sexual sense), straightforwardness, truth, and fidelity. Anexistence that ignores these is by no means “realistic,” but subreal. Forthe man who concerns us, dissolution cannot touch these values, exceptin extreme cases of an absolute “rupture of levels.” One must nevertheless distinguish between the substance and certain expressions of it, andalso recognize that, on account of the general transformations of mentality and environment that have already happened or are in process,
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1416these expressions have already been prejudiced by the conformism, therhetoric, the idealistic pathos, and the social mythology of the bourgeois period; thus their foundations are already undermined. Whateveris worth saving in the field of conduct needs to be liberated in an interior and simplified form, needing no consensus, and sound enough notto lean on any of the institutions or value systems of yesterday’s world.As for the rest, it may as well collapse.
1417Once this point is settled (and it was already explained in theintroduction), one can recognize that the corrosive action exercised bycontemporary literature rarely touches on anything essential, and thatmany of its targets are not worth defending, cherishing, or regretting.Those scandalized, alarmist, and moralizing reactions stem from anundue confusion of the essential and the contingent, from the incapacity to conceive of any substantial values beyond limited forms of expression that have become alien and ineffective. The differentiated man isnot scandalized, but adopts a calm attitude of understatement; he cango even further in overthrowing the idols, but then he asks: “And nowwhat?” At most, he will trace an existential line of demarcation, inthe direction that I have repeatedly indicated. It does not matter thatthis corrosive and “immoral” literature does not obey any higher goals
1418(though it likes to pretend that it does), and is only of value as evidenceof the somber, tainted, and often filthy horizons of its authors. Theevidence remains valid: it defines a certain distance. Times like thesejustify the saying that it is good to give the final push to that whichdeserves to fall.
1419From our point of view, a reactionary “remoralizing” of literatureappears inauspicious, even if it were possible, in the sense of a return tothe style of Manzoni, and in general of the nineteenthcentury specialistsin the theatrical presentation of concepts of honor, family, homeland,heroism, sin, and so on. One has to go beyond both positions: that of themoralizers, and that of the proponents of this corrosive art whose transitional and primitive forms are destined to exhaust themselves, leavingfor some a void, and for others, the free space for a higher realism. Andthese considerations should make it plain that my former accusations ofdivided and indifferent art are not to be interpreted as the desire to giveart a moralizing, edifying, or didactic content.
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1424Modern Musicand Jazz
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1426There is another particular area worth paying attention to, because itreflects some typical processes of the epoch, and examining it will leadus on to some general phenomena of contemporary life. I am speakingof music.
1427It is obvious that, unlike what is proper to a “civilization of being,”the music of a “civilization of becoming,” which is unquestionably themodern one, must have developed in a peculiar way to enable us tospeak of it as a Western demon of music. The processes of dissociationbehind all modern art naturally play a part here, so that in the latestphases of music we find selfdissolving situations just like the generalones spoken of above.
1428It is no oversimplification to say that the most modern Westernmusic has been characterized by an ever more distinct separation fromits origin, whether in melodramatic, melodious, pretentious, heroicromanticism (most recently in the line represented by Wagnerism), orin tragic pathos (we need only refer to Beethoven’s usual ideas). Thisseparation has been realized through two developments, only apparently opposed.
1429The first is intellectualization, in which the cerebral element prevails, with an interest focused on harmony, often leading to a technicalradicalism to the detriment of immediacy and sentiment (“human contents”), resulting in abstract rhythmicharmonic constructs that oftenseem to be ends in themselves. The extreme case of this is recent twelvetone music and strict serialism.
1430The second is the physical character found in the most recent music.This term has already been used for a music, mostly symphonic and
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1439descriptive, that returns in a certain sense to nature, removing itselffrom the subjective world of pathos, and is inclined to draw its principalinspiration from the world of things, actions, and elementary impulses.Here the process is similar to the intolerance for intimist, academic studio painting during the rise of early impressionism and plein air painting. This second musical tendency had already begun with the Russianschool and the French impressionists, having as its limit compositionssuch as Honegger’s Pacific  and Mossolov’s The Iron Foundry.When the second, physical current met with the first, superintellectualized one, this meeting came to define a most interesting situation inrecent music. One need only think of early Stravinsky, where an intellectualism of pure, overelaborated rhythmic constructions blossomedinto the evocation of something pertaining less to psychology, or to thepassionate, romantic, and expressionistic world, than to the substratumof natural forces. One can see The Rite of Spring as the conclusion ofthis stage. It represents the almost complete triumph over nineteenthcentury bourgeois music; music becomes pure rhythm, an intensity of asonorous and tonal dynamism in action. It is “pure music,” but with anadditional Dionysian element, hence the particular reference to dance.The predominance of dance music over vocal and emotional music hasalso characterized this current.
1440Up to this point, such a process of liberating dissolution in the realmof music might have a positive aspect from our point of view. One couldwell approve of a revolution that has caused Italian operatic music ofthe early nineteenth century, and German as well, to appear out ofphase, heavy, and false, and likewise even symphonic music with high
1441“humanist” pretensions. The fact is, however, that, at least in the fieldof “serious” concert music, the next phase after the revolutionary stagementioned above consisted of abstract forms dominated by technicalvirtuosity: forms whose inner meaning recalls what I have interpretedas an existential refusal or diversion, taking it beyond the plane of dangerous intensity.
1442Here one can refer to Stravinsky’s second period, where dance musicgave way to a formal music that was sometimes parodistic, sometimesneoclassically inspired, or else characterized by a pure, dissociatedsonorous arithmetic that had begun to appear in the preceding period,
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1447producing a timeless spatialization of sounds. One also thinks ofSchoenberg, considering his development from free atonal music, oftenin the service of an exasperated, existential expressionism (the existential revolt being expressed here as the atonal revolt against the “commonchord,” a symbol of bourgeois idealism), to a phase of dodecaphony
1448(twelvetone system). This development in itself is very significant for theterminal crisis of modern music. After the chromatic limit had beenreached, from a technical point of view, stepbystep from post Wagnerian music to that of Richard Strauss and Alexander Scriabin, atonalmusic abandoned the traditional tonal system, the basis of all precedingmusic, transporting, so to speak, the sound to a pure and free state,almost as if it were an active musical nihilism. After that, with all twelvetones of the chromatic scale taken without hierarchical distinction andin all their unlimited possibilities of direct combination, the twelvetonesystem sought to impose a new abstract law, beyond the formulae ofcommonpractice harmony. Recently, music has experimented withsounds created by electronic technology, which transcend traditionalorchestral means of production. This new territory also incurs the problem of finding an abstract law to apply to electronic music.
1449One can see in the extremes of dodecaphony reached in Anton vonWebern’s compositions that the trend can go no further. While Adornocould state in his Philosophy of Modern Music: “The twelvetone technique is our destiny,”  others have justly spoken of a musical “ice age.”We have arrived at compositions whose extreme rarefaction and formalabstraction depict worlds similar to that of modern physics with itspure algebraic entities or, on the other hand, that of some surrealists.The very sounds are freed from traditional structures and propelledinto a convoluted system where the complete dissolution into the formless, with skeletal and atomically dissociated timbres, is contained onlyby the pure algebra of the composition. As in the world created bymachine technology, the technical perfection and force of these newmusical resources is accompanied by the same emptiness, soullessness,spectrality, or chaos. It is inconceivable that the new twelvetone andpostserial language, with its foundation of inner devastation, couldexpress contents similar to those of earlier music. At most, this languagecan be conducive to exasperated, existential expressionistic contents
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1455such as surface in Alban Berg’s works. The limit is crossed by the socalled musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer, with its “organization ofnoises” and “montage” of environmental and orchestral sounds. Atypical case is that of John Cage, a musician who declares explicitlythat his compositions are no longer music. Going beyond the disintegrations of traditional structures through serial music and leaving behindWebern and his school, Cage mixes music with pure noise, electronicsound effects, long pauses, random insertions, even spoken ones such asradio transmissions. The goal is to produce disorientation in the listenerin the same way as dadaism, so that one is hurled toward unexpectedhorizons, beyond the realm of music, and even of art in general.
1456If we look instead for the continuing role of dance music, we shallnot find it in the “classical” symphonic genre but in modern dancemusic, specifically in jazz. It is with good reason that the present epoch,besides being called the “age of the emergence of the masses,” the “ageof the economy,” and “the age of omnipotent technology,” has beencalled the “Jazz Age.” This shows that the extension of the trend inquestion now goes beyond esoteric musical circles and saturates ourcontemporaries’ general manner of listening. Jazz reflects the sametendency as early Stravinsky, in terms of the pure rhythmic or syncopated element; apart from its elements of song, it is a “physical” musicthat does not stop at the soul, but directly arouses and stirs the body.This is quite different from the earlier European dance music; in factthe very gracefulness, impetus, movement, and sensuality permeatingthose dances — for example, the Viennese or English waltz, and eventhe tango — are substituted in jazz by something mechanical, disjointed,altogether primitively ecstatic, and even paroxysmal through the use ofconstant repetition. This elemental content cannot be lost on anyonewho finds himself in great European and American metropolitan dancehalls, amidst the atmosphere of hundreds of couples shaking themselvesto the syncopation and driving energy of this music.
1457The enormous and spontaneous spread of jazz in the modern worldshows that meanings no different from those of the physicocerebral
1458“classical” music, which superseded nineteenthcentury bourgeoismelodrama and pathos, have in fact thoroughly penetrated the youngergeneration. But there are two sides to this phenomenon. Those who
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1463once went crazy for the waltz or delighted in the treacherous and conventional pathos of melodrama, now find themselves at ease surroundedby the convulsivemechanical or abstract rhythms of recent jazz, both
1464“hot” and “cool,” which we must consider as more than a deviant,superficial vogue. We are facing a rapid and central transformation ofthe manner of listening, which is an integral part of that complex thatdefines the nature of the present. Jazz is undeniably an aspect of theresurfacing of the elemental in the modern world, bringing the bourgeois epoch to its dissolution. Naturally, the young men and womenwho like to dance to jazz today do so simply “for fun” and are not concerned with this; yet the change exists, its reality unprejudiced by itslack of recognition, since its true meaning and possibilities could onlybe noted from the particular point of view employed by us in all of ouranalyses.
1465Some have included jazz among the forms of compensation thattoday’s man resorts to when faced with his practical, arid, and mechanical existence; jazz is supposed to provide him with raw contents ofrhythm and elemental vitality. If there is any truth in this idea, we mustconsider the fact that to arrive at this, Western man did not create original forms, nor utilize elements of European folk music, which, for example in the rhythms of southeastern Europe (Romanian or Hungarian),has a fascination and an intensity comprising not only rhythm but alsoauthentic dynamics. He instead looked for inspiration in the patrimonyof the lower and more exotic races, the Negroes and mulattoes of jthetropical and subtropical zones.
1466According to one of the scholars of Afro Cuban music, FernandoOrtiz, all the primary elements of modern dance actually have theseorigins, including those whose origins are obscured by the fact that theyhave come through Latin America. One can deduce that modern man,especially North American man, has regressed to primitivism in choosing, assimilating, and developing a music of such primitive qualities asNegro music, which was even originally associated with dark forms ofecstasy.
1467In fact, it is known that African music, the origin of the principalrhythms of modern dances, has been one of the major techniques usedto open people up to ecstasy and possession. Both Alfons Dauer and
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1473Ortiz have rightly seen the characteristic of this music as its polyrhythmic structure, developed in such a way that the static [onbeat] accentsthat mark the rhythm constantly act as ecstatic [offbeat] accents; hencethe special rhythmic figures that generate a tension intended to “feed anuninterrupted ecstasy.”  The same structure has been preserved in allsocalled syncopated jazz. These syncopations are like delays that tendto liberate energy or generate an impulse: a technique used in Africanrites to induce possession of the dancers by certain entities, the Orishaof the Yoruba or the Loa of the Voodoo of Haiti, who took over theirpersonalities and “rode” them. This ecstatic potential still exists in jazz.But even here there is a process of dissociation, of abstract developmentof rhythmic forms separated from the whole to which they originallybelonged. Thus, given the desacralization of the environment and thenonexistence of any institutional framework or corresponding ritualtradition, any suitable atmosphere or appropriate attitude, one cannotexpect the specific effects of authentic African music with its evocativefunction; the effect always remains a diffuse and formless possession,primitive and collective in character.
1474This is very apparent in the latest forms, such as the music of the socalled beat groups. Here the obsessive reiteration of a rhythm prevails
1475(similar to the use of the African tomtom), causing paroxysmal contortions of the body and inarticulate screams in the performers, whilethe mass of the listeners joins in, hysterically shrieking and throwingthemselves around, creating a collective climate similar to that of thepossessions of savage ritual and certain Dervish sects, or the Macumbaand the Negro religious revivals.
1476The frequent use of drugs both by performers of this music and bythe enraptured young people is also significant, causing a true, frenetic
1477“crowd mentality,” as in beat or hippie sessions in California involvingtens of thousands of both sexes.
1478Here we are no longer concerned with the specific compensationthat one can find in syncopated dance music as the popular counterpartand extension of the extremes reached, but not maintained, by modernsymphonic music; we are concerned with the semiecstatic and hysterical beginnings of a formless, convoluted escapism, empty of content, abeginning and end in itself. Hence, it is completely inappropriate when
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1483some compare it to certain frenetic, collective, ancient rites, because thelatter always had a sacred background.
1484Quite apart from similar extreme and aberrant forms, one can stillconsider the general problem of all these methods that provide elemental, ecstatic possibilities, which the differentiated man, not the masses,can use in order to feed that particular intoxication described earlier,which is the only nourishment he can existentially draw from an epochof dissolution. The processes of recent times tend precisely toward theseextremes; and whereas some of the present youth merely seek to dulltheir senses and to use certain experiences merely for extreme sensations, others can use such situations as a challenge that demands theright response: a reaction that arises from “being.”
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1491Going beyond music and dance, we are led to an even larger andmore problematic realm, which embraces many other methods beingincreasingly used by the younger generation. The North American BeatGeneration, in putting together alcohol, the sexual orgasm, and drugsas essential ingredients to give them a sense of life, radically associated techniques that in reality have a common background that I havealluded to earlier.
1492I need not dwell much on this realm. Apart from what will be saidof sex in another chapter, I shall address here only a few considerationson drugs, which are the means that, among all those used in certainsectors of the contemporary world, most visibly have the goal of anecstatic escape.
1493The increasing spread of drugs among today’s youth is a very significant phenomenon. A specialist. Dr. Laennec, writes: “In our lands,the most widespread category of drug addicts is represented by the neurotics and psychopaths for whom the drug is not a luxury but an essential food, the response to anguish. . . . Toxicomania now appears as anadditional symptom of the patient’s neurotic syndrome, one symptomamong others, a last defense, soon becoming the one and only defense .” 1These considerations can be generalized, or rather extended, to an evenlarger circle of people who are not clinically neurotic: I am speakingabove all about young people who have more or less distinctly perceived the emptiness and boredom of modern existence, and are seeking an escape from it. The impulse can be contagious: drug use extendsto individuals who did not have this original impetus as a point ofdeparture, and in such people it can only be regarded as an avoidablebad habit. Once starting on drugs to fit in or be in vogue, they succumb
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1501to the seduction of the states caused by the drug, which often wreckstheir already weak personality.
1502With drugs we have a situation similar to that of syncopated music.Both were often transpositions onto the profane and “physical” planeof means that were originally used to open one up to the suprasensiblein initiation rites or similar experiences. Just as dances to modern syncopated music derive from ecstatic Negro dance, the various drugs usedtoday and created in laboratories correspond to drugs that were oftenused for “sacred” ends in primitive populations, according to ancienttraditions. This is even true for tobacco; strong extracts of tobacco wereused to prepare young Native Americans in their withdrawal from profane life to obtain “signs” and visions. A similar claim can be made foralcohol, within certain limits; we are aware of the tradition centered on
1503“sacred beverages,” as in the use of alcohol in Dionysian and similarrituals. For example, alcoholic beverages were not prohibited in ancientTaoism: on the contrary, they were considered “life essences” inducing an intoxication that, like dance, could lead to a “magical state ofgrace,” sought by the socalled real men. In addition, the extracts ofcoca, mescal, peyote, and other narcotics have been, and often still are,used in the rituals of secret societies of Central and South America.
1504No one has a clear or adequate idea about all this anymore, becausethere is not enough emphasis today on the fact that the effects of thesesubstances are quite different according to the constitution, the specific capacity for reaction, and — in these cases of nonprofane use — thespiritual preparation and intent of the user. Lewin has even spoken ofa “toxic equation” that is different in every individual, but this concepthas not been given the necessary emphasis, nor has the available field ofobservations been broad enough, given that the blocked existential situation of the great majority of our contemporaries considerably restrictsthe possible range of reaction to drugs.
1505However, the “personal equation” and the specific zone on whichdrugs, here including alcohol, act, lead the individual toward alienationand a passive opening to states that give him the illusion of a higher freedom, an intoxication and an unfamiliar intensity of sensation, but thatin reality have a character of dissolution that by no means “takes himbeyond.” In order to expect a different result from these experiences, he
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1509
1510would have to have at his command an exceptional degree of spiritualactivity, and his attitude would be the opposite of those who seek andneed drugs to escape from tensions, traumatic events, neuroses, and feelings of emptiness and absurdity.
1511I have already pointed out the African polyrhythmic technique: oneenergy is locked into continuous stasis in order to unleash an energyof a different order. In the inferior ecstaticism of primitive peoples thisopens the way for possession by dark powers. I have said that in ourcase, this different energy should be produced by the response of the
1512“being” (the Self) to the stimulus. The situation created by the reaction to drugs and even alcohol is no different. But this kind of reaction almost never occurs; the reaction to the substance is too strong,rapid, unexpected, and external to be simply experienced, and thus theprocess cannot involve the “being.” It is as if a powerful current penetrated the consciousness without requiring assent, leaving the person tomerely notice the change of state: he is submerged in this new state, and
1513“acted on” by it. Thus the true effect, even if not noticed, is a collapse, alesion of the Self, for all his sense of an exalted life or of a transcendentbeatitude or sensuality.
1514For the process to proceed differently, it would go schematicallyas follows: at the point in which the drug frees energy x in an exteriorway, an act of the Self, of “being,” brings its own double energy, x + x,into the current and maintains it up to the end. Similarly, a wave, evenif unexpected, serves a skilled swimmer with whom it collides by propelling him beyond it. Thus, there would be no collapse, the negativewould be transformed into positive, no condition of passivity would beformed with respect to the drug, the experience in a certain way wouldbe deconditioned, and, as a result, one would not undergo an ecstaticdissolution, devoid of any true opening beyond the individual and onlysubstantiated by sensations. Instead, in certain cases there would be thepossibility of coming into contact with a superior dimension of reality,which was the intention of ancient, nonprofane drug use. To a certaindegree, the harmful effect of drugs would be eliminated.
1515At this point it will be helpful to add some details. In general, drugscan be divided into four categories: stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, and narcotics. The first two categories do not concern us; for
1516
1517
1518Excursus on Drugs
1519
1520example, the use of tobacco and alcohol is irrelevant unless it becomesa vice, that is, if it leads to addiction.
1521The third category includes drugs that bring on states in which oneexperiences various visions and seemingly other worlds of the sensesand spirit. On account of these effects, they have also been called “psychedelics,” under the assumption that the visions project and revealthe hidden contents of the depths of one’s own psyche, but are not recognized as such. As a result, physicians have even tried to use drugslike mescaline for a psychic exploration analogous to psychoanalysis.However, when all is reduced to the projection of a psychic substratum,not even experiences of this kind can interest the differentiated man.Leaving aside the perilous contents of the sensations and their artificial paradise, these illusory phantasmagoria do not take one beyond,even if one cannot exclude the possibility that what is acting may notbe merely the contents of one’s own subconscious, but dark influencesthat, finding the door open, manifest themselves in these visions. Wemight even say that those influences, and not the simple substratumrepressed by the individual psyche, are responsible for certain impulsesthat can burst out in these states, even driving some compulsively tocommit criminal acts.
1522An effective use of these drugs would presuppose a preliminary
1523“catharsis,” that is, the proper neutralization of the individual unconscious substratum that is activated; then the images and senses couldrefer to a spiritual reality of a higher order, rather than being reducedto a subjective, visionary orgy. One should emphasize that the instancesof this higher use of drugs were preceded not only by periods of preparation and purification of the subject, but also that the process wasproperly guided through the contemplation of certain symbols.Sometimes “consecrations” were also prescribed for protective purposes. There are accounts of certain indigenous communities in Centraland South America whose members, only while under the influence ofpeyote, hear the sculpted figures on ancient temple ruins “speak,”revealing their meaning in terms of spiritual enlightenment. The importance of the individual’s attitude clearly appears from the completelydifferent effects of mescaline on two contemporary writers who haveexperimented with drugs, Aldous Huxley and R. H. Zaehner. And it is
1524
1525
1526
1527 The Realm of Art
1528
1529a fact that in the case of hallucinogens like opium and, in part, hashish,this active assumption of the experience that is essential from our pointof view is generally excluded.
1530There remains the category of narcotics and of substances that arealso used for total anesthesia, whose normal effect is the complete suspension of consciousness. This corresponds to a detachment that wouldexclude all intermediate “psychedelic” forms and the insidious, ecstatic,and sensual contents, leaving a void. However, if consciousness weremaintained, with the pure I at the center, it could facilitate the opening to a higher reality. But the advantages would be outweighed by theextreme difficulty of any training capable of maintaining detached consciousness.
1531In general, one must keep in mind that drug use even for a spiritualend, that is, to catch glimpses of transcendence, has its price. How drugsproduce certain psychic effects has not yet been determined by modernscience. It is said that some, like LSD, destroy certain brain cells. Onepoint is certain: Habitual use of drugs brings a certain psychic disorganization; one should substitute for them the power of attaining analogous states through one’s own means. Therefore, when one has chosena path based on the maximum unification of all one’s psychic faculties,these drawbacks must be kept firmly in mind.
1532The common reader probably finds these ideas tedious, and lackingin personal points of reference to give him bearings. But, again, it is thedevelopment of our argument that has required even this brief excursus.In fact, only by dwelling on these possibilities, as unusual as they are,can one adequately identify the necessary antitheses. This shows us theblockage that prevents any positive value in the evocation of the elemental in today’s world, leaving only those purely dissolutive and regressiveprocesses that prevail increasingly in the younger generations.
1533
1534
1535Part 7
1536
1537Dissolution in theSocial Realm
1538
1539
1540
1541
1542States and Parties
1543
1544Apoliteia
1545
1546As a result of today’s general processes of dissolution, the sociopoliticalis the realm that most displays the lack of any truly legitimate structurepossessing a link to higher meanings. Given this state of affairs, wemust frankly recognize that the human type who concerns us must govern his own behavior by entirely different principles from those which,in social life, would be proper to him under other circumstances.
1547In the present epoch, no nationstates exist that, by their nature,can claim any principle of true, inalienable authority. Furthermore, onecannot even speak of states today in the proper traditional sense. Only
1548“representative” and administrative systems exist, in which the primaryelement is no longer the state, understood as an entity in itself andan incarnation of a higher idea and power, but “society,” conceived interms of “democracy.” This background even persists in totalitariancommunist regimes, which so insist on the quality of “popular democracies.” For a long time there have been no true sovereigns, monarchsby divine right capable of wielding sword and scepter, and symbols ofa higher human ideal. More than a century ago, Juan Donoso Cortesstated that no kings existed capable of proclaiming themselves as suchexcept “by the will of the nation,” adding that, even if any had existed,they would not have been recognized. The few monarchies still surviving are notoriously impotent and empty, while the traditional nobilityhas lost its essential character as a political class and any existentialprestige and rank along with it. Its current representatives may stillinterest our contemporaries when put on the same plane as film actorsand actresses, sport heroes and opera stars, and when through someprivate, sentimental, or scandalous chance, they serve as fodder formagazine articles.
1549
1550
1551
1552
1553
1554States and Parties
1555
1556Even outside traditional frameworks, true leaders do not exist today.
1557“I turned my back on the rulers when I saw what they called ruling:bartering and haggling with the rabble. . . . Among all the hypocrisies,this seems to me the worst: that even those who commanded feignedthe virtues of the serfs”  — Nietzsche’s words are without exception stilltrue of the socalled ruling class of our times.
1558Like the true state, the hierarchical, organic state has ceased toexist. No comparable party or movement exists, offering itself as adefender of higher ideas, to which one can unconditionally adhere andsupport with absolute fidelity. The present world of party politics consists only of the regime of petty politicians, who, whatever their partyaffiliations, are often figureheads at the service of financial, industrial,or corporate interests. The situation has gone so far that even if parties or movements of a different type existed, they would have almostno following among the rootless masses who respond only to thosewho promise material advantages and “social conquests.” When striking these chords does not suffice, the only influence over the massestoday — and now even more than ever — is on the plane of impassionedand subintellectual forces, which by their very nature lack any stability. These are the forces that demagogues, popular leaders, manipulators of myths, and fabricators of “public opinion” count on. In thisregard we can learn from yesterday’s regimes in Germany and Italy thatpositioned themselves against democracy and Marxism: that potentialenthusiasm and faith that animated masses of people, even to the pointof fanaticism, has completely vanished in the face of crisis, or else beentransferred to new, opposing myths, replacing the preceding ones bythe sole force of circumstances. One must expect this from every collective current that lacks a dimension of depth, inasmuch as it depends onthe forces I have mentioned, corresponding to the pure demos and itssovereignty — which is as much as to say, literally, “democracy.”
1559The only realms left for any efficacious political action after the endof the old regimes are this irrational and subintellectual plane, or theother one, determined by pure material and “social” utility. As a result,even if leaders worthy of the name were to appear today — men whoappealed to forces and interests of a different type, who did not promisematerial advantages, who demanded and imposed a severe discipline on
1560
1561
1562 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1563
1564everyone, and who did not prostitute and degrade themselves just toensure a personal, ephemeral, revocable, and formless power — theywould have almost no hold on present society. The “immortal principles” of  and the rights of equality granted by absolute democracyto the atomized individual regardless of qualification or rank, and theirruption of the masses into the political structure, have effectivelybrought about what Walther Rathenau calls a “vertical invasion by barbarians from below.”  Consequently, the following observation of essayist Ortega y Gasset remains true: “The characteristic fact of the momentis that the mediocre soul, recognizing itself as mediocre, has the audacityto assert the right of mediocrity and impose it everywhere.”
1565In the introduction I mentioned the few who by temperament andvocation still think today, in spite of everything, about the possibility ofa rectifying, political action. Men among the Ruins was written withtheir ideological orientation in mind. But on the basis of experience wemust admit the lack of the necessary premises to reach any concrete,appreciable results in a struggle of this kind. On the other hand, I havespecified within these pages a human type of a different orientation,although spiritually related to those others who will fight on even inhopeless positions. After taking stock of the situation, this type can onlyfeel disinterested and detached from everything that is “politics” today.His principle will become apoliteia, as it was called in ancient times.
1566It is important to emphasize that this principle refers essentiallyto the inner attitude. In the present political situation, in a climate ofdemocracy and “socialism,” the rules of the game are such that the manin question absolutely cannot take part in it. He recognizes, as I havesaid before, that ideas, motives, and goals worthy of the pledge of one’sown true being do not exist today; there are no demands of which hecan recognize any moral right and foundation outside that which theyderive as mere facts on the empirical and profane plane. However, apoliteia , detachment, does not necessarily involve specific consequencesin the field of pure and simple activity. I have already discussed thecapacity to apply oneself to a given task for love of action in itself andin terms of an impersonal perfection. So, in principle, there is no reasonto exclude the political realm itself as a particular case among others,since participating in it on these terms requires neither any objective
1567
1568
1569States and Parties
1570
1571value of a higher order, nor impulses that come from emotional andirrational layers of one’s own being. But if this is how one dedicatesoneself to political activity, clearly all that matters is the action and theimpersonal perfection in acting for its own sake. Such political activity, for one who desires it, cannot present a higher value and dignitythan dedicating oneself, in the same spirit, to quite different activities:absurd colonization projects, speculations on the stock market, science,and even — to give a drastic example — arms traffic or white slavery.
1572As conceived here, apoliteia creates no special presuppositions inthe exterior field, not necessarily having a corollary in practical abstention. The truly detached man is not a professional and polemic outsider,nor conscientious objector, nor anarchist. Once it is established that lifewith its interactions does not constrain his being, he could even show thequalities of a soldier who, in order to act and accomplish a task, does notrequest in advance a transcendent justification and a quasitheologicalassurance of the goodness of the cause. We can speak, in these cases, ofa voluntary obligation that concerns the “persona,” not the being, bywhich — even while one is involved — one remains isolated.
1573I have already said that the positive overcoming of nihilism lies precisely in the fact that lack of meaning does not paralyze the action ofthe “persona.” In existential terms, the only exception would be thepossibility of action being manipulated by some current political orsocial myth that regarded today’s political life as serious, significant,and important. Apoliteia is the inner distance unassailable by thissociety and its “values”; it does not accept being bound by anythingspiritual or moral. Once this is firm, the activities that in others wouldpresuppose such bonds can be exercised in a different spirit. Moreover,there remains the sphere of activities that can be made to serve a higherordained and invisible end, as when I mentioned the two aspects ofimpersonality and what is to be gained from some forms of modernexistence.
1574Turning to a particular point, one can only maintain an attitude ofdetachment when facing the confrontation of the two factions contending for world domination today: the democratic, capitalist Westand the communist East. In fact, this struggle is devoid of any meaningfrom a spiritual point of view. The “West” is not an exponent of any
1575
1576
1577
1578 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1579
1580higher ideal. Its very civilization, based on an essential negation of traditional values, presents the same destructions and nihilistic background that is evident in the Marxist and communist sphere, howeverdifferent in form and degree. I will not dwell on this, given that I haveoutlined a total conception of the course of history, and dismissed anyillusion about the final result of that struggle for world control, inRevolt Against the Modern World. Since the problem of values does notcome into question, at most it presents a practical problem to the differentiated man. That certain margin of material freedom that theworld of democracy still leaves for external activity to one who will notlet himself be conditioned inwardly, would certainly be abolished in acommunist regime. Simply in view of that, one may take a position
1581 against the sovietcommunist system: not because one believes in somehigher ideal that the rival system possesses, but for motives one mightalmost call basely physical.
1582On the other hand, one can keep in mind that for the differentiatedman, having no interest in affirming and exposing himself in externallife today, and his deeper life remaining invisible and out of reach, acommunist system would not have the same fatal significance as forothers; also an “underground front” could very well exist there. Takingsides in the present struggle for world hegemony is not a spiritual problem, but a banal, practical choice.
1583In any case, the general situation characterized by Nietzsche remains:
1584“The struggle for supremacy amidst conditions that are worth nothing:this civilization of great cities, newspapers, fever, uselessness .”  Such isthe framework that justifies the inner imperative of apoliteia : to defendthe world of being and dignity of him who feels himself belonging to adifferent humanity and recognizes the desert around himself.
1585
1586
1587
1588
1589Society
1590
1591The Crisis ofPatriotic Feeling
1592
1593We now come to the social realm in the proper sense. Here we canonly conclude that every organic unity has been dissolved or is dissolving: caste, stock, nation, homeland, and even the family. Even whenall these have not completely disappeared, their social foundation isnot a living force full of significance, but the mere force of inertia. Wehave already seen this when speaking of the person: what exists todayis essentially the shifting mass of “individuals,” devoid of organic connections, a mass contained by external structures or moved by collective, formless, and unstable currents. The differences between them,as they exist today, are no longer true differences. The classes are onlyfluid, economic classes. Again, the words of Zarathustra are timely:
1594“Rabble above, rabble below! What do ‘p° or> or ‘rich’ mean today? Ihave forgotten how to tell the difference .”  The only real hierarchiesare those technical ones of the specialists who serve material utility, theneeds (largely unnatural), and the distractions of the human animal:hierarchies in which rank and spiritual superiority no longer have anymeaning or place.
1595Instead of the traditional unification through particular bodies,orders, functional castes or classes, guilds — frameworks to which theindividual felt an attachment, based on a supraindividual principle thatinformed his entire life, giving it a specific meaning and orientation —today’s associations are determined only by the material interests ofindividuals, united only on this basis, such as trade unions, professionalorganizations, parties. The formless state of the people, turned into mere
1596
1597
1598
1599
1600
1601 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1602
1603higher ideal. Its very civilization, based on an essential negation of traditional values, presents the same destructions and nihilistic background that is evident in the Marxist and communist sphere, howeverdifferent in form and degree. I will not dwell on this, given that I haveoutlined a total conception of the course of history, and dismissed anyillusion about the final result of that struggle for world control, inRevolt Against the Modern World. Since the problem of values does notcome into question, at most it presents a practical problem to the differentiated man. That certain margin of material freedom that theworld of democracy still leaves for external activity to one who will notlet himself be conditioned inwardly, would certainly be abolished in acommunist regime. Simply in view of that, one may take a positionagainst the sovietcommunist system: not because one believes in somehigher ideal that the rival system possesses, but for motives one mightalmost call basely physical.
1604On the other hand, one can keep in mind that for the differentiatedman, having no interest in affirming and exposing himself in externallife today, and his deeper life remaining invisible and out of reach, acommunist system would not have the same fatal significance as forothers; also an “underground front” could very well exist there. Takingsides in the present struggle for world hegemony is not a spiritual problem, but a banal, practical choice.
1605In any case, the general situation characterized by Nietzsche remains:
1606“The struggle for supremacy amidst conditions that are worth nothing:this civilization of great cities, newspapers, fever, uselessness .”  Such isthe framework that justifies the inner imperative of apoliteia: to defendthe world of being and dignity of him who feels himself belonging to adifferent humanity and recognizes the desert around himself.
1607
1608
1609
1610 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1611
1612masses, ensures that any possible order will necessarily have a centralisticand coercive character. The inevitable, centralizing, overgrown structures of modern states, which increase their interventions and restrictionseven when “democratic freedoms” are proclaimed, if on the one handthey hold off complete disorder, on the other they destroy whatever mightstill remain of organic bonds and unity. And this social standardizationreaches its limit when openly totalitarian forms take over.
1613Furthermore, the absurdity of modern life is blatantly revealed bythose economic aspects that essentially, and regressively, determineit. On the one hand, an economy of necessities has decidedly becomean economy of excess, one of whose causes is the overproduction andprogress of industrial technology. On the other hand, overproductionrequires, for the sake of the market, that a maximum volume of needsbe fed and maintained among the masses: needs that, on the brink ofbecoming customary and “normal,” entail a corresponding, growingconditioning of the individual. The first factor here is the very natureof the dissociated productive process that has, as it were, taken modern man by the hand, like an unleashed giant incapable of restraint,thus confirming the saying: Fiat productio, pereat homo! (Let therebe production! Let man perish! — Werner Sombart). While in a capitalist regime not only greed for profits and dividends has a part inthis senseless increase in production, but also the objective necessityfor capital reinvestment in order to prevent a blockage paralyzing theentire system, another more general cause of the senseless increase ofproduction along the lines of an excessive consumer economy is thenecessity to employ labor to combat unemployment. As a result, inmany states the principle of overproduction and overindustrialization, exacerbated by the demands of private capitalism, has becomethe very dictator of sociopolitical planning. So a vicious circle forms,the opposite of a system in equilibrium, of processes well containedwithin sensible boundaries.
1614This naturally brings us to an even more prominent aspect of theabsurdity of modern existence: the unrestrained increase and growth ofthe population, occurring along with the regime of the masses, fosteredby democracy, the “conquests of science,” and the unselective welfaresystem. The procreative pandemic or demon is effectively the principal
1615
1616
1617Society
1618
1619force that incessantly feeds and sustains the entire system of the moderneconomy, with its mechanism ever more conditioning the individual.Proof positive of the derisory character of the craze for power nurturedby today’s man is the fact that this creator of machines, this dominatorof nature, this inaugurator of the atomic era, is not far above an animalor a savage when it comes to sex. He is incapable of controlling themost primitive forms of the sexual impulse and everything connectedwith it. So, as though obeying a blind destiny, he ceaselessly, irresponsibly, increases the formless human mass and supplies the chief drivingforce to the entire system of the paroxysmal, unnatural, and ever moreconditioned economic life of modern society, creating at the same timeinnumerable hotbeds of social and international instabilities and tensions. The vicious circle then becomes that of the mass, which, with theexcess potential of a workforce, feeds overproduction, which in its turnseeks everlarger markets and masses to absorb the products. Nor canwe ignore the fact that demographic growth has an index inversely proportional to the social scale, thus adding a further factor to the generalregressive process.
1620Evidence of this is absurdly obvious, and could easily be developedand supported by specific analyses. But this summary of the essentialpoints is enough to validate the principle of inner detachment not onlytoward the present political world but also, more generally, the socialworld. The differentiated man cannot feel part of a “society” like thepresent one, which is formless and has sunk to the level of purely material, economic, “physical” values, and moreover lives at this level andfollows its insane course under the sign of the absurd. Therefore, apoliteia requires the most decided resistance to any social myth. Here it isnot just a matter of its extreme, openly collectivist forms, in which theperson is not recognized as significant except as a fragment of a classor party or, as in the MarxistSoviet area, is denied any existence of hisown outside the society, so that personal destiny and happiness distinctfrom those of the collective do not even exist. We must equally rejectthe more general and bland ideal of “sociability” that today often functions as a slogan even in the socalled free world, after the decline of theideal of the true state. The differentiated man feels absolutely outside ofsociety, he recognizes no moral claim that requires his inclusion in an
1621
1622
1623
1624 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1625
1626absurd system; he can understand not only those who are outside, buteven those who are against “society” — meaning against this society.Putting aside everything that does not directly concern him (because hisway does not match that of his contemporaries), he would be the lastto endorse efforts to normalize and rehabilitate within “society” thosewho have had enough of the game and are stigmatized as “unsuitable”and “asocial” — the anathema of democratic societies. The ultimateintention of such efforts is to narcotize those who can see through theabsurd and nihilistic character of today’s collective life, behind all the
1627“social” masks and the corresponding lay mythology, as I have alreadysaid.
1628Based on these general considerations, we can now examine the
1629* crisis that some particular ideals and institutions of the previousperiod are undergoing, in order to clarify the position to be taken inthat regard.
1630We turn first to the ideas of homeland and nation. The crisis thatsuch ideas are suffering is evident, especially after World War II. On theone hand, it is a consequence of objective processes: the great economicand political forces in motion are such as to increasingly relativize thefrontiers and to reduce the principle of national sovereignty. One tendsto think in terms of large spaces and blocs or supranational systems,and given the growing uniformity of mores and ways of life, given thetransformation of the population into masses, and given the development and ease of communications, everything that has a solely nationalreference is assuming the quasiprovincial character of a local curiosity.
1631On the other hand, the crisis regards the way of feeling itself; it isconnected to the decline of yesterday’s myths and ideals, to which menrespond less and less after the upheavals and downfalls of recent times,and which are ever less capable of awakening the old enthusiasm in thecollectivity.
1632As in so many previous occasions, it is also necessary here to seeclearly what exactly is suffering the crisis, and to define its value. Again,it is not about the reality of the traditional world, but of conceptionsessentially born and introduced with its destruction, and above all withthe revolution of the Third Estate. The words “homeland” and
1633“nation,” in the modern sense of political myths and collective ideals,
1634
1635
1636Society
1637
1638were virtually unknown in the traditional world. The traditional worldknew “nationalities,” ethnicities, and races only as natural facts,devoid of that specific political value that they would receive in modern nationalism. They represented a primary material differentiated byhierarchies and subject to a superior principle of political sovereignty.In many cases, this elevated principle represented the primary element,the nation the secondary and derived element, since at the beginningthere was no unity of language, territory, “natural borders,” or relativeethnic homogeneity beyond the encounter and miscegenation of different bloods; these were often only the effect of a long formative processdetermined over centuries by a political center and its loyalist and feudal bonds.
1639In addition, it is well known that in the West, political nationsand nationstates emerged from the decline of the medieval ecumenical unity, due to a process of dissociation, a freeing of particular unitsfrom a whole (as indicated in chapter 25). The process replicates onthe international and continental plane the same features as would giverise within every state to the freeing of individuals, to social atomismand the dissolution of the organic concept of the state.
1640To an extent, the formation of nations has run parallel with therevolutionary idea. Already in the oldest historical example, that of theFrance of Philip the Fair, one can see how the move toward a nationalstate went hand in hand with a process of antiaristocratic leveling, anincipient destruction of the articulations of an organic society due toabsolutism, and the constitution of those centralized “public powers”that would become ever more prominent in modern states. We are wellaware of the close relationship between the dissolution correspondingto the declaration of the “rights of man and the citizen” of  and thepatriotic, nationalistic, and revolutionary idea. The very word “patriot”was unknown before the French Revolution; it first appeared between
1641 and  to indicate one who supported the revolution against themonarchies and aristocracies. Similarly, in the European revolutionarymovements of  and 1849, “people,” “national idea,” and “patriotism” on the one hand, and revolution, liberalism, constitutionalism,republican and antimonarchical tendencies on the other, were concordant and often inseparable elements.
1642
1643
1644
1645 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1646
1647It was in this climate, on the eve of the bourgeois or Third Estaterevolution, that “homeland” and “nation” took on a primarily political meaning and that mythical value that would become ever moreevident in the openly nationalistic ideologies that followed. Thus
1648“patriotic” and “national sentiments” are tied to the mythology ofthe bourgeois era, and it was only then, during the relatively briefperiod from the French Revolution to the First or perhaps the SecondWorld War, that the idea of nation actually played a determining rolein European history, in close connection with the democratic ideologies. The same idea is now playing the same role for the nonEuropeanpeoples as they become emancipated, following the same presuppositions, or rather following the internal antitraditional and modernizingdissolutions.
1649When bland patriotism turned into radical nationalistic forms, theregressive character of such tendencies and the contribution from theemergence of the massman in the modern world became clearly evident. For the essence of nationalistic ideology is to hold homeland andnation as supreme values, conceiving them as mystical entities almostwith a life of their own and having an absolute claim on the individual;whereas, in reality, they are only dissociated and formless realities, byway of their negation of any true hierarchical principle, and of any symbol or warrant of a transcendent authority. In general, the foundationof political unities that have taken form in this direction is antitheticalto the traditional state. In fact, as I have said, the cement of the latterwas a loyalty and fidelity that could dispense with the naturalistic factof nationality; it was a principle of order and sovereignty that, by notbeing based on this fact, could even be valid in areas including morethan one nationality. It was the dignities, particular rights, and castesthat united or divided individuals “vertically,” beyond the “horizontal”common denominator of “nation” and “homeland.” In a word, it wasunification from above, not from below.
1650Once all this is recognized, we can see in a different light the present crisis, both objective and ideal, of the concepts and sentiments ofhomeland and nation. Again, one might speak of destructions thatattack something already having a negative and regressive character, sothat they could even signify a potential liberation, if the direction of the
1651
1652
1653Society
1654
1655whole process were not toward something still more problematic.Therefore, even if only a void remained, it would be no reason for thedifferentiated man to deplore that crisis and concern himself with thereactions in the “realm of residues.” The void could be filled, the negative could give rise to the positive, only if the ancient principles returnedto replace the dissolving naturalistic unities with those of a differenttype; if it were no longer homelands and nations that united or divided,but rather ideas; if the decisive thing were not sentimental and irrational adhesion to a collectivizing myth, but a system of loyal, free, andstrongly personalized connections — something that would naturallyrequire as a fundamental point of reference leaders invested with asupreme and intangible authority. Along this line they could even beformed by transnational groupings such as were known in variousimperial epochs and, partially, in the Holy Alliance. Today, the degradedcounterfeit of all that is taking form alongside the crisis of nationalsovereignties: power blocs determined solely by factors that are material, economic, and “political” in the worst sense, devoid of every ideal.Hence the insignificance of the antithesis between the two principalblocs of this type existing today, between the democratic West and thecommunist and Marxist East. For lack of a third force of a differentcharacter, and a true ideal to unite and divide beyond homelands,nations, and antinations, the only prospect is that of an invisible unity,in a world without frontiers, of those few individuals who are associated by their very nature, which is different from that of the man oftoday, and by the same inner law — in short, almost in the same termsas Plato used, speaking of the true state, which idea was then taken upby the Stoics. A similar, dematerialized type of unity and state was atthe basis of the Orders, and its last reflection, deformed to the point ofbeing unrecognizable, can be seen in secret societies like Freemasonry.If new processes are to develop when the present cycle exhausts itself,perhaps they could have their point of departure in this very kind ofunity. Then we could see in action the positive side of overcoming theidea of homeland, whether as myth of the romantic bourgeois period oras a naturalistic fact almost irrelevant to a unity of a different type.Being from the same country or homeland would be replaced by being,or not being, for the same cause. Apoliteia, the detachment of today.
1656
1657
1658
1659 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1660
1661contains this eventual possibility for tomorrow. In this case too it isnecessary to see the distance existing between the attitude indicatedhere and certain recent products of modern political erosion: a formlessand humanitarian cosmopolitanism, a paranoid pacifism, and thewhims of those who want to feel themselves only as “citizens of theworld,” eventually becoming the “conscientious objectors.”
1662
1663
1664
1665Marriageand the Family
1666
1667Social factors present a closer connection with those of private life andmores, when one considers the problem of relations between the sexes,marriage, and the family as they are today.
1668In our time, the crisis of the family as an institution is no less salientthan that of the nineteenthcentury romantic idea of homeland, and islargely an effect of processes that are irreversible, being tied to all thefactors that characterize existence in recent times. Naturally, today’scrisis of the family also arouses preoccupations and moral reactions,with more or less hopeless attempts at restoration that can offer nothingbut conformism and an empty and false traditionalism.
1669Here, too, I see things in a different way and, as in the case of theother phenomena already considered, must coldly recognize the realityof the situation. We have to face the consequences of the fact that thefamily has long since ceased to have any higher meaning, or beencemented by living factors that go beyond the merely individual. Theorganic and, to a certain degree, “heroic” character that its unity presented in the past has been lost in the modern world, just as the institution’s residual veneer of “sacrality” bestowed by religious marriagehas disappeared, or nearly so. In reality, in the great majority of casesthe modern family is presented as a petit bourgeois institution determined almost exclusively by conformist, utilitarian, primitive, or at bestsentimental factors. Above all, its essential fulcrum has disappeared,which was constituted by the primarily spiritual authority of its head,the father: that is shown by the etymological meaning of the word pateras “lord,” or “sovereign.” At this rate one of the principal goals of thefamily, procreation, is reduced to the mere mindless propagation of
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1676 Dissolution in the Social Realm
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1678one’s bloodline: propagation, moreover, that is promiscuous, given thatwith modern individualism any limitation of conjugal unions by stock,caste, and race has collapsed, and given that, in any case, it no longerhas as counterpart the most essential continuity, that is, the transmission of a spiritual influence, a tradition, and an ideal heritage fromgeneration to generation. Yet how could it be otherwise? How could thefamily continue to have a firm, binding center, if its natural head, thefather, is so often estranged from it today — even physically, when thepractical mechanism of material life takes him away from it, in a society that is intrinsically absurd? What authority can the father have,especially in the socalled upper classes, if he is reduced to a moneymaking machine, a busy professional, and the like? Moreover, this often
1679**■ holds for both parents, owing to the emancipation of the woman andher entrance into the world of the professions and work. Even less conducive to the climate within the family or to a positive influence on thechildren is the alternative, the “lady” who devotes herself to a frivolousand mondaine existence. In such a situation, how can the erosive anddisintegrating processes not work against the unity of the modern family, and how can the claim of a “sacred character” of the institution notbe counted among the mendacious hypocrisies of our society?
1680The interrelation between the disappearance of the preexisting principle of authority and the unleashing of individualism, already revealedin the political realm, is also manifested in the realm of the family. Thedecline of any prestige of the father has resulted in the estrangement ofthe children, the ever more clear and severe gap between new and oldgenerations. The dissolution of the organic links in space (castes, bodies, and so on) corresponds to a dissolution in time, in the breaking ofthe spiritual continuity between the generations, between fathers andsons. The detachment and estrangement in both cases is undeniable andever increasing, being exacerbated by the ever more rapid and confusedrhythm of existence in today’s world. Thus it is significant that suchphenomena are particularly severe in the upper classes and the remainsof the ancient nobility, where one would have expected the bonds ofblood and tradition to persist. It is more than a humorous remark thatparents are “an unavoidable evil” for “modern” children. The new generation wants its parents “to mind their own business” and not to med
1681
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1683Marriage and the Family
1684
1685die in the lives of their children, since they “don’t understand” (evenwhen there is absolutely nothing to understand); and it is no longer justthe boys who make such a claim: the girls too have filed a similar protest. Naturally, all this intensifies the general rootless condition.Therefore, the privation of any higher meaning of the family in a materialistic and dispirited civilization is also one of the causes of the extremism of the “burntout generation,” and of the growing criminal activityand corruption among the youth.
1686Given this state of affairs, whatever its principal cause — whetherthis cause lies in the children or the parents — procreation itself assumesan absurd character and cannot maintain its validity as one of the principal reasons of being for the family. Thus, as I have said, in innumerable cases today’s family owes its existence merely to a force of inertia,conventions, practical convenience, and weakness of character in aregime of mediocrity and compromises. Nor can one expect externalmeasures to bring about a change. I must repeat that familial unitycould only remain firm when determined by a suprapersonal way ofthinking, so as to leave mere individual matters on a secondary level.Then the marriage could even lack “happiness,” the “needs of the soul”could be unsatisfied, and yet the unity would persist. In the individualistic climate of present society no higher reason demands that familialunity should persist even when the man or the woman “does not agree,”and sentiment or sex leads them to new choices. Therefore, the increaseof socalled failed marriages and related divorces and separations isnatural in contemporary society. It is also absurd to think of any efficacy in restraining measures, since the basis of the whole is by now achange of an existential order.
1687After this evaluation, it would almost be superfluous to specify whatcan be the behavior of the differentiated man today. In principle, he cannot value marriage, family, or procreation as I have just described them.All that can only be alien to him; he can recognize nothing significantto merit his attention. (Later I will return to the problem of the sexes initself, not from the social perspective.)
1688The contaminations in marriage between sacred and profane andits bourgeois conformism are evident to him, even in the case of religious,indissoluble. Catholic marriage. This indissolubility that is supposed
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1692 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1693
1694to safeguard the family in the Catholic area is by now little more thana facade. In fact, the indissoluble unions are often profoundly corrupted and loosened, and in that area petty morality is not concernedin the least that the marriage is actually indissoluble; it is importantonly to act as if it were such. That men and women, once duly married, do more or less whatever they want, that they feign, betray, orsimply put up with each other, that they remain together for simpleconvenience, reducing the family to what I have already described, isof little importance there. Morality is saved: One can believe that thefamily remains the fundamental unit of society so long as one condemns divorce and accepts that social sanction or authorization — asif it had any right — for any sexually based cohabitation that corresponds to marriage. What is more, even if we are not speaking of the
1695“indissoluble” Catholic rite of marriage, but of a society that permitsdivorce, the hypocrisy persists: one worships at the altar of social conformism even when men and women separate and remarry repeatedlyfor the most frivolous and ridiculous motives, as typically happens inthe United States, so that marriage ends up being little more than apuritanical veneer for a regime of high prostitution or legalized freelove.
1696Nevertheless, the issue of Catholic marriage deserves some additional theoretical and historical consideration to prevent ambiguity.Naturally in our case it is not the arguments of “free thinkers” thatturn us against this kind of marriage.
1697Earlier I mentioned the contamination between the sacred and theprofane. It is worth recalling that marriage as a rite and sacramentinvolving indissolubility took shape late in the history of the Church,and not before the twelfth century. The obligatory nature of the religious rite for every union that wished to be considered more than mereconcubinage was later still, declared at the Council of Trent (1563). Forour purposes, this does not affect the concept of indissoluble marriagein itself, but its place, significance, and conditions have to be clarified.The consequence here, as in other cases regarding the sacraments, isthat the Catholic Church finds itself facing a singular paradox: proposals intending to make the profane sacred have practically ended upmaking the sacred profane.
1698
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1700Marriage and the Family
1701
1702The true, traditional significance of the marriage rite is outlinedby Saint Paul, when he uses not the term “sacrament” but rather “mystery” to indicate it (“it is a great mystery,” taken verbatim — Ephesians
17035:3132). One can indeed allow a higher idea of marriage as a sacredand indissoluble union not in words, but in fact. A union of this type,however, is conceivable only in exceptional cases in which that absolute,almost heroic dedication of two people in life and beyond life is presentin principle. This was known in more than one traditional civilization,with examples of wives who even found it natural not to outlive thedeath of their husbands.
1704In speaking of making the sacred profane, I alluded to the fact thatthe concept of an indissoluble sacramental union, “written in the heavens” (as opposed to one on the naturalistic plane that is generically sentimental, and even at base merely social), has been applied to, or ratherimposed on, every couple who must join themselves in church ratherthan in civil marriage, only to conform to their social environment. Itis pretended that on this exterior and prosaic plane, on this plane ofthe Nietzschean “human, all too human,” the attributes of truly sacredmarriage, of marriage as a “mystery,” can and must be valid. Whendivorce is not permitted in a society like the present, one can expect thishypocritical regime and the rise of grave personal and social problems.
1705On the other hand, it should be noted that in Catholicism itself thetheoretical absoluteness of the marriage rite bears a significant limitation. It is enough to remember that if the Church insists on the indissolubility of the marriage bond in space, denying divorce, it has ceasedto observe it in time. The Church that does not allow one to divorce andremarry does permit widows and widowers to remarry, which amountsto a breach of faithfulness, and is at best conceivable within an openlymaterialistic premise; in other words, only if it is thought that whenone who was indissolubly united by the supernatural power of the ritehas died, he or she has ceased to exist. This inconsistency shows thatCatholic religious law, far from truly having transcendent spiritual values in view, has made the sacrament into a simple, social convenience,an ingredient of the profane life, reducing it to a mere formality, orrather degrading it.
1706This is not all. Together with the absurdity proper to democratizing
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1710 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1711
1712the marriage rite and imposing it on all, there is an inconsistency inCatholic doctrine when it claims that the rite, as well as being indissoluble, renders natural unions “sacred” — which represents one incongruence associating with another. Through precise, dogmatic premises, the
1713“sacred” is here reduced to a mere manner of speech. It is well knownthat Christian and Catholic attitudes are characterized by the antithesisbetween “flesh” and spirit, by a theological hatred for sex, due to theillegitimate extension to ordinary life of a principle valid at best for acertain type of ascetic life. With sex being presented as something sinful,marriage has been conceived as a lesser evil, a concession to humanweakness for those who cannot choose chastity as a way of life, andrenounce sex. Not being able to ban sexuality altogether, Catholicismhas tried to reduce it to a mere biological fact, allowing its use in marriage only for procreation. Unlike certain ancient traditions, Catholicismhas recognized no higher value, not even a potential one, in the sexualexperience taken in itself. There is lacking any basis for its transformation in the interests of a more intense life, to integrate and elevate theinner tension of two beings of different sexes, whereas it is in exactlythese terms that one should conceive of a concrete “sacralization” of theunion and the effect of a higher influence involved in the rite.
1714On the other hand, since the marriage rite has been democratized,the situation could not be otherwise even if the premises were different; otherwise, it would be necessary to suppose an almost magicalpower in the rite to automatically elevate the sexual experiences of anycouple to the level of a higher tension, of a transforming intoxicationthat alone could lift it beyond the “natural” plane. The sexual actwould constitute the primary element, whereas procreation wouldappear absolutely secondary and belonging to the naturalistic plane.As a whole, whether through its conception of sexuality, or through itsprofanation of the marriage rite as something put in everyone’s reachand even rendered obligatory for any Catholic couple, religious marriage itself is reduced to the mere religious sanction of a profane,unbreakable contract. Thus the Catholic precepts about the relationsbetween the sexes reduce everything to the plane of a restrained, bourgeois mediocrity: tamed, procreative animality within conformist limits that have not been fundamentally changed by certain hesitant.
1715
1716
1717Marriage and the Family
1718
1719fringe concessions made for the sake of “updating” at the SecondVatican Council.
1720So much for clarifying the principles of the matter. In such a materialized and desecrated civilization and society as the present ones, it isthen natural that the very barriers against dissolution that the Christianconception of marriage and family provided — however problematic itmight have been — have become less and less, and that as things nowstand, there is no longer anything worth being sincerely defended andpreserved. None of the consequences of the crisis as seen in this realm,including all today’s problems surrounding divorce, free love, and therest, can be of much interest to the differentiated man. Upon final analysis, he cannot consider the overt individualistic disintegration of marriage as a worse evil than the line followed by the communist world,which, having liquidated the fads of free unions cultivated by early revolutionary, antibourgeois socialism, tended ever more to substitute thestate or some collective for the family, while vindicating the “dignity”of the woman only as worker side by side with the man, and in termsof a mere reproductive mammal. In fact, in presentday Russia decorations as lofty as “Heroine of the Soviet Union” are being contemplatedfor fruitful women — even unmarried comrades — who have given atleast ten babies to the world, which, if they desire, they can even ridthemselves of by handing them over to the state, which supposes it caneducate them more directly and rationally to make them into “Sovietmen.” It is known that a comment in Article  of the Soviet constitution has essentially inspired such a view of the female sex: “Work, inother times considered as a useless or dishonorable labor, becomes aquestion of dignity, glory, a question of valor, heroism.” The title of
1721“Hero of Socialist Labor,” equaled by the “Hero of the Soviet Union,”is the counterpart of the title just indicated bestowed upon the reproductive woman. These are the happy horizons offered as the alternativeto the “decadence” and “corruption” of bourgeois capitalist society,where the family is dissolving amid anarchy, indifference, and the socalled sexual revolution of the younger generation, along with the disappearance of any organic link or principle of authority.
1722In any case, these alternatives also lack any significance. In thisepoch of dissolution it is hard for the differentiated man to become
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1726 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1727
1728the marriage rite and imposing it on all, there is an inconsistency inCatholic doctrine when it claims that the rite, as well as being indissoluble, renders natural unions “sacred” — which represents one incongruence associating with another. Through precise, dogmatic premises, the
1729“sacred” is here reduced to a mere manner of speech. It is well knownthat Christian and Catholic attitudes are characterized by the antithesisbetween “flesh” and spirit, by a theological hatred for sex, due to theillegitimate extension to ordinary life of a principle valid at best for acertain type of ascetic life. With sex being presented as something sinful,marriage has been conceived as a lesser evil, a concession to humanweakness for those who cannot choose chastity as a way of life, andrenounce sex. Not being able to ban sexuality altogether, Catholicismhas tried to reduce it to a mere biological fact, allowing its use in marriage only for procreation. Unlike certain ancient traditions, Catholicismhas recognized no higher value, not even a potential one, in the sexualexperience taken in itself. There is lacking any basis for its transformation in the interests of a more intense life, to integrate and elevate theinner tension of two beings of different sexes, whereas it is in exactlythese terms that one should conceive of a concrete “sacralization” of theunion and the effect of a higher influence involved in the rite.
1730On the other hand, since the marriage rite has been democratized,the situation could not be otherwise even if the premises were different; otherwise, it would he necessary to suppose an almost magicalpower in the rite to automatically elevate the sexual experiences of anycouple to the level of a higher tension, of a transforming intoxicationthat alone could lift it beyond the “natural” plane. The sexual actwould constitute the primary element, whereas procreation wouldappear absolutely secondary and belonging to the naturalistic plane.As a whole, whether through its conception of sexuality, or through itsprofanation of the marriage rite as something put in everyone’s reachand even rendered obligatory for any Catholic couple, religious marriage itself is reduced to the mere religious sanction of a profane,unbreakable contract. Thus the Catholic precepts about the relationsbetween the sexes reduce everything to the plane of a restrained, bourgeois mediocrity: tamed, procreative animality within conformist limits that have not been fundamentally changed by certain hesitant,
1731
1732
1733Marriage and the Family
1734
1735fringe concessions made for the sake of “updating” at the SecondVatican Council.
1736So much for clarifying the principles of the matter. In such a materialized and desecrated civilization and society as the present ones, it isthen natural that the very barriers against dissolution that the Christianconception of marriage and family provided — however problematic itmight have been — have become less and less, and that as things nowstand, there is no longer anything worth being sincerely defended andpreserved. None of the consequences of the crisis as seen in this realm,including all today’s problems surrounding divorce, free love, and therest, can be of much interest to the differentiated man. Upon final analysis, he cannot consider the overt individualistic disintegration of marriage as a worse evil than the line followed by the communist world,which, having liquidated the fads of free unions cultivated by early revolutionary, antibourgeois socialism, tended ever more to substitute thestate or some collective for the family, while vindicating the “dignity”of the woman only as worker side by side with the man, and in termsof a mere reproductive mammal. In fact, in presentday Russia decorations as lofty as “Heroine of the Soviet Union” are being contemplatedfor fruitful women — even unmarried comrades — who have given atleast ten babies to the world, which, if they desire, they can even ridthemselves of by handing them over to the state, which supposes it caneducate them more directly and rationally to make them into “Sovietmen.” It is known that a comment in Article  of the Soviet constitution has essentially inspired such a view of the female sex: “Work, inother times considered as a useless or dishonorable labor, becomes aquestion of dignity, glory, a question of valor, heroism.” The title of
1737“Hero of Socialist Labor,” equaled by the “Hero of the Soviet Union,”is the counterpart of the title just indicated bestowed upon the reproductive woman. These are the happy horizons offered as the alternativeto the “decadence” and “corruption” of bourgeois capitalist society,where the family is dissolving amid anarchy, indifference, and the socalled sexual revolution of the younger generation, along with the disappearance of any organic link or principle of authority.
1738In any case, these alternatives also lack any significance. In thisepoch of dissolution it is hard for the differentiated man to become
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1741 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1742
1743involved in marriage and family in any way. It is not a matter of ostentatious anticonformism, but a conclusion drawn from a vision consistent with reality, in which the imperative of an inner freedom remains.In a world like the present, the differentiated man must be able to havethe self at his disposal, all his life long. It is not for him to form any tiesin this realm, any more than ascetics or mercenaries in another epochwould have done. It is not that he is unwilling to assume even graverburdens: the problem refers instead to that which, in itself, is devoid ofany meaning.
1744This saying of Nietzsche is well known: “ Nicht fort sollst du dichpflanzen, sondern hinauf. Dazu helfe dir der Garten der Ehe” (Do notplant for the future but for the heights. May the garden of marriage helpyou in that). It refers to the idea that today’s man is a mere form oftransition whose only purpose is to prepare the birth of the “superman,” being ready to sacrifice himself for him, and to withdraw at hisarising. We have already done justice to the craze of the superman andthis finalism that postpones the possession of an absolute meaning ofexistence to a hypothetical future humanity. But from the wordplay ofNietzsche’s saying, one can deduce the endorsement of a concept thatmarriage should serve to reproduce not “horizontally” (such is themeaning of fortpflanzen), simply breeding, but rather “vertically,”toward the summit (hinauf pflanzen), elevating one’s own line. In fact,this would be the only higher justification of marriage and family.Today it is nonexistent, because of the objective existential situation ofwhich we have spoken, and because of the processes of dissolution thathave severed the profound ties that can spiritually unite the generations.Even a Catholic, Charles Peguy, had spoken of being a father as the
1745“great adventure of modern man,” given the utter uncertainty of whathis own offspring may be, given the improbability that in our day thechild might receive anything more than mere “life” from the father. Ihave already emphasized that it is not about having or not having thatpaternal quality, not only physical, that existed in the ancient familyand that grounded his authority. Even if this quality were still present —and, in principle, one should assume that it could still be present in thedifferentiated man — it would be paralyzed by the presence of a refractory and dissociated material in the younger generation. As we have
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1748Marriage and the Family
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1750said, the state of the modern masses is by now such that, even if figureshaving the stature of true leaders were to appear, they would be the lastto be followed. Thus one should not deceive oneself about the formation and education still possible for an offspring born in an environment like that of present society, even if the father were such in a morethan legal sense.
1751The objection that such a position could provoke is certainly notthat it involves the danger of a depopulation of the earth, because thereis more than a sufficient pandemic and catastrophic reproduction ofcommon humanity, but that thus the differentiated men would renouncethe assurance of a lineage that would carry on the heritage of their ideasand way of being, leaving the masses and the most insignificant classesto breed their ever more numerous progeny.
1752One can overcome this objection by dissociating the physical generation from the spiritual one. In a regime of dissolution, in a worldwhere neither castes, traditions, nor races exist in the proper sense, thetwo types of generation have ceased to be parallel, and the hereditarycontinuity of blood no longer represents a favorable condition for aspiritual continuity. We might refer here to that spiritual paternity towhich the traditional world accorded priority over solely biologicalpaternity, as when speaking of the relationship between teacher andstudent, initiator and initiate. This extended to the idea of a rebirth orsecond birth as a fact independent of any physical paternity, and whichcreated in the person concerned a more intimate and essential tie thanany of those that could unite him to the physical father, the family, orany naturalistic community and unity.
1753This, then, is the special possibility that can be considered as a substitute: it goes back to an order of ideas analogous to the principle ofthe nation, when we said that a naturalistic unity entering crisis couldonly be replaced by a unity determined by an idea. To the “adventure”of physically procreating beings who may become isolated, “modern”individuals good only for increasing the senseless world of quantity, onecan then oppose the action of awakening, which those who do not spiritually belong to the present world may exert on suitably qualified people, so that the physical disappearance of the former does not leave anunfilled void. Besides, the few differentiated men existing today rarely
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1756 Dissolution in the Social Realm
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1758find themselves sharing their inner form and orientation on account ofsharing the same blood or stock, through heredity. So there is no reason to suppose that things should go otherwise for the next generation.However important the task of assuring oneself a spiritual successionis, its practicability depends on circumstances. It will be realized if andwhere it can be, without one having to search frantically and, leastof all, resort to any kind of proselytism. Above all in this realm, thatwhich is authentic and valid is accomplished under the guidance of ahigher, inscrutable wisdom, with the external appearance of casuality,rather than through a direct initiative “willed” by any individual.
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1763Relationsbetween the Sexes
1764
1765I have taken care to distinguish the social problem of the family and marriage from the personal problem of sex. Once again, it is a matter of aseparation that, neither normal nor legitimate in a normal world, exceptin special cases, imposes itself when the world is dissolving. So we cometo consider the relationship between man and woman in itself.
1766Here too, I will first consider the positive aspects that, at leastpotentially, are offered by certain processes of dissolution, to the extentthat what is dissolved belongs to the bourgeois world and, moreover,suffers from distortions and obscurities in sexual matters, due to thepredominant religion of the West.
1767I turn first to that characteristic complex caused by the interferencebetween morality and sexuality, as well as that between spirituality andsexuality. The importance that has been attributed to sexual mattersin the field of ethical and spiritual values, often to the point of makingthem the sole criterion, is nothing less than aberrant.
1768Vilfredo Pareto  spoke of a “sexual religion” that in the nineteenthcentury, with its taboos, dogmas, and intolerance, accompanied religion as usually understood. It was particularly virulent in AngloSaxoncountries, where it had, and in part still has as its worthy companions,two other brandnew, dogmatic, secular religions: humanitarian progressivism and the religion of democracy. But, apart from this, thereare distortions concerning a much wider field. For example, one ofthem concerns the very meaning of the term “virtue .”  It is known thatvirtus in antiquity and even during the Renaissance had the meaningof a force of the soul, of virile quality, of power, while later its prevalent meaning became sexual, so much that Pareto could coin the term
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1777“virtuism” itself to characterize the said puritanical religion. Anothertypical case of the interference between sexuality and ethics and of thedistortion of them is the notion of honor. It is true that this primarilyconcerned the female sex, but the matter was no less significant forthat. For a long time it was held, and still is in certain social strataand regions, that a girl loses her “honor” not only when she has freesexual experiences outside of marriage, but even when she is a victimof rape. A similar absurdity even inspired the theme of some “greatart,” the grotesque extreme of this perhaps being reached by Lope deVega’s drama The Best Judge Is the King, in which a girl, having beenkidnapped and violated by a feudal lord, loses her “honor”; but shequickly regains it when the king has the rapist executed and has the girlmarry her fiance. A parallel absurdity is the idea that a man loses hisown “honor” if his wife betrays him, whereas, if anything, the opposite would be true; in adultery, it is the woman, and not the man wholoses “honor”: not by the sexual fact itself, but from a superior pointof view, because where marriage is something serious and profound,the woman in marrying freely binds herself to a man, and throughher adultery she, first disgracing herself, breaks this ethical tie. So,incidentally, one can see how foolish it was of the bourgeois world tolet the blow land on the betrayed husband. It would be equivalent toridiculing one who suddenly discovers a thief, or a leader when one ofhis followers breaks his oath of fidelity and betrays him — unless onewants the defense of “honor” to engender in the husband the qualityof a jailer or a despot, which is certainly not compatible with a higherideal of virile dignity.
1778Even from such banal examples we can clearly see the contamination suffered by ethical values through sexual prejudices. I have alreadyindicated the principles of a “greater morality” that, being dependenton a kind of interior race, cannot be damaged by nihilistic dissolutions: these include truth, justice, loyalty, inner courage, the authentic, socially unconditioned sentiment of honor and shame, control overoneself. These are what are meant by “virtue”; sexual acts have no partin it except indirectly, and only when they lead to a behavior that deviates from these values.
1779The value that was attributed to virginity by Western religion, even
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1781Relations oetween me sexes 17/
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1783on a theological plane, relates to the complex mentioned earlier. It isalready evident on this plane through the importance and the emphasison the virginity of Mary, the “Mother of God,” which is altogetherincomprehensible except on the purely symbolic level. But it was alsoattested on the moral and normative plane by many opinions recognized as “probable” by Catholic moral theology (that is, recommendedbecause prevalent and defended by thinkers of a particular doctrine,although not unequivocally binding). For example, it would be preferable for a girl to kill herself rather than allow herself to be violated
1784(an idea that even led to the recent “sanctification” of a certain MariaGoretti), or that it would be permissible for her to kill the assailant, ifshe could save her own anatomical integrity thereby. A similar sentiment is defended in the same terms by the casuistry of moral theologythat, when for the salvation of a city the enemy had required the sacrifice of an innocent, she could be sacrificed and the city could consentto surrender her — not, however, if a girl were demanded in order to beraped. So we can see that the sexual taboo was given a greater emphasisthan life itself, and many more examples of this could easily be provided. But when, with a regime of interdictions and anathemas, oneis so preoccupied with sexual matters, it is evident that one dependson them, no less than if one made a crude exhibition of them. On thewhole, this is the case in Christianized Europe — and all the more sosince positive religion lacks both the contemplative potential and theorientation toward transcendence, high asceticism, and true sacrality.The realm of morality has become contaminated by the idea of sex, tothe extent of the complexes mentioned earlier.
1785Although all this abnormal order of things is not of recent date, thecharacteristic fact of the bourgeois period is that it assumed the principal,dissociated, and autonomous characteristics of a “social morality” — precisely with the “virtuism” of which Pareto accuses it, which to a certainextent was no longer subject to religious morality. Now, it is exactly thismorality with a sexual basis that is the principal object of the processesof dissolution in recent times. We hear of a “sexual revolution” supposedto remove both inner inhibitions and repressive social taboos. In fact, intoday’s world “sexual freedom” is being affirmed ever more, as a currentpractice. But we have to consider this in more detail.
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1788 Dissolution in the Social Realm
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1790I must emphasize above all that the direction of the processes atwork is toward a freeing of sex, but in no way a freeing from sex.  Sexand women are instead becoming dominant forces in present society,an evident fact that is also part of the general phenomenology of everyterminal phase of a civilization’s cycle. One might speak of a chronicsexual intoxication that is profusely manifested in public life, conduct,and art. Its counterpart is a gynocratic tendency, a sexually orientedpreeminence of the woman that relates to the materialistic and practical involvement of the masculine sex: a phenomenon that is clearest inthose countries, like the United States, where that involvement is moreexcessive.
1791Since I have dealt with it on other occasions,  I shall not dwell onthis subject here, limiting myself to the collective and, in a certain way,abstract character of eroticism and the fascination centered on the latestfemale idols, in an atmosphere fed by countless means: cinema, magazines, television, musicals, beauty contests, and so on. Here the realpersona of the woman is often a quasisoulless prop, center of crystallization of that atmosphere of diffuse and chronic sexuality, so that themajority of “stars” with their fascinating features have as persons quitepoor sexual qualities, their existential basis being close to that of common, misguided, and rather neurotic girls. To describe them someonehas aptly used the image of jellyfish with magnificent iridescent colorsthat are reduced to a gelatinous mass and evaporate if brought out ofthe water into sunlight — the water corresponding to the atmosphere ofdiffuse and collective sexuality.
1792As for our concerns, my principle is not simply to deplore the factthat all the mores of the past based on sexual prejudices are ever morelosing their force; and it should not surprise us that what seemed corruption yesterday is now becoming normal in much of contemporary society.The important thing would be to take advantage of the changed situationin order to affirm a healthier conception of life than that of bourgeoismorality, by freeing ethical values from their sexual connections. Whatwas said of the contamination suffered by that morality’s interference withthe concepts of virtue, honor, and fidelity, can already indicate the rightdirection. We must recognize that continence and chastity have theirproper place only in the framework of a certain type of ascesis and in the
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1795Relations between the Sexes
1796
1797uncommon vocations corresponding to it, as was always thought in thetraditional world. Contrary to puritanical opinion, a free sexual life inthe case of persons of a certain stature can tell us nothing about theirintrinsic value — history is rich in examples of that. What they allowthemselves should be measured solely by what they are, by the power thatthey have over themselves.
1798Relationships between men and women, with regard to livingtogether, should be clearer, more important, and interesting than thosedefined by bourgeois mores and sexual exclusivism, which understandsthe significance of female integrity in mere anatomical terms. In principle, the processes of dissolution at work could favor many similarrectifications, if one has a particular human type in sight. However, ifone refers to the majority, those possibilities remain entirely hypothetical, because here too, the necessary existential premises are lacking.Today’s situation is such that increased freedom in the realm of sex isnot connected to a conscious reacquisition of values that accord littleimportance to “important” sexual matters and oppose the “fetishization” of intersexual human relations, but is caused by the general weakening of any value, of any restraint. The positive advantages that mightbe drawn from the processes at work are then only virtual, and shouldnot delude us about the actual — and future — tendencies of modern life.Aside from the atmosphere of a diffuse, pandemic, erotic intoxication,
1799“sexual freedom” can lead to banal relationships between men andwomen, to a materialism, a petty immoralism, and an insipid promiscuity where the most elementary conditions for sexual experiences ofany interest or intensity do not exist. It is easy to see that this is theeffective outcome of the proclaimed “sexual revolution”: sex “free ofcomplexes” that becomes a general current of mass consumption.
1800The aspects of the crisis of female modesty are another part ofthis .  Beside the cases in which almost full female nudity feeds theatmosphere of abstract, collective sexuality, we should consider thosecases in which nudity has lost every serious “functional” character —cases which by their habitual, public character almost engender aninvoluntarily chaste glance that is capable of considering a fullyundressed girl with the same aesthetic disinterest as observing a fishor a cat. Furthermore, by adding the products of commercialized mass
1801
1802
1803
1804 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1805
1806pornography, the polarity between the sexes is diluted, as seen in theconduct of “modern” life where the youth of both sexes are everywhere intermingled, promiscuously and “unaffectedly,” with almostno tension, as if they were turnips and cabbages in a vegetable garden.We can see how this particular result of the processes of dissolutionrelates to what I have said of the “animal ideal,” as well as the correspondence between the East and the West. The primitive, erotic life sotypical among American youth is not at all far from the promiscuityof male and female “comrades” in the communist realm, free fromthe “individualistic accidents of bourgeois decadence,” who in the endreflect little on sexual matters, their prevalent interests being channeled elsewhere into collective life and class .
1807We can consider separately the cases in which the climate of diffuse and constant eroticism leads one to seek in pure sexuality, moreor less along the same lines as drugs, frantic sensations that mask theemptiness of modern existence. The testimonies of certain beatniks andsimilar groups reveal that their pursuit of the sexual orgasm causes ananguish aroused by the idea that they and their partner might not reachit, even to the point of exhaustion.
1808This use of sex deals with negative forms and quasicaricatures thatmay, however, refer to something more serious, because the pure sexualexperience also has its metaphysicalValue, the intensity of intercoursebeing able to produce an existential rupture of planes and an openingbeyond ordinary consciousness. Along with the sacralization of sex,these possibilities were recognized in the traditional world. Havingdealt with this in Eros and the Mysteries of Love, I shall only includehere a brief reference as it concerns the differentiated man.
1809As I have said, the present situation excludes the possibility of integrating sex in a life full of meaning within institutional frameworks. Sowe can only think of certain cases in which, despite everything, favorable conditions exceptionally and sporadically converge. Certainly, theromantic bourgeois idea of love as a union of “souls” can no longerhave any place for the man in question. The significance of humanrelationships can only be relative to him, and he can no more seek themeaning of existence in a woman than in family and children. In particular, he must put aside the idea, or ambition, of human possession,
1810
1811
1812Relations between the Sexes
1813
1814of completely “having” the other being as a person. Here too, a senseof distance would be natural, and could indicate a mutual respect. Thepositive use of the greater freedom of modern conduct and of the moderntransformation of the woman can be seen in relationships that, withoutbeing superficial or “naturalistic,” have an evident character, groundedon the social and ethical side in loyalty, camaraderie, independence,and courage. The man and woman always remain conscious as twobeings with distinct paths, who, in the world in dissolution, can overcome their fundamental, existential isolation only through the effect ofpure sexual polarity. If there is no need to “possess” another humanbeing, the woman will not be a mere object of “pleasure,” a source ofsensations that are sought as means to assert oneself. The integratedbeing has no need of such assurances; at most he requires “nourishment.” That which can be gained from the polarity just mentioned, ifadequately used, can provide one of the principal materials to feed thatspecial active and living intoxication of which I have repeatedly spoken,above all when discussing the Dionysian experience.
1815This brings us to the other possibility, that offered by the regimeof sexuality that renders it in a certain way autonomous, and detached.As we have seen, the first possibility is “naturalistic” degeneracy. Thiscontrasts with the second possibility, which is that of the “elementary”:the assumption of the sexual experience in its elementarily. One of thethemes of Eros and the Mysteries of Love was shown in the words:
1816“Since psychoanalysis has emphasized the subpersonal primordialismof sex by applying a degrading inversion, it is necessary to oppose itwith a metaphysical perspective .”  On the one hand, I have examinedto this end certain dimensions of transcendence that exist in latent orhidden forms in profane love itself, while on the other hand I have gathered from the world of Tradition many testimonies about the use of sexin the sense indicated, when I spoke of how higher influences couldtransform the general rule of union between men and women. If, however, we do not want to deal with mere concepts, but with their practical application, today I can only refer to sporadic, unusual experiencesopen only to the differentiated human type, because they presuppose aspecial interior constitution that survives in him alone.
1817Another presupposition regards the woman: it is that the erotic,
1818
1819
1820
1821 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1822
1823fascinating quality widespread in today’s environment is concentratedand almost “precipitated” (in a chemical sense) in certain female typesprecisely in terms of an “elementary” quality. Therefore, in a sexualrelationship with a woman, the situation I have often considered wouldreappear — that is, a dangerous situation that requires a selfmastery,the surpassing of an inner limit by anyone who intends actively toattempt it. Despite a certain exasperation or crudeness due to the different environment, the meanings originally connected to the polarityof the sexes could reappear in this context, if not yet suffocated by thepuritan religion of the “spirit,” and if they were not enfeebled, sentimentalized, and made bourgeois, but also not primitivized or simplycorrupted. These significances are found in many legends, myths, andsagas of very different traditions. In the true, typical, absolute woman,they recognized a spiritually dangerous presence, a fascinating andeven dissolutive force; this explains the attitude and the precepts of thatparticular line of ascesis averse to sex and woman, as if to cut off theirdanger. The man who has not chosen either to renounce the world orto be impassively detached from it can face the danger and even derivenourishment from the poison, if he uses sex without becoming a slaveto it, and if he is able to evoke the profound, elemental dimensions in acertain transbiological sense.
1824As I have said, in the present world # these possibilities are the exception and can only offer themselves by happy chance, given their presuppositions, and also under the unfavorable circumstances of the dullnessoften presented by the woman as current civilization has made her. An
1825“absolute woman” cannot in fact easily imagine herself in the guise ofan “uptodate” and “modern” girl. More generally, she cannot easilyimagine the necessary feminine qualities mentioned earlier as compatible with those required for relationships that, as we have said, shouldalso have a character of freedom, clarity, and independence. As a result,an entirely unique form of woman would be necessary, a seeminglyparadoxical form, because in a certain sense she should reproduce that
1826“duality” (inner duality) of the differentiated male type; which, despitecertain appearances, is far from the typical orientation of modernwoman’s life.
1827In reality, the entrance of the woman with equal rights into practi
1828
1829
1830Relations between the Sexes
1831
1832cal modern life, her new freedom, her finding herself side by side withmen in the streets, offices, professions, factories, sports, and now evenin political and military life, is one of those dissolutive phenomena inwhich, in most cases, it is difficult to perceive anything positive. Inessence, all this is simply the renunciation of the woman’s right to bea woman. The promiscuity of the sexes in modern existence can only
1833“relieve” the woman to a greater or lesser degree of the energy withwhich she is endowed; she enters freer relationships only by regressing,because they are primitivized, prejudiced by all the factors and the practical, predominating interests of modern life. So the processes at workin present society, with woman’s new status, can satisfy only one of thetwo requirements, that of clearer, freer, and more essential relationships,beyond both moralism and the erosive quality of bourgeois sentimentalism and “idealism,” but certainly cannot satisfy the second — the activation of the most profound forces that define the absolute woman.
1834It lies outside of the scope of this book to consider the meaningof existence not only from the man’s point of view, but also from thewoman’s. It is certain that in an epoch of dissolution the solution forthe woman is more difficult than that for the man. One should bear inmind the already irreversible consequences of the error through whichthe woman believed herself to win a “personality” of her own using theman as a model: the “man,” in a manner of speaking, because today’stypical forms of activity are almost all anodyne, they engage “neuter”faculties of a predominantly intellectual and practical order that have nospecific relation to either sex, or even to any particular race or nationality, and are exercised under the sign of the absurdity that characterizes all the systems of contemporary society. It is a world of existencewithout quality and of mere masks, in which the modern woman inmost cases simply takes care of the cosmetic aspect, being so inwardlydiminished and displaced, and lacking any basis for that active andessentializing depersonalization of which I have spoken, regarding therelations between person and mask.
1835In an inauthentic existence, the regime of diversions, surrogates,and tranquilizers that pass for today’s “distractions” and “amusements”does not yet allow the modern woman to foresee the crisis that awaitsher when she recognizes how meaningless are those male occupations
1836
1837
1838
1839 Dissolution in the Social Realm
1840
1841for which she has fought, when the illusions and the euphoria of herconquests vanish, and when she realizes that, given the climate of dissolution, family and children can no longer give her a sense of satisfaction in life. Meanwhile, as a result of diminished tension even man andsex can no longer mean a great deal to her; they cannot be her naturalcenter of existence as they were for the traditional absolute woman, butcan only be of value as one ingredient of a diffused and externalizedexistence, no more important than fashion, sport, a narcissistic cult ofthe body, practical interests, and so on. The destructive effects so oftenproduced in modern women by a mistaken vocation or warped ambitions, and also the force of circumstances, enter into the equation. Thus,when the race of true men is also nearly extinct, and modern man haslittle left of virility in a higher sense, there is little point in the sayingabout the true man’s capacity to “redeem,” to “save the woman withinwoman.” There is more of a danger that a true man today, in manycases, might find appropriate another maxim, that spoken by the oldwoman to Zarathustra: “Are you going to women? Don’t forget yourwhip!”  — if it could be applied with impunity and fruitfully in theseprogressive times. The possibility of restoring to sex, even sporadically,its elementarily, its transcendence, and perhaps even its danger in thecontext mentioned, appears very much prejudiced by all these factors.
1842In summary, the general picture that today’s society presents in thefield of sex reflects in a particular way the negative aspects of a periodof transition. The regime of residues, influenced in Latin countries byCatholic and bourgeois conformism, and by Puritanism in Protestantcountries, still possesses a certain force. Where only the outer inhibitions have been removed, sexual life frequently assumes neurotic forms.In the opposite case of the younger generation’s completely emancipatedbehavior, without complexes, the tendency is toward an insipid naturalism and primitivism in sexual relations. At the same time the general climate prevails of a fascination with sex and the predominance ofwoman as its object, without any effective differentiation, often to thepoint of regression, of the absolute types of femininity and virility. Inparticular, the emancipated feminine element becomes dimmed wheninvolved in the social mechanism. Finally, there are the marginal casesof an exasperated use of sex, often associated with drugs, by a youth
1843
1844
1845Relations between the Sexes
1846
1847that is existentially traumatized and at risk, in the context of a chaoticsearch for surrogates for a firm sense of existence.
1848Thus in the current situation, for the type that concerns us, the prospect of the use of more profound sexual possibilities in freer and clearerrelationships between men and women can only occur in rare, unexpected cases. Apart from this, considering the current processes andtheir effects, the only ones of value to him are those disintegrating onesthat may help to separate the realms, and which articulate the principlesbelonging to a higher law of life than the preceding sexual morality.Lacking anything better, he takes stock of the free space that is openedwhen important sexual and erotic matters are rendered less important,though not discounting what they can offer on their own level.
1849
1850
1851
1852Part 8
1853
1854The SpiritualProblem
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859The “Second Religiosity”
1860
1861In chapter  I showed how utterly baseless is the idea of certain popularizes of the latest physics, who claim that it has graduated beyondits previous materialism and is leading toward a new, spiritual vision ofreality. Now a similar deception lies at the basis of the pretences of whatwe might call “neospiritualism.”  In some circles the same conclusionis drawn, namely that we are returning to spirituality, because of theproliferating tendencies toward the supernatural and the supersensibleon the part of movements, cults, sects, lodges, and conventicles of everydescription. They have in common the ambition to supply Western manwith something more than the forms of positive and dogmatic religion,reckoned inadequate, empty, and inefficient, and to lead him beyondmaterialism.
1862This too is an illusion, caused by the lack of principles so typical ofour contemporaries. The truth is that here too, we are facing phenomena that in most cases are part and parcel of the dissolving processes ofthe age, and that despite all appearances have an existentially negativecharacter, representing a kind of counterpart in alliance with Westernmaterialism.
1863To understand the true place and significance of this new spiritualism, one can refer to what Spengler wrote about the “second religiosity.” In his principal work, The Decline of the West , this authorexpounded ideas that, for all their grave confusions and personaldigressions of every kind, partly reproduce the traditional conceptionof history. He speaks there of a process in the various cycles of civilization that leads from the organic forms of life at their origin, inwhich quality, spirituality, living tradition, and race prevail, to lateand soulless urban forms in which the abstract intellect, economy andfinance, pragmatism, and the world of the masses predominate, resting
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868The “Second Religiosity”
1869
1870on a grandeur that is purely material. When such forms appear, a civilization is heading for its end. The terminal state has been characterizedmore forcibly by Guenon,  who, using an image drawn from the decomposition of organisms, mentions two phases: first that of rigor mortis
1871(corresponding in civilization to the period of materialism), and following that the ultimate phase in which the corpse disintegrates.
1872According to Spengler, one of the phenomena that consistentlyaccompanies the terminal phase of a civilization is the “second religiosity.” On the fringes of structures of barbaric grandeur — rationalism,practical atheism, and materialism — there spring up sporadic forms ofspirituality and mysticism, even irruptions from the supersensible, whichdo not indicate a reascent but are symptoms of decay. Their expressions no longer take their stamp from the religion of the origins, fromthe severe forms inherited from the dominating elites who stood at thecenter of an organic and qualitative civilization (this being exactly whatI call the world of Tradition). In the phase in question, even the positive religions lose any higher dimension; they become secularized, onedimensional, and cease to exercise their original functions. The “secondreligiosity” develops outside them — often even in opposition to them —but also outside the principal and predominant currents of existence,and signifies, in general, a phenomenon of escapism, alienation, andconfused compensation that in no way impinges seriously on the realityof a soulless, mechanistic, and purely earthly civilization. This then isthe place and the sense of the “second religiosity.” The picture can becompleted by referring to Guenon, an author of far deeper doctrine thanSpengler. He has stated that after nineteenthcentury materialism andpositivism had closed man off to what was effectively above him — thetruly supernatural, the transcendent— the many twentiethcentury currents appearing under the guise of “spirituality” or “new psychology”tended to open him up to that which was beneath him — beneath theexistential level that generally corresponds to the complete human being.One might also use an expression of Aldous Huxley, who speaks of a
1873“selftranscendence downwards” as opposed to a “selftranscendenceupwards.”
1874Since the West truly finds itself today in the soulless, collectivistic, andmaterialistic phase corresponding to the closing of a cycle of civilization,
1875
1876
1877
1878 The Spiritual Problem
1879
1880there can be no doubt that the great majority of facts interpreted as theprelude to a new spirituality simply belong to this “second religiosity.”They represent something promiscuous, fragmented, and subintellectual;they resemble the fluorescence that appears when corpses decompose.Thus the currents in question should not be seen as counteracting ourpresent twilight civilization, but as its counterpart, and if they take hold,they might even be the prelude to a more acute phase of regression anddissolution. This is so particularly when it is not merely a matter of statesof mind and theories, but when a morbid interest in the sensational andthe occult is accompanied by practicing evocations and opening up theunderground strata of the human psyche — as happens not infrequentlyin spiritualism and even in psychoanalysis. Here one may well speak,with Guenon, of “fissures in the Great Wall,”  dangerous faults in thatprotecting barrier that, despite everything, protects every normal andsoundminded person in ordinary life from the action of genuine darkforces that are hidden behind the facade of the senseworld and beneaththe threshold of sound and conscious human thoughts. From this pointof view, neospiritualism appears even more dangerous than materialismor positivism, whose primitivity and intellectual myopia at least serve toreinforce that “wall” which, while limiting, also protects.
1881In another respect, nothing is more indicative of the level of thisneospiritualism than the human material of the majority of those whocultivate it. While the ancient sciences had the prerogative of a superiorhumanity drawn from the royal and priestly castes, today’s new antimaterialist gospel is bandied about by mediums, popular “maguses,”dowsers, spiritists, Anthroposophists, newspaper astrologers and seers,Theosophists, “healers,” popularizers of an Americanized yoga, andso forth, accompanied by a few exalted mystics and extemporizingprophets. Mystification and superstition are constantly mingled inneospiritualism, another of whose typical traits, especially in AngloSaxon countries, is the high percentage of women (women who arefailures, dropouts, or “past it”). In fact, its general orientation may wellbe described as a “feminine” spirituality.
1882This is a topic I have already addressed and explained on manyoccasions. For the order of ideas that concerns us here, all that mattersis to lay bare the appalling confusion that can arise from the frequent
1883
1884The “Second Religiosity”
1885
1886references in neospiritualism stemming from AngloIndian Theosophy,to certain doctrines related to what I call the world of Tradition, particularly in its Eastern varieties.
1887Now a clear distinction is necessary. Whatever of Tradition is to befound in the currents in question is nearly always reduced to counterfeits of those doctrines, to residues or fragments of them mixed in withthe worst of Western prejudices and with purely personal divagations.Neospiritualism in general has not the slightest notion of the plane towhich the ideas it borrows truly belong, any more than of what its followers are really seeking. Such ideas usually end up as mere surrogatesfor the same needs as propel others toward faith and simple religion — aserious error, because the ideas really concern metaphysics, and, quiteoften, those teachings that even in the traditional world belonged exclusively to the esoteric doctrines that were not divulged. Besides, while itis said that the reason the neospiritualists are interested in promulgating them and even taking them into the marketplace is to be found inthe decadence and aridity of Western religion, another reason is thatmany of them believe that these teachings are more “open” and consoling, and that they exempt one from the duties and bonds belonging tothe positive faiths; whereas the opposite is the case, even if it is a matterof very different bonds. A typical example is the kind of moralizing,humanitarian, and pacifist values recently attached to the Buddhistdoctrine (according to Nehru, Buddhism is “the only alternative to theHbomb”). On a different level, we see someone like Jung “valuing”in psychoanalytic terms every type of mystery teaching and symbol,adapting them for the treatment of neurotic and schizoid individuals.
1888After all this, one has to wonder about how far the practical effectof neospiritualism is negative in another direction: that of throwingdiscredit on the teachings concerned, which are traceable to the esotericdoctrines of the world of Tradition, because of the distorted and spurious way in which they have been publicized and propagandized by thecurrents in question. One must in fact have a very precise inner orientation, and no less precise an instinct, to be capable of separating thepositive from the negative, and of gaining from these currents an incentive toward a true reconnection with the origins and the rediscovery ofa lost knowledge. And should this occur, and one enter the right path.
1889
1890
1891
1892 The Spiritual Problem
1893
1894one should not hesitate to abandon everything to do with that casualpoint of departure, that is, the spiritualism of today and especially thespiritual level corresponding to it: a level that is completely alien to thegrandeur, the power, the severe and sovereign character proper to thatwhich is situated, in effect, beyond the human, and which alone canopen a way beyond the world that is still living out the “death of God.”
1895This will suffice regarding the doctrinal plane; and the differentiated man with whom we are concerned, if his attention is drawn to thatdomain, should be quite clear about the distinction made here. Shouldhe lack more direct and authentic sources of information, beyond thebyproducts and the ambiguous glamour of the “second religiosity,” hewill need to undertake a task of discrimination and integration. Thistask is at least made easier by the fact that the modern science of religions and kindred disciplines have published the fundamental texts ofvarious great traditions, in versions that may show their academic andspecialist limitations (philology, orientalism, and so on), but that arefree from the distortions, the irrelevancies, and the adulterations ofneospiritualism. Thus one has the basis, the “ materia prima ,” for goingfurther after the initial and occasional impulse .
1896There is also the practical problem to be considered. Neospiritualismoften looks to practice and inner experience, borrowing from the different worlds of antiquity or the East not only ideas of the supersensible,but also paths and disciplines for removing the limits of ordinary humanconsciousness. Here is the same dubious situation as was mentioned inthe context of Catholic rites that have ended up profaned and deprivedof any effective “operative” significance, through being applied to themasses without considering the conditions required for their efficacy.In the present case the situation is even more dubious, because the goalis more ambitious.
1897We can set aside the most spurious, “occultist” varieties of neospiritualism, dominated by the interest in “clairvoyance,” in this or thatsupposed “power,” and any kind of contact with the invisible. The differentiated man can only be indifferent to all of that; the problem of themeaning of existence is not going to be resolved in that way, becausethere one is still always within the realm of phenomena. Instead of a profound existential change, it may even cause an evasion and a greater dis
1898
1899
1900The “Second Religiosity ”
1901
1902persion, like that caused on another plane by the stupefying proliferationof scientific knowledge and technology. However, neospiritualism doesoccasionally envisage something more and different, even if confusedly,when it refers to “initiation” and when this is postulated as the goal ofvarious practices, “exercises,” rites, yogic techniques, and so on.
1903I cannot simply condemn this out of hand, but it is necessary todispel some illusions. Initiation, taken in its strict and legitimate sense,means a real ontological and existential change of man’s state, an opening to the fact of the transcendent dimension. It would be the undeniable realization, the integral and deconditioning appropriation, of thequality that I have considered as the basis of the human type who concerns us, the man still spiritually rooted in the world of Tradition. Thusthe problem arises of what one should think when some neospiritualistcurrent exhumes and presents “initiatic” paths and methods.
1904This problem has to be circumscribed by the limits of this book,which is not concerned with those who leave their environment andconcentrate all their energies on transcendence, as the ascetic or thesaint can do in the religious realm. I am concerned rather with thehuman type who accepts living in the world and the age, despite having a different inner form from that of his contemporaries. This manknows that it is impossible, in a civilization like the present one, torevive the structures that in the world of Tradition gave a meaningto the whole of existence. But in that same world of Tradition, whatmight correspond to the idea of initiation belonged to the summit, toa separate domain with precise limits, to a path having an exceptionaland exclusive character. It was not a question of the realm in whichthe general law, handed down from the heights of Tradition, shapedcommon existence within a given civilization, but of a higher plane,virtually released from that very law by the fact of being at its origin.I cannot go here into the distinctions to be made within the domain ofinitiation itself; we must just keep firmly in mind the higher and moreessential significance that initiation has when one is placed on themetaphysical plane: a significance already mentioned as consisting ofthe spiritual deconditioning of the being. Those lesser forms that correspond to caste and tribal initiations, and also to the minor initiationslinked to one or another cosmic power, as in certain cults of antiquity —
1905
1906
1907
1908 The Spiritual Problem
1909
1910forms quite different, therefore, from the “great liberation” — must beleft aside here, not least because no basis for them exists any longer inthe modern world.
1911Well then, if initiation is taken in its highest, metaphysical sense,one must assume a priori that it is not even a hypothetical possibilityin an epoch like the present, in an environment like the one we live in,and also given the general inner formation of individuals (now feelingthe fatal effect of a collective ancestry that for centuries has been absolutely unfavorable). Anyone who sees things differently either does notunderstand the matter, or else is deceiving himself and others.  Whathas to be negated most decisively is the transposition to this field of theindividualistic and democratic view of the “selfmade man,” that is, theidea that anyone who wants can become an “initiate,” and that he canalso become one on his own, through his own strength alone, by resorting to various kinds of “exercises” and practices. This is an illusion, thetruth being that through his own strength alone, the human individualcannot go beyond human individuality, and that any positive result inthis field is conditioned by the presence and action of a genuine powerof a different, nonindividual order. And I can say categorically that inthis respect, the possible cases are reduced to only three.
1912The first case is where one already naturally possesses this otherpower. This is the exceptional case of what was called “natural dignity,” not derived from simple human birth; it is comparable to what inthe religious domain is called election. The differentiated man positedhere does possess a structure akin to the type to whom this first possibility refers. But for “natural dignity” in this specific, technical sense tobe validated in him, a host of problems arise that can only be overcomeif the trial of the self, spoken of in chapter 1, happens to be oriented inthis direction.
1913The other cases concern an “acquired dignity.” The second case isthe possibility of the power in question appearing in cases of profoundcrises, spiritual traumas, or desperate actions, with the consequence ofa violent breakthrough of the existential and ontological plane. Here itis possible that if the person is not wrecked, he may be led to participate in that force, even without his having held it consciously as a goal.I should clarify the situation by adding that in such cases a quantity of
1914
1915
1916The “Second Religiosity”
1917
1918energy must already have been accumulated, which the circumstancescause to suddenly appear, with a consequent change of state. Thereforethe circumstances appear as an occasional cause but not a determiningcause, being necessary but not sufficient. It is like the last drop of waterthat makes the vase overflow, but only when it is already full, or thebreaking of a dike that does not cause an inundation unless the wateris already pressing on it.
1919The third and last case concerns the grafting of the power in question onto the individual by virtue of the action of a representative of apreexistent initiatic organization who is duly qualified to do so. It is theequivalent of priestly ordination in the religious field, which in theoryimprints on the person an “indelible character,” qualifying him forthe efficacious performance of the rites. The author already cited here,Rene Guenon — who in modern times has been almost alone in treatingsuch arguments with authority and seriousness, not without denouncing, too, the deviations, errors, and mystifications of neospiritualism —considers this third case almost to the exclusion of the others. For mypart, I think that in our time this case is virtually excluded in practicalterms, because of the almost complete nonexistence of the organizations in question. If organizations of the kind have always had a moreor less underground character in the West, because of the nature of thereligion that has come to predominate there, with its repressions andpersecutions, in recent times they have virtually disappeared. As forother areas, especially the East, such organizations have become evermore rare and inaccessible, even when the forces that they control havenot been withdrawn, in parallel with the general process of degeneration and modernization that has now invaded those areas, too. Mostof all, today the East itself is no longer in a position to furnish mostpeople with anything but byproducts, in a “regime of residues.” Thatmuch is obvious if one examines the spiritual stature of those fromthe East who have set to exporting and publicizing “Eastern wisdom”among us.
1920Guenon did not see the situation in such pessimistic terms becauseof two misunderstandings. The first derived from his not only considering initiation in the integral and actual sense, as described here, butintroducing the concept of a “virtual initiation” that can take place
1921
1922
1923
1924 The Spiritual Problem
1925
1926without any effect being perceptible by the consciousness; thus itremains as inoperative in concrete terms as — to take another parallelfrom the Catholic religion — the supernatural quality of being a “son ofGod” is in the vast majority of cases, though this is dispensed at baptism, even to retarded infants. Guenon’s second misunderstandingcomes from supposing that the transmission of such a force is real evenin the case of organizations that once had an initiatic character, butwhich time has brought to a state of extreme degenerescence. There isgood reason to suppose that the spiritual power that originally constituted their center has withdrawn, leaving nothing behind the facade buta sort of psychic cadaver .  In neither point can I agree with Guenon,and so I think that today the third case is even more improbable thanthe other two.
1927Referring now to the man who concerns us, if the idea of an “initiation” is to figure on his mental horizon, he should clearly recognize thedistance between that and the climate of neospiritualism, nor shouldhe have any illusions about it. The most he can conceive of as a practical possibility is a basic orientation in terms of preparation, for whichhe will find a natural predisposition in himself. But realization has tobe left undetermined, and it is well for him to recall the postnihilisticvision of life, described above, which excludes any reference point thatmight cause a deviation or decentering — even if the diversion, as in thiscase, were linked to the impatient awaiting of the moment in which hewould finally achieve an opening. The Zen saying is again valid in thiscontext: “He who seeks the Way, leaves the Way.”
1928A realistic view of the situation and an honest selfevaluation indicate that the only serious and essential task today is to give ever moreemphasis to the dimension of transcendence in oneself, more or lessconcealed as it may be. Study of traditional wisdom and knowledge ofits doctrines may assist, but they will not be effective without a progressive change affecting the existential plane, and more particularly,the basic life force of oneself as a person: that force that for most people is bound to the world and is simply the will to live. One can compare this effect to the induction of magnetism into a piece of iron — aninduction that also imprints on it a direction. Afterwards one can suspend the iron and move it about as one wishes, but after oscillating for
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1933a certain time and amplitude, it will always return to point toward thepole. When the orientation toward the transcendent no longer has amerely mental or emotional character, but has come to penetrate a person’s being, the most essential work is done, the seed has penetrated theearth, and the rest is, in a way, secondary and consequential. All theexperiences and actions that, when one lives in the world, especially inan epoch like ours, may have the character of a diversion and be tied tovarious contingencies, will then have the same irrelevant effect as thedisplacing of the magnetized needle, after which it resumes its direction. Anything more that may eventually be realized, as I have said, isleft to circumstance and to an invisible wisdom. And here the horizonsshould not be restricted to those of the individual, finite existence thatthe differentiated man finds himself living here and now.
1934Thus, setting aside the faroff and overly pretentious goals of anabsolute and actual initiation understood in metaphysical terms, eventhe differentiated man should think himself fortunate if he can actuallysucceed in producing this modification, which integrates quite naturally the partial effects of the attitudes defined for him, in many different domains, in the preceding pages.
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1942In our examination of existentialism, we encountered Heidegger’s conception of existence as “living for death.” He makes death a sort ofcenter of gravity, because it is there that the realization of the absoluteand final sense of existence, of “Dasein,” has been displaced: something that even recalls the religious conception of life as preparationfor death. We have seen that all the premises of Heidegger’s philosophy certainly make this outcome of existence ending in death appearnegative — almost ecstatically negative.
1943This does not prevent the idea of death from having a particularmeaning for the differentiated man; on the contrary, in a certain way itcan be his touchstone. Here too, it is a matter of seeing how far he hasbeen invaded, even beneath the threshold of his ordinary consciousness,by the way of feeling that has come to be existentially determined inWestern man in general, whether through complex processes of involution, or through the conceptions of the dominant, theistic religion.
1944Facing the idea of death, the end of the “person,” his first test naturally refers to establishing in the self the incapacity for that anguishthat, according to Heidegger, one should “have the courage to feel,”while also discounting all those prospects of the beyond and those otherworldly judgments that popular forms of religion have used to controlthe individual by working on the subintellectual part of his soul.
1945Here too, we can see that some processes of dissolution in the modern world are virtually ambivalent. Not only have atheism and materialism contributed to banishing the terrors of the soul facing death, butthe tragedy of death itself has often been trivialized by the collectivecatastrophic events of recent times. Today death occurs more simplyand easily than in earlier times, and in turn diminishes the importance
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1953of human life, parallel to the growing insignificance and irrelevancethat have marked the individual in the modern mechanized world ofthe masses. In addition, during the indiscriminate carpet bombings ofthe recent war, many could arrive at an attitude in which the death ofany person, even a relative, became a natural and habitual event, havingno more impact than the destruction of something merely material andexternal. Meanwhile, the idea of the uncertainty of life also enters intothe order of habitual events, along with the prospect that tomorrow onecould cease to exist.
1954In most cases the result of all this is a numbing, which alone can perhaps explain the strange Heideggerian reaction of approving anguish inthe face of death. But a contrary, positive result should not be excludedwhen similar experiences favor an inner calm, under the sign of thatwhich remains beyond the individual and the bond of the physical I. Inantiquity, Lucretius made a functional, pragmatic use of something likemodern atheistic science: in order to banish the fears of the beyond, hemaintained the Olympic idea of the divine, but recognized the gods asdistant essences that do not intervene in the world, and should be valuedby the wise only as ideals of ontological perfection.
1955These aspects could provide a positive climate in the modern worldfor the differentiated man, because that which has been affected onlyconcerns a vision of humanized life devoid of the sense of great distances. He can then consider a particular “contemplation of death” asa positive factor, as a challenge, and as a measure of his inner strength.He can also follow the wellknown ancient maxim of considering everyday as the last of his individual existence: at the prospect, not onlyshould he maintain his calm, but he should not even change anythingin his thinking or acting. Here an example could be the kamikaze suicide pilots who had vowed to die; the prospect of being called at anymoment to execute a mission with no return did not exclude them fromordinary occupations, training, and recreation, and was not at allweighed down by a dismal sense of tragedy, even when lasting formonths. More generally, the idea of death is a matter of surpassing aninner limit, of breaking a bond. To a certain extent, it brings us back towhat was said in the first chapter. The positive contemplatio mortis , towhich I referred, no longer gives importance to staying alive or not, and
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1961leaves death behind one, so to speak, without being paralyzed by it. Onthe contrary: from this point one should enter into a higher, exalted,free form of living, carried by a sort of magical, lucid intoxication.
1962There is one factor that positively undramatizes the idea of death:it is that mentioned when speaking of the traditional doctrine of preexistence. The differentiated man cannot think that his being beginswith his physical, corporeal birth, and ends with his death. However,he can neither make the beyond the center of gravity of his life, as in thereligious theory of salvation, nor can he regard terrestrial existence asthe mere ascetic preparation for death. We have seen that he solves theproblem of the meaning of life in the epoch of nihilism by displacing theI toward the dimension of “being.” In the preceding paragraph I spokeof the attitude consistent with this displacement, which should existentially pervade the person, just as magnetism permeates a metal. Even ifin many cases the force produced from this attitude can only act sensiblybeyond this existence, it should still be able to assure a calm and securelife. An Eastern saying puts it as follows: “Life on earth is a journey inthe night hours.” One can explain its positive content by referring to thesensation of a “before” (with respect to human existence) and “after”
1963(with respect to the same). In metaphysical terms, birth is a change ofstate and so is death; the human condition of earthly existence is onlya restricted section in a continuum, m a current that traverses manyother states.
1964In general, but particularly in a chaotic epoch in dissolution like thepresent one, it can be difficult to grasp the sense of this apparition ofthe being that one is, in the guise of a certain person, who lives in agiven time and in a given place, who goes through these experiences, ofwhom this will be the end: it is like the confused sensation of a regiontraversed in a night journey where only a few scattered lights revealsome glimpses of the landscape. Nevertheless, one should maintain thesentiment, or presentiment, of one who when getting on a train knowshe will get off it, and that when he gets off he will also see the entirecourse traveled, and will go further. This sentiment favors an immanentfirmness and security, distinctly different from the state that arises in thesoul facing death within the framework of a creationist theistic religion,in which whatever part of the being is superior and anterior to life, thus
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1970However, any change of state involves a crisis; only the traditionalview mentioned earlier can completely eliminate the problematic natureof the beyond and the event of death itself. Here, again, we would haveto examine teachings that fall outside the scope of this book. I willlimit myself to showing that the valid attitude toward the beyond is thesame attitude that I proposed for life in general: that of a transcendentalconfidence, joined on one side by the “heroic” and “sacrificial” disposition (readiness to actively take oneself beyond oneself), on the other byone’s capacity to dominate his soul, impulses, and imagination: just asone who, in a difficult and risky situation does not lose control of himself, doing lucidly and without hesitation all that can be done. Throughthis, one should benefit from all the recommendations in the precedingpages, recommendations that can then be as valid beyond life as theyare for life in the current epoch. Last but not least, they include thedisposition of being ready “to bear lethal blows on one’s own beingwithout being destroyed.”
1971At this point, we shall briefly turn our attention to a particular problem, the right over one’s own life, understood as the freedom to accept itor to put an end to it voluntarily. The examination of this issue will alsoallow a further clarification of some points considered earlier.
1972Suicide, condemned by most moralities with social and religiousfoundations, has in fact been permitted by two doctrines whose normsof life are not far from those indicated for the differentiated man in thepresent epoch: Stoicism and Buddhism. One can refer to the ideas ofSeneca regarding Stoicism, recalling above all the general backgroundof its vision of life. I have already said that for Seneca the true manwould be above the gods themselves because they, by their very nature,do not know adversity and misfortune, whereas he is exposed to them,but has the power to triumph over them. Moreover, Seneca sees thebeings that are most harshly tested as the worthiest, recalling thisanalogy: in war it is the most capable, sure, and qualified persons thatleaders entrust with the most exposed positions and the hardest tasks.Usually it is this virile and agonistic conception that applies when suicide is condemned and stigmatized as cowardice and desertion. (There
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1978is a saying attributed by Cicero to the Pythagoreans: “To leave the placethat one is assigned in life is not permitted without an order from theleader, who is God.”) Instead Seneca reached the opposite conclusion,and put the justification of suicide directly into the mouth of divinity
1979( De Providentia, 6.79). He makes the divinity say that he has given thesuperior man, the sage, not only a force stronger than any contingency,and something more than being exempt from evils, namely the power totriumph over them interiorly, but has also ensured that no one can holdhim back against his will: the path to “exit” is open to him — patet exitus. “Wherever you do not want to fight, it is always possible to retreat.You have been given nothing easier than death.”
1980Given the presuppositions mentioned earlier with regard to the general vision of life, there is no doubt that Seneca did not intend this decision to refer to cases in which death is sought because a given situationappears unbearable: especially then, one could not permit oneself theact. Here too it is unnecessary to add what is equally valid for all thosewho are driven to cut their life short due to emotional and impassionedmotives, because this would be equivalent to recognizing one’s ownpassivity and impotence toward the irrational part of one’s soul. Thesame is even true for cases in which social motives intervene. Both theideal Stoic type and the differentiated man do not permit these motivesto intimately touch them, as if their dignity were injured by what bindsthem to social life. They would never be driven to put an end to theirown existence for these motives, which are included by the Stoics inthe category of “that which does not depend on me.” The only exception we can consider is the case of a disgrace not before others whosejudgment and contempt one cannot bear, but before oneself, becauseof one’s own downfall. Considering all this, Seneca’s maxim can onlyhave the meaning of an enhancement of the inner freedom of a superiorbeing. It is not a matter of retreating because one does not feel strongenough before such ordeals and circumstances; rather, it is a matter ofthe sovereign right — that one always keeps in reserve — to either acceptthese ordeals or not, and even to draw the line when one no longer seesa meaning in them, and after having sufficiently demonstrated to oneself the capacity to face them. Impassibility is taken for granted, and theright to “exit” is justifiable as one of the possibilities to be considered,
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1985in principle, only for the sake of decreeing that our circumstances haveour assent, that we are really active in them, and that we are not justmaking a virtue of necessity. This Stoic point of view is intelligible and,what is more, unassailable.
1986We turn now to Buddhism, whose orientation is more or less thesame. Also there the most frequent kind of suicide is forbidden: whenever one is driven to renounce life in the name of life itself, that is,because some form of a will to live, enjoy, and be worthwhile has beenhindered or thwarted, killing oneself is censured. In fact, in these casesthe act is not judged as a freeing of oneself but, on the contrary, as theextreme, even negative, form of attachment to life, of dependence onlife. No transfiguring beyond can be expected by one who uses suchviolence on himself; in other states of being, the law of an existencedevoid of peace, stability, and light is once again asserted over him.Buddhism even goes as far as condemning as a deviation the impulsetoward extinction, nirvana , if one discovers that it is connected to anydesire, any “thirst.” At the same time, like Stoicism, it permits suicidewith a similar restriction: it does not apply to the commonality, but toa superior and ascetic type in whom are found, intensified, many traitsof the Stoic sage; those who in a certain way have realized a separation of the Self, to the extent of being virtually beyond both living andnonliving.
1987Though obviously this prospect can also be included in the horizonof the differentiated man, it leaves the path open for some difficulties.First of all, if he has reached the spiritual level just indicated, whatcould ever make him initiate a voluntary death? Judging from certainconcrete cases alleged by Buddhist texts, some of the cases mentionedearlier would seem to be in question: in some circumstances there is noreason to feel committed beyond a certain limit. One can then “exit,”almost as when one has had enough of a game, or as when one shoosa fly away after having let it settle for a time on one’s face. It remainsto be seen how far one can be truly sure of oneself, and sincere withoneself, in cases of this kind.
1988Up to this point, it is the “person” that we have essentially considered. The issue becomes more complex when going beyond the level ofthe person and referring to the traditional doctrine in which the being
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1994does not begin with earthly existence. Then a higher concept of responsibility, and also of risk, shows itself. It is not the responsibility calledupon in the framework of a theistic and creationist religion, which condemns suicide by appealing to a kind of military loyalty as in Cicero’sterms: one should not abandon his post. Such an idea appears absurdwhen the preexistence of the soul is denied (as that religion denies it)before its union with the body in the human condition. In this “creationist” hypothesis one cannot sensibly speak of responsibility, becausebefore being in the assigned “post” one did not exist at all, and becauseone suddenly finds oneself in it without having wanted or accepted it.Nor can one speak of a “military obligation” toward a life received,but not requested. I have already examined the dead end to which sucha conception, connected to the theistic creationist point of view, leadswhen it is assailed by nihilism. The extreme here is in Dostoyevsky, withKirilov’s existential revolt and “metaphysical suicide” in which he takeshis own life only to prove to himself that he is stronger than fear, hissovereignty, and an absolute freedom that makes him God. This position is absurd because here, no less than in theism, the only point ofreference always appears to be the person; it is from the person that theinitiative arises, it is the person that wants to make itself absolute. For asimilar case, Augustine’s words could even be valid: “Slave, you wantedto simulate a mutilated freedom by doing the illicit with impunity, in ablind imitation of omnipotence.”  As we have seen, this is also the reason why Raskolnikov and Stavrogin fell, the latter’s suicide corresponding to that type that is imposed by one’s own failure — though, from anentirely different standpoint, it could be justified in a given human typeunder special circumstances, as touched on earlier.
1995But the problem of responsibility is seen under a different lightwhen one refers to the traditional doctrine that we saw to have beenmore or less confusedly shadowed by existentialism itself: if one holdson to the idea that whatever one is as a person in the human conditionproceeds from an original, prenatal, and pretemporal choice, whereinone willed, in terms of an “original project” (as Sartre calls it), everything that would define the contents of one’s existence. In this case, it isno longer a matter of answering to a Creator, but to something referring to the very dimension of being or transcendence in oneself. The
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2000course of existence, though not attributable to the more exterior andalready human will of the individual (the person), follows, in principle,a line that has significance for the I, even though still latent or concealed: as an entirety of experiences important not in themselves but forthe reactions that they provoke in us, reactions through which thatbeing that one wished to be can be realized. In that case, life in thisworld cannot be considered as something that one can arbitrarily throwaway, nor can it be considered simply as a bad situation in which theonly choice is faith or fatalistic resignation (we have seen that, at best,the horizons of modern existentialism end there), or else being lockedinto a continuous trial of resistance (as happens along the lines of adark Stoicism, devoid of the background of transcendence). As in anadventure, a mission, a trial, an election, or an experiment, earthly lifeappears to be something to which one committed oneself before findingoneself in the human condition, accepting in anticipation whatever difficult, miserable, or dramatic aspects it might bring, aspects that areespecially likely in an epoch like the present. In these terms we candefine and accept a principle of responsibility and “loyalty,” withoutexternal, “heteronomous” references.
2001I have already spoken of the only presuppositions that, accordingto Stoicism and Buddhism, would permit the act of suicide: a superiority, a detachment from life. It is, however, difficult to realize themwithout meanwhile achieving, in some way, a suprapersonal meaningof existence on earth in the terms just mentioned: there being addedthe sensation that the whole of this existence is only an episode, a passage, as in the image of the voyage at night. Then would not feeling inoneself any impatience, any intolerance, or even any tediousness testifyto the presence of a too human residue, of something not yet resolvedby the sense of eternity or, at least, by great unearthly and nontemporal distances? And if it were so, would one not be obliged, facingoneself, not to act?
2002An Islamic saying, appropriate for a rigorous doctrine of predestination, is true: “No one can die unless by the will of Allah and at themoment fixed by Him.” Similarly, if one assumes the predeterminationof the essential course of individual existence, even suicide could bethought of as one of the particular acts already contemplated, so that it
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2008only appears to be an arbitrary initiative of the person. However, thisis an extreme assumption, and in reality the decision could only be illuminated by the degree of effective integration that has been attained,in terms already mentioned, as the welding of the person with Being. Itis certain that in an integration of this kind, even if incomplete, suicidecould have the meaning of an extreme gesture that seals one’s sovereignty, in terms quite different from those of Kirilov: the sovereigntywould not be of the person, but over the person. All that would remainwould be the responsibility inherent in affirming that what acts is precisely the principle that is not the person, but possesses the person.However, recourse to this action can rarely present a positive and intelligible character for the differentiated man. Everyone knows that sooneror later the end will come, so that when facing every contingency it ismore valuable to try to decipher the hidden meaning, the part that it hasin a context that, according to the view mentioned earlier, is not aliento us, but proceeds from our transcendental will.
2009Matters are obviously different when one does not directly seekdeath but includes it, so to speak, in life, considering situations inwhich death coincides with obtaining the utmost meaning from lifein the human condition. Here, unlike what Heidegger described, it isnot a matter of a presumed gravitation of the “Dasein” of any finiteexistence — having its own principle o’utside itself — toward death andas if from one’s dependence on it. The presupposition is instead a special and uncommon orientation that can be given to one’s own life. Inplace of violent and direct action over one’s life, one can “interrogate”it through forms of intense and risky existence. There are ways to putan ever more peremptory and insistent question to “destiny” (we intendthis term as when speaking of amor fati and the special confidence inalways following one’s own way, in any event or contingency) in orderto obtain the response as to how far there is still a profound, impersonalreason for existing in the human condition. And if this questioningleads to situations in which the borderline between life and death alsorepresents the extreme limit of the sense and fullness of a life — differently from what would come from exaltation, simple intoxication, ora confused, ecstatic effort — then one would certainly reach the mostsatisfying condition for existentially overcoming the problem faced by
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2014us. The formula referred to in context of a change of polarity of living,of particular intensities of living as a means toward a morethanliving,evidently finds its supreme application on this path. In particular, hereone can see a connection with the special orientations considered in thischapter: measuring oneself in a contemplation of death, living everyday in the present as if it were the last, and the quasimagnetic orientation to be induced in one’s own being, which may not manifest in thisexistence with the complete rupture of the ontological level proper to
2015“initiation,” but will not fail to emerge at the right moment, in order tocarry one beyond.
2016One will see, therefore, that dwelling on this problem of death andthe right over life, as the last problem of all we have examined, is of thegreatest advantage regarding the attitude and behavior of the differentiated and unbroken man in an epoch of dissolution.
2017Elevating oneself above that which can be understood in the light ofhuman reason alone; reaching a high interior level and an invulnerability otherwise hard to attain: these are perhaps among the possibilitiesthat, through adequate reactions, are offered in the cases in which thenight journey allows almost nothing to be perceived of the landscapethat one traverses, and in which the theory of Geworfenheit, of beingabsurdly “flung” into the world and time, seems to be true, especiallyin a climate in which physical existence itself must present a growinginsecurity. If one can allow one’s mind to dwell on a bold hypothesis —which could also be an act of faith in a higher sense — once the idea ofGeworfenheit is rejected, once it is conceived that living here and nowin this world has a sense, because it is always the effect of a choice anda will, one might even believe that one’s own realization of the possibilities I have indicated — far more concealed and less imaginable inother situations that might be more desirable from the merely humanpoint of view, from the point of view of the “person” — is the ultimaterationale and significance of a choice made by a “being” that wantedto measure itself against a difficult challenge: that of living in a worldcontrary to that consistent with its nature, that is, contrary to the worldof Tradition.