(1935): 1133– 1135; “Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den
jüdischen Geist,” Deutsche Juristen- Zeitung 41 (1936): 1193– 1199.
7. Carl Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Großraumlehre mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde
Mächte: Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff des Völkerrechts (Berlin: Deutscher
Rechtsverlag, 1939).
8. Carl Schmitt, Über Schuld und Schuldarten (1910); Gesetz und Urteil (1912); Der
Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (1914).
9. Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (1919); Die Diktatur (1921); Politische Theologie
(1922); Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (1923);
Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (1923).
10. Carl Schmitt, Die Rheinlande als Objekt internationaler Politik (1925); Die Kernfrage
des Völkerbundes (1926).
11. Carl Schmitt, Volksbegehren und Volksentscheid (1927); Der Begriff des Politischen
(1927).
12. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (1928).
13. Carl Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung (1931); Legalität und Legitimität (1932).
14. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 50.
15. Ibid., 13.
16. Ibid., 33.
17. Ibid., 49.
18. Ibid., 65.
19. Ibid., 63.
20. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 33 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
21. Carl Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).
22. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and
Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
23. Carl Schmitt, Der Schatten Gottes: Introspektionen, Tagebücher und Briefe
1921 bis 1924, ed. Gerd Giesler, Ernst Hüsmert, and Wolfgang H. Spindler
(Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2014), 482.
24. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 19.
25. Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, trans. Gary L. Ulmen (New York: Telos,
2007), originally published as Theorie des Partisanen (1963).
26. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 27.
27. Ibid., 35.
28. Ibid., 33.
53
Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Identity
53
29. Ibid., 35.
30. Ibid., 37.
31. Ibid., 46.
32. Ibid., 70.
33. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), 55.
34. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 42.
35. Stefan Breuer, Carl Schmitt im Kontext: Intellektuellenpolitik in der Weimarer
Republik (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 2012).
36. See the standard work on this by Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit
des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte der frühen
Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie-
Verlag, 1993). See also Mehring, Carl
Schmitt: Denker im Widerstreit.
37. Hugo Ball, “Carl Schmitts Politische Theologie,” Hochland 21 (1924): 263–
286; Eric Voegelin, “Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt: Versuch
einer konstruktiven Analyse ihrer staatlichen Prinzipien,” Zeitschrift für
öffentliches Recht 11 (1931): 89– 109; Ernst Rudolf Huber, “Verfassung und
Verfassungswirklichkeit bei Carl Schmitt,” Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie 5
(1931/ 1932): 302– 315; Otto Kirchheimer and Nathan Leites, “Bemerkungen
zu Carl Schmitts ‘Legalität und Legitimität,’” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik 69 (1932): 457– 487.
38. Leo Strauss, “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitts ‘Der Begriff des Politischen,’”
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67 (1932): 732– 749; Helmut Kuhn,
“Carl Schmitt ‘Der Begriff des Politischen,’” Kantstudien 38 (1933): 190– 196; Karl
Löwith (Pseudonym: Hugo Fiala), “Politischer Dezisionismus,” Internationale
Zeitschrift für Theorie des Rechts 9 (1935): 101– 123.
39. Hasso Hofmann, Legitimität gegen Legalität: Der Weg der politischen Philosophie
Carl Schmitts (Neuwied: Luchterhandt Verlag, 1964).
40. Reinhard Mehring, “Otto Kirchheimers Promotionsakte,” in Kriegstechniker
des Begriffs: Biographische Studien zu Carl Schmitt, ed. Reinhard Mehring
(Tübingen: Mohr, 2014), 31– 46, 137– 152.
41. Jürgen Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years’
Remove,” in The Inclusion of the Other (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 165– 201; “Does
the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” in Jürgen
Habermas, The Divided West (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 113– 93; Jacques Derrida,
The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005); Giorgio Agamben, The State of
Exception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); Chantal Mouffe, ed., The
Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999).
54
4
Julius Evola and Tradition
H. Thomas Hakl (Translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
J U L I U S E V O L A H A R D LY ever spoke about his outer life and wrote little
about it. His autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar ( Il cammino del cinabro),
describes almost exclusively his inner development.1 The uncertainties
begin with his origins. He was born in Rome on May 19, 1898. Despite
what standard short biographies say, he most probably did not stem from
the Sicilian nobility. Both parental lines originated in Cinisi (in the prov-
ince of Palermo), and were certainly not ennobled.2 The title of baron,
frequently used even on some official documents, could date from a pro-
vocative Dadaistic pose of his youth, when he was known for his dandyish
behavior. However, we can state that Evola never referred to himself as
a baron.
Evola was born at a very disturbed time. The Risorgimento (revival),
with its unification of Italy and the rise of the middle classes, had also pre-
pared the country for the rise of Fascism. An alternative religiosity in Italy
led to the emergence of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and awareness of
Eastern religions. In philosophy, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile’s
idealism served as a counterweight to Marxism.
Early work and thought
Evola’s intellectual activity can be divided into several phases, and this
chapter will discuss its key concepts and resultant writings. Despite his
multiple fields of interest, Evola’s worldview has a clear and discernable
structure. Many fundamental ideas, primarily that of transcendence,
5
Julius Evola and Tradition
55
remained valid and visible as they continually developed and seized on
each new field of interest.
Intellectual foundations
Although Evola was raised in Catholicism, he turned against it and felt
attracted to writers such as Oscar Wilde, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Arthur
Rimbaud. At the same time he pursued technical and mathematical
interests. His early readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Otto Weininger
were especially influential, together with the philosophy of Carlo
Michelstaedter, whose cousin Emilio was friends with the young Evola.
The influence of these three thinkers cannot be overestimated, for they
were not only decisive in Evola’s youth but also in later life. Nietzsche gave
him his uncompromising, aggressive attitude, his revulsion toward the
“humility” and “bourgeois moralism” of Christianity, as well as his oppo-
sition to “egalitarianism, democratic ideals and conformism.”3 However,
Evola did not embrace Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superman) ideal, at least
not until later on, finding it dominated by the naturalistic, biological ele-
ment, and utterly lacking the transcendent.4
Otto Weininger’s influence carried equal weight. His work obviously af-
fected Evola’s attitude to the female sex and to Judaism (of which Weininger,
though of Jewish origin, was extremely critical), also embracing ethical prin-
ciples (“Truth, purity, fidelity, sincerity towards oneself: that is the only accept-
able ethic”)5 and even political views, rejecting popularism in the broadest
sense. Above all it is the attitude of “virility” in the sense of courage, daring,
and steadfastness, so characteristic of Evola, that goes back to Weininger,
who in his book Sex and Character ( Geschlecht und Charakter) proposed that
everyone carries both masculine and feminine elements, and that no purely
masculine or feminine type exists. He identified the feminine element with
sexuality and motherhood, and regarded Judaism as marked by it.
Carlo Michelstaedter, who came from a Jewish family in northeastern
Italy, committed suicide at the age of twenty- three after finishing his book
Inner Conviction and Rhetoric ( La persuasione e la rettorica), apparently
believing that his philosophical discoveries could go no farther. By “inner
conviction” Michelstaedter understood an absolute self- sufficiency of the
“I.” As long as this did not rest exclusively on oneself but depended on
some “other,” it was subjected to the “necessity” of external circumstances
and therefore had no freedom. True freedom lay only in autarchy.
56
56
C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
Evola called these three thinkers the “holy damned,” because none of
them, for all their genius, was equal to the power and force of their own
conceptions. Two of them committed suicide while still young; the third
became insane. Evola was convinced that it was their own inner tension
that destroyed them because they lacked the spiritual element— the deep,
inner connection with the transcendent— that is unshakable and above
and beyond anything earthly. And as Evola says, this decisive drive to tran-
scendence had “manifested itself from my early youth.”6 Upon his return
from the First World War, Evola too was thrown into an existential crisis
and contemplated suicide. He lost his longing for extinction when he sud-
denly grasped a passage from the Buddhist Pali Canon.7 It said that he
who believes that his own extinction is final extinction has in no way un-
derstood true extinction.8
Evola came to a transcendent experience of the “I” through spiritual
experimentation, reinforced by inhaling ether. It changed his life and for-
ever after gave him the firm grounding that allowed no inner deviation.
He describes this consciousness expansion as an “idea of peremptory, ab-
solute, and resounding certainty,” adding “When I compare it to my pre-
vious and habitual consciousness, only one image comes to mind: the most
lucid, conscious state of wakefulness in comparison to the deepest, most
hypnotic and torpid state of sleep.”9 This was the basis for the unshakable
quality of his views, despite all the hazards of his life. His many ambitious
mountaineering excursions in the Alpine glacier region helped to deepen
this attitude. Climbing mountain peaks was for him a symbol of the ascent
to the divine.10
Futurism and Dadaism
Evola’s philosophical and literary interests brought him into the artistic
circle around the Italian Futurists Giovanni Papini and Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, and Evola himself soon began to paint. Papini introduced him
to Eastern spirituality and above all to Meister Eckhart. In one of his
earliest writings, Essays on Magical Idealism ( Saggi sull’idealismo magico)
Evola cites Eckhart’s statement that one should not do one’s work for the
sake of heaven, God, or salvation, that is, not for anything outside, but
always without asking why.11 This saying stands as a leading principle of
Evola’s entire life: action done irrespective of success or of the plaudits or
opposition of others. Eckhart also wrote: “God and Being are the same.
57
Julius Evola and Tradition
57
But if I know God directly thus, then I must become him and he must
become me . . . so completely one that this he and this I are one thing.”
This may be the origin of Evola’s recurrent urge in his esoteric writings
toward “identity with God” (deification), often criticized as hubris and
“supermanhood.”12
Evola soon broke with Futurism, whose polemical attacks against the
bourgeois had so attracted him. “What disturbed me in Futurism was its
sensualist overtones: its lack of inwardness, its noisy and exhibitionist char-
acter . . .with its chauvinistic nationalism.”13 He then turned to the incipient
Dada movement. A friendship developed with Tristan Tzara, Dada’s prime
mover, documented by thirty surviving letters from Evola to the Franco-
Romanian artist.14 Dadaism was far more radical than Futurism, and like Far
Eastern philosophy spoke of an identity of the I with the Non- I. In his essay
Abstract Art ( Arte astratta) Evola speaks of art as coming out of a higher con-
sciousness. 15 Dadaism could, however, not satisfy his metaphysical thirst,
and in 1922, at the age of twenty- four, he ended not only his Dadaistic period
but also, abruptly and finally, his artistic career. Even so, he is reckoned today
as one of the foremost representatives of Italian Dadaism and is valued by
collectors, with paintings in Roman and Brescian museums.16
The philosophical phase and the Far East
Evola dates this phase to about 1923– 27, although his two main philosoph-
ical works— Theory of the Absolute Individual ( Teoria del l’individuo assoluto)
and Phenomenology of the Absolute Individual ( Fenomenologia dell’individuo
assoluto)— were published later.17 His philosophy goes back to German
idealism (especially Fichte and Schelling) and beyond that to Plato. Evola
called it “magical idealism,” a term from the Romantic poet Novalis, in
which one again detects his transcendent impulse.
Evola’s question is one of the oldest in philosophy. He seeks the ab-
solute point of certainty on which to build his structure of thinking. In
view of his earlier transcendent experience of the I, there could only be
one certainty for him: the I itself— naturally not the everyday ego but the
transcendent foundation of one’s own personality. Called the “absolute
individual” and likened to the Indian ātman, this is for Evola not only the
“center of universal responsibility”18 but also expr
esses a perfect fullness
of power, which necessarily grows from absolute knowledge and is at the
same time boundless freedom.
58
58
C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
During this phase, Evola was also deeply involved with the reli-
gious and esoteric writings of the Far East. It was already evident in
his Essays on Magical Idealism ( Saggi sull’idealismo magico) how impor-
tant he found the Tao Te Ching.19 His philosophy thus broke the usual
academic boundaries and reached far into spiritual traditions. Equally
important was his study of the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, whose
statements could only reinforce Evola’s natural leaning toward the
Kshatriya warrior class. He concluded that the outward battle simulta-
neously symbolizes the inward battle against one’s own weaknesses and
negative qualities.20
Evola’s next book, Man as Power ( L’Uomo come Potenza),21 which
appeared in 1925, formed the link between his philosophical period and
the following “magical” one, in which he strove, after his theorizing, for an
active and practical breakthrough to transcendence. Evola’s all- important
concept of power, which also applied to politics and which he interprets
in the sense of Tantrism and Taoism, must be firmly distinguished from
“force” or “violence.” Power and force stand for him as contraries, for
power loses its own being when it has to resort to material means, that is,
to force, rather than working completely from itself, out of its inner supe-
riority and hence “magically.” In his first political work, Pagan Imperialism
( Imperialismo pagano) he stated that “superiority is not based upon power,
but power upon superiority. To need ‘power’ is impotence.”22
A very important relationship of Evola’s was with the Italian Arturo
Reghini, a Pythagorean and a Freemason, who introduced him to al-
chemy, magic, and the pagan tradition of Rome. In 1927 Evola and Reghini
founded the magical and initiatically oriented “Group of Ur.”23 Beside in-
dividual practices there was also “group work” by the leading members,
aimed at creating a “subtle” entity for magically influencing Mussolini,
who had spoken of the “Return of the Empire after fifteen centuries to
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 12
