Ride the Tiger: Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul
Julius Evola
Language: English
Pages: 180
ISBN: 2:00310235
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The organizations and institutions that, in a traditional civilization and society, would have allowed an individual to realize himself completely, to defend the principal values he recognizes as his own, and to structure his life in a clear and unambiguous way, no longer exist in the contemporary world. Everything that has come to predominate in the modern world is the direct antithesis of the world of Tradition, in which a society is ruled by principles that transcend the merely human and transitory. Ride the Tiger presents an implacable criticism of the idols, structures, theories, and illusions of our dissolute age examined in the light of the inner teachings of indestructible Tradition. Evola identifies the type of human capable of "riding the tiger," who may transform destructive processes into inner liberation. He offers hope for those who wish to reembrace Tradition.
the crises and the dissolutions that so many people deplore today should be stated, indicating the real and direct object of the destructive processes: bourgeois civilization and society. But measured against traditional values, these latter were already the first negation of a world anterior and superior to them. Consequently the crisis of the modern world could represent, in Hegel's terms, a "negation of a negation," so as to signify a phenomenon that, in its own way, is positive. This double
to transcendence as to feel that it was external to himself. This makes him incapable of identification with 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 particular implication appears in a rigid, false, substance-bound concept of transcendence—of the Absolute, Being, the Infinite, or whatever one prefers to call the principle in which occurred the
to appear in the preceding period, producing a timeless spatialization of sounds. One also thinks of Schoenberg, considering his development from free atonal music, often in the service of an exasperated, existential expressionism (the existential revolt being expressed here as the atonal revolt against the "common chord," a symbol of bourgeois idealism), to a phase of dodecaphony (twelve-tone system). This development in itself is very significant for the terminal crisis of modern music. After
could state in his Philosophy of Modern Music: "The twelve-tone technique is our destiny," 1 others have justly spoken of a musical "ice age." We have arrived at compositions whose extreme rarefaction and formal abstraction depict worlds similar to that of modern physics with its pure algebraic entities or, on the other hand, that of some surrealists. The very sounds are freed from traditional structures and propelled into a convoluted system where the complete dissolution into the formless, with
attitude, one cannot expect the specific effects of authentic African music with its evocative function; the effect always remains a diffuse and formless possession, primitive and collective in character. This is very apparent in the latest forms, such as the music of the so-called beat groups. Here the obsessive reiteration of a rhythm prevails (similar to the use of the African tom-tom), causing paroxysmal contortions of the body and inarticulate screams in the performers, while the mass of