Julius Evola on Oswald Spengler
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Spengler’s Decline of the West was at one point translated into Italian by Julius Evola himself; Longanesi has published many editions of “Il Tramonto dell’Occidente”, and Evola’s translation was the one published in 1957, pictured below.
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Evola writes on this in his Path of Cinnabar, in a chapter titled “Bachofen, Spengler and the ‘Metaphysics of Sex'”; he begins by stating that Spengler “rejected progressive and historicist whims, and showed awareness of the degenerate nature of the times in which we are living”.
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Evola recognized that Spengler contributed to the possibility of going beyond the linear and evolutionary conception of history; they were also in agreement that the civilization stage reached after the First World War was not an apex, but the opposite: a “twilight”.
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Evola also agrees with Spengler’s analysis of “Caesarism” (for both men this also referred to Hitlerian National Socialism), calling it a product of democratic titanism; this is mirrored in Evola’s Fascism Viewed from the Right, and his Notes on the Third Reich.
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However, as a negative counterpart to this praise, Evola states that Spengler embraced pluralism and historical relativism; he also criticizes an absence of a coherent definition of “Kultur” in Spengler’s writings, and an apparent influence of vitalist and “irrationalist” thought.
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Evola argues that Spengler’s description of each distinct and different civilization following the same pattern is “simplistic”, that plurality is only on the surface; Evola states that beyond this, “modern” and “Traditional” types of civilization are still fundamentally opposed.
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Evola cites the “detrimental” influence of certain intellectual schemes proper to modernity as the reason for Spengler’s failing to capture the essence of each “Kultur”; not “life” and “instinct”, but “intellectualized and spiritualized awareness”.
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Per Evola: “the valorisation of life is vain, if not illuminated by an authentic comprehension of the world of origins. The plunge into existentiality, into Life can initiate a regressive process”; Evola believes this causes Spengler to misunderstand Buddhism, Taoism and Stoicism.
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Finally, Evola comments on Spengler’s idea of the Faustian man as one of the major causes of crisis in the West; for Evola, Faustian man is simply “the consequence of an external and horizontal projection of the metaphysical tension which had previously been directed upwards”
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Evola concludes that Spengler had no influence on his thought, but their overlap can be glaring. Both Evola and Spengler rejected the West as the “only” civilization; Guénon’s idea of the West as “irreligion pushed to its full consequence” can fit within this framework as well.
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