JULIUS EVOLA – ROOTS WESTERN NIHILISM


For some time, a good part of Western humanity has considered it a natural thing for existence to lack any real meaning, and for it not to be ordered by higher principle, arranging their lives in the most bearable and least disagreeable way they can.

This has its counterpart and inevitable consequence in an inner life that is more and more reduced, formless, feeble and elusive and in a growing dissolution of any uprightness and character.

For the symbolic expression of the complex process that has led to the present situation of crisis in matters of morals and the vision of life, the best formulation is that of Nietzsche said: “God is dead”.

“The death of God” is an image that characterizes a whole historical process. The phrase expresses a desacralization of existence and total rift with the world of Tradition.

Morality rendered independent from theology and metaphysics and founded on the sole authority of reason is the first phenomenon to take shape after the death of God, trying to hide it from consciousness.

But once morality has lost its root, which is the orginal and effective relationship of man with a higher world, it ceases to have any invulnerable foundation and the critics soon have the better of it.

In secular and rational morality, the only resistance to any natural impulse is an empty and rigid command, a “thou shalt” that is a mere echo of the ancient, living law.

Then at the point where one tries to give this “thou shalt” some firm content and to justify that content, the ground gives way.

Renouncing any intrinsic or absolute basis for “good” and “evil”, the justification proposed for what is left of moral norms is whatever suits the individual for his own advantage and for his material tranquility in social life.

But nihilism is already visible behind this morality. When there is no longer any internal restraint, every action behavior appears licit so long as the outer sanctions of society’s laws can be avoided or if one is indifferent to them.

The most acute forms of the modern existential crisis are appearing today at the margin of a civilization of prosperity. One sees there rebellion, disgust and anger manifesting not in a wretched and oppressed subproletariat but often in young people who lack nothing.

Burgeois civilization and society are the real and direct object of the destructive processes that so many people deplore today. Man, at a given moment, wanted to be free. He was allowed to be so, and he was allowed 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 his liberation, following ineluctably up to his present state in which “God is dead”, and existence becomes the field of absurdity, where everything is possible and everything is allowed.

 

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