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I’ve been reading philosophy since I was 15 years old. Since my teenage years, my favourite writer has been Friedrich Nietzsche, the predominant poet of the German language and (in my view) the greatest thinker of the last 500 years. But for the last decade or so, I’ve tended to neglect philosophy in favour of history and politics. My degree is in Politics and Economics. I am a political blogger and we all live in a uniquely politicised era.
Julius Evola’s ‘Ride the Tiger’ is the first work of philosophy to distract my attention in many years. You may remember that this blog is named as a refutation of Evola – whose work ‘Revolt against the Modern World’ advocated a rebellion against industrial development.
That book, commonly regarded as his masterpiece, is garbage. ‘Ride the Tiger’ on the other hand, continues to fascinate me. At its heart, this book (described by some reviewers as a self-help book for fascists) ponders the right way for a person of intellectual and spiritual depth to survive an age of stupidity, dissolution and over-democratisation.
To try and allow the reader to learn this ‘correct’ way, Evola takes issue confronts Nietzsche directly by reforming the philosopher’s classical dichotomy of ‘Dionysian’ against ‘Apollonian’.
In case you are unfamiliar with that dichotomy, I’ll try to briefly explain it here.
For Nietzsche, to be ‘Dionysian’ is to live in slack obedience to reaction and emotion; that is, to follow the impulses of pure physiology and worldliness; to live, as it were, without rationalisation (Dionysus, incidentally, was the Greek God of intoxication and wine). Nietzsche often suggests more explicitly in his later work that the reader choose ‘life’ over ‘thought’ and his noted thought experiment imagining an ‘Eternal Recurrence of the same” is designed to provoke this way of thinking in the reader. ISIS and al-Qaeda for example, pursue a life of unrestrained impulse and barbarity. In this way, they are far closer to the Nietzschean ideal than many of his Western readers would care to admit.
The Apollonian spirit, by contrast, is an attitude to life and art that rationalises and ‘stands back’ from existence; one that refuses to follow impulse and places greater value on the mind and the realm of intellect. This is undoubtedly closer to the spirit of the modern age than the former concept, given that we are encouraged to sublimate our instincts into the pursuit of rational goals (wealth creation, civility, security etc…).
In Ride the Tiger, Evola suggests a fusion of both concepts – the construction of what he called Dionysian Apollonism. As this name would suggest, Evola advises us to take inspiration from both philosophies. We should live in a way that honours our nature and innate drives, but in a way that allows us to navigate our way through modern society.
Evola rejects the barbaric as infeasible and self-destructive. He suggests instead the pursuit of primeval goals in a disguise of civility. This is what ‘Ride the Tiger’ is chiefly concerned with.
The title of the book is derived from a Hindu parable. There are many variations on it, but the basic gist is as follows: Imagine a tiger is charging at you at great speed… Your first impulse might be to fight or ‘take on’ the beast. But if you do this, you will surely lose, since the beast is more powerful than you are. However, if you manage to leap on the back of the tiger and ride it, you may be able to harness its energy and strength for your own ends.
For Evola, the tiger is modern industrial society, something he hated with a terrible passion but which he conceded was too strong to oppose. Rather than commit suicide by attempting a futile revolution against it, we should instead try to play by its rules, integrate into its system, but all the while stay faithful to higher and more transcendent concepts.
I understand and concede that Evola’s philosophy is esoteric and strange and also that the Italian was a confused anti-Semite and political fascist. But this short, strange and beguiling work has the potential to haunt the thinking of the reader long after he/she has closed it.
D, LDN.
Defend the Modern World 
You want a different ‘take’ on things?
Try Tom Cahill’s “The Gifts of the Jews” to see why no westerner shaped by the afterglow of a thousand years of Christendom (itself the child of the revolution that could easily be called “the Sinai revolution”) should ever be tempted by the lure of return to what Cahill sums up as “the world of the Wheel”.
And Franz Rosenzweig, “The Star of Redemption”, which has a very provocative and interesting discussion of what radically distinguishes the biblical faiths – Christianity and Judaism together – from all other religious systems and/ or philosophies (whether those systems were classic western paganism, or eastern systems such as Hinduism which the likes of Evola admired so much, or anything else, including Islam, which Rosenzweig saw as fundamentally ‘pagan’, that is, nonbiblical ).
And G K Chesterton, “Orthodoxy” and ‘The Everlasting Man” (especially the latter).
Read David Bentley Hart: The Beauty of the Infinite, The Doors of the Sea, and…Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Hart knows both the modern philosophers and the ancients – and he knows his biblical theology through and through. He’s an education. He exposes, along the way, just how many of the casual opinions that the average modern semi-educated westerner holds, on the subject of Christianity and the Christian centuries, are quite simply false, or at best, half-truths.
Read the French sociologist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul (who sponsored and mentored Bat Yeor who was one of the first to sound the alarm about Islamisation in Europe, and coined the term “dhimmitude”; Ellul wrote brilliant little essays on dhimmitude, and on Jihad, as forewords for two of her books): I suggest for starters “The Technological Society”, “The Technological Bluff”, and “Propaganda”, for starters. Then “The New Demons” and “Hope in a Time of Abandonment”. (He wrote, in French, “Un Chretien Pour Israel” which is well worth a read, if you can read French). He called himself ‘communist’ but he was sui generis. He diagnosed many of the ailments of the modern/ postmodern world (and he saw clearly the meaning and menace of Islam, and totally skewers the whole “religionsofthebook/weworshiponegod/abrahamicfaiths interfaith dawa game, in one biting essay entitled “Les trois piliers du conformisme”). He is one of the great teaching saints of the church in France, and like all prophets, better known beyond the borders of his own country, than at home.
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The ‘We worship one God’ trick is particularly annoying. Islam clearly proposes that all traditions prior to it are ‘corrupted’.
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Since I mentioned Bat Yeor – author of monumental and dense (downright encyclopaedic) meticulously-researched tomes “The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam”, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam” and “Islam and Dhimmitude” – it’s also worth mentioning an Australian Anglican priest, the very astute Rev Dr Mark Durie, who sat down and absorbed Bat Yeor’s work and immersed himself in other material as well – e.g. C S Hurgronje the brilliant Dutch scholar of Islam – and did some additional research in the Islamic source materials himself (he did some time at the very solid University of Leiden under Hans Jansen).
Durie then wrote a book of his own that sort of distils and then builds upon and extends the main insights and findings of Bat Yeor.
It’s called “The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom” and if we could persuade even a modicum of the world’s non-Muslim religious and political leaders to a/ read it and b/ take it *seriously* and craft policy vis a vis the Islamic ‘world’ accordingly, we’d be well on our way out of the woods.
He unblinkingly analyses the dhimma system and exposes it to be not just a common or garden ‘protection racket’ a la the mafia (“pay the jizya and we might oh-so-graciously allow you to live as despised untermenschen/ milch cows for one more year”), but is also a calculated and deliberately designed system of Abuse on the grand scale. It’s particularly fiendish because it forces the Abusee to praise and flatter and be ‘grateful’ to the Abuser…even while they are being grossly abused. Like the Pol Pot torturers who told their victims they weren’t allowed to scream.
Durie came across at least one mainstream historical Muslim writer/ ‘thinker’ who defined the dhimma as a system of **soul-killing**. It wasn’t just about physical/ economic exploitation. It was about breaking people’s spirits, to turn them into objects to be abused ad infinitum, for the pleasure and profit of the Abuser (= alpha Muslim males). And to give a hard sharp shock of reality to anyone you encoutner who harbours rosy ideas about Sufis, you can tell them that *two* of the Muslim writers Durie came across who were most zealous in their advocacy of this aim – that is, “soul-killing” – as the *real* aim of the dhimma system, were …Sufis. One, Sirhindi, 17th century, was in India and is still revered by Muslims there as a “saint”. Some saint!! He says, of the dhimmis, that “they must always remain terrified and trembling”. You could call his treatise “in praise of sadistic bullying” and you’d be right on the money. The other was an 18th century Moroccan Quran commentator, Ibn Ajibah. You could say, perhaps, that the flipside of the much-ballyhooed Sufi mysticism is..a taking of delight in the singleminded, obsessive destruction of the self and soul of the despised *others*, the dhimmis, the non-Muslims.
When you understand the obsessive cruelty at the heart of the dhimma system, the will-to-annihilate/ the will-to-dominate / to humiliate, degrade and exploit to the nth degree, without a flicker of empathy, to turn dhimmis into dead bodies walking, unresisting objects that can be used at will as chew toys, punching bags, sex toys, you will see exactly why the testimony of the girls who were chewed up and spat out by the ‘grooming gangs’ is so hair-raisingly awful. Because this is the way that 1400 years of history and the core playbooks of Islam *program* Muslims to feel and behave toward non-Muslims.
islam makes the average western S & M practitioner or domestic abuser or even our psycho serial killers look like rank amateurs.
Sorry for the length of this comment! But I do hope you’ll check out Durie. His book has the virtue of being inexpensive to buy, scholarly (full references provided), lucid, and…relatively short. It can be read in a weekend, or in the course of a long plane flight, and you’ll get the big picture, though re-reading is a good idea.
Incidentally, he’s done a youtube presentation on the ideological background to the Muslim grooming gangs in the UK (and he also discussed the Muslim gang rapes of non-Muslim girls in Sydney in Australia, some years ago); you might be able to google round for it.
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Thanks, I’ll look it up. I find it funny that some people argue the Dhimmi system is an example of Islamic tolerance.
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Thanks dumbledore. I will also look up the books you mentioned.
Incidentally, Julius Evola was a great admirer of Buddhism and wrote a book called “The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts”. He was one of first Westerners to go back to the early texts of Buddhism and discover that the teachings of the Buddha are actually very rational and ethical and free of the mumbo-jumbo that had accumulated over the centuries. This book actually inspired two British soldier-academics to convert to Buddhism, travel to Sri Lanka, ordain as Buddhist monks and were the finest translators of the Pali Canon into English.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanamoli_Bhikkhu.
(How things link-up!
DTMW, the Internet is indeed a marvelous modern invention!)
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