Contemporary Requirements for Magical Idealism

Next: Carlo Michelstaedter ⇒

[Evola] invests the dark matter of esoterism with a dialectic and discursive reflexion. (From Franco Volpi’s introduction to Magical Idealism.)

TRANSLATION of Chapter 6 of Essays on Magical Idealism (Saggi sull’idealismo magico) by Julius Evola.

In this early book, the young Evola sketched out his philosophical position which he named “Magical Idealism” (presumably inspired by Novalis). Although this predates his interest in Tradition aroused in him by Rene Guenon, he never repudiated his philosophy, but rather tried to integrate it with his understanding of Tradition.

It is easy to forget in our time how influential philosophical idealism was in the 1920s. It was still dominant in Germany after more than a century of development. England had Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and Collingwood. France, too, had its own stream which reached its peak in the spiritualism of Lavelle and Lesenne (both indirectly influenced by Octave Hamelin.) And of course, Italian philosophy was dominated by the idealists Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. Evola sought to insinuate himself in that current of thought. Actually, as this introduction shows, he regarded his own system as the culmination and fulfillment of what went before.

Evola includes brief summaries of five thinkers who most influenced magical idealism. These are Carlo Michelstaedter, Otto Braun, Giovanni Gentile, Octave Hamelin, and Herman Keyserling. Of these, I will be offering translations of the first, third, and the fifth, since I am familiar with them and have read their works. I know nothing of Braun and Hamelin, both very obscure today, so I doubt I will bother to translate those sections.

A requirement raised many times in these pages is to show how the conception of magical idealism carries on by way of logical continuity and integrates the most advanced positions that modern Western speculative thinking has achieved. We now want to give a specific, direct satisfaction to one such requirement by considering a group of thinkers among the most significant in contemporary culture, emphasizing the deep theme that informs their conceptions and finally showing how, when such a theme is given free reign in the interior of their own systems — and without violating any of their existing parts, but rather bringing them to a great organic perfection — we reach those assertions that were sketched out in the preceding chapters.

However, it is first necessary to understand well the meaning of this historical conclusion of magical idealism. It is that if we conceive history as existing in itself, as therefore imposing the bad misfortune of a group of given elements from which, in one way or another, the current moment would come to be conditioned, a demonstration of the historical necessity of magical idealism in truth could have value only as a true rebuttal of magical idealism itself, since the fundamental principle of this doctrine is absolute, unconditioned self-determination. What cannot therefore happen if something stands against the I, which is simply given to it, something that is there without the participation of its will. Things proceed however quite differently when one holds firm to the principle of the ideality of time and, with it, of history. If time is not a thing in itself, but rather—as Kant taught—a category, if it is simply a mode by which the I orders the matter of representation which therefore, in itself, is neither temporal nor intemporal, it does not exist as a before nor as an after—then the spectre of an inevitable determination from part of the past vanishes into nothing. Since in such a case it instead remains true that, insofar as the past exists only inside the act—which in itself, in this regard, is to be understood as metatemporal—by which I make my various affirmations appear temporally, the past does not condition or determine the present, but the present conditions or determines the past.

The past remains simply a mark with which I identify a part of my current experience, since a past in itself, i.e., a past that falls outside my real experience, which is not an object, is gnoseologically an absurdity and non-being. From that, it follows that history is nothing other than a mode according to which the I projects onto the canvas of time, I would say almost as in a mythical figuration, that it is to will interiorly and intemporally. As creator of history in the current historical moment, the individual experiences in this way only the limit-point of his own affirmation. The theory of the ideality of time therefore makes history a plastic faculty and in itself is indifferent to freedom—no longer a tyrannical fact that does violence to the individual, but rather a docile creation that the individual dominates, reflects and confirms unfailingly a posteriori what it a priori and metahistorically affirms. Thus, properly, it should be said that history is nothing other than the very power of freedom in reflecting and demonstrating a posteriori, alongside the category of time, its determination having happened a priori in an intemporal and metahistorical point. The “historical conclusion” is always something that comes after, an epiginomenon, and its necessity is only the phenomenon of freedom that determines it unconditionally.

That granted, we can show the historical necessity of magical idealism without that assumption implying a contradiction. It rises like the synthesis of a dialecticism, in which the thesis is the rationalism of romantic philosophy which, exhausting itself in a conceptual world abstracted from reality and from individuality, generated the antithesis of materialism and positivism.[1] For the consummation of the thesis in the antithesis, the empty ideality had to be refilled with a concrete content whence, in the terms of the Hegelian Left (Stirner, Nietzsche), the mentioned emergence in the affirmation of the real individual in the value of the unconditioned. This principle of synthesis was developed, then it led to the concept of an individual affirmation such that in the same plane of the real world presented antithetically by positive science and established that sufficiency in that mediation, of which in the abstract world of the rational only the image without life was known. As the rationalistic thesis culminated in an idealization of the real, so a realization of the ideal was postulated of the synthesis of magical idealism (which is then the true derealization of the real), that is, a power of the individual so real, that he was the being and determination of nature studied from the antithetical moment of science.

[1] The surpassing of the Hegelian Logos, so that this acquires its concreteness, is not that of nature, internal to the pure logical sphere of the Encyclopedia of Philosophic Sciences, but rather that of the entire Hegelianism, through the Hegelian left, in the sciences of nature, with the organs proper to which and falling outside the pure conceptual apriorism and took specific knowledge of concrete reality.

9 thoughts on “Contemporary Requirements for Magical Idealism

  1. Rudolf Steiner Saw The Sun At Midnight: Magical Idealism at its best…

    Early on the previous evening the pupils gathered together. In quiet contemplation they were to be made aware of the meaning and import of this momentous happening. Silently and in darkness they sat together. When the midnight hour drew near they had been for long hours in the darkened chamber, steeped in the contemplation of eternal truths. Then, towards midnight, mysterious tones, now louder, now gentler, resounded through the space around them. Hearing these tones, the pupils knew: This is the Music of the Spheres. Then a faint light began to glimmer from an illumined disc. Those who gazed at it knew that this disc represented the earth. The illumined disc became darker and darker — until finally it was quite black. At the same time the surrounding space grew brighter. Again the pupils knew: the black disc represents the earth; the sun, which otherwise radiates light to the earth, is hidden; the earth can see the sun no longer. Then, ring upon ring, rainbow colours appeared around the earth-disc and those who saw it knew: This is the radiant Iris. At midnight, in the place of the black earth-disc, a violet-reddish orb gradually became visible, on which a word was inscribed, varying according to the peoples whose members were permitted to experience this Mystery. With us, the word would be Christos. Those who gazed at it knew: It is the sun which appears at the midnight hour, when the world around lies at rest in deep darkness. The pupils were now told that they had experienced what was known in the Mysteries as “seeing the sun at midnight.”

    He who is truly initiated experiences the sun at midnight, for in him the material is obliterated: the sun of the Spirit alone lives within him, dispelling with its light the darkness of matter. The most holy of all moments in the evolution of man is that in which he experiences the truth that he lives in eternal light, freed from the darkness. In the Mysteries, this moment was represented pictorially, year by year, at the midnight hour of the Holy Night. The picture imaged forth the truth that as well as the physical sun there is a Spiritual Sun which, like the physical sun, must be born out of the darkness. In order that the pupils might realise this even more intensely, after they had experienced the rising of the spiritual Sun, of the Christos, they were taken into a cave in which there seemed to be nothing but stone, nothing but dead, lifeless matter. But springing out of the stones they saw ears of corn as tokens of life, indicating symbolically that out of apparent death, life arises, that life is born from the dead stone. Then it was said to them: Just as from this day onwards the power of the sun awakens anew after it seemed to have died, so does new life forever spring from the dying.

  2. Rudolf Steiner literally pulled the sword from the stone through the process of magical idealism: Rudolf Steiner Literally Pulled The Sword From The Stone…

    he Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner.’

    on his visit to Tintagel and King Arthur’s Castle

    On an unforgettable day Rudolf Steiner went with us to the place on the Rocky western coast of Cornwall, Tintagel, where the castle of King Arthur had once stood, where he and the Knights of the Round Table carried on their battle for victory against evil and to rescue the impulse of esoteric Christianity and the current of the grail for a new Epoch. That strangely densified spiritual atmosphere we shall never forget, so intensely felt as Rudolf Steiner climbed the strange projecting cliff on the lonely Coast of Cornwall where the last walls of the castle of King Arthur towered over the Roaring sea. The unceasing struggle of the Sun forces against the clouds and fog rising from the sea surrounded the cliffs and the castle with an atmosphere of an eternal Elemental battle

    He spoke their standing on the cliff, about the experiences of the Knights of King Arthur, who experience in this external struggle of the forces of light with the elements of the earth a reflection of their own inner battles, where in the realm of soul and spirit light and darkness battle for the mastery, of the I-force, the illuminated consciousness of Man, strives to achieve in ceaseless battle mastery over the clouds and fog of passions.

    He spoke of the teaching of Merlin, which was there fostered, of the service to the spiritual sun practice by Arthur’s circle and their knowledge of the cosmic deed of Christ.

    As he then surveyed on the highest point of the cliff the remains of the walls of the ancient castle, which indicated the structure of the mystery place of King Arthur and it’s external lines, the past became present to him in his spiritual vision, and he described to us in living pictures pointing with his hand to the various parts of the castle where the Hall of the Round Table had once been, the rooms of the king and his Knights. The immediacy of the spiritual vision in this place was so intense that, during his descriptions, the entire reality, the external life and action, the inner willing and achievement of the circle of King Arthur’s knights, stood before us as actual experience.

    That such an occurrence is in our time actually possible making the past livingly present through spiritual vision and the resulting real union of present experience and will with a spiritual stream of a past age, this fact gave to those hours on the cliff of Arthur’s castle in Tintagel the sacred character of a deed which is inscribed in the annals of history.

  3. In your text book of magical idealism you elaborate on how to reconcile the particular with the universal. An impossible impossibility. If I make all my acts final will I make history? or anyone for that matter no matter what there position in life is?

  4. this is a theory. From my “I” comments below, “So then from a point of supposing from personal evidence that there is indeed some form of “mirroring and revealing ” intelligence out there, it does not require one to say this is god , although it could indeed be , one could also suppose that there is in place in this human existence, a particular and definite ordered high intelligence that does reveal itself …….only in response to human consciousness , i.e. it always attempts to gravitate to the positive end , but that this can be affected by the locality of consciousness so in simple terms this universal spontaneity is not truly spontaneous at its roots but that it does have some form of possible absolute high intelligibility that is directly proportionate in its expression to the nature of consciousness of a person that is relating with it , i obviously need to work on clarification a bit more , but these are the areas i am gravitating in regarding the i and the potential god energies in these times , in the nature of evolving understanding”

    In Evolas theory , the evolving i is admitting its not a cause of all the representations it encounters and those it has not caused are just due to an insufficiency in that i-developments full comprehension of their apparent spontaneity , a privation.
    So now i am proposing that the spontaneous activity that meets the i is “indirectly” present-conscious-wise but directly from the deeper-spiritual acquired emanation from that i development , i.e. the progress of evolving the i also co-creates a deeper parallel evolution of the spiritual level of that i .
    Then by introducing the prospect of benevolent and malevolent non-physical entity / entities , that do generate the very so called spontaneous activities that meet each and every i.
    Then another possibility arises that when an i has evolved to a certain level of evolution , it has aroused a particular higher response from benevolent entities that do co-ordinate with its will to be, but also if that evolved i were to somehow choose from temptation a lower level of will to be in the selfish kind, then these benevolent influences, back off, and if the degeneration continues , malevolent influences take the lead .
    It is also then probable that all stage 1 i consciousnesses , also incur benevolent and malevolent influences in relationship to their inner level of purity of intention , or some form of pre-ordained status or acquired status from their encounters with spontaneous challenges to date.
    So the key difference in the evolving i is that the individual is actually raising the level of both their ability to receive joy. pleasure , meaningfulness, and their counterparts , increasing their human state into a super state which results in them increasing power over the nature of their existence and others they encounter . But also there is some form of higher ethical demands put on them as they rise in the consciousness .
    This theory then still allows the phenomena of synchronicity to be a form of benevolent communication , and also allows evolas absolute i to consciously conclude its absoluteness having no requirement to consciously recognise that its has amassed a large amount of benevolent entity influence that does appear to arrange much of its spontaneous activity as “expected activity”

    Just a thought .

  5. Im Back already, i located the synopsis on the 3 stages by i believe your good self cologero – Absolutely excellent Good sir, now from that i have extracted an area at the end which does answer my question about the spontaneous phenomena = ……”Evola consolidates the understanding gained by the man at stage three. This involves the refutation of realism and an answer to its arguments against the position taken by Evola. The realist claims that there is a something behind the appearances or representations that somehow causes or accounts for them. Evola denies this and reasserts his claim that the appearances are from the “I”. But certainly there are things that are impervious to my will. Evola claims that they are not real things but rather a privation, something that reveals my own insufficiency. Along the way of explaining this, a new, and perhaps greater and more heroic, meaning is given to activity in the world.

    In a note, Evola points out the limit at which philosophy as such must end; what is then required is self-realization, to which no study of philosophy can lead. Evola asserts that such a transformation is “not a myth but a real possibility”. This cannot be overemphasized – it is insufficient to study Evola, one must work to achieve such a realization by other means; otherwise, nothing will be understood.

    The rejection of realism, the elevation of self-realization over rational thought, and the centrality of the will, freedom, and power have far reaching implications. This short work does not draw out all such implications, but it is an interesting exercise to ponder them.

    Evola then turns to the position of the realist in order to refute him. Bear in mind that Evola is here concerned with the problem of certainty: that is, how do I know — that is directly — with certainty. For this, Evola only allows what happens in consciousness, my self-awareness or sense of “I”, and, derivatively, what I have power over and can control.

    Therefore, a “thing” is whatever appears in my consciousness as “representation”. The realist, on the other hand, speculates that there is something that accounts for that appearance and thus causes it in my consciousness. Since what I can know with certainty is whatever is in my own consciousness, the theory of the realist must necessarily be speculative.

    The objection of the realist is that you have no experience of directly causing or bringing about the appearances of the world. To counter this, Evola returns to the distinction between spontaneity and will that was made in the discussion of the stages. The appearance of the world is “spontaneous”, in the sense that it arises of necessity without the full consent of my will. So whatever resists my will is not something that has an independent existence — as the realist would claim — but rather it represents a “privation”, something that lacks being, and merely indicates an insufficiency on my part. “……..

    So there it is , sort of the crossroads where philosophy must end , which also encompasses my comments regarding the phenomenon of synchronicity as some sign of potential external intelligence which can just as easily fit into an extension of my i-ness

    Conclusive tangental Note – I now realise the significance and true depth of a platonic love !

  6. Apologies for hoarding replies but one last thought in this “train of thinking about to end for the moment” People in the stage 1 could still be of immaculate conception , but that their experiencing of existence must be very limited in comparison to the hero that could go through the stages , (and they know that inside of them which creates this constant need ? ) because for the realisation of true ecstasy ,joy, etc a form of stepped certainty has to have been transpersed or transcended so that there is a knowledge of consciousness compare through multiple levels , only then , can that ultimate anticipation be realised in actuality in all its absolute power

    Footnote – power corrupts , there are traps ongoing , wherever one is on the path of understandings

  7. The distinction between positive and negative freedom in regard to will and spontaneity at the s3 is a perfect and fabulous departure from the realist and idealist proposal .
    On this spontaneous activity relationship to consciousness , it can be seen where the nature of praying comes from and also the potential dangers of prayer petition. So its as if everyone already knows of the connection , but not of the work required to be carried out ….or endured , (as in evolas description) before that is what may be termed a golden connection is established and all else before that achievement is truly a tainted love
    As in “the secret” etc

  8. I have just reread the iabow and its just simply genius analysis from stage 1 to 3 which are not a formal process but i can loosely relate to being in the garden of eden or hades,(what occurs here may propel into stage 2 to varying degrees) , i also think that most depressives suicides etc are lingering at the gates of stage 2 (but i also have to be aware of imposing simplistic psychological terms on such an expansive concept) then followed by the fall into hades , then the rise out of hades into a lordship that does from its pinnacle potentially “save” and direct the nature of reality wherever it may be . The use of the word “save” is a critical choice for me because this underlines some form of superior internalised morality that is unlocked and now drives the I orchestrator
    What has to be emphasised is also that these are achievements , have to be achieved through action , and not a train ride of eventuality

    So then i think my question of what is behind the universal spontaneity would be that it has to be seen as a pre-supposition !

    But then i am allowed to impose my own speculation onto it which in a manner of speaking still allows evolas concept to breathe freely
    In the phenomena of Synchronicity , i personally have confirmed as far as possible that at least in my own existence , it seems that there is an underlying intelligence in this “universal spontaneity ” but that it only reveals itself in greater analytical details, when the subject matter “me” does sincerely look for this potential connection . Now bearing in mind that there is a fine line here between sanity and madness , one must consider these things very very sombrely, so then it can be said that from my point of view , the nature of the “sincerity” as an “absolute necessity” of ones present existence , and not some inquisitive past time , which in retrospect ties into evolas world of the importance of action, in that , the sincerity is presently the active inspiration behind ones becoming being , i.e. the search for elaboration of the mystery of synchronisation is carried out through specific sincere actions to that end …….
    So then from a point of supposing from personal evidence that there is indeed some form of “mirroring and revealing ” intelligence out there, it does not require one to say this is god , although it could indeed be , one could also suppose that there is in place in this human existence, a particular and definite ordered high intelligence that does reveal itself …….only in response to human consciousness , i.e. it always attempts to gravitate to the positive end , but that this can be affected by the locality of consciousness so in simple terms this universal spontaneity is not truly spontaneous at its roots but that it does have some form of possible absolute high intelligibility that is directly proportionate in its expression to the nature of consciousness of a person that is relating with it , i obviously need to work on clarification a bit more , but these are the areas i am gravitating in regarding the i and the potential god energies in these times , in the nature of evolving understanding

  9. @cologero – From Evolas indiv and becoming conclusion , never before have i read an elaboration that without question puts forth a beautifully constructed process of potential i-consciousness evolution which categorically climaxes in confirming the absolute necessity of action in ones existence as a means to evolve comprehension of ones very existence as it unfolds upon its consciousness , and paradoxically speaking, as overtly and subliminally demanded by it to proportional degrees based on ones progress of actualisation of the i !

    “To say that I, as I, that is, as sufficient and free principle, cannot recognize myself as unconditioned cause of the representations, does not at all mean say that these representations are caused by “something else” and have some real or existent things in themselves as substrate, but means simply that I am insufficient for a part of my activity, which is still spontaneity, that such a part is not yet MORALIZED, that the I as freedom suffers a PRIVATION in it.”

    The above part is the turning point in clarity of perception when reading through it and all that follows is then the greatest concluded elaboration i have yet read on the nature of the I consciousness evolving development to its proposed “pinnacle”
    A term i think that evola may even give a quiet nod of consent too from the beyond . The explanation covers every single area of thinking apart from one, but i suppose thinking must have a limit and that could be because it in itself is “becoming”

    The only slightly grey area where i find present thought can not completely clarify is
    ” a continuum of activity that has as limits spontaneity on one side and free will on the other. Spontaneity is the universal, free will is the individual.”

    what determines this content of the universal spontaneity to each specific individual ? i will have to revisit it to form a satisfactory answer to this one question or maybe i already answered that with the “becoming” solution

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