The Individual and the Becoming of the World

by Julius Evola

"The Individual and the Becoming of the World" was originally presented as two lectures to the "Lega teosofica indipendente di Roma" ("The independent theosophical league of Rome") in 1925. The individual lectures have no titles and section breaks are simply indicated in the text. Therefore, I have added section headers for the purposes of organization and discussion.

Philosophy

Three Stages of Consciousness

Considering the process through which the individual can reach a perfect fulfilment of himself, three fundamental stages can be distinguished. These stages, which are found in a certain way reflected both in the history of thought as well as in the history of culture in general, reconnect themselves to distinct forms used in the problem of certainty, and their sense is, approximately, the following:

Stage One

In the first period we can say that the "I" still lives only as if in a dream: it is not yet a self-consciousness, nor an autonomous principle of action: immersed in an immediate, indistinct coalescence with nature and the world, we can say that it is not so much he who thinks, speaks, and asserts himself, as much as that various forces and impulses think, speak and assert themselves in him. He therefore is only a type of medium, a passive instrument that has its own life outside of himself, and that everything lives as a grace, as spontaneity, as the immediate self-manifestation of something that transcends him.

It is clear that in this original stage, it is believed that the problem of certainty does not exist, as religion does not even exist in the proper sense: since both the problem of certainty qua problem, as well as religion (religion derives from “religare”, that is “to tie fast”) presuppose a state of detachment that is not yet present. Instead, the individual [singolo] and the totality are one and same thing, the I with the not-I, the spirit with nature; and that is precisely because the individual [singolo] as properly such has not yet been born. In him instead the same universal life immediately flows and resonates and he is lost in it, fed and sustained as if the I is the being in formation in the mother’s womb. Hence certainty cannot constitute a problem, it is instead a matter of direct experience, it is a “this”, something intuitively evident, revealing itself case by case without mediation according to that instant confidence and wonderful wisdom whose echo we still feel in the life of the instincts.

Stage Two

Following this stage, whose principle is spontaneity, a second one follows – or, better said, a second one may follow, since the life of the spirit is essentially that of freedom. It makes no sense to speak of a transcendent law – whether natural, rational, or moral – which would determine how the stages would proceed in accordance with some incontrovertible sequence: the passage from one stage to another is instead unconditioned, it happens if it happens, its direction is not deducible from one stage to the other; it is an absolute achievement, an achievement therefore for which one cannot, but even must not, ask for a further reason.

Now in this second stage, following the "period of spontaneity", the "I" turns toward autonomy and individual existence – that consequently happens only in so far as the original connection with the whole is steadily broken, and as a gradual tearing away from the World is realized. Consequently, what used to be familiar to the individual is made alien and impenetrable, what intuitive certainty used to reveal to him as indisputable fact is made dubious and problematic. Opposite the "I", the non-I arises; opposite man, nature. And experience is dispersed in outward appearance and particularity, whose elements stand in a contingent relationship to the "I": it is the boundless ocean of forms and beings, of generations and corruption, of becoming and transmuting: it is the madness of phenomena, the oblique fluctuation of "things that are and that are not". The individual in the first moment of his birth as such awakens to that; he finds himself therefore swept along in an incomprehensible adventure, consumed moment by moment by various flashes of phenomena and contradictory impulses in which – while his essence is torn to pieces – he endures the death of his unity and self-certainty. And the more the "I" advances in its individual assertion, the stronger the antithesis – the "other", the irrational, and the contingent – rises against him.

It is therefore natural that at the very first moment man, since nostalgia and the feeling of the primordial state of union still resound in him, was led to consider the world as a place of sorrow, explicable only as the consequence of a "fall", as the upheaval of a primordial "injustice", or as illusion and "ignorance" (avidya) – in each case as a non-value, as a misadventure, as something from which it matters only to be saved. So we have the means of understanding the feeling and the ideal "locus" of the pessimistic and ascetic attitudes characteristic of the Upanishadic and Buddhist Orient, the first Greek culture and even primitive Christianity. Consequently, since the contingent and phenomenal mode of the appearing of the world is only the necessary consequence of the rising of the "I" to an autonomous principle, this ascetic direction is of value in drawing back in a regressive movement; in truth, it expresses the fear and the contradiction of an individuality still inadequate for is own assertion. Since this assertion in every case has taken place, the result cannot be the restoration of the primordial state, but either the dissolution in nirvana or nirguna-brahman – that, is in an undifferentiated principle that devours every concrete reality – or else Eleatic and Stoic dualism, the hardening of man against the becoming of phenomena whose having to be one refuses to recognize but whose being, therefore, cannot avoid undergoing drastic interpretation.

A second reaction to such a state of things is typical of the scientific position, in which the attempt is made to encompass the chaos of phenomena in principles of order and uniform laws, by means of the discursive faculty: the concept on one hand, the mathematical relation on the other. Man tries to find in a cognitive system the substitute for that harmonious unity of the universal and the particular, for that intrinsic understanding of the individual in the whole, from which he benefited as immediate life in his pre-individual stage; so that the reduction of particular phenomenon under a general law is now valid for him as the criterion of certainty. But in truth, this certainty is apparent and uncertain; one could never in this way really resolve the contingent nature of the relationship according to which things, in this further stage, are presented to the "I". In fact, in the first place, isn’t substituting a law for a fact perhaps just the same as substituting one contingency for another? In the second place, as will be shortly shown in a little more detail, the concept can account for what constitutes the "essence" of a thing, or the totality of the characteristics that logically define it, but it is impotent to deduce – and even less to produce – its "existence", the naked fact of its "being there" (dasein) as a real thing. That can be illuminated with a brief reference to the views of the latest physics, where a truly superb effort – by an Einstein, a Weyl, an Eddington – was made toward a system of unification and comprehensive deduction of the multiplicity of phenomena. Here the theory can deduce all the electro-gravitational phenomena – once they were given the so-called "curvature" or spatial "contraction" – that proceed from it, yet it is impotent to deduce the reason for the curvatures themselves, which remain a brute "given", in the face of which one must halt, since it must simply be presupposed. In that there is a contingency and a fundamental obscurity, at bottom a thousand questionable points are removed, so that to put them back in their place would require a thousand times more. The "I" remains facing a fact, a something that – in being such, as it could also have been something else without its reality being thus instead of something else – depends on it or can be penetrated by it, and cannot support real certainty. Therefore, a state of doubt and scepticism imposes itself; and precisely from this development the advance of the individual toward complete and separate self-assertion is conditional.

Such a development is connected to the critical investigation around the problem of knowing. In fact, once the "I" is constituted as principle in itself and a separate centre of self-reference, the very fact that it can communicate with something other than itself, the very fact that it can in general know, appears as a singular mystery. And since it is evident that, with the subject placed on one side and the object on the other, there is no longer any way of meaning by that their meeting in which knowledge consists, if it be possible; and since on the other hand, by this point the "I" has become aware of itself and can no longer return to the state of naοve support, of compenetration with things that were conditioned precisely by its not yet being placed. A single path to the problem of knowledge remains open, and that is: to deny that the idea of a reality existing in itself has any sense, to assert that the substance of things consists simply in their being represented or thought by the "I", to mean therefore that the entire world system, in the unlimited richness of its forms, with its oceans, its suns and its Milky Ways, is nothing but a phenomenon, an appearance that is of this "I" and for this "I", outside of which no consistency could be coherently guaranteed to it. Along such a path man then sees all those supports and natural proofs on which he initially rested progressively fail – everything now becomes for him doubtful, problematic, contingent. All that he knows is that he now finds himself so and so determined, that this is his current experience, these laws and categories by which he finds himself constrained to think about it. But regarding the foundation of such a determination, of similar laws and similar categories, he knows nothing, and so nothing could guarantee for him that things, if such are and also were in the observed cases, they cannot change all at once, that every uniformity and every constancy is not abstract and uncertain, that, founded on a radical contingency, this system of phenomena and categories is only a transient incident, dispersed in an irrepressible, unpredictable event.

If, after that, the individual is still looking for a still point, he can only find it in his "I". The world is a representation, all well and good: but can we perhaps speak of representation without at the same time presupposing the existence of a "representing", of a subject that is representing it? The world is a dream: but doesn’t every dream imply perhaps a dreamer? One can call the whole of experience false, illusory, nonexistent– but whoever experiences and asserts this falsity, illusion, nonexistence cannot himself be false, illusory, nonexistent. Beyond the obliqueness and fluctuation of "things that are and are not", there is then one single certainty: the "I". Only here the individual, with mastery, has an absolute and self-evident reality. Of all the rest – of the boundless ocean of names, forms and beings – there is no real certainty: appearance, contingency, the force of a raw irrational "being there", such are its principles. "I alone am – the rest is my representation" – thus, with that, the conclusion of the second stage can be understood.

Stage Three

Before going further, we have to point out the necessity that this critical moment of the ideal history of the individual be brought down to and experienced in its depths. Not until he has doubted and denied everything, not until he has cut himself off from everyone, not he until has suffered the unreality of every reality, the uncertainty of every fact, the darkness of every light; not until he has destroyed every support and every haven and has realized the point of the "great alone" – not until the individual can call himself completely that, not until he is an autonomous and self-conscious being. It is this negative act, this absolute tearing of oneself away from whatever used to provide solidity and consistency – that now makes him be. Besides, according the powerful saying of Stirner, the "I" is not everything, but that which destroys everything; through this absolute negativity that tragic principle dawns in man which – as was clearly seen in Buddhism – makes him superior to the whole of nature and to the very kingdom of the "gods".

We can specify the place of such an 7quot;I" as follows. Every experience is inseparably accompanied by the characteristic, implicit or explicit, of being one of my experiences. The self-reference, the ahamkara of Vedic metaphysics, is the elementary condition, without which no reality is conceivable, since the only reality that I can concretely speak about is that which, in one way or another, resolves in one of my experiences. Now it is possible to detach this principle of self-reference from the particular contents of experiences in order to fold it back in a certain way onto itself. Thus we have: "I" equals "I", that is a bare experience, a possession, something simple and ineffable. This bare experience presupposes, in fact and by right, some other experience – one can say that it is like the cloth from which all the particular experiences are then cut out: here we have that "seeing that is never seen", that "knowing that is never known", that point of pure centrality that the Upanishads talk about, and in respect to which every particular experience, phenomenon, or thought is a "posterius", something that comes afterwards and remains at the periphery.

Keep this in mind: it is not a matter of a "higher" I, or a "lower" I, or an "empirical" I, or a "transcendent" I – mere names and conceptual abstractions – but rather of my I, that absolute presence that I am in the depths of my individual being. Now that such an "I" is something unmultipliable, something that is "one and without a second", is all too evident. To speak of other I’s from this level is in fact a contradiction in terms. The other I’s in so far as they are "other", are not "I", but rather some particular contents present in my experience – therefore of objects, of the "things known", at most the concept of a knowing person and a subject, not the subject nor the knowing person which it is in itself (that is, as self-experience), which, as such, is unique and incommunicable. Particular phenomena in this great phenomenon, that is the world that I wake up to as an individual; the "other I’s" take part in its contingency, they are something whose principle eludes me, of which I have no real certainty (perhaps don’t even dreams show me the appearance of other beings similar to me? And could not so-called real experience be a dream more powerful and constantly burned in me, as Cartesian scepticism puts it, from some spirit?), that fall outside of that centre which, alone, can constitute for me a terra firma in the great sea of being. This is a point which it is particularly necessary to draw attention to: whoever, either because of moral and sentimental concerns – that is, reconnected to the preceding stage of natural evidence – or because of a lack of critical reflexion, does not succeed in extending doubt to the very reality of other subjects and so conceiving them as nothing other than my representations, has not truly brought that detachment, which we wrote about previously, to its limit, and so has not yet perfectly realized the pure essence of the individual. He is not yet ready for the passage to the third stage since those who have first not known how to doubt everything, can have absolute certainty of nothing.

Therefore, moving onto the third stage, let us immediately say that in it there is an overcoming of the negative point of view connected to the arising of individuality. As one, whom an unfavourable event had cast onto a desert island, followed, after the initial shock, immediately by the will to live, must look for and create the means for a new existence, so the individual, who feels himself by this point alone with himself in the entire extent of the world, can be brought to drag out from his own interior a principle that can secure a new reality beyond the order of appearance and mere representation, in which every thing up to now had to be submerged. This principle is: THE POWER OF CONTROL. The "I", in fact, is not a thing, a "given", a "fact", but, essentially, a deep centre of will and power. As "I", Fichte says, it is, only insofar as it posits itself – and only a pure self-positing is, to tell the truth, its "being".

Through a further self-analysis, the nature of that still point, which was realized in the second stage, is revealed to be such. Now this still point can convey is own substance to whatever lacks it, and that obviously when the various arrangements of that reality, that first appeared irrationally as raw contingency, without participation of the will of the I – almost as in a dream – get recovered in accordance with its own connection to an unconditioned assertion of the individual. What now remains is to proceed to a definition of this stage, so that the point of the present treatment is resolved, which is the relationship of the individual to the becoming of the world. In the meantime, we can specify the criterion of certainty that is called for at this point. It is expressed by the principle:

There is absolute certainty – and postulatable reality – only of those things, of being or non-being, of being such or being otherwise than what the I has in itself, in its capacity of control, or the beginning or cause; of other things, only to the extent of that in them which satisfies such a criterion.
These things, which depend in fact entirely on the power of the "I", contribute to the intrinsic evidence that is inherent in its unvarnished beginning.

Privation

Therefore, with the intention to develop the position assumed by the consciousness of the third stage, we will consider the only true objection encountered by absolute idealism. In absolute idealism there is a doctrine that seeks to transform the negative task of criticism and scepticism that defines the second stage into something positive; and that ceasing to understand the world as a phenomenon, as simply an appearance, (the only legitimate conclusion of critical investigation) in order to understand it instead as something posited, created by the I. Therefore when one no longer speaks of representing but rather of positing and creating, the concept of a free will comes into play, and thus this problem arises: I can well reduce the world to my representation, but at what point can I reduce it also to my will and my freedom?

Here it is necessary to make a fundamental point and that is to understand the essential difference between spontaneity and will. There is spontaneity where the possible is identical to the real or to put it better, where that which is could only have been that, the act has the form of an inconvertible compulsion, of a brute happening and outburst, and it is passive, impotent in respect to itself. In the will, instead, there is an excess of the possible over the real, that is, one does not pass from the possible to the real immediately, but a point of autonomy, of "potestas", controls the act as the final unconditioned reason for its being or non being, of its being this way or its being otherwise, as an act that is only one of the possibilities, or rather, compossibilities. It is important to note that spontaneity, as well as will, can be said to be free: however, while in spontaneity it is a question of a completely negative freedom, that is, of a freedom that simply means: "not determined from something external". In the will there is a positive freedom, that is, a freedoms that means absolute absence of conditions, whether they be internal or external, and therefore the contingency or, if one prefers, the arbitrariness of the act.

Once this distinction is understood, it is not so much based on concepts and intellectual subtleties, but rather on an immediate given of consciousness, on internal evidence that one either does or does not have; when the absolute idealist, in the face of the system of reality, asserts he was the "I" who posited it, it is evident that he is referring not to will, but to spontaneity. He is referring in fact to that activity whereby things are perceived and made interior to our I, to that fundamental "assent" so we become aware of them – an assent that if it is a necessary condition for every reality, insofar as the reality experienced by the I (and we cannot coherently speak about other reality), it is still quite far from being a sufficient condition. In fact, in representing the real is not controlled by the possible, the I is passive in respect to its own act – not as it asserts things but rather it is as if things were asserting themselves in it. As passion and emotion, the representation is something of mine, something that I pull from my own interiority (and at this point the legitimacy of the need for idealism arrives, the rest is satisfied until Leibniz), but it is not me, since I cannot give it freely to myself, since I don’t stand in relationship of master to its determinations, so that the spectacle of reality is unfolding before me, that is, this reality, not the reality that I will. Consequently: to the extent that the idealist can say he was the I who "posited" nature, he reduces the I to nature, that is, in as much as that I, which is freedom, knows nothing, or, better said, acts as if it knows nothing, and, with an obvious paralogism, borrows the concept of the I from that of the principle of spontaneity. I can say it was I who posited nature, but in so far as I am spontaneity, not as I am properly an "I", that is, freedom and control. And this is the first point.

The realist, referring exactly to the point of real individuality, thus puts forward an appeal that is entirely legitimate. He puts us in front of a common occurrence of experience, a storm for example, and asks us if we can say that is was we who "posited it". While here the idealist would respond in the affirmative – because as was said, for him "to posit" means simply to represent with "free necessity". We instead, referring to a positing that the principle of control and unconditioned freedom requires, would respond: "That, actually, is not posited by the I." Then the realist immediately says: "Since that is not posited by the I, there must be 'something else' that posits it" – and infers a real or existent cause in itself of the representations, such as God, matter, the noumenon, etc. Instead, here lies the error and the point on which we are permitted to demand the full attention of the reader.

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.

Everything I cannot act on, everything that resists my will, is only a privation of this very will, something negative, not a being, but a non-being. Hence the realist must be rejected out of hand: he in his reference to "something else" – God, noumenon, substance, etc. – makes a being out of non-being, calls real something that, being only a privation of my power, being nothing other than a negation and a void in the unmultipliable body of my activity, should instead, by right, be called unreal. Thus he confirms this very privation -- as he eschews it: instead of the act that, by controlling and possessing them, annuls things1 and redeems the privation, he substitutes the act that recognizes them and superstitiously gives them being and an autonomous reality. To the former act, he instead applies the criterion of certainty of the third stage: that is, he demands that the free and naked I of the individual can genuinely assert the principle of absolute idealism, and however say: "In truth, I myself am the cause and the Lord of this world, in which I live". But when will it be possible to assert that? Obviously when the individual has redeemed the dark passion of the world in a body of freedom, when the form according to which he lives has let the representative activity (that is, that activity through which the spectacle of the universe is formed in him) pass from spontaneity – from the harmony of the possible and real – to bare, unconditioned causality, that is to: powerful will2.

Now only in a view like this does the act of the individual have a cosmic value, whereas in the view of realism every true meaning and purpose is removed from activity – this can be clear to everyone. In fact activity truly has meaning and value only where it exists to make something real, that is not yet such. This case is verified precisely where the “other” – or that which reflects the limit of my freedom – is understood not as a reality, but rather as a negation and a void: then the world appears as something incomplete, as something that demands its integration in that act of the individual, so that necessity is made freedom, to that development of self-assertion so that the potent actuality of the Unique one is laid out and re-asserted inasmuch as it is its privation. If instead one posits that the "other" as such – that is, exactly as that principle which limits my freedom – is not a privation and a non-being, but rather a positivity and a reality – then everything is already perfect, everything is already "being", and it is not necessary to do anything else. Every purpose and every value of activity and of becoming, every responsibility fails – since the voids of my being are not also voids of being in general: the "other", with the reality attributed to it, fills them up. Instead, in the other case the whole world appears as a dark, painful claim to the "I" so that one gives these to oneself according to power and, in that, enacts it into being, redeems it from privation, and makes it real. And the becoming – that which I make – now has a value, a cosmic value.

Examining more closely the realist position, we see that it is based on this presupposition: that an imperfect activity, a self-limiting activity cannot be conceived, as soon as a limited activity is present, one must immediately think of something that is the cause of this limitation. In fact this is the question in the problem of knowledge: in things there is an aspect through which they indisputably depend on the activity of the I, an aspect that we refer to their being in general represented or experienced. But there is also a second aspect, which represents a negative side in the activity of the I, referring precisely to the impotence of perceiving, not perceiving, or transmuting perception as one wills. Now what does realism base itself on? Precisely on this: that the realist feels the need to give an explanation to this limitation, that he does not want to admit merely a limited activity, that is, an incomplete activity, that comes first, and therefore feels the need to explain the limitation by something "else". He refers therefore to a reality distinct from the I as cause of the representations. But such a presupposition of the realist is what is most debatable.

The conception we repeat is this: what is first must be the absolute and everything that is particularity and finiteness is not conceivable other than as a negation carried out by part of "another" in the fullness of this pre-existent absolute. That is, we examine the Platonic and Spinozist position, expressed by the principle: "Whatever truly is, is the universal; the particular does not exist from itself, that is: in that which it is, it is the universal, and in that which is properly particular, it is not, it is cold and uninspired negation." Now we can oppose the other conception to this one. According to it one does not presuppose the absolute in the finite and the particular, but instead one admits that what is first is precisely the finite and the particular, meant nevertheless not as something contradictory in itself, but rather as something incomplete, not as something that does not exist from itself, but rather as something that already in a certain measure possesses being and in respect to which the absolute would not be its negation, but its development, the point at which it perfects its own principle according to a continual process from the least to the greatest, from potency to act, from a more deficient degree to a more intensive degree of actuality and being.

Now in such a conception – which foists itself wherever development, synthesis, and becoming are not empty words – a certain degree of "privation" is inherent in what comes first in so far as it comes first, which is natural to it and in no way demands to be explained. Its explanation, if ever, does not lie behind – in an absolute limited by the power of an "other" – but rather ahead – in the process of the incomplete that becomes complete, of the power that burns in the act, so that there is nothing really to explain, but to act, to proceed toward a stronger assertion.3

Therefore the presupposition of realism can be disputed and the Spinozian concept of the finite as negation on which it is based cannot be conceded. Since things are, in as much as they are first of all represented, so that a degree of activity and therefore of positivity is already implicit; since the I can experience itself directly as an energy, as a principle of action, as something that does not demand its being from another; since by right an inconvertible limit does not exist for the development of power. There is no necessity to transcend, with regard to the problem of knowing, the concept of an imperfect activity (which is spontaneity in respect to the will) that alone is imposed by a positive test, and to explain the representation with the realist reference to an "other" that causes it and subtends it. In doing that one would have no so much an intellectual digression, but rather the lazy sophism of those who, as inadequate, flee from the act.

Hence the conception that appears in the third stage of the development of the individual is, as a whole, the following: 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. These limits are related to each other as potential to act: everything objective, immediate, and necessary in experience, is, in regards to the position of the individual, the non-being inherent in what is in potential – and here perhaps we can understand what certain mystics alluded to when they spoke of the "dark passion of the world", the "unspeakable suffering of existence", in which the body of the "celestial man" is crucified.

Freedom is the act and the luminous flame of such a darkness, of such a privation; and the world becomes, it is made real in conformity with absolute reality only in and through this flame – that is, only to the extent that the individual, asserting himself at the point of power and control, consumes, burns up his former nature, made spontaneously. Now, a fundamental point: only in the "absolute individual", only in "Autonomy" does the world become real: the sufficiency he gives himself, gives being, solidity, certainty and reason to nature which, before him, it did not yet posses, but demanded. Hence, to seek truth and certainty in nature is absurd: since nature as such is privation, steresis [gr. "privation"] and does not have certainty and truth in itself, but in the individual; therefore as much as it has of it, is what the individual himself gives it. The world is, only if he is. But he will not be able to borrow this being from nothing, that is, if owned by another, it would no longer be able to be, since being is only that which is from itself [kat’ autos]. If therefore he does not make himself saviour of himself, nothing ever will be able to save him.

So it is that explanation and truth do not lie behind, but ahead – and not by deducing, but by passing into action. All of nature, together with conditioned beings, together with beings that go back from one to the other, gravitates toward the individual: those that need nothing, those that support themselves on nothing – it is that which all beings need, that on which all beings support themselves and with which, to the extent that they are, they are one. He alone, as the one who has in himself the proper principle, as the one who is "entity of owndership", who is "persuaded", sustains the weight of the world: the universal process hangs on him, who stands firm, and in him it finds its condition, that through him is from eternity, and in him it has its final destination. That is why only at the point at which the individual realises himself in the sudden intuition of power does a purpose, a reason and a goal in nature arise: not before; it is he who gives it to them. It demands it of his action. And yet the individual has a single imperative by this point: "Be, make yourself GOD, and in bringing that about, SAVE the world".

Further Considerations

Essence and Existence

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The One and the Many

[NOT INCLUDED IN ON-LINE PREVIEW]

Conclusion

We can summarise the major points thus far.

The point of departure is the universal, which in the order of reality does not constitute the richest degree – as Platonism would have it – but instead the poorest degree, not the point of arrival, the terminus ad quem, but the point of departure, the terminus a quo. In it we have in fact the simple state of the being that discovers itself, that is pure spontaneity, that does not own itself but simply is. Although a state of fullness and light for the "I" yet to be born, close to the point of the individual, it appears instead as darkness and death: so in a first moment, it is dissolved in the world of appearances and mere representations; in a second moment it is felt as infinite passion, as the dark and silent pain of privation, as the indescribable crucifixion in the world of necessity. But, born from it, the individual now assumes this death with joy; he is adequate to it; he knows that only his own supernatural value of a "being made of possession" is its cause; he recognizes it as matter, from which only he will be able to drag the splendour of a life to an absolute reality. And then the darkness gradually is illumined, then the terrible flower of the absolute Individual rises from the abyss of necessity. He raises himself slowly into the starless sky, pulling himself from the fierce heat of what he devours in his power. Things and beings die in his vertiginous intensity and he gradually, irresistibly, becomes – he, tremendous in his purity, is "Master of Yes and No" and Ruler of the "three worlds". And in him, a being of possession, a being that "burns and flames", the process of the universe will have its consummation or final perfection with his act.

This is, in a nutshell, the sense of the system I uphold, in which on the one hand I sought to fuse the gnoseological problem and the ontological problem with the ethical problem and the problem of self-realisation or magical problem; on the other hand, to claim the value of the individual and to make him become conscious of his task and his cosmic dignity.

It is that which I recognize as truth, or, better said, it is that which I will as truth.

Religion

[Forthcoming]

Apollo

Dionysus

Notes

  1. Naturally: it annuls them in so far as they are something else, in order to affirm them instead as acts of a powerful will.
  2. As this transformation, which we claim is not a myth but a real possibility, can then practically be completed, is a problem we treated – at least within the limits in which it is possible to treat it publically and generically – elsewhere, and so it is not found here. We can only say that it is a task which neither culture, nor devotion, nor philosophy, nor art, nor morality, nor anything other than what men call "spirituality", can make the least contribution. As to philosophy, its limit is magical idealism, in which it ends up by recognizing its own insufficiency and postulating the realization of power as that by which the most problems can find their only absolute solution.

  3. It is important to note the relativity of the concept of privation. A given element is never privation in itself, but always in relation to the good of autonomy. The transit to that good makes what was positive as spontaneity something negative and "in potential" in respect to the other point. So for the man who does not want to move from the logical point of view to that of will, the concept of privation is not intelligible – but then abstract idealism is the final instance. By believing that the present doctrine explaining privation is surpassed by postulating a distinct reality, he is not taking a step forward but a step backward, since he is making use of the logical category of causality with which this very reality becomes conditioned, logically posited by the I. And the circle is closed again and the critical level remains the limit. But he passes beyond through an absolute positivism.

    What is the difference between a real and an imaginary thing? Represented, they are both the same; but beyond that, the representing activity to which the real thing corresponds is an activity in respect to which they are impotent. There are elements on which I cannot act. This is all.

    We do not resolve the problem of interpreting this non-power, because we do not pose it; hence we are accused of being intellectualistic, abstract, and irrelevant in respect to what is really important to every research of such a type at this point. This is a fundamental point: we claim that the explanation of the fact that one is impotent in certain situations by making recourse to an "other" – something in itself, God, "Historicity of the spirit" and similar things – is a pseudo-explanation, and therefore a vicious circle for this reason: in us the concept of "other" gets its meaning and its foundation from the concept of "non-power", which is what comes first, and out of which objectivity, thing in itself, God, etc. are only so many symbols and intellectual interpretations. The so called real things are symbols of my non-power, of my privation. The reason I call a thing real comes from my experience of a privation and not vice versa. Privation explains the concept of objective reality but not objective reality the concept of privation. Does a declared profession of agnosticism, a stop before the bare fact of non-power with renunciation to explain it as what is, follow from that? Not at all. What we deny (not because we cannot provide one, but because such explanations do not serve us and are not enough for us) is the intellectual pseudo-explanation that leaves facts as they are, that does not transform the real relationship of my power with things. (Does one seriously believe that the poverty and contingency that damn finite being are removed from anything when one explains them with matter rather than with God, with the transcendental I rather than with God, and so on, in similar bad, cheap abstractions?) The explanation that magical idealism demands is completely different: it is an explanation by means of action, a resolutive explanation. It is to ex-plicate, or to actuate, to make perfect: to make what is in potential pass into act, what is imperfection into perfection, what is insufficiency into sufficiency, according to a synthetic, creative, originary process. This is the only true explanation. Everything else is a pastime.

    We will fiercely combat all intellectual and philosophic rhetoric whereby man restrains himself to talk about his impotency (which we mean when speaking of "truth", "objectivity", "rationality", etc.) rather than to finally jump to his feet, to grasp himself and, burning up his impotency, to make himself what he is in himself: a God, a builder of the world.