The so-called vitalistic, evolutionistic, “Faustian” conception of life is closely connected with the coming of the machine in the West. The romantic exaltation of everything which is exertion, quest, tragic nature; religion, or, better said, drawing on Guénon’s expression, the superstition of life understood as an irrepressible tension, as a restlessness which never finds satisfaction and, in a perpetual thirst and in a perpetual disgust, moves without pause from form to form, from sensation to sensation, from invention to invention; the obsession with “doing” and with “gaining”, with what is new, with the “record”, with the unusual—all this constitutes the fourth aspect of the European sickness: an aspect which characterises unquestionably the physiognomy of Western civilisation and which, these days, has really reached a feverish crisis.
We have already indicated how the root of this perversion, too, can be traced back to the Semitic stock. The spirit of messianism is its spirit, its original matter. The hallucination of another world and of a messianic solution which flees from the present is the need for escape of the failures, of the pariahs, of the accursed, of those who are powerless to assume and to will the reality which is theirs; it is the inadequacy of the persons who suffer, whose being is desire, passion, and despair. Gradually, persistently hatched within the Semitic race and rendered still bolder and more necessary all the more as the political fortune of the “chosen people” stumbled, this obscure reality developed from the dregs of the Empire and was the myth for the great revolt of the slaves, for the frenzied wave with which pagan Rome was overwhelmed.
And then, going beyond the Catholic order, pushing it aside, there was the spread of the millennial madness; and when the promise and the wait proved to be deceptive, and the goal receded to infinity, while need and desperation persisted and increased, what remained was a becoming without end, a pure tension, a gravitation to emptiness.
The flight from this world and the never-ending withdrawing of the other—this anxiety towards the world which is the secret of modern life, and which shouts desperately that it is of value to escape the consciousness of oneself—is likewise the deeper secret of Christianity after the failure of its eschatology; it is the immanent curse which it carries within itself and which spread to the peoples who converted to it, betraying the Olympian, classical, and Aryan ideal.
Combining the first theme which we saw rising from the messianic failure—the theme of the ecclesia which has become the law of social interdependence—with that second theme which has the same origin—combining those two themes we find ourselves facing the very law which dominates the whole culture and society of today: on the lower plane, the industrialist fever, means which become ends, mechanisation, the system of economic and materialist determinisms for which science beats the rhythm—linked with social climbing, with the race for success of men who do not live, but are lived—and, ultimately, the newest, already mentioned, myths of “infinite progress” on the basis of “social service” and of work having become an end-in-itself and universal duty; on the higher plane, the whole of the “Faustian”, evolutionistic, Bergsonian doctrines which we mentioned above, and the basis of socialised truth, of the “becoming of knowledge”, of universalism, and of the impersonalism of the philosophies.
In the last analysis, all this confirms and testifies to one thing, the same thing: the decadence in the West of value and of individuality—of that value which it chatters about with so much impudence. Only lives which are not self-sufficient and which wander from themselves quest, in fact, for the “other”: they need society, a system of mutual supports, a collective law; and they aim—since they are not being, they are search, dissatisfaction, dependence upon the future—they are becoming. They are terrified by man’s natural environment: by silence, by solitude, by idle time, by the eternal—and they act, they toss restlessly, they turn here and there unceasingly, dealing with everything except with themselves. They act to feel themselves, to prove that they are: demanding of action and all that they do its own confirmation; actually, they do not act, but are obsessed by action.
This is the meaning of the activism of the moderns. It is not action, but the fever of action. It is the mad race of those who have been pushed away from the axis of the wheel and whose race is all the more insane the greater their distance from the centre. That race, that “velocity”, just as the tyranny of social law in the economic, industrial, cultural, and scientific domain, is entirely lethal, in the whole order of things which they have created, once the individual wandered from himself; once, with the sense of centrality, of stability, and of inner sufficiency, he also lost the sense of what really constitutes the value of individuality. The twilight of the West follows unquestionably from the twilight of the individual as such.
We have said at the beginning that, today, people no longer know what action is. This is the truth. Those who would skim through some traditional Indian doctrines, with which, besides, correspondences could be found also in our classical West, would certainly be surprised at the affirmation that everything which is movement, activity, becoming, and change is characteristic of the passive and feminine principle (shakti), whereas immobility is to be referred to the positive, masculine, solar principle (shiva). And, in the same way, they would not quite realise the meaning of the other affirmation, contained in a relatively more well-known text—the Bhagavad-Gita; (IV, 18)—according to which the wise man distinguishes non-action from action and action from non-action.
What is expressed in this is neither quietism nor contemplative nirvana in any way: what is expressed, on the contrary, is the consciousness of what activity really is. The concept is rigorously identical to the one which Aristotle expressed in speaking of “unmoved movers”. The one who is the cause of and in control of movement is not moved himself. He arouses, controls, and directs movement: he causes the act, but does not act, that is to say, he is not led by, not involved in action; he is not action, but rather an impassible, very calm superiority, which action comes from and depends upon. This is why his potent and invisible control can be called, with Lao Tzu, an “action-without-action” (wei-wu-wei). His opposite, the one who acts is acted on: the one who is seized by action, the one who is drunk with action, with “will”, with “force” in élan, in passion, in enthusiasm, is already an instrument; he does not act but is subject to action; thus he appears—to these doctrines—as a feminine principle and a negation with respect to the higher, transcendent, motionless, and Olympian mode of the Masters of motion.
Well, what is exalted today in the West is precisely this negative, decentred, lower, action: a drunken spontaneity which is unable to control itself and to create a centre for itself, whose law is outside itself and whose secret workings is a will to dissipate and to keep up a whirl of activity. Thus, they call positive and masculine, and exalt, what is completely negative and feminine. In their blindness, contemporary men of the West do not see anything else and imagine that inner action, the secret force which does not create machines, banks, and companies, but men and gods, is not action, but renunciation, abstraction, a waste of time. “Power”, thus, is reduced to a synonym for violence; will, to be identified more and more only with the type of the animal and “muscle man”, with the one assumes an antithesis, a resistance (within or outside himself) against which he strains and wears himself out. Tension, struggle, effort, aspiration—nisus, struggle—these are the watchwords of this activism.
But all this is not action.
Action is something elementary. It is something, simple, terrible, irresistible. There is no room in it for passion, nor for its antithesis, nor for “effort”, and even less for “humanity” and “feeling”. It starts from absolute centres without hatred, without craving and without pity; from a calmness which terrifies and immobilises; from a level of “creative indifference” superior to every opposition.
It is command. It is the fearsome power of the Caesars. It is the concealed and silent action of the Emperors of the Far East, fatal as that of the forces of nature, whose “purity” it shares. It is what can still be felt breaking out of the magic immobility of some Egyptian portraits, of the fascinating slowness of certain ritual gestures. It is the naked, new Machiavellianism, in all its hardness and its inhumanity. It is what bursts out when—as in the high feudal Middles Ages—man becomes alone again, man next to man or man against man, cloaked in his strength or in his weakness, without escape, without law. It is what shines when—in heroism, in sacrifice, or in great sacrilege—a force stronger than good and evil, mercy, fear, and happiness arises in man, a force before which the eye no longer stares either at itself or at others and in which arises the primordial power of circumstances and persons.
What is called in physics dissipation of energy by friction—this is what, instead, Europeans call “heroism”, in which, like children, they pride themselves. The torment of torn up souls, the pathos of naive weaklings powerless to control themselves, to impose upon themselves silence and absolute will, all this is exalted in the West in the name of the “tragic sense of life” since unbalance and dualism, “guilty conscience”, the sense of “sin”, of man as enemy of himself and angry against himself, has grown in the soul.
And complication arose from complication: action disappeared behind pleasure of feeling and of torment. Resistance, that is powerlessness, became a condition for the sense of self, hence the need for effort, the romantic exaltation of violence, the running in circles, the yearning, the superstition that the value is not in arriving, but in the running; not mastery and control, but painful, struggling, conquest; not precise, bare, fulfilled realisation, but “unending task”. Christianity, denying classical harmony, the sense of autarchy and of absolute limit, the sense of Olympian superiority, of Dorian simplicity, of active, positive, hard, immanent force has prepared the ground for a world of the obsessed and the shackled.
Everyone in the West knows of chains, blood and darkness, but nothing of freedom. The shout of freedom, which is heard ringing out everywhere, is only a shout of prisoners, a howling of chained wild animals, a voice which comes from below. Modern “voluntarism” is not will, but a desperate rhetoric which is substituted for will, a mental effusion to convince oneself of a will which one does not have. Identical obsessive signs, symptoms of worry, assertions which only testify to the lack of and the need for what they assert, are all modern exaltations of “power” and of “individuality”: desperate aspects of European decadence under a hard law of “seriousness” and “duty”.
For everything in the West is, in a sinister way, serious, tragic, unfree. Everything betrays a sense of deep coercion which, in some, manifests as rigourism, prohibitionism, imperativism, moralist or rationalist intolerance, in others as romantic impulse and human pathos. Crystalline clarity, agile simplicity, detached in a spiritual joy of free play, irony, and aristocratic superiority, all this exists and is conceived of only as a myth. In any thing there reigns instead a sense of identification, of collapse, of greedy interest. It is the world of Michelangelian prisons which still echoes in humanity, embellished with “heroism” and “cosmicity”, with a Beethoven and a Wagner. And, how much seriousness and romantic passion there is in the Nietzschean exaltation of the “gay science”, in the very laugh of Zarathustra! The curse of the crucified god has spread everywhere, has wrapped the whole of Europe, a block of metal and blood, in its deep pain.
This “human” sense of life, so typical of the modern West, confirms its plebeian and lower aspect. That which some were ashamed of—“man”—others took pride in. The ancient world elevated the individual to God, made every effort to unbind him from passion, to adapt him to transcendence, with the free air of the heights in contemplation as well as in action; it knew traditions of non-human heroes and of men of divine blood. The Semiticised world not only deprived the “creature” of the divine, but finally reduced God to a human figure. Bringing back to life the demonism of a Pelasgian substratum, it substituted the pure Olympian regions, vertiginous in their radiant perfection, with the terrorist viewpoints of its apocalypses, of hells, of predestination, of perdition. God was no longer the aristocratic god of the Romans, the god of the patricians, to whom one prays standing, in the light of the fire, head up high and which is carried at the head of the victorious legions; it was no longer Donar-Thor, the exterminator of Thrym and Hymir, the “strongest of the strong”, the “irresistible”, the master of the “refuge against terror”, whose fearsome weapon, the hammer Mjolnir, in a representation corresponding to the Vajra of Shiva—of the same lightning force which hallowed the divine kings of the Aryans; it was no longer Odin-Wotan, the one who brings victory, the Eagle, the host of the heroes who, in death on the battlefield, celebrated the highest cult of sacrifice and were transformed into the phalanx of immortals—but become, to say it with Rougier, the patron of the wretched and of the desperate, the holocaust, the comforter of the afflicted who is implored with tears of ecstasy in the annihilation of oneself. Therefore, the spirit was materialised, the soul softened. Only what is passion, feeling, effort, was then experienced. Not only the supra-mundane sense for Olympian spirituality, but also for virile Nordic-Roman dignity disappeared little by little and, in a general degeneration, a contorted world of tragedy, of suffering and of seriousness followed: the “human” world instead of the epic and Dorian world.
“Humanism”: in all this—a dirty fog exhaled from the earth, which has prevented the vision of the heavens—some take pride as being the “worth” of the West. It spreads effectively in each of its forms, it is at the root of old and new romanticisms, of all sentimentalisms, of all modern enthusiasms of action and will.
And we shout: it is necessary to purify oneself from it! The task is just as hard as the eradication of the other described elements which canonise European decadence.
What is “human” must be overcome, absolutely, without mercy. But, to come to this, it is necessary that individuals attain the feeling of inner liberation. Let it be known that this cannot be the object of thirst, it cannot be the object of a greedy quest by the shackled who, as such, have no right to it. Either it is, as a simple matter which is neither solemnly proclaimed nor theorised about, which is barely noticed, as a natural, elementary, and inalienable presence of the elect—or it is not. The more it is sought and desired, the more it is elusive, because necessity is fatal to it.
It is necessary to regain consciousness: as the one who, realising that he is running, gasping for breath in the scorching heat, would say to himself: "So? What if I walked more slowly?" —and, walking more slowly : "So? What if I stopped walking?"—and, ceasing to walk : "So? What if I lie down on the ground, here, in the shade?"—and, lying on the ground, he would feel an infinite rest and recall with amazement his race, his old haste; likewise, the soul of the Moderns, which does not know rest, silence, nor a breathing space, must be gradually appeased. It is necessary to bring men back to themselves and to force them to find in themselves their purpose and their value. They should learn again to feel alone, without help and without law, until they awaken to the act of absolute command and of absolute obedience. So that, looking coldly around, they realise that there is nowhere to go, that there is nothing to ask for, nothing to hope for, nothing to fear. They should breathe again, released from the weight, and acknowledge the misery and the weakness of both love and hate. They should stand up as simple, pure, and yet no longer human things.
In the superiority of aristocrats, in the high estate of souls in control of themselves, they mock the turbid avidity with which slaves rush at the banquet of life. They retreat into an active indifference capable of everything in accordance with a renewed innocence. The power of putting their own life on the line and to stare, smiling, into the abysses, of giving without passion, of acting while placing on the same level both victory and defeat, success and failure—it should spring from that superiority which disposes of oneself like a thing and in which the experience of a principle stronger than every death and every corruption truly awakens. The sense of rigidity, of effort, of the brute “you must!” no longer exists except as the memory of an absurd mania. Acknowledging the illusion of all “evolutions”, of all “providential plans”, of all “historicisms”, acknowledging the illusion of all the “goals” and the “reasons” as leashes necessary only for those who, still children, don’t know how to walk on their own, men will cease to be moved, but will move. If their “I” becomes the centre, action in its primitive, elementary, absolute sense will spring up again from them, men and no longer ghosts.
And, here, then, if the poisonous fog of the “human” world is dispelled, besides intellectualism, besides psychology, besides the passion and the superstition of men, nature in its free and essential state will reappear. Everything around will become free again, everything will breathe, at last. The great disease of romantic man, faith, will now be overcome through experience. To man, thus reintegrated, new eyes, new ears, new wings, will really and spontaneously open. The supernatural will cease to be the pallid escape of pallid souls. It will be reality and will become one and the same thing with the natural. In the pure, calm, powerful, and incorporeal light of a revived Dorian simplicity, spirit and form, interiority and exteriority, reality and supra-reality, will become one and the same thing in the balance of both members, of which none is higher, none is lower than the other. It will thus be an epoch of transcendent realism: in the forces of those who believe they are men and do not know they are sleeping gods, the forces of the elements will awaken, up to the thrills of absolute illumination and of absolute revival.
And then the other great human constraint, that of the faceless social amalgam, will also be overcome. If the law which has made them parts of machines, stones linked together in the impersonal cement of collective despotism and humanitarian ideologies is swept aside, individuals will each be the beginning and end in himself; each closed in himself like worlds, rocks, peaks, clad only in their strength and in their weakness. To everyone a place—a combat post—a quality, a life, a dignity, a distinct force, matchless, irreducible. Their moral will be: you must assert yourself over the need to “communicate” and to “understand each other”, over the ignominy of the pathos of fraternity, over the sensual delight of loving and feeling loved, of feeling equal and close—assert yourself over that subtle force of corruption which dissolves and weakens the sense of aristocracy. Incommunicability will be desired, in the name of an absolute and virile respect: valleys and peaks, stronger forces and weaker forces, one beside the other or one against the other, loyally acknowledged, in the discipline of the spirit inwardly on fire but externally stiff and hard as steel, containing the immensity of the infinite to a magnificent extent: militarily, as in a warlike enterprise, as on the battlefield. Precise relationships, order, cosmos, hierarchy. Rigorously specific groups which organise, without intermediaries and without attenuations, through actions in which some will luminously rise, others will irremediably fall. Above, solar and haughty beings, a race of Masters with a "long, distant, fearsome look", which does not take, but gives light and power superabundantly, and, in a resolute conduct of life, aspires to a more and more extraordinary intensity, yet always balanced in its supernatural calm.
Then the romanticist myth, that of “man” and of the “human”, will vanish and we will approach the threshold of great liberation. In a world of limpidity, the words of Nietzsche, the precursor, will then be able to ring out in a transcendent sense: "How beautiful, how pure, these free forces, no longer stained by spirit!"