Evola - Science vs Wisdom

Julius Evola

Science vs Wisdom

As power, depersonalised and socialised, has become gold or capital, so likewise has wisdom, depersonalised and socialised, become “concept” or “rationality”. And this is the second root of the European sickness.

Both philosophy and Western positive science are, in their essence, fundamentally socialistic, democratic, and anti-hierarchical. They propose as “true” only that which must be universally recognised, which anyone can assent to, whatever life he allows himself to live, provided only that he has a certain education. And so, as in the criterion of the “majority” of political democratism, they presuppose equality, and, under the criterion of quantity, they dominate everything in this field that could be quality, the irreducibility of quality, or the distinction of quality.

And it is useless to proclaim individualistic, or even relativistic, doctrines, if the very manner in which one does so, which is the conceptual manner of secular philosophy, shows that one has adhered to the democratic, impersonal, collectivist presuppositions which lie at the base of that very philosophy. The way is altogether different—it would be necessary to begin by contesting those very presuppositions, if we do not want to fall again into the foolishness of an imperialism which, instead of imposing itself through that hierarchy from above, as has been said, appeals to popular recognition for its own justification. And here one will begin to realise the nature of one's enemy, and how frighteningly “culture” itself, not only the “society” of our contemporaries, is a democratism in act—and one begins to see what renunciation will be necessary in order to regain health.

Just as gold is a reality which has become indifferent to the nature of the individuals who own it, so is the “knowledge” of contemporary men. Let us put it better: following a will to equality, an anti-hierarchical intolerance, and, therefore, a socialistic prejudice, the knowledge of Europeans had necessarily to come to something, on which the effect of individual differences and of the condition—through knowledge—of an active individual differentiation, is reduced to a minimum; thus, it referred, either to physical experience, more or less equal for all men insofar as they are animals (positive science), or to the world of abstraction and of verbal conventions (philosophy and rationalism).

The need for the socialisation of knowledge has led fatally to its abstraction, and therefore created an insuperable hiatus between knowledge itself and life, between knowledge and being, beyond that with which it can be the quality of phenomena and “metaphysical reality”. Thus, in the West, thought, when it is not reduced to a tool for the more or less conventional transcription of the most exterior, fully quantitative, and uniform aspect of material things, is the creator only of unreality, “reified” words, and empty logical schematisms, or becomes an intellectual sport, all the more ridiculous for the good faith in which it is practiced.

Hence the whole unreality of the modern spirit: split off from life, man today is almost a shadow that bustles about among schemes and programs and intellectual superstructures, powerless to dominate reality and life itself, while making himself more and more dependent upon a science which piles abstractions onto abstractions, slave as it is to phenomenal laws ascertained but not understood by it, and exhausting himself in mechanical exteriority, without any possibilities for the inner being of man.

We certainly cannot get to the heart of this question here, due to the limits of the present exposition. It should not be thought, however, that it is unrelated to the problem of Empire: for us the problem of Empire is the problem par excellence, with respect to which more specialised problems cannot be separated and made into domains of their own. Particularism, the common indifference of the various forms of human activity—here politics, there science, here practice, there religion, and so on—is, as we have already stated, itself an aspect of European decline, and an unequivocal symptom of Europe's inorganicity.

The foundation of the imperial hierarchy must be based on knowledge: "The wise should govern", Plato already said—and this is a central, absolute, definitive point in every rational order of things. But nothing would be more ridiculous than to associate this knowledge to some technical competence, positive science, or philosophising speculation: instead, it coincides with what, from the outset, we have called Wisdom, a traditional expression used by both the classical West and the East. Wisdom is as much aristocratic, individual, real, substantial, organic, and qualitative, as the knowledge of the “civilised” is democratic, social, universalistic, abstract, levelling, and quantitative. Here again, there are two worlds, two eyes, two different visions to pose one against the other without any reduction.

To know, according to Wisdom, does not mean “to think”, but to be the thing known: to live it, to realise it inwardly. One does not really know a thing unless one can actively transform one's consciousness into it. Therefore, only what ensues from direct individual experience will count as knowledge. And, this is just the opposite of the modern mentality, for which, whatever appears immediately to the individual is called “phenomenon”, or “subjective”, and so it posits some other thing behind it as “true reality”, which is simply imagined or presumed (the “thing in itself” of the philosophers, the “Absolute” of vulgar religion, “matter”, “ether”, or “energy” of science). Wisdom is an absolute positivism which regards only what can be grasped by direct experience as real, and everything else as unreal, abstract, and illusory.

It will be objected that, from this point of view, all knowledge would be reduced to the finite and contingent things presented by the physical senses—and, indeed, this is the way things are, and how they must remain, for the great mass of men, who can only truly claim to know this finiteness and contingency, which remains such even after all the scientific pseudo-explanations. However, beyond this, we maintain the possibility of forms of experience different from the sensory forms of the common man, not “given”, not “normal”, which can be reached by means of certain active processes of inner transformation. The peculiarity of such transcendent experiences (of which the “supraworld”, the “field of the beings”, the seven heavens, the spheres of fire, and so on, were only different representations of humanity linked to Tradition) is to be direct, concrete, and individual, as much as sensory experience itself, and yet to see reality, beyond the contingent, spatio-temporal aspect characteristic of everything that is sensory. Aspects that science also tries to transcend, on condition of even transcending everything which is truly knowledge—vision, individual and living evidence—in favour of mere probabilities, incomprehensible “uniformities”, and abstract explanatory principles.

This would be the sense in which we speak of “metaphysical” reality. It must be borne in mind, however, that we speak of experience, and only of experience; that, from the traditional point of view, there is not a finite reality and an absolute reality, but a finite manner and an absolute manner of experiencing reality, a finite eye and an absolute eye; that the whole so-called “problem of knowledge” is enclosed within the interiority of every being, and does not depend on “culture”, but on his capacity for freeing himself from the human, i.e., from the sensory, the rational, and the emotional, and of identifying himself with one or another form of “metaphysical” experience, along with a hierarchy which, at its limit, culminates in a state of perfect identity, spiritual vision, full suprasensual and suprarational accomplishment of the thing in the I and of the I in the thing, which realises a state of power and, simultaneously, a state of absolute evidence with respect to the thing itself, in which one no longer asks oneself anything, and one discovers that it is just as unnecessary to reason as it is to speak.

This, in broad outline, is the meaning of that Wisdom which constitutes the foundation of “metaphysical” teaching and of spiritual science, whose rite of initiation originally produced the transformation of consciousness necessary for “knowledge” and metaphysical “vision”, and whose tradition has maintained itself in the West, in subterranean form, even after the Semiticisation and decline of its ancient civilisation.

The point to be borne in mind is that sacred and sapiential science, since it is, unlike secular science, not a “knowing”, but a being, cannot be taught by books or universities or transmitted by words: to gain it, it is necessary to be transformed, to transcend common life for a superior life. It measures exactly the quality and reality of individual life, of which it becomes an inviolable privilege and an organic part, rather than being a concept, or a notion, which can be put into one's head like something into a sack, without at the same time having to be transformed or to budge in the slightest in regard to what one is.

Hence the natural aristocracy of Wisdom; hence its resolute non-popularisation, non-communicability. Another taboo of Europeans is precisely communicability: they think, more or less, that intelligible being and speakable being are the same thing. They do not realise that, although this may make sense with respect to intellectual abstractions and conventions at the basis of experiences—those characteristic of the physical senses—presumed to be roughly the same for everybody, nevertheless, where this uniformity ceases, where a qualitative differentiation is reasserted, discursive communicativity can no longer be a criterion.

Since it is based precisely on the evidence of actual experiences beyond the experience of common men, Wisdom leaves open just one road: to try to bring oneself to the same level, by means of a free and creative act, as the one who sets out the teaching, so as by knowing from experience what the other knows, or says with one word, what otherwise will remain only words. To the socialisation, depersonalisation and conceptualisation of knowledge, to the democratic inclination to “popularise”, to weaken the superior for the purposes of the inferior, so that the majority can participate in knowledge without a change of mind or ceasing to be inferior—we oppose, without compromise, the opposite aristocratic attitude. There must exist hierarchies in knowledge itself; there must exist many truths separated from each other by deep, immense, impassable gulfs, corresponding exactly to the many qualities of life and power, to the many distinct individualities: there must exist an aristocracy of knowledge, and “universality”, understood in a communicative, democratic, and uniform manner, must cease to be a criterion. We must not descend to them; they are obliged to raise themselves to us, by dignifying themselves, by ascending for real—according to their possibilities, along the hierarchy of beings—if they want to partake of higher and metaphysical forms, which are the points of reference to themselves and to the lower and physical forms.

From this, freedom also ensues, the open field, the spirit which gives Wisdom. In socialised knowledge there is always instead a hidden "you must", a hidden, intolerant, moralistic constraint: “scientific” or “philosophical” truth demands to be recognised by everyone as “the truth”; in the face of it, one is not allowed to take a different stand. The expression of a collective despotism, it aims to reign despotically over all, making all equal with respect to it—and it is precisely on the basis of this will that it has organised, built its arms, its ordeals, its method, its violence. In Wisdom, on the contrary, the individual is dissolved, restored, returned to himself: he has his truth, which expresses his life exactly and profoundly, which is a special way of experiencing and expressing reality, which does not contradict or exclude other, different ways, which are equally possible in the differentiation on which the hierarchy of Wisdom is based.

This discussion will suffice as far as the second root of the European sickness and its corrective are concerned; already, in this brief outline, the principle that "the wise must govern" is justified. In the order of Wisdom, the hierarchy of knowledge is coextensive with the hierarchy of strength and superiority of individuals. Knowledge is being, and being is ability and power, so that it attracts spontaneously to itself the dignity of Imperium. The true foundation of the primordial concept, rooted in the Tradition of “divine royalty”, was nothing other than this.

Opposed to this, let us repeat, there is the whole of Europe, with its age-old inheritance and organisation: there is, as we said, the reign of professors, “intellectuals", glasses without eyes, the “cultured”, academic, university world, which, in claiming for itself the privilege of knowledge and spirit, testifies only to the extent which they have been able to push the decline and abstraction of modern man.