Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul is an elegant and instructive grieving for a dead, but much revered, Tradition.
      It is also the cerebral thrashings of one who would like to deny that death but who seeks meaning and survival through the challenges of riding the tiger, the treacherous living of a Tradition that is a fading if defiant memory in a hostile world.
      First published in 1961, Evola’s work remains highly evocative of the spiritual and related failings of the post-Enlightenment West and the modernity with which it has killed off Tradition.
      This review will suggest, however, that some have come to understand the death of Western Tradition better than may have been possible in Evola’s time and that, contrary to Evola’s judgement, some traditions have managed modernity with less self-harm than has the Abrahamaic world of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
      Evola captures the essence of his lament in words directed to the myth of Marxism, but that may equally have been addressed to all modern myths, including that of the free market:
      “.....wherever this myth is affirmed through the control of movements, organisations and people, it is linked to a corresponding education, a sort of psychic lobotomy intended methodically to neutralise and infantilise any form of higher sensibility and interest, every way of thought that is not in terms of the economy and socio-economic processes..... Oblivious to the fact that they are living on a volcano materially, politically and in relation to the struggle for world domination, Westerners enjoy a technological euphoria, encouraged by the prospects of the ‘second industrial revolution’ of the atomic revolution.”
      While the atomic revolution has been overshadowed by other revolutions involving information, genetic and nano technologies, these have compounded and deepened the modern tragedy that preoccupies Evola.
      He captures elusive characteristics of contemporary life with incisive language like the following:
      “Given that the speed factor has an essential role in the modern, technical mastery of distances, a passing allusion could be made to the value of the experience of speed itself.”
      And:
      “None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge: rather it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense.”
      Evola displays a comprehensive and acute understanding of the many false qualities in his world. He is, however, less authoritative when he seeks to articulate the alternative values of his Tradition.
      His lament about the loss of any meaningful transcendent authority is, however, invaluable in highlighting the peculiar nature of the European Tradition and the way in which the Enlightenment left it fragmented and stripped of qualities that had been fundamental to its identity, integrity and spirituality.
      John Gray, Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, explored in his 2004 Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions the way in which Christendom had been duped into transferring faith in a God and a Utopia in the next world to faith in science and progress and a Utopia in this world. Ride the Tiger details the pain inflicted on some noble souls by this fraud.
      It is possible, however, to feel that Evola was mistaken when he argued that people in the East were equally defrauded. David Hall and Roger Ames argued in their 1998 Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture that the qualities of self, truth and transcendence as known in the West are not present in Chinese civilisation.
      This exposition, together with some familiarity with Chinese and East Asian cultures, can lead one to the sense that Evola’s lament is essentially of European culture. Perversely, this is regardless of the devastation European follies may have inflicted on others.
      The replacement of self, truth and transcendence (in crude short-hand) with community, dao and immanence in East Asia means that much of Evola’s suffering and the philosophical exploration of it seems valid only in the context of European spiritual and intellectual history.
      Of course, many of the crimes of modernity are universal but other traditions have spiritual reserves unfamiliar to the West.
      In East Asia, Evola’s Aristocrat of the Soul becomes the Scholar of the Way, not so much a seeker of the Way but one familiar as a result of dedicated study with the harsh demands made on humankind by frailties of character and the rigours of nature.
      This Scholar is also different in kind from the bourgeois intellectuals Evola mocks and is usually tested by the trials of community administrative responsibility and political experience.
      This is not meant to argue the superiority of the Confucian over the Christian tradition, although such a debate is long overdue. Attention draws to the fact that much of Evola’s language and sentiment is the product of the European experience in moving the focus of its faith from obedience and loyalty to a transcendent authority, to the illusion that humanity can master this world with tricks like science and progress.
      Evola succeeds brilliantly, however, in raising questions about the nature of “knowledge in the true sense.” His integrity in adhering to a sense of value that has been lost is beyond question, even if the above is designed to question whether he did not tie himself too much to a European Tradition that is unaccustomed to self-criticism and that became hostile to genuinely exploring alternative orders of value.
      Simply put, Evola shows, unintentionally but with passion, why European Tradition may not be able to match East Asia in riding the tiger in today’s world. It lacks a spirituality for today’s mundane world, tempered by the harsh realism of Daoism and the practical disciplines of Confucianism.

– Reviewed by Reg Little in New Dawn No. 121