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Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul Hardcover – September 8, 2003

4.0 out of 5 stars 28 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Inner Traditions; 1 edition (September 15, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0892811250
  • ISBN-13: 978-0892811250
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #92,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Format: Hardcover
Julius Evola wrote this book (in the 1950's) for people like himself (although younger and less experienced): marginalized radical-right intellectuals (with a strong spiritual bent) trying to maintain their dignity in a world where they exert little to no influence over their contemporaries, which he refers to throughout the book as the "differentiated" and "integrated" type of man--the "aristocrats of the soul" referred to in the subtitle. Topics of his critique range from (to name a few) nihilism, youth sub-cultures, existentialism, science, the arts, sexuality, and death. Evola's basic premise is that Western civilization is disintegrating and beyond the point of saving (or being worth saving), and so it is the task of the individual who is disgusted by his surroundings to make the best of the situation by "riding the tiger"--a non-resisting controlled indulgence--for the time being, and yet not falling prey to the delusions offered by the surrounding world.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
_Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul_ by Italian counter-revolutionary theorist Baron Julius Evola is a manual for a certain spiritual type of man - the man of Tradition - faced with the nihilistic reality of the modern world. Tradition is characterized by a recognition of transcendence and hierarchy as opposed to the mass levelling which has taken place in modernity - at root in nihilism. Evola, a gloomy figure on the marginalized radical right in postwar Italy, writes of the modern world as witnessing a new dark age, the Kali Yuga of Indian tradition (as noted by the father of Traditionalism, Rene Guenon). In the philosophy of Traditionalism, the world is said to have fallen from a past Golden Age (as witnessed to by the ancient Greeks, Hesiod, and the Hindus) and approaching the end of a cycle has entered the Kali Yuga, an era characterized by dissolution. Kali is a dark goddess of sexuality and orgiastic rites in Hindu mythology - said to be asleep in previous eras but in the Kali Yuga said to be wide awake. The modern age is characterized by the "death of God" (the end of the transcendent), the beginning of European nihilism as explained by Nietzsche. In such a world, the spiritual type Evola writes for is totally alienated. Topics covered in this book include Nietzsche's philosophy and the world in which "God is dead", the "lost youth" and the postwar generation of Beatniks, the dead end of existentialist philosophies, Heideggerianism and Husserlian phenomenologies, the new physics and scientism, moral decline, an excursus on drugs, the failure of modern art, sexuality and marriage, the "new religiosity, and death.Read more ›
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Format: Hardcover
This book is extraordinary. Evola eviscerates the various -isms and -ologies of the modern world, revealing the crushing spiritual vacuum at the core of modern life. While discussing the failings of the modern intellectual or scientist, he is always careful to explain how traditional thinkers walked that conceptual path before, emerging with treasures and insights instead of ennui and nihilism. Of particular interest is his hyper-rational onslaught on the claims of modern science, which he effortlessly reveals for the pointless, vapid exercise it is. As I understand it, Evola trained as an engineer and like his fellow Italian Vilfredo Pareto, applies an engineer's incisive thought to the problem of Kali-Yuga modernity for the differentiated man. At the same time he is brutally candid about modern western spiritual forms such as Christianity, an effeminate parody of Traditional spirituality aimed at the lower types in our ailing epoch.

What I like about this book is the fact it is shot through with heroism and hope, unlike Men Among the Ruins or Revolt Against the Modern World which, while brilliant, are rather despairing in character. While revealing modernist assumptions and values for the dross they are, Evola somehow retains an essential optimism in the face of our blighted age. This is not the 'traditional' conservatism of the Anglo-American world: this is a full-scale intellectual assault on post-Renaissance Western civilization.

Highly recommended.
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Format: Hardcover
There's little point in reviewing this, or any book, by Evola, as they are pretty well self-recommending to the `differentiated individual' [the man who stands out from the crowd] that he is concerned with. If you don't fall into that rarefied class, then this book is not for you, and if that sound like 'elitism', then so be it; facts are facts, and this book would not please you anyway.

That said, even some who might be expected to welcome this translation of a relatively recent [Evola in the 70s!] work might not be pleased either. This book represents an even greater movement away from practical politics (his famous post-war `apoliteia' which some seem to think makes him "the godfather of neo-Nazi terror") than the previous Men among the Ruins. And Evola continues to take his own stands, regardless of what professors or publicists may think as "of the Right." Enthusiasts for the "French New Right" or the "Conservative Revolution" may be nonplussed to find their hero Heidegger beaten soundly in the chapter on Existentialism [which can even be recommended to the non-differentiated soul who wants a relatively short analysis and dismissal of that tiresome movement], while Sartre, that dirty French commie, gets some qualified praise for his views on freedom.

On the other hand, the relatively illiterate American `conservatives' who know nothing of Heidegger but worry about eugenics and `the white race dying out' would do well to contemplate Evola's views on marriage and reproduction. No great race, he points out, has conquered and ruled through force of numbers, but only by the will of its elites (the British Raj, for example).
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