Tag: Giambattista Vico
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40:58 / 148 words
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Beginning in August of 1999, I gave a series of eight lectures on “The Pursuit of Happiness: Philosophies East and West,” dealing with different conceptions of the good life. (more…)
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Editor’s Note:
In this text, Evola distinguishes the race of the body (biological race–race as such, in my opinion), the race of the soul (which I would call non-hereditary character types, shaped by culture, ideas, and education), and race of the spirit, which has to do with “vertical,” “superhistorical” heredity, i.e., man’s alleged descent from superhuman or divine beings. It is unfortunate that Evola speaks disparagingly of evolution as a “myth” — only to replace it with genuine myths (more…)
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With the likes of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline he translated for an Italian readership, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Julius Evola (1898–1974) stands as one of the notably incisive mid-Twentieth Century critics of modernity. Like Spengler and Ortega, Evola understood himself to owe a formative debt to Friedrich Nietzsche, but more forcefully than Spengler or Ortega, Evola saw the limitations – the contradictions and inconsistencies–in Nietzsche’s thinking.
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Oswald Spengler was born in Blankenburg (Harz) in central Germany in 1880, the eldest of four children, and the only boy. His mother’s side of the family was quite artistically bent. His father, who had originally been a mining technician and came from a long line of mineworkers, was an official in the German postal bureaucracy, and he provided his family with a simple but comfortable middle class home.