Eschatological Being: The Dissimilation of Beginning

[Originally published in French as “L’Être eschatologique: La dissimilation du commencement” in Perspectives Libres 33-34: Le sacré (Cercle Aristote, 2024-2025)].

How can one truly, meaningfully, fruitfully live while knowing that the culture, the civilization, the life-world around them, will end, or already is coming to an end? This question might sound “extremist” (although, indeed, etymologically it is), but the motivation and apperception underpinning it are by all means natural and commonplace. After all, the human being is essentially characterized by finitude, by mortality, which is to say that one of the only absolute and universal certainties facing all humans is the end of their life, death. If, as more than a few thinkers have done, we treat cultures and civilizations as living beings connected to their human bearers, then they, too, can be said to be born, mature, undergo different experiences, age, and die. Alas, what is decisively characteristic and peculiar of human beings is the fact that they know that they will inevitably die, and can take such into the fold of thinking, yet they prefer to live in constant avoidance of the very thought, as if their lives could only happen despite their deaths. Very few take their own end, or the end of the world as they know it, such as the decline and end of their civilization, into consistent consideration as something challenging the meaning of their life. Instead, the norm is to hide from mortality — or, in contemporary society, to leave mortality to the sentimental reflections of pensioners, to the survivors of events made into documentaries, or to (bio)political instrumentalization whenever framing a conflict or pandemic comes in handy. Cultures, civilizations, and their embodiments in particular states seem to partake in this all too human evasion with very few exceptions. As for an extreme but all too real and relevant example, it is too quickly forgotten in our days that just several decades ago (far less than the world’s lowest average lifespan), the ideologists of Western Modernity and the strategists of American unipolarity proclaimed and celebrated the “End of History.”

The allergy to thinking about the end, whether of one person or of a whole culture or civilization at large, is one of the fundamental, qualitative, paradigmatic differences between modern man and his ancestors for most of what we call history, not to mention “prehistory.” In premodern, traditional societies, death and the end were, to say the least, factored into life. The cosmogonies and cosmologies in which the traditional human being heard their world announced and the myths they lived by were bound up with eschatologies, and the cosmogony itself was often effected with the death of a primordial being or the end of a different arrangement of the (non-)world. The essence of the living being, their soul or spirit, was bound up with death as a matter of reincarnation, salvation, or liberation. What we are accustomed to call the “economy” in traditional society included the death of beings and things, such as through sacrifice, ritual circulation, or seeing off belongings alongside the dead. Some people who died might not even be considered full humans insofar as they had not undergone the proper initiations. At the origins of Western thought, when the immortality of the soul became a philosophical question, Socrates felt the need to say the same thing twice on his deathbed: “I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death… In fact, those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men.”1 All of this is to say that in the sacred, pulsating cosmos of traditional cultures, full of Divinities, spirits, and many other beings and forces among which the human was definitionally in the middle, the end was not only something “natural,” but a telos, something that was lived up to and towards, and something that was lived with. We would be tragicomically kidding ourselves if we believed that this is some hard-earned result of “critical historical consciousness” or the “comparative study of civilizations,” for it is the default fact already presented in the very beginning everywhere: such as in the primeval drama of the death of one being necessitated for another to live (such as hunting an animal or harvesting a plant), or in the primordial myths at the origin of human communities, traditions, worldviews, and decisions. This primordial and ultimate “condition,” that is the immanence and even imminence of the end, is remembered rather than discovered.

Forgetting and disregarding the end is a very recent development that took hold in the West, symbolically in the direction where the Sun declines and sets. Less than a few hundred years ago, in the wake of a philosophical trajectory in the minds of a few who came to the conclusion that the material world is quite fine and logical and just needs a bit of enlightenment, the end became just as unnecessary as did scholastic and logical proofs of the existence of a Divine watch-setter — after all, the clock still ticks on, and the clock can be made even better, the watch even more refined, and with it the hitherto primitive man who wears it, and the profit he can make by selling it, and the processes he can better calculate with it, etc. In the paradigm of Western Modernity, death became simply a “nothing,” a disappearance, a “0” that only eventually comes to hinder further machinations upon something. Even hundreds of millions of deaths, together with the ever-looming technologies that can guarantee many, many more, do not bring the end into conscious questioning or into the fold of the meaning of living. Only marginal, extreme outbursts are left — like doomsday cults, climate change hysteria, or investments in Transhumanist visions, all of which seek to “overtake” the end by denaturing that which is still living.

Yet, perhaps by no coincidence, in this very same region, around the First and Second World Wars, the end came to be remembered among a handful of thinkers who thought about the spiritual above and beyond the ideological and the material. In France, René Guénon masterfully diagnosed the “crisis of the modern world,” a designation with which he articulated not only various crises affecting the modern world, but the very fact that Modernity is a crisis, i.e., that the modern world itself, in its origins, nature, and course, is a metaphysical, ontological, existential crisis, the fateful and fatal period and paradigmatic culmination of a long-running, negative trajectory of decline now verging on catastrophe. Guénon recollected for consciousness the facts and interpretations of how the modern world corresponds to what ancient traditions foresaw as the “Dark Age,” the end of the current cosmic cycle, the extreme diminution of the metaphysical principles underlying the manifestation of the world — a time which, in the East, in Indian tradition, is known as the Kali-Yuga, and in the West, following a variation of Hesiod’s words, has been called the “Iron Age.” Modern mankind, Guénon forcefully indicated, has lost any sense not only of recognizing and living through the end, but of surviving it, because this mankind is submersed in finite and illusory things and has lost that which is eternal, that which lives on and, accordingly, has been handed down across the history of civilizations despite so many collapses and catastrophes. Guénon posed the question: “Will the modern world follow this fatal course right to the end, or will a new readjustment intervene once more, as it did in the case of the Greco-Latin decadence, before it reaches the bottom of the abyss into which it is being drawn?” He responded:

It would seem that a halt midway is no longer possible since, according to all the indications furnished by the traditional doctrines, we have in fact entered upon the last phase of the Kali-Yuga, the darkest period of this 'dark age', the state of dissolution from which it is impossible to emerge otherwise than by a cataclysm, since it is not a mere readjustment that is necessary at such a stage, but a complete renovation. Disorder and confusion prevail in every domain and have been carried to a point far surpassing all that has been known previously, so that, issuing from the West, they now threaten to invade the whole world…2

Of course, we now know all too well that this crisis has indeed invaded and overwhelmed nearly the whole world, including the East in which Guénon still saw a certain safe haven.

In addition to his prophetic-like forecasts, Guénon would have (and indeed has) already provided enough for generations to process if he had merely rested content with identifying the crisis of Modernity, uncovering the foreknowledge and archetypes of it attested in ancient sources, and drawing the connection that the metaphysical concerns of these sources speak to the metaphysical scope and nature of this crisis — all of which he did. But Guénon went further, and this further step harbors the essential differentiation — a detailed pondering of which exceeds our scope of inquiry here — between, on the one hand, the traditions he retrieved as well as the Primordial and Perennial Tradition he paradigmatically “theorized,”3 and, on the other hand, the current of thought known as Traditionalism which he inspired. Guénon posed the question of the metaphysically inherent “reason” for the decline and crisis. By “reason” we mean the ground, the necessary cause, or the “rationale” of the degradation and oblivion, but also “reason” in the sense of the telos, the point, the “meaningfulness” of the experience of such. Guénon reconstructed in general terms the doctrine of manifestation which in the West had been formulated in what is so improperly called “Neo-“ or “Late” Platonism: the manifestation of Being proceeds from the primordial One downwards all the way to the final point of matter, or even sub-matter, over the course of which the increasing differentiation, distance, and dissipation entails the diminution of the visibility and recognizability of the principle itself as well as its whole trajectory and its originary meaning. This process appears not only vertically, as in the downward manifestation from pure Being to sheer matter, but also horizontally, “historically,” as in the course from the Primordial Tradition to traditions and ultimately to the rejection of any traditions on the coagulating surface of rhizomatic matter in which they are “pointless,” or as in the course from the Human Being to citizens and ultimately to the sub-cultural atoms of “civil society” representing sundry dysphorias. Like the inhalation and exhalation of breath, the decline is metaphysically natural and necessary, and so is the return, the re-ascent, the recollection and restoration. As soon as one recognizes the metaphysical “orderliness” of the disorderly crisis, that is the immanence of the end, the horizons open up, as if for the first time, for a really re-existing human being. Instead of taking up a “reactionary” or “revolutionary” relation to present beings, things, and affairs, the human being is confronted with the very question and meaning of their state(s) and way(s) of being within the cycle. “However abnormal present conditions may be when considered in themselves, they must nevertheless enter into the general order of things,” Guénon wrote, for “the present age, however painful and troubled it may be, must also, like all the others, have its allotted place in the complete course of human development…”4 In this way, the end comes together with the beginning, and in turn the end is revealed to be not a crashing into nothing, but a confrontation with something — with the question of beginning as such, with beginning anew. This means that the situation of the modern world calls for, and even necessarily conditions, a unique spiritual orientation and comportment.

Guénon’s works — of which it would be more appropriate to speak in the German and more particularly Gadamerian sense of Wirkung, that is a “working-out,” “enacting,” “effecting,” “impacting” in a “fusion of horizons”5 — not only brought eschatology to the forefront of civilizational apperception, but thereby thematized eschatological consciousness as a guiding orientation for intellectual and spiritual theory and practice, and thus, furthermore, pointed the way to the question of the human being’s eschatological “being-in-the-world.”6 For the individual who, finding themself thrown into Modernity, seeks to commune with the metaphysical due, Guénon proclaimed the imperative of becoming one with tradition anew, i.e., seeking initiation into a particular tradition and living “un-modernly” already here and now. On the civilizational and “international” scale, Guénon envisioned the formation and networking of an intellectual and spiritual elite who might constitute a common front against the active forces of Modernity and brace to survive the cataclysm accompanying the end of the Kali-Yuga.

We live in the post-Guénonian age — “post-” not in the sense that Guénon’s thought has been “assimilated” or “overcome” or “aged” to any “extent,” but in the sense that any approach to thinking and existing in the face of the crisis of the modern world must take into consideration the metaphysical due underlying it and the accompanying existential drama of being-in-the-end. This is, of course, no easy feat, and many of those claiming to be carrying on Guénon’s cause have shied away from such, instead settling into the vestiges of one or another tradition as if nothing happened over the past thousands of years, as if committing to spiritual realization in the Kali-Yuga was merely a matter of stepping into old shoes, as if the existential challenge of the end boils down to renormalizing old exoteric forms alongside a new scholasticism. The obscuration and withdrawal of the Divine, the diminution of the sacred, the disenchantment and hardening of the world in the cosmic decline, the degeneration of the human being — it is as if the whole drama is no longer relevant as soon as one becomes a Traditionalist and rejoins a tradition. Eventually, Guénon’s thought itself, its event, is relegated to a halfway house, a rehabilitating reminder, or an introductory, roundabout textbook that can soon enough be shelved in favor of a copy of the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Edda, or a philosophically rigorous resuscitation of a “re-spiritualized” Aristotle or Aquinas, or a plane ticket to an ashram in India. The hermeneutic circle collapses, like so many other phenomena in the modern world, into a superficial plane; the hermeneutic revelation is mistaken to be a “closure.” Whether this “de-velopment” is due to some pronunciations within Guénon’s own thought and recommendations is not our concern here; instead, what is essential is preserving, or perhaps at this point rediscovering, the dramatic challenge in which Guénon’s thought arises in the first place: the facticity of living in and through a world in which Tradition, in accordance with the very same metaphysical due to which it testifies, is no longer our surrounding reality, no matter what confession one may read about after work on the weekdays or attend on the weekend. And this world, let us remind ourselves, is slated to end, but there is no end in sight, not to mention any calculable new beginning.

The challenge of being a “Traditionalist without tradition,” of leading a spiritual life in a spiritless and lifeless world, and of revolting against the modern world when no revolt can actually overcome it on any “world-scale,” comes to the fore in the works of Guénon’s Italian correspondent, Julius Evola, who emphasized the need to delve into the “existential side” of Guénon’s legacy.7 This is especially significant not only because Evola was Guénon’s contemporary and had his own intellectual trajectory (i.e., such a recognition was not the result of a “new generation” of Guénonians seeking a “new reading”), but furthermore because Evola himself, unlike Guénon, remained in Europe, and for a time he even attempted to influence events on the political-ideological plane. Here is not the proper occasion or scope to address the differences between Guénon and Evola’s trains of thought and respective accents, nor to offer an interpretation of Evola’s political engagements that might clarify whether the Evolian perspectives which we shall proceed to expound represent a continuity or shift contextualizable with reference to Evola’s biography. What is essential is that Evola prioritizes as the starting point not the chance of seeking to (re)join one or another tradition, but rather the imperative of cultivating lone and inward spiritual transcendence in the absence of any exterior support or framework.

For Evola, the basic facticity of our situation is such that “there no longer exist the organizations and institutions that, in a traditional civilization and society, would have allowed [man] to realize himself wholly,” and furthermore, “the circumstances make it increasingly unlikely that anyone, starting from the values of Tradition (even assuming that one could still identify and adopt them), could take actions or reactions of a certain efficacy that would provoke any real change in the current state of affairs.”8 The humans living today are “incapable of following the ancient precepts” and “because of the different historical and even planetary circumstances, such precepts, even if followed, would not yield the same results.”9 The latter statement clarifies that the problem at hand is, to borrow the terms of Martin Heidegger, not an “ontic” one, i.e., a question of what things presently exist, to what extent, how their qualities and categories might be assessed in one’s “personal” situation, etc., but an “ontological” one, i.e., a question of the very nature, meaning, occurrence, and fate of Being and existence, of the possibilities open to and in the Dasein (the “being-here”) of the human being thrown into history and faced with deciding upon its response and responsibility. In other words, Evola’s view is not confined to a proposition on the number or criteria of spiritual resources available, but rather is an affirmation of the fundamental, metaphysically ordained situation of being in the Kali-Yuga as an existential challenge wherein one cannot rely on traditional-spiritual frameworks as if they still represented and operated as the dominant paradigm — something “differentiated” is required in these different conditions.

For Evola, what Guénon called Tradition, the primordial antithesis to Modernity, is neither an abstract doctrine nor a mere sum of the lineages and spectrums of spiritual traditions, but a power in its own right, a force, an energy, a spiritual fire, the “immanent transcendence” and “enacting” of Being.10 That which is transmitted in tradition — a seemingly thought-provoking “oxymoron,” of course, since tradition is that which is transmitted — is not merely a doctrine in and of itself, but the spiritual force which such a doctrine articulates and prescribes in its ways of enactment. To be a Traditionalist, therefore, is to “reawaken to a renewed, spiritualised, and austere sense of the world, not as a philosophic concept, but as something which vibrates in our very blood: to the sensation of the world as power, to the situation of the world as rhythm, to the sensation of the world as a sacrificial act.”11 But the modern world, deprived of Tradition, is an impotent, castrated world, a world which denies authentic power, where the “powers-that-be” have nothing in common with the word, and where ancient powers are perhaps no longer operable. Within this state of the world, the Traditionalist is exteriorly powerless, and even the realization of spiritual power has no isomorphic application on the barren planes of the hardened planet. The only place for the establishment of any “counter-hegemony” in the Kali-Yuga is within oneself, within the “differentiated man” who takes Nietzsche’s words to heart: “The desert encroaches. Woe to him whose desert is within!”12

Evola, therefore, is concerned with the “new” subject proper to the Kali-Yuga, which he calls the “differentiated man,” the “man among the ruins,” or the one who “rides the tiger,” the one who remains upright in the face of an avalanche which he knows he cannot escape or change, but which he must dare to live through, or else miss the chance of living at all. “A realistic view of the situation and an honest self-evaluation,” Evola writes, “indicate that the only serious and essential task today is to give ever more emphasis to the dimension of transcendence in oneself, more or less concealed as it may be.”13 It is not an irony, but rather a fateful recognition of a paradoxical situation saturated with a meaningful dilemma, that the dark age of today calls for an inner comportment of transcendence even more intense than in the age when the esoteric doctrines known to us for propounding such work came into circulation. Thus, Evola writes in the final line of his Revolt Against the Modern World, “although the Kali-Yuga is an age of great destructions, those who live during it and manage to remain standing may achieve fruits that were not easily achieved by men living in other ages.”14 In the situation of the end, we are dealing with the supreme tribulation, the “ultimate rationale and significance of a choice made by a ‘being’ that wanted to measure itself against a difficult challenge: that of living in a world contrary to that consistent with its nature, that is, contrary to the world of Tradition.”15 If Guénon’s wayfarer of the end seeks re-initiation into tradition and the sacerdotal reconstruction of Tradition, then the Evolian figure dares to live in the modern world in accordance with one of two sides of a coin kept in his pocket: the way of being of a lone ascetic who is completely aloof towards the surrounding world, dwelling only in the higher world cultivated within himself, or the way of being a lone warrior who exteriorly is completely involved in all the phenomena of the surrounding world while interiorly being as far away from all of it as possible, treating everything like a test of one’s ability to be comported to transcendence in every dark corner. For Evola, both paths, those of the Zen monk and the Tantric dancer, belong to the same order of imperative: to exist amidst and yet against all the odds. Anything else is an illusion distracting from the liberation and salvation that is immanent to the due here and now.

A similar archetype surfaces in the work of one such “inwardly aloof” warrior and author whom Evola translated and corresponded with, Ernst Jünger. Unlike Guénon and Evola, Jünger did not operate on the basis of reconstructing a comprehensive metaphysical framework. Instead, as is befitting of poets and warriors, he beheld metaphysical insight, existential ecstasy, and a feeling of the world’s fate from within the most intense experiences exacted in the thickest fray of word, war, traveling the world, and experimenting with alterations of consciousness. In the middle of Jünger’s vast oeuvre, the figure of the human challenged to live through the catastrophic dark age of the modern world surfaces in a small book from 1951, Der Waldgang, translated into English as The Forest Passage. The first sentence of Jünger’s work could preface any adventurous travel book: “The forest passage — it is no jaunt that is concealed in this title. Rather, the reader should be prepared for a dangerous expedition, leading not merely beyond the blazed trails but also beyond the limits of his considerations.”16 This “dangerous expedition” off the beaten track is none other than the challenge of being inwardly free, innermostly transcendent, and spiritually upright while living in the very middle of the clutches of the alienated machine of the modern world. The symbolic contrast is immediately clear: nothing could be further from Modernity than the forest. Against the artificial, industrial, technological matrix of the modern metropolis, against the “reality” of screens, economic relations, and calculating votes, against the ideology of progress and the “end of history,” the forest, still surviving in certain pockets, represents a last vestige of nature, eternity, and freedom. Jünger compares modern civilization to a ship, namely the Titanic, whose designers and operators claimed that not even God could sink it. We, the passengers, do not even suspect our existential bondage to the technological vessel until the last, catastrophic moment, when something so natural and simple like an iceberg wreaks fatal havoc that shocks the whole world only to then become another popular screenplay. If Plato in the Republic described the state as a ship in need of good and just philosophical steering, then modern society is a “state-of-the-art” mega-cruiseliner in which all of its passengers, i.e., consumers making their commute, maintain a faith in the sophistic marketing that is so absolute and yet so bare and unthought that such “faith” is incomparable to the religious sense of the word, perhaps representing its most extreme inversion. The life of the modern “citizen” is totally beholden to and organized by the cruise package and its technological framing. But, Jünger dares to think, lurking in the shadows of this titanic life’s blindspots is the possibility of existing in a way so that one does not go down with the ship.

What does the Titanic have to do with the forest? Jünger reminds us of an ancient myth which comes down to us as one of the Homeric hymns to Dionysus. Taken hostage by pirates ignorant of his identity, Dionysus suddenly unleashed an overwhelming entanglement of vines, morphed into a lion, and conjured a bear in the middle of the deck. Only the helmsman who had suspected that the prisoner was a God and urged his shipmates to release him was spared, and Dionysus blessed him. Jünger commented:

Sea voyage and forest — uniting such disparate elements in an image may seem difficult. But myth is well-acquainted with such opposites… Myth is not prehistory; it is timeless reality, which repeats itself in history. We may consider our own century’s rediscovery of meaning in myth as a favorable sign. Today, too, man has been conducted by powerful forces far out onto the ocean, deep into the deserts with their mask worlds. The journey will lose its threatening aspect the moment man recollects his own divine power.17

Like the vines and wildlife that Dionysus summoned to liberate himself from bondage on the ship, the forest is a symbol of existential salvation: “The ship signifies being in time, the forest supra-temporal being.”18 Like the Greek God of metamorphoses, the dissident and spiritual seeker stuck on the modern Titanic must master the art of summoning and becoming the primal elements of the forest, of being the Waldganger, the one who “passes into the forest,” the “forest rebel.” “The forest rebel,” Jünger writes, “is that individual who, isolated and uprooted from his homeland by the great process, sees himself finally delivered up for destruction,” yet he dares to summon his innermost “determination to resist, and his intention to fight the battle, however hopeless.”19 In the middle of titanic landscapes, the forest rebel revives and cultivates the “three great powers of art, philosophy, and theology.”20

Just as Dionysus unleashed flora and fauna on a ship in the middle of the sea, Jünger constantly reiterates that the forest and the forest passage are possible anytime and “everywhere on the planet,” “whether in the thicket, in the metropolis, whether inside or outside society.”21 The forest, Jünger writes, is “the locus of freedom” that can be found even in the concrete metropolis: “A city of a million will then house a thousand forest rebels.”22 He adds an extremely important qualification, one which discredits previous English translations of the Waldgang as “forest flight”: The forest is “nowhere that any flight can lead to.”23 If we deal exclusively with interpreting the English semantics, we could take “flight” to mean a journey by plane, which is to say that the forest cannot be entered merely by transporting oneself from one place to another. Treating “flight” as “retreat,” an equally significant point of Jünger’s meditation on passing into the forest emerges: Passing into the forest is not an escapist, isolationist, imaginational fleeing into a physical forest or into one’s wholly individual mental world; rather, the forest passage is a fully present way of being, a lively attunement to and repose into Being in any given moment, an immanent-transcendent existence which knows its paths and resources in any contingent circumstances. Thus:

The teaching of the forest is as ancient as human history, and even older… The knowledge that primal centers of power are hidden in the mutating landscapes, founts of superabundance and cosmic power within the ephemeral phenomena, may be found always and everywhere… Anyone who has once touched being has crossed the threshold where words, ideas, schools, and confessions still matter. Yet, in the process, he has also learned to revere that which is the life force of all of them… All this only seems to have been given to remote places and times. In reality, it is concealed in every individual, entrusted to him in code, so that he might understand himself, in his deepest, supra-individual power. This is the goal of every teaching that is worthy of the name.24

The forest passage revolves around an existential recognition that is translated into a “realization.” We are finite beings thrown into a world which does not depend on us, which is beyond our control, and which, in all of its temporary and contingent values and forms, is an illusion distracting our souls from the concealed reality and from eternity. However, reality is not established or restored by merely changing the ontic configuration of the illusion, institutionalizing an alternative structure, or seeking to flee to where the hegemonic illusion is less imposing. The very idea that the illusion can be replaced on a grand scale by reality is part of the illusion itself which keeps us fixated on externality. As Jünger put it, in the forest we find other ways and resources for radical existence than “a nay scribbled in its prescribed circle.”25 To the contrary, it is internally that we realize that the omnipotent reign of the illusion over us is itself necessarily part of the illusion. The truly meaningful and salvational process of liberation and differentiation takes place within ourselves, in our way of being, in our orientation to the transcendent, in our spirit and soul right here and now. To dwell in the forest here and now in the middle of the surrounding “reality” is a metaphor for the spiritual realization taught by many ancient traditions which enjoyed far more favorable circumstances. The forest passage to which one commits in their deepest self, in the soul that sees through their eyes and the spirit that strives through their mind, is completely inaccessible and indestructible to the outside world, which doesn’t believe in it anyway.

The resonance between Evola’s “riding the tiger” and Jünger’s “forest passage” is obvious, as is the belonging together of these trains of thought in the common wake of the metaphysical facticity of the end unearthed and held out by Guénon. While these “doctrines” by all means deserve more detailed exposition and interpretation, it is worth meditating on the very fact that such perspectives have arisen at all, and to what grander process they thereby bear witness and testimony together. To this end, we find ourselves in the company of contemporary authors.

Askr Svarte (Evgeny Nechkasov) leads us to speak of a certain “dissimilation” at play in and proclaimed by these perspectives.26 Suddenly, in the deep midst of Modernity, we find a handful of powerful thinkers disassociating themselves from the surrounding paradigm and advocating a conscious, comprehensive differentiation of worldview, conscience, lifestyle, and approach to the future rooted in changing themselves today, i.e., an entirely different relationship to Being that is not “taken up” as if a subsequent “opinion,” but as their innermost existence and meaning. As the crisis accelerates and the modern architecture disintegrates and collapses, a unique stock of people will already be going their own way, cultivating the foundations of their own culture, developing for themselves the “three great powers” of art, philosophy, and theology, all against the backdrop of a declining civilization that doesn’t even believe in such, or considers such to be merely another pastime of consumption.

Moreover, Nechkasov draws heightened attention to the consequences of the unbridled expansion of the technological matrix, including Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and other phenomena which threaten to alienate and displace the last vestiges of human ontology. In the wake of the technological projects of the “future” gathering pace in our days, whose “philosophical” development and discourse are already gaining ground in extreme Postmodern currents like “speculative realism” and “object-oriented ontology,” it is now a very real possibility, already actualized in certain spheres, that there will be little left of the human. There can be no “forest passage” or “riding the tiger” for a human completely plugged into the network, and the “forest passage” could become the last refuge for the last remaining humans — indeed, in an all-encompassing virtual and technologized hologram-reality, the forest passage would be the last remaining human thing to do. In this futurological vision, the individuals and groups who commit to the “forest passage” could become like the Southeast Asian rebels who escaped the state to the Zomia highlands, where their separate cultural and linguistic development culminated in novel ethnogenesis.27 Thus, Nechkasov hypothesizes, or perhaps foresees, a transition from dissidence to completely “empirical” dissonance and dissimilation. As the perverse, distorted, false “reality” we have known degenerates into a virtual landscape of QR-codes and technologically-dependent “non-entities,” the forest passage opens up as a chance to re-discover and “re-invent” the altogether different reality of the spirit. Thus, a new beginning attains embodiment here and now by radically revising the terms, content, and space of “reality.” Or from another direction: the “fixation” of the imminent end is translated into an imminent cultural creativity here and now which consciously perceives itself as a “re-beginning.”

Radiating through Guénon, Evola, Jünger, and Nechkasov’s visions is an apperception which Daria Dugina, who became a martyr for her ideas at the age of 29 (so old for the ancient world, so young for the modern world), called “eschatological optimism.”28 In her posthumously published volume titled with this term, Dugina outlines how eschatological optimism is not only a heuristic common name for these perspectives, but is the existential underpinning of intellectual and spiritual activity as such. Philosophizing is a volitional intensification of, and radical response to, the human being’s finitude and mortality by bringing that which transcends what is present, or that which is different from what is present, into the present equation here and now. Thus, following Dugina’s train of thought, the perspectives we have visited here represent a profound return to the fundamental meaningfulness of human existence and cultural creation in an age and circumstance in which the very posing of such as a question, problem, or imperative has become extreme, a matter of “eschatology” and “optimism” together. The end is intimately interconnected with the beginning, with a “new,” “other,” or “another” beginning, a “re-beginning,” whose potentiality subsumes all actuality. According to Dugina and the above-quoted authors, any conception of a future belongs to those who behold the end and an “other beginning” here and now — those who remove the dominant paradigm from themselves, remove themselves from the illusion that the paradigm is merely something outside of themselves that can simply be changed, and who resolve to cultivate the immanent-transcendence and “great powers” which seem to be so far away at the same time as they are so dearly close.

In vitally Traditionalist fashion, Dugina rediscovers this “logic” and vocation as speaking to us now out of re-enlivened ancient sources which have been mistaken to be closed systems belonging to a “past history.” As her adopted pen name “Platonova” suggests, Daria found immediate relevance in the ancient beginning of philosophy, in Plato and the Platonists. In Neoplatonic philosophy, for example, Dugina contends that where academic scholarship has not seen anything resembling a “political philosophy” comparable to the vision of Plato’s Republic and Laws or the modern reduction of “politics” to ideology and policies, there is in fact a corresponding arrangement that understands human affairs not as an external sphere, but as a matter of the aspiring harmony of the soul in the manifest world, i.e., in any given political framework in which it finds itself not as a conclusion, but as a question, as a vocation, as an emanating movement. Man may find himself in chains, such as at the bottom of Plato’s Cave, but he simultaneously finds himself as a link in the metaphysical chain that links every given being in the overall cosmos, and it is for this reason that he can climb up, explore, leave, and return to the cave anew. In other words, the state of world affairs as it presents itself to us above our wanting and doing is always a challenge for recognition, for harmonization, for reconciliation, for overcoming through one’s own positioning. In the materials preceding her unfinished doctoral dissertation on Neoplatonic political philosophy, Daria summated:

Within space and alongside the gods, daemons, heroes, and other eidetic entities, the human being is one of the foremost actors of the eidetic, ontological, aesthetic, ethical, and political orders. Neoplatonic political philosophy envisions man as being called to think and act analogously to the gods, to dwell in contemplating the intelligible forms, to attentively peer into the trajectories of earthly events, and to compare them to heavenly scenarios. Proclus’ political philosophy demands that man raise the degree of his own participation in being by considering each point of his presence in the world as a node in which the intelligible series of all the best and all the worst orders of the Platonic cosmos arrive and meet, where war is waged and power is fought for — physical, mythological, eidetic, material, metaphysical, and political power. The Earth and its regions, the realms of Land and Sea, are living territories with a sacred topology, all with their own eidetic path through the ages. The human being’s task, the human being’s political task, is to participate in the Platonic noetic universe on the side of the forces of the higher eidetic series.29

In this way, disclosing a supposedly “closed” philosophical system of antiquity as an open universe of vocation, Dugina, herself an attentive reader of the “avant-garde” of Postmodern philosophizing, turned the Postmodernist slogan that “the personal is political” on its head: in the end, the dilemma of being human is not a matter of investing oneself in changing exterior surroundings, as if the latter were the fundamental reality, but of participating in the transformative moment of “where the best and the worst orders arrive and meet,” that is in realizing that, then and now, there and here, it always remains the case that:

Each focal point is a node from which one can contemplate the entire universe. All political scenarios, the life of society, matters of war and peace, the forms of political structures and cultures, the scenarios of historical events, and their foresight, prediction, and fulfillment are akin to homologous scenarios of the eidetic chains ascending from sensible things to the World Soul, the Intellect, and further to the One as the Good and the One as the ineffable, the Apophatic, Non-Being.30

Pursuing the Neoplatonic line into Christianity with Dionysius the Areopagite, Dugina insinuated an existential translation of such into her own Orthodox Christian faith with reference to Jünger in the discussion following one of her lectures:

If even one of us, including myself and everyone gathered here today, commits to seeking this “forest passage,” to becoming the anarch, or to making the strong-willed decision that we must break with the modern world and cultivate the warrior and hero within ourselves, then it seems to me that the world is already saved. Because even a single person can save all of mankind, as we know.31

That “the world is already saved” by virtue of a human being’s decision to correspond to that which transcends their environment, but which is at the same time immanent to their very being and to the “worlding of the world” as such, brings the hermeneutic circle back to the unity of its beginning and end: Thrown into the world, the human being is called to change, to be, above and beyond and throughout or despite changing things. That Dugina thought about politics Neoplatonically in the 21st century is the great fact: It is not that which is “present,” but that which “presences,” that which is “essentially presenting,” that defines the human capacity to live, think, and author anew in a world whose dominant paradigm is otherwise opposed to life, thought, and authorship in its “all too human” finitude as well as in all its eternity. Whether it is Plato, the Neoplatonists, Guénon, Evola, Jünger, Nechkasov, Dugina, or any other thinkers in their times and places, what is essentially at once “timeless” and timely is the fundamental, initiatory condition that being a human being calls for a “new” beginning here and now. Whomever we read, we are reading ourselves as a task for interpretation, for being, in the limited time and space we are allotted. Our response consists in a fundamental responsibility in the original Latin sense of “returning” to spondere, that is a pledge, a promise — “original” not because it once was, but “originary” in that it is the starting of something, and not a “pledge” or “promise” for something that should be done in the future, but as a fidelity to realizing the opportunity that makes the present moment into the Moment (Augenblick, kairos) around which all time and being come together as “since and henceforth.” The authors we read are not “history” in the sense of the “past”, but “historic” — they are “history” in the ancient Greek sense of historeo, “I inquire,” and in the German sense as Geschichte, “happening,” “occurring,” and “event” (Geschehen, Geschehnis, Ereignis). Following the course of the metaphysical due, we are not simply something that “once was,” “is,” or “will be”; rather, we are an opportunity and possibility that has the calling to “happen,” that can unfold out of the fold of the situation that is our starting point for an end, for a telos. This is why such penetrating analyses and deconstructions of the modern moment are only penetrating and resonant insofar as they are a liberation, a releasement (Gelassenheit), an openness to thinking and being, that touches us here and now. Tradition, immanent-transcendence, riding the tiger, the forest passage, dissimilation, eschatological optimism — these are all originary names for that “process” by which the human being resolves to be a human being by being and seeking more than what is present, precisely upon accepting the meaning of their own finitude and mortality.

Let us turn back to Guénon, who wrote in 1945: “The end of a world never is and can never be anything but the end of an illusion.”32 In these words lies one of the fundamental turns of thought in the 20th century, ever alive and actual here and now, which, in coming to be rediscovered in our days, sounds like a caesura in waiting. Neither stale historiography nor restless activism can grasp what follows the caesura, whose ensuing notes are, according to those above who were seeking and following its trails before us, to be found in a certain clearing which we ourselves are called to think and to be here and now. In rediscovering the itineraries and implications of these thinkers today, we find ourselves confronted not only with a radically revised experience and interpretation of the modern world, but an utterly “free perspective” on what responding to this confrontation calls for — ultimately, in the end, but also primordially, in the beginning, in the original differentiation of the human condition.

1. Plato, Phaedo 64a, 67e, trans. G.M.A Grube, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

2. René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, trans. Marco Pallis, Arthur Osborne, and Richard C. Nicholson (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004), 17

3. Against the modern notion of “theory” as a “construct” or “explanation,” we have in mind the ancient Greek theoria, i.e., a contemplative journey, a pilgrimage, traveling to behold and participate in a rite and returning to tell of it, and, in the Platonic context, even the journey of the soul’s intellect to behold or rediscover the Idea-Forms that have been forgotten and obscured in mundane life.

4. Guénon, Crisis of the Modern World, 18.

5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

7. Julius Evola, "René Guénon and ‘Integral Traditionalism’” in idem, Recognitions: Studies on Men and Problems from the Perspective of the Right, trans. John Bruce Leonard (London: Arktos, 2017), 271.

8. Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul, trans. Joscelyn Godwin and Constance Fontana (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2003), 3-4.

9. Ibid., 9-10

10. Julius Evola, “What ‘Tradition’ Is” in idem, The Bow and the Club, trans. Sergio Knipe (London: Arktos, 2018).

11. Julius Evola, Pagan Imperialism, trans. Cologero Salvo (Gornahoor Press, 2017), 16.

12. Evola, Ride the Tiger, 3.

13. Ibid., 216.

14. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1995), 366.

15. Evola, Ride the Tiger, 227.

16. Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, trans. Thomas Friese, ed. Russell A. Berman (Candor: Telos Press Publishing, 2013), 1.

17. Ibid., 34.

18. Ibid., 37.

19. Ibid., 25

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 40.

22. Ibid., 17.

23. Ibid., 32.

24. Ibid., 46-47.

25. Ibid., 32.

26. Askr Svarte, Polemos II: Pagan Perspectives, trans. Jafe Arnold (PRAV Publishing, 2021); idem, Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours (PRAV Publishing, 2023).

27. Askr Svarte, Tradition and Future Shock, 507-521; James S. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

28. Daria Platonova Dugina, Eschatological Optimism, trans. Jafe Arnold, ed. John Stachelski (PRAV Publishing, 2023).

29. Ibid., 256; cf. idem, For a Radical Life: Meditations by Daria Platonova Dugina, trans. Jafe Arnold, ed. John Stachelski (PRAV Publishing, 2024), 16.

30. Dugina, Eschatological Optimism, 246; idem, For a Radical Life, 16.

31. Ibid., 105; ibid., 27.

32. René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, trans. Lord Northbourne (Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2004), 279.

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