In the Forward to Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola characterizes the “Traditional Method” with two principles, which I schematize below:
| Perspective | Principle | |
|---|---|---|
| Ontology | Objective | Correspondence |
| Epistemology | Subjective | Induction |
Ontology
The Principle of Correspondence “ensures an essential and functional correlation between analogous elements, presenting them as simple homologous forms of the appearance of a central and unitary meaning.”
This makes two claims:
- There is a central and unitary meaning
- This meaning may appear differently in different circumstances and different times
That this is true can be seen in the use of languages. For example, “dog” and “perro” look different and sound different. Nevertheless, they both “mean” the same thing. However, for someone who doesn’t know English and Spanish, the two words (“appearances”) appear unrelated. So the denial of this principle implies the absurd conclusion that languages are mutually unintelligible.
In practice, this means that the source of events in the world must be traced back to its corresponding idea. Thus different myths, legends, and symbolic forms from disparate cultures can be shown to be expressions of the same idea. But just as I cannot “prove” that dog=perro to someone ignorant of those languages, neither can Tradition be proven to someone ignorant of spiritual reality.
Epistemology
Principle of Induction is a “discursive approximation of a spiritual intuition, in which what is realized is the integration and the homologous unification of the diverse elements encountered in the same one meaning and in the same one principle.”
Again, this contains two elements:
- Discursive approximation
- Spiritual intuition
Although a metaphysician may express himself in speech or writing, this can never be more than a discursive approximation, since spiritual reality is ultimately ineffable and irreducible to objective language. However, what the metaphysician knows, he knows by direct intuition. So, in the case of myths, legends and other symbolic forms, one “realizes” that they encompass a unitary meaning by a sort of clairvoyance or spiritual “seeing”.
Revolt of the Spirit
Via this “traditional method”, Evola will portray the world of Tradition as a unity and a universal type. Specifically, this means that the world of Tradition has manifested in various forms and can still manifest in a different form. The man of Tradition does not blindly desire to repeat the past — which “past”, since the universal type has manifested in different forms in the past.
Furthermore, Evola will show that the idea or type of Tradition is “capable of creating points of reference and of evaluation different from the ones to which the majority of the people in the West have passively and semiconsciously become accustomed”. Specifically, this the idea that everything is “text”, can be written down and debated endlessly — a process that does not result in understanding but only aporia. This is the viewpoint of the modernists and those who think like them.
Only by understanding the sense of the world of Tradition, only by intuiting the spiritual reality behind the world of appearances, then
this sense can also lead to the establishment of the foundations for an eventual revolt (not a polemical, but real and positive one) of the spirit against the modern world.
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