The universe exists for each Individual because he consciously wills it.

~John Woodroffe, Sakti and Sakta

After concluding the discussion of privation, Julius Evola next turns to the concepts of Essence and Existence. This can be understood as the philosophical analog of the concepts of Purusha and Prakriti. There are some important notions developed in what Evola wrote about essence and existence. Evola avoids a one-sided philosophy. He relates these concepts to freedom and necessity, will and thought, the actual and the potential. Yet he accomplishes this not by an unbridgeable dichotomy between opposed concepts, but rather by relating them on a scale of values.

Evola offers us a full philosophy: there is transcendence, yet there is activity in the world. The first point he makes is that things comprise both essence and existence. The essence of something answers the question “What it is”. Existence is “that it is”. Yet the idea of a thing is logically the same both for an imagined thing and a real thing. Therefore, the existence of a thing is irreducible to logic. In practical terms, what this means is that there is no intellectual answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The solution to that riddle lies on a different level.

Things are essence and existence. The idea of one hundred thalers and one hundred real thalers are obviously not the same thing. Consequently, from a logical point of view, as Kant has shown, there is nothing included in the hundred real thalers beyond the idea of the hundred thalers. It follows that, insofar as we differentiate between them, we are referring to something irreducible to the logical element. This something is “existence”, as opposed to “essence” (or more rigorously, the “esse existentiae” as opposed to the “esse essentiae“).

The essence of a thing is logically explained by a concept. However, its existence is beyond logic (note: this does not mean illogical or irrational). Since in Evola’s system there is only representation and the “I”, therefore existence can only be explained by will or by power. Otherwise, the existence of a thing is opaque to the I. Of course, tying this back to previous topics, the activity of my will may be spontaneous, i.e., beyond my conscious intervention. Nevertheless, it “explains” existence without resorting to theories of external forces. So, here is the symmetry:

1. essence is the ideal and is constructed in thought
2. existence is the real and is caused by an act of will.

And now to a second point. The explicative principle of the essence, of the “what is”, of a determinate reality, is the concept: when a reality is genetically constructed by means of the concept in all the characteristics that determine it, the explicative principle in the order of essence is exhausted. Therefore, what an object is, which is entirely penetrated by being, is the bare fact of its “being there” as real object, and that constitutes a point that entirely eludes a rational explanation, it is an alogos — and an adequate explicative principle for it is not the concept, but rather the Will or, even better, power. In fact the pure being of things constitutes for me a mystery up to the point where it has the character of a brute given, of something that is there without the participation of my will, imposing itself, on the contrary, forcefully against it; briefly: as a privation of my activity. While I can think of essence and therefore “construct it”, existence simply suffers it — and this constitutes for me a darkness. If you imagine instead a situation in which you can connect the “being here” of things to willing them unconditionally, that is, in which my will had value as creative power: then their existence in fact beyond their concept would cease to be a mystery to me, on the contrary, it would be for me perfectly intelligible — it would be explained. Essence and existence have therefore as their explicative principles the ideal construction through the act of thought and real causation through the act of the will respectively.

Evola adds a third point. He rejects dualism, in particular a dualism between thought and action. The world is representation and will, essence and existence, thought and action. The third point is: there is not a difference of nature, but only of degree. Note how this is another expression of the Great Chain of Being, that reality is hierarchically ordered from the less dense to the more dense. Thus the idea is already at a level in the chain and the real is a fuller expression of the idea. The Tantric writings, as documented by John Woodroffe, also portray a similar conception; they add many levels of detail in describing the full constitution of the human being, for example.

The third point is the following: between ideal constructions and the creative will — therefore between essence and existence — there is not a difference of nature, but only of degree. The idea is already a degree of real affirmation; and so-called objective reality is only the most intense and complete assertion of that power which, in elementary form, determines the thing simply thought or represented. Reality is only the act of the idea, in which it characterises and expresses itself entirely, just as the idea is only a reality in potential or a reality simply sketched out or in a nascent state. Between one and the other, therefore, there is not a jump, there is instead progressivity. The thought of one hundred Thalers and one hundred real Thalers are obviously not the same thing — but not qualitatively different (as is assumed by those who believe that the thought is the impersonal image of an objective reality instead of a power) but intensively different, in the sense that the hundred real Thalers are the deepest, most intense power related precisely to the magical act, of the assertion corresponding to the hundred Thalers in thought.

This has important implications. First of all, there is the first type of existence that is “death, privation, unreality” which is the spontaneity of the first stage. Life is experienced as impotence. Things and events block me. I impute reality to the unreal. Thinking deals only with concepts and I can never grasp the real simply by thinking about it. To escape, I must be convinced that philosophy is incomplete without a method of self-realisation.

Only in that way — and not by “reasoning” oneself to it, can there be the second type of existence. This type is based on the freedom, power — beyond logical analysis as was shown in the second point. Notice the comments about ever increasing levels of spontaneity. Thus as a man’s power is expanded, his actions become effortless, i.e., they arise spontaneously from the nature of his being, the wei wu wei of Taoism.

There is an existence that is death, privation, unreality, which corresponds to representational spontaneity, the residue from the first stage, in which the act is passive in respect to itself, and which the “I” does not control as its master. There is no true certainty of this existence: since it does not depend on me as passion or emotion and is a pure happening, therefore a principle of radical contingency takes it back. There is instead a second existence, which is what a will elevating itself to power can unconditionally produce: only this is properly existence, absolute reality, and only from it, where it is found joined only with itself in possession and control — the “I” can have real certainty. Between these types of existence there is mental activity in the proper sense. In other words: beyond the ideal limit of the reign of pure necessity — of nature and spontaneity — and beyond his “privation”, the individual enjoys in the rational or ideal order of the first level of sufficient actuality and freedom. This level proceeds towards its perfection in development in accordance to which power reasserts itself in continually deeper and more complex levels of spontaneity — of primitive nature or the universal — right up to controlling the same intensive level of real existence. Then from the dark passion and savage desert resulting from privation, the world will make itself the very act of the individual, and in that he will be redeemed and convinced.