The idiot simpliciter is a man who cannot follow a logical argument. The idiot savant is a man who can say the words, without understanding what they mean. And the useful idiot is the man who does someone else’s dirty work in the mistaken belief he is working towards his own ends. Continue reading
The fundamental attitude of the Courtier was to do everything with a type of style and grace done with a certain nonchalance that made the difficult seem effortless. Castiglione coined a new word for this: Sprezzatura. Continue reading
A gentleman who recalled this story. He was called upon to give an impromptu talk on the question, “If you had just 5 minutes to live, what would you do differently with your life?” He recalled that he stumbled through some explanation about seeing life more clearly and changing his values. What is more significant is that he remembered the critique I made to his talk. Continue reading
In between sensible things and intelligible things, there is the human world, constructed by thought, strained and defiled, which is the ground for both the greater and lesser battles. Continue reading
As a thought experiment, we shall attempt, in several posts, to specify the characteristics of what Tradition in the West will have to look like, based on the 400+ preceding posts. In particular, we will look at the following elements: Foundation External structure Internal Structure Practical Dualism These characteristics will … Continue reading
Julius Evola opens the chapter The Arctic Myth from Il mito del sangue by describing the state of prehistoric research: Oswald Menghin, rector of the University of Vienna, wrote these characteristic words, “More than any other discipline, the science of prehistory is being brought back, and still more must be … Continue reading
About a spy who receives a “burn notice”, that is, he is excommunicated, in the original sense of the world, from his spiritual community without explanation. He is thrown into the world and left without any identity, assets, or resources, basically turned into an outlaw. Continue reading
The real difficulty [in understanding metaphysics] is the mental assimilation needed to arrive at this result; there are certainly many minds that are quite incapable of it, and it is easy to gauge how far this effort transcends the scope of mere works of erudition. There is only one really profitable of studying doctrines: in order to be understood they must be studied so to speak “from the inside” Continue reading
On various occasions we have insisted on the necessity of a radical revision of methods and criteria with which, in the order of common teaching and of that culture that claims to be serious, history is made. We demonstrated that history of true history does not grasp that the two … Continue reading
The Hermetic method is the way of depth, not confrontation. If we have two opposing view, each of which seems reasonable or even unrefutable, then we try to go deeper to determine what they have in common. A frequent example involves the debate between believers in religion and believers in science. Continue reading