The attitudes of Julius Evola and Charles Maurras toward the influence of German thought were fundamentally different. Maurras opposed it on several points; he regarded the Germans as barbarians and rejected, in his view, German nationalism, racism, its Protestant outlook. Specifically, he rejected Fichte’s philosophy as the basis of German thought. Rather than an alliance with the Germans, Maurras was hoping for an alliance of the Romance language speaking nations of Europe. The documentation for this will have to wait for another time, since it involves pulling together and translating statements from multiple works.

On the other hand, Evola was a Germanophile; he admired the German spirit and regarded the civilization of the Middle Ages as a joint creation of Europe’s German and Roman elements. In his youth, the heirs of German philosophy were found in Italy in Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce. Evola embarked on a program of self-study of German philosophy well before his turn to Tradition. This influence colored (or tainted, depending on your point of view) Evola’s exposition of Tradition in some significant ways. Oftentimes, it seemed strained, as he tried to combine the two streams of thought.

I should add a disclaimer here. I myself have a great respect and admiration for the German people and their accomplishments in the arts, music, science, and philosophy. Since the thinkers about to be discussed were trying to come to terms with the fundamental and hidden structures of the world, their ideas deserve to be carefully considered.

German philosophy is a series of footnotes to Immanuel Kant, who tried to reconcile empiricism with traditional metaphysics. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant demonstrated that, starting solely from empirical data, the pure intellect was incompetent to know reality in itself. This is the opposite of metaphysics whose fundamental claim is that the Intellect knows reality through a direct intuition of the ideas, or forms. In one way, this first critique can be read as a reduction ad absurdum proof that empiricism, and, a fortiori, the scientific method, is false as paths to knowledge. Instead, Kant went in another direction.

He wrote the Critique of Practical Reason in response. Since we have direct experience of ourselves as moral beings, i.e., beings acting in the world, this can be the only source of truth. To make sense of the moral life, Kant postulated the existence of God, the freedom of the will, and immortality as fundamental truths. However, he did not intuit these truths as a metaphysician, but saw them as logically necessary axioms.

From the Traditional point of view, the Intellect is prior to the Will; Kant reversed this, denying the Intellect its priority, and making the Will fundamental. The corollary was that action was the means to knowledge, a point not lost on Evola. Post-Kantian German philosophy developed this philosophy of the Will.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s system was the most extreme. Since Mind is not the fundamental reality, it was the Will. But, unlike Kant, for Schopenhauer the Will is itself unknowable; since it is not directed by the Logos, it is blind and irrational. We do not know that Will directly, but only through its representations or appearances, what we call the “world”. The Will becomes dual, splitting into the knowing subject and the known object. But this is all illusion; when the duality is abolished, the individual will dissipates, and there is only the Will.

Johann Fichte did not go so far. In his understanding, the “I” is itself the noumenal reality, not the abstract Will, but one’s own will. As Kant showed, our conception of the world cannot derive from the world, which is noumenal and unknowable. Fichte, accepting Kant’s postulate of the freedom of the will, concludes from this that our conception of the world must be a free creation of the mind. Since the I is primary (I experience it directly, although as subject and never as object), it is the phenomenal world that is derivative. A morally acting I creates that world as its field of action; without something to oppose it, the I cannot be “moral” in any real sense. This all follows logically from the initial assumptions.

The echoes of this manner of thinking resound in Evola’s philosophical works, as is obvious from The Individual and the Becoming of the World, and what he writes about the “I” or the Absolute Self. It is the source of most, if not all, of his divergences from Rene Guenon. Clearly, Evola’s claim that action is a way of self-realization is based on this type of philosophy.

Nevertheless, it is not without danger. It may be hard to accept that the physical world is the creation of my “I”, but if we restrict ourselves to the social world, it gains much more credibility. Specifically, it reveals itself in the modern idea that our social world is a construct. Two hundred years later, this idea has become commonplace, even among those who have no idea who Fichte is, and, in any case, could not even understand him. To the modern mind, then, there is no objective social reality, as it is simply a free creation of the mind. Hence, by changing our conception of it, we can mould our society any way we please. Still following Fichte, this is not simply an intellectual exercise, rather it is a moral quest. Therefore, those who reject the dominant conception are experienced as ignorant, as immoral, as enemies, as mortal enemies.

Furthermore, the postmodern mind fully embraces Fichte, seeing the physical world itself as a free creation of the human will. This leads logically to causes such as man-made climate change. Even more, what may seem to be undeniable physical differences, such as sexual and racial diversity, are themselves regarded as products of the human will. For those who have followed thus far, this is all too obvious to require further elucidation.

There is a serious consequence: this philosophy cannot be countered on its own terms. It is pointless to mention biological realities to those who do not even regard them as independent of human conception. You cannot try to create a counter-conception, which logically makes no sense.

Yet this is the direction of modernity and postmodernity. If follows its own logic and to deny that logic is seen as a moral failing. There can be no discussion with such a point of view; that is why Evola appreciated Donoso Cortes so much. Guenon insisted that only an intellectual conversion can overcome that perspective.

I know this will not please many people, since it seems to be too passive. They believe in debate and confrontation. But those who understand Tradition will agree that one’s own intellectual conversion must come first. Then, instead of debate, an alternate worldview must be presented and events understood in the terms of a new historiography.

A different way to read Fichte, as well as the influence of Nietzsche, will have to await another day.