Are You the Differentiated Man?

One way of looking at Julius Evola’s book Ride the Tiger is as his attempt to conceptualize a specific kind of man which he calls “differentiated man”. The idea of “riding the tiger” in its general form seems straightforward, but the concept of the differentiated man is full of very tricky aspects. It is very easy to cope even with the idea of “ride the tiger” which is at its basis oriented against all coping. Intellectually it is clear that if what one is opposing is too strong, one cannot confront it directly, but details of this approach are much harder to define. Although Evola’s concept of the differentiated man has individual dimension in that due to explosion of individuality in the world in dissolution it is not possible to define typical behavior for larger groups of men, there are many aspects of this concept which are clearly defined in a typically Evolian style where his mathematical and engineering talents shine.

In Ride the Tiger Evola roughly divided men living in the world in dissolution in several categories. The majority is passively coping with the remnants of the bourgeois world, which for many decades means consumer-bourgeois world. Smaller number of men feel the effects of dissolution in their existential reality, but are rebelling without a cause which leads them either to coping of the first group or to the collapse due to inability to handle high level of nihilism. Even smaller number are dealing with the world in dissolution actively. These men match the concept of the differentiated man. They acknowledged the state of zero point of values reached by the bourgeois world long time ago, but unlike the second group can transform the poison of this radically nihilistic climate into medicine. What enables those men to operate that way is their inborn ability of transcendence, a feature which differentiates them from most of their contemporaries. In Ride the Tiger Evola writes:

… essential thing is that such a man is characterized by an existential dimension not present in the predominant human type of recent times – that is, the dimension of transcendence.

Evola goes even as far as considering these men as men of a different race than those which predominate at the very end of the cycle. Here it should be noted that the term “race” should be understood in the context of Evola’s racial doctrine, not in the context of typical biological reductionism. These men are able to maintain dual nature, one individual and the other supra-individual which allows them to simultaneously live in this world, but not be of this world. They can be considered late children of Tradition whose real fatherland is situated somewhere in the world of Tradition. They cannot view themselves “inside” the society, which might even put them in the category of outcasts. They come from afar into this world, are involved in it, but stay untouched by it. Evola writes in Ride the Tiger:

In contrast, there is a different and much smaller category of modern men who, instead of submitting to the nihilistic processes, seek to accept them actively. In particular, there are those who not only admit that the processes of dissolution are irreversible and there is no going back, but who would not want to follow that path even if it existed.

He even speculates on the idea that groups of differentiated men could have a significant role in renewing the idea of Orders which had significant role in many upward civilizational cycles, including that of the Romano-Germanic cycle. In Ride the Tiger he writes:

… the only prospect is that of an invisible unit, in a world without frontiers, of those few individuals who are associated by their very nature, which is different from that of the man of today … A similar, dematerialized type of unity and state was at the basis of the Orders, ... If new processes are to develop when the present cycle exhausts itself, perhaps they could have their point of departure in this very kind of unity.

It can be speculated that Evola invented the concept of the differentiated man in order to partly solve the problem of continuation of cycles. Traditional teachings roughly suggest that when one cycle ends, the other one starts anew, so if the end of the cycle represents true zero point of values, how can something be created out of nothing on that zero point? Maybe differentiated men can act as a bridge between cycles, although Evola does not encourage coping with waiting for “the end of the world” as the solution to the existential problem of the differentiated man. In Ride the Tiger he writes:

When one cycle closes, another begins, and the point at which a given process reaches its extreme is also the point at which it turns in the opposite direction. But there is still the problem of continuity between the two cycles. To use an image from Hoffmansthal, the positive solution would be that of a meeting between those who have been able to stay through the long night, and those who may appear the next morning.

Differentiated man’s path is a left-hand path of riding the tiger. Evola mixes into his concept many ideas from the world of Tradition, as he usually does, in order to conceptually define this kind of man, which gives this concept higher significance, and although this man is a modern man, frees it from typically modern arbitrariness. This kind of man appears at the end of each cycle which gives him perennial significance.

Although Evola in his book Ride the Tiger makes sure to define the differentiated man as truly differentiated and special kind of man, after his book was published in 1960s, he noticed that this was often not taken into account or is misinterpreted. This concept does not apply to angry young men who are rebelling against something, although they might even be grounded in some solid ideas. Differentiated man is a man with high degree of maturity in surviving with no or minimal external support in the world left to itself, and in various trials of self-knowledge. In his essay from 1968 The Youth, the Beats, and Right-Wing Anarchists he writes:

My book Ride the Tiger, which has been described as a ‘manual for the Right-wing anarchist’, only partially solves this problem, since it is essentially addressed to a specific differentiated type, with a high level of maturity – something which people have failed to observe all too often. So the guidelines provided in this book are not always suitable for the category of young people I have just mentioned.

Evola in his book Ride the Tiger tries very hard to keep definition of the differentiated man as general as possible, but without losing on concreteness when it is needed. This kind of definition can be viewed as a specification which can have many different implementations, so although many men reading the book can imagine themselves as differentiated men, there is no way to prove that intellectually. This book makes sense only to those men who have significant prior experience in ways of survival related to “ride the tiger” approach, and have already tried to conceptualize their approach. Evola in this context has a role of a man with similar experiences who broadens horizons and provides grounding in traditional teachings.

Given that Evola used “ride the tiger” approach in his own life and that it seems that his path in that direction started with deep existential crisis after First World War, it is possible that this approach makes sense only to those who had similar experiences. In any case, his book Ride the Tiger has deep existential and personal dimension and in that way differs from most of his other books. In The Path of Cinnabar Evola writes:

In many ways, Ride the Tiger reflects the path that I have chosen for myself: for the indications and guidelines suggested in the book are those which I have sought to apply in the course of my own life. This, however, does not bestow a merely subjective and private character on Ride the Tiger, as if it were a kind of spiritual testament; on the contrary, I believe that the problems and experiences that have marked my own life reflect and contribute to define typical features of individual existence in the contemporary world.

Readers of his books should always be careful in identifying themselves with Evola given that he is a man, although in many ways modern and therefore similar to men of today, of very differentiated kind. His background, which he fully rejected in his youth, is a serious bourgeois world of early 20^th century Italy, a world very different from today’s consumer-bourgeois world. No matter how radical his readers are, Evola probably lived more radical life than them. In order to know Evola as the “differentiated man” and Evola in many phases of his career, which are in some cases contradictory and not fully consistent, the best book to read is The Path of Cinnabar, his intellectual autobiography. Reading this book before any other book is the best way to avoid misunderstandings and to read what fits the nature of the reader, and in a proper way.

Evola in several cases uses the term “man of Tradition” in order to assign a very noble-sounding property to the differentiated man. He defined the “world of Tradition” in some other of his books, so this might be the reason why he does not go into details in defining what he exactly means by “man of Tradition” in his book Ride the Tiger. It is clear that differentiated man’s Self matches the structure of the Self of the man of Tradition in that it has the ability of transcendence, which allows him to keep a distance from various destructions of the bourgeois world, the antithesis of the world of Tradition. Evola is very realistic on the ability of the differentiated man to fully transcend limitations of the world left to itself. Ideas like the one which suggests unfortunate subtitle of Ride the Tiger which was published in early 2000s, “survival manual for aristocrats of the soul”, should be avoided. The differentiated man is neither priest nor warrior nor aristocrat of the old world. In Ride the Tiger Evola writes:

One cannot ignore everything that modern progress and culture have created, and that is now established fact in modern man’s makeup, largely neutralizing the faculties necessary for an effective “opening” of the experience of things and beings – an opening that has nothing to do with the philosophical lubrications of today’s phenomenologists.

Although Evola had many phases in his 40 years long writing career, it is clear that he ended his career with the “ride the tiger” phase, considering this approach the only existentially relevant approach after all possibilities for direct action disappeared at the end of the Second World War. Given the acceleration of dissolution he noticed after the war, he considered most of his other books as being valuable primarily for the broadening of reader’s intellectual horizons, especially those which are dealing with inner doctrines. In The Path of Cinnabar he writes:

On the other hand, if we turn from doctrine to practice, I believe that the only reasonable (yet rather important) aims that can be accomplished today concern the strengthening of one’s character. … What is more difficult is to discipline oneself: to adopt a firm line of conduct in everyday life. In this respect, I believe that what I have written in Ride the Tiger, and partly in The Bow and the Club, can prove useful.

It is generally very easy, given the generality of the concept of the differentiated man, to lower the bar and treat every form of non-conformism as “riding the tiger”. It is very easy to be “differentiated” living in the greatest Bubble in history, but as the consumer-bourgeois cycle is ending, many will have opportunity to existentially prove do they really match the concept of the differentiated man. In the context of the bursting of Everything Bubble, the possible end of Kali Yuga and the Great Reset, this concept might prove to be not just interesting but also useful from the perspective of survival, both physical and metaphysical.