To The Readers of "La Torre"
Julius Evola's introduction to Issue No. 1 of La Torre (The Tower)
This magazine gathers the few, for whom the sharp denial of the current “civilization” is the principle and the indispensable presupposition for every truly creative activity. Without softening and without compromises, we set ourselves against the lowering of the spiritual level that on all planes the men of today have constituted as a system.
We react against the loss of every higher meaning of existence; against the materialization, the socialization, and the standardization that everything undergoes; against the strange contaminations and the newest idolatries with which day by day every fount is poisoned, every life petrified, every way closed.
Our watchword, across all planes, is the supreme right of that which was the privilege of the ascetic, the heroic, and the aristocratic over everything that is practical, conditioned, temporal, and in any way measurable by passion and utility, whether individual or collective; it is the firm protest against the insolent omnipresence of economic and social tyranny, and against the shipwreck of every perspective into the most petty human one.
For all that is weak, that is compromising, that is enslaved to opinions and to the small conveniences of the moment, both in Italy and abroad, we intend to be a danger, a challenge, and a denunciation. We say that, cut off from the source and from the ray, every life is pseudo-life, every form is a vain scaffolding destined to certain collapse.
To philosophy, to art, to politics, to science and to religion itself, we contest the right and the possibility that these are closing in on themselves, living without reference to a unified point of view, higher than them all.
Beyond the limits of “civilization” and of “culture”, it is necessary that contacts be opened again, that every particularism be overcome, that in all the forms of activity there returns to circulate and to manifest a light that bears witness to a rediscovered sense of existence, of being born, of living and of dying, which raises all values to a plane of heroic synthesis and of freedom, whether of the natural order or of the supernatural order.
This is our affirmation and this is our negation; the one absolute as much as the other. We do not admit points of meeting and of “discussion.” If we affirm that the profound state of crisis of the modern world is due to the lack of a “tradition,” we say however that for us “tradition” has nothing to do with certain nationalistic and provincial ambitions of little men, with any acquiescence and survivals: with nothing, in short, that takes away the first rank and the supreme right from free and realizing spirituality.
It is the development of a breath grafted to all the forces of the world, yet disciplined in a high tension of the soul in culminations of the races of those superior beings, who, in every time, upon vulgar traditions constituted the highest tradition of spirituality – such is instead our point of reference for the “traditionality” that in the sense above all of common dignity and aristocracy, we today affirm, outside any empirical limitation: ethnic, religious, cultural or political – and against every other traditionalism.
The ground on which we will keep ourselves rigidly firm, is this: to it, in the variety of the treatments, we will constantly refer every realization, every critique, every struggle, every destruction; placing ourselves outside of any particular interest and of any contingency of the moment; paralyzing every inclination to yield, to evade, or to concede; fully assuming the dignity and the responsibility of our task; investigating problems of speculation, of art and of politics, but from a point of view that will always be superior to that of each of such special forms, and above all to the measures to which men today are reducing everything.
The “solitaries,” the “irreducibles,” and the “free” therefore gather in La Torre, not as a refuge or a place of a more or less mystical flight, but as a post of resistance, of combat, and of superior realism.
More than programs or orientations, ways: various expressions of the one tradition which, in the plurality of realizations, tends not to form, but to unite individuals, not in equality of belief, but in equality of dignity. Contemplation or action, ascetic solitude or realizing will, lyricism or warfare, affirmation or destruction, visions of peaks or visions of abysses: it matters little, provided that there be one sign that unites us, and one which appears through the variety of forms and of aspirations.
In this sense, if this journal has a director and a direction, nevertheless each who writes in it is free, and precisely because they are free, they are responsible in an absolute seat, in the seat of truth, for their writings.
And such are the words that all of us, present, future, and potential defenders of La Torre write in unity of impulse. Each then will follow his own way, and the readers will understand and judge.