Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola was an Italian far-right philosopher. Evola regarded his values as aristocratic, monarchist, masculine, traditionalist, heroic, and defiantly reactionary. An eccentric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany; in the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant Right.

Evola was born in Rome and served as an artillery officer in the First World War. He became an artist within the Dada movement, but gave up painting in his twenties; he said he considered suicide until he had a revelation while reading a Buddhist text. In the 1920s he delved into the occult; he wrote on Western esotericism and Eastern mysticism, developing his doctrine of "magical idealism". His writings blend various ideas of German idealism, Eastern doctrines, traditionalism and the Conservative Revolution of the interwar period. Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites. To counter this and call in a primordial rebirth, Evola presented a "world of Tradition". Tradition for Evola was not Christian—he did not believe in God—but rather an eternal supernatural knowledge with values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience.

Evola advocated for the Italian racial laws, and became the leading Italian "racial philosopher". Autobiographical remarks allude to his having worked for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) the intelligence agency of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Nazi Party. He fled to Nazi Germany in 1943 when the Italian Fascist regime fell, but returned to Rome under the Italian Social Republic, a German puppet state, to organise a radical-right group. In 1945 in Vienna a Soviet shell fragment permanently paralysed him from the waist down. On trial for glorifying fascism in 1951, Evola denied being a fascist, instead declaring himself "superfascista" (lit. 'superfascist'). The historian Elisabetta Cassina Wolff wrote that "It is unclear whether this meant that Evola was placing himself above or beyond Fascism". Evola was acquitted.

Evola has been called the "chief ideologue" of the Italian radical right after the Second World War, and his philosophy has been characterised as one of the most consistently "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century". His writings contain misogyny, racism, antisemitism and attacks on Christianity and the Catholic Church. He continues to influence contemporary traditionalist and neo-fascist movements.

Early life

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to Sicilian parents on 19 May 1898. His family were aristocrats and devout Roman Catholics; he is sometimes described as a baron. Evola considered details about his early life irrelevant, and is noted for hiding some details of his personal life. He adopted the name Julius in homage to Ancient Rome.

Evola rebelled against his Catholic upbringing. He studied engineering at the Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci in Rome, but did not complete his course, later claiming this was because he did not want to be associated with "bourgeois academic recognition" and titles such as "doctor and engineer". In his teenage years he immersed himself in painting—which he considered one of his natural talents—and literature, including Oscar Wilde and Gabriele d'Annunzio. He was introduced to philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Otto Weininger. Other early philosophical influences included the Italian man of letters Carlo Michelstaedter and the German post-Hegelian thinker Max Stirner.

Philosophy

Evola's writings blended ideas from German idealism, Eastern doctrines, traditionalist conservatism, and especially the interwar Conservative Revolution, "with which Evola had a deep personal involvement". He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age (the Kali Yuga). In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l'uomo differenziato—"the man who has become different"—who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages. Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola's definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Matthew Rose wrote that "Evola claimed to show how basic human activities—from eating and sex, commerce and games, to war and social intercourse—were elevated by Tradition into something ritualistic, becoming activities whose very repetitiveness offered a glimpse of an unchanging eternal realm". Ensuring Tradition's triumph of order over chaos, in Evola's view, required an obedience to aristocracy. Rose wrote that Evola "aspired to be the most right-wing thinker possible in the modern world".

Evola's philosophical work started in the 1920s with The Theory of the Absolute Individual and Phenomenology of the Absolute Individual. Teoria dell'individuo assoluto (Theory of The Absolute Individual) and Fenomenologia dell'individuo assoluto (Phenomenology of the Absolute Individual) originally constituted a single work which only for editorial reasons ended up being divided into two separate volumes, published a few years apart from each other, one in 1927 and the other in 1930, published in Turin at the publisher called Bocca. This work was different and even attack on the dominant Hegelian thought in Italy, prevailed by the works of Benedetto Croce. He helped Evola to find a publisher for his Theory and Phenomenology of Absolute Individual, a work which started in 1924 but was only published in its final form in 1927 and 1930, though it is not certain to which extent Croce helped Evola

Personal life

Evola was childless and never married, but as a young man he had a relationship with the writer Sibilla Aleramo. He spent his postwar years in his apartment in Rome. He died on 11 June 1974 in Rome of congestive heart failure. His ashes, per his will, were deposited in a hole cut in a glacier on Monte Rosa in the Pennine Alps