"Spirit is the life that cuts through life."
All the positive aspects of the way of the superman belong to these aspects:
1) The power to make a law for oneself
2) The power to refuse and not to act, when one is pressed to affirmation by a prodigious force and an enormous tension
3) The natural and free asceticism moved to test its own strength by guaging "the power of a will according to the degree of resistance, pain, and torment that it can bear in order to turn them to its own advantage"
4) The principle of not obeying the passions but of holding them on a leash: one must have them to the greatest degree, but held in check, and moreover, doing this with simplicity, not feeling any particular satisfaction thereby
5) The idea that the superior man is distinguished from the inferior by his intrepidity, by his defiance of unhappiness
6) The responding with incredulity to those who point the way to happiness in order to make man follow a certain behavior: "But what does happiness mean to us?"
7) The recognition that one of the ways to preserve a superior species of man is to claim the right to exceptional acts as attempts at victory over oneself and as acts of freedom...to assure oneself, with a sort of asceticism, a preponderance and a certitude of one's own strength of will, without refusing any privation
8) To affirm that freedom whose elements include keeping the distance which separates us, being indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privations, even to life itself, the highest type of the free man being seen in "he who always overcomes the strongest resistances
9) To denounce the insidious confusion between discipline and enfeeblement and holding that indulgence can only be objected to in the case of him who has no right to it, and when all the passions have been discredited thatnks to those who were not strong enough to turn them to their own advantage
10) To point the way of those who, free from all bonds, obeying only their own law, are unbending in obedience to it and above every human weakness
...all those aspects, in fine, in which, the superman is not the "blond beast of prey" and the heir to the equivocal virtus of Renaissance despots, but is also capable of generosity, quick to offer manly aid, of generous virtue, magnanimity, and superiority to his own individuality - all these are the positive elements that the man of Tradition also makes his own, but which are only comprehensible and attainable when "life" is "more than life," that is, through transcendence. They are values attainable only by those in whom there is something else, and something more, than mere life.
Julius Evola - Ride the Tiger, 48-50
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