Being Oneself

...is the valid attitude for the man who must stay standing as a free being, even in the epoch of dissolution: to assume his own being into a willing, making it his own law, a law as absolute and autonomous as Kant's categorical imperative but affirmed without regard for received values, for "good" or "evil," nor for happiness, pleasure, or pain. The man in question affirms and actualizes his own being without considering rewards or punishments, either here or in an afterlife, saying: The way does not exist: this is my will, neither good nor bad, but my own.

In short, Nietzsche hands on the ancient sayings "Be Yourself," "Become what you are" as propositions for today, when all superstructure has fragmented.

Strength and responsibility must be no less than they were long ago, when they were born from religious faith and from a given point of support, in a different human type and a different climate (42).

In all strictness, to be purely oneself and to have a fully free existence, one should be able to accept, will, and say an absolute "yes" to whatever one is - even when there is nothing in one's nature that approaches the ideal of the superman; even if one's own life and destiny do not present heroism, nobility, splendor, generosity, and altruism, but decadence, corruption, debility, and perversion.

"I teach you to say yes to all that strenthens, that gathers energy, that justifies the feeling of vigor."

The claim is justified only when the corresponding command is transposed, internalized, and purified, detached from any specific content and especially from any reference to a greater or lesser vitality. It is rather a matter of either being capable or incapable of holding firm within, in one's own naked absolute being, with nothing to fear and nothing to hope for (43-44).

One can see now how problematic is the very point that has hitherto seemed fixed: fidelity to oneself, the absolute, autonomous law based on one's own "being," when it is formulated in general and abstract terms.

At the moment when they are thrown back on their own naked will, trying to prove it to themselves with an absolute action, they collapse; they collapse precisely because they are divided beings, because they are deluded concerning their true nature and their real strength. Their freedom is turned against them and destroys them; they fail at the very point at which they should have reaffirmed themselves - in their depths they find nothing to sustain them and carry them forward.

To continue our agenda, I will now consider a line of conduct during the reign of dissolution that is not suitable for everyone, but for a differentiated type, and especially for the heir to the man of the traditional world, who retains his roots in that world even though he finds himself devoid of any support for it in his outer existence (46).

Only this kind of man can use those positive aspects gleaned from the preceding analysis as his elementary basis, because when he looks within himself, he does not find a changeable and divided substance, but a fundamental direction, a "dominant," even though shrouded or limited by secondary impulses. What is more, the 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.

Nietzsche's solution of the problem of the meaning of life, consisting in the affirmation that this meaning does not exist outside of life, and that life in itself is meaning, is valid only on the presupposition of a being that has transcendence as its essential component.

Spirit is the life that cuts through life (47).

-Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger