Abstract
This article analyses two “translations” of the Dàodéjīng by Julius Evola (1898–1974), published in 1923 and 1959, respectively. Evola had no knowledge of the Chinese language, and his works were retranslations of materials available at his time to which he added his own personal ideas. By a comparison of the two editions of the Daoist classic, it is demonstrated how Evola changed his cultural points of reference over time, moving from an interpretation of the Dàodéjīng characterised by a mix of Dadaism, Hegelian Idealism, and occultism to a version in line with René Guénon’s (1886–1951) teachings (Traditionalism). However, this article also demonstrates how, despite changing his vocabulary and sources, Evola continued to seek confirmation of his solipsistic theory of the “Absolute Individual” in the ancient Chinese text. For this reason, the article argues that Evola’s orientalist production did not stem from a dispassionate interest in the cultures of Asia, but should be seen as inextricably connected to his reactionary political ideology.
1 Introduction
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the great sinologist Édouard Chavannes (1865–1918) assessed the state of his discipline: “The study of Daoism is one of the great tasks which remains to be accomplished by sinologists; the endless numbers of translations of the Tao-te-ching by whom beginners hope to gain with little effort their laurels as translators, do not advance us at all; we now have to study Daoist literature in all its completeness” (Chavannes 1911: 749). However, taking a look at the shelves of contemporary generalist European and American bookstores, it might seem that little has changed since Chavannes’s times. Surely, Daoist Studies have greatly developed in the last fifty years, but it seems that the general public has remained almost untouched by this evolution. Euro-American readers, even those interested in “Oriental spirituality,” are rarely engaged with Sinological works and prefer to look at the same “translations of the Tao-te-ching” about which Chavannes complained. In this regard, Russell Kirkland (1997) has talked of “Taoism of the Western imagination,” which should not be confused with “the Taoism of China.” This phenomenon is especially visible in Italy. Despite a tradition of Chinese Studies that exceeds a hundred years in total, the overwhelming majority of translations of the Daoist Classics available to the general public are (often scientifically dubious) retranslations of French, English, and German editions.1
The present article discusses a pair of these works, two different versions of one of the foundational texts of Daoism, the Dàodéjīng
This multifaced nature of Evola’s work created a hermeneutical paradox, most evident in the pioneer of Evolian studies, “H.T. Hansen” (pseudonym of Hans Thomas Hakl; b. 1947).2 On the one hand, Hakl believed that one part of Evola’s production should be separated from his political ideology, and he argued that Evola’s “purely esoteric writings […] have nothing to do with political questions” (Hansen 2002: 1). On the other hand, he maintained that “esoteric truths additionally influenced and strengthened Evola’s thought, including his political ideas” (ibid.: 21). Furthermore, Hakl deemed “self-evident” the connection between some aspects of Evola’s thought and the Daoist Classic (ibid.: 19–22). Nevertheless, and despite this importance given by Hakl to Daoism,3 he never specifically discussed Evola’s engagement with the Dàodéjīng.
Contra Hakl, this article argues against any attempt to separate Evola’s political ideology from his orientalist production.4 By exploring his approach to the Dàodéjīng, reconstructing his sources, and describing the theoretical framework of both editions, I intend to a) point out how, in the course of his intellectual career, Evola systematically bent his source material to his ideological agenda, and b) demonstrate that his works on Daoism should be ascribed to the same “Dao of the West” (Clarke 2000) that still enjoys great commercial success and cultural influence today.
2 Biographical Note: Evola before 1923
Giulio (“Julius”) Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome in 1898 to a well-off family originally from Sicily. Evola’s biography and intellectual activity are conventionally divided into three periods, namely, an artistic, philosophical, and Traditionalist one.5 As customary at the time of his upbringing, he was raised in a Catholic environment, but soon turned to more “anti-establishment” authors like the novelists Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), and philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Carlo Michelstaedter (1887–1910). Literature and philosophy continued to characterise Evola’s youth, eventually estranging him from Christianity and convincing him of the necessity of
a revolt against the bourgeois world and its petty morality, against all egalitarianism, democratism, and conformism, and in the affirmation of the principles of an aristocratic morality and the values of the individual that frees himself from all ties and who makes his own law (Evola 1963: 14).6
This “revolt” brought Evola to his involvement with many modernist movements of his time, most notably Futurism, which, founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), was exceptionally vehement in its denunciation of the past.
At the outbreak of World War I, Evola enlisted as a volunteer in the Italian army, even though he later affirmed that he has not agreed with “the most obsolete, jingoist slogans of anti-German rhetoric” nor believed that the Italian war effort alongside the Triple Entente was “a war in defence of civilisation and freedom against barbarian invaders” (Evola 1963: 17). Upon his return, he went through a profound intellectual and spiritual crisis, which led him to contemplate the idea of suicide. According to his own account, it was a religious text of Asia, the Buddhist Majjhima Nikāya,7 that convinced him of the inanity of a suicidal choice. Once he overcame this crisis, Evola broke with Futurism, about which he disliked “the sensuality, the lack of interiority, its whole noisy and exhibitionistic side, a crude exaltation of life and instinctual curiously mixed with mechanisms and a sort of Americanism” (ibid.).
Having abandoned Futurism, Evola moved his attention to the Dadaists and began corresponding with one of the founders of the movement, Tristan Tzara (1896–1963),8 and soon became the most important Italian exponent of Dadaism. He published a theory of Dadaism (Evola 1920) and participated in several exhibitions with his paintings, which are receiving increasing attention from contemporary art critics (Sgarbi 2022).
In his autobiography, Evola explained that he was attracted by Dadaism because of the radicalism of the movement, given that, in his view, Dadaism did not aim at being one among many avant-garde art movements: “Dadaism could not lead to any art in the proper sense. Rather, it marked the self-dissolution of art into a higher state of freedom. This seemed to me to be its essential meaning” (Evola 1963: 22). It was this spiritual significance of Dadaist art that most interested Evola. For him, the paradoxical nature of Dada represented “the impulse towards absolute liberation with the disruption of all logical, ethical, and aesthetic categories” (ibid.: 22), and he acknowledged that there was “a certain, albeit hidden, tendency towards transcendence” (ibid.: 23) in Tzara’s artistic ideals. Evola’s expectations about the spiritual significance of Dadaism soon faded away,9 and, in the early 1920s, he stopped his artistic production and turned his attention to philosophy.10
The Italian philosophical discussion in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by the Hegelian neo-Idealism of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), and Evola entered the philosophical debate of his time with two works, his Teoria dell’individuo assoluto (Theory of the Absolute Individual) and Fenomenologia dell’individuo assoluto (Phenomenology of the Absolute Individual), whose writing started in 1917 but only published in 1927 and 1930, respectively. Similar to his understanding of Dadaism, Evola’s theory of “the Absolute Individual” is also characterised by a radical quest for absolute freedom grounded on the unconditioned affirmation of the self.
3 Countercultural Orientalisms in the Early 1900s Italy
The first of Evola’s translations of the Dàodéjīng was written in 1922 and published in 1923.11 As noted above, this year represented a watershed between his “artistic” and “philosophical” periods, something explicitly acknowledged by Evola himself who argued that his first Dàodéjīng “constituted a kind of link between the two phases” (Evola 1963: 30).
One may wonder why someone interested in artistic avant-garde and Hegelian philosophy would turn to the Dàodéjīng. In order to understand the reasons behind this choice, one has to look at the context of the Italian culture of the early 1900s. The late nineteenth century was hegemonised by positivism which soon became “a strategy for reasserting the power of […] traditional intellectuals” (Riley, Emigh, and Ahmed 2021: 814). However, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of authors reacted against positivism. A notable protagonist of this reaction was Decio Calvari (1863–1937), leader of La Lega Teosofica Indipendente (The Independent Theosophical League), an independent branch of the multinational Theosophical Society (Pasi 2012). Asian religions were essential ingredients of the Lega Teosofica’s occultist discourse and – through Calvari’s organisation – Evola met several orientalists like John Woodroffe (better known with his pen name “Arthur Avalon”; 1865–1936) and, most relevant for this article, Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984), one of the leading Italian experts of Daoism of his time (D’Anna 2014; Rossi 1994).12
A “countercultural” interest in the religions of the Orient was by no means limited to Calvari and his Lega Teosofica. Of particular interest for the current discussion is another Italian intellectual movement, the scapigliatura fiornentina (Florentine Scapigliatura),13 described as “a particular phase of Florentine history, where new poetics, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) and Nietzsche, Pragmatism and Croce’s neo-Idealism, Oriental religions, and occultism did, for a short number of years, seem to be able to all go hand in hand” (Giudice 2022: 56). Evola had met one of the two founding figures of the movement,14 Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), as early as 1914, and his first edition of the Dàodéjīng was inspired by this milieu. This connection is testified by the publisher chosen for his work, that is, Carabba.
Founded in 1878 as a philosophical and literary publishing house, in the first decades of the 1900s, the Rocco Carabba Publishing House (Casa editrice Rocco Carabba) chose Papini as the curator of a very innovative book series entitled La Cultura dell’anima (Culture of the Soul), which ran from 1909 to 1938. Under Papini’s supervision, La Cultura dell’anima consisted of 163 titles which included classics of the Western philosophical canon such as Aristotle and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), as well as spiritual books such as a selection of Upanishads, Buddhist texts, and even the Pagine di morale ebraica (Pages of Jewish Moral; Colombo 1931) (Del Castello, Lucchetta, and Tatasciore 2011; 2013). However, the most recurrent non-Christian tradition included by Papini in his La Cultura dell’anima was Daoism. In 1917, Carabba published Il Taoismo (Daoism) by Carlo Puini (1839–1924), an armchair orientalist who was professor of East Asian history at the Institute of Higher Studies in Florence (Istituto di studi superiori di Firenze) from 1878 to 1921 and Papini’s personal friend (Papini 1948: 247–250). Five years later, an anthology of stories from Zhuāngzǐ
The relevance given by Papini to Daoism in a context such as La Cultura dell’anima is significant if we consider the relatively high presence of books about Daoism compared to other religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, which were much more known in the first decades of the twentieth century. The most interesting aspect of Daoism in Papini’s cultural milieu is the fact that the majority of the authors/curators of the books about Daoism had never been in China, and only one of them was a trained Sinologist, namely Puini. Even more surprising was the fact that Puini wrote a historical introduction to the Daoist religion whereas the presentations (as well as the Italian translation) of the Daoist most obscure text were left to a poet (Novaro). This arrangement reflected Papini’s dissatisfaction with the works of sinologists as translators, publicly expressed in 1916 when he lamented that “our sinologists have an understandable aversion for translating poetry. They are only interested in philosophical and religious texts and history” (quoted in Masini 1999: 34).
In addition to literature, poetry, and attention to Asian religions, another important ingredient of Carabba’s milieu was “esotericism.”17 In the interwar period, Italy saw a growing interest in alternative spiritualities, and the study of esotericism “was an integral part of the culture or, at least, of the high culture, of those who devoted themselves to philosophical and psychological studies without rationalist prejudices conditioning their choices” (Marcigliano 2006). This interest had begun in the early 1900s, and Papini himself actively engaged with the Italian occultist milieu (Bozzato 2022). In addition to specifically esoteric publishers like Atanòr, even more mainstream publishing houses like Laterza or Bocca Editori included in their catalogue authors such as Édouard Schuré (1841–1929), Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875), Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), and Rudolph Steiner (1861–1925).
As noted above, Carabba was one of the protagonists of this ambiance, and Evola’s Dàodéjīng should be placed within this intellectual milieu. His work was not included in La Cultura dell’anima, but in another of Carabba’s series entitled Scrittori Italiani e Stranieri (Italian and Foreign Writers), which, in addition to literature (especially German), philosophy, and Asian religious texts, also published occult authors such as the Austrian writer and translator Gustav Meyrink (born Gustav Meyer; 1868–1932). As it happened in La Cultura dell’anima, Chinese religion was also presented to the readers of Scrittori Italiani e Stranieri with editions of Chinese classics curated by non-specialists. Most notably, a collection of Chinese poetry was published in 1918 with the title Nuvole Bianche (White Clouds). The author, the Florentine poet Mario Chini (1876–1959), is notable for his “Variazioni” (Variations), loose literary retranslations (mostly from French) of foreign poetry.18
Evola’s Dàodéjīng (as well as all of his “orientalist literature” until the 1930s) is the product of the context described above, and was published exactly at that moment in which Chinese poetry and literature exerted a notable influence on the Italian intellectual life, not due to the work of modern sinologists but “mostly to some versatile writers who, using the translations by sinologists, were able to present Chinese literature to European readers, often disregarding the original texts, but using freer prose and, in so doing, attracting a wider audience” (Masini 1999: 38).
These “versatile writers” were not exclusively an Italian phenomenon. On the contrary, literary adaptations of Daoist texts were read and appreciated across all of Europe.
4 China and Daoism in 1920s Europe
Daoism and the Dàodéjīng were virtually unknown to the European public until the nineteenth century. Formerly, the study of Chinese culture was dominated by the Jesuits, who were responsible for a wave of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sinophilia that played a central role in European intellectual discourse in religion, arts, morals, and politics (Mungello 1985; 2009; Zhang 2008; Zuroski 2013). However, the Jesuits chose to represent Confucianism as the most valuable aspect of Chinese culture (because they deemed it compatible with Christianity) and discredited Daoism as an idolatrous superstition inspired by the devil, whose practice “gave rise to ravings and delirium” (Clarke 2000: 8).
The situation changed in the early 1800s. Since the Society of Jesus had been suppressed in 1773, a new generation of European scholars was left without informants with direct access to China. Thus, 1800s sinologists turned to the enormous amount of textual material that had been sent from China in previous centuries. In France, the most important collection of Chinese literature was the Chinese fund of La Bibliothèque du Roi (today’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France), consisting of over four thousand volumes of mostly unexplored Chinese literature which had been collected since 1698 (Lebranchu 2017: 167). A considerable part of this literature was represented by Daoist texts that were for the first time translated by the new generation of scholars. Starting from simpler books like the Tàishàng gǎnyìng piān
Some scholars believed that Julien’s scientific translation would have stopped the production of fanciful interpretations of the text (Müller 1873: 330–331) but, as noted above, this was not the case. If Julien inaugurated an approach that is still followed today by people seriously interested in Chinese religion, not only more loose translations continued to exist, but imaginative renderings of the Dàodéjīng have enjoyed (and still enjoy) a large commercial success that justifies the countless number of “translations” that currently flood the Euro-American book market.
This dichotomy between professional scholars and amateurs is very visible in Evola’s presentation of his first Dàodéjīng. In his introduction, in addition to Julien, Evola acknowledged other translations he consulted for his work, including an old German translation by Reinhold von Plänckner (1820–1884). Published in 1870, von Plänckner’s book was severely outdated by the standards of the 1920s, and already harshly criticised in the late nineteenth century by James Legge (1883: 78; Pokorny 2024: 62). Possibly the most important European Sinologist of the post-Julien generation, Legge was responsible for the inclusion of Daoism within the ranks of “world religions” (Girardot 1999: 109) and it was also acknowledged by Evola in the presentation of his work.
Julien’s and Legge’s professional translations became important reference points for anyone engaging with the Dàodéjīng in the 1920s. Yet, in his introduction, Evola showed a great deal of distrust towards them, launching an invective against scholars (“the orientalists”), “mere erudites and grammarians, incapable of thinking in philosophical terms” (Evola 1923: ii). Unlike Julien and Legge, Evola positioned his work as that of a writer-philosopher who, being able to grasp the essential meaning of an ancient source, can overcome “the inevitable difficulties inherent in the accidental lacunae and aporias in the texts” (ibid.). This approach was not new and Evola could draw from a well-established tradition of non-sinologists who tried their hand at translating the Dàodéjīng. In fact, because of his distrust for academics, Evola turned to another translation of the Dàodéjīng that was published in 1903 by a German (naturalised French) author with the name Alexander Ular (1876–1919).20 Born Alexander Ferdinand Uhlemann, Ular was a writer, journalist, political and industrial representative, and spent many years in Asia (Bernier 2001: 110). It is not hard to understand why Evola liked Ular’s approach: his work was a perfect embodiment of those European authors who compensated for their lack of Sinological training with polemical verve, a hypertrophic ego, and fervid imagination. Presenting his Dàodéjīng, Ular attacked Julien and his work which was allegedly filled with “aberration” and “dangerous interpretation” (Reiter 1996: 283) and, despite his relative ignorance of the necessary knowledge for translating a text as complex as the Dàodéjīng, he even insisted that he has shown to the Chinese intellectuals the meaning of “the essential passages of the text, which they did not understand” (Ular 1903: 68).
Contemporary scholars are aware that “today we surely do not confuse this rather pretentious adaptation with the [original] Tao-te ching of Chou times” (Reiter 1996: 283), but Ular’s book was a commercial success in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was widely read, both in its French (1902) and German (1903) versions, by those interested in literary translation of Chinese literature and became the basis for many European retranslations, including the very first Italian version of the Dàodéjīng. In fact, at the time of Evola’s first edition of the Chinese classic, there was not a single Italian Dàodéjīng that was translated from the original Chinese (D’Arelli 2007). For Italian readers, the only choice was Laotse: Il libro della via e della virtù (Laotse: The Book of the Way and Virtue) by Guglielmo Evans, an amateur author notable for his Italian translations of German literature.
For his first Dàodéjīng, Evola heavily relied on Evans and explicitly acknowledged him in the introduction. Surprisingly, Evola did not realise that Evans’ work was not an original but a blatant plagiarism of Ular’s Dàodéjīng.21
5 1923: Dao and Dada
Evans’ plagiarism shows the influence of Ular’s Dàodéjīng among the German-speaking readership (Grasmück 2004: 65).22 Most importantly, it is necessary to remark that Ular was widely read and appreciated by a group dear to Evola: the Germanophone Dadaists. We know that Ular’s book was read and shared by protagonists of German Dadaism such as Hannah Höch (1889–1978), Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), Richard Hülsenbeck (1892–1974), and Hugo Ball (1886–1927), who often read the Dàodéjīng in comparison with classics of German mysticism like Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). The Dadaists were not original in this approach to the Chinese classic which had been foreshadowed in the late nineteenth century by German Theosophists such as Franz Hartmann (1838–1912) (Pokorny 2024).
Echoes of Daoist concepts in the work of German-speaking Dadaists have been noticed by several scholars. For example, John Bramble has argued that Daoism “was the most important ingredient in Dada mystical syncretism” (Bramble 2015: 78) and that Hülsenbeck’s assertion that Dada “‘raves because it knows how to be silent, it acts because it is in a state of rest’ evokes the Tao Te Ching’s reconciliation of opposites” (ibid.: 79). In this context, it is important to point out how Ular’s Dàodéjīng was a contributing factor in the Dadaist interest in Daoism, starting from Tzara, who had argued that Zhuāngzǐ (the author of another important Daoist classic) was “as dada as we are” (quoted in Baas 2012: 55).
Like the Dadaists, Evola’s understanding of Daoism was heavily influenced by Ular. In fact, in his 1923 translation, Evola relied on the German edition of Ular’s Dàodéjīng and on Evans who, in turn, had copied Ular’s French edition. Hence, it is not surprising that the introduction written by the Roman Dadaist reads like a celebration of the Franco-German writer. There, Evola wrote that most of the translations preceding his were “extremely faulty” (1923: ii) and, thanks to Ular’s work, Europeans finally rectified “the error of giving the ancient signs used by Lao-tze the meanings of current linguistic usage” (ibid.). Obviously, this affirmation is totally inaccurate given that European intellectuals were aware of the evolution of the Chinese language since at least the seventeenth century, but it is important to signal Evola’s approach to the text and the cultural stream to which his first Dàodéjīng belongs.
To point out each of Evola’s (i.e., Ular’s) countless mischaracterisations of the Dàodéjīng would require an entire article. Suffice it to say that he ignored most of the basic information about the dating and authorship of the Dàodéjīng that, at the time of Evola’s book, had been scholarly common knowledge for almost a century. However, although Evola’s attempt may look naïve to anyone familiar with the training necessary to approach a complex text like the Dàodéjīng, his book illustrates that precise moment in European intellectual life in which (a representation of) Daoism became a source of inspiration for European artists.
Being the most important Italian Dadaist and a sincere admirer of German culture, Evola made the connection between Daoism and Dadaism explicit in a letter to Tzara, in which he informed his friend about his forthcoming “new translation-interpretation of Lao Tze’s Tao-The King, which I did with the help of a Chinese […].23 In this book, I try to show that Lao Tze’s doctrine can be regarded as a transcendental presupposition of the Dadaist position” (Valento 1991: 53–54).
This idea finds confirmation in many passages of Evola’s introduction to his Dàodéjīng. First of all, for Evola, the “Dao” (like Dada) is essentially performative. Since, in Chinese, the word dào
Evola characterised the Dao as a process called “dialectic of meaning” (1923: v).24 In this view, the meaning of the “Dao” unfolds in a series of contradictions between opposite determinations (being/non-being, affirmation/negation, immanence/transcendence, etc.) and, so understood, the Dao acquires meaning precisely because, when stripped of any given meaning and its nature, forces the interpreter in a world where formal logic and ordinary language are powerless. Hence, the Dao can only be described with paradoxes: it is “essentially, the form of formlessness, the phenomenon of non-phenomenon” (1923: vi).
This dynamic explains why Evola found in Lǎozǐ
I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things […] I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together in one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense. […]
Dada means nothing.
If you find it futile and don’t want to waste your time on a word that means nothing […] (Tzara 1918: 1)
6 Philosophy and Occultism
In Evola’s “Dadaist” Dàodéjīng very little is said about art. As seen above, what mattered to the Roman author was to describe the presupposed sapiential content of the text. To do so, he mainly resorted to a repertoire of Hegelian neo-Idealism that was dominating Italian philosophy during the first decades of the twentieth century. In the dozen pages of his introduction, Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) name is mentioned several times (second only to Lǎozǐ) and his thought functions as a continuous reference point across all his arguments.
If Evola depicted Lǎozǐ as a proto-Dadaist, he also affirmed that “this Chinese from the seventh century BC anticipated all the fundamentals of German idealism” and the “fundamental principle of Fichte’s and Schelling’s philosophies” (1923: v). Bringing Lǎozǐ’s thought into dialogue with the European philosophical tradition was one of Evola’s most important goals, explicitly acknowledged at the end of the introduction, where he stated that his translation aimed at “elevating to the form of the concept […] the content which in Lao-tze is expressed in symbolic and metaphorical form” (ibid.: xxvi). For these reasons, his version of the Dàodéjīng was intended for an audience of “philosophy scholars,” for whom other “faulty” translations were of no use.
Some scholars have highlighted how Evola’s introduction to the Dàodéjīng contains, in nuce, the main elements of the philosophical theory of the “Absolute Individual,” developed by Evola in his “philosophical phase” (Ricciotti 2020: 41).25 Indeed, in a very idealistic fashion, Evola argued that reality does not subsist externally to the self, but the foundation of all things and the only possibility of sure knowledge is an act of absolute affirmation of the self. The Dao itself is expressed by Evola with the formula “I Am”26 (Evola 1923: 47), which both emphasises the solipsistic nature of his speculation; for him, Lǎozǐ was important because he taught the most powerful doctrine of the self. Unlike modern thinkers – Evola mentions Karl Marx (1818–1883), Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), and Max Striner (1806–1856) – who could only elaborate “deformed images” (ibid.: xxiv) of this doctrine, the Dàodéjīng radically affirmed “divine egoism, the original model of every individuality and purpose of the universe” (ibid.: xv).
Despite recent attempts to celebrate Evola as an original philosopher (Donà 2020; Ricciotti 2020; Volpi 2006),27 the theoretical discussion attached to his first Dàodéjīng is quite scholastic, and mainly consisted of the application of the Hegelian dialectic method as a means to overcome the aporia between transcendence and immanence and advocate for a series of “absolutes” that could be beyond all dualisms. In the few pages of his introduction, all of Evola’s arguments lead to “the absolute”: in addition to the seminal concept of “the Absolute Individual” (L’Individuo Assoluto), we find “the absolute actuality” (l’assoluta attualità), “the absolute spirit” (lo spirito assoluto), “the absolute act” (l’atto assoluto), “the absolute power” (il potere assoluto), “absolute actuality” (assoluta attualità), and many other “absolutes” that reveal the true nature of Evola’s speculation.28 Hence, although dressed up in philosophical garb, Evola’s theory is mainly a rhapsodic narrative, a prime example of his Dada esotericism aiming at finding the possibility of a definitive form of knowledge that could overcome the contradictory nature of reality (Chiantera-Stutte 2001: 120–125).
All those who tried to insert Evola’s Dàodéjīng in a serious philosophical discussion have focused their attention on his introduction, leaving out a very revealing section of his work, namely, a short appendix that follows his translation. However, I believe that the two pages of this appendix disclose the real nature of Evola’s work. Leaving behind the verbose philosophical discussion of the introduction, the reader enters into a new intellectual environment. Evola himself acknowledged that these pages concern “issues that go far beyond the mere philosophical consciousness” (1923: 99).
The appendix begins with these inspired words: “Having completed, with long years of solitude, the process of his inner development, Lao-tze silently left his land and his people, leaving behind him – in the synthetic ideograms of Tao-teh-king – the trace of his wisdom finally elevated to life” (Evola 1923: 97). After these opening words, which echoes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,29 Lǎozǐ and his Dàodéjīng are explained with a new goal in mind: initiation. Here we learn that, before leaving China, Lǎozǐ initiated two disciples, who, in turn, initiated another ten. This was, according to Evola, the original Daoism: an initiatic path reserved for a sapiential elite solely committed to knowledge. Unfortunately, the original teaching of Lǎozǐ “was soon completely depleted by interpretations and comments full of mythicising and poetic fantasy, as well as sentimentalism and moralism” (ibid.). Evola went on to argue that the original initiatic Dao survived in restricted circles, more exactly in three initiatic moments which are also three hierarchic degrees in which the Daoist community is articulated. The threefold hierarchy described by Evola is peculiar and does not correspond to anything that can be qualified as “Chinese Daoism.” The names of these alleged “initiatory moments” (“tongsang,” “phü-tüy,” and “phap”) are not Chinese, but they loosely refer to a series of ritual specialists typical of Vietnamese syncretic popular religion (Marino 2024b) which, ironically, can well be qualified as “full of mythicising and poetic fantasy, as well as sentimentalism and moralism” (on Vietnamese popular religion, see Bertrand 1996).
For historians of ideas interested in understanding the intellectual context of Evola’s Dàodéjīng and not in the sapiential content of the book, this odd characterisation of Daoism is extremely interesting because it represents the last element of Evola’s 1923 book, viz. “occultism.”30 For the ideas contained in his appendix, Evola relied on the French author Albert de Pouvourville (better known as Matgioi; 1861–1939), who, at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote a series of books about (what he called) Daoism and offered a like-wise idiosyncratic translation of the Dàodéjīng (de Pouvourville 1894a; 1894b). De Pouvourville was one of the protagonists of the Parisian occult milieu and an advocate for French colonial interests in East Asia, and his imaginative books on “Chinese” religions were read by a small circle of occultists (Marino 2024a).
It is not known what Evola knew of de Pouvourville at the time of his first Dàodéjīng but his appendix relied on the work of the French occultist to the extent that some paragraphs are almost literal translations of de Pouvourville’s French original. However, albeit apparently relegated in the final few pages of his book, “occultism” will be the most important aspect of Evola’s “occult Dadaism” because, unlike the other two relevant components of his Dàodéjīng (Hegelian Idealism and Dadaism), it will survive Evola’s next intellectual period, and it will still be visible in the 1959 edition of the Dàodéjīng.
7 From “Occult Dadaism” to Traditionalism
The world had changed dramatically in the three decades that separate Evola’s two different editions of the Dàodéjīng. In the year he published his second Dàodéjīng (1959), the time of early twentieth-century avant-gardes was long gone. Dadaism declined in the 1920s and soon Tzara had to face problems more pressing than artistic manifestoes. Due to his sympathy for the Communist Party and his Jewish origin, he had to flee Paris after Germany’s occupation and join the French resistance. On the opposite side of history, Evola turned to reactionary and racist ideologies, repeatedly trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to influence both the Italian Fascist and the German Nazi regimes. After World War II, Evola became one of the most prominent intellectual figures of the Radical Right, “and his undisputed domain was that of youth groups, circles, journals, cenacles: for generation upon generation of Radical Right militants he was the sage and guru, extending his influence outside of Italy” (Ferraresi 1987: 108).
More than Evola’s controversial political views, for this work it is important to mention another encounter that took place in the late 1920s, that with Traditionalism, a system of thought elaborated by the French esotericist René Guénon (1886–1951) (Sedgwick 2004; 2023). As noted above, the milieu in which Evola was active in the first decades of the twentieth century was very receptive towards esotericism, and the ideas of an occultist like de Pouvourville were explicitly endorsed and utilised by Evola as a reliable source about Daoism. However, it was only after he read Guénon that Evola found a stable theoretical framework in which he could place the different interests that have characterised the previous phases of his life and production. Philosophy, politics, and religion found a new home in the “integral traditionalism” (Evola 1973) advocated by Guénon. For him, such a tradition was a universal and eternal Truth “whose origin lies in the transcendent, beyond humans, peoples, and history. It is primordial, unitive, and all-encompassing” (Hakl 2019: 59), and should be understood as the origin of all “orthodox” religious traditions. Guénon was also a radical anti-modernist and subscribed to an interpretation of the Hinduist philosophy which sees history as a process of spiritual decadence that culminated with the Age of Darkness (Kali Yuga). Like Guénon, Evola believed that “modernity” represented the terminal stage of this degeneration, where humankind lives in a state of materialistic dissolution (Goodrick-Clarke 2001: 52–71). Despite Evola and Guénon not agreeing on everything (Di Vona 1985; 1993), the former continued to believe in the main tenets of Traditionalism until the end of his life.
Evola’s second Dàodéjīng was published during this “Traditionalist phase” and the discontinuity with his previous work is acknowledged by Evola himself in the first paragraph of his introduction, where he explicitly stated that “the present version of this far-eastern text differs considerably from our early work [because …] deliberately sets aside any philosophical superstructure and follows a traditional perspective” (1959: 7).
If many aspects of Evola’s thought changed in the three decades that separated his two editions of the Dàodéjīng, one thing remained consistent: his distrust in academic Sinology. For Evola, linguistic competence is not sufficient for grasping the real meaning of “traditional and sapiential texts.” On the one hand, Evola affirmed that his new edition was made necessary by the fact that many new translations have been published since the 1920s.31 On the other hand, he believed that the work of academics had to “be rectified and fine-tuned” by his “traditional”(-ist) perspective (punto di vista tradizionale; Evola 1959: 8).
Paradoxically, the reason for this idiosyncratic reasoning has to be found “in the peculiar character of the far-eastern language, which is ideographic […,] that is, a language made of images and symbols” (Evola 1959: 8). Keeping aside the fact that Chinese is not an ideographic language, something known to European scholars for centuries (O’Neill 2016), what is striking about Evola’s characterisation is that he criticised the limits of linguistics with arguments about the complexity of Chinese language that, if anything, suggests the necessity for more linguistic awareness, not less. Even more paradoxically, in Evola’s introduction we find a long tirade against “the claims of definitiveness and ‘critical restoration’ made by every new Western specialist translator” (Evola 1959: 9), who are never mentioned by name. On the contrary, Evola quoted the opinion of one of the greatest sinologists of his time, Marcel Granet (1884–1940), explicitly arguing against the possibility of a definitive translation of the Dàodéjīng.
This ambivalent relationship with academics is the first notable Traditionalist feature of Evola’s second Dàodéjīng. Like Evola, Guénon also remained ambiguous towards modern scholarship. On the one hand, he criticised “official orientalism […,] the insufficiency of its methods and the falsity of its conclusions” (Guénon 1921: 275), and he advocated for the necessity of linguistic training in the approach of a sacred text (on this basis, Guénon had criticised Evola’s first Dàodéjīng).32 In addition to the desire to maintain his new edition “‘in order’ also from a profane point of view” (1959: 9), Evola incorporated two other distinctively Traditionalist concepts in the presentation of his second Dàodéjīng: that of Daoism as “pure metaphysics” and the initiatic ladder.
For Guénon, “metaphysics” is the highest form of knowledge, the only one that can be qualified as “truth.” Since he was also a perennialist and an elitist, Guénon also believed that this supreme truth is shared by every “traditional form” (the Traditionalist term for religion) but that only a selected few could achieve it. Thus, the masses can only approach an exterior (“exoteric”) part of this truth, whereas a small “spiritual elite” is capable of entering the most profound levels of metaphysics. In this framework, “religion” and “philosophy” are exoteric aspects of knowledge, rational and sentimental adaptations of the supra-rational metaphysical knowledge. In his perennialism, Guénon also looked at the Chinese tradition and showed particular appreciation for Daoism, which was understood as “a pure metaphysics, to which are joined all the traditional sciences of which the scope is, strictly speaking, speculative” (Guénon 1932: 492). Also, according to Guénon, while Daoism is exclusively metaphysical, “the ceremonies of Confucianism are actually social rites, without the slightest religious character” (Guénon 1921: 87) and represent the “exoteric” side of the Chinese tradition.
As it will become clear in the next section, most of Evola’s word choices in his second Dàodéjīng were influenced by this Traditionalist perspective.
8 1959: “Traditionalist Daoism”
By 1959, Evola had entirely accepted Guénon’s lesson. In his introduction, he argued that the most important characteristic of Daoism is its “trans-human purity and essentially metaphysical characters” (Evola 1959: 32). Also, loyal to Guénon’s distinction between “metaphysics” and “religion”, Evola insisted that “the Far-Eastern tradition was not religious but metaphysical” (ibid.).33
Evola’s Traditionalism is most visible in the translation he chose to render the title of the Daoist classic. The word “Dàodéjīng” is made of three Chinese characters, dào
In 1923, Evola rendered “Dàodéjīng” as Il libro della Via e della Virtù (The Book of the Way and Virtue). Rendering dào with “way/path” and dé with “virtue” is the most common choice of translation and it was adopted by most of the versions consulted by Evola. However, he must have felt dissatisfied with this choice, and he published his second Dàodéjīng as Il libro del Principio e della sua Azione (The Book of the Principle and its Action). In his introduction, he supported this change by arguing that the new title “indicates the fundamental ideas of the text, which includes a metaphysics, an ethics, a political doctrine, and, finally, elements of an esoteric doctrine of immortality” (Evola 1959: 14).
For Evola, when dào refers to the level of “pure metaphysics” (pura metafisica) it should be translated as “principle.” This choice may appear unusual for translators of Chinese literature,35 but not to anyone familiar with Guénon’s Traditionalism who wrote in 1927 that “[t]he word Tao, literally ‘Way’, which designates the principle […] is represented by an ideographic character which brings together the signs of the head and the feet” (Guénon 1927: 33).36 “Principle” is a distinctive Guénonian term. In line with his abstract metaphysics, “it designates the being which exists in all beings, the universal norm which governs cosmic evolution” (Guénon 1931: 184). This absolute transcendent principle is also found in Evola’s characterisation of the “metaphysical and not religious Far-Eastern tradition” that only “considered abstract, impersonal principles and remained as such even when represented with material images taken from the world of nature” (Evola 1959: 15).
As for dé, Evola rejected his previous translation as “virtù” (virtue) in favour of “azione” (action), or better “of its [the dào’s] action” (della sua Azione). For him, the problem with “virtue” is that it can be erroneously understood as conveying a moral meaning that is absent, in Evola’s opinion, from ancient Chinese and it was only added by later Confucians.37 This idea can be also found in Guénon, who, like Evola, was also very weary of the moralistic (mis)understanding of dé and, for this reason, he preferred “to translate it by ‘rectitude’ rather than ‘virtue’ as is sometimes rendered, in order not to seem to give it a ‘moral’ meaning which is in no way in the spirit of Daoism” (Guénon 1932: 495).38 Even the shift from “The Book of Dao and Virtue” to “The Book of the Principle and Its Action” was foreshadowed by Guénon, who maintained that “the Virtue is what one might call a ‘specification’ of Dao with respect to a definite being” (ibid.). Thus, like Guénon, Evola believed that “virtue” is not an accurate translation of dé unless understood in the sense “of the principle, taken in its aspect of ordering power, […] of power of action (just as in the Middle Ages people spoke of the ‘virtues’ of a substance or an element) and, above all, of magical power” (Evola 1959: 17).
At first glance, Evola’s “virtue” may seem comparable to the Guénonian “rectitude,” defined as “the direction that a being must follow for its existence to be according to the ‘Way’ (Tao), or, in other words, in accordance with the principle” (Guénon 1930: 720). However, the translation of dé reveals an important point of divergence between the two authors, namely, the treatment of magic. In this regard, Evola insisted that
in the ancient Chinese language, the term tê did not have a moral sense (it acquired such a sense only later, after Confucianism), but that of power of action (just as in the Middle Ages people spoke of the “virtues” of a substance or element) and, above all, of magical power. This magical force was designated both ling and tê (Evola 1959: 17).39
Similarly, Evola argued that “Virtue, tê, here must be understood in its magical aspect, as the power emanating from non-acting impassibility, a power capable of paralyzing the adversary” (Evola 1959: 145)40 and that “it is generally believed that the Tao confers a magic power, and its masters are defined tê-jên, that is, ‘men of tê (of power)’” (ibid.: 22).41 These passages reveal a crucial point of divergence between the two authors since “action” and “power” (especially “magical power”) are typical characteristics of Evola’s Traditionalism, nowhere to be found in the work of the contemplative Guénon with his notorious distaste for magic (Guénon 1946: 20).
In addition to dào and (to a lesser extent) dé, Evola’s Traditionalism can be especially noticed in his translation choices with regard to another of the Dàodéjīng’s key concepts: shèngrén
This devaluation of religion and mysticism as “sentimental” and “moralistic” forms of knowledge is also one of the most recognisable features of Traditionalism and is found throughout the entirety of Guénon’s production. Thus, after having rejected “sage” and “saint” as appropriate translations of shèngrén, Evola settles on “Uomo Reale” (True Man).42 This choice is rather peculiar given that “true man” is the literal translation of a second technical Daoist word: zhēnrén
In La grande triade (The Great Triad), Guénon also discussed Daoist vocabulary and he distinguished between “l’homme veritable” (true man, zhēnrén) and “l’homme transcendant” (transcendental man, shénrén
As mentioned above, Evola was not aware of these subtleties because of his lack of proficiency in the Chinese language and his superficial knowledge of Chinese Daoism. Considering all this, it seems quite difficult to agree with some of his recent apologists who have talked of Evola’s “fortunate intuitions, which sometimes seem to be more reliable reconstructions of Lao-tzu’s message than those of many titled translators” (Vita 1996).
9 Concluding Remarks
Although Evola’s two editions of the Dàodéjīng were never as influential as other of his books,43 both are available in the “oriental spirituality” sections of many Italian bookstores and, as such, are read by a public mostly unaware of the ideological charge of their author.44 Furthermore, the introductory essay of the 1959 edition enjoyed some fortune outside Italy, as it was published as a stand-alone volume in French (Bemachot and Baillet 1989) and in English (Stucco 1992).
In this article, I have pointed out how Evola’s two versions of the Dàodéjīng can hardly be considered translations as they are Italian retranslations from French or German mixed with Evola’s own speculations. What is worse, with his contempt for academics, Evola rejected most professional translations of his time, preferring to use as a point of reference the often peculiar theories of authors like Ular and Guénon. Thus, from a scholarly perspective, it would be easy to dismiss Evola’s project. Today, readers interested in Chinese Daoism have at their disposal entire libraries of volumes written by specialists in the subject, whose knowledge and competence in disciplines such as Chinese history, philosophy, and philology are far more reliable than Evola’s conjectures.
This distance between professional Sinologists and amateurs was already apparent at the time of Evola’s two editions of the Dàodéjīng. In the 1920s and, even more so, in the 1950s, Sinology was mature enough to offer the educated public real translations of the Dàodéjīng in most of the major European languages.45 Considering that Evola’s works on Daoism were outdated even by the standards of his time, one may wonder what the appeal of his two Dàodéjīng editions is today. The answer is, in my opinion, twofold.
First, people interested in Evola’s thought should pay close attention to the two editions studied herein because, for the Italian Traditionalist, the Dàodéjīng functioned as a laboratory in which he experimented with ideas that would characterise the entirety of his philosophy. The introduction to his first Dàodéjīng seems of utmost importance in this regard. This early work, albeit imbued with a superficial Hegelianism, clearly indicates all the directions that would be followed by Evola in his mature years. Most prominently, Lǎozǐ was celebrated by Evola as the proponent of a doctrine of the transcendent self, that of the “Absolute Individual.” From the late 1920s, after Evola abandoned both idealist jargon and avant-gardist rhetoric, he found in Guénon’s Traditionalism a new framework to continue his speculations about the power of the individual, and this fact alone explains why, even within a Traditionalist perspective, Evola decided to mark his independence with respect to the impersonal philosophy of Guénon in all those aspects (like the translations of dé and shèngrén) that emphasised the (“magical”) power of the initiate.
Second, Evola’s interpretations of the Dàodéjīng are important in regard to the European reception of Chinese religion in general and Daoism in particular. Neglected and looked down during the Jesuit-led waves of European Sinophilia, Daoism had been “discovered” by French Sinologists in the nineteenth century and started enjoying increasing success in several countercultural circles. As noted above, the Dàodéjīng entered different intellectual milieus that influenced Evola. Daoism inspired both early twentieth-century cultural/artistic circles (German Dadaism and Italian avant-gardes) and the occult milieu (Theosophy and occultism) that decisively impacted Evola’s intellectual formation.46 Thus, Evola and his Dàodéjīng belong to an identifiable literary genre. Like other non-specialist authors, such as Ular and de Pouvourville, Evola’s attraction for the Daoist classic comes from its very powerful rhetoric, its mysterious style, and the arcane vagueness of its statements that allowed European authors to see their own ideas mirrored in Lǎozǐ’s words. Like many others, Evola employed the Dàodéjīng as a mirror in which he could reflect his intellectual concerns and, drawing from an inventory of pre-existing forms, Lǎozǐ went from being Hegelian, Occultist, and Dadaist (in 1929) to a Guénonian initiate bearer of Evolian “magical power.” Thus, Evola’s Dàodéjīng versions still stand as examples of that “Dao of the West,” which, to this day, continues to both captivate the interest of the general public and influence the Euro-American understanding of Daoism.
It can be argued that, after such a hermeneutic twist, very little survives of the Dàodéjīng’s original message. However, I agree with Julian Strube’s proposal of shifting away
the presumed accuracy of a translation, or even its presumed appropriateness [… and] beyond the search for equivalents that fit a preconceived prototype, and we can sidestep ideological disputes by being less interested in whether dharma or dīn, for instance, is an adequate translation of religion and instead trying to understand why, how, and by whom it was or was not translated as such in a particular context (Strube 2024: 18).
Similarly, as long as we clarify that Evola’s two versions of the Dàodéjīng are not translations but simply personal speculations sparked from his encounter with Daoism, it will be trivial to discuss the “authenticity” of Evola’s works on the Chinese religion. More important is to signal the ideology underlying his production. From the analysis of both Dàodéjīng editions, it seems clear that Evola was looking, as early as the 1920s, for a framework in which to insert his idée fixe, that of the “Absolute Individual” which, unfortunately, became a bedrock against which he built his illiberal worldviews. Thus, the main problem for us is not to judge whether Evola was a good interpreter of Daoism (he was not), but to point out what originated from such an interpretation. Unfortunately, despite what argued by some of Evola’s sympathetic interpreters, his orientalist production (to which his two Dàodéjīng editions belong) can and should not be separated by his disturbing ideology.47
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank my friends Filippo Pedretti and Milan Reith for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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There are some notable exceptions to this trend such as the recent translation of the Dàodéjīng by the sinologist Attilio Andreini (2018) or a beautiful and philologically rigorous translation of Lièzǐ
An issue of the journal Religiographies recently discussed (from a sympathetic standpoint) Hakl’s intellectual itinerary (Pasi 2023).
Hakl’s interest in religious literature was described as “inspired by Shankara and the Tao Te Ching” and his worldview was deemed “Taoist” (Otto 2023: 25–28).
The contiguity of Evola’s racism and his engagement with the Japanese tradition has been already noted (Pedretti 2021).
This periodisation was proposed by Evola himself in his autobiography Il Cammino del cinabro (The Path of Cinnabar; 1963) and followed by Hakl (2019).
“Una rivolta contro il mondo borghese e la sua piccola morale, contro ogni egualitarismo, democraticismo e conformismo, e nella affermazione dei principi di una morale aristocratica e dei valori dell’essere che si scioglie da ogni legame ed è a sé stesso la propria legge.” Translations of quotations from languages other than English are mine.
The Majjhima Nikāya (sometimes translated with the title The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha) is one of the major collections of texts in the Buddhist Pāli Canon. It is an anthology of discourses attributed to the Buddha and some of his disciples. Evola consulted the Italian version of the text curated by the amateur orientalist Giuseppe De Lorenzo (1871–1957) (De Lorenzo 1907). This was not an original translation, but a retranslation of the German edition published by one of the pioneers of Buddhist Studies (and De Lorenzo’s personal friend) Karl Eugen Neumann (1865–1915) (Neuman 1902).
The Fondazione Julius Evola (Julius Evola Foundation) has published the Italian translation of Evola’s letters to Tzara (Valento 1991).
“As for abstract art, it ended up in a convention and an academy. […] In this turn, its value was completely lost, not as a new artistic direction but rather as a sign or trace of a given existential situation, and above all of the tendency towards transcendence: a value which for me had been the most essential one” (Evola 1963: 25).
The only known exception is represented by a series of female nudes painted by Evola between 1960 and 1970, probably in connection with his 1958 book Metafisica del sesso (Metaphysics of Sex).
The introduction is dated September 1922.
Tucci was writing his Apologia del Taoismo (Apology of Daoism) and translating passages of Chinese Classics during the same years Evola was preparing his first Dàodéjīng (Evola 1923; Tucci 1924; 1926).
The Italian term Scapigliato, literally meaning “with unkept hairstyle,” was first applied to a bohemian style artistic movement that developed in Milan in the years following the Italian unification (1861). In the first decades of the twentieth century, the legacy of La Scapigliatura was picked up by a new group of intellectuals located in Florence.
The other was Giuseppe Prezzolini (1882–1982). It was via Papini that Evola got in contact with the Futurist milieu and its founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944).
It was the first Italian rendering of the Zhuāngzǐ (Zoboli 2022: 396) even though it was not a direct translation from Chinese but a poetic rendering of James Legge’s (1815–1897) English translation (Legge 1891). In his introduction, Novaro proclaims himself “ignorant of Chinese” (Ricca 2012: 591).
Testi taoisti includes passages from the Zhuāngzǐ, Lièzǐ, Qīngjìngjīng
“Esotericism” is an umbrella term used by contemporary scholars to define Euro-American religious trajectories alternative to mainstream Christianity. The complex debate about the definition of esotericism has recently been summarised by Okropiridze 2021.
In addition to Chinese, Chini also published Variazioni of Japanese and Persian literature (Colapietra 2006).
Von Collani (2015: 50–54) mentions three early Latin translations, all published in the early eighteenth century, which, however, were soon lost or forgotten. See also Pokorny 2024: 62–63.
The book was originally published in French in 1902 as Le Livre de la voie et la ligne droite de Lao-Tsé (Lao-Tsé’s Book about the Way and the Straight Line) and republished the following year in German as Die Bahn und der rechte Weg des Lao-Tse (The Direction and the Right Way of Lao-Tse).
Evans’ plagiarism was well known and noted as early as 1905 by the French journal La Voie (Caie 1905: 86).
“This book, together with translations of Laozi and Zhuangzi published by Martin Buber and Richard Wilhelm, unleashed a kind of Dao craze among intellectuals and artists of the Weimar Republic” (Baier 2013: 5).
In the acknowledgements section of his introduction, Evola thanks his Chinese helper “Mr. He-sing” for “the discussion on the Chinese original text” (Evola 1923: xxv). Unfortunately, nothing more is known about this person.
Here, “dialectic” refers to the Hegelian pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
Evola’s major philosophical works written between 1917 and 1924, the same years in which he was working on his Dàodéjīng.
“Io sono” (I am) intends to translate the Chinese expression yǐcǐ
A less enthusiastic account of Evola’s philosophical production was proposed by the philosopher Antimo Negri (1923–2005) (Negri 1988).
Evola’s constant reductio ad absolutum can be explicitly seen in his translation of Dàodéjīng LXIX, 4–7, rendered as “il progresso della Virtù diviene quell’adeguamento assoluto per cui ogni limite sparisce; dall’adeguamento assoluto procede il compimento dell’Individuo assoluto; nell’Individuo assoluto riposa la condizione per possedere il Regno” (“the progress of Virtue becomes that absolute adaptation through which every limit disappears; from the absolute adaptation proceeds the fulfilment of the absolute Individual; the condition for possessing the Kingdom rests in the absolute Individual”) (Evola 1923: 79–80, emphasis added). Needless to say, nothing of this sort can be found in the original Chinese text.
“Portato a compimento nei lunghi anni di solitudine il processo del suo sviluppo interiore, Lao-tze si eclissò silenziosamente dalla sua terra e dal suo popolo, lasciando dietro di sé – negli ideogrammi sintetici del Tao-teh-king – la traccia della sua sapienza ormai elevata a vita.” In the Italian text, Lǎozǐ “si eclissò” (literally, “eclipsed himself”). Alike, Zarathustra is said to have “untergegangen.”
Like “esotericism,” “occultism” is also a contested term, and the scholarly discussion on latter largely coincided with that of the former. Historically speaking, “occultism” refers to that “specifically French currents in the wake of Éliphas Lévi [born Alphonse Louis Constant; 1810–1875], flourishing in the ‘neo-martinist’ context of Papus and related manifestations of fin-de-siecle esotericism” (Hanegraaff 2006: 888).
He mostly abandoned Ular, preferring the translations made by Léon Wieger (1856–1933) and Jan Julius Lodewijk Duyvendak (1889–1954), published in 1913 and 1954, respectively. Wieger’s translation, previously ignored by Evola, was recommended by Guénon to his followers.
Guénon communicated to a friend that he had not read Evola’s first Dàodéjīng, adding that “I don’t trust it since the author does not know the language” (unpublished letter from Guénon to Arturo Reghini dated April 21, 1925).
“La tradizione estremo-orientale ha avuto un carattere non religioso ma metafisico.”
“The semantics of the ‘classic’ (jing) in Chinese intellectual history derived from notions of continuity, cultural reproduction, and fidelity to models from the past” (Schaberg 2017: 170).
I believe this to be a unicum in the history of Dàodéjīng’s translation. Out of the 175 versions analysed by Yang (2016), none rendered “dào” with “principle.”
“Le mot Tao, littéralement « Voie », qui désigne le Principe […] est représenté par un caractère idéographique qui réunit les signes de la tête et des pieds.”
This is also a questionable interpretation since the word is found in early Zhōu
“Nous préférons rendre par « Rectitude » plutôt que par « Vertu » comme on le fait quelquefois, et cela afin de ne pas paraître lui donner une acception « morale » qui n’est aucunement dans l’esprit du Taoïsme.”
“Nell’antica lingua cinese il termine tê non aveva un senso morale (un tale senso lo acquistò solo tardivamente, dopo il confucianesimo), ma quello di potere d’azione (come nel Medioevo si parlò delle ‘virtú’ di una sostanza o di elemento) e, soprattutto, di potere magico. La forza magica fu designata sia come ling che come tê.”
“La Virtù, tê, qui va intesa nel suo aspetto magico, come il potere promanante dall’impassibilità non-agente, potere capace di paralizzare l’avversario.”
“È idea generale che il possesso del Tao conferisca una forza magica, e i maestri sono definiti come tê-jên, cioè ‘uomini dalla tê’ (dal potere).”
This choice differs from his earlier translation where he opted for “the perfected.”
Overall, Evola is most appreciated as a critic of modernity and a political ideologue. However, I agree with Francesco Baroni when he argues that Evola’s “theoretical contributions – those concerning Eastern spiritualities and hermeticism in particular – had interacted with mainstream culture more than many were willing to admit” (Baroni 2023: 40).
The curator of the book (Gianfranco de Turris, president of the Evola Foundation) introduces Evola as a philosopher and does not mention his ideological orientation, except in one sentence, where Evola is qualified as “di destra” (“right-wing,” quotation marks in the original) (De Turris 1996: 8).
The first professional Italian translation of the Dàodéjīng, by the orientalist Alberto Castellani (1884–1932), was published in 1927.
This is yet another example of the (still understudied) tremendous impact of Chinese ideas on modern European culture (Pokorny and Winter 2024a; 2024b).
It is not an accidental that, in his most successful work, Evola lunches in suppositions about the “western” (Aryan) origin of the Chinese civilisation (Evola 1934: 287).
