Evola, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and the 'Woman Question'
At this point, it may not be a luxury to say a few words about
Nietzsche's views on woman. To do this, a convenient starting point
is given to us by the preface of an anthology of aphorisms by the
German philosopher published in 1990 by Editions du Rocher.
Three different positions on woman are expressed in Nietzsche's work :
The first resumes the classical thesis according to which woman is
lie, sham, seduction, game, deceit. That thesis is the Platonic one,
in the name of truth as 'mimete' - identity to oneself. According to
it, woman is non-truth, and, as such, disparaged by Platonism.
However, woman has been, still in a Platonising manner, idealised,
sublimed, overestimated. The 'idea', Nietzsche says in the 'Twilight
of the Idols', has become woman, that is to say that
the 'elusive', 'specious' character of woman has been attributed to
truth, and that the latter, as well as woman, becomes a constantly
postponed promise, a background, as is the Kantian idea which can be
reached only in an indefinite asymptote. The Kantian postulate is a
feminisation of truth. Woman is kept at a distance, as is truth,
inaccessible, in this world.
Finally, woman is identified with life as a Dionysian, destructive
and creative power in which appearance is truth, and the whole game
of masks or simply of phenomenon doesn't refer to any final
revelation. The masculine impulse to unveil, to see, the metaphysic-
scientific desire to penetrate things thoroughly is the mistake par
excellence. To love appearance, surface, which does not refer to any
inside, is an assertive position, of which she has the secret.
The moderns, by emancipating woman, have destroyed the most precious
thing about her : the 'eternal feminine'. It is not so much the
emancipation of woman as its consequent masculinisation which made
her lost this eternal feminine. It is likely to be an illusion. "The
eternal feminine is a purely illusory value in which man is the only
one to believe". By letting it be destroyed, woman could loose her
power. By becoming like man, she looses her mystery and her
authority, not to mention her instincts.
To regain that influence within society and at home, woman must
regain her fundamental instincts, which a masculine civilisation has
tried to dull and to weaken.
Leaving aside that Nietzsche doesn't seem to have fully realised that
woman emancipation could not have occurred without a prior
feminisation of man, or rather of the leading masculine type, it is
easy to realise why none of those positions held Evola's attention,
whether in 'Metaphysics of Sex' or in his other writings on woman and
sexuality, and why the agnostic conception on which the second is
based and which refers to the need to dismiss transcendent values in
the name of 'Life' and of a Dionysian Becoming in the context of
the 'revaluation of values' couldn't but be criticised by him in
other writings.
Of course, on the other hand, Nietzsche was a fine expert in feminine
psychology : "To love intelligent women is the pleasure of a
pederast" ; "Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable ; also, she
is always vulgar, that is to say, the opposite of the dandy". Now,
those two excerpts from his 'Unpublished Notebooks' are all the more
remarkable as they are nothing else than the literal translation of
two aphorisms by Baudelaire : "Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un
plaisir de pédérastes" ; "La femme est naturelle, c'est-à-dire
abominable. Aussi est-elle toujours vulgaire, c'est-à-dire le
contraire du dandy" ('Mon coeur mis à nu'), something which doesn't
seem to have been noticed either by Baudelairian critique or by
Nietzschean critique.
And last but no least, a few other 'fusées', which have no cause to
be jealous of aphorisms much praised by Schuon and Evola, Wilde's :
"Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner, n'ait même pas besoin
d'exister".
"Ce qui est créé par l'esprit est plus vivant que la matière".
"L'amour, c'est le goût de la prostitution. Il n'est même pas de
plaisir noble qui puisse être ramené à la Prostitution".
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