engleski

Rabindranath Tagore and Julius Evola: Two Halves of Reading Imperial Japan

The paper confronts the idea of nation and nationalism as presented in Tagore's "Nationalism in Japan" from Nationalism, his famous 1917 book of essays, with Julius Evola's 1940 text "Spiritual Basis of Japanese Imperial Idea". While Tagore seems to have well understood the malformations and threats inherent to the Japanese national idea in the very early days of its military imperialist materialization, Evola − Italian author belonging to the marginalized traditionalist or antimodernist current − was keen to justify it, although writing when the Second World War had already broken loose, with Japan itself soon to join it and fully reveal the dark side of its bottom idea. However, things are not so black and white. Demonstrating the deeply humanistic starting point and strategy of Tagore's criticism, the paper at the same time indicates its elements that from a traditional(ist) point of view smack of secularism and loss of a metaphysical foundation, which is precisely what foremost constitutes its attack on humanism. With a slight oversimplification, Tagore's stance is all breadth, while Evola's is all depth. Tagore the man is worried by the surface, skipping over or even ignoring the underlying idea. Evola the "initiate" admires the idea, to the point of remaining blind to its plain misrepresentations (in which he comes very close to some other contemporaries, also mentioned as facets of a basically single attitude). In the final proposition of the paper an ideal position is suggested, rooted in the spiritual presuppositions and nature of imperial rule and warrior mentality, but with branches trimmed by a constant awereness distinguishing an ideal from its all too human forms of realization.

Tagore, Evola, Japan, nation, nationalism, humanism, traditionalism

16, 3 kartice