It would be hard to deny that "activism", the exaltation and practice of action understood as force, impetus, becoming, struggle, transformation, perennial research, or ceaseless movement, is the watchword of the modern world. The world of the "being" is drawing to its close, and this decline has for long been hailed with joy. Not only do we have today the triumph of activism, but also a philosophy sui generis at its service; a philosophy whose systematic criticism and whose speculative apparatus serve to justify it in every way while pouring contempt and heaping discredit on all other points of view.
Interest in pure knowledge has become ever more displaced by interest in "living" and in "doing" or, at any rate, by interest in those departments of knowledge that can be employed in terms of action or practical and temporal realization. Today the nature and potentialities of pure knowledge, that is to say, knowledge whose peculiar object - as in the traditional ideal of all periods - is superindividual and superhistorical reality is almost unknown.
Our contemporaries grow ever more accustomed to disregard the "being" aspect of things and concentrate, instead, upon their aspect as "becoming", "life", "movement", "development", or "history". "Historicism" and "the cult of becoming" beat out the rhythm of activism, even on the cultural plane. Pragmatism, voluntarism, irrationalism, varieties of the religion of "life" and "actuality", relativism, evolutionism, progressivism, Faustism, are lines of speculation that, in spite of their different guises, all spring from the same motive.
And this, then, is merely the translation into terms of self-consciousness and intellectual justification of the central motive of the precipitate life of these times, with its tumult, its agitation, its fever for speed, its mechanization devoted to the shortening of all intervals of space and time, its congestive and breathless rhythm that is, particularly in the New World, carried to its limit. There the activist theme really reaches paroxysmal and almost pandemic heights and completely absorbs the whole of life, whose horizons, moreover, are thereby restricted to the dark and gloom that are natural to wholly temporal and contingent achievements.
It is too an ominous fact that forces of a collectivist and therefore subpersonal nature must gain more and more power over beings who have no real traditional support and are racked by a fundamental restlessness. The activist world is also essentially a featureless and plebeian world, ruled by the demon of collectivism: it is not only the scene of triumph of what has been called "the ideal animal", but it is also a world that is essentially "telluric", moved by forces that are hound up with the elements of "mass" and "quantity," where action, force, strife, and even heroism and sacrifice are seen to become increasingly irrational, devoid of light, "elemental", and altogether earthly.
That which the ancient Indo-Aryan wisdom had denoted by the symbol of samsaric existence, and which corresponding Western traditions had styled "the Age of Iron", can now be said to be at the height of its career; and there is no lack, either in Buddhism or in similar traditions, of texts in which such characteristics of times to come were predicted with astonishing accuracy.
We repeat, however, that the main characteristic of our times is not that life tends to exhaust itself almost exclusively on the samsaric plane, but that our civilization stimulates and exalts this kind of life, and considers it, not so much as a state of fact, but rather as something of value, as something that should be, as something that is right. It must be unique in all history that samsara should become the object of a species of mystique or religion.
The new philosophies of life, of becoming, of the elan vital, which flourish on the borders of practical activism, have just this significance and even come to exalt in human existence all that is unconscious spontaneity, pure vitality, prepersonal biological sub-stratum and which is therefore, essentially prehuman and subhuman.
To think that we can effectively react against such a state of affairs, taken as a whole, would be frivolous, and would mean (unless we are simply dealing with intellectual reactions) ignoring the remote causes that have gradually led up to it they are causes that cannot be removed in a day. But although success on a large scale, taking into account the general orientation of the modern world, is at present very remote, yet it might be achieved locally within the circle of an elite, of a certain number of qualified individuals.
The only possible point of reference, here, is ascetic values, in the fullest, purest, and strictest meaning of the term. The affirmation of an ascetic vision of life is today particularly necessary in view of the unparalleled force of the "telluric" and samsaric element in the modern world.
The prejudices that have been created or encouraged by certain quite special, abnormal, and un-Aryan forms of ascesis we have already removed. Let no one, then, declare that ascesis means renunciation, flight from the world, inaction, quietism, or mortification. The affirmation of a background of pure transcendency to balance a world that is ever more and more the captive of immanency, is the first point and the first task.
But another point, not less important, concerns that very action that lies so close to the heart of our contemporaries. Indeed, one could justly maintain that those who despise all asceticism know nothing of what action really is, and what they exalt is merely an inferior, emasculated, and passive form of action. The sort of activism that consists in fever, impulsiveness, identification, centerless vertigo, passion, or agitation, far from testifying power, merely demonstrates impotence. Our own classical world knew this well: the central theme of the Ciceronian oration Pro Marcello is just this: there is no higher power than that of mastery over oneself. Only those who possess this mastery can know what is the true action, which shows them also to the outside world, not as those who are acted upon, but as those who truly act. We remember the illuminating Buddhist saying: he who goes, stands still - he who stands still, goes. For this very reason, in the traditions springing from the same root all movement, activity, becoming, or change was referred to the passive and female principle, while to the positive, luminous, masculine principle were attributed the particular qualities of immobility, unchangeability, and stability. We can, then, definitely affirm the existence of an ascesis that in no way signifies quietism but that is, rather, the prerequisite for a higher, aristocratic ideal of activity and virility.
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