Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (Italian: Cavalcare la Tigre) is a 1961 book by Italian Traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola. The first English translation (translated by Joscelyn Godwin and Constance Fontana) was published by Inner Traditions in 2003 (ISBN 0-89281-125-0). Evola believes that the modern world has become totally corrupt and that the institutions and traditions of the ancient world that once allowed a person to fully realize his being have been lost. Ride the Tiger expands upon the Radical Traditionalist ideas which Evola developed in Revolt Against the Modern World and offers a solution to the problem of living in the modern world different from the reactionary revolution he argued for in Men Among the Ruins. The principal metaphor of the book is its title. Evola argues that in order to survive in the modern world an enlightened or "differentiated man" should "ride the tiger". As a man, by holding onto the tiger's back may survive the confrontation, so too might a man, by letting the world take him on its inexorable path be able to turn the destructive forces around him into a kind of inner liberation. While the traditional world described in Revolt Against the Modern World would allow a man to fully realize his being in a united society, the world Evola describes in Ride the Tiger is much lonelier and even more pessimistic. Ride the Tiger, despite its pessimism, is a testament to Evola's belief that no matter how lost civilization may be, there always exists the ability for the individual person to live his life always looking "above" himself and thus achieving enlightenment.
Famous quotes containing the words ride and/or tiger:
“How soon I may ride the whole world about;
And at the third question thou must not shrink,
But tell me here truly what I do think.””
—Unknown. King John and the Abbot of Canterbury (l. 30–32)
“The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of the snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,—these are in the system, and our habits like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races,—race living at the expense of race.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)