“What ought to be is not; what is, is what ought not to be.”

On these terms, all that remains real is what had been negated or rejected from the point of view of that other, “superior” world of “God” and “truth”—the world of what ought to be, not of what is. The conclusion is that “what ought to be is not; what is, is what ought not to be.” This is what Nietzsche called the “tragic phase” of nihilism. It is the beginning of the “misery of man without God.” Existence seems devoid of any meaning, any goal. While all imperatives, moral values, and restraints have fallen away, so have all supports. Once more we find a parallel in Dostoyevsky, where he makes Kirilov say that man invented God just to be able to go on living:5 God, therefore, as an “alienation of the I.” The terminal situation is given in drastic form by Sartre, when he declares that “existentialism is not an atheism in the sense of being reduced to proving that God does not exist. Rather it says that even if God existed, nothing would change.” Existence is reduced to itself in its naked reality, without any reference point outside itself that could give it a real meaning for man.

Julius Evola
Ride the Tiger