Rene
Guenon (Abd al-Wahid Yahya) (1886-1951)
Considered
to be the founder of the Traditionalist school, Guenon was born in Blois, France
on November 15, 1886. He devoted the early years of his life to the study of
mathematics and philosophy. He went to Paris in 1906, where he maintained
regular contact with various spiritualist groups. In 1909, he edited and
published a review journal called La Gnose for which he wrote a number of
essays and reviews on spirituality and esoterism. In 1910, he met the famous
French painter Gustav Ageli, who had by that time embraced Islam and taken the
name Abd al-Hadi. Guenon was initiated into Sufism in 1912 and became Muslim,
taking the name Abd al-Wahid Yahya.
He
finished his university education in 1916 with a thesis called “Leibniz and
Infinitesimal Calculus”. The same year, he met Jacques Maritain, one of the
most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20th century. In 1921, he
prepared his doctoral dissertation under the title “General Introduction to
the Study of Hindu Doctrines”. Guenon’s thesis was rejected by his doctoral
committee, which led to his eventual abandonment of academia in 1923. The
dissertation was later published as a book under the same title. In 1924, he
published Orient and Occident, one of his major works on comparative
philosophy and spirituality. This was followed by The Crisis of the Modern
World (1927)--perhaps his most famous and widely read book.
A
year after the publication of The Crisis of the Modern World, Guenon’s
wife died. He went to Egypt in 1930 as part of a project for the study and
publication of some Sufi texts. He never left Egypt again. He married Fatima,
the daughter of the Sufi Shaykh Muhammad Ibrahim, in 1934 and settled in a house
near al-Azhar University where he had regular contact with ‘Abd al-Halim
Mahmud, the famous president of al-Azhar and scholar of Sufism. Although Guenon
received occasional visits from such members of the Traditionalist School as
Titus Burckhardt, Frithjof Schuon and Martin Lings, he remained largely
reclusive during his years in Egypt, working on his major books and articles.
Towards the end of his life, Guenon’s poor health, which had accompanied him
throughout his life, deteriorated further, leading to his death on January 7,
1951.
Guenon’s
writings span a wide array of subjects from metaphysics and symbolism to the
critique of the modern world and traditional sciences. One of the constant
themes of his corpus is the sharp contrast between the traditional worldview
shared by various religions of the world and modernism, which he considered to
be an anomaly in the history of mankind. His writings devoted to the critique of
modernism and the modern world contain some of the most profound and enduring
analyses of the modern world and its philosophical outlook. Orient and
Occident and The Crisis of the Modern World, both published in the
first half of the 20th century, are still widely read today and have
been translated into various languages. In addition to these two books devoted
exclusively to the critique of the modern world from a traditionalist point of
view, Guenon’s other writings contain many references
to metaphysical and philosophical misconceptions prevalent in modern Western
societies.
The
second part of Guenon’s corpus deals with traditional doctrines and it is in
these works that Guenon attempts to revive traditional concepts and sciences
that have been either ignored or lost with the rise of modern philosophy. Such
works as The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Multiple
States of Being and Fundamental Symbols of Sacred Science are devoted
to the revival of traditional doctrines and have been instrumental in the rise
and spread of the Traditionalist School represented by such figures as Frithjof
Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Marco Pallis, Seyyed Hossein Nasr
and Martin Lings. In addition to these, some of Guenon’s writings deal with
certain themes and specific religious traditions, all of which have been written
from the same perspective of traditional metaphysics and esoterism. For this
category of writings, we can mention The Symbolism of the Cross, Man
and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, Introduction to the Study of
Hindu Doctrines, and the Grand Triad.
Guenon’s
view of science is an integral part of his endeavor of reviving the traditional
worldview and cannot be properly understood in isolation from the general
purview that he adopts throughout his works. The gist of Guenon’s metaphysical
views also lies at the heart of the Traditionalist School: the primordial and
perennial Truth, which manifests itself in a variety of religious traditions and
metaphysical systems, has been lost in the modern world. The modernists seek to
reduce all higher principles and levels of reality to their manifestation in the
world of multiplicity and relative existence. Modern philosophy carries this out
by reducing everything to the individualistic horizon of the subject and by
relegating objective reality to the discursive constructions of the knowing
subject. In the field of natural sciences, positivism and its scientistic allies
similarly reject any reality that is beyond the reach and scrutiny of the
quantitative measurement of physical sciences. In the social realm, the moral
and aesthetic principles are left to the arbitrary decisions and consensuses of
the majority, thus jeopardizing the objective reality of the truth. For Guenon,
the malaise of the modern world is its relentless denial of the metaphysical
realm, the metaphysical world being comprised of both philosophy and
spirituality. Guenon sees everything in the world of creation as an application
and manifestation of metaphysical principles that are contained in the perennial
teachings of religions, and applies them to every single subject that he
addresses in his works. Both the value of traditional sciences of nature and the
misguided claims of modern secular science are judged in proportion to their
proximity or distance from these principles. In this sense, Guenon is a
metaphysician par excellence who has devoted his life to the diagnosis
and correction of the metaphysical mistakes of the modern world.
As
far as Guenon’s writings on science are concerned, we can apply the
aforementioned two-fold distinction and analyze his views in two broad
categories. While the first category of writings pertains to the critical
analysis of modern science and its philosophical viewpoint, the second group of
writings deals with traditional sciences of nature, such as cosmology, alchemy,
philosophy of numbers, and the science of the soul, which Guenon elucidates as
numerous applications of metaphysical principles to the domain of the relative
and the physical.
To
emphasize the deep contrast between the traditional and modern sciences, Guenon
calls the former ‘sacred science’ and the latter ‘profane science’ (The
Crisis of the Modern World, p. 37, 47). Sacred science, which, in this
particular context, is synonymous with traditional science, is based on
“intellectual intuition” on the one hand, and the acceptance of the
hierarchy of being, on the other. For Guenon, intellectual intuition, which lies
at the foundation of traditional societies, precedes discursive knowledge for it
is directly related to the knowledge of the Absolute. The relative, which is the
domain of physical sciences and their applications in the form of various
quantitative methods and technology, is not to be denied but placed in its
proper position in the great chain of being. Sciences of nature deal with the
relative in the total economy of things, and in this sense they pertain to the
world of multiplicity. This explains, according to Guenon, the existence of
various traditional sciences that display significant differences in form and
language from one traditional civilization to another but remain the same in
essence and principle. When construed as multifarious adaptations and
“illustrations” (Ibid., p. 48) of metaphysical principles to the realm of
corporeal existence, the traditional cosmological and scientific systems that
use different methodologies and languages within and across civilizations become
justified.
In
understanding Guenon’s notion of science, therefore, one can hardly
overemphasize the significance of the relation between the Principle and its
adaptations. For Guenon, metaphysics studies the Principle and provides
principial knowledge whereas the sciences of nature investigate its earthly,
relative, and multi-layered manifestation in the cosmos. Scientific theories,
even when enunciated as empirically established and universal truths, cannot
function as substitutes for higher principles but only as further corroborations
of the principles of which they are but applications. In this regard,
metaphysics, as Aristotle has said, is the science of all sciences, namely it is
a knowledge that provides a total framework for all other forms of knowledge,
whether based on theoria or praxis. Consequently, metaphysics
connects all branches and forms of knowledge, supplying a frame of reference
within which the physical sciences function. To carry this point a step further,
Guenon reverses the relation between theory and experiment and gives priority to
“preconceived ideas” – a point of view remarkably close to Thomas Kuhn’s
concept of paradigm. For Guenon, it is a “peculiar delusion, typical of modern
‘experimentalism’, to suppose that a theory can be proved by facts whereas
really the same facts can always be equally well explained by a variety of
different theories” (Ibid., p. 42).
Guenon
attributes this mistake to what he calls the “superstition of facts”, a
creation of modern profane science, which supposes that science investigates
“bare facts” devoid of any subjective, theoretical or supra-sensual
ingredients. By contrast, Guenon makes a radical intellectual claim and grounds
all human understanding, theoretical, experimental or aesthetic, in intellectual
intuition, which is also the main gateway to metaphysical knowledge. All
knowledge is a form of understanding in one way or another – a conclusion
voiced and articulated by many philosophers of modern hermeneutics. To use the
terminology of the philosophy of science, we can assuredly say that Guenon would
agree with the basic postulate that all observation is theory laden, i.e., it is
preceded by a set of preconceived ideas and suppositions that cannot be
accounted for within the exclusive purview of physical sciences. As we have
pointed out before, sciences of nature are applications and adaptations of
metaphysical principles to particular fields of study and as such derive their
philosophical justification not from their subject matter, as the positivists
would argue, but from those principles that inform and determine their purview.
In this sense, scientific knowledge, insofar as it derives its justification
from principles, is neither false nor useless. Thus Guenon emphatically states
that “there is no question of maintaining that any kind of knowledge, however
inferior, is illegitimate in itself; what is not legitimate is simply the abuse
which occurs when subjects of this kind absorb the whole of human activity, as
is the case today.” (Ibid., p. 43).
It
is from this point of view that Guenon takes up the question of the rise of the
experimental method in modern sciences. He puts the question in the following
way: “Why have the experimental sciences received a development in the modern
civilization such as they have never received at the hands of any other
civilization before?” (Ibid., p. 42). Guenon answers this crucial question by
underscoring a powerful tendency of the modern world, and it is the exclusive
concern of the modern mind with what is given to us in our immediate sense
experience. Natural sciences by definition confine themselves to the corporeal
realm and provide a systematic access to what can be tested only in the sensible
world. The sciences thus deal with the most minimal aspect of reality, which is
what is immediately available to us in terms of sensation, feelings,
experiences, and so on. Once the quantitative dimension of things is construed
to be the ultimate foundation of what can be known and studied, philosophy,
following Kant and his students, becomes a handmaid of physics, viz., a mere
interpreter of the data supplied by physical sciences.
For
Guenon, this represents the peak of modern reductionism, which turns all
intellectual endeavors into bad philosophy. This is what Guenon calls “the
reign of quantity” as the title of his most important work on traditional
sciences of nature states (See his The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the
Times, Introduction). As Guenon puts it, the reason why the experimental
method has gained an unprecedented prominence in the modern world is that the
physical sciences “confine their attention to things of the senses and to the
world of matter, and also that they lend themselves readily to the most
immediate practical applications; their development, going hand in hand with
what may well be termed the “superstition of facts”, is thus quite in
accordance with the specifically modern tendencies, whereas preceding ages
would, on the contrary, have been unable to find sufficient inducements for
becoming absorbed in this direction to the extent of neglecting the higher
orders of knowledge.” (The Crisis of the Modern World, pp. 42-3).
Thus
Guenon considers the rise of modern science not as a natural outcome of advances
in experimental methods but rather as a result of a fundamental change in modern
man’s Weltanschauung, which Guenon takes to be a “process of
degeneration” from the point of view of intuitive-metaphysical knowledge. By
the same token, the infinitely detailed data gathered by the sciences about the
quantitative dimension of reality signifies, for Guenon, not a deepening of
knowledge but “dispersion in detail … which can be pursued indefinitely
without advancing a single step further in the direction of true knowledge.”
(Ibid., p. 41). As Guenon has explained in the Reign of Quantity and his
other writings, this is a result of the severing of scientific knowledge from
higher principles outlined by traditional metaphysics. Another important outcome
of this process is that the natural sciences are now concerned primarily with
practical applications, and in many cases this is combined with a will to power.
This is the common confusion between science and technology. As Guenon puts it:
“…it is not for its own sake that Westerners in general cultivate science as
they understand it; their primary aim is not knowledge, even of an inferior
order, but practical applications, as may be inferred from the ease with which
the majority of our contemporaries confuse science and industry, so that by many
the engineer is looked upon as a typical man of science” (Ibid., p. 41).
Guenon
assigns two interrelated functions to the sciences of nature when they are
conceived in their traditional setting. The first pertains to the fact that
sciences as “applications of the doctrine … allow of linking up all the
different orders of reality one to another and of integrating them in the unity
of the total synthesis.” (Ibid., p. 47). Said differently, natural sciences
analyze the hierarchy of being and show the underlying unity that exists in
various domains of the cosmos. The second function of the traditional sciences
of nature is rather pedagogical in that they prepare us for higher forms of
knowledge: “they [i.e., natural sciences] constitute, for some people at
least, and in accordance with their own particular aptitudes, a preparation for
a higher type of knowledge and a kind of pathway leading towards it, while from
their hierarchical arrangement, according to the levels of existence to which
they relate, they form as it were so many rungs of a ladder with the aid of
which it is possible to raise oneself to the heights of pure intellectuality.”
Guenon
has further developed the above themes in The Reign of Quantity and the Signs
of the Times with more emphasis on the analysis of various scientific
concepts from the traditional point of view. With great mastery and lucidity,
Guenon deals with such concepts as quantity and quality, prime matter,
“spatial quantity and qualified space”, time, individuation, unity and
simplicity, “solidification of the world”, geometrical symbols, numbers,
change and becoming, and a host of other concepts, all analyzed with a view
towards underscoring the deep intellectual transformation that took place with
the rise of modern secular science. In this particular book whose title
summarizes a great deal of its message, Guenon focuses on the quantification of
reality in the name of scientific measurement, prediction, exactitude.
As
the most prominent defender of traditional metaphysics and philosophy of science
in the 20th century, Guenon has played a key role in the development
of a highly critical position towards what Wolfgang Smith has called modern
‘scientism’. Even though Guenon has remained somewhat unknown in Western
academic circles owing to his scathing criticism of the modern worldview and
uncompromising defense of tradition, his writings have made a deep impact on
many intellectuals and writers in the West and the East.
July 25, 2001
Rene
Guenon’s major works include the following:
The
Crisis of the Modern World,
tr. by A. Osborne, M. Pallis, R. Nicholson (London: Luzac, 1962).
The
Multiple States of Being,
tr. by Jocelyn Godwin (New York: Larson, 1984).
The
Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times,
tr. by Lord Northbourne (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972).
Symbolism
of the Cross, tr.
by Angus Macnab (London: Luzac, 1958).
East
and West, tr. by
William Massey (London: Luzac, 1941). See also the new translation by Martin
Lings (New York: Sophia Perennis, 2001).
The
Esotericism of Dante,
tr. by Henry D. Fohr (New York: Sophia Perennis, 2001).
The
Great Triad, tr.
by Peter Kingsley (Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1991).
Insights
into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism,
tr. by Henry D. Fohr (New York: Sophia Perennis, 2001).
Introduction
to the Study of Hindu Doctrines,
tr. by M. Pallis (London: Luzac, 1945).
Man
and His Becoming According to the Vedanta,
tr. By R. Nicholson (London: Luzac, 1946).
The
Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus,
tr. by Henry D. Fohr (New York: Sophia Perennis, 2001).
Spiritual
Authority and Temporal Power,
tr. by Henry D. Fohr (New York: Sophia Perennis, 2001).
Fundamental
Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science,
tr. by Alvin Moore, revised and edited by martin Lings (Cambridge: Quinta
Essentia, 1995).
One
may also refer to the following sources for Guenon’s life and writings:
Rene
Alleau and M.
Scriabine, Rene Guenon et l’Actualite de la Pensee Traditionnelle: Actes du
Colloque International de Cerisy-La-Salle; 13-20 Julliet 1973 (Paris: Dervy
Livres, 1981).
Robin
Waterfield, Rene Guenon and the Future of the West: the Life and Writings of
a 20th-century Metaphysician (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987)
Jean
Robin, Rene Guenon: Temoin de la Tradition (Paris: G. Tredaniel, 1986).
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