The following are selected passages from Rene Gueron’s, The
Crisis of the Modern World, first published in 1942. Guenon challenges our assumptions and provides an unparalleled
perspective on the impact of individualism, our ability to perceive truth and the troubling crisis of our modern civilization. No faith system seems to have been spared the corruption of this grand delusion and the path to understanding the truth of the cosmos seems only open to the most courageous aspirant armed with tools for dismantling the barriers that obscure real visibility.
“By Individualism, we mean the negation of any principle
higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all
of its branches, to purely human elements; fundamentally, therefore,
individualism amounts to the same thing as what, at the time of the
Renaissance, was called ‘humanism’; it is also the characteristic feature of
the “profane point of view” as we have described it above. Indeed these are but
different names for the same thing; and we have also shown that this “profane”
outlook coincides with the anti-traditional outlook that lies at the root of
all specifically modern tendencies. That is not to say, of course, that this
outlook is entirely new; it had appeared in more or less pronounced forms in
other periods, but its manifestations were always limited in scope and apart
from the main trend, and they never went so far as to overrun the whole of a
civilization, as has happened during the recent centuries of the West.
What has never been seen before is the erection of an entire
civilization on something purely negative, on what indeed could be called the
absence of principle; and it is this that gives the modern world its abnormal
character and makes of it a sort of monstrosity, only to be understood if one
thinks of it as corresponding to the end of a cyclical period, as we have
already said. Individualism,
thus defined, is therefore the determining cause of the present decline of the
West, precisely because it is, so to speak, the mainspring for the development
of the lowest possibilities of mankind, namely those possibilities that do not
require the intervention of any supra-human element and which, on the contrary,
can only expand freely if every supra-human element be absent, since they stand
at the antipodes of all genuine spirituality and intellectuality.
Individualism implies, in the first place, the negation of
intellectual intuition – inasmuch as this is essentially a supra-individual
faculty – and of the knowledge that constitutes the true province of this
intuition, namely metaphysics understood in its true sense. That is why
everything that modern philosophers understand by the word metaphysics – if
they admit the existence of anything at all under this name – is completely
foreign to real metaphysics; it consists indeed of nothing but rational
constructs or imaginative hypotheses, and thus purely individual conceptions,
most of which bear only on the domain of ‘physics’, or in other words of
nature. Even if any question is touched upon that could really belong to the
metaphysical order, the manner in which it is envisaged and treated reduces it
to the level of ‘pseudo-metaphysics’, and precludes any real or valid solution.
It would seem, indeed, as if the philosophers are much more
interested in creating problems, however artificial and illusory they may be,
than in solving them; and this is but one aspect of the irrational love of
research for its own sake, that is to say, of the most futile agitation in both
the mental and the corporeal domains. It is also an important consideration for
these philosophers to be able to put their name to a “system”, that is, to a
strictly limited and circumscribed set of theories, which shall belong to them
and be exclusively their creation; hence the desire to be original at all
costs, even if truth should have to be sacrificed to this ‘originality’: a
philosopher’s renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by
repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others. This form of
individualism, the begetter of so many ‘systems’ that contradict one another
even when they are not contradictory in themselves, is to be found also among
modern scholars and artists; but it is perhaps in philosophy that the intellectual
anarchy to which it inevitably gives rise is most apparent.
In a traditional civilization it is almost inconceivable
that a man should claim an idea as his own; and in any case, were he to do so,
he would thereby deprive it of all credit and authority, reducing it to the
level of a meaningless fantasy: if an idea is true, it belongs equally to all
who are capable of understanding it; if it is false, there is no credit in
having invented it. A true idea
cannot be ‘new’, for truth is not a product of the human mind; it exists
independently of us, an all we have to do is to take cognizance of it; outside
this knowledge there can be nothing buy error: but do the moderns on the whole
care about truth, or do they even know what it is?
Here again words have lost their meaning, inasmuch as some
people – for instance contemporary pragmatists – go so far as to misappropriate
the word “truth” for what is simply practical utility, that is to say for
something that is quite foreign to the intellectual order. The logical outcome
of the modern deviation is precisely the negation of truth, as well as of the
intelligence of which truth is the object. But let us knot anticipate further,
an on this point, merely say that the kind of individualism of which we have
been speaking is the chief source of the illusion about the importance of
so-called ‘great men’; to be a ‘genius’, in the profane sense of the word,
amounts to very little, and is utterly incapable of making up for the lack of
true knowledge.
As we are speaking of philosophy, we shall mention some of
the consequences of individualism in this field, though without entering into
every detail: first of all there was the negation of intellectual intuition and
the consequent raising of reason above all else, this purely human and relative
faculty being treated as the highest part of the intelligence, or even as
coinciding with the whole of the intelligence; this is what constitutes
rationalism, whose real founder was Descartes. This limitation of intelligence was
however only a first stage; before long, reason itself was increasingly
relegated to mainly practical functions, in proportion as applications began to
predominate over such sciences as might still have kept a certain speculative
character; and Descartes himself was already at heart much more concerned with
these practical applications than with pure science.
More than this: individualism inevitability implies
naturalism, since all that lies beyond nature is, for that very reason, out of
reach of the individual as such; naturalism and the negation of metaphysics are
indeed but one and the same thing, and once intellectual intuition is no longer
recognized, no metaphysics is any longer possible; but whereas some persist in
inventing a ‘pseudo-metaphysics’ of one kind or another, others – with greater
frankness – assert its impossibility; form this has arisen ‘relativism’ in all
its forms, whether it be the ‘criticism’ of Kant or the ’positivism’ of Auguste
Comte; and since reason itself is quite relative, and can deal validly only
with a domain that is equally relative, it is true to say that ‘relativism’ is
the only logical outcome of rationalism.
By this means, however, rationalism was to bring about its
own destruction: ‘nature’ and ‘becoming’, as we said above, are in reality
synonymous; a consistent naturalism can therefore only be one of the ‘
philosophies of becoming’, already mentioned. Of which the specifically modern
type is evolutionism; it was precisely this that finally turned against
rationalism, by accusing reason of being unable to deal adequately, on the one
hand, with what is solely change and multiplicity, and, on the other, with the
indefinite complexity of sensible phenomena.
…
The digression into which we have been led by our review of
the manifestation of individualism in the religious field does not seem
unjustified, for it shows that the evil, in this domain, is even more serious
and widespread than might at first sign be supposed, moreover, it is not really
foreign to the question we are considering, upon which our last remark directly
bears, for it is individualism that everywhere sponsors the spirit of debate.
It is difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things, which by
their very nature cannot be discussed.
Modern man, instead of attempting to raise himself to truth,
seeks to drag truth down to his own level, which is doubtless the reason why
there are so many who imagine, when one speaks to them of ‘traditional
sciences’, or even of pure metaphysics, that one is speaking only of ‘profane
science’ and of ‘philosophy’. It is always possible to hold discussions within
the realm of individual opinion, as this does not go beyond the rational order,
and it is easy to find more or less valid arguments on both sides of a question
when there is no appeal to any higher principle. Indeed, in many cases,
discussion can be carried on indefinitely without philosophy is built up on
quibbles and badly-framed questions.
Far from clearing up these question, as it is commonly supposed
to do, discussion usually only entangles or obscures them still further, and
its commonest result is for each participant, in trying to convert his
opponent, to become more firmly wedded to his own opinion, and to enclose
himself in it more exclusively than ever.
The real motive is not the wish to attain to knowledge of the truth, but
to prove oneself right in spite of opposition, or at least, if one cannot
convince others, to convince oneself of one’s own rightness – though failure to
convince other nevertheless causes regret, in view of the craving for
‘proselytism’ that is one of the characteristic features of the modern Western
mentality.
Sometimes individualism, in the lowest and most vulgar sense
of the word, is manifested in a still more obvious way, as in the desire that
is frequently shown to judge a man’s work by what is known of his private life,
as though there could be any sort of connection between the two. The same
tendency, combined with a mania for detail, is also responsible for the
interest shown in the smallest peculiarities in the lives of ‘great men’ and
for the illusion that all that they have done can be explained by a sort of
‘psycho-physiological’ analysis; all this is very significant for anyone who
wishes to understand the real nature of the contemporary mentality. “
