Inspirerade av Viveca Wessels på Café Exposé nyligen publicerade text om Kurt Almqvist bjuder vi idag på en av de texter Almqvist (Abd al-Muqsit) skrev i Svenska Dagbladet (630703). Ämnet har, i vanlig ordning, alls icke tappat i aktualitet sedan texten skrevs även om det förefaller som om våra dagars "konstdebatt" föga förvånande befinner sig på än lägre nivå än den Almqvist refererar och deltager i.
I texten drar Almqvist helt korrekt gränsen mellan Tradition och modernitet, snarare än mellan tidigt- och senmodernt. Det senare alltför vanligt förekommande vilket leder till en mängd bisarra fenomen såsom hyllningar av nationalism och punschpatriotism, 1809-års regeringsform och allehanda moderna konstnärer, icke minst Wagner, i tron att dessa skulle vara representera någonting konservativt, ja, kanske rent av ickemodernt. För att inte tala om de som omfamnar 1800-talets profanvetenskap, vilken ju i allmänhet går än längre i sin vulgära materialism än sina samtida motsvarigheter. Men över till Almqvist vars texter vi säkerligen kommer att återkomma till.
Modern konst – befrielse?
Lektor Kurt Almqvist anklagar deltagarna i dagens konstdebatt för att ha alltför snäva perspektiv. Den avgörande fronten går inte mellan den naturalistiska och den efternaturalistiska konstepoken, hävdar dr Almqvist, utan mellan den nya tiden och medeltiden. Endast en inlevelse i medeltidens och Orientens inställning till konsten och den andliga verksamheten över huvud kan ge en fruktbar grund för en fördjupning av konstdiskussionen, anser artikelförfattaren.
Vilken subtil och komplicerad utformning frågeställningarna i våra dagars konstdebatt än får, tycks man ha rätt att förenkla dem genom att beteckna denna debatt som en konfrontation av den naturalistiska och den efter-naturalistiska eller i gängse mening moderna perioden. Detta innebär, att man praktiskt taget begränsar diskussionen till att gälla Europas s. k. nya tid, vilken i stort sett utfylls av de båda nämnda epokerna. Man kan som exempel ta den i höstas i Sverige utkämpade debatten – nyligen samlad i volymen ”Är allting konst?” som recenserades på denna plats av Göran Schildt: om under dess förlopp Europas för-naturalistiska period, medeltiden, någon gång nämndes, så skedde det med schablonartade och intetsägande formuleringar och i en anda av antingen motvilja eller likgiltighet för det som utgör väsenskärnan i dess kultur: den religiösa traditionen och den därur härledda världsbilden. Likgiltighet på denna punkt präglade för övrigt också de enstaka uttalanden som gjordes – de av Rabbe Enckell inbegripna – om forntida eller utomeuropeiska kulturer: dessa bygger ju alla i motsats till Europas nya tid på liknande metafysiska principer som medeltiden.
När deltagarna i dagens konstdiskussion i regel begränsar sitt perspektiv till den lilla ö i tiden och rummet som den nya tidens Europa utgör, dömer de sig själva till att stanna kvar i ytskiktet av vad det rör sig om. För att få ett begrepp om det djupare skeendet är det minsta man kan göra att utan förutfattade meningar studera hela den europeiska konsthistorien och dess andliga bakgrund; och gör man det, begriper man snart att den väsentliga fronten ej går mellan de båda huvudperioderna i den nya tiden utan mellan denna senare is sin helhet och dess föregångare medeltiden. Och det blir också klart, att man utan att se nya tiden mot dess historiska bakgrund omöjligen kan bedöma var och en av dess delperioder eller dess inbördes förhållande; det är ju nämligen en allmän regel, att man blott genom att känna till helheten kan rätt uppfatta delarna och proportionerna dem emellan.
Låt oss först i största allmänhet karakterisera de båda viktigaste av den nya tidens delperioder. Vi kan då säga att den naturalistiska konsten vill återge tingens yttre former och färger så som de ter sig för ögat, medan den efter-naturalistiska epokens många skolor som gemensamt kännemärke har en strävan att ”befria sig” från dessa perceptuella elements herravälde över konstnärens syften: ”Exakthet är icke sanning är hela den moderna konstperiodens tes”, säger Herbert Read i sin Concise History of Modern Painting. Nu finns det ju emellertid för människan utom den kroppsliga, med synen uppfattade formen en subtil eller själslig form, som framför allt präglas av förståndet; och det är bara naturligt att en viss kategori människor i ett visst skede av sin utveckling alltid har en likartad inställning till dessa båda former. Renässansen, som på konstens område trodde sig kunna uttömmande återge motivet med hjälp av den perceptuella, den varsebliva formen och som därmed inledde naturalismen, var sålunda också ingångsporten till den nya tid inom filosofi och vetenskap, som inbillade sig lika uttömmande kunna förklara världen med hjälp av den konceptuella formen, den logiska tanken; det är detta betraktelsesätt som kallas ”rationalism”. (Även under antikens klassiska period gick förövrigt de båda samman.) I båda dessa avseenden bröt renässansen med medeltiden, som ansåg att skapelsens innersta verklighet genom sin över-formella karaktär ej kan inneslutas i några som helst former, vare sig begreppens eller bildernas. Till följd av detta synsätt följde medeltidskonsten Dionysos Areopagitas maning att ”respektera avståndet som skiljer det andliga från det sinnliga” och ville blott, ödmjukt antyda, hur det senare mottas och genomlyses av det förra. Med det ”andliga” avser medeltiden den verklighetssfär, som står över och behärskar både det själsliga och det kroppsliga och som därför kan ge människan sann frihet gentemot båda.
Det innebär då ej heller någon överraskning att se, hur senare 1800-talets reaktion mot naturalismen gick hand i hand med ett uppror även om dess tvillingsyster rationalismen och dennas följdföreteelse, materialismen. Sin logiska, avslöjande slutpunkt nådde denna utveckling i och med den i början av 1900-talet uppkommande surrealismen. Om denna riktning är representativ för all efter-naturalistisk konst, så är det i själva verket därför att där – ohöljt – arten av den anti-rationalism framträder, som varit själen i de sista hundra årens konstnärliga och allmänna utveckling. Denna anti-rationalism är nämligen som bekant i sina mest typiska manifestationer en flykt in i det undermedvetna, detta dittills av mänskligheten ringaktade område, som psykoanalysen i början av vårt århundrade öppnade portarna till. Men den ”frigörelse”, som de flesta konstnärer och kritiker – t. ex. Kandinsky eller den här ovan citerade Read – har velat se i modernismen, är enbart en illusion, därför att det undermedvetna på sätt och vis i ännu högre grad än det rationella medvetandet är vårt ego, nämligen såsom dess grumliga och gyttjiga bottenskikt; och detta ego i sin helhet är det som i verkligheten klavbinder människan. Denna illusion är för övrigt analog med psykoanalysens tro på att kunna läka.
Liksom denna senare framträdde surrealismen genom sina anspråk på att ”befria” människan som en efterträdare till den uppenbarade tron. Denna angav sig uttryckligen som en ”religion”, ”metafysik” eller ”mystik”, som efter naturalismens och materialismens hänvisande till det ”yttre” i människan och naturen, nu äntligen skulle uppenbara och lämna tillgång till båda verkliga, ”inre” djup. Denna vokabulär – liksom också själva termen ”surrealism”, ”över-verklighetskonst” – framstår rentav som en parodi, eftersom det här var fråga om infra-rationella och ej som i den verkliga religionen och dess konst supra-rationella krafters spel och eftersom det i människan blott är dessa senare som kan göra anspråk på epitetet ”inre”. Även om dessa termer numera ej används lika mycket som i surrealismens barndom, kan man tydligen – och betecknande nog – ej helt komma ifrån dem, ej ens i det positivistiska Sverige. Så får vi t. ex. i Ulf Lindes vägledande studie av Marcel Duchamps ”readymades”, som nyligen ställts ut i repliker på Galerie Burén, se hur dessa präktiga föremål sammanställs med ”det man kunde kalla teologierna lärorna om hur det okända är beskaffat”. Och författaren fortsätter: ”Psykoanalysen är en sådan teologi, och den har utbildat sina särskilda riter (!), t. ex. surrealismen”. I själva verket har modernismen i ”action painting” o. dyl. alltmer frenetisk och blint låtit sig inspireras av det undermedvetna, och trots alla ”lekfulla” attityder gör den alltjämt detta med ett patos som väl kan kallas dogmatiserande.
Detta det modernaste konstskapandets blinda karaktär angavs träffande i höstens debatt av Ole Bauman i hans yttrande, att ”slumpen, tillfälligheten och det oavsiktliga i dag är den främsta förutsättningen för bildskapandet”: det som i metafysiskt-mystiska traditioner – medeltidens, orientens, indiankulturernas – är det övermedvetnas för förståndet ofattbara men därför icke mindre verkliga och existentiella normer, det är hos modernisterna undermedvetandets kringtumlande skuggor; och det som i förra fallet är direkt, intuitiv kunskap om de nämnda normerna, motsvarar i det senare skuggornas slumpartade inramlande u medvetandets sfär. Inställningen till det icke-medvetna är alltså verkligen i senare fallet en vrångbild av vad det är i den förra.
Man kunde i våras få en god illustration till detta förhållande på Moderna museet, där i samband med utställningen av Jackson Pollocks action paintings två kortfilmer gavs, varav den ena visade den vite amerikanske målaren och den andra en okänd puebloindiansk sandmålare i verksamhet. Säkert hade denna sammanställning gjorts avsiktligt för att framhäva den likhet som består i att båda fallen den bearbetade ytan sammanfaller med själva marken och målaren tycks liksom infångas av den och bli ett medium för nedifrån jorden uppträngande makter: ”När jag är inne i mon målning, är jag inte alls medveten om vad jag gör”, säger Pollock själv. Men denna likhet är endast skenbar, ty de ”makter” det rör sig om i de två fallen är het olika, och deras olikhet är av just den principiella art som nyss angetts. Man behöver bara jämföra resultaten i de båda fallen för att bli på det klara med detta: å ena sidan färgslingor, som är helt eller nästan helt godtyckliga, d. v. s. meningslösa, och å den andra geometriska symboler i exakt överensstämmelse med ett kulturfolks nedärvda kosmologi – en kosmologi som hos de åkerbrukande puebloindianerna framför allt bygger på jordens sinnebildlighet.
I samband med konstnärer, som är ”inne” i sina verk, ligger det också nära tillhands att tänka på det östasiatiska, av taoism och zenbuddhism inspirerade landskapsmåleriet. Ty här företräde naturen det övermedvetna, som konstnären vill uppgå i; och enligt den taoistiska legenden gick denna absorption i vissa all så långt, at målaren kunde bokstavligen försvinna i en i målningen befintlig grotta. Inom parentes sagt för detta i sin tur tanken till de grottor August Strindberg, ”surrealisten före surrealismen”, målat och som antagligen uttrycker dennes omedvetna och vanmäktiga längtan efter liknande ”inre sortier” ur den plågsamma dagsvärlden. En av dessa grottor tillkom för övrigt samtidigt med Drömspelen, d. v. s. i sluten av ”infernoperioden”. (Dessa och andra Strindbergmålningar visades i våras på Moderna museet jämsidens Pollocks.)
En av de mest framträdande frågorna i höstens konstdebatt var den huruvida – som Ulf Linde först hävdade – ”konstverket ... får verklighet – form och värde – först i en akt av mottagande”. Fullständigad av Lindes därpå följande yttrande, att ”konstnären (själv) är den förste och mest levande mottagaren”, förefaller denna tes ovedersäglig, även om den, som Enckell påpekar, måste kompletteras med det självklara påpekandet att konstnären också är skapare. Frågan är bara, vad konstnären mottar och varifrån, och det är i oförmågan – eller försummelsen – att göra särskillnader på så verkligt avgörande punkter som dessa, som dagens konstdebatt visar sin otillräcklighet. Så talar t. ex. Göran Schildt – i sin ovan nämnda artikel – från synpunkten av just ”mottagarens aktiva medverkan” utan vidare kommentarer om ”beröringspunkter” mellan modernisternas och de gamla kinesernas måleri – något som måste en aning förvåna den som läst samme författarens tidigare artikel ”Konsten som tröst”. Där tillbakavisade nämligen Schildt den esteticism som bl. a. består i att ignorera de religiöst traditionella konstnärerna egen uppfattning om vad som är väsentligt för dem: den mystiska, ”personlighetsomvandlande” kontemplationen. I själva verket måste man beträffande de båda nyssnämnda konstskolorna säga detsamma som i fråga om Pollock och sandmålaren: det som skiljer är ojämförligt mycket viktigare än det som förenar. Den av osynliga normer styrda verkligheten, som landskapsmålaren i Kina eller Japan kunde antyda till följd av andlig samling, denna verklighet aktualiserades såsom följd av en motsvarande samling hos den åskådare som tillhörde samma religiösa tradition. Därmed upplöses dennes ego-gränser, och han införlivades med alltet i en befriande ”samandning” – en verkan som koncentrationen förut haft hos konstnären själv. Inom parentes sagt kan ju även vi, som ej är inlemmade i denna tradition, få åtminstone någon aning om denna verkan, ifall vi utan förutfattade meningar försöker sätta oss in i det främmande kulturmönstret. Hur skall däremot hos en modern människa någon existentiellt omvandlande eller utvidgande process kunna ske, när hon, själv ett barn av normlöshet eller kaos, står inför ett konstverk, som också det har sina rötter i kaos? Hur skall verkan kunna bli annat än andnöd och tryck över bröstet?
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
[Poem, German] Jünger, F.G., Das Feuer
Friedrich Georg Jüngers poem "Das Feuer", taken from Gedichte.
Das Feuer
Wohin du mit geschmeid’gem Sprunge
Dich wendest, Feuer überall.
Aus Höhlen strömt mit breitem Schwunge
Rotleuchtend flüssiges Metall.
Das Fruktland sinkt vor dem Vulkane
Und wird zum heißen Lavameer.
Darüber zieht mit goldner Fahne
Die Sonne wild und stolz einher.
Aus diesem flammenhellen Ringe
Ist kein Entkommen, keine Flucht.
Dem Vogelschwarme schrumpft die Schwinge
Und klagend stürzt er in die Schlucht.
Es schießt aus hundert Feuerstellen
Dem Springbrunn gleich die wisse Glut.
Du lechzt nach Kühlung, rufst nach Quellen
Fragst, was erfrischt das tolle Blut?
Willst du dich Salamander nennen,
So zeig es, halt im roten Wind.
Es brennt, doch ohne zu verbrennen,
Des Feuergeists geliebtes Kind.
Das Feuer
Wohin du mit geschmeid’gem Sprunge
Dich wendest, Feuer überall.
Aus Höhlen strömt mit breitem Schwunge
Rotleuchtend flüssiges Metall.
Das Fruktland sinkt vor dem Vulkane
Und wird zum heißen Lavameer.
Darüber zieht mit goldner Fahne
Die Sonne wild und stolz einher.
Aus diesem flammenhellen Ringe
Ist kein Entkommen, keine Flucht.
Dem Vogelschwarme schrumpft die Schwinge
Und klagend stürzt er in die Schlucht.
Es schießt aus hundert Feuerstellen
Dem Springbrunn gleich die wisse Glut.
Du lechzt nach Kühlung, rufst nach Quellen
Fragst, was erfrischt das tolle Blut?
Willst du dich Salamander nennen,
So zeig es, halt im roten Wind.
Es brennt, doch ohne zu verbrennen,
Des Feuergeists geliebtes Kind.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
[Excerpts] Guénon, The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times
Excerpts from Guénon, René (2004) The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times Sophia Perennis: Hillsdale, New York
Excerpting The Reign of Quantity has by no means been easy. The sentences are often long, sometimes very long, the book constantly refers back to itself, to previous paragraphs and chapters. This, combined with the fact that it is filled with knowledge, insights and timeless wisdoms makes it difficult to exclude anything, or less than everything.
All of the above makes it a book that not only deserves to be read more than once but one that almost needs to be read multiple times. This said, and done, it is more than likely that these excerpts will be updated some time in the future.
The truth is that time is not something that unrolls itself uniformly, so that the practice of representing it geometrically by a straight line, usual among modern mathematicians, conveys an idea of time that is wholly falsified by over-simplification; we shall see later that a tendency toward a pernicious simplification is yet another characteristic of the modern spirit, and also that it inevitably accompanies a tendency to reduce everything to quantity. The correct representation of time is to be found in the traditional conception of cycles, and this conception obviously involves a ’qualified’ time; besides, whenever the question of geometrical representation arises, whether in fact it be set out graphically or only expressed through the use of an appropriate terminology, it is clear that a spatial symbolism is being made use of; all this may suggest that an indication of some kind of correlation may well be discovered between the he qualitative determinations of time and those of space.
p. 40-1
A more or less complete exposition of the doctrine of cycles cannot be entered upon here, although that doctrine is naturally implicit in and fundamental to the whole of this study; if the limits of the available space are not to be overstepped, it must suffice for the present to formulate a few observations more directly connected with the subject of this book taken as a whole, referring wherever necessary in later chapters to relevant matters connected with the doctrine of cycles. The first of these observations is as follows: not only has each phase of a temporal cycle, of whatever kind it may be, its peculiar quality that influences the determination of events, but the speed with which events are unfolded also depends on these phases, and is therefore of a qualitative rather than of a quantitative order. Therefore, in speaking of the speed of events in time, by analogy with the speed of displacement of a body in space, a certain transposition of the notion of speed has to be effected, for speed in time cannot be reduced to quantitative expression, as can be done in mechanics when speed properly so called is in question. What this means is that, according to the different phases of the cycle, sequences of events comparable one to another do not occupy quantitatively equal durations; this is particularly evident in the case of the great cycles, applicable both to the cosmic and to the human orders, the most notable example being furnished by the decreasing lengths of the respective durations of the four Yugas that together make up a Manvantara. For that very reason, events are being unfolded nowadays with a speed unexampled in the earlier ages, and this speed goes on increasing and will continue to increase up to the end of the cycle; there is thus something like a progressive ‘contraction’ of duration, the limit of which corresponds to the ‘stopping-point’ previously alluded to […].
p. 41-2
The conclusion that emerges clearly from all this is that uniformity, in order that it may be possible, presupposes beings deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical ‘units’; also that no such uniformity is ever in fact realizable, while the result of all the efforts made to realize it, notably in the human domain, can only be to rob beings more or less completely of their proper qualities, thus turning them into something as nearly as possible like mere machines; and machines, the typical product of the modern world, are the very things that represent, in the highest degree attained up till now, the predominance of quantity over quality. From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic’ and ‘egalitarian’ conceptions tend toward exactly the same end, for according to them all individuals are equivalent one to another. This idea carries with it the absurd supposition that everyone is equally well fitted for anything whatsoever, though nature provides no example of any such ‘equality’, for the reasons already given, since it would imply nothing but a complete similitude between individuals; but it is obvious that, in the name of this assumed ‘equality’, which is one of the topsy-turvy ‘ideals’ most dear to the modern world, individuals are in fact directed toward becoming as nearly alike one to another as nature allows—and this in the first place by the attempt to impose a uniform education on everyone. It is no less obvious that differences of aptitude cannot in spite of everything be entirely suppressed, so that a uniform education will not give exactly the same results for all; but it is all too true that, although it cannot confer on anyone qualities that he does not possess, it is on the contrary very well fitted to suppress in everyone all possibilities above the common level; thus the ‘leveling’ always works downward: indeed, it could not work in any other way, being itself only an expression of the tendency toward the lowest, that is, toward pure quantity, situated as it is at a level lower than that of all corporeal manifestation—not only below the degree occupied by the most rudimentary of living beings, but also below that occupied by what our contemporaries have a habit of calling ‘lifeless matter’, though even this last, since it is manifested to our senses, is still far from being wholly denuded of quality.
p. 51-2
There is a great contrast between what the ancient crafts used to be and what modern industry now is, and it presents in its essentials another particular case and at the same time a practical application of the contrast between the qualitative and quantitative points of view, which predominate in the one and in the other respectively. In order to see why this is so, it is useful to note first of all that the distinction between the arts and the crafts, or between ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’, is itself something specifically modern, as if it had been born of the deviation and degeneration which have led to the replacement in all fields of the traditional conception by the profane conception.
p. 55
In every traditional civilization, as there has often been occasion to point out, every human activity of whatever kind is always regarded as derived essentially from principles. This is conspicuously true for the sciences, and it is no less true for the arts and the crafts, and there is in addition a close connection between them all for according to a formula postulated as a fundamental axiom by the builders of the Middle Ages, ars sine scientia nihil; the science in question is of course traditional science, and certainly not modern science, the application of which can give birth to nothing except modern industry. By this attachment to principles human activity could be said to be as it were ‘transformed’, and instead of being limited to what it is in itself, namely, a mere external manifestation (and the profane point of view consists in this and nothing else), it is integrated with the tradition, and constitutes for those who carry it out an effective means of participation in the tradition, and this is as much as to say that it takes on a truly ‘sacred’ and ‘ritual’ character. That is why it can be said that, in any such civilization, ‘every occupation is a priesthood’; but in order to avoid conferring on this last word a more or less unwarrantable extension of meaning, if not a wholly false one, it must be made clear that priesthood is not priesthood unless it possesses something that has been preserved in the sacerdotal functions alone, ever since the time when the previously non-existent distinction between the sacred and the profane arose.
p. 56
There is thus no difficulty in seeing how far removed true craft is from modern industry, so much so that the two are as it were opposites, and how far it is unhappily true that in the ‘reign of quantity’ the craft is, as the partisans of ‘progress’ so readily declare, a ‘thing of the past’. The workman in industry cannot put into his work anything of himself, and a lot of trouble would even be taken to prevent him if he had the least inclination to try to do so; but he cannot even try, because all his activity consists solely in making a machine go, and because in addition he is rendered quite incapable of initiative by the professional ‘formation’—or rather deformation—he has received, which is practically the antithesis of the ancient apprenticeship, and has for its sole object to teach him to execute certain movements ‘mechanically’ and always in the same way, without having at all to understand the reason for them or to trouble himself about the result, for it is not he, but the machine, that will really fabricate the object. Servant of the machine, the man must become a machine himself, and thenceforth his work has nothing really human in it, for it no longer implies the putting to work of any of the qualities that really constitute human nature.* The end of all The end of all this is what is called in present-day jargon ‘mass-production’, the purpose of which is only to produce the greatest possible quantity of objects, and of objects as exactly alike as possible, intended for the use of men who are supposed to be no less alike; that is indeed the triumph of quantity, as was pointed out earlier, and it is by the same token the triumph of uniformity. These men who are reduced to mere numerical ‘units’ are expected to live in what can scarcely be called houses, for that would be to misuse the word, but in ‘hives’ of which the compartments will all be planned on the same model, and furnished with objects made by ‘mass-production’, in such a way as to cause to disappear from the environment in which the people live every qualitative difference; it is enough to examine the projects of some contemporary architects (who themselves describe these dwellings as ‘living-machines’) in order to see that nothing has been exaggerated.
p. 60-1
* It may be remarked that the machine is in a sense the opposite of the tool, and is in no way a ‘perfected tool’ as many imagine, for the tool is in a sense a ‘prolongation’ of the man himself, whereas the machine reduces the man to being no more than its servant; and, if it was true to say that ‘the tool engenders the craft’, it is no less true that the machine kills it; the instinctive reactions of the artisans against the first machines thus explain themselves.
p. 60
In connection with the traditional conception of the crafts, which is but one with that of the arts, there is another important question to which attention must be drawn: the works of traditional art, those of medieval art, for instance, are generally anonymous, and it is only very recently that attempts have been made, as a result of modern ‘individualism’, to attach the few names preserved in history to known masterpieces, even though such ‘attributions’ are often very hypothetical. This anonymity is just the opposite of the constant preoccupation of modern artists to affirm and to make known above all their own individualities; on the other hand, a superficial observer might think that it is comparable to the anonymity of the products of present-day industry, although the latter have no claim whatever to be called ‘works of art’; but the truth is quite otherwise, for although there is indeed anonymity in both cases, it is for exactly contrary reasons. It is the same with anonymity as with many other things which by virtue of the inversion of analogy, can be taken either in a superior or in an in inferior sense: thus, for example, in a traditional social organization, an individual can be outside the castes in two ways, either because he is above them (ativarna) or because he is beneath them (avarna), and it is evident that these cases represent two opposite extremes. In a similar way, those among the moderns who consider themselves to be outside all religion are at the extreme opposite point from those who, having penetrated to the principial unity of all the traditions, are no longer tied to any particular traditional form. In relation to the conditions of the normal humanity, or to what may be called its ‘mean’, one category is below the castes and the other beyond: it could be said that one has fallen to the ‘infra-human’ and the other has risen to the ‘supra-human’. Now, anonymity itself can be characteristic both of the ‘infra-human’ and of the ‘supra-human’: the first case is that of modern anonymity, the anonymity of the crowd or the ‘masses’ as they are called today (and this use of the highly quantitative word ‘mass’ is very significant), and the second case is that of traditional anonymity in its manifold applications, including its application to works of art.
p. 62-3
Returning now to the consideration of the more specifically ‘scientific’ point of view as the modern world understands it, its chief characteristic is obviously that it seeks to bring everything down to quantity, anything that cannot be so treated being left out of account and is regarded as more or less non-existent.
p. 68
The earliest product of rationalism in the so-called ’scientific’ field was Cartesian mechanism; materialism was not due to appear until later, for as explained elsewhere, the word and the thing itself are not actually met with earlier than the eighteenth century; besides, whatever may have been the intentions of Descartes himself (and it is in fact possible, by pursuing to the end the logical are mutually very contradictory), there is nonetheless a direct filiation between mechanism and materialism. In this connection it is useful to recall that, although the ancient atomistic conceptions such as and especially of Epicurus can be qualified as mechanistic, these two being the only ‘precursors’ from the ancient world whom the moderns can with any justification claim as their own in this field, their conceptions are of often wrongly looked upon as the earliest form of materialism: for materialism implies above all the modern physicist’s notion of ‘matter’, and at that time this notion was still a long way from having come to birth. The truth is that materialism merely represents one of the two halves of Cartesian dualism, the half to which its author had applied the mechanistic conception; it was sufficient thereafter to ignore or to deny the remaining half, or what comes to the same thing, to claim to bring the whole of reality into the first half, in order to arrive quite naturally at materialism.
p. 96
Without seeking for the moment to determine more precisely the nature and quality of the supra-sensible, insofar as it is actually involved in this matter, it will be useful to observe how far the very people who still admit it and think that they are aware of its action are in reality permeated by materialistic influence: for even if they do not deny all extra-corporeal reality, like the majority of their contemporaries, it is only because they have formed for themselves an idea of it that enables them in some way to assimilate it to the likeness of sensible things, and to do that is certainly scarcely better than to deny it. There is no reason to be surprised at this, considering the extent to which all the occultist, Theosophist, and other schools of that sort are fond of searching assiduously for points of approach to modern scientific theories, from which indeed they draw their inspiration more directly than they are prepared to admit, and the result is what might logically be expected under such conditions. It may even be observed that, in accordance with the continuous changes in scientific theories, the resemblance between the conceptions of a particular school and a particular scientific theory may make it possible to ‘date’ the school, in default of any more precise information about its history and its origins.
p. 123-4
Even today most magnetizers and spiritualists continue to talk of ’fluids’, and what is more, to believe seriously in them; this ‘anachronism’ is all the more strange in that these people are in general fanatical partisans of ‘progress’; such an attitude fits in badly with a conception that has for a long time been excluded from the scientific domain and so ought in their eyes to appear very ‘backward’. In the present-day mythology, ‘fluids’ have been replaced by ‘waves’ and ‘radiations’, these last in their turn of course effectively playing the part of ‘fluids’ in the theories most recently invented to try to explain the action of certain subtle influences; it should suffice to mention ‘radiaesthesia’ which is as ‘typical’ as possible in this respect.
p. 125
Of course a majority of ’spiritualists’ and even of ’traditionalists’, or of people who call themselves such, are in fact quite as materialistic as other people when matters of this kind are in question, so that the situation is made even more irremediable by the fact that those who most sincerely want to combat the modern spirit are almost all unwittingly affected by it, and all their efforts are therefore condemned to remain without any appreciable result; for these are matters in which goodwill is far from being sufficient; effective knowledge being needed as well, indeed, more needed than anything else. But effective knowledge is the very thing that is made impossible by the influence of the modern spirit with all its limitations, even in the case of those who might have some intellectual capabilities of the required kind if conditions were less abnormal.
p. 175-6
In the first place, yet one more confusion and error of interpretation arising from the modern mentality must be dissipated, and that is the idea that there exist things that are purely ’material’. This conception belongs exclusively to the modern mentality, and when it is disencumbered from all the secondary complications added to it by the special theories of the physicists, it amounts to no more than the idea that there exist beings and things that are solely corporeal, and that their existence and their constitution involve no element that is not corporeal. This idea is directly linked to the profane point of view as expressed, perhaps in its most complete form, in the sciences of today, for these sciences are characterized by the absence of any attachment to principles of a superior order, and thus the things taken as the objects of their study must themselves be thought of as being without any such attachment (whereby the ‘residual’ character of the said sciences is once again made evident); this kind of outlook can be regarded as indispensable in order to enable science to deal with its object, for if a contrary admission were made, science would at once be compelled to recognize that the real nature of its object eludes it. It may perhaps be superfluous to seek elsewhere the reason for the enthusiasm displayed by scientists in discrediting any other conception, by presenting it as a ‘superstition’ arising in the imagination of ‘primitive’ peoples, who, it is suggested, can have been nothing but savages or men of an infantile mentality, as the ‘evolutionist’ theories make them out to have been; but whether the reason be mere incomprehension on their part or a conscious partisanship, the scientists do succeed in producing a caricature of the situation convincing enough to induce a complete acceptance of their interpretation in everyone who believes implicitly in whatever they say, namely, in a large majority of our contemporaries.
p. 178-9
‘Shamanism’ will also be found to include rites comparable to some that belong to traditions of the highest order: some of them, for example, recall in a striking way the Vedic rites, and particularly those that are most clearly derived from the primordial tradition, such as those in which the symbols of the tree and of the swan predominate.
p. 182
The people just referred to are such as can properly be described as ‘traditionalists’, meaning people who only have a sort of tendency or aspiration toward tradition without really knowing anything at all about it; this is the measure of the distance dividing the ‘traditionalist’ spirit from the truly traditional spirit, for the latter implies a real knowledge, being indeed in a sense the same as that knowledge. In short, the ‘traditionalist’ is and can be no more than a mere ‘seeker’, and that is why he is always in danger of going astray, not being in possession of the principles that alone could provide him with infallible guidance; and his danger is all the greater because he will find in his path, like so many ambushes, all the false ideas set on foot by the power of illusion, which has a keen interest in preventing him from reaching the true goal of his search. It is indeed evident that this power can only maintain itself and continue to exercise its action on condition that all restoration of the traditional idea is made impossible, and more than ever so when it is preparing to take a further step in the direction of subversion, subversion being, as explained, the second phase of its action.
p. 210
All misuses of the word ‘tradition’ can serve this same purpose in one way or another, beginning with the most popular of all, whereby it is made synonymous with ‘custom’ or ‘usage’, thus bringing about a confusion of tradition with things that are on the lower human level and are completely lacking in profound significance.
p. 211
Granted that nothing that is of a purely human order can for that very reason legitimately be called ‘traditional’, there cannot possibly be, for instance, a ‘philosophical tradition’ or a ‘scientific tradition’ in the modern and profane sense of the words, any more, of course, than there can be a ‘political tradition’, at least where all traditional social organization is lacking, as is the case in the modern Western world.
p. 212
Indeed it sometimes happens that people go so far as to apply the word ‘tradition’ to things that by their very nature are as directly anti-traditional as possible: thus they talk about a ‘humanist tradition’, and a ‘national tradition’, despite the fact that humanism is nothing if not an explicit denial of the supra-human, and the formation of ’nationalities’ was the means employed for the destruction of the traditional civilization of the Middle Ages.
p. 212
It should be noted that the expression ‘counter-initiation’ has been used here, and not ‘pseudo-initiation’, for the two are quite different, and it is important moreover not to confuse the counterfeiter with the counterfeit. ‘Pseudo-initiation’ as it exists today in numerous organizations, many of them an attached to some form of ‘neo-spiritualism’, is but one of many examples of counterfeit […]. It is really only one of the products of the state of disorder and confusion brought about in the modern period by the ‘satanic’ activity that has its conscious starting-point in the ‘counter-initiation’ […]
p. 241
As for the ‘counter-initiation’, it is certainly not a mere illusory counterfeit, but on the contrary something very real in its own order, as the effectiveness of its action shows only too well; at least, it is not a counterfeit except in the sense that it necessarily imitates initiation like an inverted shadow, although its real intention is not to imitate but to oppose.
p. 242
One of the simplest means at the disposal of ‘pseudo-initiatic’ organizations for the fabrication of a false tradition for the use of their adherents is undoubtedly ‘syncretism’, which consists in assembling m an a more or less convincing manner elements borrowed from almost anywhere, and in putting them together as it were ‘from the outside’, without any genuine understanding of what they really represent in the various traditions to which they properly belong.
p. 245
The truth is that there has never existed anything that could rightly be called either an ‘Oriental tradition’ or a ‘Western tradition’, any such denomination being obviously much too vague to be applied to a defined traditional form, since, unless one goes back to the primordial tradition, which is here not in question for very easily understandable reasons, and which is anyhow neither Eastern nor Western, there are and there always have been diverse and multiple traditional forms both in the East and in the West. Others have thought to do better and to inspire confidence more easily by appropriating to themselves the name of some tradition that really existed at some more or less distant date, and using it as a label for a structure that is no less incongruous than the others, for although they naturally make some use of what they can manage to find out about the tradition on which they have staked their claim, they are forced to reinforce their few facts, always very fragmentary and often even partly hypothetical, by recourse to other elements either borrowed from a different source or wholly imaginary.
p. 248-9
Others do not hesitate to claim to be attached to some tradition that has entirely disappeared and has been extinct for centuries, even for thousands of years. However, unless they are bold enough to assert that their chosen tradition has been perpetuated for that length of time in a manner so secret and so well concealed that nobody but themselves has been able to discover the smallest trace of it, they are admittedly deprived of the appreciable advantage of being able to claim a direct and continuous filiation, for in their case the claim cannot even present an appearance of plausibility such as it can still present when of a fairly recent form such as that of the Rosicrucian tradition is chosen; but this defect does not seem to have much importance in their eyes, for they are so ignorant of the true conditions of initiation that they readily imagine that a mere ‘ideal’ attachment, without any regular transmission, can take the place of an effective attachment.
p. 250
Here this already long discussion must be brought to a close; it has amply sufficed to indicate in a general way the nature of the many ‘pseudo-initiatic’ counterfeits of the traditional idea that are so characteristic of our times: a mixture, more or less coherent but rather less than more so, of elements partly borrowed and partly invented, the whole dominated by anti-traditional conceptions such as are peculiar to the modern spirit, and for this reason serving no purpose other than the further spread of these same conceptions by making them pass with some people as traditional, not to mention the manifest deceit that consists in giving, in place of ‘initiation’, not only something purely profane in itself, but also something that makes for ‘profanation’. Should anyone now put forward the suggestion, as a sort of extenuating circumstance, that there are always in these affairs, despite all their faults, some elements derived from genuinely traditional sources, the answer would be this: in order to get itself accepted, every imitation must take on at least some of the features of the thing imitated, but that is just what makes it so dangerous; is not the cleverest lie, as well as the most deadly, precisely the lie that mixes most inextricably the true and the false, thus contriving to press the true into service in order to promote the triumph of the false?
p. 251
The previous chapter was concerned with matters that, like everything else belonging essentially to the modern world, are radically anti-traditional; but in a sense they go even further than ‘anti-tradition’, understood as being pure negation and nothing more, appropriately be called a ‘counter-tradition’. The distinction between the two is similar to that made earlier between deviation and subversion, and it corresponds to the same two phases of anti-traditional action considered as a whole. ‘Anti-tradition’ found its most complete expression in the kind of materialism that could be called ‘integral’, such as that which prevailed toward the end of the last century; as for the ‘counter-tradition’, we can still only see the preliminary signs of it, in the form of all the things that are striving to become counterfeits in one way or another of the traditional idea itself.
p. 260
In Islamic esoterism it is said that one who presents himself at a certain ‘gate’, without having reached it by a normal and legitimate way, sees it shut in his face and is obliged to turn back, but not as a mere profane person, for he can never be such again, but as a sāher (a sorcerer or a magician working in the domain of subtle possibilities of an inferior (order).
p. 263
The various matters dealt with in the course of this study together constitute what may, in a general way, be called the ‘signs of the times’ in the Gospel sense, in other words, the precursory signs of the ‘end of a world’ or of a cycle. This end only appears to b« be the ‘end of the world’, without any reservation or specification of any kind, to those who see nothing beyond the limits of this particular cycle; a very excusable error of perspective it is true, but one that has nonetheless some regrettable consequences in the excessive and unjustified terrors to which it gives rise in those who are not sufficiently detached from terrestrial existence; and naturally they are the very people who form this erroneous conception most easily, just because of the narrowness of their point of view. In truth there can be many ‘ends of the world’, because there are cycles of very varied duration, contained as it were one within another, and also because this same notion can always be applied analogically at all degrees and at all levels; but it is obvious that these ‘ends’ are of very unequal importance, as are the cycles themselves to which they belong; and in this connection it must be acknowledged that the end now under consideration is undeniably of considerably greater importance than many others, for it is the end of a whole Manvantara, and so of the temporal existence of what may rightly be called a humanity, but this, it must be said once more, in no way implies that it is the end of the terrestrial world itself, because, through the ‘rectification’ that takes place at the final Instant, this end will itself immediately become the beginning of another Manvantara.
p. 275
Excerpting The Reign of Quantity has by no means been easy. The sentences are often long, sometimes very long, the book constantly refers back to itself, to previous paragraphs and chapters. This, combined with the fact that it is filled with knowledge, insights and timeless wisdoms makes it difficult to exclude anything, or less than everything.
All of the above makes it a book that not only deserves to be read more than once but one that almost needs to be read multiple times. This said, and done, it is more than likely that these excerpts will be updated some time in the future.
The truth is that time is not something that unrolls itself uniformly, so that the practice of representing it geometrically by a straight line, usual among modern mathematicians, conveys an idea of time that is wholly falsified by over-simplification; we shall see later that a tendency toward a pernicious simplification is yet another characteristic of the modern spirit, and also that it inevitably accompanies a tendency to reduce everything to quantity. The correct representation of time is to be found in the traditional conception of cycles, and this conception obviously involves a ’qualified’ time; besides, whenever the question of geometrical representation arises, whether in fact it be set out graphically or only expressed through the use of an appropriate terminology, it is clear that a spatial symbolism is being made use of; all this may suggest that an indication of some kind of correlation may well be discovered between the he qualitative determinations of time and those of space.
p. 40-1
A more or less complete exposition of the doctrine of cycles cannot be entered upon here, although that doctrine is naturally implicit in and fundamental to the whole of this study; if the limits of the available space are not to be overstepped, it must suffice for the present to formulate a few observations more directly connected with the subject of this book taken as a whole, referring wherever necessary in later chapters to relevant matters connected with the doctrine of cycles. The first of these observations is as follows: not only has each phase of a temporal cycle, of whatever kind it may be, its peculiar quality that influences the determination of events, but the speed with which events are unfolded also depends on these phases, and is therefore of a qualitative rather than of a quantitative order. Therefore, in speaking of the speed of events in time, by analogy with the speed of displacement of a body in space, a certain transposition of the notion of speed has to be effected, for speed in time cannot be reduced to quantitative expression, as can be done in mechanics when speed properly so called is in question. What this means is that, according to the different phases of the cycle, sequences of events comparable one to another do not occupy quantitatively equal durations; this is particularly evident in the case of the great cycles, applicable both to the cosmic and to the human orders, the most notable example being furnished by the decreasing lengths of the respective durations of the four Yugas that together make up a Manvantara. For that very reason, events are being unfolded nowadays with a speed unexampled in the earlier ages, and this speed goes on increasing and will continue to increase up to the end of the cycle; there is thus something like a progressive ‘contraction’ of duration, the limit of which corresponds to the ‘stopping-point’ previously alluded to […].
p. 41-2
The conclusion that emerges clearly from all this is that uniformity, in order that it may be possible, presupposes beings deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical ‘units’; also that no such uniformity is ever in fact realizable, while the result of all the efforts made to realize it, notably in the human domain, can only be to rob beings more or less completely of their proper qualities, thus turning them into something as nearly as possible like mere machines; and machines, the typical product of the modern world, are the very things that represent, in the highest degree attained up till now, the predominance of quantity over quality. From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic’ and ‘egalitarian’ conceptions tend toward exactly the same end, for according to them all individuals are equivalent one to another. This idea carries with it the absurd supposition that everyone is equally well fitted for anything whatsoever, though nature provides no example of any such ‘equality’, for the reasons already given, since it would imply nothing but a complete similitude between individuals; but it is obvious that, in the name of this assumed ‘equality’, which is one of the topsy-turvy ‘ideals’ most dear to the modern world, individuals are in fact directed toward becoming as nearly alike one to another as nature allows—and this in the first place by the attempt to impose a uniform education on everyone. It is no less obvious that differences of aptitude cannot in spite of everything be entirely suppressed, so that a uniform education will not give exactly the same results for all; but it is all too true that, although it cannot confer on anyone qualities that he does not possess, it is on the contrary very well fitted to suppress in everyone all possibilities above the common level; thus the ‘leveling’ always works downward: indeed, it could not work in any other way, being itself only an expression of the tendency toward the lowest, that is, toward pure quantity, situated as it is at a level lower than that of all corporeal manifestation—not only below the degree occupied by the most rudimentary of living beings, but also below that occupied by what our contemporaries have a habit of calling ‘lifeless matter’, though even this last, since it is manifested to our senses, is still far from being wholly denuded of quality.
p. 51-2
There is a great contrast between what the ancient crafts used to be and what modern industry now is, and it presents in its essentials another particular case and at the same time a practical application of the contrast between the qualitative and quantitative points of view, which predominate in the one and in the other respectively. In order to see why this is so, it is useful to note first of all that the distinction between the arts and the crafts, or between ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’, is itself something specifically modern, as if it had been born of the deviation and degeneration which have led to the replacement in all fields of the traditional conception by the profane conception.
p. 55
In every traditional civilization, as there has often been occasion to point out, every human activity of whatever kind is always regarded as derived essentially from principles. This is conspicuously true for the sciences, and it is no less true for the arts and the crafts, and there is in addition a close connection between them all for according to a formula postulated as a fundamental axiom by the builders of the Middle Ages, ars sine scientia nihil; the science in question is of course traditional science, and certainly not modern science, the application of which can give birth to nothing except modern industry. By this attachment to principles human activity could be said to be as it were ‘transformed’, and instead of being limited to what it is in itself, namely, a mere external manifestation (and the profane point of view consists in this and nothing else), it is integrated with the tradition, and constitutes for those who carry it out an effective means of participation in the tradition, and this is as much as to say that it takes on a truly ‘sacred’ and ‘ritual’ character. That is why it can be said that, in any such civilization, ‘every occupation is a priesthood’; but in order to avoid conferring on this last word a more or less unwarrantable extension of meaning, if not a wholly false one, it must be made clear that priesthood is not priesthood unless it possesses something that has been preserved in the sacerdotal functions alone, ever since the time when the previously non-existent distinction between the sacred and the profane arose.
p. 56
There is thus no difficulty in seeing how far removed true craft is from modern industry, so much so that the two are as it were opposites, and how far it is unhappily true that in the ‘reign of quantity’ the craft is, as the partisans of ‘progress’ so readily declare, a ‘thing of the past’. The workman in industry cannot put into his work anything of himself, and a lot of trouble would even be taken to prevent him if he had the least inclination to try to do so; but he cannot even try, because all his activity consists solely in making a machine go, and because in addition he is rendered quite incapable of initiative by the professional ‘formation’—or rather deformation—he has received, which is practically the antithesis of the ancient apprenticeship, and has for its sole object to teach him to execute certain movements ‘mechanically’ and always in the same way, without having at all to understand the reason for them or to trouble himself about the result, for it is not he, but the machine, that will really fabricate the object. Servant of the machine, the man must become a machine himself, and thenceforth his work has nothing really human in it, for it no longer implies the putting to work of any of the qualities that really constitute human nature.* The end of all The end of all this is what is called in present-day jargon ‘mass-production’, the purpose of which is only to produce the greatest possible quantity of objects, and of objects as exactly alike as possible, intended for the use of men who are supposed to be no less alike; that is indeed the triumph of quantity, as was pointed out earlier, and it is by the same token the triumph of uniformity. These men who are reduced to mere numerical ‘units’ are expected to live in what can scarcely be called houses, for that would be to misuse the word, but in ‘hives’ of which the compartments will all be planned on the same model, and furnished with objects made by ‘mass-production’, in such a way as to cause to disappear from the environment in which the people live every qualitative difference; it is enough to examine the projects of some contemporary architects (who themselves describe these dwellings as ‘living-machines’) in order to see that nothing has been exaggerated.
p. 60-1
* It may be remarked that the machine is in a sense the opposite of the tool, and is in no way a ‘perfected tool’ as many imagine, for the tool is in a sense a ‘prolongation’ of the man himself, whereas the machine reduces the man to being no more than its servant; and, if it was true to say that ‘the tool engenders the craft’, it is no less true that the machine kills it; the instinctive reactions of the artisans against the first machines thus explain themselves.
p. 60
In connection with the traditional conception of the crafts, which is but one with that of the arts, there is another important question to which attention must be drawn: the works of traditional art, those of medieval art, for instance, are generally anonymous, and it is only very recently that attempts have been made, as a result of modern ‘individualism’, to attach the few names preserved in history to known masterpieces, even though such ‘attributions’ are often very hypothetical. This anonymity is just the opposite of the constant preoccupation of modern artists to affirm and to make known above all their own individualities; on the other hand, a superficial observer might think that it is comparable to the anonymity of the products of present-day industry, although the latter have no claim whatever to be called ‘works of art’; but the truth is quite otherwise, for although there is indeed anonymity in both cases, it is for exactly contrary reasons. It is the same with anonymity as with many other things which by virtue of the inversion of analogy, can be taken either in a superior or in an in inferior sense: thus, for example, in a traditional social organization, an individual can be outside the castes in two ways, either because he is above them (ativarna) or because he is beneath them (avarna), and it is evident that these cases represent two opposite extremes. In a similar way, those among the moderns who consider themselves to be outside all religion are at the extreme opposite point from those who, having penetrated to the principial unity of all the traditions, are no longer tied to any particular traditional form. In relation to the conditions of the normal humanity, or to what may be called its ‘mean’, one category is below the castes and the other beyond: it could be said that one has fallen to the ‘infra-human’ and the other has risen to the ‘supra-human’. Now, anonymity itself can be characteristic both of the ‘infra-human’ and of the ‘supra-human’: the first case is that of modern anonymity, the anonymity of the crowd or the ‘masses’ as they are called today (and this use of the highly quantitative word ‘mass’ is very significant), and the second case is that of traditional anonymity in its manifold applications, including its application to works of art.
p. 62-3
Returning now to the consideration of the more specifically ‘scientific’ point of view as the modern world understands it, its chief characteristic is obviously that it seeks to bring everything down to quantity, anything that cannot be so treated being left out of account and is regarded as more or less non-existent.
p. 68
The earliest product of rationalism in the so-called ’scientific’ field was Cartesian mechanism; materialism was not due to appear until later, for as explained elsewhere, the word and the thing itself are not actually met with earlier than the eighteenth century; besides, whatever may have been the intentions of Descartes himself (and it is in fact possible, by pursuing to the end the logical are mutually very contradictory), there is nonetheless a direct filiation between mechanism and materialism. In this connection it is useful to recall that, although the ancient atomistic conceptions such as and especially of Epicurus can be qualified as mechanistic, these two being the only ‘precursors’ from the ancient world whom the moderns can with any justification claim as their own in this field, their conceptions are of often wrongly looked upon as the earliest form of materialism: for materialism implies above all the modern physicist’s notion of ‘matter’, and at that time this notion was still a long way from having come to birth. The truth is that materialism merely represents one of the two halves of Cartesian dualism, the half to which its author had applied the mechanistic conception; it was sufficient thereafter to ignore or to deny the remaining half, or what comes to the same thing, to claim to bring the whole of reality into the first half, in order to arrive quite naturally at materialism.
p. 96
Without seeking for the moment to determine more precisely the nature and quality of the supra-sensible, insofar as it is actually involved in this matter, it will be useful to observe how far the very people who still admit it and think that they are aware of its action are in reality permeated by materialistic influence: for even if they do not deny all extra-corporeal reality, like the majority of their contemporaries, it is only because they have formed for themselves an idea of it that enables them in some way to assimilate it to the likeness of sensible things, and to do that is certainly scarcely better than to deny it. There is no reason to be surprised at this, considering the extent to which all the occultist, Theosophist, and other schools of that sort are fond of searching assiduously for points of approach to modern scientific theories, from which indeed they draw their inspiration more directly than they are prepared to admit, and the result is what might logically be expected under such conditions. It may even be observed that, in accordance with the continuous changes in scientific theories, the resemblance between the conceptions of a particular school and a particular scientific theory may make it possible to ‘date’ the school, in default of any more precise information about its history and its origins.
p. 123-4
Even today most magnetizers and spiritualists continue to talk of ’fluids’, and what is more, to believe seriously in them; this ‘anachronism’ is all the more strange in that these people are in general fanatical partisans of ‘progress’; such an attitude fits in badly with a conception that has for a long time been excluded from the scientific domain and so ought in their eyes to appear very ‘backward’. In the present-day mythology, ‘fluids’ have been replaced by ‘waves’ and ‘radiations’, these last in their turn of course effectively playing the part of ‘fluids’ in the theories most recently invented to try to explain the action of certain subtle influences; it should suffice to mention ‘radiaesthesia’ which is as ‘typical’ as possible in this respect.
p. 125
Of course a majority of ’spiritualists’ and even of ’traditionalists’, or of people who call themselves such, are in fact quite as materialistic as other people when matters of this kind are in question, so that the situation is made even more irremediable by the fact that those who most sincerely want to combat the modern spirit are almost all unwittingly affected by it, and all their efforts are therefore condemned to remain without any appreciable result; for these are matters in which goodwill is far from being sufficient; effective knowledge being needed as well, indeed, more needed than anything else. But effective knowledge is the very thing that is made impossible by the influence of the modern spirit with all its limitations, even in the case of those who might have some intellectual capabilities of the required kind if conditions were less abnormal.
p. 175-6
In the first place, yet one more confusion and error of interpretation arising from the modern mentality must be dissipated, and that is the idea that there exist things that are purely ’material’. This conception belongs exclusively to the modern mentality, and when it is disencumbered from all the secondary complications added to it by the special theories of the physicists, it amounts to no more than the idea that there exist beings and things that are solely corporeal, and that their existence and their constitution involve no element that is not corporeal. This idea is directly linked to the profane point of view as expressed, perhaps in its most complete form, in the sciences of today, for these sciences are characterized by the absence of any attachment to principles of a superior order, and thus the things taken as the objects of their study must themselves be thought of as being without any such attachment (whereby the ‘residual’ character of the said sciences is once again made evident); this kind of outlook can be regarded as indispensable in order to enable science to deal with its object, for if a contrary admission were made, science would at once be compelled to recognize that the real nature of its object eludes it. It may perhaps be superfluous to seek elsewhere the reason for the enthusiasm displayed by scientists in discrediting any other conception, by presenting it as a ‘superstition’ arising in the imagination of ‘primitive’ peoples, who, it is suggested, can have been nothing but savages or men of an infantile mentality, as the ‘evolutionist’ theories make them out to have been; but whether the reason be mere incomprehension on their part or a conscious partisanship, the scientists do succeed in producing a caricature of the situation convincing enough to induce a complete acceptance of their interpretation in everyone who believes implicitly in whatever they say, namely, in a large majority of our contemporaries.
p. 178-9
‘Shamanism’ will also be found to include rites comparable to some that belong to traditions of the highest order: some of them, for example, recall in a striking way the Vedic rites, and particularly those that are most clearly derived from the primordial tradition, such as those in which the symbols of the tree and of the swan predominate.
p. 182
The people just referred to are such as can properly be described as ‘traditionalists’, meaning people who only have a sort of tendency or aspiration toward tradition without really knowing anything at all about it; this is the measure of the distance dividing the ‘traditionalist’ spirit from the truly traditional spirit, for the latter implies a real knowledge, being indeed in a sense the same as that knowledge. In short, the ‘traditionalist’ is and can be no more than a mere ‘seeker’, and that is why he is always in danger of going astray, not being in possession of the principles that alone could provide him with infallible guidance; and his danger is all the greater because he will find in his path, like so many ambushes, all the false ideas set on foot by the power of illusion, which has a keen interest in preventing him from reaching the true goal of his search. It is indeed evident that this power can only maintain itself and continue to exercise its action on condition that all restoration of the traditional idea is made impossible, and more than ever so when it is preparing to take a further step in the direction of subversion, subversion being, as explained, the second phase of its action.
p. 210
All misuses of the word ‘tradition’ can serve this same purpose in one way or another, beginning with the most popular of all, whereby it is made synonymous with ‘custom’ or ‘usage’, thus bringing about a confusion of tradition with things that are on the lower human level and are completely lacking in profound significance.
p. 211
Granted that nothing that is of a purely human order can for that very reason legitimately be called ‘traditional’, there cannot possibly be, for instance, a ‘philosophical tradition’ or a ‘scientific tradition’ in the modern and profane sense of the words, any more, of course, than there can be a ‘political tradition’, at least where all traditional social organization is lacking, as is the case in the modern Western world.
p. 212
Indeed it sometimes happens that people go so far as to apply the word ‘tradition’ to things that by their very nature are as directly anti-traditional as possible: thus they talk about a ‘humanist tradition’, and a ‘national tradition’, despite the fact that humanism is nothing if not an explicit denial of the supra-human, and the formation of ’nationalities’ was the means employed for the destruction of the traditional civilization of the Middle Ages.
p. 212
It should be noted that the expression ‘counter-initiation’ has been used here, and not ‘pseudo-initiation’, for the two are quite different, and it is important moreover not to confuse the counterfeiter with the counterfeit. ‘Pseudo-initiation’ as it exists today in numerous organizations, many of them an attached to some form of ‘neo-spiritualism’, is but one of many examples of counterfeit […]. It is really only one of the products of the state of disorder and confusion brought about in the modern period by the ‘satanic’ activity that has its conscious starting-point in the ‘counter-initiation’ […]
p. 241
As for the ‘counter-initiation’, it is certainly not a mere illusory counterfeit, but on the contrary something very real in its own order, as the effectiveness of its action shows only too well; at least, it is not a counterfeit except in the sense that it necessarily imitates initiation like an inverted shadow, although its real intention is not to imitate but to oppose.
p. 242
One of the simplest means at the disposal of ‘pseudo-initiatic’ organizations for the fabrication of a false tradition for the use of their adherents is undoubtedly ‘syncretism’, which consists in assembling m an a more or less convincing manner elements borrowed from almost anywhere, and in putting them together as it were ‘from the outside’, without any genuine understanding of what they really represent in the various traditions to which they properly belong.
p. 245
The truth is that there has never existed anything that could rightly be called either an ‘Oriental tradition’ or a ‘Western tradition’, any such denomination being obviously much too vague to be applied to a defined traditional form, since, unless one goes back to the primordial tradition, which is here not in question for very easily understandable reasons, and which is anyhow neither Eastern nor Western, there are and there always have been diverse and multiple traditional forms both in the East and in the West. Others have thought to do better and to inspire confidence more easily by appropriating to themselves the name of some tradition that really existed at some more or less distant date, and using it as a label for a structure that is no less incongruous than the others, for although they naturally make some use of what they can manage to find out about the tradition on which they have staked their claim, they are forced to reinforce their few facts, always very fragmentary and often even partly hypothetical, by recourse to other elements either borrowed from a different source or wholly imaginary.
p. 248-9
Others do not hesitate to claim to be attached to some tradition that has entirely disappeared and has been extinct for centuries, even for thousands of years. However, unless they are bold enough to assert that their chosen tradition has been perpetuated for that length of time in a manner so secret and so well concealed that nobody but themselves has been able to discover the smallest trace of it, they are admittedly deprived of the appreciable advantage of being able to claim a direct and continuous filiation, for in their case the claim cannot even present an appearance of plausibility such as it can still present when of a fairly recent form such as that of the Rosicrucian tradition is chosen; but this defect does not seem to have much importance in their eyes, for they are so ignorant of the true conditions of initiation that they readily imagine that a mere ‘ideal’ attachment, without any regular transmission, can take the place of an effective attachment.
p. 250
Here this already long discussion must be brought to a close; it has amply sufficed to indicate in a general way the nature of the many ‘pseudo-initiatic’ counterfeits of the traditional idea that are so characteristic of our times: a mixture, more or less coherent but rather less than more so, of elements partly borrowed and partly invented, the whole dominated by anti-traditional conceptions such as are peculiar to the modern spirit, and for this reason serving no purpose other than the further spread of these same conceptions by making them pass with some people as traditional, not to mention the manifest deceit that consists in giving, in place of ‘initiation’, not only something purely profane in itself, but also something that makes for ‘profanation’. Should anyone now put forward the suggestion, as a sort of extenuating circumstance, that there are always in these affairs, despite all their faults, some elements derived from genuinely traditional sources, the answer would be this: in order to get itself accepted, every imitation must take on at least some of the features of the thing imitated, but that is just what makes it so dangerous; is not the cleverest lie, as well as the most deadly, precisely the lie that mixes most inextricably the true and the false, thus contriving to press the true into service in order to promote the triumph of the false?
p. 251
The previous chapter was concerned with matters that, like everything else belonging essentially to the modern world, are radically anti-traditional; but in a sense they go even further than ‘anti-tradition’, understood as being pure negation and nothing more, appropriately be called a ‘counter-tradition’. The distinction between the two is similar to that made earlier between deviation and subversion, and it corresponds to the same two phases of anti-traditional action considered as a whole. ‘Anti-tradition’ found its most complete expression in the kind of materialism that could be called ‘integral’, such as that which prevailed toward the end of the last century; as for the ‘counter-tradition’, we can still only see the preliminary signs of it, in the form of all the things that are striving to become counterfeits in one way or another of the traditional idea itself.
p. 260
In Islamic esoterism it is said that one who presents himself at a certain ‘gate’, without having reached it by a normal and legitimate way, sees it shut in his face and is obliged to turn back, but not as a mere profane person, for he can never be such again, but as a sāher (a sorcerer or a magician working in the domain of subtle possibilities of an inferior (order).
p. 263
The various matters dealt with in the course of this study together constitute what may, in a general way, be called the ‘signs of the times’ in the Gospel sense, in other words, the precursory signs of the ‘end of a world’ or of a cycle. This end only appears to b« be the ‘end of the world’, without any reservation or specification of any kind, to those who see nothing beyond the limits of this particular cycle; a very excusable error of perspective it is true, but one that has nonetheless some regrettable consequences in the excessive and unjustified terrors to which it gives rise in those who are not sufficiently detached from terrestrial existence; and naturally they are the very people who form this erroneous conception most easily, just because of the narrowness of their point of view. In truth there can be many ‘ends of the world’, because there are cycles of very varied duration, contained as it were one within another, and also because this same notion can always be applied analogically at all degrees and at all levels; but it is obvious that these ‘ends’ are of very unequal importance, as are the cycles themselves to which they belong; and in this connection it must be acknowledged that the end now under consideration is undeniably of considerably greater importance than many others, for it is the end of a whole Manvantara, and so of the temporal existence of what may rightly be called a humanity, but this, it must be said once more, in no way implies that it is the end of the terrestrial world itself, because, through the ‘rectification’ that takes place at the final Instant, this end will itself immediately become the beginning of another Manvantara.
p. 275
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
[Excerpts] Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
Excerpts from Guénon, René (2001) The Crisis of the Modern World Sophia Perennis: Hillsdale, New York
René Guénon, Abd al-Wahid Yahya after his acceptance of Islam, was undoubtedly one of the, if not the, most important exponents of perennialism of the last century. As is pointed out in a very good introduction (in Swedish) to the book on Café Exposé it’s topicality has in no way decreased since it was first published in 1927.
Theosophy and 'Celtism' may no longer be the pseudo-initiatic flavour of the day. Instead we have other types of self-proclaimed "traditionalists" who, with their attempts to fuse the most revolting modern identities with since long dead traditions, make wiccans and anthroposophists look like remnants of the Golden Age.
The next set of excerpts from Guénon will be from The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Before that there will however most likely be some new excerpts from one or two works of Evola. This even though it must be noted that the realization of Evolas inferiority to Guénon in almost every relevant instance only grows with time and increased knowledge of the two.
The Hindu doctrine teaches that a human cycle, to which it gives the name Manvantara, is divided into four periods marking so many stages during which the primordial spirituality becomes gradually more and more obscured; these are the same periods that the ancient traditions of the West called the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages. We are now in the fourth age, the Kali-Yuga or ‘dark age’, and have been so already, it is said, for more than six thousand years, that is to say since a time far earlier than any known to ‘classical’ history. Since that time, the truths which were formerly within reach of all have become more and more hidden and inaccessible; those who possess them grow fewer and fewer, and although the treasure of ‘nonhuman’ (that is, supra-human) wisdom that was prior to all the ages can never be lost, it nevertheless becomes enveloped in more and more impenetrable veils, which hide it from men’s sight and make e it extremely difficult to discover.
p. 7
However, we have for the moment no intention of going back to the origin of the present cycle, or even to the beginning of the Kali-Yuga; we shall only be concerned, directly at least, with a far more limited field, namely with the last phases of the Kali-Yuga.
p. 9
For us, the real Middle Ages extend from the reign of Charlemagne to the opening of the fourteenth century, at which date a new decadence set in that has continued, through various phases and with gathering impetus, up to the present time. This date is the real starting-point of the modern crisis: it is the beginning of the disruption of Christendom, with which the Western civilization of the Middle Ages was essentially identified: at the same time, it marks the origin of the formation of ’nations’ and the end of the feudal system, which was very closely linked with the existence of Christendom. The origin of the modern period must therefore be placed almost two centuries further back than is usual with historians; the Renaissance and Reformation were primarily results, made possible only by the preceding decadence; but, far from being a readjustment, they marked an even deeper falling off, consummating, as they did the definitive rupture with the traditional spirit, the former in the domain of the arts and sciences, and the latter in that of religion itself, although this was the domain in which it might have seemed the most difficult to conceive of such a rupture.
p. 15
Humanism was the first form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy.
p. 17
It would seem that a halt midway is no longer possible since, according to all the indications furnished by the traditional doctrines, we have in fact entered upon the last phase of the Kali-Yuga, the darkest period of this ‘dark age’, the state of dissolution from which it is impossible to emerge otherwise than by a cataclysm, since it is not a mere readjustment that is necessary at such a stage, but a complete renovation.
p. 17
In this connection, it might be said that what according to tradition, characterizes the ultimate phase of a cycle is the realization of all that has been neglected or rejected during the preceding phases; and indeed, this is exactly the case with modern civilization, which lives as it were only by that for which previous civilizations had no use.
p. 19
An inevitable ill is nonetheless an ill, and even if good is to come out of evil, this does not change the evil character of the evil itself: we use the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ here only to make ourselves clear and without any specifically ‘moral’ intention.
p. 19
It is true that there have always been many and varied civilizations, […] but distinction does not mean opposition, and there can be equivalence of a sort between civilizations with very long as they are all based on the same fundamental principles—of which they only represent applications varying in accordance with varied circumstances. This is the case with all civilizations that can be called normal or traditional, which comes to the same thing; there is no essential opposition between them, and such divergences as may exist are merely outward and superficial. On the other hand, a civilization that recognizes no higher principle, but is in reality based only on a negation of principles, is by this very fact ruled out from all mutual understanding with other civilizations, for if such understanding is to be profound and effective it can only come from above, that is to say from the very factor that this abnormal and perverted civilization lacks.
p. 21-2
[T]here was no reason for opposition between East and West as long as there were traditional civilizations in the West as well as in the East; the opposition has meaning only as far as the modern West is concerned, for it is far more an opposition between two mentalities than between two more or less clearly defined geographical entities.
p. 23
When, therefore, in speaking of the world of today, we use the expression ‘Western mentality’, this means the same as the modern mentality; and since the other mentality has continued to exist only in the East, we can, also with reference to the present state of things, call it the Eastern mentality. These two terms, then, express nothing more than an actual fact; and, whereas one of the two mentalities has come into being during recent history and is in fact quite clearly Western, we do not wish to imply anything as to the source of the other, which was formerly common to East and West, for its origin must, if truth be told, merge with that of mankind itself, being the mentality that can be described as normal, if only for the reason that it has inspired more or less completely all the civilizations we know, with the exception of one only, that is to say, once again, the modern Western civilization.
p. 23
[T]he explicit assertion is to be found everywhere that the primordial tradition of the present cycle comes from the hyperborean region; at a later time there were several secondary currents corresponding to different periods, and one of the most important of these, at least among those whose traces are still discernible, undoubtedly flowed from West to East. All this, however, refers to very far off times—such as are commonly called ‘prehistoric’—with which we are not concerned here; what we do say is this: in the first place, the home of the primordial tradition has for a very long time now been in the East and it is there that the doctrinal forms that have issued most directly from it are to be found; secondly, in the present state of things, the true traditional spirit, with all that it implies, no longer has any authentic representatives except in the East.
p. 23-4
This explanation would be incomplete without a reference, however brief, to certain proposals that have seen the light in various contemporary circles for restoring a ‘Western tradition’. […] Unfortunately, such ‘traditionalism’ is not the same as the real traditional outlook, for it may be no more than a tendency, a more or less vague aspiration presupposing no real knowledge; and it is unfortunately true that, in the mental confusion of our times, this aspiration usually gives rise to fantastic and imaginary conceptions devoid of any serious foundation.
p. 24
There are others who wish to attach themselves to Celtism, and, since the model they take is less remote from our time, their purpose may seem less impracticable. But where can one find ‘Celtism’ today in a pure state and with sufficient vitality to be able to serve as a basis? […] It is true that clearly recognizable and still usable elements of Celtism’ have come down to us through various intermediaries, but these elements are very far from constituting a complete tradition; moreover, strange to say, even in the countries where it formerly existed, this tradition is now more completely forgotten than those of many other civilizations that never had a home there.
p. 25-6
It is only by establishing contact with still living traditions that what is capable of being revived can be made to live again; and this, as we have so often pointed out, is one of the greatest services that the East can render the West.
p. 26
[I]f the Eastern traditions in their own special forms can certainly be assimilated by an elite—which by its very definition must be beyond all forms—they certainly cannot be so by the mass of Western people, for whom they were not made, unless some unforeseen transformation takes place.
p. 27
There are those today who speak of a ‘defense’ of the West, which is odd, to say the least, considering that it is the West, as we shall see later on, that is threatening to submerge the whole of mankind in the whirlpool of its own confused activity; odd, we say, and completely unjustified if they mean, as they seem to (despite certain reservations), that this defense is to be against the East, for the true East has no thought of attacking or dominating anybody, and asks no more than to be left in independence and tranquillity—surely a not unreasonable demand.
p. 31
The Eastern doctrines are unanimous, as also were the ancient doctrines of the West, in asserting that contemplation is superior to action, just as the unchanging is superior to change.
p. 36
Aristotle asserted that there must be a ‘unmoved mover’ of all things. It is knowledge that serves as the ‘unmoved mover of action; it is clear that action belongs entirely to the world of change and ‘becoming’; knowledge alone gives the possibility of leaving this world and the limitations that are inherent in it, and when it attains to the unchanging —as does principial or metaphysical knowledge, that is to say knowledge in its essence—it becomes itself possessed of immutability, for all true knowledge essentially consists in identification with its object.
p. 37-8
What is most remarkable is that movement and change are actually prized for their own sake, and not in view of any end to which they may lead; this is a direct result of the absorption of all human faculties in outward action whose necessarily fleeting character has just been demonstrated.
p. 38
This leads us to repeat an essential point on which not the slightest ambiguity must be allowed to persist: intellectual intuition, by which alone metaphysical knowledge is to be obtained, has absolutely nothing in common with this other ‘intuition’ of which certain contemporary philosophers speak: the latter pertains to the sensible realm and in fact is sub-rational, whereas the former, which is pure intelligence, is on the contrary supra-rational.
p. 41
As long as Westerners persist in ignoring or denying intellectual intuition, they can have no tradition in the true sense of the word, nor can they reach any understanding with the authentic representatives of the Eastern civilizations, in which everything, so to speak derives from this intuition, which is immutable and infallible in itself, and the only starting-point for any development in conformity with traditional norms.
p. 41
We have just seen that in civilizations of a traditional nature, intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality. Not only is this true of social institutions, but also of the sciences, that is, branches of knowledge bearing on the domain of the relative, which in such civilizations are only regarded as dependencies, prolongations, or reflections of absolute or principial knowledge.
p. 42
By individualism we mean the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all 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.
p. 55
That is not to say, of course, that this outlook is entirely new; it had already appeared in a more or less pronounced form 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 recent centuries in 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.
p. 55
[A] philosopher’s renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others.
p. 56
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, and all we have to do is to take cognisance of it; outside this knowledge there can be nothing but error: but do the moderns on the whole care much about truth, or do they even know what it is?
p. 56-7
In the same way the Renaissance and the Reformation, which are usually considered to be the first great manifestations of the modern mentality, completed the breach with tradition rather than provoked it; for us, the beginning of this breach is to be found in the fourteenth century, and it is at this date, and not a century or two later, that the beginning of modern times should be fixed.
p. 59
Individualism necessarily implies the refusal to accept any authority higher than the individual, as well as any means of knowledge higher than individual reason; these two attitudes are inseparable.
p. 60
Actually, religion being essentially a form of tradition, the anti-traditional outlook cannot help being anti-religious; it begins by denaturing religion and, when it can, ends by suppressing it entirely.
p. 62
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’.
p. 66
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.
p. 66
Nothing and nobody is any longer in the right place; men no longer recognize any effective authority in the spiritual order or any legitimate power in the temporal; the ‘profane’ presume to discuss what is sacred, and to contest its character and even its existence; the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the Divine, earth has priority over Heaven, the individual sets the measure for all things and claims to dictate to the universe laws drawn entirely from his own relative and fallible reason.
p. 67-8
The most decisive argument against de democracy can be summed up in a few words: the higher cannot proceed from the lower, because the greater cannot proceed from the lesser; this is an absolute mathematical certainty that nothing can gainsay.
p. 73
It is abundantly clear that the people cannot confer a power that they do not themselves possess; true power can only come from above, and this is why—be it said in passing—it can be legitimised only by the sanction of something standing above the social order, that is to say by a spiritual authority, for otherwise it is a mere counterfeit of power, unjustifiable through lack of any principle, and in which I there can be nothing but disorder and confusion.
p. 73
[T]he French monarchy was itself working unconsciously, from the fourteenth century onward, to prepare the Revolution that was to overthrow it […]
p. 73-4
Indeed, if one takes the word ‘individualism’ in its narrowest sense, one could be tempted to oppose the collectivity to the individual, and to think that facts such as the increasingly invasive role of the State and the growing complexity of social institutions indicate a tendency contrary to individualism. In reality however it is not so, because the collectivity, being nothing other than the sum of the individuals within it, , cannot be opposed to them, any more than can the State itself, conceived in the modern fashion, and viewed as a simple representation of the masses—in which no higher principle is reflected; and it will be recalled that individualism, as we have defined it, consists precisely in the negation of every supra-individual principle.
p. 77
From all that has been said above, it seems sufficiently clear that Easterners are justified in reproaching modern Western civilization for being exclusively material: it has developed along purely material lines only, and from whatever point of view it is considered, one is faced with the more or less direct results of this materialization.
p. 81
A little later the same word [materialism] took on a narrower meaning, the one in fact that it still retains: it came to denote a conception according to which nothing else exists but matter and its derivatives.
p. 81
But we intend at present to speak of materialism mainly in another, much wider, and yet very definite sense: in this sense, materialism stands for a complete state of mind, of which the conception that we have just described is only one manifestation among many others, and which, in itself, is independent of any philosophical theory. This state of mind is one that consists in more or less consciously putting material things, and the preoccupations arising out of them, in the first place, whether these preoccupations claim to be speculative or purely practical; and it cannot be seriously disputed that this is the mentality of the immense majority of our contemporaries.
p. 82
It seems that nothing exists for modern men beyond what can be seen and touched; or at least, even if they admit theoretically that something more may exist, they immediately declare it not merely unknown but unknowable, which absolves them from having to think about it.
p. 83
Let it be added that these generalized wars have only been made possible by another specifically modern phenomenon, that is, by the formation of ‘nations’—a consequence on the one hand of the destruction of the feudal system, and on the other of the disruption of the higher unity of medieval Christendom […].
p. 90
For that is what is taking place: the modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be nonexistent, it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of agitation and who does not produce much in a material way must be ‘lazy’. In evidence of this and without speaking of the opinions commonly expressed about Eastern peoples, it is enough to note how the contemplative orders are viewed, even in circles that consider themselves religious. In such a world, there is no longer any place for intelligence, or anything else that is purely inward, for these are things that can neither be seen nor touched, that can neither be counted nor weighed; there is a place only for outward action in all its forms, even those that are the most completely meaningless.
p. 92
However, let us consider things for a moment from the standpoint of those whose ideal is material ‘welfare’, and who therefore rejoice at all the improvements to life furnished by modern ‘progress’; are they quite sure they are not being duped? Is it true that, because they dispose of swifter means of communication and other things of the kind, and because of their more agitated and complicated manner of life, men are happier today than they were formerly? The very opposite seems to us to be true: disequilibrium ca cannot be a condition of real happiness. Moreover, the more needs a man has, the greater the likelihood that he will lack something, and thereby be unhappy; modern civilization aims at creating more and more artificial needs, and as we have already said, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, for once one has started on this path, it is very hard to stop, and, indeed, there is no reason for stopping at any particular point.
p. 93
The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. […] More than this: we even assert that everything of value that there may be in the modern world has come to it from Christianity, or at any rate through Christianity, for Christianity has brought with it the whole heritage of former traditions, has kept this heritage alive so far as the state of things in the West made it possible, and still contains its latent possibilities.
p. 95
The modern confusion had its origin in the West, as we have already said, and until the last few years remained in the West. But now a process is taking place, the gravity of which should not be overlooked: the confusion is spreading everywhere, and even the East seems to be succumbing to it.
p. 97
Let it be stated quite clearly: the modern outlook is purely Western, and those who are affected by it should be classed as Westerners mentally, even though they may be Easterners by birth; all Eastern ideas are completely alien to them, and their ignorance of the traditional doctrines is the only excuse for their hostility toward them. What may seem remarkable, and even contradictory, is that these same individuals who become the auxiliaries of ‘Westernism’ from an intellectual point of view—or, more exactly, in opposition to all real intellectuality—sometimes come to the fore as the opponents of the West in the field of politics. But there is nothing surprising in this, for it is they who strive to introduce the idea of ‘nation’ in the East, and all nationalism is essentially opposed to the traditional outlook; they may wish to resist foreign domination, but in order to do so they make use of Western methods, such as are used by the various Western peoples when fighting among themselves; and it may be that in this fact lies the justification for their existence.
p. 98
The traditional spirit cannot die, being in its essence above death and change; but it can withdraw completely from the outward world, and then there would really be the ‘end of a world’.
p. 99
It is true that, when certain passions come into play, the same things can be appreciated in a very different, and even quite contrary, sense according to the circumstances: so, for instance, when a Western people resists a foreign invasion, this is called ‘patriotism’ and merits the highest praise, but when an Eastern people does so it is called ‘fanaticism’ or ‘xenophobia’, and merits hatred and contempt. Moreover, is it not in the name of ‘Right’, and ‘Liberty’, of ’justice’ and ‘Civilization’, that the Europeans claim to impose their dominion over all others, and to forbid anyone to live and think otherwise than they do themselves?
p. 100
René Guénon, Abd al-Wahid Yahya after his acceptance of Islam, was undoubtedly one of the, if not the, most important exponents of perennialism of the last century. As is pointed out in a very good introduction (in Swedish) to the book on Café Exposé it’s topicality has in no way decreased since it was first published in 1927.
Theosophy and 'Celtism' may no longer be the pseudo-initiatic flavour of the day. Instead we have other types of self-proclaimed "traditionalists" who, with their attempts to fuse the most revolting modern identities with since long dead traditions, make wiccans and anthroposophists look like remnants of the Golden Age.
The next set of excerpts from Guénon will be from The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Before that there will however most likely be some new excerpts from one or two works of Evola. This even though it must be noted that the realization of Evolas inferiority to Guénon in almost every relevant instance only grows with time and increased knowledge of the two.
The Hindu doctrine teaches that a human cycle, to which it gives the name Manvantara, is divided into four periods marking so many stages during which the primordial spirituality becomes gradually more and more obscured; these are the same periods that the ancient traditions of the West called the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages. We are now in the fourth age, the Kali-Yuga or ‘dark age’, and have been so already, it is said, for more than six thousand years, that is to say since a time far earlier than any known to ‘classical’ history. Since that time, the truths which were formerly within reach of all have become more and more hidden and inaccessible; those who possess them grow fewer and fewer, and although the treasure of ‘nonhuman’ (that is, supra-human) wisdom that was prior to all the ages can never be lost, it nevertheless becomes enveloped in more and more impenetrable veils, which hide it from men’s sight and make e it extremely difficult to discover.
p. 7
However, we have for the moment no intention of going back to the origin of the present cycle, or even to the beginning of the Kali-Yuga; we shall only be concerned, directly at least, with a far more limited field, namely with the last phases of the Kali-Yuga.
p. 9
For us, the real Middle Ages extend from the reign of Charlemagne to the opening of the fourteenth century, at which date a new decadence set in that has continued, through various phases and with gathering impetus, up to the present time. This date is the real starting-point of the modern crisis: it is the beginning of the disruption of Christendom, with which the Western civilization of the Middle Ages was essentially identified: at the same time, it marks the origin of the formation of ’nations’ and the end of the feudal system, which was very closely linked with the existence of Christendom. The origin of the modern period must therefore be placed almost two centuries further back than is usual with historians; the Renaissance and Reformation were primarily results, made possible only by the preceding decadence; but, far from being a readjustment, they marked an even deeper falling off, consummating, as they did the definitive rupture with the traditional spirit, the former in the domain of the arts and sciences, and the latter in that of religion itself, although this was the domain in which it might have seemed the most difficult to conceive of such a rupture.
p. 15
Humanism was the first form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy.
p. 17
It would seem that a halt midway is no longer possible since, according to all the indications furnished by the traditional doctrines, we have in fact entered upon the last phase of the Kali-Yuga, the darkest period of this ‘dark age’, the state of dissolution from which it is impossible to emerge otherwise than by a cataclysm, since it is not a mere readjustment that is necessary at such a stage, but a complete renovation.
p. 17
In this connection, it might be said that what according to tradition, characterizes the ultimate phase of a cycle is the realization of all that has been neglected or rejected during the preceding phases; and indeed, this is exactly the case with modern civilization, which lives as it were only by that for which previous civilizations had no use.
p. 19
An inevitable ill is nonetheless an ill, and even if good is to come out of evil, this does not change the evil character of the evil itself: we use the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ here only to make ourselves clear and without any specifically ‘moral’ intention.
p. 19
It is true that there have always been many and varied civilizations, […] but distinction does not mean opposition, and there can be equivalence of a sort between civilizations with very long as they are all based on the same fundamental principles—of which they only represent applications varying in accordance with varied circumstances. This is the case with all civilizations that can be called normal or traditional, which comes to the same thing; there is no essential opposition between them, and such divergences as may exist are merely outward and superficial. On the other hand, a civilization that recognizes no higher principle, but is in reality based only on a negation of principles, is by this very fact ruled out from all mutual understanding with other civilizations, for if such understanding is to be profound and effective it can only come from above, that is to say from the very factor that this abnormal and perverted civilization lacks.
p. 21-2
[T]here was no reason for opposition between East and West as long as there were traditional civilizations in the West as well as in the East; the opposition has meaning only as far as the modern West is concerned, for it is far more an opposition between two mentalities than between two more or less clearly defined geographical entities.
p. 23
When, therefore, in speaking of the world of today, we use the expression ‘Western mentality’, this means the same as the modern mentality; and since the other mentality has continued to exist only in the East, we can, also with reference to the present state of things, call it the Eastern mentality. These two terms, then, express nothing more than an actual fact; and, whereas one of the two mentalities has come into being during recent history and is in fact quite clearly Western, we do not wish to imply anything as to the source of the other, which was formerly common to East and West, for its origin must, if truth be told, merge with that of mankind itself, being the mentality that can be described as normal, if only for the reason that it has inspired more or less completely all the civilizations we know, with the exception of one only, that is to say, once again, the modern Western civilization.
p. 23
[T]he explicit assertion is to be found everywhere that the primordial tradition of the present cycle comes from the hyperborean region; at a later time there were several secondary currents corresponding to different periods, and one of the most important of these, at least among those whose traces are still discernible, undoubtedly flowed from West to East. All this, however, refers to very far off times—such as are commonly called ‘prehistoric’—with which we are not concerned here; what we do say is this: in the first place, the home of the primordial tradition has for a very long time now been in the East and it is there that the doctrinal forms that have issued most directly from it are to be found; secondly, in the present state of things, the true traditional spirit, with all that it implies, no longer has any authentic representatives except in the East.
p. 23-4
This explanation would be incomplete without a reference, however brief, to certain proposals that have seen the light in various contemporary circles for restoring a ‘Western tradition’. […] Unfortunately, such ‘traditionalism’ is not the same as the real traditional outlook, for it may be no more than a tendency, a more or less vague aspiration presupposing no real knowledge; and it is unfortunately true that, in the mental confusion of our times, this aspiration usually gives rise to fantastic and imaginary conceptions devoid of any serious foundation.
p. 24
There are others who wish to attach themselves to Celtism, and, since the model they take is less remote from our time, their purpose may seem less impracticable. But where can one find ‘Celtism’ today in a pure state and with sufficient vitality to be able to serve as a basis? […] It is true that clearly recognizable and still usable elements of Celtism’ have come down to us through various intermediaries, but these elements are very far from constituting a complete tradition; moreover, strange to say, even in the countries where it formerly existed, this tradition is now more completely forgotten than those of many other civilizations that never had a home there.
p. 25-6
It is only by establishing contact with still living traditions that what is capable of being revived can be made to live again; and this, as we have so often pointed out, is one of the greatest services that the East can render the West.
p. 26
[I]f the Eastern traditions in their own special forms can certainly be assimilated by an elite—which by its very definition must be beyond all forms—they certainly cannot be so by the mass of Western people, for whom they were not made, unless some unforeseen transformation takes place.
p. 27
There are those today who speak of a ‘defense’ of the West, which is odd, to say the least, considering that it is the West, as we shall see later on, that is threatening to submerge the whole of mankind in the whirlpool of its own confused activity; odd, we say, and completely unjustified if they mean, as they seem to (despite certain reservations), that this defense is to be against the East, for the true East has no thought of attacking or dominating anybody, and asks no more than to be left in independence and tranquillity—surely a not unreasonable demand.
p. 31
The Eastern doctrines are unanimous, as also were the ancient doctrines of the West, in asserting that contemplation is superior to action, just as the unchanging is superior to change.
p. 36
Aristotle asserted that there must be a ‘unmoved mover’ of all things. It is knowledge that serves as the ‘unmoved mover of action; it is clear that action belongs entirely to the world of change and ‘becoming’; knowledge alone gives the possibility of leaving this world and the limitations that are inherent in it, and when it attains to the unchanging —as does principial or metaphysical knowledge, that is to say knowledge in its essence—it becomes itself possessed of immutability, for all true knowledge essentially consists in identification with its object.
p. 37-8
What is most remarkable is that movement and change are actually prized for their own sake, and not in view of any end to which they may lead; this is a direct result of the absorption of all human faculties in outward action whose necessarily fleeting character has just been demonstrated.
p. 38
This leads us to repeat an essential point on which not the slightest ambiguity must be allowed to persist: intellectual intuition, by which alone metaphysical knowledge is to be obtained, has absolutely nothing in common with this other ‘intuition’ of which certain contemporary philosophers speak: the latter pertains to the sensible realm and in fact is sub-rational, whereas the former, which is pure intelligence, is on the contrary supra-rational.
p. 41
As long as Westerners persist in ignoring or denying intellectual intuition, they can have no tradition in the true sense of the word, nor can they reach any understanding with the authentic representatives of the Eastern civilizations, in which everything, so to speak derives from this intuition, which is immutable and infallible in itself, and the only starting-point for any development in conformity with traditional norms.
p. 41
We have just seen that in civilizations of a traditional nature, intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality. Not only is this true of social institutions, but also of the sciences, that is, branches of knowledge bearing on the domain of the relative, which in such civilizations are only regarded as dependencies, prolongations, or reflections of absolute or principial knowledge.
p. 42
By individualism we mean the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all 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.
p. 55
That is not to say, of course, that this outlook is entirely new; it had already appeared in a more or less pronounced form 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 recent centuries in 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.
p. 55
[A] philosopher’s renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others.
p. 56
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, and all we have to do is to take cognisance of it; outside this knowledge there can be nothing but error: but do the moderns on the whole care much about truth, or do they even know what it is?
p. 56-7
In the same way the Renaissance and the Reformation, which are usually considered to be the first great manifestations of the modern mentality, completed the breach with tradition rather than provoked it; for us, the beginning of this breach is to be found in the fourteenth century, and it is at this date, and not a century or two later, that the beginning of modern times should be fixed.
p. 59
Individualism necessarily implies the refusal to accept any authority higher than the individual, as well as any means of knowledge higher than individual reason; these two attitudes are inseparable.
p. 60
Actually, religion being essentially a form of tradition, the anti-traditional outlook cannot help being anti-religious; it begins by denaturing religion and, when it can, ends by suppressing it entirely.
p. 62
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’.
p. 66
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.
p. 66
Nothing and nobody is any longer in the right place; men no longer recognize any effective authority in the spiritual order or any legitimate power in the temporal; the ‘profane’ presume to discuss what is sacred, and to contest its character and even its existence; the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the Divine, earth has priority over Heaven, the individual sets the measure for all things and claims to dictate to the universe laws drawn entirely from his own relative and fallible reason.
p. 67-8
The most decisive argument against de democracy can be summed up in a few words: the higher cannot proceed from the lower, because the greater cannot proceed from the lesser; this is an absolute mathematical certainty that nothing can gainsay.
p. 73
It is abundantly clear that the people cannot confer a power that they do not themselves possess; true power can only come from above, and this is why—be it said in passing—it can be legitimised only by the sanction of something standing above the social order, that is to say by a spiritual authority, for otherwise it is a mere counterfeit of power, unjustifiable through lack of any principle, and in which I there can be nothing but disorder and confusion.
p. 73
[T]he French monarchy was itself working unconsciously, from the fourteenth century onward, to prepare the Revolution that was to overthrow it […]
p. 73-4
Indeed, if one takes the word ‘individualism’ in its narrowest sense, one could be tempted to oppose the collectivity to the individual, and to think that facts such as the increasingly invasive role of the State and the growing complexity of social institutions indicate a tendency contrary to individualism. In reality however it is not so, because the collectivity, being nothing other than the sum of the individuals within it, , cannot be opposed to them, any more than can the State itself, conceived in the modern fashion, and viewed as a simple representation of the masses—in which no higher principle is reflected; and it will be recalled that individualism, as we have defined it, consists precisely in the negation of every supra-individual principle.
p. 77
From all that has been said above, it seems sufficiently clear that Easterners are justified in reproaching modern Western civilization for being exclusively material: it has developed along purely material lines only, and from whatever point of view it is considered, one is faced with the more or less direct results of this materialization.
p. 81
A little later the same word [materialism] took on a narrower meaning, the one in fact that it still retains: it came to denote a conception according to which nothing else exists but matter and its derivatives.
p. 81
But we intend at present to speak of materialism mainly in another, much wider, and yet very definite sense: in this sense, materialism stands for a complete state of mind, of which the conception that we have just described is only one manifestation among many others, and which, in itself, is independent of any philosophical theory. This state of mind is one that consists in more or less consciously putting material things, and the preoccupations arising out of them, in the first place, whether these preoccupations claim to be speculative or purely practical; and it cannot be seriously disputed that this is the mentality of the immense majority of our contemporaries.
p. 82
It seems that nothing exists for modern men beyond what can be seen and touched; or at least, even if they admit theoretically that something more may exist, they immediately declare it not merely unknown but unknowable, which absolves them from having to think about it.
p. 83
Let it be added that these generalized wars have only been made possible by another specifically modern phenomenon, that is, by the formation of ‘nations’—a consequence on the one hand of the destruction of the feudal system, and on the other of the disruption of the higher unity of medieval Christendom […].
p. 90
For that is what is taking place: the modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be nonexistent, it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of agitation and who does not produce much in a material way must be ‘lazy’. In evidence of this and without speaking of the opinions commonly expressed about Eastern peoples, it is enough to note how the contemplative orders are viewed, even in circles that consider themselves religious. In such a world, there is no longer any place for intelligence, or anything else that is purely inward, for these are things that can neither be seen nor touched, that can neither be counted nor weighed; there is a place only for outward action in all its forms, even those that are the most completely meaningless.
p. 92
However, let us consider things for a moment from the standpoint of those whose ideal is material ‘welfare’, and who therefore rejoice at all the improvements to life furnished by modern ‘progress’; are they quite sure they are not being duped? Is it true that, because they dispose of swifter means of communication and other things of the kind, and because of their more agitated and complicated manner of life, men are happier today than they were formerly? The very opposite seems to us to be true: disequilibrium ca cannot be a condition of real happiness. Moreover, the more needs a man has, the greater the likelihood that he will lack something, and thereby be unhappy; modern civilization aims at creating more and more artificial needs, and as we have already said, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, for once one has started on this path, it is very hard to stop, and, indeed, there is no reason for stopping at any particular point.
p. 93
The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. […] More than this: we even assert that everything of value that there may be in the modern world has come to it from Christianity, or at any rate through Christianity, for Christianity has brought with it the whole heritage of former traditions, has kept this heritage alive so far as the state of things in the West made it possible, and still contains its latent possibilities.
p. 95
The modern confusion had its origin in the West, as we have already said, and until the last few years remained in the West. But now a process is taking place, the gravity of which should not be overlooked: the confusion is spreading everywhere, and even the East seems to be succumbing to it.
p. 97
Let it be stated quite clearly: the modern outlook is purely Western, and those who are affected by it should be classed as Westerners mentally, even though they may be Easterners by birth; all Eastern ideas are completely alien to them, and their ignorance of the traditional doctrines is the only excuse for their hostility toward them. What may seem remarkable, and even contradictory, is that these same individuals who become the auxiliaries of ‘Westernism’ from an intellectual point of view—or, more exactly, in opposition to all real intellectuality—sometimes come to the fore as the opponents of the West in the field of politics. But there is nothing surprising in this, for it is they who strive to introduce the idea of ‘nation’ in the East, and all nationalism is essentially opposed to the traditional outlook; they may wish to resist foreign domination, but in order to do so they make use of Western methods, such as are used by the various Western peoples when fighting among themselves; and it may be that in this fact lies the justification for their existence.
p. 98
The traditional spirit cannot die, being in its essence above death and change; but it can withdraw completely from the outward world, and then there would really be the ‘end of a world’.
p. 99
It is true that, when certain passions come into play, the same things can be appreciated in a very different, and even quite contrary, sense according to the circumstances: so, for instance, when a Western people resists a foreign invasion, this is called ‘patriotism’ and merits the highest praise, but when an Eastern people does so it is called ‘fanaticism’ or ‘xenophobia’, and merits hatred and contempt. Moreover, is it not in the name of ‘Right’, and ‘Liberty’, of ’justice’ and ‘Civilization’, that the Europeans claim to impose their dominion over all others, and to forbid anyone to live and think otherwise than they do themselves?
p. 100
Friday, December 29, 2006
[Swedish] Simpel länk
Spöknippet avslutar året med något så, för vår del, simpelt som ett länktips. Haecceitas publicerar en mycket läsvärd text om Jünger och Mishima, Att ha något vackert att dö för. Detta är kommunism när den är som allra bäst. Vi kan bara hoppas att haecceitas publicerar fler texter om Jünger och/eller Mishima framöver.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Jünger, On Danger
Yet another Ernst Jünger piece stolen from the Weimar republic sourcebook, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). This time an english translation of ”Über die Gefahr,” published in in Der gefährliche Augenblick. Eine Sammlung von Bildern und Berichten. (Berlin: Jünker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1931), p. 11-16.
Among the signs of the epoch we have now entered belongs the increased intrusion of danger into daily life. There is no accident concealing itself behind this fact but a comprehensive change of the inner and outer world.
We see this clearly when we remember what an important role was assigned to the concept of security in the bourgeois epoch just past. The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest values and conducts his life accordingly. His arrangements and systems are dedicated to securing his space against the danger that at times, when scarcely a cloud appears to darken the sky, has faded into the distance. However, it is always there: it seeks with elemental constancy to break through the dams with which order has surrounded itself.
The peculiarity of the bourgeois’ relation to danger lies in his perception of it as an irresolvable contradiction to order, that is, as senseless. In this he marks himself off from other figures, for example, the warrior, the artist, and the criminal, who are given a lofty or base relation to the elemental. Thus battle, in the eyes of the warrior, is a process that completes itself in a higher order; the tragic conflict, for the writer, is a condition in which the deeper sense of life is to be comprehended very clearly; and a burning city or one beset be insurrection is a field of intensified activity for the criminal. In turn bourgeois values possess just as little validity for the believing person, for the gods appear in the elements, as in the burning bush unconsumed by the flames. Through misfortune and danger, fate draws the mortal into the superior sphere of a higher order.
The supreme power through which the bourgeois sees security guarantied is reason. The closer he finds himself to the center of reason, the more the dark shadows in which danger conceals itself disperse, and the ideal condition which it is the task of progress to achieve consists of the world domination of reason through which the wellsprings of the dangerous are not merely to be minimized but ultimately to be dried up altogether. The dangerous reveals itself in the light of reason to be senseless and relinquishes its claim on reality. In this world all depends on the perception of the dangerous as the senseless; then in the same moment it is overcome, it appears in the mirror of reason as an error.
This can be demonstrated everywhere and in detail within the intellectual and actual arrangements of the bourgeois world. It reveals itself at large in the endeavor to see the state, which rests on hierarchy, as society, with equality as its fundamental principle and which is founded through an act of reason. It reveals itself in the comprehensive establishment of an insurance system, through which not only the risk of foreign and domestic politics but also that of private life is to be uniformly distributed and thus subordinated to reason. It reveals itself further in the many and very entangled efforts to understand the life of the soul as a series of causes and effects and thus to remove it from an unpredictable in to a predictable condition, therefore to include it within the sphere in which consciousness holds sway.
In this sense the securing of life against fate, that great mother of danger, appears as the truly bourgeois problem, which is then made subject to the most diverse economic or humanitarian solutions. All formulations of questions at present, whether aesthetic, scientific, or political in nature, move in the direction of the claim that conflict is avoidable. Should conflict nevertheless arise, as cannot, for example, be overlooked in regard to the permanent fact of war or criminality, then all depends upon proving it to be an error whose repetition is to be avoided through education or enlightenment. These errors appear for the sole reason that the factors of the great equation – the result of which has the population of the globe becoming a unified, fundamentally good as well as fundamentally rational, and therefore also a fundamentally secure humanity – have not yet achieved general recognition. Faith in the persuasive force of these views is one of the reasons that enlightenment tends to overestimate the powers given to it.
One of the best objections that has been raised against this variation is that under such circumstances life would be intolerably boring. This objection has never been of a purely theoretical nature but was applied practically by those young persons who, in the foggy dark of night, left their parental home to pursue danger in America, on the sea, or in the French Foreign Legion. It is a sign of the domination of bourgeois values that danger slips into the distance, “far away in Turkey,” in those lands where pepper grows, or wherever the bourgeois likes to deplore everyone not conforming to his standards. For these values to disappear entirely, however, will never be possible, not just because they are always present but above all because the human heart is in need not only of security but of danger too. Yet this desire us capable of revealing itself in bourgeois society only as protest, and it indeed does appear, in the form of romantic protest. The bourgeois has nearly succeeded in persuading the adventurous heart that the dangerous is not present at all. Thus do figures become possible who scarcely dare to speak their own superior language, whether that of the poet, who compares himself to the albatross, whose powerful wings are nothing more than the object of a tedious curiosity in a foreign and windless environment, or that of the born warrior, who appear to be a ne’er-do-well because the life of a shopkeeper fills him with disgust. Countless examples could show how in an era of great security any profitable life will depart for the distances symbolized by strange lands, intoxication, or death.
In this sense the world war appears as the great, red balance line under the bourgeois era, the spirit of which explained – that is, believed itself capable of invalidating – the jubilation of the volunteer who welcomed the war by attributing to him either a patriotic error or s suspect lust for adventure. Fundamentally, however, this jubilation was a revolutionary protest against the values of the bourgeois world; it was a recognition of fate as the expression of the supreme power. In this jubilation a revaluation of all values, which had been prophesied by exalted spirits, was completed: after an era that sought to subordinate fate to reason, another followed which saw reason as the servant of fate. From that moment on, danger was no longer the goal of a romantic opposition; it was rather reality, and the task of the bourgeois was one again to withdraw from this reality and escape into the utopia of security. From this moment on, the words peace and order became a slogan to which a weaker morale resorted.
This was a war that not only nations but two epochs conducted against each other. As a consequence, both victors and vanquished exists here in Germany. Victors are those who, like salamanders, have gone through the school of danger. Only these will hold their own in a time when danger, not security, will determine the order of life.
Precisely for this reason, however, the tasks that order must accomplish have become much more comprehensive than before; these tasks have to be preformed where danger is not the exception, but is constantly present. As an example, the police force might be mentioned. It has transformed itself from a group of civil servants into a formation that already greatly resembles a military unit. Likewise the various large parties acknowledge the need to adopt means of power that express the fact that the battle of opinions will not be decided solely through votes and programs but also by the stalwarts committed to march in support of those programs. Such facts are in no way to be isolated and regarded as a temporary or transient change in the political landscape. Nor can the inclination to danger be overlooked in intellectual endeavors, and it is unmistakable that new forms of the volcanic spirit are at work. Phenomena like modern atomic theory, glacial cosmogony, the introduction of the concept of mutation into zoology all point clearly completely apart from their truth content, to how strongly the spirit is beginning to partake of explosive events. The history of inventions also raises ever more clearly the question of whether a space of absolute comfort or s space of absolute danger is the final aim concealed in technology. Completely apart from the circumstance that scarcely a machine, scarcely a science has ever existed which did not fulfill, directly or indirectly, dangerous functions in war, inventions like the automobile engine have already resulted in greater losses than any war, however bloody.
What especially characterizes the era in which we find ourselves, into which we enter more deeply with every passing day, is the close relationship that exists between danger and order. It may be expressed in this way: danger appears merely as the other side of our order. This whole is more or less equivalent to our image of the atom, which is utterly mobile and utterly constant. The secret concealed within is a new and different return to nature; it is the fact that we are simultaneously civilized and barbaric, that we have approached the elemental without having sacrificed the acuity of our consciousness. Thus does the path through which danger has penetrated our life present itself as twofold. It has intruded upon us first of all out of an arena in which nature is still more vital. Things, “the likes of which were only possible in South America,” are now familiar to us. The distinction is that danger, from a romantic dimension, has in this way become real. Secondly, however, we are sending danger back over the globe in a new form.
This new form of danger appears in he closest connection having been made between elemental events and consciousness. The elemental is eternal: as people have always found themselves in passionate struggle with things, animals, or other people, as is the case today. The particular characteristic of our era, however, is precisely that all this transpires in the presence of the most acute consciousness. This finds expression above all in the circumstance that in all of these conflicts the most powerful servant of consciousness, the machine, is always present. Thus does humanity’s eternal struggle with the elemental nature of the sea present itself in the temporal form of a supremely complicated mechanical contrivance. Thus does the battle appear as a process during which the armored engine moves fighting men through the sea, over land, or into the air. Thus does the daily accident itself, with which our newspapers are filled, appear nearly exclusively as a catastrophe of a technological type.
Beyond all this the wonder of our world, at once sober and dangerous, is the registration of the moment in which the danger transpires – a registration that is moreover accomplished whenever it does not capture human consciousness immediately, by means of machines. One needs no prophetic talent to predict that soon any given event will be there to see or to hear in any given place. Already today there is hardly an event of human significance toward which the artificial eye of civilization, the photographic lens, is not directed. The result is often pictures of demoniacal precision through which humanity’s new relation to danger becomes visible in an exceptional fashion. One has to recognize that it is a question here much less of the peculiarity of new tools than of a new style that makes use of technological tools. The change becomes illuminating in the investigation of the change in tools that have long been at our disposal, such as language. Although our time produces little in the way of literature in the old sense, much of significance is accomplished through the objective reports of experience. Our time is prompted by human need – which explains, among other things, the success of war literature. We already posses a new style of language, one which gradually becomes visible from underneath the language of the bourgeois epoch. The same, however, is true of our style altogether; it is reminiscent of the fact that the automobile was for a long time constructed in the form of a horse-drawn coach, or that a wholly different society has already long since established itself beneath the surface of bourgeois society. As during the inflation, we continue for a time to spend the usual coins, without sensing that the rate of exchange is no longer the same.
In this sense, it may be said that we have already plunged deeply into new, more dangerous realms, without our being conscious of them.
Among the signs of the epoch we have now entered belongs the increased intrusion of danger into daily life. There is no accident concealing itself behind this fact but a comprehensive change of the inner and outer world.
We see this clearly when we remember what an important role was assigned to the concept of security in the bourgeois epoch just past. The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest values and conducts his life accordingly. His arrangements and systems are dedicated to securing his space against the danger that at times, when scarcely a cloud appears to darken the sky, has faded into the distance. However, it is always there: it seeks with elemental constancy to break through the dams with which order has surrounded itself.
The peculiarity of the bourgeois’ relation to danger lies in his perception of it as an irresolvable contradiction to order, that is, as senseless. In this he marks himself off from other figures, for example, the warrior, the artist, and the criminal, who are given a lofty or base relation to the elemental. Thus battle, in the eyes of the warrior, is a process that completes itself in a higher order; the tragic conflict, for the writer, is a condition in which the deeper sense of life is to be comprehended very clearly; and a burning city or one beset be insurrection is a field of intensified activity for the criminal. In turn bourgeois values possess just as little validity for the believing person, for the gods appear in the elements, as in the burning bush unconsumed by the flames. Through misfortune and danger, fate draws the mortal into the superior sphere of a higher order.
The supreme power through which the bourgeois sees security guarantied is reason. The closer he finds himself to the center of reason, the more the dark shadows in which danger conceals itself disperse, and the ideal condition which it is the task of progress to achieve consists of the world domination of reason through which the wellsprings of the dangerous are not merely to be minimized but ultimately to be dried up altogether. The dangerous reveals itself in the light of reason to be senseless and relinquishes its claim on reality. In this world all depends on the perception of the dangerous as the senseless; then in the same moment it is overcome, it appears in the mirror of reason as an error.
This can be demonstrated everywhere and in detail within the intellectual and actual arrangements of the bourgeois world. It reveals itself at large in the endeavor to see the state, which rests on hierarchy, as society, with equality as its fundamental principle and which is founded through an act of reason. It reveals itself in the comprehensive establishment of an insurance system, through which not only the risk of foreign and domestic politics but also that of private life is to be uniformly distributed and thus subordinated to reason. It reveals itself further in the many and very entangled efforts to understand the life of the soul as a series of causes and effects and thus to remove it from an unpredictable in to a predictable condition, therefore to include it within the sphere in which consciousness holds sway.
In this sense the securing of life against fate, that great mother of danger, appears as the truly bourgeois problem, which is then made subject to the most diverse economic or humanitarian solutions. All formulations of questions at present, whether aesthetic, scientific, or political in nature, move in the direction of the claim that conflict is avoidable. Should conflict nevertheless arise, as cannot, for example, be overlooked in regard to the permanent fact of war or criminality, then all depends upon proving it to be an error whose repetition is to be avoided through education or enlightenment. These errors appear for the sole reason that the factors of the great equation – the result of which has the population of the globe becoming a unified, fundamentally good as well as fundamentally rational, and therefore also a fundamentally secure humanity – have not yet achieved general recognition. Faith in the persuasive force of these views is one of the reasons that enlightenment tends to overestimate the powers given to it.
One of the best objections that has been raised against this variation is that under such circumstances life would be intolerably boring. This objection has never been of a purely theoretical nature but was applied practically by those young persons who, in the foggy dark of night, left their parental home to pursue danger in America, on the sea, or in the French Foreign Legion. It is a sign of the domination of bourgeois values that danger slips into the distance, “far away in Turkey,” in those lands where pepper grows, or wherever the bourgeois likes to deplore everyone not conforming to his standards. For these values to disappear entirely, however, will never be possible, not just because they are always present but above all because the human heart is in need not only of security but of danger too. Yet this desire us capable of revealing itself in bourgeois society only as protest, and it indeed does appear, in the form of romantic protest. The bourgeois has nearly succeeded in persuading the adventurous heart that the dangerous is not present at all. Thus do figures become possible who scarcely dare to speak their own superior language, whether that of the poet, who compares himself to the albatross, whose powerful wings are nothing more than the object of a tedious curiosity in a foreign and windless environment, or that of the born warrior, who appear to be a ne’er-do-well because the life of a shopkeeper fills him with disgust. Countless examples could show how in an era of great security any profitable life will depart for the distances symbolized by strange lands, intoxication, or death.
In this sense the world war appears as the great, red balance line under the bourgeois era, the spirit of which explained – that is, believed itself capable of invalidating – the jubilation of the volunteer who welcomed the war by attributing to him either a patriotic error or s suspect lust for adventure. Fundamentally, however, this jubilation was a revolutionary protest against the values of the bourgeois world; it was a recognition of fate as the expression of the supreme power. In this jubilation a revaluation of all values, which had been prophesied by exalted spirits, was completed: after an era that sought to subordinate fate to reason, another followed which saw reason as the servant of fate. From that moment on, danger was no longer the goal of a romantic opposition; it was rather reality, and the task of the bourgeois was one again to withdraw from this reality and escape into the utopia of security. From this moment on, the words peace and order became a slogan to which a weaker morale resorted.
This was a war that not only nations but two epochs conducted against each other. As a consequence, both victors and vanquished exists here in Germany. Victors are those who, like salamanders, have gone through the school of danger. Only these will hold their own in a time when danger, not security, will determine the order of life.
Precisely for this reason, however, the tasks that order must accomplish have become much more comprehensive than before; these tasks have to be preformed where danger is not the exception, but is constantly present. As an example, the police force might be mentioned. It has transformed itself from a group of civil servants into a formation that already greatly resembles a military unit. Likewise the various large parties acknowledge the need to adopt means of power that express the fact that the battle of opinions will not be decided solely through votes and programs but also by the stalwarts committed to march in support of those programs. Such facts are in no way to be isolated and regarded as a temporary or transient change in the political landscape. Nor can the inclination to danger be overlooked in intellectual endeavors, and it is unmistakable that new forms of the volcanic spirit are at work. Phenomena like modern atomic theory, glacial cosmogony, the introduction of the concept of mutation into zoology all point clearly completely apart from their truth content, to how strongly the spirit is beginning to partake of explosive events. The history of inventions also raises ever more clearly the question of whether a space of absolute comfort or s space of absolute danger is the final aim concealed in technology. Completely apart from the circumstance that scarcely a machine, scarcely a science has ever existed which did not fulfill, directly or indirectly, dangerous functions in war, inventions like the automobile engine have already resulted in greater losses than any war, however bloody.
What especially characterizes the era in which we find ourselves, into which we enter more deeply with every passing day, is the close relationship that exists between danger and order. It may be expressed in this way: danger appears merely as the other side of our order. This whole is more or less equivalent to our image of the atom, which is utterly mobile and utterly constant. The secret concealed within is a new and different return to nature; it is the fact that we are simultaneously civilized and barbaric, that we have approached the elemental without having sacrificed the acuity of our consciousness. Thus does the path through which danger has penetrated our life present itself as twofold. It has intruded upon us first of all out of an arena in which nature is still more vital. Things, “the likes of which were only possible in South America,” are now familiar to us. The distinction is that danger, from a romantic dimension, has in this way become real. Secondly, however, we are sending danger back over the globe in a new form.
This new form of danger appears in he closest connection having been made between elemental events and consciousness. The elemental is eternal: as people have always found themselves in passionate struggle with things, animals, or other people, as is the case today. The particular characteristic of our era, however, is precisely that all this transpires in the presence of the most acute consciousness. This finds expression above all in the circumstance that in all of these conflicts the most powerful servant of consciousness, the machine, is always present. Thus does humanity’s eternal struggle with the elemental nature of the sea present itself in the temporal form of a supremely complicated mechanical contrivance. Thus does the battle appear as a process during which the armored engine moves fighting men through the sea, over land, or into the air. Thus does the daily accident itself, with which our newspapers are filled, appear nearly exclusively as a catastrophe of a technological type.
Beyond all this the wonder of our world, at once sober and dangerous, is the registration of the moment in which the danger transpires – a registration that is moreover accomplished whenever it does not capture human consciousness immediately, by means of machines. One needs no prophetic talent to predict that soon any given event will be there to see or to hear in any given place. Already today there is hardly an event of human significance toward which the artificial eye of civilization, the photographic lens, is not directed. The result is often pictures of demoniacal precision through which humanity’s new relation to danger becomes visible in an exceptional fashion. One has to recognize that it is a question here much less of the peculiarity of new tools than of a new style that makes use of technological tools. The change becomes illuminating in the investigation of the change in tools that have long been at our disposal, such as language. Although our time produces little in the way of literature in the old sense, much of significance is accomplished through the objective reports of experience. Our time is prompted by human need – which explains, among other things, the success of war literature. We already posses a new style of language, one which gradually becomes visible from underneath the language of the bourgeois epoch. The same, however, is true of our style altogether; it is reminiscent of the fact that the automobile was for a long time constructed in the form of a horse-drawn coach, or that a wholly different society has already long since established itself beneath the surface of bourgeois society. As during the inflation, we continue for a time to spend the usual coins, without sensing that the rate of exchange is no longer the same.
In this sense, it may be said that we have already plunged deeply into new, more dangerous realms, without our being conscious of them.
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