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René Guénon Books

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EAST AND WEST

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“Pragmatism, by its very name, poses above all as a 'pholosophy of action'; its more or less avowed assumption is that man only has needs of a practical order, material ones and, together with these, sentimental ones. It means, then, the doing away with intellectuality; but, if this is so, why go on wanting to evolve theories? That is rather hard to understand; and if pragmatism, like skepticism, which it only differs from with regard to action, wished to conform to its own standards, it would have to limit itself to a mere mental attitude, which it cannot even seek to justify logically without giving itself the lie; but there is no doubt that it is very difficult to keep strictly within such bounds.”

PhilosophyLogicPragmatismLogical ThinkingPractical PhilosophyContinental Philosophy
Book:EAST AND WEST
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“In a traditional civilization it is almost inconceivable that a man should claim an idea as his own; [...] 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 cognizance 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? Here again words have lost their real meaning, inasmuch as some people-for instance contemporary pragmatists-go so far as to misappropriate the word 'truth' for what is simply practical utility, that is to say for something that is quite foreign to the intellectual order. The logical outcome of the modern deviation is precisely the negation of truth, as well as of the intelligence of which truth is the object.”

PhilosophyTruthTraditionLogic
Book:The Crisis of the Modern World
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“Where is the notion of a real hierarchy still to be found in the modern world? 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. 'Woe unto you, ye blind guides,' the Gospel says; and indeed everywhere today one sees nothing but blind leaders of the blind, who, unless restrained by some timely check, will inevitably lead them into the abyss, there to perish with them.”

WisdomSpiritualAuthoritySacredModernity
Book:The Crisis of the Modern World
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“Those who might be tempted to give way to despair should realize that nothing accomplished in this order can ever be lost, that confusion, error and darkness can win the day only apparently and in a purely ephemeral way, that all partial and transitory disequilibrium must perforce contribute towards the greater equilibrium of the whole, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against the power of truth.”

WorldInspirationTruthPurposeReligionOrderSpiritualityHopeGoalBalanceDespairTraditionModernity
Book:The Crisis of the Modern World
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“No one can deny that the feudal wars, which were quite localized and subject moreover to restrictive regulation by the spiritual authority, were nothing compared to the national wars that have resulted, following the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, in armed nations, and we have seen in our own day new developments hardly reassuring for the future. By compelling all men indiscriminately lo take part in modern wars, the essential distinctions among the social functions are entirely ignored, this being moreover a logical consequence of 'egalitarianism'.”

WarNationFeudalArmed NationFeudal WarNational War
Book:Spiritual Authority & Temporal Power
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“[...] The movement of the celestial bodies can be given as an example. It is not exactly circular, but elliptic; the ellipse constitutes as it were a first “specification” of the circle, by the splitting of the center into two poles or “foci” in the direction of one of the diameters which thereafter plays a special “axial” part, while at the same time all the other diameters are differentiated one from another in respect of their lengths. It may be added incidentally in this connection that, since the planets describe ellipses of which the sun occupies one of the foci, the question arises as to what the other focus corresponds to; as there is nothing corporeal actually there, there must be something belonging only to the subtle order; but that question cannot be further examined here, as it would be quite outside our subject.”

SunFocusKepler S Laws
Book:The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times
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“The ease with which certain words come to be musused is truly extraordinary: there are some who have gone so far as to give the name 'traditions' to popular habits, or even to conventions of quite recent origin, withouth importnace or real significance. As for ourselves, we refuse to give this name to what is only a more or less automatic respect for certain outward forms, which are sometimes nothing more than 'superstitions' in the etymological sense of the word. True tradition dewells in the outlook of a people or race or civilization, and it springs from causes that lie far deeper.”

TraditionHabitsSuperstitionTraditional ValuesTraditionalism
Book:EAST AND WEST
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“Aux trois gunas correspondent des couleurs symboliques : le blanc à sattwa, le rouge à rajas, le noir à tamas ; en vertu du rapport que nous indiquons ici, les deux premières de ces couleurs symbolisent aussi respectivement l’autorité spirituelle et le pouvoir temporel. – Il est intéressant de noter, à ce propos, que l’« oriflamme » des rois de France était rouge ; la substitution ultérieure du blanc au rouge comme couleur royale marque, en quelque sorte, l’usurpation d’un des attributs de l’autorité spirituelle.”

TamasRajasGunaSattwa
Book:Spiritual Authority & Temporal Power
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“The civilization of the modern West has, among other pretensions, that of being eminently 'scientific'; [...] it is one of those words to which our contemporaries seem to attach a sort of mysterious power, independent of their meaning. 'Science', with a capital letter, like 'Progress' and 'Civilization', like 'Right', 'Justice', and 'Liberty', is another of those entities that are better left undefined, and that run the risk of losing all their prestige as soon as they are inspected a little too closely. [...] These are veritable idols, the divinities of a sort of 'lay religion', which is not clearly defined, no doubt, and which cannot be, but which has nonetheless a very real existence: it is not religion in the proper sense of the word, but it is what pretends to take its place, and what better deserves to be called 'conter-relgilion'.”

ScienceModernityWestern CivilizationScientismWestern Society
Book:EAST AND WEST
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“some might be surprised to see us say that reincarnation is an exclusively modern idea. Too many confusions and misconceptions have been going on for a century so that many people, even outside "neo-spiritualist" circles, are not seriously affected by them; this distortion has even reached such a point that official orientalists, for example, routinely interpret in a reincarnationist sense texts where there is no such thing, and that they have become completely incapable of understanding them in any other way. is to say that they understand absolutely nothing.”

ReincarnationSpiritism
Book:The Spiritist Fallacy
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