The Crisis of the Modern World (Rene Guenon Works) Revised Edition

“…movement and change are actually prized for their own sake…outward action…fleeting…dispersion…a tendency toward instantaneity, have for its limit a state of pure disequilibrium, which…would coincide with the final dissolution of this world; and this too is one of the clearest signs that the final phase of the Kali Yuga is at hand.”
- Rene Guenon, ‘The Crisis of the Modern World’

The French metaphysical scholar Rene Guenon (1886-1951) is considered to be one of the greatest of all in the western world. Guenon was no mere occultist. He was an authority on the Sanskrit teachings, Sufism, Taoism, and many others including western esoteric traditions. ‘The Reign of Quantity’ is his masterwork and was the turning point in my own understanding as he convinced me to accept the Cycles of Time as reality.

Guenon’s ‘The Crisis in the Modern World’ was written in 1942 (three years before my own birth) and describes our current times with prescient and increasing accuracy. In the chapter on ‘Knowledge and Action’ Guenon explains in his razor-like French precision that the modern world, its sciences and philosophies, its very foundations have become completely disconnected from any metaphysical truth. The reason for this is our ongoing Kali Yuga descent into matter and limited five-sense perception, which blocks our understanding of the Invisible Realms that are the support and substratum of this entire universe.

The people who have become prominent in all fields of modern life simply are no longer capable of understanding the real underlying metaphysical principles that are the substratum of the temporal illusory earth we stand upon. Thus the various and always changing theories that become the basis of our lives are profoundly flawed, unsound, and subject to collapse. Rene Guenon: “It is impossible in any way to separate knowledge from the process by which it is acquired.” The intelligence that is now held in high esteem is of the lowest order — regardless of how many corporate global policy institute think-tanks these modern era PhD priests are ensconced within.

True knowledge consists in 'identification'...
Guenon: “…for all true knowledge essentially consists in identification with its object.” This is the traditional ancient way of immersing consciousness to reach wisdom knowledge and is precisely what the shamans still today practice. In the west and spreading around the globe, this process of intense identification is overlooked and “…they admit nothing higher than rational or discursive knowledge, which is necessarily indirect and imperfect, being…reflected knowledge.” One is reminded of Plato’s shadows in a cave being taken as real.

This ‘lower type of knowledge’ has become more and more valued ‘only insofar as it can be made to serve immediate practical ends.’ Our modern western culture has become absorbed and obsessed with action, scientific and mathematical theories that produce profitable results, and have denied everything that lies beyond the grasp of their own limited five-sense perception. These servants of the corporatist scions are blind to the fact that acts thus disconnected from metaphysical truth degenerate — “from the absence of any principle, into an agitation as vain as it is sterile.”

We are lost in what Guenon back in 1942 called “dispersion in multiplicity, and in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle.” This external multiplicity is merely the temporal ‘appearance’ generated by the eternal Real, the One substratum beneath all appearances. And yet the best and seemingly the most intelligent are consumed in its quantitative analysis, a bottomless pit of frantic change for its own sake and profit.

Guenon: “…in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis [of external multiplicity] driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders.” Nothing is of value that cannot generate profit, while the wisdom that is born from silent contemplation is ridiculed. Thus we live in an intellectual environment suffused in “the inaptitude for synthesis and the incapacity for any sort of concentration.”

This incessant frantic descent into ever increasing multiplicity and complexity is, as Rene Guenon says, the result of “a pretended intuition modelled on the ceaseless flux of things of the senses, far from being able to serve as an instrument for obtaining true knowledge, represents in reality the dissolution of all possible knowledge.”

An intelligence that has been disconnected from the immutable imperishable substratum that lies beneath ‘the curtain of each atom’ [Mahmud Shabistari's Sufi poem] is necessarily precariously unstable and inclined to collapse. Without metaphysical wisdom, each temporal ‘fix’ our elitist servant PhD’s come up with will only lead us closer to the final moments of this Kali Yuga.

Rene Guenon would not have been surprised to witness our current predicament. Guenon offers us one last profound comfort in the final sentence of his brilliant ‘The Reign of Quantity’: “…it can be said in all truth that the ‘end of a world’ never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.”

Essential for all students of traditionalism and those interested in esoteric knowledge.
Those who seek a spiritual order in their lives should be intrigued by Guenon's prescriptions for modern man

In perhaps his most important work, _The Crisis of the Modern World_, traditionalist thinker Rene Guenon outlines his philosophy and shows how the traditional outlook is opposed by modern developments. Guenon begins by noting that the modern world has brought about a crisis, conceived by many in terms of apocalypse and the "end times" (the coming dark age of the Kali Yuga in terms of Hindu cyclical cosmology), which can only be resolved by a return of the West to the traditional outlook. Taking off from what he had written earlier in a book entitled _East and West_, Guenon notes that the worldviews of West and East are profoundly different from each other, the East maintaining its traditions, while the West creeps towards degeneracy in the form of modernism and materialism. Much of this book is spent contrasting East and West, attempting to demonstrate exactly where the West has gone astray (both in its attempts to colonize the East and in its rampant materialism and modernism). In the East, three great traditions remain corresponding to the Near, Middle, and Far East respectively. These are the traditions of Islam, the traditions of India (especially Hinduism), and the traditions of the Chinese civilization. Guenon believes that only one possible source for traditional renewal remains in the West, and that is the Catholic (meaning "universal") Church, which he opposes to Protestant Christianity or modern day "rationalism", for example. Tranditionalism places an emphasis on both "primordialism" and universality, in line with its Vedantist roots. Guenon also notes several contrasting distinctions between the traditional viewpoint and that of the modern day (the Western materialist/"rationalist" outlook). Part of this involves the contrast between sacred and profane science. Modernists emphasize profane science, attempting to desacralize nature, and place their priority in both pragmatism and the material world. Such a view has come even to relegate metaphysical notions of truth to the realm of the purely pragmatic and utilitarian. Guenon also notes how the modern day world is dominated by a mass democratic levelling brought about by what he terms "individualism". It is this form of "individualism" which has led to materialism and an emphasis on pure pragmatics (quantity as opposed to quality), although he contrasts this to the more genuine view of the traditional man which remains opposed to the encroaching influences of force, through the state for example. Guenon sees much to criticize in the democratic development of the West, seeing in democracy a form of mass levelling. Opposing these developments within the modern world, Guenon calls for a new intellectual elite, who will serve to revive tradition where it is to be found. This revival also centers around the schism between East and West. In this sense, those among the "intellectual elite" must either opt to integrate the traditions of the East (which remain viable) into the West or attempt to restore genuine Western tradition (such as that which exists in a form of decline within the Catholic Church). Guenon remains a champion of the East and notes the Western bias and attempt to dominate the traditional East, citing several sources of this problematic, where he means by the West the modern materialist-driven West and not the traditional West. This book serves as an important introduction to the thinking of Rene Guenon, who is the father of the traditionalist school which also includes Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade, among others. It serves to highlight many of the contrasts which exist between the modern world (undergoing crisis) and the traditional outlook. Guenon notes that while there is a tendency for those among the traditional camp to despair, given the bleak outlook presented by the modern world (which may be destroyed in catastrophe given its false foundations), that this tendency should be overcome, particularly by those among his chosen elite. Guenon quotes several important passages from the Gospel accounts to illustrate his point. Truly the modern world represents the traditional Kali Yuga of the Hindu cycle, a dark age of rampant materialism, and a decline from the once golden age of spiritual tradition.