JUST as the sacred sciences have fallen prey to a divisive and destructive formula, so too has mankind become detached from the metaphysical realm that must act as the most crucial focus of human existence.

Guénon defines individualism as something that begins and ends with man, a new and even more pernicious form of the Occidental humanism that first emerged during the Renaissance. Previously, however, 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 civilisation, as has happened during recent centuries in the West. (p.55)

This civilisation is characterised by what Guénon labels the ‘absence of principle,’ another key indication that the Kali-Yuga is well under way. The principle in question is the supra-human dimension which, ordinarily, would underpin the entirety of human affairs.

Without the application of intellectual intuition, our mental and spiritual life is akin to a barren wasteland. Consider the professional ‘thinker,’ for example, who is

much more interested in creating problems, however artificial and illusory they may be, than in solving them; and this is but one aspect of the irrational love of research for its own sake, that is to say, of the most futile agitation in both the mental and the corporeal domains. It is also an important consideration for these philosophers to be able to put their name to a ‘system’, that is, to a strictly limited and circumscribed set of theories, which shall belong to them and be exclusively their creation; hence the desire to be original at all costs, even if truth should have to be sacrificed to this ‘originality’: a philosopher’s renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others. (p.56)

The self-centred egoism that Guénon finds in philosophy, especially in those cases where ancient wisdom is repackaged to the extent that it is either obfuscated or relegated to the semi-logical verbosity of a complex system, is a particularly bad case of the individualist tendency at work. This is completely at odds with the selflessness one finds in civilisations based on metaphysical principles:

In a traditional civilisation 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 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? (pp.56-58)

At a time when the average philosopher has more in common with a ‘self-help’ guru than the great minds of the past, the quest to either acquire or impart authentic truth seems less important than the frantic scramble to sell books, appear on television shows and increase the number of digits on one’s annual bank balance.

More importantly, this particular school of activity has become a vehicle for the triumph of rationalism and this first began to accelerate with the ‘natural philosophy’ of René Descartes (1596-1650). By confining human intelligence to the boundaries of the purely biological, the intuitive faculty that unites man with the divine was – to retain the naturalistic metaphor – surgically removed. Intelligence was therefore reduced to what Guénon describes as ‘practical functions,’ and even

Descartes himself was already at heart much more concerned with these practical applications than with pure science. More than this: individualism inevitably implies naturalism, since all that lies beyond nature is, for that very reason, out of reach of the individual as such; naturalism and the negation of metaphysics are indeed but one and the same thing, and once intellectual intuition is no longer recognized, no metaphysics is any longer possible; but whereas some persist in inventing a ‘pseudo-metaphysics’ of one kind or another, others — with greater frankness — assert its impossibility; from this has arisen ‘relativism’ in all its forms, whether it be the ‘criticism’ of Kant or the ‘positivism’ of Auguste Comte; and since reason itself is quite relative, and can deal validly only with a domain that is equally relative, it is true to say that ‘relativism’ is the only logical outcome of rationalism. (pp.57-58)

To further illustrate Guénon’s point, consider the manner in which Descartes viewed animals. Humans, he believed, have a conscious mind that is capable of arriving at the realisation ‘I think,’ whilst animals do not possess souls and are therefore little more than machines that are programmed to act purely on instinct. As Sarah Bakewell explains in her 2011 work on Montaigne, a ‘dog, for Descartes, has no perspective, no true experience. It does not create a hare in its inner world and chase it across the fields. It can snuffle and twitch its paws all it likes; Descartes will never see anything but contracting muscles and firing nerves, triggered by equally mechanical operations in the brain.’ (How to Live, p.136)

However, despite his belief in the existence of the human soul the philosopher’s rigid dualism essentially reduces man to a similar kind of biological machine. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), at least, developed his own theory of noumenal and phenomenal realms in an attempt to correct the errors of Cartesianism and its catastrophic separation of body and mind. Nonetheless, in the case of Descartes himself the purely materialistic approach precludes any type of transcendent outlook.

At the same time, the encroaching rationalism of the eighteenth-century

was to bring about its own destruction: ‘nature’ and ‘becoming’, as we said above, are in reality synonymous; a consistent naturalism can therefore only be one of the ‘philosophies of becoming’, already mentioned, of which the specifically mod-ern type is evolutionism; it was precisely this that finally turned against rationalism, by accusing reason of being unable to deal adequately, on the one hand, with what is solely change and multiplicity, and, on the other, with the indefinite complexity of sensible phenomena. (p.58)

Evolution, which remains a scientific theory, has actively sought to replace authentic ‘truth’ with sensible ‘reality’. Intelligence is no longer used to intuit the realm of the Absolute, but has become a mere cerebral ‘function’ that reduces everything down to the level of base matter. This reversal of hierarchy, as Guénon views it, ignores the existence of metaphysics completely:

This, in its main outlines, is the course that ‘profane’ philosophy, left to itself and claiming to limit all knowledge to its own horizon, was bound to tread, and has indeed trodden: as long as there existed a higher knowledge, nothing of this sort could happen, for philosophy was bound at least to respect that of which it was ignorant, but whose existence it could not deny; but when this higher knowledge had disappeared, its negation, already a fact, was soon erected into a theory, and it is from this that all modern philosophy has sprung. (pp.58-59)

Descartes, therefore, has much to answer for and his naturalistic approach has since infected far more than philosophy.

As we saw in the second part of this series, Guénon is convinced that the roots of this vigorous assault on Tradition can be found in the fourteenth century – prior to the Renaissance – and despite the fact that the Medieval sciences of the Church had managed to retain a semblance of the esoteric a dangerous rival soon appeared on the horizon and served as the basis for large-scale disruption:

At that time, the tradition of the West bore outwardly a specifically religious form, being in fact represented by Catholicism; it is therefore in the realm of religion that we shall have to consider the revolt against the traditional outlook, a revolt which, when it had acquired a definite form, became known as Protestantism; it is not difficult to see that this is a manifestation of individualism; indeed one could call it individualism as applied to religion. Protestantism, like the modern world, is built upon mere negation, the same negation of principles that is the essence of individualism; and one can see in it one more example, and a most striking one, of the state of anarchy and dissolution that has arisen from this negation. (p.60)

The fact that individualism is based on the notion that there is no higher authority than the self, and that individual reason is superior to all forms of metaphysical transcendence, means that anything which acknowledges the supra-human is dismissed out of hand.

As a means of undermining the supremacy of the Catholic Papacy, Protestant theologians were determined to prove that private judgement should take precedence over the authority of the Pope. Guénon explains:

What happened in the realm of religion was therefore analogous to the part to be played by rationalism in philosophy: the door was left open to all manner of discussions, divergencies, and deviations; and the result could not but be dispersion in an ever growing multitude of sects, each of which represents no more than the private opinion of certain individuals. (p.61)

Although the Protestants had their own ideas about doctrine, by concentrating on the issue of morality they were able to transform Christianity into an ineffectual bastion of sentimentality and this led to a pronounced religious fervour that relied very little on knowledge or the application of the intellect.

Interestingly, Guénon detects a link between the attack on philosophy and modern Protestant thinkers such as William James (1842-1910), who were committed to locating

in the ‘subconscious’ man’s means of entering into communication with the divine. At this stage the final products of religious and of philosophical decline mingle together and ‘religious experience’ becomes merged in pragmatism, in the name of which a limited God is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God, insofar as one can feel for him sentiments comparable to those one would feel for a higher man. (p.61)

Guénon was no doubt aware of the philosophical spat that had raged in the lecture halls of German academia in mid-September 1850 and which took the form of the so-called ‘Materialism Controversy’. Given the threat presented by the arrival of Darwinism in central Europe, as well as the rapid ascendency of the natural sciences, those who sought to defend Christian values were determined to make a stand. One philosopher in particular, Rudolph Wagner (1805-1864), delivered a hackle-raising speech at the Physiological Institute of Göttingen in which he suggested that Christians and evolutionists should adopt the Protestant approach of a double-truth doctrine. What this meant, in practice, was that whilst faith should not seek to make judgements about scientific observation and experimentation, scientists must not presume on matters of faith. Although Wagner was aware that faith and reason often coincide, he was determined to persuade his philosophical contemporaries that they should apply a form of ‘double bookkeeping’ to ensure that each side remained within its own separate sphere.

This, of course, is another example of the subdivision that Guénon was discussing earlier and further evidence that Protestantism has always been at the forefront of attempts to eradicate from Catholicism the last remaining vestiges of Tradition. At the same time, whilst it might be argued that Protestantism nonetheless retained a healthy respect for Holy Scripture the Frenchman reminds us that

the introduction of ‘free criticism’ completely refutes such a hypothesis, since it opens the door to all manner of individual fantasies; moreover, the preservation of the doctrine presupposes an organized traditional teaching to keep alive the orthodox interpretation, and in actual fact this teaching has, in the Western world, been identified with Catholicism. (pp.62-63)

Despite this assertion, Guénon is perfectly aware that Catholicism has not been left unscathed by the ravages of time and just one decade after his death the Church was to establish the Second Vatican Council with the aid of several leading Protestants.

Few people today are able to comprehend the esoteric symbolism of Catholicism, he argues, and that to rediscover its more Traditional facets those in the West must learn from their Eastern counterparts. For Guénon, there is presumably a very fine line between the ecumenicalism and syncretism of modernity and a more productive attempt to re-establish the sacred by way of comparative religion and the primordial concordance one finds in perennial wisdom:

It is possible to think oneself sincerely religious and not be at all religious at heart; it is even possible to consider oneself a ‘traditionalist’ without having the least notion of the real traditional spirit; and this is one more symptom of the mental confusion of our time. (p.64)

By using religion as a means of tracking the progress of individualism, therefore, Guénon had managed to expose the damage that it has caused down the last few centuries.

Another example of individualism can be found in the way that the modern mentality ascribes so much importance to personal habits. If the media is not fixating over the sexual conquests of a popular athlete, something that clearly has nothing whatsoever to do with his or her sporting prowess, the most successful or prolific personalities are first celebrated and then wantonly dismantled in the most base and brutal manner:

Sometimes individualism, in the lowest and most vulgar sense of the word, is manifested in a still more obvious way, as in the desire that is frequently shown to judge a man’s work by what is known of his private life, as though there could be any sort of connection between the two. The same tendency, combined with a mania for detail, is also responsible for the interest shown in the smallest peculiarities in the lives of ‘great men’ and for the illusion that all that they have done can be explained by a sort of ‘psycho-physiological’ analysis; all this is very significant for anyone who wishes to understand the real nature of the contemporary mentality. (p.66)

Similarly, the preoccupation with ‘apologetics’ and seeking to appease one’s detractors leads – even more so, in the case of Tradition – to the worst forms of compromise and exposing oneself in this way is another mark of individualism. Guénon suggests that the best approach is to adopt a more far-sighted attitude towards such matters and defer to the higher powers of the Absolute:

The domain of strife is the domain of action, that is to say the individual and temporal domain; the ‘unmoved mover’ produces and directs movement without being involved in it; knowledge enlightens action without partaking of its vicissitudes; the spiritual guides the temporal without mingling with it; and thus everything remains in its proper order, in the rank that is its own in the universal hierarchy; but where is the notion of a real hierarchy still to be found in the modern world? (p.67)

Guénon’s analysis ends in a decidedly pessimistic tone and yet it is difficult to place one’s trust in spiritual authority when so many of its leading representatives are no longer up the task themselves, but despite the widespread atomisation of humanity it is important not to descend into the limitations of reason and suppose that the only legitimate jurisdiction is to be found in the self.