/lit/ - Literature

>>20621986
What did Guenon even write about Islam? The most I can find is one of his shorter books that talks about it + Taosim. desu I did expect him to write a bit more on the tradition he finally chose and moved to become closer with it

>2021
>still unrefuted

>>19108901

>The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary results it achieves; here we see an ever more rapid succession of unfounded theories and hypotheses, no sooner set up than crumbling to give way to others that will have an even shorter life— a veritable chaos amid which one would search in vain for anything definitive, unless it be a monstrous accumulation of facts and details incapable of proving or signifying anything. We refer here of course to speculative science, insofar as this still exists; in applied science there are on the contrary undeniable results, and this is easily understandable since these results bear directly on the domain of matter, the only domain in which modern man can boast any real superiority. It is therefore to be expected that discoveries, or rather mechanical and industrial inventions, will go on developing and multiplying more and more rapidly until the end of the present age; and who knows if, given the dangers of destruction they bear in themselves, they will not be one of the chief agents in the ultimate catastrophe, if things reach a point at which this cannot be averted?

>Be that as it may, one has the general impression that, in the present state of things, there is no longer any stability; but while there are some who sense the danger and try to react to it, most of our contemporaries are quite at ease amid this confusion, in which they see a kind of exteriorized image of their own mentality. Indeed there is an exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere ‘becoming’, leaving no place for the changeless and the permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this ‘becoming’, thus implicitly denying true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, namely transcendent and universal principles. One can go even further and say that it amounts to the negation of all real knowledge whatsoever, even of a relative order, since, as we have shown above, the relative is unintelligible and impossible without the absolute, the contingent without the necessary, change without the unchanging, and multiplicity without unity; ‘relativism’ is self-contradictory, for, in seeking to reduce everything to change, one logically arrives at a denial of the very existence of change; this was fundamentally the meaning of the famous arguments of Zeno of Elea

>>18550826

> However, let us put ourselves for a moment in the position of those who pin their hopes to the ideal of material welfare and who therefore rejoice at all the improvements to life furnished by modern “progress”; are they quite sure that they are not being made dupes? Is it true that men are happier today than they used to be simply because they command swifter means of transport and other things of that kind, or because of their more agitated and complicated mode of life?

>The truth would appear to be quite the contrary; disequilibrium cannot be the condition of any real happiness; moreover, the more needs a man has the greater likelihood there is of his lacking something, and consequently of his being unhappy; modern civilization aims at creating ever greater and greater artificial needs, and, as we have already remarked, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, because, once launched upon such a course, it becomes exceedingly difficult to pull up, and, indeed, there is no reason for pulling up at one stage rather than at another. It was no hardship for people to do without things that did not exist and which they could never have even dreamed of; now, on the contrary, they are bound to suffer when deprived of those things, since they have grown accustomed to regarding them as necessities, with the result that they have in fact really become necessary to them.

>Consequently, with all the power at their disposal, they struggle to acquire whatever can procure them material satisfactions, the only kind they are capable of appreciating; they become absorbed in “making money,” because it is money which enables them to obtain these things, and the more they possess the more they desire because they are continually discovering fresh needs, until this pursuit becomes their only aim in life.

>Hence that ferocious competition which certain “evolutionists” have raised to the dignity of a scientific law under the name of the “struggle for existence,” the logical result of which is that only the strongest, in the most narrowly material sense of the word, have a right to exist. Hence also the envy and even hatred with which those possessed of wealth are regarded by those who are not so endowed; how could men to whom equalitarian theories have been preached fail to react when all around they see inequality in the most material order of things, the order to which they are bound to be most sensitive?

>>18493095
I've been on this board through this whole crazy wild Guenon ride and I've never once been curious about him---I can tell by looking at him he's a corny mf.

>>18486323
>Such as?
Like when it says that the only way the pluralistic attitude of the Traditionalists was possible because of modernity itself, and it was pointed out in response that this is a totally false claim since religious freedom and pluralism was always the case in India for thousands of years and usually the case in China for the same span of time.

You can read the response that refutes the whole essay starting here

>>/lit/thread/S18470130#p18472189

>>18464639
>What's the difference?
The renowned Sufi metaphysician and scholar René Guénon points out in his book 'L'Homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta' that in Advaita Vedānta Hinduism, 'Salvation' corresponds to gaining entry into the Brahmāloka. This is a heavenly-like state where souls acquire divine powers and their desires are easily manifested, this lasts until the end of the day of Brahmā that the universe is presently in (each day of Brahmā is 4.32 billion years). This is contrasted to moksha, or liberation, where one attains the end of ignorance and realizes one's own identity with Brahman, the Supreme Lord. Moksha is considered to be a higher achievement than the Brahmāloka (salvation) because it totally eliminates spiritual ignorance and forever severs the thread of continued transmigration. Beings who gain entry into the Brahmāloka can attain moksha while they are there, but it's not assured that every soul in the Brahmāloka will attain salvation. At the end of the day of Brahmā all the non-liberated souls in the Brahmāloka along with the transmigrating souls on earth etc are withdrawn into an unmanifest state (except for Brahmā himself, who is liberated) along with the universe, and then after a night of Brahmā is over they along with the universe emerge into manifestation and begin transmigrating into bodies all over again. So, you can attain 'salvation' via entry into the Brahmāloka but if you don't attain liberation while there then after billions of years you'll start transmigrating again and experiencing various forms of suffering relating to that.

>>18343652
>Guénon was not an anti-semite or racist.
True, but that didn't stop him from acknowledging the maleficent influence of certain modernist Jews in this passage from Reign of Quantity below, while he elsewhere still acknowledged traditional Judaism (which was not followed by any of these Jews that Guenon calls out) and Kabbalah as a legitimate religious tradition which points to the same truth as other traditions.

>In passing from philosophy to psychology it will be found that identical tendencies appear once again in the latter, and in the most recent schools of psychology they assume a far more dangerous aspect, for instead of taking the form of mere theoretical postulates they are given practical applications of a very disturbing character; the most ‘representative’ of these new methods, from the point of view of the present study, are those grouped under the general heading of ‘psychoanalysis’. It may be noted that, by a curious inconsistency, their handling of elements indubitably belonging to the subtle order continues to be accompanied in many psychologists by a materialistic attitude, no doubt because of their earlier training, as well as because of their present ignorance of the true nature of the elements they are bringing into play (1);

>(1) The case of Freud himself, founder of ‘psychoanalysis’, is quite typical in this respect, for he never ceased to declare himself a materialist. One further remark: why is it that the principal representatives of the new tendencies, like Einstein in physics, Marx in economics, Bergson in philosophy, Freud in psychology, and many others of less importance, are almost all of Jewish origin, unless it he because there is something involved that is closely hound up with the ‘malefic’ and dissolving aspect of nomadism when it is deviated, and because that aspect must inevitably predominate in Jews detached from their tradition?

>>18335990
>The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary results it achieves; here we see an ever more rapid succession of unfounded theories and hypotheses, no sooner set up than crumbling to give way to others that will have an even shorter life— a veritable chaos amid which one would search in vain for anything definitive, unless it be a monstrous accumulation of facts and details incapable of proving or signifying anything. We refer here of course to speculative science, insofar as this still exists; in applied science there are on the contrary undeniable results, and this is easily understandable since these results bear directly on the domain of matter, the only domain in which modern man can boast any real superiority. It is therefore to be expected that discoveries, or rather mechanical and industrial inventions, will go on developing and multiplying more and more rapidly until the end of the present age; and who knows if, given the dangers of destruction they bear in themselves, they will not be one of the chief agents in the ultimate catastrophe, if things reach a point at which this cannot be averted?

>Be that as it may, one has the general impression that, in the present state of things, there is no longer any stability; but while there are some who sense the danger and try to react to it, most of our contemporaries are quite at ease amid this confusion, in which they see a kind of exteriorized image of their own mentality. Indeed there is an exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere ‘becoming’, leaving no place for the changeless and the permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this ‘becoming’, thus implicitly denying true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, namely transcendent and universal principles. One can go even further and say that it amounts to the negation of all real knowledge whatsoever, even of a relative order, since, as we have shown above, the relative is unintelligible and impossible without the absolute, the contingent without the necessary, change without the unchanging, and multiplicity without unity; ‘relativism’ is self-contradictory, for, in seeking to reduce everything to change, one logically arrives at a denial of the very existence of change; this was fundamentally the meaning of the famous arguments of Zeno of Elea

>>18277729
Nagarjuna is logically incoherent and would have been laughed at by any platonist, he BTFO’s himself by saying the reflexive relations are impossible but then he says that the subject is empty or shunya but if reflexive relations are impossible the subject is incapable of perceiving its own emptiness because that’s reflexive

>>18269954
>Why does /lit/ frown upon individualism?
Because we are disciples of the great René Guénon (pbuh)

>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.

>Indeed these are but different names for the same thing; and we have also shown that this 'profane' outlook coincides with the antitraditional outlook that lies at the root of all specifically modern tendencies. That is not to say, of course, that this outlook is entirely new; it had 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.

>Individualism, thus defined, is therefore the determining cause of the present decline of the West, precisely because it is, so to speak, the mainspring for the development of the lowest possibilities of mankind, namely those possibilities that do not require the intervention of any supra-human element and which, on the contrary, can only expand freely if every supra-human element be absent, since they stand at the antipodes of all genuine spirituality and intellectuality

Apophatic theology is atheism. Advaita vedanta is atheism. Plotinus was a modernist atheist. Depersonalized after-life is just oblivion. Convince me otherwise.

>>17946622
>what made Western Civilization so great was individualism

Individualism is precisely what's wrong with the west, Peterson would do well to learn from the works of Rene Guenon

>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.

>Indeed these are but different names for the same thing; and we have also shown that this 'profane' outlook coincides with the antitraditional outlook that lies at the root of all specifically modern tendencies. That is not to say, of course, that this outlook is entirely new; it had 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.

>Individualism, thus defined, is therefore the determining cause of the present decline of the West, precisely because it is, so to speak, the mainspring for the development of the lowest possibilities of mankind, namely those possibilities that do not require the intervention of any supra-human element and which, on the contrary, can only expand freely if every supra-human element be absent, since they stand at the antipodes of all genuine spirituality and intellectuality

>>17916256

> However, let us put ourselves for a moment in the position of those who pin their hopes to the ideal of material welfare and who therefore rejoice at all the improvements to life furnished by modern “progress”; are they quite sure that they are not being made dupes? Is it true that men are happier today than they used to be simply because they command swifter means of transport and other things of that kind, or because of their more agitated and complicated mode of life?

>The truth would appear to be quite the contrary; disequilibrium cannot be the condition of any real happiness; moreover, the more needs a man has the greater likelihood there is of his lacking something, and consequently of his being unhappy; modern civilization aims at creating ever greater and greater artificial needs, and, as we have already remarked, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, because, once launched upon such a course, it becomes exceedingly difficult to pull up, and, indeed, there is no reason for pulling up at one stage rather than at another. It was no hardship for people to do without things that did not exist and which they could never have even dreamed of; now, on the contrary, they are bound to suffer when deprived of those things, since they have grown accustomed to regarding them as necessities, with the result that they have in fact really become necessary to them.

>Consequently, with all the power at their disposal, they struggle to acquire whatever can procure them material satisfactions, the only kind they are capable of appreciating; they become absorbed in “making money,” because it is money which enables them to obtain these things, and the more they possess the more they desire because they are continually discovering fresh needs, until this pursuit becomes their only aim in life.

>Hence that ferocious competition which certain “evolutionists” have raised to the dignity of a scientific law under the name of the “struggle for existence,” the logical result of which is that only the strongest, in the most narrowly material sense of the word, have a right to exist. Hence also the envy and even hatred with which those possessed of wealth are regarded by those who are not so endowed; how could men to whom equalitarian theories have been preached fail to react when all around they see inequality in the most material order of things, the order to which they are bound to be most sensitive?

Isn't there something a bit hypocritical about depersonalizing non-dual trads who still want the highest spot in the Hindu heaven? in b4"Just desire not to desire, bro."

>>17758352
>It's obvious upon close examination that it's the most sophisticated and intellectual right wing ideology.
*laughs in arabic*

>>17642072

> However, let us put ourselves for a moment in the position of those who pin their hopes to the ideal of material welfare and who therefore rejoice at all the improvements to life furnished by modern “progress”; are they quite sure that they are not being made dupes? Is it true that men are happier today than they used to be simply because they command swifter means of transport and other things of that kind, or because of their more agitated and complicated mode of life? The truth would appear to be quite the contrary; disequilibrium cannot be the condition of any real happiness; moreover, the more needs a man has the greater likelihood there is of his lacking something, and consequently of his being unhappy; modern civilization aims at creating ever greater and greater artificial needs, and, as we have already remarked, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, because, once launched upon such a course, it becomes exceedingly difficult to pull up, and, indeed, there is no reason for pulling up at one stage rather than at another. It was no hardship for people to do without things that did not exist and which they could never have even dreamed of; now, on the contrary, they are bound to suffer when deprived of those things, since they have grown accustomed to regarding them as necessities, with the result that they have in fact really become necessary to them. Consequently, with all the power at their disposal, they struggle to acquire whatever can procure them material satisfactions, the only kind they are capable of appreciating; they become absorbed in “making money,” because it is money which enables them to obtain these things, and the more they possess the more they desire because they are continually discovering fresh needs, until this pursuit becomes their only aim in life. Hence that ferocious competition which certain “evolutionists” have raised to the dignity of a scientific law under the name of the “struggle for existence,” the logical result of which is that only the strongest, in the most narrowly material sense of the word, have a right to exist. Hence also the envy and even hatred with which those possessed of wealth are regarded by those who are not so endowed; how could men to whom equalitarian theories have been preached fail to react when all around they see inequality in the most material order of things, the order to which they are bound to be most sensitive?

Why do non-dualists seethe if you call them monist/pantheist? Saying non-dualism isn't pantheism doesn't save your sloppy metaphysics from the exact same faults.

How was he so wise?

>>16115883
>"R-R-R-R-R-R-R-r-r-r-r-rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeettttrrrrrrroooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaccccccccccttttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivvvvvvvvvveeeeeeeelllllllllllyyyyyyyyyy rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeefffffffffuuuuuuuuuttttttttttteeeeeeeeedddddddd"

I miss this little nigga like you wouldn't believe

>>15536883
based

>>15227777
Guenon (PBUH) is both the first, the last, and the only Islamic scholar you will ever need anon.

>>13342223
whoops wrong photo my bad