/lit/ - Literature

>>18768461
Please stop mentioning this guy

>>18768463
Think I'd rather solidify and disolve, senpai

>>18768461
No, that's baseless slander.

>>18768461
He is very much an orientalist, an even worse one than the other orientalists he critiques himself.

If he isn't an orientalist himself, he is at least a pure product of Orientalism. His entire shtick is based on the fetished thought that eastern thought is something more deeper and mystical than we in the west can relate too. This interpretation of the ""orient"" was beneficial for the large western powers and imperialists of the time since they can sell the narrative that Easterns aren't hung up on material conditions, they find meaning in higher spiritual matters. If easterners aren't interested in their material conditions, any larger power is free to exploit them for resources and material wealth.

Where Guenon is a complete retard is as he himself adapts this false narrative and believes it to be better. Don't get me wrong, I think Guenon has good takes on religion, symbolism, and a great critique of modern civilization, but he is completely blind to the fact that his "solution" to modern civilization is itself made up by the west. If he was aware of this he would've maybe been a proper respected scholar instead of just a meme.

Who would win?

>>18768461
guenon? gueoui! :)

>>18768461
Fucking hell. I read the other Guen*n thread and clicked on the catalog and this was the first thread I saw. How is he so present here, there are absolute 0 (yes, ZERO) people outside of /lit/ who even know who this is. Yes, not a single human being on earth outside of /lit/ ever even heard of his name. You are really a special kind of retard, Guen*nfag. Get help.

Yes. He never visited India, only knew it from books. When he lived in Cairo and dressed like that, he was being anachronistic by Egyptian standards, especially Cairo standards, since most people dressed far more "modern" at the time. The real and official sufi orders of his time in the Muslim world were not deeply mystical and backward looking but modern and mostly focused on exoteric Islamic practice, not the timeless esoteric mysticism Guenon wanted, and definitely not pan-traditional. Guenon had a few of his followers, like Schuon, get spurious or semi-spurious initiations (basically a piece of paper from the head of one of the leading sufi orders, too busy to meet with them), so that they felt they could initiate more white followers back in Europe, and then they started attracting new age hippies and dropping Muslim exoteric practice completely.

Said's definition of orientalism applies to him perfectly. Like Said says, he even refused to believe in "modern inventions" or "corruptions" if they contradicted his European philosophical and occult preferences for how the exotic orient should behave, for instance he disparaged most actual living and existing traditions, like the bhakti devotional Hinduism practiced by most Hindus, and also famously Buddhism, until Coomaraswamy changed his mind by convincing him, along neo-vedanta lines, that Buddhism was a form of absolute idealism just like the cleaned up Europeanized advaita he preferred. In this he was following a century of Indians like Ram Mohan Roy, Aurobindo, and Vivekananda who had cleaned up and Europeanized historic Hinduism to present it to European audiences, and several centuries of European thinkers who saw vedic philosophy as synonymous with some form of pristine monism, usually either Plotinian mysticism or Spinozist deism (depending on their preferences).

Guenon was really more of a western occultist and religious revivalist. He was initiated 6 times in his life, once around age 20 through a seance he claimed put him in contact with the grand master of the Templars, and once by masons. He had little in common with the actual religions of the orient, which were mostly modern even when he began writing, and which have become even more aggressively exoteric and anti-sufi since then.

>>18768747
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnnXKmGQ4nI#t=3m0s

umm then you maybe should have finished reading the last thread sweaty

>>18768747
Seraphim Rose read Guenon

>>18768764
gee, what are ya? some kinda post-colonial nerd?

>>18768808
No, Said is ironically a westernized pussy who is orientalist in his own way because he fetishizes the oriental untouched by European influence. Orientals are supposed to be simultaneously exactly the same as Euros (all humans are the same) but totally different (don't impose your philosophy on me man).

Instead of reducing the entire orient to a single quasiplatonic mysticism like Guenonians do, postcolonialists just reduce it to bourgeois cultural anthropology where everything is "diverse culture" but nothing actually means anything, because liberal academics don't believe in anything other than a secular world filled with diverse peoples eating diverse foods.

Guenon is interesting but people should at least know that he's not really a sufi and definitely not a Hindu. He's more of an occult mason from the same milieu as Blavatsky's Theosophy, writing when French society was rejecting laicite as bourgeois but unable to go back to its ancestral Catholicism because it was also seen as bourgeois, corrupted, and boring.

>>18768847
>Orientals are supposed to be simultaneously exactly the same as Euros (all humans are the same) but totally different (don't impose your philosophy on me man
This is why only racists can appreciate other cultures sincerely

>>18768764
>Yes. He never visited India, only knew it from books.
not for lack of trying, the British denied him a visa

>When he lived in Cairo and dressed like that, he was being anachronistic by Egyptian standards, especially Cairo standards, since most people dressed far more "modern" at the time.
So? You say this like its a bad thing

>The real and official sufi orders of his time in the Muslim world were not deeply mystical and backward looking but modern and mostly focused on exoteric Islamic practice, not the timeless esoteric mysticism Guenon wanted, and definitely not pan-traditional.
This isn't true, Shaikh Ahmad al-°Alawi was alive in Guenon's time and was deeply mystical focused. Do you even have any figures to back this up? How would one ever measure this objectively?

>Guenon had a few of his followers, like Schuon, get spurious or semi-spurious initiations (basically a piece of paper from the head of one of the leading sufi orders, too busy to meet with them), so that they felt they could initiate more white followers back in Europe, and then they started attracting new age hippies and dropping Muslim exoteric practice completely.
What Schuon et al did does not have any bearing upon Guenon, Guenon distanced himself from and disagreed with Schuon. This is just a stupid guild-by-association ploy

>for instance he disparaged most actual living and existing traditions, like the bhakti devotional Hinduism practiced by most Hindus
Guenon didn't disparage them but just said that there were another approach to orthodox doctrine but didn't go as far as Advaita, and various Hindu thinkers including medieval Hindu philosophers have said the same. Multiple medieval Hindu doxographies for example rank Bhakti-based doctrines as being preliminary in understanding to non-duality. This is Guenon just siding with an already long pre-existing perspective within Hinduism.

>and also famously Buddhism, until Coomaraswamy changed his mind by convincing him, along neo-vedanta lines, that Buddhism was a form of absolute idealism just like the cleaned up Europeanized advaita he preferred.
Guenon didn't "prefer a Europeanized cleaned-up Advaita", he stuck with the traditional Advaita of Shankara and didn't diverge from it. Guenon instead condemned the attempts at modernizing Vedanta that others undertook including NeoVedantists who all depart from Shankara.

>In this he was following a century of Indians like Ram Mohan Roy, Aurobindo, and Vivekananda who had cleaned up and Europeanized historic Hinduism to present it to European audiences, and several centuries of European thinkers who saw vedic philosophy as synonymous with some form of pristine monism, usually either Plotinian mysticism or Spinozist deism (depending on their preferences).
Wrong in both cases, because those Indians changed Shankara's Advaita while Guenon never changed it. And Guenon never claimed Vedic philosophy was synonymous with either 1) monism 2) Plotinus or 3) Spinoza.

>>18768978
The Alawites certainly didn't sanction Guenon and definitely not Schuon's syncretic new age activities in Basel, but Guenon continued to forward converts to Schuon for a decade, so yes Guenon both considered Schuon a valid representative of tradition for quite some time, and committed acts al-Alawi would never have sanctioned and didn't ever sanction. When Guenon lost faith in Schuon he arranged to set up another white Frenchman as a pseudo-initiate to the Darqawi order so he could refer initiates to him in Paris.

>Schuon, on the other hand, gave his tariqa to hundreds; he seems to have received his ijaza from al-Alawi after al-Alawi's death, in a dream. That this dream included the Buddha Amitabha did not augur well for the future Islamic orthodoxy of his tariqa.

Alawi was an orthodox Muslim, not a dhikr fetishizing esoteric like Guenon's and Schuon's theosophical traditionalists. He would have found Guenon's insistence on perennial tradition heretical and probably did.

No need to respond to the typical mayavada apologetics in your post since everyone on /lit/ is familiar with them by now. If you choose to believe Guenon that his westernized interpretation of mayavada is the true Hindu tradition as yet another white esoteric that's fine for you. Although it is funny that you once again put Guenon's understanding of Hinduism above that of actual Hindus. Apparently only you and Guenon know the real truth about a country you have never seen and will never see.

Remember not to let Schuon touch you in your next esoteric dream session with him after the seance in which you contact the ghost of Guenon. That's some orthodox Islam for you.

>>18768764
bhai tu kaha se hai? ;)

Stick to your shit, whitey.

>>18769378
>Although it is funny that you once again put Guenon's understanding of Hinduism above that of actual Hindus.
I don't, I place Shankara's (one of the foremost Hindu theologians) understanding of it above Guenon's and other peoples both Hindu and non-Hindu, Guenon just happens to do the same as I do.

>>18768463
Seethe. The shadow of Guenon (pbuh) will keep haunting you, even in your dreams until you embrace the truth..

>>18768699
if you beleive that 'western imperialists' ever had this thought, let alone propagated it, you are a retard. Do you think people who read his work were like 'whoah my shared interest in these venerable traditions with this author who also respects them makes me not worry about raping their land'?

>>18768747
>there are absolute 0 (yes, ZERO) people outside of /lit/ who even know who this is
He’s pretty well-known even in certain academic circles.