Contents
- What is a philosopher?
- The abuse of intelligence
- Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism
- Positive aspect of rationalism?
- Can thought be in perfect conformity with the Real?
- Definition of modern philosophy
- Difference between philosophy, theology and gnosis
- What is dogmatism?
- Existentialism
- Infallibility of knowledge?
- What is “intellection”?
- Carl Jung
- Use and limit of logic
- The passage from objectivity to reflexive subjectivity
- A “brilliant” intelligence may be the vehicle of error
- Difference between metaphysics and philosophy
- Nature of modern man
- Modern philosophers
- Original meaning of the word philosophy
- What is thought?
- Phenomenology
- Philosophy and Christianity
- Sophia Perennis
- Scientistic philosophy
- Profane “thinkers”
- Protagoras, Sophists
- Reason and Intellection
- About the rational mode of knowledge
- Relativism
- Scepticism
- Scholasticism
- What is the understanding of an idea?
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Comparison between Plato and Aristotle
- More about Plato and/or Aristotle
- Platonism and Christianity
- Philosophy and modern times
- Kantianism
- Descartes
- Heidegger
- Kierkegaard
- Logic
- Pascal
What is a philosopher?
According to Pythagoras, wisdom is a priori the knowledge of the stellar world and of all that is situated above us; sophia being the wisdom of the gods, and philosophia that of men. For Heraclitus, the philosopher is one who applies himself to the knowledge of the profound nature of things; whereas for Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for Aristotle, it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them.
In addition, philosophy implies for all of the Ancients moral conformity to wisdom: only he is wise, sophos, who lives wisely. In this particular and precise sense, the wisdom of Solomon is philosophy; it is to live according to the nature of things, on the basis of piety — of the “fear of God” — with a view to that which is essential and liberating.
All this shows that, to say the least, the word “philosopher” in itself has nothing restrictive about it, and that one cannot legitimately impute to this word any of the vexing associations of ideas that it may elicit; usage applies this word to all thinkers, including eminent metaphysicians — some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets — so that one would like to reserve it for sages and simply use the term “rationalists” for profane thinkers. It is nevertheless legitimate to take account of a misuse of language that has become conventional, for unquestionably the terms “philosophy” and “philosopher” have been seriously compromised by ancient and modern reasoners; in fact, the serious inconvenience of these terms is that they conventionally imply that the norm for the mind is reasoning pure and simple, [1] in the absence not only of intellection, but also of indispensable objective data. Admittedly one is neither ignorant nor rationalistic just because one is a logician, but one is both if one is a logician and nothing more. [2]
In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible; on the other hand, gnosis, or philosophy in the proper and primitive sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone.
What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposed reasons: that the rationalist if need be draws his inspiration from a pre-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be “free”— falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth—likewise, mutatis mutandis: that the gnostic — in the orthodox sense of the term — bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth, or proper to the Essence which by definition escapes formal constraints.
Or again: whether the gnostic “thinks” what he has “seen” with the “eye of the heart,” or whether on the contrary he obtains his “vision” thanks to the intervention — preliminary and provisional and in no wise efficient — of a thought which then takes on the role of occasional cause , is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth, or with regard to its almost supernatural springing forth in the spirit.
Notes
[1] Naturally the most “ advanced” of the modernists seek to demolish the very principles of reasoning, but this is simply fantasy pro domo, for man is condemned to reason as soon as he uses language, unless he wishes to demonstrate nothing at all. In any case, one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of demonstrating anything, if words are still to have any meaning.
[2] A German author (H. Turck) has proposed the term “misosopher” —“ enemy of wisdom”— for those thinkers who undermine the very foundations of truth and intelligence. We will add that misosophy—without mentioning some ancient precedents—begins grosso modo with “ criticism” and ends with subjectivisms, relativisms, existentialisms, dynamisms, psychologisms and biologisms of every kind. As for the ancient expression “misology,” it designates above all the hatred of the fideist for the use of reason.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, pp. 89-90
The abuse of intelligence
The abuse of intelligence must not be confused with intelligence itself, as was done in classical Greece, the Renaissance, the Age of Philosophy, the Nineteenth Century and, with new and rather unpleasant modalities, in the Twentieth; the human spirit has the right to be creative only to the extent that it is contemplative, and if it has this quality, it will acknowledge that which “is” before busying itself with that which “may be.”
The progressivist ideology of the Nineteenth Century believed that it could reduce the problem of the human spirit, in a certain respect at least, to the rather expeditious distinction between “civilized” and “barbarian” peoples. Now if to be intelligent is to be realistic, the Red Indians for example, with their ecological realism, were more intelligent than the chimerically industrialist Whites, and they were so not merely on the surface, but in depth. And this allows us to note that the naturism of peoples without written language is based, more often than one may be prepared to admit, on a “primordial choice” that is far from being devoid of wisdom. Instinctively distrusting the intelligence of the sorcerer’s apprentice, they preferred to abstain.(12) 12. Their axioms are: if you create something — by going too far in outwardness and concretization — you become its slave; and: urban conglomerations produce both degeneracy and calamities. These convictions explain the vandalism of naturist peoples when they become conquerors, even though afterwards they cannot resist the hypnosis of urban civilizations. Judeo-Moslem iconoclasm is not unconnected with this perspective.
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, 2002,
“On Intelligence”, p.13
Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism
Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism are the two great abuses of intelligence, which violate pure intellectuality as well as the sense of the sacred; [1] it is through this propensity that thinkers “are wise in their own eyes” and end by “calling evil good, and good evil” and by “putting darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah, 5:20 and 21); they are also the ones who, on the plane of life or experience, “make bitter what is sweet,” namely the love of the eternal God, and “sweet what is bitter,” namely the illusion of the evanescent world.
[1] By a curious and inevitable backlash, the abuse of intelligence is always accompanied by some inconsequentiality and some blindness: on the plane of art for example, it is inconsequential to copy nature when one is condemned in advance to stop halfway, for in painting, one can realize neither total perspective nor movement, any more than one can realize the latter in sculpture, without mentioning the impossibility of imitating the living appearance of surfaces.
Similarly in philosophy: by forgetting that thought is there to furnish keys, and by wanting to exhaust all the knowable by thought alone, one ends by no longer knowing how to think at all; and likewise for science, which out of principle bypasses everything essential, as is proved moreover by its dismal results. Some persons will term our doctrine “ dogmatic” and “ naïve,” which for us is a compliment.
Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, 1982,
“To refuse or to accept revelation”, pp. 151-152
Positive aspect of rationalism?
(…) it has to be acknowledged that rationalism benefits from extenuating circumstances in the face of religion, to the extent that rationalism becomes the mouthpiece of legitimate needs for causality raised by certain dogmas, at least when these are taken literally, as theology demands. [1]
In an altogether general way, it goes without saying that a rationalist can be right on the level of observations and experiences; man is not a closed system, although he can try to be. But even aside from any question of rationalism and dogmatism, one cannot begrudge anyone being scandalized by the stupidities and the crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, or even simply by the antinomies between the different creeds; however, since horrors are assuredly not the appanage of religion — the preachers of the “goddess reason” furnish the proof of this — it is necessary to confine ourselves to the observation that excesses and abuses are a part of human nature. If it is absurd and shocking that crimes claim the authority of the Holy Spirit, it is no less illogical and scandalous that they take place in the shadow of an ideal of rationality and justice.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Thought: Light and Perversion”, p. 5.
What is important to understand is that the “positivistic” rationalism of the West does not exclude the presence of a valid element that also pertains to reason, namely the habit of relying on reason in all the cases wherein it is normal to do so; thus of considering the nature of things rather than obeying conventional reflexes.
If the Westerner — “free thinker” or not — has a tendency to “think for himself,” wrongly or rightly according to the case, this is due to distant causes; the Western mind expressed itself through Plato and Aristotle before having undergone the influence of Christian fideism, and even then, and from the very outset, it could not help having recourse to the Greek philosophers.
Howbeit, if finally the West had need of that messianic and dramatic religion which is Christianity, it is because the average European was an active type and an adventurer and not a contemplative like the Hindu; but the “Aryan” atavism had to resurface sooner or later, whence the Renaissance and modern rationalism. No doubt, Christianity presents elements of esoterism that make it compatible with all ethnic temperaments, but its formal structure, or its moral bearing, had to be in keeping with the fundamental temperament of the West, whether Mediterranean or Nordic.
Schuon, The Eye of the Heart, 1997,
“Between East and West”, pp. 63-64.
As regards the question of Western rationality, (…) the following must be taken into account: the “critical mind,” if one may so express it, developed in a world where everything is called into question and where intelligence is continually forced into a state of self-defense; whereas the East has been able to slumber in the shade of the sacred and of the conventional, in the security of a religious universe without fissures.
In the West, such disciplines as the “science of religions” and “textual criticism,” whatever their errors of principle, benefit from extenuating circumstances, given the irrefutable documentary evidence; so that certain hypotheses may be valid, despite the falseness of their context.
In short: we reject rationalism not because of its possibly plausible criticisms of humanized religion, but because of its negation of the divine kernel of the phenomenon of religion; a negation that essentially implies the negation of intellectual intuition, thus of that immanent Divine Presence which is the Intellect. The basic error of systematized rationality — by the way, it is wrong to attribute this ideology to the great Greeks — is to put fallible reasoning in place of infallible intellection; as if the rational faculty were the whole of Intelligence and even the only Intelligence.
[1] There were “voices of wisdom” — not sceptical, but positive and constructive — on the side of the believers themselves, within the framework of Scholasticism and that of the Renaissance; also within that of the Reformation, with the old theosophers for example.
Schuon, The Eye of the Heart, 1997,
“Between East and West”, pp. 68-69.
Can thought be in perfect conformity with the Real?
It is from this unintelligible — and in a sense “absurd” — aspect of Mâyâ or of Prakriti [1] that arises in the main that disturbing element which insinuates itself into our mental crystallizations as soon as they depart from their normal function, which is indicative and not exhaustive; to speak of an absolute conformity of our thought to the Real is a contradiction in terms, since our thought is not the Real and since our sense of a partial conformity to the Real implies that our thought is separated from it or different from it.
To deduce from this that total truth is inaccessible to us is an even greater error, and it is of a piece with the other, being also a product of confusion between direct knowledge and thought. The fact that we can have a perfectly adequate notion of a tree cannot possibly signify that our thought is identified with the tree, but on the other hand neither can the fact that our adequation is not an identity signify that we cannot know the tree in any way.
However that may be, the desire to enclose universal Reality in an exclusive and exhaustive “explanation” brings with it a permanent disequilibrium due to the interferences of Mâyâ; moreover it is just this disequilibrium and this anxiety that are the life of modem philosophy. Nevertheless this aspect of unintelligibility, this kind of “irrationality”, this elusive and almost “mocking” element in Mâyâ that condemns philosophy “according to the flesh” (St. Paul) to a vicious circle and finally to suicide, proceeds in the last analysis from the transcendence of the Principle, which will no more allow itself to be imprisoned by blind ratiocinations than will our sensorial faculties allow themselves to be perceived by our senses; the use of the word “imprisoned” allows the “indicative” value of logical processes to remain unquestioned.
[1] This does not mean that these two ideas are synonymous, but their juxtaposition signifies that Prakriti, the ontological “Substance”, is the divine “ femininity” of Mâyâ. The masculine aspect is represented by the divine Names which, in so far as they correspond to Purusha, determine and “fertilize” Substance, in collaboration with the three fundamental tendencies comprised in Substance (the gunas: sattwa, rajas, tamas).
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“Tracing Mâyâ”, 78-79
As regards the illegitimacy of any attempt to overstep the limits imposed by the mystery of Isis, it could be objected that metaphysics is also such an attempt. This argument applies to profane philosophy, but not to the scientia sacra by which Isis Herself consents to lift a veil, without however withdrawing it to the point of leaving no mystery.
The goal of the profane thinkers on the contrary is to propose to the intelligence only what is rationally verifiable and to “free” thought from all transcendence; the intention is to “demystify” the universe by explaining it once and for all; thus rationalistic language wishes to press the knowable to the last drop. Thought is then all that language expresses and nothing more.
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, 2002,
“The Veil of Isis”, p. 21.
Definition of modern philosophy
On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity: the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the “fall” entails a hypertrophy of practical intelligence, whence in the final analysis the explosion of the physical sciences and the appearance of pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology. [1]
[1] In the nineteenth century, the desire to reconcile faith and reason, or the religious spirit and science, appeared in the form of occultism: a hybrid phenomenon that despite its phantasmagoria had some merits, if only by its opposition to materialism and to confessional superficiality.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Thought: Light and Perversion”, p. 4.
Difference between philosophy, theology and gnosis
In a certain respect, the difference between philosophy, theology and gnosis is total; in another respect, it is relative. It is total when one understands by “philosophy,” only rationalism; by “theology,” only the explanation of religious teachings; and by “gnosis,” only intuitive and intellective, and thus supra-rational, knowledge; but the difference is only relative when one understands by “philosophy” the fact of thinking, by “theology” the fact of speaking dogmatically of God and religious things, and by “gnosis” the fact of presenting pure metaphysics, for then the genres interpenetrate. It is impossible to deny that the most illustrious Sufis, while being “ gnostics” by definition, were at the same time to some extent theologians and to some extent philosophers, or that the great theologians were both to some extent philosophers and to some extent gnostics, the last word having to be understood in its proper and not sectarian meaning.
If we wish to retain the limitative, or even pejorative, sense of the word philosopher, we could say that gnosis or pure metaphysics starts with certainty, whereas philosophy on the contrary starts from doubt and only serves to overcome it with the means that are at its disposal and which intend to be purely rational. But since neither the term “philosophy” in itself, nor the usage that has always been made of it, obliges us to accept only the restrictive sense of the word, we shall not censure too severely those who employ it in a wider sense than may seem opportune. [1]
Theory, by definition, is not an end in itself; it is only — and seeks only — to be a key for becoming conscious through the “heart.” If there is attached to the notion of “philosophy” a suspicion of superficiality, insufficiency and pretension, it is precisely because all too often — and indeed always in the case of the moderns — it is presented as being sufficient unto itself. “This is only philosophy”: we readily accept the use of this turn of phrase, but only on condition that one does not say that “Plato is only a philosopher,” Plato who said that “beauty is the splendor of the true”; beauty that includes or demands all that we are or can be.
[1] Even Ananda Coomaraswamy does not hesitate to speak of “Hindu philosophy,” which at least has the advantage of making clear the “ literary genre,” more especially as the reader is supposed to know what the Hindu spirit is in particular and what the traditional spirit is in general. In an analogous manner, when one speaks of the “Hindu religion,” one knows perfectly well that it is not a case — and cannot be a case — of a Semitic and western religion, hence refractory to every differentiation of perspective; thus one speaks traditionally of the Roman, Greek and Egyptian “ religions,” and the Koran does not hesitate to say to the pagan Arabs: “To you your religion and to me mine,” although the religion of the pagans had none of the characteristic features of Judeo-Christian monotheism.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, pp. 97-98.
What is dogmatism?
The purely ‘theoristic’ understanding of an idea, which we have so termed because of the limitative tendency which paralyses it, may justly be characterized by the word ‘dogmatism’; religious dogma in fact, at least to the extent to which it is supposed to exclude other conceptual forms, though certainly not in itself, represents an idea considered in conformity with a ‘theoristic’ tendency, and this exclusive way of looking at ideas has even become characteristic of the religious point of view as such.
A religious dogma ceases, however, to be limited in this way once it is understood in the light of its inherent truth, which is of a universal order, and this is the case in all esoterism. On the other hand, the ideas formulated in esoterism and in metaphysical doctrines generally may in their turn be understood according to the dogmatic or ‘theoristic’ tendency, and the case is then analogous to that of the religious dogmatism of which we have just spoken.
In this connection, we must again point out that a religious dogma is not a dogma in itself but solely by the fact of being considered as such and through a sort of confusion of the idea with the form in which it is clothed; on the other hand, the outward dogmatization of universal truths is perfectly justified in view of the fact that these truths or ideas, in having to provide the foundation of a tradition, must be capable of being assimilated in some degree by all men.
Dogmatism as such does not consist in the mere enunciation of an idea, that is to say in the fact of giving form to a spiritual intuition, but rather in an interpretation which, instead of rejoining the formless and total Truth after taking as its starting point one of the forms of that Truth, results in a sort of paralysis of this form by denying its intellectual potentialities and by attributing to it an absoluteness which only the formless and total Truth itself can possess.
Dogmatism reveals itself not only by its inability to conceive the inward or implicit illimitability of the symbol, the universality which resolves all outward oppositions, but also by its inability to recognize, when faced with two apparently contradictory truths, the inward connection which they implicitly affirm, a connection which makes of them complementary aspects of one and the same truth.
One might illustrate this in the following manner: whoever participates in universal Knowledge will regard two apparently contradictory truths as he would two points situated on one and the same circumference which links them together by its continuity and so reduces them to unity; in the measure in which these points are distant from, and thus opposed to, one another, there will be contradiction, and this contradiction will reach its maximum when the two points are situated at the extremities of a diameter of the circle; but this extreme opposition or contradiction only appears as a result of isolating the points under consideration from the circle and ignoring the existence of the latter. One may conclude from this that a dogmatic affirmation, that is to say an affirmation which is inseparable from its form and admits no other, is comparable to a point, which by definition, as it were, contradicts all other possible points; a speculative formulation, on the other hand, is comparable to an element of a circle, the very form of which indicates its logical and ontological continuity and therefore the whole circle or, by analogical transposition, the whole Truth; this comparison will, perhaps, suggest in the clearest possible way the difference which separates a dogmatic affirmation from a speculative formulation.
The outward and intentional contradictoriness of speculative formulations may show itself, it goes without saying, not only in a single, logically paradoxical formula such as the Vedic Aham Brahmasmi (“I am Brahma”) — or the Vedantic definition of the Yogi — or the Anal-Haqq (“I am the Truth”) of El Hallaj, or Christ’s words concerning His Divinity, but also, and for even stronger reasons, as between different formulations each of which may be logically homogeneous in itself. Examples of the latter may be found in all sacred Scriptures, notably in the Koran: we need only recall the apparent contradiction between the affirmations regarding predestination and those regarding free-will, affirmations which are only contradictory in the sense that they express opposite aspects of a single reality. However, apart from these paradoxical formulations — whether they are so in themselves or in relation to one another — there also remain certain theories which, although expressing the strictest orthodoxy, are nevertheless in outward contradiction one with another, this being due to the diversity of their respective points of view, which are not chosen arbitrarily and artificially but are established spontaneously by virtue of a genuine intellectual originality.
To return to what was said above about the understanding of ideas, a theoretical notion may be compared to the view of an object. Just as this view does not reveal all possible aspects, or in other words the integral nature of the object, the perfect knowledge of which would be nothing less than identity with it, so a theoretical notion does not itself correspond to the integral truth, of which it necessarily suggests only one aspect, essential or otherwise. [1]
In the example just given error corresponds to an inadequate view of the object whereas a dogmatic conception is comparable to the exclusive view of one aspect of the object, a view which supposes the immobility of the seeing subject. As for a speculative and therefore intellectually unlimited conception, this may be compared to the sum of all possible views of the object in question, views which presuppose in the subject a power of displacement or an ability to alter his viewpoint, hence a certain mode of identity with the dimensions of space, which themselves effectually reveal the integral nature of the object, at least with respect to its form which is all that is in question in the example given. Movement in space is in fact an active participation in the possibilities of space, whereas static extension in space, the form of our bodies for example, is a passive participation in these same possibilities. This may be transposed without difficulty to a higher plane and one may then speak of an ‘intellectual space, namely the cognitive all-possibility which is fundamentally the same as the divine Omniscience, and consequently of ‘intellectual dimensions’ which are the ‘internal’ modalities of this Omniscience; Knowledge through the Intellect is none other than the perfect participation of the subject in these modalities, and in the physical world this participation is effectively represented by movement.
When speaking, therefore, of the understanding of ideas, we may distinguish between a ‘dogmatic’ understanding, comparable to the view of an object from a single viewpoint, and an integral or speculative understanding, comparable to the indefinite series of possible views of the object, views which are realized through indefinitely multiple changes of point of view. Just as, when the eye changes its position, the different views of an object are connected by a perfect continuity, which represents, so to speak, the determining reality of the object, so the different aspects of a truth, however contradictory they may appear and notwithstanding their indefinite multiplicity, describe the integral Truth which surpasses and determines them. We would again refer here to an illustration we have already used; a dogmatic affirmation corresponds to a point which, as such, contradicts by definition every other point, whereas a speculative formulation is always conceived as an element of a circle which by its very form indicates principially its own continuity, and hence the entire circle and the Truth in its entirety.
It follows from the above that in speculative doctrines it is the ‘point of view’ on the one hand and the ‘aspect’ on the other hand which determine the form of the affirmation, whereas in dogmatism the affirmation is confused with a determinate point of view and aspect, thus excluding all others. [2] In a treatise directed against rationalist philosophy, Al-Ghazzâli speaks of certain blind men who, not having even a theoretical knowledge of an elephant, came across this animal one day and started to feel the different parts of its body; as a result each man represented the animal to himsel f according to the limb which he touched: for the first, who touched a foot, the elephant resembled a column, whereas for the second, who touched one of the tusks, it resembled a stake, and so on. By this parable Al-Ghazzâli seeks to show the error involved in trying to enclose the universal within a fragment ary notion of it, or within isolated and exclusive ‘aspects’ or ‘points of view’. Shri Ramakrishna also uses this parable to demonstrate the inadequacy of dogmatic exclusiveness in its negative aspect. The same idea could however be expressed by means of an even more adequate example: faced with any object, some might say that it ‘is’ a certain shape, while others might say that it ‘is’ such and such a material; others again might maintain that it ‘is’ such and such a number or such and such a weight and so forth.
[1] In a treatise directed against rationalist philosophy, Al-Ghazzâli speaks of certain blind men who, not having even a theoretical knowledge of an elephant, came across this animal one day and started to feel the different parts of its body: as a result each man represented the animal to himself according to the part that he touched: for the first, who touched a foot, the elephant resembled a column, whereas for the second, who touched one of the tusks, it resembled a snake, and so on. By this parable Al-Ghazzâli seeks to show the error involved in trying to enclose the universal within a fragmentary notion of it or within isolated and exclusive aspects or points of view. Shri Ramakrishna also uses this parable to demonstrate the inadequacy of dogmatic exclusiveness in its negative aspect. The same idea could, however, be expressed by means of an even more adequate example: faced with any object some might say that it “is” a certain shape, while others might say that it “is” such and such a material: others again might maintain that it “is” such and such a number or such and such a weight and so forth.
[2] The Angels are intelligences that are limited to a particular aspect of Divinity: consequently an angelic state is a sort of transcendent point of view. On a lower plane. the “intellectuality” of animals and of the more peripheral species of the terrestrial state, that of plants, for example, corresponds cosmologically to the angelic intellectuality: what differentiates one vegetable species from another is, in reality, simply the mode of its “intelligence”: in other words, it is the form or rather the integral nature of a plant that reveals the state — eminently passive, of course — of contemplation or knowledge of its species: we say “of its species” advisedly, because, considered in isolation, a plant does not constitute an individual. We would recall here that the Intellect, being universal, must be discoverable in everything that exists, to whatever order it belongs; the same is not true of reason, which is only a specifically human faculty and is in no way identical with intelligence, either our own or that of other beings.
Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, 1993,
“Conceptual Dimensions”, pp. 1-6.
Existentialism
In an altogether opposite order of things, let us take note of that suicide of reason — or “esoterism of stupidity” — which is existentialism in all its forms; it is the incapacity to think erected into a philosophy. Positivistic and democratic rationalism had to come to that.
Schuon, The Eye of the Heart, 1997,
“Between East and West”, p. 69
The experience of the deceptive “liberty” which is propounded as an end in itself or as “art for art’s sake” — as if one could be really free outside the truth and without inward liberty! — this experience, we say, is only in its beginning phase, although the world has already reaped some of its bitter fruits; for everything still human, normal and stable in the world survives only through the vitality of ancestral traditions — of “prejudices” if one so prefers — whether it be a matter of the West, molded by Christianity, or of any Nilotic or Amazonian tribe. To have some idea of what the free man of “tomorrow” might be like, the man starting from zero and “creating himself”[1] — but in reality the man of the machine which has escaped from his control — it suffices to take a glance at the very “existentialist” psychology of most youth. If the profound and “subconscious” imprints of tradition are removed from man, there remain finally only the stigmata of his fall and the unleashing of the infra-human.
[1] And creating the truth at the same time, of course.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Reflections on Ideological Sentimentalism”, pp. 15-16.
To wish to replace reasoning by experience on the practical plane and in a relative fashion could still be meaningful; but to do so on the intellectual and speculative plane, as the empiricists and existentialists wish to do is, properly speaking, demented. For the inferior man, only what is contingent is real, and he seeks by his method to lower principles to the level of contingencies, when he does not deny them purely and simply. This mentality of the shudra has infiltrated Christian theology and has committed its well-known ravages. [1]
[1] Some modernist theologians readily admit that there is a God — they find a few reasons for doing so — but they wish to justify this in a “provisional” and not in a “fixed” manner, while refusing of course the definitive formulations of the scholastics; whereas on this plane the truth is either definitive or it is not. A mode of knowledge which is incapable of furnishing the truth to us now, will never furnish it.
Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, 1986,
“Epistemological Premises”, pp. 8-9.
Relativism engenders the spirit of rebellion and is at the same time its fruit. The spirit of rebellion is not, like holy anger, a passing state and directed against some worldly abuse; on the contrary, it is a chronic malady directed against Heaven and against all that represents Heaven or is a reminder of it. When Lao-Tse said that “in the latter times the man of virtue appears vile,” he had in mind this spirit of rebellion that characterizes our century; yet, for psychological and existentialist relativism, which by definition is always out to justify the crude ego, such a state of mind is normal, it is its absence which is a sickness; hence the would-be abolition of the sense of sin. The sense of sin is really the consciousness of an equilibrium that surpasses our personal will and which, even while wounding us on occasion, operates in the long run for the good of our integral personality and that of the human collectivity; this sense of sin is a counterpart of the sense of the sacred, the instinct for that which surpasses us and which, for that very reason, must not be touched by ignorant and iconoclastic hands.
While those errors tending to deny objective and intrinsic intelligence destroy themselves by postulating a thesis which is disproved by the very existence of the postulate itself, the fact that errors exist does not in itself amount to a proof that the intelligence suffers from an inevitable fallibility, for error does not derive from intelligence as such. On the contrary, error is a privative phenomenon causing the activity of the intelligence to deviate through the intervention of an element of passion or blindness, without however being able to invalidate the nature of the cognitive faculty itself.
A patent example of the classical contradiction here in question, one which largely affects all modern thinking, is provided by existentialism, which postulates a definition of the world that is impossible if existentialism itself is possible. We have to take our choice between two things: either objective knowledge, absolute therefore in its own order, is possible, proving thereby that existentialism is false; or else existentialism is true, but then its own promulgation is impossible, since in the existentialist universe there is no room for any intellection that is objective and stable.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“The Contradiction of Relativism”, pp. 7-8.
Intelligent persons, provided they have not been artificially perverted, have certain ways of thinking and reacting, while unintelligent persons have other ways. Existentialism has achieved the tour de force or the monstrous contortion of representing the commonest stupidity as intelligence and disguising it as philosophy, and of holding intelligence up to ridicule, that of all intelligent men of all times. Since “scandal must needs come” this manifestation of the absurd was to be expected, there was no escaping it at the time when it had become a possibility; and if it be original to elevate error into truth, vice into virtue and evil into good the same may be said of representing stupidity as intelligence and vice versa; all that was wanted was to conceive the idea. All down the ages to philosophize was to think; it has been reserved to the twentieth century not to think and to make a philosophy of it.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 1984,
“Abuse of the Ideas of the Concrete and the Abstract”, p. 26
If the normal functioning of the intelligence has to be subjected to a critique, then the criticizing consciousness has to be subjected to a critique in its turn by asking, “what is it that thinks?” and so forth—a play of mirrors whose very inconclusiveness demonstrates its absurdity, proved moreover in advance by the very nature of cognition. A thought is “dogmatist,” or else it is nothing; a thought that is “criticist” is in contradiction with its own existence. A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting; and this is just what has happened to critical philosophy, swept away in its turn, and through its own fault, by existentialism in all its forms.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Rationalism Real and Apparent”, p. 29.
Wearied by the artifices and the lack of imagination of academic rationalism, many of our contemporaries in rejecting it reject true metaphysics as well, because they think it “abstract” — which in their minds is synonymous with “artificial” — and seek the “concrete,” not beyond the rational and in the order of ontological prototypes, but in crude fact, in the sensory, the “actual”; man becomes the arbitrary measure of everything, and thereby abdicates his dignity as man, namely his possibility of objective and universal knowledge. He is then the measure of things not in a truly human but in an animal way; his dull empiricism is that of an animal which registers facts and notices a pasture or a path; but since he is despite all a “human animal,” he disguises his dullness in mental arabesques. The existentialists are human as it were by chance; what distinguishes them from animals is not human intelligence but the human style of an infra-human intelligence.
The protagonists of “concrete” thought, of whatever shade, readily label as “speculations in the abstract” whatever goes beyond their understanding, but they forget to tell us why these speculations are possible, that is to say what confers this strange possibility on human intelligence. Thus what does it mean that for thousands of years men deemed to be wise have practiced such speculations, and by what right does one call “intellectual progress” the replacement of these speculations by a crude empiricism which excludes on principle any operation characteristic of intelligence? If these “positivists” are right, none but they are intelligent; all the founders of religions, all the saints, all the sages have been wrong on essentials whereas Mr. So-and-So at long last sees things clearly; one might just as well say that human intelligence does not exist. There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas — not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia — were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, 24-25.
To sum up our exposition and at the risk of repeating ourselves, we say that all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error. If “everything is true that is subjective,” then Lapland is in France, provided we imagine it so; and if everything is relative — in a sense which excludes all reflection of absoluteness in the world — then the definition of relativity is equally relative, absolutely relative, and our definition has no meaning. Relativists of all kinds — the “existentialist” and “vitalist” defenders of the infra-rational — have then no excuse for their bad habits of thought.
Those who would dig a grave for the intelligence [1] do not escape this fatal contradiction: they reject intellectual discrimination as being “rationalism” and in favor of “existence” or of “life,” without realizing that this rejection is not “existence” or “life” but a “rationalist” operation in its turn, hence something considered to be opposed to the idol “life” or “existence”; for if rationalism — or let us say intelligence — is opposed, as these philosophers believe, to fair and innocent “existence” — that of vipers and bombs among other things — then there is no means of either defending or accusing this existence, nor even of defining it in any way at all, since all thinking is supposed to “go outside” existence in order to place itself on the side of rationalism, as if one could cease to exist in order to think.
In reality, man — insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth — is intelligence; and intelligence — in its principle and its plenitude — is knowledge of the Absolute; the Absolute is the fundamental content of the intelligence and determines its nature and functions. What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept — whether explicit or implicit — of the Absolute; it is from this that the whole hierarchy of values is derived, and hence all notion of a homogeneous world. God is the “motionless mover” of every operation of the mind, even when man — reason — makes himself out to be the measure of God.
To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the Absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence; nothing is fully human that is not determined by the Divine, and therefore centered on it. Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.
In our day, it is the machine which tends to become the measure of man, and thereby it becomes something like the measure of God, though of course in a diabolically illusory manner; for the most “advanced” minds it is in fact the machine, technics, experimental science, which will henceforth dictate to man his nature, and it is these which create the truth — as is shamelessly admitted — or rather what usurps its place in man’s consciousness. It is difficult for man to fall lower, to realize a greater mental perversion, a more complete abandonment of himself, a more perfect betrayal of his intelligent and free personality: in the name of “science” and of “human genius” man consents to become the creation of what he has created and to forget what he is, to the point of expecting the answer to this from machines and from the blind forces of nature; he has waited until he is no longer anything and now claims to be his own creator. Swept away by a torrent, he glories in his incapacity to resist it.
[1] Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Klages and others like them.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, 36-38.
What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity.
The moderns have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers — and all the sages of the East as well — with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well. How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already—for it alone could conceive of any such idea—and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity?
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians”, pp. 51-52.
The existentialist will not ask, “What is this thing?” but “What does this thing signify for me?” Thus he will put the altogether subjective “ significance” in place of the objective nature, which is not only the height of absurdity but also of pride and insolence. As true greatness “ signifies” nothing for the little man, he will see in it only a kind of infirmity the better to be able to enjoy his own “ significant” inflatedness.
Schuon, From the Divine do the Human, 1982,
“Aspects of the Theophanic Phenomenon of Consciousness”, p. 16, footnote 6.
Man is often just an animal which — as if by chance — possesses a human brain. A cow is well aware in her own fashion that she exists and grazes where she will; that is not difficult to say in human language; but before the existentialists no one had the audacity to class as wisdom this perception of his own existence and of his freedom to choose between apples and pears.
Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, 2007,
“Thought and Civilization”, p. 12.
There is a common mistake, and one characteristic of the positivist or existentialist mentality of our times, which consists in believing that the establishing of a fact depends on knowing its causes or the remedies for it as the case may be, as if man had not a right to see things he can neither explain nor modify; to point out an evil is called “barren criticism” and one forgets that the first step towards a possible cure is to establish the nature of the disease. In any case, every situation offers the possibility, if not of an objective solution, at least of a subjective evaluation, a liberation by the spirit; whoever understands the real nature of machinery will at the same time escape from psychological enslavement to machines, and this is already a great gain. We say this without any optimism and without losing sight of the fact that the present world is a necessary evil whose metaphysical root lies in the last analysis in the infinity of Divine Possibility.
Schuon, Castes and Races, “The Meaning of Caste”.
A poem by Schuon in English translation
“Existentialism” is a thinking
That no longer wishes to think;
this means the destruction
Of the true thinking that constitutes man.
The existentialist fanatics
Dislocate their brains for nothing —
it is only a case of Self-delusion and self-promotion.
For to think truly means: recollection.
Let the fools spin their foolishness.
Schuon, Songs Without Names, Vol. VII-XII.
German original
“Daseinsphilosophie” — sie ist ein Denken
Des Nichtmehr-Denkenwollens: so Zerstörung
Des wahren Denkens, das den Menschen macht.
Die Existenz-Fanatiker verrenken
Sich das Gehirn für nichts — nur Selbstbetörung
Und Selbstbespiegelung kommt in Betracht.
Denn wirklich denken heißet: sich besinnen.
Und lasst die Narren ihre Torheit spinnen.”
Schuon, Songs Without Names, Vol. VII-XII.
Infallibility of knowledge?
The notion of philosophy, with its suggestion of human fallibility, evokes ipso facto the problem of infallibility, and thereby the question of knowing whether man is condemned by his nature to be mistaken. We have seen in the course of this book that in fact the human mind, even when disciplined by a sacred tradition, remains exposed to many faults. That these should be possible does not mean that they are inevitable in principle; on the contrary they are due to causes that are not at all mysterious. Doctrinal infallibility pertains to the realm of orthodoxy and authority, the first element being objective and the second subjective, each having a bearing that is either formal or formless, extrinsic or intrinsic, traditional or universal, depending on the case.
This being so, it is not even difficult to be infallible when one knows one’s limits; it is enough not to speak of things of which one is ignorant, which presupposes that one knows that one is ignorant of them. This amounts to saying that infallibility is not only a matter of information and intellection, but that it also, and essentially, comprises a moral or a psychological condition, in the absence of which even men who are in principle infallible become accidentally fallible. Let us add that it is not blameworthy to offer a plausible hypothesis, on condition that is not be presented in the form of certitude ex cathedra.
At all events, no infallibility exists which a priori encompasses all possible contingent domains; omniscience is not a human possibility. No one can be infallible with regard to unknown, or insufficiently known, phenomena; one may have an intuition for pure principles without having one for a given phenomenal order, that is to say, without being able to apply the principles spontaneously in such and such a domain. The importance of this possible incapacity diminishes to the extent that the phenomenal domain envisaged is secondary and, on the contrary, that the principles infallibly enunciated are essential. One must forgive small errors on the part of one who offers great truths — and it is the latter that determine how small or how great the errors are — whereas it would obviously be perverse to forgive great errors when they are accompanied by many small truths. [1]
Infallibility, in a sense by definition, pertains in one degree or another to the Holy Spirit, in a way that may be extraordinary or ordinary, properly supernatural or quasi-natural; now the Holy Spirit, in the religious order, adapts itself to the nature of man in the sense that it limits itself to preventing the victory of intrinsic heresies, a victory which would falsify this “divine form” that is the religion; for the upaya, the “saving mirage,” is willed by Heaven, not by men. [2]
[1] There is certainly no reason to admire a science that enumerates insects and atoms but is unaware of God, a science that professes ignorance concerning Him and yet claims omniscience as a matter of principle. It should be noted that the scientist, like every other rationalist, does not base himself on reason as such; he calls “reason” his lack of imagination and knowledge, and his ignorances are for him the “data” of reason.
[2] Always respectful of this form, the Holy Spirit will not teach a Muslim theologian the subtleties of Trinitarian theology nor those of Vedānta; from another angle it will not change a racial or ethnic mentality—neither that of the Romans with regard to Catholicism nor that of the Arabs with regard to Islam. Humanity must have not only its history but its histrionics.
Schuon, Sufism, Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, pp. 99-100.
What is intellection?
… As for intellection, on the one hand it necessarily expresses itself by means of reason and on the other hand it can make use of the latter as a support for actualization. These two factors enable theologians to reduce intellection to reasoning; that is to say, they deny it — while at the same time seeing in rationality an element that is more or less problematic if not contrary to faith — without seeking or being able to account for the fact that faith is itself an indirect, and in a way, anticipated mode of intellection.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“The Exo-Esoteric Symbiosis“, p. 18.
The intellect is a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not “create,” it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective. In most men of the “iron age” the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality, although doubtless there is no watertight partition between it and the reason, for a sound process of reasoning indirectly transmits something of the intellect; be that as it may, the respective operations of the reason – or the mind – and of the intellect are fundamentally different from the point of view that interests us here, despite certain appearances due to the fact that every man is a thinking being, whether he be wise or ignorant.
There is at the same time analogy and opposition: the mind is analogous to the intellect insofar as it is a kind of intelligence, but is opposed to it by its limited, indirect and discursive character; as for the apparent limitations of the intellect, they are merely accidental and extrinsic, while the limits of the mental faculty are inherent in it. Even if the intellect cannot exteriorize the “total truth” – or rather reality – because that is in itself impossible, it can perfectly well establish points of reference which are adequate and sufficient, rather as it is possible to represent space by a circle, a cross, a square, a spiral or a point and so on. Truth and reality must not be confused: the latter relates to “being” and signifies the aseity of things, and the former relates to “knowing” – to the image of reality reflected in the mirror of the intellect – and signifies the adequation of “being” and “knowing”; it is true that reality is often designated by the word “truth,” but this is a dialectical synthesis which aims at defining truth in relation to its virtuality of “being,” of “reality.”
If truth is thus made to embrace ontological reality, aseity, the inexpressible, and so also the “personal” realization of the Divine, there is clearly no “total truth” on the plane of thought; but if by “truth” is understood thought insofar as it is an adequate reflection, on the intellectual plane, of “being,” there is a “total truth” on this plane, but on condition firstly that nothing quantitative is envisaged in this totality, and secondly that it is made clear that this totality can have a relative sense, according to the order of thought to which it belongs.
There is a total truth which is such because it embraces, in principle, all possible truths: this is metaphysical doctrine, whether its enunciation be simple or complex, symbolical or dialectical; but there is also a truth which is total on the plane of spiritual realization, and in this case “truth” becomes synonymous with “reality.” Since on the plane of facts there is never anything absolute – or more precisely, nothing “absolutely absolute” – the “totality,” while being perfect and sufficient in practice, is always relative in theory; it is indefinitely extensible, but also indefinitely reducible; it can assume the form of an extended doctrine, but also that of a simple sentence, just as the totality of space can be expressed by a system of intertwining patterns too complex for the eye to unravel, but also by an elementary geometrical figure.
We have compared pure intelligence to a mirror; now it must be recalled that there is always a certain element of inversion in the relationship between subject and object, that is, the subject which reflects inverts the object reflected. A tree reflected in water is inverted, and so is “false” in relation to the real tree, but it is still a tree – even “this” tree – and never anything else: consequently the reflected tree is perfectly “true,” despite its illusory character, so that it is a mistake to conclude that intellection is illusory because of its subjective framework. The powers of the cosmic illusion are not unlimited, for the Absolute is reflected in the contingent, otherwise the latter would not exist; everything is in God – “All is Atma” – and the Absolute flashes forth everywhere, it is “infinitely close”; barriers are illusory, they are at the same time immeasurably great and infinitesimally small.
The world is antinomic by definition, which is a way of saying it is not God; every image is at the same time true and false, and it suffices to discern the various relationships. Christ is “true God and true man,” which is the very formula of the antinomy and parallelism governing the cosmos: antinomy because the creature is not the Creator, and parallelism because nothing can be “outside God,” Reality being one.
In a certain sense, doctrine is identical with truth, for account must always be taken of the “relatively absolute”; doctrine should have more than a relative value for us seeing that its content transcends relativities to the extent that it is essential. There is no difficulty in the fact that pure intelligence – the intellect – immensely surpasses thought, and that there is no continuity – despite the identity of essence – between a concept as such and reality, the aseity of the real; to lament over the shortcomings of thought is to ask it to be something that it is not; this is the classical error of philosophers who seek to enclose everything in the cogito alone. From the point of view of concrete – not abstract – knowledge of the transcendent, the problem of thought is resolved in the very nature of the intellect.
There are objects which exceed the possibilities of reason; there are none which exceed those of intelligence as such. If there were not something absolute in man – he is “made in the image of God” – he would be only an animal like other animals; but man knows the animals, while they do not know man. Man alone can step out of the cosmos, and this possibility proves – and presupposes – that in a certain way he incarnates the Absolute.[1]
[1] Without this quality of absoluteness there could be no question either of his salvation or of his damnation.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, pp. 9-12.
Carl Jung
According to Jung, the figurative emergence of certain contents of the “collective unconscious” is accompanied empirically, as its psychic complement, by a noumenal sensation of eternity and infinitude; this is the way to insidiously ruin all transcendence and all intellection. According to this theory, it is the collective unconscious, or subconscious, which is the origin of “individuated” consciousness, human intelligence having two components, namely the reflections of the subconscious on the one hand and the experience of the external world on the other; but since experience is not in itself intelligence, the latter will necessarily have the subconscious for its substance, so that one ends up trying to define the subconscious on the basis of its own ramification. This is the classical contradiction of all subjectivist and relativist philosophy.
Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism, 1993,
“A Defense of Zen”, p. 69, footnote 2.
Use and limit of logic
The validity of a logical demonstration depends then on the prior knowledge which this demonstration aims at communicating, and it is clearly false to take as the point of departure, not a direct cognition, but logic pure and simple; when man has no “visionary” – as opposed to discursive – knowledge of Being, and when he thinks only with his brain instead of “seeing” with the “heart,” all his logic will be useless to him, since he starts from an initial blindness. A further distinction must be made between the validity of a demonstration and its dialectical efficacy; the latter evidently depends on an intuitive disposition for recognizing the truth demonstrated, namely on intellectual capacity, which amounts to saying that a demonstration is effective for those to whom it applies.
Logic is nothing other than the science of mental coordination, of rational conclusion; hence it cannot attain to the universal and the transcendent by its own resources; a supralogical – but not “illogical” – dialectic based on symbolism and on analogy, and therefore descriptive rather than ratiocinative, may be harder for some people to assimilate, but it conforms more closely to transcendent realities.
Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as “prejudice”; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious.[1]
Philosophical skepticism takes itself for an absence of prejudices and a healthy attitude, whereas it is something quite artificial: it is a result not of knowledge but of ignorance, and that is why it is as contrary to intelligence as it is to reality.
[1] This is what Kant with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a “doctrine” and definitively installed in European “thought,” giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative “culture.” Mental hypertrophy in the “cultured” man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as “positive” or “human.” Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, pp. 7-9.
The passage from objectivity to reflexive subjectivity
Mention has already been made of the passage from objectivity to reflexive subjectivity — a phenomenon pointed out by Maritain — and at the same time the ambiguous character of this development has been emphasized.
The fatal result of a “reflexivity” that has become hypertrophied is an exaggerated attention to verbal subtleties which makes a man less and less sensitive to the objective value of formulations of ideas; a habit has grown up of “classifying” everything without rhyme or reason in a long series of superficial and often imaginary categories, so that the most decisive—and intrinsically the most evident—truths are unrecognized because they are conventionally relegated into the category of things “seen and done with”, while ignoring the fact that “to see” is not necessarily synonymous with “to understand”; a name like that of Jacob Boehme, for example, means theosophy, so “let’s turn over”.
Such propensities hide the distinction between the “lived vision” of the sage and the mental virtuosity of the profane “thinker”; everywhere we see “literature”, nothing but “literature”, and what is more, literature of such and such a “period”. But truth is not and cannot be a personal affair; trees flourish and the sun rises without anyone asking who has drawn them forth from the silence and the darkness, and the birds sing without being given names.
In the Middle Ages there were still only two or three types of greatness: the saint and the hero, and also the sage; and then on a lesser scale and as it were by reflection, the pontiff and the prince; as for the “genius” and the “artist”, those glories of the Lay universe, their like was not yet born. Saints and heroes are like the appearance of stars on earth; they rescind after their death to the firmament, to their eternal home; they are almost pure symbols, spiritual signs only provisionally detached from the celestial iconostasis in which they have been enshrined since the creation of the world.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 1984,
“In the Wake of the Fall”, pp. 33-34.
A “brilliant” intelligence may be the vehicle of error
It is only too evident that mental effort does not automatically give rise to the perception of the real; the most capable mind may be the vehicle of the grossest error.
The paradoxical phenomenon of even a “brilliant” intelligence being the vehicle of error is explained first of all by the possibility of a mental operation that is exclusively “horizontal,” hence lacking all awareness of “vertical” relationships; however, the definition “intelligence” still applies, because there is still a discernment between something essential and something secondary, or between a cause and an effect.
A decisive factor in the phenomenon of “intelligent error” is plainly the intervention of an extra-intellectual element, such as sentimentality or passion; the exclusivism of “horizontality” creates a void that the irrational necessarily comes to fill.
It should be noted that “horizontality” is not always the negation of the supernatural; it may also be the case of a believer whose intellectual intuition remains latent, this being precisely what constitutes the “obscure merit of faith”; in such a case one may, without absurdity, speak of devotional and moral “verticality.”
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, 2002,
“On Intelligence”, pp. 4-5.
Difference between metaphysics and philosophy
This book is founded on a doctrine which is metaphysical in the most precise meaning of the word and cannot by any means be described as philosophical. Such a distinction may appear unwarrantable to those who are accustomed to regard metaphysics as a branch of philosophy, but the practice of linking the two together in this manner, although it can be traced back to Aristotle and the Scholastic writers who followed him, merely shows that all philosophy suffers from certain limitations which, even in the most favourable instances such as those just quoted, exclude a completely adequate appreciation of metaphysics. In reality the transcendent character of metaphysics makes it independent of any purely human mode of thought.
In order to define clearly the difference between the two modes in question, it may be said that philosophy proceeds from reason (which is a purely individual faculty), whereas metaphysics proceeds exclusively from the Intellect.
The latter faculty has been defined by Meister Eckhart—who fully understood the import of his words—as follows: ‘There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable; if the whole soul were this it would be uncreated and uncreatable; and this is the Intellect.’
An analogous definition, which is still more concise and even richer in symbolic value, is to be found in Moslem esotericism: “The Sufi (that is to say man identified with the Intellect) is uncreated.” Since purely intellectual knowledge is by definition beyond the reach of the individual, being in its essence supra-individual, universal or divine, and since it proceeds from pure Intelligence, which is direct and not discursive, it follows that this knowledge not only goes infinitely farther than reasoning, but even goes farther than faith in the ordinary sense of this term.
In other words, intellectual knowledge also transcends the specifically religious point of view, which is itself incomparably superior to the philosophic point of view, since, like metaphysical knowledge, it emanates from God and not from man; but whereas metaphysic proceeds wholly from intellectual intuition, religion proceeds from revelation.
The latter is the Word of God spoken to His creatures, whereas intellectual intuition is a direct and active participation in divine Knowledge and not an indirect and passive participation, as is faith. In other words, in the case of intellectual intuition, knowledge is not possessed by the individual in so far as he is an individual, but in so far as in his innermost essence he is not distinct from his divine Principle.
Thus metaphysical certitude is absolute because of the identity between the knower and the known in the Intellect. If an example may be drawn from the sensory sphere to illustrate the difference between metaphysical and religious knowledge, it may be said that the former, which can be called ‘esoteric’ when it is manifested through a religious symbolism, is conscious of the colourless essence of light and of its character of pure luminosity; a given religious belief, on the other hand, will assert that light is red and not green, whereas another belief will assert the opposite; both will be right in so far as they distinguish light from darkness but not in so far as they identify it with a particular colour.
This very rudimentary example is designed to show that the religious point of view, because it is based in the minds of believers on a revelation and not on a knowledge that is accessible to each one of them (an unrealizable condition for a large human collectivity), will of necessity confuse the symbol or form with the naked and supraformal Truth, while metaphysic, which can only be assimilated to a particular ‘point of view’ in a purely provisional sense, will be able to make use of the same symbol or form as a means of expression, while being aware of its relativity.
That is why each of the great and intrinsically orthodox religions can, through its dogmas, rites and other symbols, serve as a means of expressing all the truths known directly by the eye of the Intellect, the spiritual organ which is called in Moslem esotericism the ‘eye of the heart’. We have just stated that religion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language.
Now, though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is none the less accessible through faith, which is, for most people, the only possible mode of participation in the divine truths. As for intellectual knowledge, which, as we have seen, proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, it goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, it penetrates its ‘internal dimension’, that is, the infinite Truth which dominates all forms.
Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions,
1984, “Preface”.
Nature of modern man
What modern man is no longer willing to admit is above all the idea of an anthropomorphic, “infinitely perfect” God, creating the world “out of goodness” while foreknowing its horrors — creating man “free,” while knowing he would make bad use of his freedom; a God who, despite His infinite goodness, would punish man for faults which He, the omniscient Creator, could not fail to foresee. But this is to be hypnotized, quite uselessly, by the inevitable defects of anthropomorphic symbolism, a symbolism which moreover is inevitable and which has been proven to be well-founded by thousands of years of efficacy. It is to contend, not without a certain pretentiousness, against modes of speech which, though no doubt imperfect, are opportune in certain circumstances; and it is to shut oneself off from truth — including even the truth which gives salvation — merely for reasons of dialectic.[1]
The answer to these sophistries is that the Absolute is not an artificial postulate, explainable by psychology, but a “pre-mental” evidence as actual as the air we breathe or the beating of our hearts; that intelligence when not atrophied — the pure, intuitive, contemplative intellect — allows no doubt on this subject, the “proofs” being in its very substance; that the Absolute of necessity takes on, in relation to man, aspects that are more or less human, without however being intrinsically limited by these aspects; that the possibility of human goodness is metaphysical proof of the divine Goodness, which is necessarily limitless in relation to its earthly traces; that the sentimental anthropomorphism of monotheists is what it has to be, given the character of the masses to which it is addressed; that in a general way the sacred Scriptures, far from being popular tales, are on the contrary highly “scientific” works through their polyvalent symbolism which contains a science at once cosmological, metaphysical and mystical, not forgetting other equally possible applications; that man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom,
1995, “Preface”, p. ix-x.
Far from proving that modern man “keeps a cool head” and that men of old were dreamers, modern unbelief and “exact science” are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism — sometimes apparently antirationalist — which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the “age of reason.” The Renaissance also knew such a wave of false lucidity: like our age, it rejected truths along with outworn sentimentalities, replacing them with new sentimentalities that were supposedly “intelligent.” To properly understand these oscillations it must be remembered that Christianity as a path of love opposed pagan rationalism; that is to say, it opposed emotional elements possessing a spiritual quality to the implacable, but “worldly,” logic of the Greco-Romans, while later on absorbing certain sapiential elements which their civilization comprised.
[1] As Saint Peter certainly foresaw: “Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation” (II Peter 3:3-4).
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom,
1995, “Preface”, p. xii.
Modern man collects keys but does not know how to open a door. A confirmed sceptic, he flounders among concepts with no suspicion of their intrinsic value or their efficacy. He ‘classifies’ ideas at the surface level of thought but never ‘realizes’ a single idea in depth. He treats himself to the luxury of despair — the most paradoxical form of that commodity. He thinks he is experienced, whereas he does nothing but avoid those experiences which are incumbent upon him and which he has not even the intellectual capacity to undergo; his experience amounts to that of a child which has burnt itself and wants to abolish fire.
Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives & Human Facts,
2007, “Thought and Civilization”, p. 6.
Modern philosophers
The wide range of forms belonging to Hinduism may be bewildering to some minds, but could never mean that Hinduism sanctions error, as is in fact done by modern philosophy, where “genius” and “culture” count as much as, or more than, truth and where the very idea of truth is even called into question by some people.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 3.
The moderns have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers—and all the sages of the East as well—with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case.
It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well.
How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already—for it alone could conceive of any such idea—and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? But the present purpose is not to prolong this subject; it is simply to call attention to the parallelism between the pre-Socratic—or more precisely the Ionian— wisdom and oriental doctrines such as the Vaisheshika and the Sankhya, and to underline, on the one hand, that in all these ancient visions of the Universe the implicit postulate is the innateness of the nature of things in the intellect[1] and not a supposition or other logical operation, and on the other hand, that this notion of innateness furnishes the very definition of that which the sceptics and empiricists think they must disdainfully characterize as “dogmatism”; in this way they demonstrate that they are ignorant, not only of the nature of intellection, but also of the nature of dogmas in the proper sense of the word. The admirable thing about the Platonists is not, to be sure, their “thought”, it is the content of their thought, whether it be called “dogmatic” or otherwise.
The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with Aristotle, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagirite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists — not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus— Aristotle on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out.
[1] In the terminology of the ancient cosmologists one must allow for its symbolism: when Thales saw in “water” the origin of all things, it is as certain as can be that Universal Substance — the Prakriti of the Hindus — is in question and not the sensible element. It is the same with the “ air” of Anaximenes of Miletus, or with the “ fire” of Heraclitus.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians”, pp. 51-51.
Modern philosophy is a liquidation of evidences, and therefore fundamentally of intelligence; it is no longer in any degree a sophia, but much more like a “misosophy”.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“Man in the Universe”, p. 94.
A science that is called “exact” is in fact an “intelligence without wisdom”, just as postscholastic philosophy is inversely a wisdom without intelligence.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“Man in the Universe”, p.p. 98-99.
In order to get a firm grasp of the dominant tendencies of contemporary philosophy it is important to note the following: everything which does not derive either from intellectual intuition or from revelation is of necessity a form of “rationalism,” because man disposes of no other resource outside the intellect.
One criterion of rationalism, even when disguised, is thinking in alternatives, which results from the fact that spanning antinomical realities is beyond the scope of reason; reason has no consciousness of analogies which exceed its radius of action, even though it is aware of them through their reflections on the physical plane; the discursive mind, beyond a certain level, sees only “segments” and not the “circle.”
Let us say at once that a consciously rationalizing thought, the content of which is true, is worth infinitely more than an anti-rationalist reaction which only ends in destroying the ideas of intelligence and truth: rationalism properly so called is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this is possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the reason, as if the latter coincided with the very principle of things.
In other words, rationalism does not present itself as a possible — and necessarily relative — development of a traditional and sapiential point of view, but it usurps the function of pure intellectuality. But there are degrees to be observed here, as for example with Aristotle: his fundamental ideas — like those of “form” and “matter” (hylomorphism) — really flow from a metaphysical knowledge, and so from supra-mental intuition; they carry in themselves all the universal significance of symbols and become rational — and therefore “abstract” — only to the extent that they become encrusted in a more or less artificial system.
There is a close relationship between rationalism and modern science; the latter is at fault not in concerning itself solely with the finite, but in seeking to reduce the Infinite to the finite, and consequently in taking no account of Revelation, an attitude which is, strictly speaking, inhuman; what we reproach modern science for is that it is inhuman — or infra-human — and not that it has no knowledge of the facts which it studies, even though it deliberately ignores certain of their modalities. It believes that it is possible to approach total knowledge of the world — which after all is indefinite — by what can only be a finite series of discoveries, as if it were possible to exhaust the inexhaustible. And what is to be said of the pretentiousness which sets out to “discover” the ultimate causes of existence, or of the intellectual bankruptcy of those who seek to subject their philosophy to the results of scientific research?
A science of the finite cannot legitimately occur outside a spiritual tradition, for intelligence is prior to its objects, and God is prior to man; an experiment which ignores the spiritual link characterizing man no longer has anything human about it; it is thus in the final analysis as contrary to our interests as it is to our nature; and “ye shall know them by their fruits.” A science of the finite has need of a wisdom which goes beyond it and controls it, just as the body needs a soul to animate it, and the reason an intellect to illumine it. The “Greek miracle” with its so-called “liberation of the human spirit” is in reality nothing but the beginning of a purely external knowledge, cut off from genuine Sophia.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 25-27.
Original meaning of the word Philosophy
It should be possible to restore to the word “philosophy” its original meaning: philosophy —the “love of wisdom” — is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which “perceives,” and not with reason alone, which “concludes.” Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: philosophy is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt.[1]
The solution to the problem of knowledge — if there is a problem — could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source — the only one there is — is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such. The so-called century of “enlightenment” did not suspect its existence; for the Encyclopedists, all that the Intellect had offered — from Pythagoras to the Scholastics — was merely naive dogmatism, even “obscurantism.” Quite paradoxically, the cult of reason ended in the sub-rationalism — or “esoterism of stupidity” — that is existentialism in all its forms; it is to illusorily replace intelligence with “existence.”
Some have believed it is possible to replace the premise of thought by the arbitrary, empirical and altogether subjective element that is the “personality” of the thinker, which amounts to the very destruction of the notion of truth; one may as well renounce all philosophy. The more thought wishes to be “concrete,” the more it is perverse; this began with empiricism, the first step towards the dismantling of the spirit; originality is sought, and perish the truth.[2]
1. For Kant, intellectual intuition — of which he does not understand the first word — is a fraudulent manipulation (Erschleichung), which throws a moral discredit onto all authentic intellectuality.
2. It is not of philosophy, but of “misosophy” that one ought to speak here. This term has been rightly applied to the paranoid ideologues of the nineteenth century, and the least one can say is that it has not lost any of
its applicability.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Thought: Light and Perversion”, pp. 3-4.
What is thought?
According to Ibn ‘Arabi, the “philosopher” — which for him practically means the skeptic — is incapable of knowing universal causality except by observing causations in the outward world and by drawing from his observations the conclusions that impose themselves on his sense of logic. According to another Sufi, Ibn al-‘Arif, intellectual knowledge is only an “indication” pointing to God: the philosopher only knows God by way of a “conclusion,” his knowledge only has a content “with a view to God,” and not “by God” as does that of the mystic.
But this distinguo is only valid, as we have said, if we assimilate all philosophy to unmitigated rationalism and forget in addition that in the doctrinaire mystics there is an obvious element of rationality. In short, the term “philosopher” in current speech signifies nothing other than the fact of expounding a doctrine while respecting the laws of logic, which are those of language and those of common sense, without which we would not be human; to practice philosophy is first and foremost to think, whatever may be the reasons which rightly or wrongly incite us to do so.
But it is also, more especially and according to the best of the Greeks, to express by means of the reason certainties “seen” or “lived” by the immanent Intellect, as we have remarked above; now the explanation necessarily takes on the character imposed on it by the laws of thought and language.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, p. 91.
Phenomenology
By “phenomenology” we simply mean the study of a category of phenomena, and not a particular philosophy which claims to resolve everything by observing or exploring in its fashion the phenomena that present themselves to one’s attention, without being able to account for the central and ungraspable phenomenon that is the mystery of subjectivity.
Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way,
1990, “The Sun Dance”, p. 219.
There are no metaphysical or cosmological reasons why, in exceptional cases, direct intellection should not occur in men who have no link at all with revealed wisdom, but an exception, if it proves the rule, assuredly cannot constitute it. For instance, an intuition as just as that which forms the basis of German ‘phenomenology’, inevitably remains, for lack of objective intellectual principles, fragmentary, problematical and inoperative. An accident does not take the place of a principle, nor does a philosophical adventure replace real wisdom. No one has, in fact, been able to extract anything from this ‘phenomenology’ from the point of view of effective and integral knowledge — the knowledge that works on the soul and transforms it. A true intuition, even if it were fundamental, could not assume a definitive function in a mode of thought as anarchical as modern philosophy; it must always be condemned to remain merely an ineffectual glimmer in the history of an entirely human system of thought which, precisely, does not know that real knowledge has no history.
Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts,
2007, “Thought and Civilization”, p. 10.
Philosophy and Christianity
Contrary to what occurred in the Greek and Oriental Churches, the intellectuality of the Latin Church became largely identified with the philosophical mode of thought, notwithstanding the formal rejection of philosophy by St. Paul (i Cor. i. 19; 11. 5—16; iii. 18, 19, 20 and Col. ii. 8).
Westerners are moreover compelled to admit this themselves: “The notion of philosophy came to have a different meaning for the Eastern and Western Churches, in the sense that for the Greeks it comprised quasi organically a large proportion of religious theories (dass der Begrjff ‘Philosophie’ dort ganz wesenhaft viel religiöse Weltanschauungskunde umfasste), while for the Latins it contained, intentionally or involuntarily, the seed which ultimately led to the total separation of religion and rationalist science (der who treats the greatest minds of the past in the spirit of a specialist in mental diseases or a collector of insects. Gedankenwissenschaft führen sollte). Thus the man of the West became the slave of his speculations, whereas the Oriental spirit knew how to preserve its inward liberty and its seemingly backward superiority” (A. M. Ammann S. J., Die Gottesschau im palamitischen Hesychasmus).
On the other hand, it is strange to note how far certain minds within the Latin Church have gone towards the acceptance not only of philosophical thought as such, but even of specifically modern thought: this attitude has led to a particularly regrettable lack of understanding of certain traditional modes of Christian thought itself, a lack of understanding which reveals itself above all in an inability to conceive of the intrinsic truth of those modes, or let us say in a fixed determination to reduce ideas to the level of historical facts.
In the case of those who are foremost in adopting what can only be described as pseudo-intellectual barbarism, anti-Catholic in its origin, their attitude of mind is accompanied by the unshakeable complacency of the “connoisseur” who arrogates to himself the role of arbiter in every field, and who treats the greatest minds of the past in the spirit of a specialist in mental diseases or a collector of insects.
Frithjof Schuon
Sophia Perennis
Strictly speaking, there is but one sole philosophy, the Sophia Perennis; it is also — envisaged in its integrality — the only religion. Sophia has two possible origins, one timeless and the other temporal: the first is “vertical” and discontinuous, and the second, “horizontal” and continuous; in other words, the first is like the rain that at any moment can descend from the sky; the second is like a stream that flows from a spring. Both modes meet and combine: metaphysical Revelation actualizes the intellective faculty, and once awakened, this gives rise to spontaneous and independent intellection.
The dialectic of the Sophia Perennis is “descriptive,” not “syllogistic,” which is to say that the affirmations are not the product of a real or imaginary “proof,” even though they may make use of proofs — real in this case — by way of “illustration” and out of a concern for clarity and intelligibility. But the language of Sophia is above all symbolism in all its forms: thus the openness to the message of symbols is a gift proper to primordial man and his heirs in every age; Spiritus ubi vult spirat.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Thought: Light and Perversion”, p. 10.
Scientistic philosophy
Not only is scientistic philosophy ignorant of the Divine Presences, it ignores their rhythms and their “life”: it ignores, not only the degrees of reality and the fact of our imprisonment in the sensory world, but also cycles, the universal solve et coagula; this means that it ignores the gushing forth of our world from an invisible and fulgurant Reality, and its reabsorption into the dark light of this same Reality. All of the Real lies in the Invisible; it is this above all that must be felt or understood before one can speak of knowledge and effectiveness. But this will not be understood, and the human world will continue inexorably on its course.
Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions,
2002, “The Five Divine Presences”, p. 65.
Profane “thinkers“
In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible; on the other hand, gnosis, or philosophy in the proper and primitive sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone. What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposed reasons: that the rationalist if need be draws his inspiration from a pre-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be “free”— falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth—likewise, mutatis mutandis: that the gnostic — in the orthodox sense of the term — bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth, or proper to the Essence which by delinition escapes formal constraints. Or again: whether the gnostic “thinks” what he has “seen” with the “eye of the heart,” or whether on the contrary he obtains his “vision” thanks to the intervention — preliminary and provisional and in no wise efficient — of a thought which then takes on the role of occasional cause , is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth, or with regard to its almost supernatural springing forth in the spirit.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, p. 90.
Profane philosophy is ignorant not only of the value of truth and universality in Revelation, but also of the transcendence of the pure Intellect;[1] it entails therefore no guarantee of truth on any level, for the quite human faculty which reason is, insofar as it is cut off from the Absolute, is readily mistaken even on the level of the relative. The efficacy of reasoning is essentially conditional.
[1] For example, the Cartesian Cogito is neither conformable to Revelation, nor the consequence of a direct intellection: it has no scriptural basis, since according to Scripture the foundation of existence is Being and not some experience or other; and it lacks inspiration, since direct intellective perception excludes a purely empirical process of reasoning. When Locke says Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, the statement is false in the same two respects; firstly, Scripture affirms that the intellect derives from God and not from the body — for man, “made in the image of God,” is distinguished from animals by the intelligence not by the senses — and secondly, the intellect conceives of realities which it does not discern a priori in the world, though it may seek their traces a posteriori in sensory perceptions.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“The Nature and Arguments of Faith”, p. 60.
Protagoras, Sophists
It is the sophists, with Protagoras at their head, who are the true precursors of modern thought; they are the “thinkers” properly so called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with “perceiving” and taking into account that which “is.” And it is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned — Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well — but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Thought: Light and Perversion”, p.4.
Taking into account the fact that according to a — rightly or wrongly — universally recognized terminology, the word “philosophy” designates all that extrinsically pertains to thought, we would say that there is a philosophy according to the “spirit,” which is founded on pure intellection — possibly actualized by a particular sacred Text — and a philosophy according to the “flesh,” which is founded on individual reasoning in the absence of sufficient data and of any supernatural intuition; the first being the philosophia perennis, and the second, the ancient Protagorism as well as the rationalist thought of the moderns.(10)
10. Even if it resists being rationalism, which is of no importance and which evokes this line of Shakespeare: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Concerning the Principle of Sacrifice”, p. 94-95.
The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with Aristotle, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists — not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus — Aristotle on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians”, p. 52.
As for the profane and properly rationalistic philosophy of the Greeks, which is personified especially by Protagoras and of which Aristotle is not completely free, it represents a deviation of the perspective which normally gives rise to gnosis or jnâna; when this perspective is cut off from pure intellection, and thus from its reason for existence, it becomes fatally hostile to religion and open to all kinds of hazards; the sages of Greece did not need the Fathers of the Church to know this, and the Fathers of the Church could not prevent the Christian world from falling into this trap. Moreover through the civilizationism which it claims as its own, so as not to lose any glory, the Church paradoxically assumes responsibility for the modern world — described as “Christian civilization” — which nevertheless is nothing other than the excrescence of that human wisdom stigmatized by the Fathers.
Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, 1990,
“Understanding Esoterism”, pp. 24-25.
the 68th Shankaracharya of Kanchi.
Reason and intellection
Reflection, like intellection, is an activity of the intelligence, with the difference that in the second case this activity springs from that immanent divine spark that is the Intellect, whereas in the first case the activity starts from the reason, which is capable only of logic and not of intellective intuition. The conditio sine qua non of reflection is that man reason on the basis of data that are both necessary and sufficient and with a view to a conclusion, [1] the latter being the reason for the existence of the mental operation.
From the point of view of knowledge properly so-called, reasoning is like the groping of a blind man, with the difference that — by removing obstacles — it may bring about a clearing of vision; it is blind and groping due to its indirect and discursive nature, but not necessarily in its function, for it may be no more than the description — or verbalization — of a vision which one possesses a priori, and in this case, it is not the mind that is groping, but the language. If we compare reasoning to a groping, it is in the sense that it is not a vision, and not in order to deny its capacity of adequation and exploration; it is a means of knowledge, but this means is mediate and fragmentary, like the sense of touch, which enables a blind man to find his way and even to feel the heat of the sun, but not to see. [2]
As for intellection, on the one hand it necessarily expresses itself by means of reason and on the other hand it can make use of the latter as a support for actualization. These two factors enable theologians to reduce intellection to reasoning; that is to say, they deny it — while at the same time seeing in rationality an element that is more or less problematic if not contrary to faith— without seeking or being able to account for the fact that faith is itself an indirect, and in a way, anticipated mode of intellection.
If on the one hand reasoning can give rise to — but not produce — intellection and if on the other hand intellection is necessarily expressed by reasoning, a third combination is also possible, but it is abnormal and abusive; namely the temptation to support a real intellection by aberrant reasoning; either because the intellection does not operate in all domains on account of some blind spot in the mind or character, or because religious emotivity involves the thought towards solutions stemming from expediency, given that faith is inclined to allow, even if only subconsciously, that “the end sanctifies the means.
[1] It is precisely the absence of such data that makes modern science aberrant from the speculative point of view, and hypertrophied from the practical point of view; likewise for philosophy: criticism, existentialism, evolutionism, have their respective points of departure in the absence of a datum which in itself is as obvious as it is essential.
[2] It is said that angels do not possess reason since they have vision of causes and consequences, which obviously does not signify an infirmity.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“The Exo-Esoteric Symbiosis”, p. 17-18.
The reduction of the notion of intellectuality to that of simple rationality often has its cause in the prejudice of a school: St. Thomas is a sensationalist — that is to say he reduces the cause of all non-theological knowledge to sensible perceptions — in order to be able to underestimate the human mind to the advantage of Scripture; in other words, because this allows him to attribute to Revelation alone the glory of “supernatural” knowledge. And Ghazali inveighs against the “philosophers” because he wishes to reserve for the Sufis the monopoly of spiritual knowledge, as if faith and piety, combined with intellectual gifts and grace — all the Arab philosophers were believers — did not provide a sufficient basis for pure intellection.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, pp. 90.
To illustrate the three modes of thought we have been considering (metaphysics, philosophy, theology) let us apply them to the idea of God. The philosophical point of view, when it does not purely and simply deny God even if only by ascribing to the word a meaning it does not possess, tries to ‘prove’ God by all kinds of argument; in other words, this point of view tries to ‘prove’ either the ‘existence’ or the ‘nonexistence ‘of God, as though reason, which is only an intermediary and in no wise a source of transcendent knowledge, could ‘prove’ anything one wished to prove. Moreover this pretension of reason to autonomy in realms where only intellectual intuition on the one hand and revelation on the other can communicate knowledge, is characteristic of the philosophical point of view and shows up all its inadequacy.
The religious point of view does not, for its part, trouble itself about proving God—it is even prepared to admit that such proof is impossible—but bases itself on belief. It must be added here that ‘faith’ cannot be reduced to a simple matter of belief; otherwise Christ would not have spoken of the ‘faith which moves mountains’, for it goes without saying that ordinary religious belief has no such power. Finally, from the metaphysical standpoint, there is no longer any question either of ‘proof’ or of ‘belief’ but solely of direct evidence, of intellectual evidence that implies absolute certainty; but in the present state of humanity such evidence is only accessible to a spiritual elite which becomes ever more restricted in number. It may be added that religion, by its very nature and independently of any wish of its representatives, who may be unaware of the fact, contains and transmits this purely intellectual Knowledge beneath the veil of its dogmatic and ritual symbols, as we have already seen.
Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions,
2005, “Preface”, xxxii-xxxiii.
It is not possible to emphasize too strongly that philosophy, in its humanistic and rationalizing and therefore current sense, consists primarily of logic; this definition of Guénon’s correctly situates philosophical thought in making clear its distinction from “intellectual intuition,” which is direct perception of truth. But another distinction must also be established on the rational plane itself: logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything; it may be an Aristotelianism conveying ontological knowledge, just as it may degenerate into an existentialism in which logic is no more than a blind, unreal activity, and which can rightly be described as an “esoterism of stupidity.” When unintelligence – and what we mean by this is in no way incompatible with “worldly” intelligence – joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very basis of intelligence and truth.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, 7.
Cartesianism — perhaps the most intelligent way of being unintelligent — is the classic example of a faith which has become the dupe of the gropings of reasoning; this is a “wisdom from below” and history shows it to be deadly. The whole of modern philosophy, including science, starts from a false conception of intelligence; for instance, the modern cult of “life” sins in the sense that it seeks the explanation and goal of man at a level below him, in something which could not serve to define the human creature. But in a much more general way, all rationalism — whether direct or indirect — is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect.
Schuon, Understanding Islam, 2011,
“The Path”, pp. 108-109, footnote 8.
About the rational mode of knowledge
In order to be absolutely clear on this point we must again insist that the rational mode of knowledge in no way extends beyond the realm of generalities and cannot by itself reach any transcendent truth; if it may nevertheless serve as a means of expressing supra-rational knowledge — as in the case of Aristotelian and Scholastic ontology — this will always be to the detriment of the intellectual integrity of the doctrine.
Some may perhaps object that even the purest metaphysic is sometimes hardly distinguishable from philosophy inasmuch as it uses arguments and seems to reach conclusions. But this resemblance is due merely to the fact that all concepts, once they are expressed, are necessarily clothed in the modes of human thought, which is rational and dialectical.
What essentially distinguishes the metaphysical from the philosophical proposition is that the former is symbolical and descriptive, in the sense that it makes use of rational modes as symbols to describe or translate knowledge possessing a greater degree of certainty than any knowledge of a sensible order, whereas philosophy—called, not without reason, ancilla theologiae—is never anything more than what it expresses.
When philosophy uses reason to resolve a doubt, this proves precisely that its starting point is a doubt which it is striving to overcome, whereas we have seen that the starting point of a metaphysical formulation is always essentially something intellectually evident or certain, which is communicated, to those able to receive it, by symbolical or dialectical means designed to awaken in them the latent knowledge which they bear unconsciously and ‘eternally’ within them.
Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions,
2005, “Preface”, pp. xxxi-xxxii.
In theology as in philosophy, and to varying degrees, one encounters a deliberate way of reasoning in a given manner and in a given direction in order to support a certain axiom, and to exclude from the intelligence all possibilities which do not serve this end. The subjectivists will say that the same holds true for all demonstrations, but this is not so, since in the case of a certitude independent of all sentimental postulates, the arguments result objectively from the certitude to be demonstrated, and not subjectively from our desire to prove it.
Schuon, Christianity/Islam, 1985,
“The Idea of ‘The Best’ in Religions”, p. 158.
Relativism
In former days it was the object that was sometimes questioned, including the object that can be found within ourselves — an “object” being anything of which the subject can be distinctively and separatively conscious, even if it be a moral defect in the subject — but in our days there is no fear of the contradiction inherent in questioning the subject, the knower, in its intrinsic and irreplaceable aspect; intelligence as such is called in question, it is even “examined”, without wondering “who” examines it — is there not talk about producing a more perfect man? — and without seeing that philosophic doubt is itself included in that same devaluation, that it falls if intelligence falls, and that at the same stroke all science and all philosophy collapse. For if our intelligence is by definition ineffectual, if we are irresponsible beings or lumps of earth, there is no sense in philosophizing.
What we are being pressed to admit is that our spirit is relative in its very essence, that this essence comprises no stable standards of measurement — as if the sufficient reason of the human intellect were not precisely that it should comprise some such standards ! — and that consequently the ideas of truth and falsehood are intrinsically relative, and so always floating; and because certain consequences of accumulated errors fall foul of our innate standards and are unmasked and stigmatized by them, we are told that it is a question of habit and that we must change our nature, that is to say, that we must create a new intelligence that finds beautiful what is ugly and accepts as true what is false.
The devil is essentially incapable of recognizing that he is wrong, unless an admission to that effect is in his interest; so it is error become habitual that must be right at all costs, even at the cost of our intelligence and, in the last analysis, of our existence; as for the nature of things and our faculty of equating ourselves thereto, ideas of that sort are all “prejudice”.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Universality and Timeliness of Monasticism”, pp. 111-112.
Scepticism
But scepticism does not always need the help of Cartesian philosophy to implant itself, for the latter would be sterile without a soil ready to receive it; in fact, all “worldliness” is a breach through which, given favorable conditions, the spirit of doubt and of denial of the supernatural is made welcome.
No people, however contemplative, can in the long run resist this psychological effect of modern science — the difference, in this respect, between men bearing the mark of the Renaissance and the traditional collectivities of Asia and elsewhere is only relative — and that clearly shows how “abnormal” this science is in relation to the basic facts of human nature.
It is only too evident that while no knowledge is bad in itself and in principle, many forms of knowledge can be harmful in fact, just because they do not correspond to man’s hereditary habits and are imposed on him without his being spiritually prepared; the soul finds it hard to accommodate facts that nature has not offered to its experience, unless it be enlightened with metaphysical knowledge or with an impregnable sanctity.
That is why traditional doctrines, and above all the Revelations from which they derive, take full account of collective and normal human experience, which constitutes an indisputable basis since in fact we are men. These doctrines provide a comprehensive and qualitative knowledge of the cosmos, while at the same time conveying the idea that the cosmos is but nothing in comparison with the Absolute and that the Absolute in any case eludes the means of investigation of specifically human knowledge.
The principle of “normal” and “providential” limitation of the data of experience applies moreover also to art: art has need of limits imposed by nature, at any rate insofar as it concerns a collectivity, which by definition is passive and “unconscious”; one has only to put the resources of machines and of the chemical industry at the disposal of a whole people or of their artisans and their art will be corrupted, not, of course, in all its manifestations, but insofar as it belongs to everyone.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom,
1995, “Preface”, pp. vii-ix.
Scholasticism
The fact that the philosophic mode of thought is centered on logic and not directly on intuition implies that intuition is left at the mercy of logic’s needs: in Scholastic disputations it was a question of avoiding certain truths which, given the general level of mentality, might have given rise to certain dangerous conclusions.
Scholasticism, it should be remembered, is above all a defense against error: its aim is to be an apologetic and not, as in the case of “metaphysically operative” doctrines – gnosis or jnâna – a support for meditation and contemplation. Before Scholasticism, Greek philosophy had also aimed to satisfy a certain need for causal explanations rather than to furnish the intelligence with a means of realization; moreover, the disinterested character of truth easily becomes, on the level of speculative logic, a tendency towards “art for art’s sake,” whence the ventosa loquacitas philosophorum stigmatized by Saint Bernard.
Some will certainly raise the objection that traditional metaphysics, whether of the East or the West, makes use of rational argumentations like any philosophy; but an argumentation a man uses to describe to his fellow men what he knows is one thing, and an argumentation a man uses on himself because he knows nothing is quite another. This is a capital distinction for it marks the whole difference between the intellectual “visionary” and the mere “thinker” who “gropes alone through the darkness” (Descartes) and whose pride it is to deny that there could be any knowledge which does not proceed in the same fashion.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p.9.
What is the understanding of an idea?
To return to what was said above about the understanding of ideas, a theoretical notion may be compared to the view of an object. Just as this view does not reveal all possible aspects, or in other words the integral nature of the object, the perfect knowledge of which would be nothing less than identity with it, so a theoretical notion does not itself correspond to the integral truth, of which it necessarily suggests only one aspect, essential or otherwise.[1] In the example just given error corresponds to an inadequate view of the object whereas a dogmatic conception is comparable to the exclusive view of one aspect of the object, a view which supposes the immobility of the seeing subject.
As for a speculative and therefore intellectually unlimited conception, this may be compared to the sum of all possible views of the object in question, views which presuppose in the subject a power of displacement or an ability to alter his viewpoint, hence a certain mode of identity with the dimensions of space, which themselves effectually reveal the integral nature of the object, at least with respect to its form which is all that is in question in the example given. Movement in space is in fact an active participation in the possibilities of space, whereas static extension in space, the form of our bodies for example, is a passive participation in these same possibilities.
This may be transposed without difficulty to a higher plane and one may then speak of an ‘intellectual space’, namely the cognitive all—possibility which is fundamentally the same as the divine Omniscience, and consequently of ‘intellectual dimensions’ which are the ‘internal’ modalities of this Omniscience; Knowledge through the Intellect is none other than the perfect participation of the subject in these modalities, and in the physical world this participation is effectively represented by movement.
When speaking, therefore, of the understanding of ideas, we may distinguish between a ‘dogmatic’ understanding, comparable to the view of an object from a single viewpoint, and an integral or speculative understanding, comparable to the indefinite series of possible views of the object, views which are realized through indefinitely multiple changes of point of view. Just as, when the eye changes its position, the different views of an object are connected by a perfect continuity, which represents, so to speak, the determining reality of the object, so the different aspects of a truth, however contradictory they may appear and notwithstanding their indefinite multiplicity, describe the integral Truth which surpasses and determines them.
We would again refer here to an illustration we have already used; a dogmatic affirmation corresponds to a point which, as such, contradicts by definition every other point, whereas a speculative formulation is always conceived as an element of a circle which by its very form indicates principially its own continuity, and hence the entire circle and the Truth in its entirety.
It follows from the above that in speculative doctrines it is the ‘point of view’ on the one hand and the ‘aspect’ on the other hand which determine the form of the affirmation, whereas in dogmatism the affirmation is confused with a determinate point of view and aspect, thus excluding all others.[2]
[1] In a treatise directed against rationalist philosophy, El-Ghazzâli speaks of certain blind men who, not having even a theoretical knowledge of an elephant, came across this animal one day and started to feel the different parts of its body; as a result each man represented the animal to himself according to the limb which he touched: for the first, who touched a foot, the elephant resembled a column, whereas for the second, who touched one of the tusks, it resembled a stake, and so on. By this parable El-Ghazzâli seeks to show the error involved in trying to enclose the universal within a fragmentary notion of it, or within isolated and exclusive ‘aspects’ or ‘points of view’. Shri Ramakrishna also uses this parable to demonstrate the inadequacy of dogmatic exclusiveness in its negative aspect. The same idea could however be expressed by means of an even more adequate example: faced with any object, some might say that it ‘is’ a certain shape, while others might say that it ‘is’ such and such a material; others again might maintain that it ‘is’ such and such a number or such and such a weight and so forth.
[2] The Angels are intelligences which are limited to a particular ‘aspect’ of Divinity; consequently an angelic state is a sort of transcendent ‘point of view’. On a lower plane, the ‘intellectuality’ of animals and of the more peripheral species of the terrestrial state, that of plants for example, corresponds cosmologically to the angelic intellectuality: what differentiates one vegetable species from another is in reality simply the mode of its ‘intelligence’; in other words, it is the form or rather the integral nature of a plant which reveals the state—eminently passive of course—of contemplation or knowledge of its species; we say ‘of its species’ advisedly, because, considered in isolation, a plant does not constitute an individual. We would recall here that the Intellect, being universal, must be discoverable in everything that exists, to whatever order it belongs; the same is not true of reason, which is only a specifi cally human faculty and is in no way identical with intelligence, either our own or that of other beings.
Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions,
2005, “Conceptual dimensions”, pp. 4-6.
Plato
Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, “reason” is synonymous with “intellect”: reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration.
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, 2002,
“The Enigma of the Diversified Subjectivity”, p. 51.
The Augustinian idea that the good tends by its very nature to communicate itself, is at bottom Platonic: this idea is self-evident since, according to Plato, the Absolute is by definition the “Sovereign Good,” the Agathón; and to say “Good,” is to say Radiation or Manifestation.
It would be futile to believe that Plato drew everything from himself, or that a Shankara had no need of the Upanishads, although in principle such a thing is not inconceivable.
It should be noted that Meister Eckhart called Plato “ the great priest”, and that Jili had a vision of him “filling the whole of space with light”; also, that the disciples of Rumi see in Plato (Sayyid-na Aflatun) a kind of prophet. Moslem authors in general see in him an eminent master of music, like Orpheus charming wild beasts with his lute in virgin nature whither he had withdrawn after a disagreement with Aristotle, which is full of meaning. It may be added that Plato, like Socrates and Pythagoras, was the providential spokesman of Orphism.
Frithjof Schuon
Some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, p. 89.
Since Plato, Virgil and St. Augustine have existed, it can no longer be said of man that he is a goat or an ant.
Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism, Smriti Books, 2003,
“Cosmological and Eschatological Viewpoints”, p. 57.
For Socrates, in Plato’s dialogues, the “true philosopher” is one who consecrates himself to “studying the separation of soul from body, or the liberation of the soul,” and “who is always occupied in the practice of dying”; it is one who withdraws from the bodily — and therefore from all that, in the ego, is the shadow or echo of the surrounding world — in order to be nothing other than absolutely pure Soul, immortal Soul, Self: “The Soul-in-itself must contemplate Things-in-themselves” (Phaedo). Thus the criterion of truth — and the basis of conviction, this reverberation of Light in the “outer man” — is Truth in itself, the prephenomenal Intelligence by which “all things were made” and without which “nothing was made that was made.”
Schuon, Gnosis, Divine Wisdom, 1990,
“Gnosis, Language of the Self”, p. 72.
Plato is sometimes included under the heading of rationalism, which is unjust despite the rationalistic style of his dialectic and a manner of thinking that is too geometrical; but what puts Plato in the clearest possible opposition to rationalism properly so-called is his doctrine of the eye of the soul. This eye, so he teaches, lies buried in a slough from which it must extricate itself in order to mount to the vision of real things, namely the archetypes. Plato doubtless here has in mind an initiatic regeneration, for he says that the eyes of the soul in the case of the ordinary man are not strong enough to bear the vision of the Divine; moreover, this mysterial background helps to explain the somewhat playful character of the Platonic dialogues, since we are most probably dealing here with an intentional dialectical exoterism destined to adapt sacred teachings for a promulgation which had become desirable at that time.[1]
However that may be, all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things. This Essence is the “Idea” and it confers on things all their perfection, which coincides with beauty.[2]
In Plotinus the essence of Platonism reveals itself without any reserves. Here one passes from the passion-centered body to the virtuous soul and from the soul to the cognizant Spirit, then from and through the Spirit to the suprarational and unitive vision of the ineffable One, which is the source of all that exists; in the One the thinking subject and the object of thought coincide. The One projects the Spirit as the sun projects light and heat: that is to say, the Spirit, Nous, emanates eternally from the One and contemplates It. By this contemplation the Spirit actualizes in itself the world of the archetypes or ideas — the sum of essential or fundamental possibilities — and thereafter produces the animic world; the latter in its turn engenders the material world — this dead end where the reflections of the possibilities coagulate and combine. The human soul, brought forth by the One from the world of the archetypes, recognizes these in their earthly reflections, and it tends by its own nature toward its celestial origin.
With Aristotle, we are much closer to the earth, though not yet so close as to find ourselves cut off from heaven. If by rationalism is meant the reduction of the intelligence to logic alone and hence the negation of intellectual intuition (which in reality has no need of mental supports even though they may have to be used for communicating perceptions of a supramental order), then it will be seen that Aristotelianism is a rationalism in principle but not absolutely so in fact, since its theism and hylomorphism depend on Intellection and not on reasoning alone.[3] And this is true of every philosophy that conveys metaphysical truths since an unmitigated rationalism is possible only where these truths or intellections are absent.[4]
[1] We are on the eve of the epic of Alexander: Socratic-Platonic Pythagoreanism could not be withheld from the transmission, otherwise so equivocal, of Hellenic genius; and in Greece itself the baleful influence of the Sophists had to be neutralized. Plato’s antisophistry proves moreover the fundamentally non-rationalistic tendency of this sage.
[2] The opinion linking Plato not only with Pythagoreanism but also with the Egyptian tradition is perhaps not to be disregarded; in that case, the wisdom of Thoth will have survived in alchemy and partially or indirectly in Neo- Platonism as well, within Islam no less than in Christianity and Judaism.
[3] Hylomorphism is a plausible thesis, but what is much less plausible is the philosopher’s opposition of this thesis to the Platonic Ideas, of which it is really only a prolongation, one that tends to exteriorize things to a dangerous degree just because of the absence of those Ideas.
[4] Kantian theism does not benefit from this positive reservation; for Kant, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Rationalism Real and Apparent”, pp. 39-41.
For Plato, the terminal point of the cosmogonic projection is matter, whose role is to make concrete the principle of centrifugal coagulation; for Christians, this “matter” becomes “flesh” and, with it, pleasure, whereas for Islam, as for Judaism, evil is polytheism, idolatry, and disobedience, and thus, finally, duality which, at its ontological root, has no connection — to say the least — with what we call sin. The same is true of Plato’s “matter” and the “flesh” of the Christians when we trace them back to their respective roots, which are Substance and Beatitude.
Schuon, The Eye of the Heart, 1997,
“The Question of Theodicies”, p. 36.
Plato has been reproached for having had too negative an idea of matter, but this is to forget that in this connection there are in Plato’s thought [1] two movements: the first refers to fallen matter, and the second to matter in itself and as a support for the spirit. For matter, like the animic substance that precedes it, is a reflection of Mâyâ: consequently it comprises a deiform and ascending aspect and a deifugal and descending aspect; and just as there occurred the fall of Lucifer — without which there would not have been a serpent in the Earthly Paradise — so also there occurred the fall of man.
For Plato, matter — or the sensible world — is bad in so far as it is opposed to spirit, and in this respect only; and it does in fact oppose the spirit — or the world of Ideas — by its hardened and compressive nature, which is heavy as well as dividing, without forgetting its corruptibility in connection with life. But matter is good with respect to the inherence in it of the world of Ideas: the cosmos, including its material limit, is the manifestation of the Sovereign Good, and matter demonstrates this by its quality of stability, by the purity and nobility of certain of its modes, and by its symbolist plasticity, in short by its inviolable capacity to serve as a receptacle for influences from Heaven.
A distant reflection of universal Mâyâ, matter is as it were a prolongation of the Throne of God, a truth that a ‘‘spirituality’’ obsessed by the cursing of the earth has too readily lost sight of, at the price of a prodigious impoverishment and a dangerous disequilibrium; and yet this same spirituality was aware of the principial and virtual sanctity of the body, which a priori is “image of God” and a posteriori an element of “glory”.
But the fullest refutation of all Manicheism is provided by the body of the Avatâra, which is capable in principle of ascending to Heaven — by ‘‘transfiguration’’ — without having to pass through that effect of the “forbidden fruit” which is death, and which shows by its sacred character that matter is fundamentally a projection of the Spirit.[2] Like every contingent substance, matter is a mode of radiation of the Divine Substance; a partially corruptible mode, indeed, as regards the existential level, but inviolable in its essence.[3]
[1] By “thought” we mean here, not an artificial elaboration but the mental crystallization of real knowledge. With all due deference to anti-Platonic theologians, Platonism is not true because it is logical, it is logical because it is true; and as for the possible or apparent illogicalities of the theologies, these can be explained not by an alleged right to the mysteries of absurdity, but by the fragment ary character of particular dogmatic positions and also by the insuffi ciency of the means of thought and expression. We may recall in this connection the alternativism and the sublimism proper to the Semitic mentality, as well as the absence of the crucial notion of Maya—. at least at the ordinary theological level, meaning by this reservation that the boundaries of theology are not strictly delimited.
[2] The “Night Journey” (isrâ, mi’râj) of the Prophet has the same significance.
3. All the same, the biblical narrative regarding the creation of the material world implies symbolically the description of the whole cosmogony, and so that of all the worlds, and even that of the eternal archetypes of the cosmos; traditional exegesis, especially that of the Kabbalists bears witness to this.
Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, 1990,
“The Primordial Tree”, 86-87.
The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite.[1] This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of “sensible consolation” the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be.
In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that “it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance.”[2]
This passage states the crucial principle of the almost magical relationship between the conforming recipient and the predestined content or between the adequate symbol and the sacramental presence of the prototype. The ideas of Plotinus must be understood in the light of those of the “divine Plato”: the latter approved the fixed types of the sacred sculptures of Egypt, but he rejected the works of the Greek artists who imitated nature in its outward and insignificant accidentality, while following their individual imagination. This verdict immediately excludes from sacred art the productions of an exteriorizing, accidentalizing, sentimentalist and virtuoso naturalism, which sins through abuse of intelligence as much as by neglect of the inward and the essential.
Likewise, and for even stronger reasons: the inadequate soul, that is to say, the soul not in conformity with its primordial dignity as “image of God”, cannot attract the graces which favour or even constitute sanctity. According to Plato, the eye is “the most solar of instruments-’, which Plotinus comments on as follows: ‘‘The eye would never have been able to see the sun if it were not itself of solar nature, any more than the soul could see the beautiful if it were not itself beautiful.” Platonic Beauty is an aspect of Divinity, and this is why it is the “splendour of the True”: this amounts to saying that Infinity is in some fashion the aura of the Absolute, or that Maya is the shakti of Atma, and that consequently every hypostasis of the absolute Real — whatever be its degree — is accompanied by a radiance which we might seek to define with the help of such notions as “harmony”, “beauty”, “goodness”, “mercy” and “beatitude”.
“God is beautiful and He loves beauty”, says a hadith which we have quoted more than once: Atma is not only Sat and Chit, “Being” and ‘‘Consciousness” — or more relatively: “Power” and “Omniscience” — but also Ananda, “Beatitude”, and thus Beauty and Goodness; and what we want to know and realize, we must a priori mirror in our own being, because in the domain of positive realities we can only know perfectly what we are.
[1] According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.
[2] This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect — works of perversion and subversion being excluded — through pure mercy and by virtue of the ‘exception that proves the rule”.
Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, 1990,
“Foundations of an Integral Aesthetics”, pp. 78-180.
Platonic recollection is none other than the participation of the human Intellect in the ontological insights of the Divine Intellect; this is why the Sufi is said to be ‘arif bi-’Llah, “knower by Allah”, in keeping with the teaching of a famous hadith according to which God is the “Eye wherewith he (the Sufi) seeth”; and this explains the nature of the “Eye of Knowledge”, or of the “Eye of the Heart”.
For Plato’s Socrates, the ‘true philosopher’ is he who consecrates himself to ‘studying the separation of soul from body, or the liberation of the soul’, and ‘who is always occupied in the practice of dying’; it is he who withdraws from the bodily — and therefore from all which, in the ego, is the shadow or echo of the surrounding world — in order to be no more than absolutely pure soul, immortal Soul, Self: ‘The Soul-in-itself must contemplate Things-in-themselves’ (Phaedo). Thus the criterion of truth — and the basis of conviction, this reverberation of Light in the ‘outer man — is Truth in itself, the pre-phenomenal Intelligence by which ‘all things were made’ and without which ‘was not anything made that was made’.
Plato in his Symposium recalls the tradition that the human body, or even simply any living body, is like half a sphere; all our faculties and movements look and tend towards a lost centre — which we feel as if “in front” of us — lost, but found again symbolically and indirectly, in sexual union. But the outcome is only a grievous renewal of the drama: a fresh entry of the spirit into matter. The opposite sex is only a symbol: the true centre is hidden in ourselves, in the heart-intellect. The creature recognizes something of the lost centre in his partner; the love which results from it is like a remote shadow of the love of God, and of the intrinsic beatitude of God; it is also a shadow of the knowledge which consumes forms as by fire and which unites and delivers.
If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, maintains this while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical “dogmatism.” The “Greek miracle” is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the Essence, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be — and in this case it would be related to the “Hindu miracle” — is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence,
2006, “Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, p. 98.
Aristotle
According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great received from Aristotle not only the doctrines concerning morality and politics, but also “those enigmatic and profound” theories that certain masters intended to “reserve for oral communication for initiates, without allowing many to learn about them.” Having heard that Aristotle had published some of these teachings, Alexander reproached him in a letter; but Plutarch assures us that the books of Aristotle treating of metaphysics are “written in a style that renders them unusable for the ordinary reader, and useful only as memoranda for those who already have been instructed in this subject.” Let us add however that according to the Kabbalists, “it is better to divulge wisdom than to forget it”; this is perhaps what Joachim of Fiore thought of when foreseeing an “age of the Spirit.”
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition,
2002, “Pillars of Wisdom”, footnote 2.
The evolutionist rationalists are of the opinion that Aristotle, being the father of logic, is ipso facto the father of intelligence become at last mature and efficacious; they obviously are unaware that this flowering of a discipline of thought, while having its merits, goes more or less hand in hand with a weakening, or even an atrophy, of intellectual intuition. The angels, it is said, do not possess reason, for they have no need of reasoning; this need presupposes in fact that the spirit, no longer able to see, must “grope.” It may be objected that the greatest metaphysicians, hence the greatest intellectual intuitives, made use of reasoning; no doubt, but this was only in their dialectic — intended for others — and not in their intellection as such. It is true that a reservation applies here: since intellectual intuition does not a priori encompass all aspects of the real, reasoning may have the function of indirectly provoking a “vision” of some aspect; but in this case reasoning operates merely as an occasional cause, it is not a constitutive element of the cognition. We will perhaps be told that reasoning may actualize in any thinker a suprarational intuition, which is true in principle, yet in fact it is more likely that such an intuition will not be produced, as there is nothing in the profane mentality that is predisposed thereto, to say the least.
In the preceding considerations, we do not have Aristotle in mind, we blame only those who believe that Aristotelianism represents a monopoly of intelligence, and who confuse simple logic with intelligence as such, something which Aristotle never dreamed of doing. That logic can be useful or necessary for earthly man is obvious; but it is also obvious that logic is not what leads directly and indispensably to knowledge — which does not mean that illogicality is legitimate or that the suprarational coincides with the absurd. If it were objected that in mysticism and even in theology there exists a pious absurdity, we would reply that in this case absurdity is merely “functional” — somewhat as in the koans of Zen — and that it is necessary to examine the underlying intentions in order to do justice to the dialectic means; in this domain, there is a case for saying that “the end justifies the means.”
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition,
2002, “On Intelligence”, pp. 9-10.
Man must “become that which he is” because he must “become That which is”; “the soul is all that it knows,” said Aristotle.
Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism,
1986, “Introduction: Epistemological Premises”, p. 7.
Every language is a soul, said Aristotle; that is to say a psychic or mental dimension. There are languages that are parallel, such as French and Italian, as there are those that are complementary, such as French and German; it could also be said that there are linguistic families, hence genera, that on the one hand include and on the other exclude.
Schuon, To Have a Center, 2015,
“On the Art of Translating”.
God is both unknowable and knowable, a paradox which implies — on pain of absurdity — that the relationships are different, first of all on the plane of mere thought and then in virtue of everything that separates mental knowledge from that of the heart; the first is a “perceiving,” and the second a “being.” “The soul is all that it knows,” said Aristotle; it is necessary to add that the soul is able to know all that it is; and that in its essence it is none other than That which is, and That which alone is.
Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, 1982,
“Structure and Universality of the Conditions of Existence”, p. 71.
From the standpoint of integral rationalism, Aristotle has been reproached with stopping halfway and thus being in contradiction with his own principle of knowledge; but this accusation stems entirely from an abusive exploitation of Aristotelian logic, and is the product of a thinking that is artificial to the point of perversion. To Aristotle’s implicit axioms, which his detractors are incapable of perceiving, they oppose a logical automatism which the Stagirite would have been the first to repudiate. If Aristotle is to be blamed it is for the quite contrary reason that his formulation of metaphysics is governed by a tendency toward exteriorization, a tendency which is contrary to the very essence of all metaphysics.
Aristotelianism is a science of the Inward expanding toward the outward and thereby tends to favor exteriorization, whereas traditional metaphysics is invariably formulated in view of an interiorization, and for this reason does not encourage the expansion of the natural sciences, or not to an excessive extent. It is this flaw in Aristotelianism that explains the superficiality of its method of knowledge, which was inherited by Thomism and exploited by it as a religious pretext to limit the intellective faculty, despite the latter being capable in principle both of absoluteness and hence also of reaching out to the supernatural; the same defect also explains the corresponding mediocrity of Aristotelian ethics, not to mention the scientism which proves Aristotle’s deviation from the epistemological principle.
The important point to retain here is that the Monotheists, whether Semite or Semitized, could not have incorporated Aristotle in their teachings if he had been exclusively a rationalist; but in incorporating him they nonetheless became poisoned, and the partial or virtual rationalism—or rationalism in principle—which resulted has finally given rise to totalitarian rationalism, systematic and self-satisfied, and consequently shut off from every element that is subjectively or objectively suprarational.[1]
The Aristotelian Pandora’s box is scientism coupled with sensationalism; it is through these concepts that Aristotle deviates from Plato by replacing the interiorizing tendency with its inverse. People say that the Church has kept science in chains; what is certain is that the modern world has unchained it with the result that it has escaped from all control, and, in the process of destroying nature, is headed toward the destruction of mankind. For genuine Christianity, as for every other traditional perspective, the world is what it appears to be to our empirical vision and there is no good reason for it to be anything else; herein lies the real significance, on the one hand, of the naïveté of the Scriptures, and, on the other, of the trial of Galileo. To try and pierce the wall of collective, normal, millenary experience is to eat of the forbidden fruit, leading fatally to the loss of essential knowledge and earthly equilibrium through the euphoria engendered by a completely unrealistic autodivinization of man.
[1] It might seem surprising that Scholasticism chose Aristotle and not Plato or Plotinus, but the reason for this is plain, since from the viewpoint of objective faith there is everything to be gained by promoting a wisdom that offers no competition, and which makes it possible, on the one hand, to neutralize that interloper Intellection, and, on the other, to give carte blanche to any theological contradictions that may occur by describing them as “mysteries.”
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 1984,
“Rationalism, Real and Apparent”, pp. 48-50
A man such as Aristotle provides a classic example of a qualification that is exclusively intellectual and, by this very fact, unilateral and necessarily limited, even on the level of his genius, since perfect intellection ipso facto involves contemplation and interiorization. In the case of the Stagirite, the intelligence is penetrating but the tendency of the will is exteriorizing, in conformity moreover with the cosmolatry of the majority of the Greeks; it is this that enabled Saint Thomas to support the religious thesis regarding the “natural” character of the intelligence, so called because it is neither revealed nor sacramental, and the reduction of intelligence to reason illumined by faith, the latter alone being granted the right to be “supernatural.” Not that Saint Thomas thereby excluded direct intellection, which would indeed have been impossible for him, but he enclosed it to all intents and purposes within dogmatic and rational limits, whence the paradox of an interiorizing contemplativity armed with an exteriorizing logic.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 1984,
“The Problem of Qualifications”, p. 175.
Contrary to too widespread an opinion, the moral doctrine of Aristotle, who advocated the golden mean inasmuch as this is situated between two excesses, is not an invitation to mediocrity, nor is it responsible for the secular bourgeois respectability that it may have occasioned. However, this moral doctrine is to be distinguished from Christian morality which sees in morals a spiritual means — whence its sacrificial character — whereas for the Greeks, as for most Orientals, moral equilibrium is spiritually a basis and not a means.
Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions,
2002, “The Question of Theodicies”.
Comparison between Plato and Aristotle
For Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for Aristotle, it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, p. 89.
The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by Aristotle, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more “concrete” and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved.
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition,
2002, “Preface”, pp. vii-viii.
Aristotelianism is a kind of exteriorization of Platonism, that is to say of the doctrine represented by the line Pythagoras-Socrates-Plato-Plotinus. The Middle Ages showed at times an awareness of the superiority of Plato over Aristotle; it is thus that Saint Bonaventure attributes “wisdom” to the former and “science” to the latter.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 33, footnote 19.
For Heidegger, for instance, the question of Being “proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle” and: “what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial” (Sein und Zeit). Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have “discovered” their ontology by dint of “thinking”; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite “indicative” and “provisional” role of “thinking” in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a “thinker,” misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: “It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology. As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently” (…). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued?
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, pp. 33-34, footnote 20.
A certain underlying warrior or chivalric mentality does much to explain both the theological fluctuations and their ensuing disputes [1] — the nature of Christ and the structure of the Trinity having been, in the Christian world, among the chief points at issue — just as it explains such narrownesses as the incomprehension and the intolerance of the ancient theologians towards Hellenism, its metaphysics and its mysteries. It is moreover this same mentality which produced, in the very bosom of the Greek tradition, the divergence of Aristotle with regard to Plato, who personified in essence the brahmana spirit inherent in the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, [2] whereas the Stagirite formulated a metaphysics that was in certain respects centrifugal and dangerously open to the world of phenomena, actions, experiments and adventures. [3]
[1] Let us not lose sight of the fact that the same causes produce the same effects in all climates — albeit to very varied extents and that India is no exception; the quarrels of sectarian Vishnuism are a case in point.
[2] It goes without saying that in the classical period — with its grave intellectual and artistic deviations — and then in its re- emergence at the time of the Renaissance, we have obvious examples of luciferianism of a warrior and chivalric, and therefore, kshatriya type. But it is not deviation proper that we have in mind here, since we are speaking on the contrary of manifestations that are normal and acceptable to Heaven, otherwise there could be no question of voluntarist and emotional upayas.
[3] But let us not make Aristotelianism responsible for the modern world, which is due to the confluence of various factors, such as the abuses — and subsequent reactions — provoked by the unrealistic idealism of Catholicism, or such as the divergent and unreconciled demands of the Latin and Germanic mentalities; all of them converging on Greek scientism and the profane mentality.
Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions,
“The Mystery of the Two Natures”.
Platonism, which is as it were “centripetal” and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is “centrifugal” and separative, tends to sever the world — and with it man — from its divine roots. This can serve theology inasmuch as it needs the image of a man totally helpless without dogmatic and sacramental graces; and this led St. Thomas to opt for Aristotle — as against the Platonism of St. Augustine — and to deprive Catholicism of its deepest metaphysical dimension, while at the same time immunizing it — according to the usual opinion — against all temptation to “gnosis.” Be that as it may, we could also say, very schematically, that Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, “reason” is synonymous with “intellect”: reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration.
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, 2002,
“The Enigma of Diversified Subjectivity”, p. 51.
In a relative sense and without wishing to underestimate Aristotle’s merits, it could be said that this philosopher “carnalized” the “divine” Plato by putting forward a metaphysics turned towards earthly experience. However, the Stagirite cannot be accused, as regards the essential, of any false idea; limitation is not error.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Concerning the Principle of Sacrifice”, p. 94, footnote 8.
The importance of this idea of the degrees of the Real, is linked to the fact that it indicates totality of knowledge. In Hinduism, as is known, this totality is represented by Shankara, whereas for Ramanuja, as for the Semitic exoterisms, the Real does not comprise extinctive degrees; among the Greeks , we encounter the awareness of these degrees in Platonic idealism, but scarcely so in Aristotelian hylomorphism, which accentuates or favors the “horizontal” perspective; whence its utility for scientism on the one hand, and for a theology more cosmological than metaphysical on the other hand; science being centered upon the world, and religion upon the eschatological interests of man.
Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, 1982,
“Transcendence is not Contrary to Sense”, pp. 28-29.
As for Aristotelianism, we can limit ourselves here to the following consideration: on the one hand the Stagirite teaches the art of thinking correctly, but on the other hand he also induces one to think too much, to the detriment of intuition. Assuredly, the syllogism is useful, but on the express condition that it be necessary; that it not be superimposed as a systematic luxury upon a cognitive capacity which it smothers and the impossibility of which it seems to postulate implicitly. It is as if, through groping continually, one no longer knew how to see, or as if the possession of an art compelled its being used, even abusively; or again, as if thought were there for logic, rather than logic for thought.
Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, 1982,
“To Refuse or to Accept Revelation”, p. 127.
More about Plato and/or Aristotle
There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas — not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia — were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 25.
In reality, the philosophia perennis, actualized in the West, though on different levels, by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, the Fathers and the Scholastics, constitutes a definitive intellectual heritage, and the great problem of our times is not to replace them with something better — for this something could not exist according to the point of view in question here — but to return to the sources, both around us and within us, and to examine all the data of contemporary life in the light of the one, timeless truth.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 33.
The cosmological proof of God, which is found in both Aristotle and Plato, and which consists in inferring from the existence of the world that of a transcendent, positive and infinite Cause, finds no greater favor in the eyes of those who deny the supernatural. According to these people the notion of God merely compensates, in this case, for our ignorance of causes, a gratuitous argument, if ever there was one, for the cosmological proof implies, not a purely logical and abstract supposition, hut a profound knowledge of causality. If we know what total causality is, namely the “vertical” and “descending” projection of a possibility through different degrees of existence, then we can conceive the First Cause; otherwise we cannot do so. Here again we observe that the objection arises from ignoring what is implicit: rationalists forget that “proof,” on the level in question, is a key or a symbol, a means of drawing back a veil rather than of providing actual illumination; it is not by itself a leap out of ignorance and into knowledge. The principial argument “indicates” rather than “proves”; it cannot be anything more than a guideline or an aide-mémoire, since it is impossible to prove the Absolute outside itself. If “to prove” means to know something by virtue of a particular mental stratagem—but for which one would perforce remain in ignorance—then there are no possible “proofs of God”; and this, moreover, explains why one can do without them in symbolist and contemplative metaphysics.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Concerning Proofs of God”, pp. 51-52.
Aristotle, in erecting his table of categories — substance, quantity, quality, relation, activity, passivity, place, moment, position, condition — seems to have been more concerned about the rational classification of things than about their concrete nature. [1] Our own standpoint being closer to cosmology than to Peripatetic logic — although the boundaries fluctuate — we give preference to the following enumeration: object and subject, space and time, which are container-categories; matter and energy, form and number, which are content-categories; quality and quantity, simplicity and complexity, which are attribute categories; the first term of each couple being static, and the second, dynamic, approximately and symbolically speaking. This being granted, we cannot exclude other possible angles of vision, whether they be more analytic, or on the contrary more synthetic; and always prefigured by some symbolism of nature. [2]
[1] The Greek word kategoria, “argument,” means in the last analysis: an ultimate form of thought, that is to say a key-notion capable of classifying other notions, or even all the notions having a bearing on existence.
[2] Let us mention this fundamental enumeration: space, time, form, number, matter — fundamental because of its relation to the symbolism of the pentagram, the human body, the hand, the five elements. There are some who put “life” in place of matter, thinking no doubt of energy, which penetrates everything.
Schuon, To Have a Center, 1990,
“Universal Categories”, p. 75-76.
It is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned — Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well — but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Thought: Light and Perversion”, p. 4.
One must react against the evolutionist prejudice which makes out that the thought of the Greeks “attained” to a certain level or a certain result, that is to say, that the triad Socrates-Plato-Aristotle represents the summit of an entirely “natural” thought, a summit reached after long periods of effort and groping. The reverse is the truth, in the sense that all the said triad did was to crystallize rather imperfectly a primordial and intrinsically timeless wisdom, actually of Aryan origin and typologically close to the Celtic, Germanic, Mazdean and Brahmanic esoterisms.
There is in Aristotelian rationality and even in the Socratic dialectic a sort of “humanism” more or less connected with artistic naturalism and scientific curiosity, and thus with empiricism. But this already too contingent dialectic — and let us not forget that the Socratic dialogues are tinged with spiritual “pedagogy” and have something of the provisional in them — this dialectic must not lead us into attributing a “natural” character to intellections that are “supernatural” by definition, or “naturally supernatural”.
On the whole, Plato expressed sacred truths in a language that had already become profane — profane because rational and discursive rather than intuitive and symbolist, or because it followed too closely the contingencies and humours of the mirror that is the mind — whereas Aristotle placed truth itself, and not merely its expression, on a profane and “humanistic” plane.
The originality of Aristotle and his school resides no doubt in giving to truth a maximum of rational bases, but this cannot be done without diminishing it, and it has no purpose save where there is a withdrawal of intellectual intuition; it is a “two-edged sword” precisely because truth seems thereafter to be at the mercy of syllogisms.
The question of knowing whether this constitutes a betrayal or a providential readaptation is of small importance here, and could no doubt be answered in either sense. [1] What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity.
The moderns have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers — and all the sages of the East as well —with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case.
It is not the dogmatists who are naive, but the skeptics, who have not the least idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well.
How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already — for it alone could conceive of any such idea — and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? But the present purpose is not to prolong this subject; it is simply to call attention to the parallelism between the pre-Socratic — or more precisely the Ionian — wisdom and oriental doctrines such as the Vaisheshika and the Sankhya, and to underline, on the one hand, that in all these ancient visions of the Universe the implicit postulate is the innateness of the nature of things in the intellect [2] and not a supposition or other logical operation, and on the other hand, that this notion of innateness furnishes the very definition of that which the sceptics and empiricists think they must disdainfully characterize as “dogmatism”; in this way they demonstrate that they are ignorant, not only of the nature of intellection, but also of the nature of dogmas in the proper sense of the word. The admirable thing about the Platonists is not, to be sure, their “thought”, it is the content of their thought, whether it be called “dogmatic” or otherwise.
The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with Aristotle, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagirite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists — not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus — Aristotle on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out.
[1] With Pythagoras one is still in the Aryan East; with Socrates-Plato one is no longer wholly in that East — in reality neither “Eastern” nor “Western”, that distinction having no meaning for an archaic Europe — but neither is one wholly in the West; whereas with Aristotle Europe begins to become specifically “Western” in the current and cultural sense of the word. The East — or a particular East — forced an entry with Christianity, but the Aristotelian and Caesarean West finally prevailed, only to escape in the end from both Aristotle and Caesar, but by the downward path. It is opportune to observe here that all modern theological attempts to “surpass” the teaching of Aristotle can only follow the same path, in view of the falsity of their motives, whether implicit or explicit. What is really being sought is a graceful capitulation before evolutionary “ scientism”, before the machine, before an activist and demagogic socialism, a destructive psychologism, abstract art and surrealism, in short before modernism in all its forms—that modernism which is less and less a “humanism” since it de-humanizes, or that individualism which is ever more infra-individual. The moderns, who are neither Pythagoricians nor Vedantists, are surely the last to have any right to complain of Aristotle.
[2] In the terminology of the ancient cosmologists one must allow for its symbolism: when Thales saw in “water” the origin of all things, it is as certain as can be that Universal Substance — the Prakriti of the Hindus — is in question and not the sensible element. It is the same with the “ air” of Anaximenes of Miletus, or with the “ fire” of Heraclitus.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians”, pp. 50-52.
The body invites to adoration by its very theomorphic form, and that is why it can be the vehicle of a celestial presence that in principle is salvific; but, as Plato suggests, this presence is accessible only to the contemplative soul not dominated by passion, and independently of the question of whether the person is an ascetic or is married. Sexuality does not mean animality, except in perverted, hence sub-human, man; in the properly human man, sexuality is determined by that which constitutes man’s prerogative, as is attested, precisely, by the theomorphic form of his body.
Schuon, The Play of Masks, 1992,
“The Liberating Passage”, p. 89.
Thus it is not surprising that from the strictly theological point of view, gnosis is the “enemy number one.” By its recourse to intellection it seems to make Revelation redundant and even superfluous, which in theological language is called “submitting Revelation to the judgement of reason”; this confusion — which is not disinterested — between reason and intellection is altogether typical. Plato’s anticipated retort is the following, and it is all the more justified in that religious sentimentalism has had extremely serious, if providential, consequences since “it must needs be that offenses come”: “All force of reasoning must be enlisted to oppose anyone who tries to maintain an assertion and at the same time destroys knowledge, understanding and intelligence.” (Sophist, 249).
Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism,
1986, “Two Esoterisms”, p. 119.
Thus it is illogical, to say the least, to wish to contrast the “wisdom of Christ,” whose purpose is to save and not to explain, with the “wisdom of the world” — that of Plato for example — whose purpose is to explain and not to save; besides, the fact that the Platonic wisdom is not dictated by an intention to save does not imply that it is of “this world” or “of the flesh,” or even that it does not contain any liberating virtue in the methodic context required by it.
Schuon, In the Face of the Absolute, 1989,
“The Complexity of Dogmatism”, p. 109, footnote 2.
It is said nowadays of Plato, Aristotle and the Scholastics that they have been “left behind”; this means, in reality, that there is no longer anyone intelligent or normal enough to understand them, the acme of originality and emancipation being to mock things which are evident.
Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, 1982,
“Transcendence isn ot Contrary to Sense”, p. 23.
For it is evident that if certain philosophers deny God — those precisely who detach reason from its roots — it is not because reason obliges them to do so, otherwise atheism would be natural to man, [1] and otherwise a Plato or an Aristotle, who are nonetheless accused of rationalism, would not have taken the trouble to speak of God; the very structure of reason would have dispensed them from it.
[1] Which is amply belied by experience. There is no people on earth which is not religious a priori.
Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, 1982,
“Transcendence is not Contrary to Sense”, p. 23.
One can be a Christian and at the same time a Platonist, given that there is no competition between mystical voluntarism and metaphysical intellectuality, leaving aside the Semitic concept of the creatio ex nihilo.
Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, 1990,
“Understanding Esoterism”, p. 27.
When one speaks of Christian esoterism, it can only be one of three things: firstly, it can be Christly gnosis, founded on the person, the teaching and the gifts of Christ, and profiting in certain eventualities from Platonic concepts, a process which in metaphysics has nothing irregular about it; [1] this gnosis was manifested in particular, although in a very uneven way, in writings such as those of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Denis the Areopagite — or the Theologian or the Mystic, if one prefers — Scotus Erigena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Jakob Boehme and Angelus Silesius. [2] (…)
[1] In a general manner, intertraditional influences are always possible under certain conditions, but without any syncretism. Unquestionably Buddhism and Islam had an influence on Hinduism, not of course by adding new elements to it, but by favouring or determining the blossoming of pre-existing elements.
[2] In other words, one finds elements of esoterism in orthodox gnosticism — which is prolonged in the theosophy of Boehme and his successors — then in the Dionysian mysticism of the Rhinelanders, and of course in Hesychasm; without forgetting that partial element of methodic esoterism constituted by the quietism of Molinos, traces of which can be found in St Francis of Sales.
Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way,
1990, “Understanding Esoterism”, p. 29.
The sacred rights of the Intellect appear besides in the fact that Christians have not been able to dispense with the wisdom of Plato, and that later, the Latins found the need for recourse to Aristotelianism, as if thereby recognising that religio could not do without the element of wisdom, which a too exclusive perspective of love had allowed to fall into discredit. [1] But if knowledge is a profound need of the human spirit, it is by that very fact also a way.
[1] The ancient tendency to reduce sophia to a ‘philosophy’, an ‘art for art’s sake’ or a ‘knowledge without love’, hence a pseudo-wisdom, has necessitated the predominance, in Christianity, of the contrary viewpoint. Love, in the sapiential perspective, is the element which surpasses simple ratiocination and makes knowledge effective; this cannot be insisted on too much.
Schuon, Gnosis, Divine Wisdom, 1990,
“Some Thoughts on Its Nature”. p. 114.
From the point of view of the Platonists — in the widest sense — the return to God is inherent in the fact of existence: our being itself offers the way of return, for that being is divine in its nature, otherwise it would be nothing; that is why we must return, passing through the strata of our ontological reality, all the way to pure Substance, which is one; it is thus that we become perfectly “ourselves”. Man realizes what he knows: a full comprehension — in the light of the Absolute — of relativity dissolves it and leads back to the Absolute. Here again there is no irreducible antagonism between Greeks and Christians: if the intervention of Christ can become necessary, it is not because deliverance is something other than a return, through the strata of our own being, to our true Self, but because the function of Christ is to render such a return possible. It is made possible on two planes, the one existential and exoteric and the other intellectual and esoteric; the second plane is hidden in the first, which alone appears in the full light of day, and that is the reason why for the common run of mortals the Christian perspective is only existential and separative, not intellectual and unitive. This gives rise to another misunderstanding between Christians and Platonists: while the Platonists propound liberation by Knowledge because man is an intelligence [1] the Christians envisage in their over-all doctrine a salvation by Grace because man is an existence— as such separated from God—and a fallen and impotent will. Once again, the Greeks can be reproached for having at their command but a single way, inaccessible in fact to the majority, and for giving the impression that it is philosophy that saves, just as one can reproach the Christians for ignoring liberation by Knowledge and for assigning an absolute character to our existential and volitive reality alone and to means appropriate to that aspect of our being, or for taking into consideration our existential relativity and not our “intellectual absoluteness”; nevertheless the reproach to the Greeks cannot concern their sages, any more than the reproach to the Christians can attack their gnosis, nor in a general way their sanctity.
[1] Islam, in conformity with its “ paracletic” character, reflects this point of view — which is also that of the Vedanta and of all other forms of gnosi — in a Semitic and religious mode, and realizes it all the more readily in its esoterism; like the Hellenist, the Moslem asks first of all: “What must I know or admit, seeing that I have an intelligence capable of objectivity and of totality?” and not a priori “What must I want, since I have a will that is free, but fallen?”
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians“, p. 49.
The Augustinian and Platonic doctrine of knowledge is still in perfect accord with gnosis, while Thomist and Aristotelian sensationalism, without being false on its own level and within its own limits, accords with the exigencies of the way of love, in the specific sense of the term bhakti. But this reservation is far from applying to the whole of Thomism, which identifies itself, in many respects, with truth unqualified.
It is necessary to reject the opinion of those who believe that Thomism, or any other ancient wisdom, has an effective value only when we ‘recreate it in ourselves’ — we, ‘men of today!’ — and that if St. Thomas had read Descartes, Kant and the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he would have expressed himself differently; in reality, he would then only have had to refute a thousand errors the more. If an ancient saying is right, there is nothing to do but accept it; if it is false, there is no reason to take notice of it; but to want to ‘rethink’ it through a veil of new errors or impressions quite clearly has no interest, and any such attempt merely shows the degree to which the sense of intrinsic and timeless truth has been lost.
Schuon, Gnosis, Divine Wisdom, 1990,
“Some Thoughts on its Nature”, p. 116, footnote 2.
It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the “depths of the heart,” which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all others. They are accessible, intuitively and infallibly, to the “gnostic,” the “pneumatic,” the “theosopher” — in the proper and original meaning of these terms — and they are accessible consequently to the “philosopher” according to the still literal and innocent meaning of the word: to a Pythagoras or a Plato, and to a certain extent even to an Aristotle, in spite of his exteriorizing and virtually scientistic perspective.
Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, 1986,
“Introduction: Epistemological Premises”. p. 3.
It is in fact the Logos which directly rules the world, and thus It coincides with the Demiurge of Plato and of the Gnostics, and no less with the Hindu Trinity of the efficient Gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
Schuon, To Have a Center, 1990,
“Degrees and Scope of Theism”, p. 117.
It has been said and said again that the Hellenists and the Orientals — the “Platonic” spirits in the widest sense — have become blameworthy in “arrogantly” rejecting Christ, or that they are trying to escape from their “responsibilities”— once again and always! — as creatures towards the Creator in withdrawing into their own centre where they claim to find, in their pure being, the essence of things and the Divine Reality; they thus dilute, it seems, the quality of creature and at the same time that of Creator with a sort of pantheistic impersonalism, which amounts to saying that they destroy the relationship of “obligation” between the Creator and the creature.
In reality “responsibilities” are relative as we ourselves are relative in our existential specification; they cannot be less relative — or “more absolute” — than the subject to which they are related. One who, by the grace of Heaven, succeeds in escaping from the tyranny of the ego is by that very circumstance discharged from the responsibilities which the ego implies. God shows himself as creative Person in so far as — or in relation to the fact that — we are “creature” and individual, but that particular reciprocal relationship is far from exhausting all our ontological and intellectual nature; that is to say, our nature cannot be exhaustively defined by notions of “duty”, of “rights”, nor by other fixations of the kind.
It has been said that the “rejection” of the Christic gift on the part of the “Platonic” spirit constitutes the subtlest and most Luciferan perversity of the intelligence; this argument, born of an instinct of selfpreservation, wrong in its inspiration but comprehensible on its own plane, can easily and far more pertinently be turned against those who make use of it: for, if we are to be obliged at all costs to find some mental perversion somewhere, we shall find it with those who want to substitute for the Absolute a personal and therefore relative God, and temporal phenomena for metaphysical principles, and that not in connection with a childlike faith that asks nothing of anybody, but within the framework of the most exacting erudition and the most totalitarian intellectual pretension.
If there is such a thing as abuse of the intelligence, it is to be found in the substitution of the relative for the Absolute, or the accident from the Substance, on the pretext of putting the “concrete” above the “abstract”; it is not to be found in the rejection — in the name of transcendent and immutable principles — of a relativity presented as absoluteness.
The misunderstanding between Christians and Hellenists can for the greater part be condensed to a false alternative: in effect, the fact that God resides in our deepest “being” — or at the extreme transpersonal depth of our consciousness — and that we can in principle realize him with the help of the pure and theomorphic intellect, in no way excludes the equal and simultaneous affirmation of this immanent and impersonal Divinity as objective and personal, nor the fact that we can do nothing without his grace, despite the essentially “divine” character of the Intellect in which we participate naturally and supernaturally.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians“, pp. 53-54.
From a certain point of view, the Christian argument is the historicity of the Christ-Saviour, whereas the Platonic or “Aryan” argument is the nature of things or the Immutable. If, to speak symbolically, all men are in danger of drowning as a consequence of the fall of Adam, the Christian saves himself by grasping the pole held out to him by Christ, whereas the Platonist saves himself by swimming; but neither course weakens or neutralizes the effectiveness of the other.
On the one hand there are certainly men who do not know how to swim or who are prevented from doing so, but on the other hand swimming is undeniably among the possibilities open to man; the whole thing is to know what counts most in any situation whether individual or collective. We have seen that Hellenism, like all directly or indirectly sapiential doctrines, is founded on the axiom man-intelligence rather than man-will, and that is one of the reasons why it had to appear as inoperative in the eyes of a majority of Christians; but only of a majority because the Christian gnostics could not apply such a reproach to the Pythagoreans and Platonists; the gnostics could not do otherwise than admit the primacy of the intellect, and for that reason the idea of divine redemption meant to them something very different from and more far-reaching than a mysticism derived from history and a sacramental dogmatism.
It is necessary to repeat once more — as others have said before and better — that sacred facts are true because they retrace on their own plane the nature of things, and not the other way round: the nature of things is not real or normative because it evokes certain sacred facts. The principles, essentially accessible to pure intelligence — if they were not so man would not be man, and it is almost blasphemy to deny that human intelligence considered in relation to animal intelligence has a supernatural side — the universal principles confirm the sacred facts, which in their turn reflect those principles and derive their efficacy from them; it is not history, whatever it may contain, that confirms the principles.
This relationship is expressed by the Buddhists when they say that spiritual truth is situated beyond the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and that it derives its evidence from the depths of Being itself, or from the innateness of Truth in all that is. In the sapiential perspective the divine redemption is always present; it pre-exists all terrestrial alchemy and is its celestial model, so that it is always thanks to this eternal redemption — whatever may be its vehicle on earth — that man is freed from the weight of his vagaries and even, Deo volente, from that of his separative existence; if “my Words shall not pass away” it is because they have always been. The Christ of the gnostics is he who is “before Abraham was” and from whom arise all the ancient wisdoms; a consciousness of this, far from diminishing a participation in the treasures of the historical Redemption, confers on them a compass that touches the very roots of Existence.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians“, pp. 55-57
German poems by Schuon in English translation
Philosophy
Sophists were the creators of wrong thinking —
False philosophers, insolent
And vainglorious. But in all the Greek world
It was Plato who was chosen for Wisdom.
Before him was Pythagoras, mysterious, deep —
The Spirit bloweth where it listeth.
One should call the inventors of false doctrines
Not philosophers, but misosophers —
Those who follow their ambition and their pride,
And are stubborn in their mad ideas.
Plato and Aristotle, and later Plotinus:
They radiate over a thousand years and more.
What they wished, and in part achieved,
Was that humanity should rally round the Truth.
Schuon, Adastra
The dignity of a noble man is not superficial;
It is based on a profound reality:
The immovable Center amidst the circling
Of the world; the wheel of existence is consecrated to God.
As Aristotle taught: silent
Is the cause of all things. Nobility
Is participation in Pure Being;
This lies deep in the blood of the noble man.
The principle of dignity should resound in the heart —
Dignity means:
to bring Being into our existence.
Schuon, Songs Without Names, 4th Collection, XXIX
XCI
Plato’s thought looked towards Heaven,
Aristotle’s thought looked towards the earth;
Similar is the relationship that we find between Shankara
And Ramanuja in India; both spiritual edifices
Had to be built, each one to shape a specific world.
Greece and India are not on the same level;
Hellas cannot be the Sanâtana Dharma.
CXLIX
All too often psychology replaces logic —
And even Truth itself —
And thereby, in our decadent age,
Has robbed many people of all support.
If one had remained with Aristotle,
One would not have swallowed every false idea —
But psychomania twists everything according to its wishful thinking.
CXXXII
Some scholars say
“That stories, plays and fables
Should be understood symbolically”;
Nevertheless: what stories tell us must have a meaning on its own plane,
Otherwise symbolic interpretation is but jest and shimmering illusion.
One can never excuse stupid puzzles by spiritual interpretation;
Give us beauty and truth, not wild yarns and lies.
Because the purpose of tragedy,
As Aristotle said, is catharsis;
If one is offered only chaotic action, the seeker after Wisdom will find nothing.
Mytho-poetical story-telling is a widespread human weakness —
The wise man, Deo juvante, is able to perceive the nature of things.
Philosophy and modern times
One of the great errors of our times is to speak of the “bankruptcy” of religion or the religions; this is to lay blame on truth for our own refusal to admit it; and by the same token it is to deny man both liberty and intelligence. Intelligence depends in large measure on the will, hence on free will, in the sense that free will can contribute towards actualizing intelligence or on the contrary paralyzing it. It was not without reason that medieval theologians located heresy in the will: intelligence can, in fact, fall into error, but its nature does not allow it to resist truth indefinitely; for this to happen it needs the intervention of a factor connected with the will, or, more precisely, with the passions, namely prejudice, sentimental bias, individualism in all its forms. There is, at the basis of every error, an element of irrational “mystique,” a tendency not deriving from concepts, but making use of them or producing them: behind every limiting or subversive philosophy can be discerned a “taste” or a “color”; errors proceed from “hardenings,” drynesses or intoxications.
Far from proving that modern man “keeps a cool head” and that men of old were dreamers, modern unbelief and “exact science” are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism — sometimes apparently antirationalist — which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the “age of reason.”
The Renaissance also knew such a wave of false lucidity: like our age, it rejected truths along with outworn sentimentalities, replacing them with new sentimentalities that were supposedly “intelligent.” To properly understand these oscillations it must be remembered that Christianity as a path of love opposed pagan rationalism; that is to say, it opposed emotional elements possessing a spiritual quality to the implacable, but “worldly,” logic of the Greco-Romans, while later on absorbing certain sapiential elements which their civilization comprised.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom,
1995, “Preface”, pp. xi,xii.
It has been said that the flaws characterizing the modern West are rationalism, materialism and sentimentalism. According to the first, reason alone brings about all knowledge; according to the second, only matter gives meaning to life; as for sentimentalism, one ought to rather speak of psychologism, besides the fact that one should not confuse a given emotivity with emotivity as such, nor wish to minimize the defects of the East by exagerating those of the West. According to psychologism, the spiritual and the intellectual are reduced to the psychic, hence in a certain way to the infrahuman: quite paradoxically, it is some rationalists who say so.
Schuon, The Eye of the Heart, 1997,
“Between East and West”, p. 63.
The most specifically modern thought readily makes the mistake of introducing the psychological notion of ‘genius’ into the intellectual sphere, a sphere which is exclusively that of truth. In the name of ‘genius’ every distortion of the normal functioning of the intelligence seems to be permitted and the most elementary logic is more and more readily rejected on the ground that it is lacking in originality and therefore ‘tedious’, ‘tiresome’ or ‘pedantic’. However it is not the person who applies principles who is the pedant, but only the person who applies them badly; moreover the ‘creative genius’, by a curious derogation of his ‘inspiration’, is never short of ‘principles’ when he needs some illusory pretexts for gratifying his mental passions.
Frithjof Schuon
In our times it is the machine which tends to become the measure of man, and thereby it becomes something like the measure of God, though of course in a diabolically illusory manner; for the most “advanced” minds it is in fact the machine, technics, experimental science, which will henceforth dictate to man his nature, and it is these which create the truth — as is shamelessly admitted — or rather what usurps its place in man’s consciousness.
It is difficult for man to fall lower, to realize a greater mental perversion, a more complete abandonment of himself, a more perfect betrayal of his intelligent and free personality: in the name of “science” and of “human genius” man consents to become the creation of what he has created and to forget what he is, to the point of expecting the answer to this from machines and from the blind forces of nature; he has waited until he is no longer anything and now claims to be his own creator. Swept away by a torrent, he glories in his incapacity to resist it.
And just as matter and machines are quantitative, so man too becomes quantitative: the human is henceforth the social. It is forgotten that man, by isolating himself, can cease to be social, whereas society, whatever it may do — and it is in fact incapable of acting of itself — can never cease to be human.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 38.
The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to categories connected with time; a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification, but their value is always related to the time in which they are rightly or wrongly placed; everything is considered as the expression of a “period” and not as having a timeless and intrinsic value; and this is entirely in conformity with modern relativism, and with a psychologist or biologist that destroys essential values. [3]
This philosophy derives all it has in the way of originality from what, in effect, is nothing but a hatred of God; but since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly through the laws of nature, and one goes so far as to disparage the very form of man and his intelligence, the very intelligence one thinks with and abuses with. There is however no escape from the immanent Truth: “The more he blasphemes”, says Meister Eckhart, “the more he praises God”.
[3] In order to “situate” the doctrine of a scholastic, for example, or even of a Prophet, a “psychoanalysis” is prepared — it is needless to emphasize the monstrous impudence implicit in such an attitude — and with wholly mechanical and perfectly unreal logic the “influences” to which this doctrine has been subject are laid bare. There is no hesitation in attributing to saints, in the course of this process, all kinds of artificial and even fraudulent, conduct; but it is obviously forgotten, with satanic inconsequence, to apply the same principle to oneself, and to explain one’s own supposedly “objective” position by psychoanalytical considerations; sages are treated as being sick men and one takes oneself for a god. In the same range of ideas, it is shamelessly asserted that there are no primary ideas; that they are due only to prejudices of a grammatical order — and thus to the stupidity of the sages who were duped by them — and that their only effect has been to sterilize “thought” for thousands of years, and so on and so forth; it is a case of expressing a maximum of absurdity with a maximum of subtlety. For procuring a pleasurable sensation of important accomplishment there is nothing like the conviction of having invented gunpowder or of having stood Christopher Columbus’ egg on its point.
Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006,
“Fall and Forfeiture”, pp. 22-23.
Kantianism
A doctrine can be described as sentimental not because it uses a symbolism of the feelings or because its language is more or less emotional, but because its point of departure is determined by a sentimental motive; indeed, it can happen that a doctrine founded on a particular aspect of reality does not try to avoid appeals to sentiment, whereas on the contrary, an illusory theory inspired by passion in its very axiom affects a rational or “icy” tone and displays an impeccable logic starting from its basic error; the “headless” character of this logic, however, will not escape the notice of those who know that logic has no validity except in virtue of the soundness — physical or metaphysical — of its foundation.
If we take the example of a doctrine in appearance completely intellectual and inaccessible to the emotions, namely Kantianism, considered as the archetype of theories seemingly divorced from all poetry, we shall have no difficulty in discovering that its starting point or “dogma” is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason; it voices, therefore, a priori an instinctive revolt against truths which are rationally ungraspable and which are considered annoying on account of this very inaccessibility. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or “brilliant” if one wishes, but contrary to truth.
What is crucial in Kantianism is not its pro domo logic and its few very limited lucidities, but the altogether “irrational” desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of theintelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.
Negations on this scale are always accompanied by a sort of moral fault which makes them less excusable than if it were merely a question of intellectual narrowness: the Kantists, failing to understand “dogmatic metaphysics,” do not notice the enormous disproportion between the intellectual and human greatness of those they label as “metaphysical dogmatists” and the illusions which they attribute to them.
Yet even if allowance be made for such a lack of understanding, it seems that any honest man ought to be sensitive, if only indirectly, to the human level of these “dogmatists” — what is evidence in metaphysics becomes “dogma” for those who do not understand it — and here is an extrinsic argument the extent of which cannot be neglected.
Whereas the metaphysician intends to come back to the “first word” — the word of primordial Intellection — the modern philosopher on the contrary wishes to have the “last word”; thus Comte imagines that after two inferior stages — namely “theology” and “metaphysics” — finally comes the “positive” or “scientific” stage which gloriously reduces itself to the most outward and coarse experiences; it is the stage of the rise of industry which, in the eyes of the philosopher, marks the summit of progress and of civilization. Like the “criticism” of Kant, the “positivism” of Comte starts from a sentimental instinct which wants to destroy everything in order to renew everything in the sense of a desacralized and totally “humanist” and profane world.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Reflections on Ideological Sentimentalism”, pp. 11-12.
In order to discredit faith and seduce believers, Kant does not hesitate to appeal to pride or vanity: whoever does not rely on reason alone is a “minor” who refuses to “grow up”; if men allow themselves to be led by “authorities” instead of “thinking for themselves,” it is solely through laziness and cowardice, neither more nor less. A thinker who needs to make use of such means — which on the whole are demagogic — must indeed be short of serious arguments.
Schuon, To Have a Center, 1990,
“The Primacy of Intellection”, p. 64, footnote 2.
Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as “prejudice”; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious. [1]
[1] This is what Kant with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a “doctrine” and definitively installed in European “thought,” giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative “culture.” Mental hypertrophy in the “cultured” man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as “positive” or “human.” Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 7.
For Kant, intellectual intuition — of which he does not understand the first word — is a fraudulent manipulation (Erschleichung), which throws a moral discredit onto all authentic intellectuality.
Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, 1995,
“Thought: Light and Perversion”, p. 3, footnote 1.
Poem # CXVI
“A demolisher of everything” is what one can call a fool
By the name of Kant, who believed that what he
Called intelligence or reason, was his own work
He thought he had discovered the limits of thought.
A consolation against the straw of such philosophers
Is that there are always flames in the fireplace.
Schuon, World Wheel – Volumes IV-VII, 2006.
Kantians will ask us to prove the existence of this way of knowing (intellection of archetypes); and herein is the first error, namely that only what can be proved de facto is knowledge; the second error, which immediately follows the first, is that a reality that one cannot prove — that is to say which one cannot make accessible to some artificial and ignorant mental demand — by reason of this apparent lack of proof, does not and cannot exist. Integral rationalism lacks intellectual objectivity as much as moral impartiality. [1]
[1] Kant calls “transcendental subreption” (Erschleichung) the transformation” of the purely “ regulative” idea of God into an objective reality; which once more proves that he is unable to conceive certitude outside a reasoning founded on sense experience and operating beneath the reality which he pretends to judge and deny. In short, Kantian “criticism’ consists in calling liar” whoever does not bend to its discipline; agnostics do practically the same, by decreeing that no one can know anything, since they themselves know nothing, or desire to know nothing.
Frithjof Schuon
Certain arguments against eternal life are thoroughly typical of the “concretist” perversion of the intelligence and the imagination: to exist, they say, is to measure oneself against limits; it is to conquer resistances and to produce something. They have evidently no conception of the possibility of an existence that is incorporated in active Immutability, or in immutable Activity and that lives by it; the touchstone of the real for the materialists is always gross experience coupled with the “hylic’s” lack of imagination; on this level of thought there is nothing but “boredom” to be seen in eternal life, which brings us to the monologue attributed metaphorically by Kant to the Divine Person who, in taking note of his eternity, would, so it is supposed, logically be obliged to raise the question of his own origin.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Abuse of the Ideas of the Concrete and the Abstract”, p. 24.
Reason, then, to the extent that it is artificially divorced from the Intellect, engenders individualism and arbitrariness. This is exactly what happens in the case of someone like Kant, who is a rationalist even while rejecting “dogmatic rationalism”; while the latter is doubtless rationalism, the Kantian critical philosophy is even more deserving of the name, indeed it is the very acme of rationalism.
As is well known this critical philosophy looks upon metaphysics, not as the science of the Absolute and of the true nature of things, but as the “science of the limits of human reason”, this reason (Vernunft) being identified with intelligence pure and simple, an utterly contradictory axiom, for in terms of what can the intelligence limit itself, seeing that by its very nature it is in principle unlimited or it is nothing? And if the intelligence as such is limited, what guarantee do we have that its operations, including those of critical philosophy, are valid?
For an intellectual limit is a wall of which one has no awareness. One cannot therefore have it both ways: either the intelligence by definition comprises a principle of illimitability or liberty, whatever be the degree of its actualization, in which case there is no call to attribute limits to it with an arbitrariness that is all the more inexcusable in that the power of a particular individual intelligence (or mode of intelligence) is not necessarily a criterion for the appraisal of intelligence as such; or else, on the contrary, the intelligence comprises, likewise by definition, a principle of limitation or constraint, in which case it no longer admits of any certitude and cannot function any differently from the intelligence of animals, with the result that all pretension to a “critical philosophy” is vain.
If the normal functioning of the intelligence has to be subjected to a critique, then the criticizing consciousness has to be subjected to a critique in its turn by asking, “what is it that thinks?” and so forth—a play of mirrors whose very inconclusiveness demonstrates its absurdity, proved moreover in advance by the very nature of cognition. A thought is “dogmatist,” or else it is nothing; a thought that is “criticist” is in contradiction with its own existence. A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting; and this is just what has happened to critical philosophy, swept away in its turn, and through its own fault, by existentialism in all its forms.
According to the sensationalists, all knowledge originates in sensorial experience; theologians hasten to add that this applies only to man’s “natural” capacity for knowledge—a comment that does not render the above opinion any the less debatable—whereas the extreme sensationalists go so far as to maintain that human knowledge can have no other source than the experience in question: which merely proves that they themselves have no access to any suprasensory knowledge and are unaware of the fact that the suprasensible can be the object of a genuine perception and hence of a concrete experience.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence,
“Rationalism Real and Apparent”, p. 28-30.
Thus, it is upon an intellectual infirmity that these thinkers build their systems, without their appearing to be in the least impressed by the fact that countless men as intelligent as themselves (to put it mildly) have thought otherwise than they do. How, for example, did a man like Kant explain to himself the fact that his thesis, so immensely important for humankind, if it were true, was unknown to all the peoples of the world and had not been discovered by a single sage, and how did he account for the fact that men of the highest abilities labored under lifelong illusions (in his eyes) which were totally incompatible with those abilities—even founding religions, producing sanctity, and creating civilizations? Surely the least one might ask of a “great thinker” is a little imagination.
Apart from the forms of sensory knowledge, Kant admits the categories, regarded by him as innate principles of cognition; these he divides into four groups inspired by Aristotle, [1] while at the same time subjectivizing the Aristotelian notion of category. He develops in his own way the peripatetic categories that he accepts while discarding others, without realizing that, regardless of Aristotelianism, the highest and most important of the categories have eluded his grasp. [2] The categories are a priori independent of all experience since they are innate; Kant recognized this, yet he considered that they were capable of being “explored” by a process he called “transcendental investigation.” But how will one ever grasp the pure subject who explores and who investigates?
Another feature of this suicidal rationalism is the following: we are asked to believe that knowledge, thus reduced to a combination of sensory experiences and the innate categories, shows us things such as they appear to be and not such as they are; as if the inherent nature of things did not pierce through their appearances, given that the whole point of knowledge is the perception of a thing-in-itself — an aseity — failing which the very notion of perception would not exist.
To speak of a knowledge that is incapable of adequation is a contradiction in terms, disproved moreover by experience at every level of the knowable; in short, it is absurd to deduce from the obvious fact that our knowledge cannot become totally identified with its objects — at least when these objects are relative — that all speculations on the aseity of things are “empty and vain” (leer und nichtig). To turn this dictatorial conclusion into an argument against metaphysical “dogmatism,” so far from unmasking the latter, serves only to demonstrate the emptiness and vanity of critical philosophy, thus causing the argument to rebound upon itself.
All the hopeless pedantic of this philosophy becomes glaringly apparent in the notion of “sophistications”: this is the name it gives to reasoning which are devoid of “empirical premises,” and which enable us to infer something of which (so it appears) we have no idea — as, for example, when we infer the reality of God from the existence of the world or the qualities it manifests.
The philosopher, who in other respects displays so little of the poet, does nevertheless have enough poetic imagination to describe conclusions of this kind as “sophistical mirages” (sophistische Blendwerke); that a reasoning might simply be the logical and provisional description of an intellectual evidence, and that its function might be the actualization of this evidence, in itself supralogical, apparently never crosses the minds of pure logicians.
[1] Quantity, quality, relation, and modality; the latter no doubt replacing the Aristotelian “ position.”
[2] Such as the principial and cosmic qualities which determine and classify phenomena, or the universal dimensions which join the world to the Supreme Essence and which include each in its own manner the qualities mentioned above. Aristotle for his part had the right not to speak of them in that he accepted God as being self-evident and his approach was in no way moralistic and empirical; since he accept ed God, he did not consider his categories to be exhaustive.
Schuon, Logicand Transcendence, 1984,
“Rationalism, Real and Apparent”, pp. 35-37.
Perhaps the following reflections will involve some repetition of things that have already been said, but no matter. From the exclusive standpoint of a logician the metaphysical doctrines of the Universe will be open to two reproaches: first, that as attempts at an explanation they are naïve, and second, that the attempts have been undertaken without previous investigation of our faculties of knowledge.
The first reproach is based on the totally false hypothesis that a metaphysical doctrine is a logical attempt at an explanation; the second reproach, which stems from Kant, amounts to flagrant nonsense, for if there is nothing to prove our intelligence is capable of adequation — in that case, what is intelligence? — there is likewise nothing to prove that the intelligence expressing this doubt is competent to doubt, and so forth. If the optic nerve has to be examined in order to be sure that vision is real, it will likewise be necessary to examine that which examines the optic nerve, an absurdity which proves in its own indirect way that knowledge of suprasensible things is intuitive and cannot be other than intuitive.
Moreover, since philosophy by definition could never limit itself to the description of phenomena available to common observation, it is forced to admit, in good logic at least, the intuitive and supralogical character of the faculty of knowledge which it claims to possess. Logic, in other words, is perfectly consistent only when exceeding itself.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Rationalism Real and Apparent”, p. 39.
For Kant, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Rationalism Real and Apparent”, p. 41, footnote 14.
There remains the experimental or mystical proof of God. While admitting that logically and in the absence of a doctrine, it proves nothing to anyone who has not undergone the unitive experience, nonetheless there is no justification for concluding that because it is incommunicable it must be false; this was the error of Kant, who moreover gave the name of “theurgy” to this direct experience of the Divine Substance.
The mystical proof of the Divinity belongs to the order of extrinsic arguments and carries the weight of the latter: the unanimous witness of the sages and the saints, over the whole surface of the globe and throughout the ages, is a sign or a criterion which no man of good faith can despise, short of asserting that the human species has neither intelligence nor dignity; and if it possesses neither the one nor the other, if truth has never been within its grasp, then neither can it hope to discover truth when in extremis.
The idea of the absurdity both of the world and of man, supposing this to be true, would remain inaccessible to us; in other words, if modern man is so intelligent, ancient man cannot have been so stupid. Much more is implied in this simple reflection than might appear at first sight.
Consequently, before putting aside the mystical or experimental proof as unacceptable from the outset, one should not forget to ask oneself what kind of men have invoked it. There can be no common measure between the intellectual and moral worth of the greatest of the contemplatives and the absurdity that their illusion would imply, were it nothing but that.
If we have to choose between some encyclopedist or other and Jesus, it is Jesus whom we choose; we would also of course choose some infinitely lesser figure, but we cannot fail to choose the side where Jesus is to be found.
In connection with the questions raised by the mystical proof and, at the other extreme, by the assurance displayed by negators of the supernatural — who deny others any right to a similar assurance without having access to their elements of certainty — we would say that the fact that the contemplative may find it impossible to furnish proof of his knowledge in no wise proves the nonexistence of that knowledge, any more than the spiritual unawareness of the rationalist does away with the falseness of his denials.
As we have already remarked, the fact that a madman does not know that he is mad is obviously no proof to the contrary, just as, inversely, the fact that a man of sound mind cannot prove to a madman that his mind is sound in no way proves it to be unsound. These are almost truisms, but their sense is too often missed by philosophers as well as by men of lesser pretensions.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Concerning Proofs of God”, p. 56-57.
Descartes and the Cogito
In the Cogito ergo sum all is lost, since consciousness of being is subordinated to the experience of thought; when being is thus blurred it carries thought downwards with it, for if it is necessary to prove being, it is necess ary also to prove the effi cacy of the intelligence, hence the validity of its conclusions, the soundness of the ergo. Guénon, who had the great merit of restoring to the conceptions of intellectuality and of orthodoxy their true and universal meaning, once wrote to us on the subject of the Cogito: “In order to see all that is involved in Descartes’ saying ‘I think, therefore I am,’ it is necessary to consider the twofold reduction which this effects: firstly, the ‘I’ is reduced to the soul alone (the body being excluded); and secondly, the soul itself is reduced to thought, ‘a substance the whole nature of which consists solely of thinking’; the distinction which he maintains between substances and their respective principal attributes seems to be primarily verbal since for him the principal attribute expresses completely the essence or the nature of the substance. There has been much discussion on the question of knowing whether the Cartesian formula ought really to be considered as an argument or line of reasoning; the ergo however does not seem open to any interpretation other than as signifying a deduction. The same objection can also be applied to the famous ‘ontological argument’; everything that it contains which is true and metaphysically valid comes down to the affirmation ‘Being is,’ where there is no trace of argument. In this connection one could recall the absurd philosophical question of the ‘criterion of truth,’ that is to say the search for an external sign by which truth would infallibly be recognized; this question is among those that cannot be solved because they do not really arise.”
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 14, footnote 11.
If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical “dogmatism.” The “Greek miracle” is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the Essence, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be — and in this case it would be related to the “Hindu miracle” — is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Tracing the Notion of Philosophy”, pp. 98-99.
Rationalism is the thought of the Cartesian “therefore,” which signals a proof; this has nothing to do with the “therefore” that language demands when we intend to express a logico-ontological relationship. Instead of cogito ergo sum, one ought to say: sum quia est esse, “I am because Being is”; “because” and not “therefore.” The certitude that we exist would be impossible without absolute, hence necessary, Being, which inspires both our existence and our certitude; Being and Consciousness: these are the two roots of our reality. Vedanta adds Beatitude, which is the ultimate content of both Consciousness and Being.
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition,
2002, Preface, p. viii.
The truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum is, not that it presents thought as the proof of Being, but simply that it enunciates the primacy of thought — hence of consciousness or of intelligence — in relation to the material world which surrounds us; certainly, it is not our personal thought which preceded the world, but it was — or is — absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is precisely a distant reflection; our thought which reminds us — and proves to us — that in the beginning was the Spirit. Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be.
Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, 1982,
“Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity”, p. 5.
What good, for example, is Schelling’s correct view of intellectual contemplation and of the transcending of the subject-object relationship in the Absolute, since it is accompanied by the promise of a flat philosophical pseudo-religion mingled with a classical or academic aestheticism of the most banal style? The replacing of the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum by the formula of Maine de Biran: “I act, I will, I exist,” or the Sum cogitans of Heidegger, and so on, is strictly a matter of taste, or of mental illusion; the starting point in all cases of this kind is at bottom merely an ignorance ignorant of itsel f. It may well be asked why thought or action are any better proof of our existence than some sensation or other; it is precisely the intelligence which shows us that many things exist without thinking, acting or willing, for once we see that stones exist, we have no need to invoke thought or action as proofs of our own existence, provided, of course, we admit that we are certain of the objective value of our vision. Now we are certain of it by virtue of the infallibility of the Intellect, and that is a subject which admits of no discussion, any more than does the question of knowing whether we are sane or mad. Philosophers readily found their systems on the absence of this certitude, which is however the conditio sine qua non of all knowledge, and even of all thought and all action.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 36, footnote 21.
Cartesianism — perhaps the most intelligent way of being unintelligent — is the classic example of a faith which has become the dupe of the gropings of reasoning; this is a “wisdom from below” and history shows it to be deadly. The whole of modern philosophy, including science, starts from a false conception of intelligence; for instance, the modern cult of “life” sins in the sense that it seeks the explanation and goal of man at a level below him, in something which could not serve to define the human creature. But in a much more general way, all rationalism — whether direct or indirect — is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect.
Schuon, Understanding Islam, 1994,
“The Path”, p. 132, footnote 7.
The Cartesian cogito ergo sum stops halfway; it would be necessary to add: “I am, therefore I am That which is,” or even: “Being is, therefore I am”; the word “therefore” indicating here, not a conclusion, but a relationship of intellectually “visible” causality.
Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, 2002,
“Traces of Being, Proofs of God”, p. 56, footnote 4.
… the “intellectual worldliness” inaugurated by the Renaissance and by Descartes resulted in a weakening of contemplative intelligence and religious instinct…
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom,
1995, Preface, p. vii.
A word concerning metaphysical certitude, or the infallibility of pure intellection, is perhaps called for here. “I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes; aside from the fact that our existence is not proven by thought alone, he should have added: “I am, therefore Being is”; or he could have said in the first place: “I think because I am.” In any event, the foundation of metaphysical certitude is the coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no ratiocination could invalidate. Contingent things are proven by factors situated within their order of contingency, whereas things deriving from the Absolute become clear by their participation in the Absolute, hence by a “superabundance of light” — according to Saint Thomas — which amounts to saying that they are proven by themselves. In other words, universal truths draw their evidence not from our contingent thought, but from our transpersonal being, which constitutes the substance of our spirit and guarantees the adequacy of intellection.
Schuon, The Play of Masks, 1992,
“In the Face of Contingency”, p.51.
The Absolute and the Infinite are complementary, the first being exclusive and the second inclusive: the Absolute excludes everything that is contingent; the Infinite includes everything that is. Within contingency, the Absolute gives rise to perfection and the Infinite to indefiniteness: the sphere is perfect, space is indefinite. Descartes reserved the term “infinite” for God alone, whereas Pascal speaks of several infinites; one must agree with Descartes yet without taking Pascal to task, for the absolute meaning of the word does not result from its literal meaning; images are physical before they are metaphysical, even though the causal relationship is the converse. Theology teaches that God is infinitely good and infinitely just since He is infinite; but, this would be a contradiction if one were too fastidious, for an infinite quality in the absolute sense would exclude any other quality.
Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions, 2002,
“Substance: Subject and Object”, footnote 1.
… scepticism does not always need the help of Cartesian philosophy to implant itself, for the latter would be sterile without a soil ready to receive it; in fact, all “worldliness” is a breach through which, given favorable conditions, the spirit of doubt and of denial of the supernatural is made welcome.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom,
1995, Preface, p. viii.
Skepticism
Descartes opined: in the beginning was doubt —
In other words: in the beginning was the devil,
Namely error. For certainty
Is what overcomes the cunning of doubt.
Intellectual intuition, not the play of thought,
Is the key to Knowledge; man has indulged
Much too much in the pseudo-thinking of doubt.
Truth stands in the heart — it is written in God.
Schuon, Autumn Leaves & the Ring, 2010, p. 97.
CXVII
The word “philosopher” has two meanings:
Firstly, the meaning that it had before Descartes;
And then the absurdity of the moderns:
A thinking that operates only with reason.
If one wishes to measure with true measures,
One should not forget what is said here.
A philosopher is any man who thinks,
Including the sage who never violates the Truth.
Schuon, World Wheel, 6th Collection.
Heidegger
For Heidegger, for instance, the question of Being “proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle” and: “what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial” (Sein und Zeit).
Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have “discovered” their ontology by dint of “thinking”; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite “indicative” and “provisional” role of “thinking” in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a “thinker,” misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: “It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology.
As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently”. It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued?
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, p. 33, footnote 20.
There are no metaphysical or cosmological reasons why, in exceptional cases, direct intellection should not occur in men who have no link at all with revealed wisdom, but an exception, if it proves the rule, assuredly cannot constitute it. For instance, an intuition as just as that which forms the basis of German ‘phenomenology’, inevitably remains, for lack of objective intellectual principles, fragmentary, problematical and inoperative. An accident does not take the place of a principle, nor does a philosophical adventure replace real wisdom. No one has, in fact, been able to extract anything from this ‘phenomenology’ from the point of view of effective and integral knowledge — the knowledge that works on the soul and transforms it.
A true intuition, even if it were fundamental, could not assume a definitive function in a mode of thought as anarchical as modern philosophy; it must always be condemned to remain merely an ineffectual glimmer in the history of an entirely human system of thought which, precisely, does not know that real knowledge has no history.
Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, 2007,
“Thought and Civilization”, p. 10.
Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard’s “existence” nullifies itself through lack of sufficient reason; how is it possible to conceive of an “existential” morality, that is to say, a morality which is “lived and not thought” and therefore immune to “abstraction,” at the level of terrestrial man who is a thinking being by definition? This alternative between “existence” and “thought-abstraction” is the fundamental misunderstanding in existentialism; indeed the latter is simply one of the most aberrant manifestations of what may be described as Western alternativism. [1]
The Western spirit has always lived to a large extent on alternatives: either it has confined thought and life within real but fragmentary and hence unbalancing alternatives (pleasure and pain, for example), or else it has erected false alternatives in the course of its philosophical “researches” or in its destructive pursuit of originality and change.
One of the most typical examples in fact is Kierkegaard’s criticism of the “abstract thinker” who, so it would appear, is guilty of “the contradiction of wishing to demonstrate his existence by means of his thought.” “To the extent that he thinks abstractly he makes an abstraction of the fact that he exists” is the conclusion reached by this philosopher.
Now in the first place, really to think, to think intelligently, and not merely to juxtapose figurative or question-begging propositions implies by definition “thinking abstractly,” since otherwise thought would be reduced to imagination; and in the second place, there is no fundamental opposition between the two poles of existing and “thin king,” since our existence is always a mode of consciousness for us and our thought is a manner of existing.
Only error (not abstraction) is inadequate in comparison with the positive fact of existence, and only mineral existence (not our life) is completely separated from our consciousness, whether the latter becomes coagulated in thought or not. An element of truth is contained none the less in the existentialist criticisms, in the sense that discursive knowledge is separative by reason of the subject-object polarization; however, the conclusion to be drawn from this is not that such knowledge is devoid of value on its own plane or that it is limited as to its content, but that it does not embrace all possible knowledge, and that in purely intellective and direct knowledge the polarization in ques tion is transcended.
[1] What is one to say of a philosopher who “thinks” cheerfully about the insincerity or the mediocrity of “thought” as such? Inept though that may be, an audience is never lacking for such literary artifices of a mentally compressed city dweller.
Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 2009,
“Abuse of the Ideas of Concrete and Abstract”, p. 20-21.
Logic cannot attain to the transcendent by its own resources
The validity of a logical demonstration depends then on the prior knowledge which this demonstration aims at communicating, and it is clearly false to take as the point of departure, not a direct cognition, but logic pure and simple; when man has no “visionary” – as opposed to discursive – knowledge of Being, and when he thinks only with his brain instead of “seeing” with the “heart,” all his logic will be useless to him, since he starts from an initial blindness. A further distinction must be made between the validity of a demonstration and its dialectical efficacy; the latter evidently depends on an intuitive disposition for recognizing the truth demonstrated, namely on intellectual capacity, which amounts to saying that a demonstration is effective for those to whom it applies.
Logic is nothing other than the science of mental coordination, of rational conclusion; hence it cannot attain to the universal and the transcendent by its own resources; a supralogical – but not “illogical” – dialectic based on symbolism and on analogy, and therefore descriptive rather than ratiocinative, may be harder for some people to assimilate, but it conforms more closely to transcendent realities.
“Avant-garde” philosophy is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as “prejudice”; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious. [1]
Philosophical skepticism takes itself for an absence of prejudices and a healthy attitude, whereas it is something quite artificial: it is a result not of knowledge but of ignorance, and that is why it is as contrary to intelligence as it is to reality.
[1] This is what Kant with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a “doctrine” and definitively installed in European “thought,” giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative “culture.” Mental hypertrophy in the “cultured” man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as “positive” or “human.” Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, pp. 7-9.
Pascal
The Absolute and the Infinite are complementary, the first being exclusive and the second inclusive: the Absolute excludes all that is contingent, and the Infinite includes all that is. Within contingency, the Absolute gives rise to perfection, and the Infinite to indefiniteness: the sphere is perfect, space is indefinite. Descartes reserved the term infinite for God alone, whereas Pascal spoke of many infinites. One has to agree with Descartes, yet without blaming Pascal, for the absolute meaning of the word does not result from its literal meaning; the images are physical before being metaphysical, even though the causal relationship is inverse. Theology teaches that God is infinitely good and infinitely just since He is infinite, which is contradictory if one wished to be too particular, for an infinite quality in the absolute sense would exclude any other quality.
Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions, 2002,
“Substance: Subject and Object”, footnote 1.
Man is situated, spatially speaking, between the “infinitely big” and the “infinitely small” — in Pascal’s terminology — so that it is his subjectivity and not a quality of the objective world that creates the line of demarcation. If we feel minute in stellar space, it is solely because what is big is more accessible to us than what is small and thus rapidly escapes our senses; and such is the case because it is the big and not the small that reflects the Infinitude and Transcendence of God in relation to man.
Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions, 2002,
“Substance: Subject and Object”, p. 46.
The “Great Vehicle” possesses a mysterious dimension known as the “Adamantine Vehicle” (Vajrayana); in order to grasp its meaning, one has to first understand what we repeatedly have termed the “metaphysical transparency of the world,” that is to say one has to base oneself on a perspective according to which — to quote an expression of Pascal’s we favor — Reality is “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere”: it is this circumference and this center which are represented, in the adamantine doctrine, by the Buddha Mahavairochana (in Japanese Dainichi Nyorai)5 who is at one and the same time — in Vedantic terms — Atma, Ishvara and Buddhi; that is to say Supra-ontological Essence, Ontological Essence and Universal Intellect. This metaphysical transparency everywhere refers the effect back to the Cause without, however, doing away with the irreversibility of the causal relationship; the Absolute is nowise causal in itself, since in reality nothing can be outside It, but it is causal from the point of view of the cosmos which is real only as effect and in virtue of the metaphysical reduction of the effect to the Cause. Thus “all is Atma,” or all is Shunya (“Void”) or Vairochana — or “solarity” if we bear in mind the etymology as well as the symbolism of this Sanskrit name — but no thing is in itself, in its accidentality the “Self” or the “Void” or the “solar Buddha.”
Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism, 1993,
“Message and Messenger”, p. 34.
Pascal mistakenly attributed to the Jesuits the idea that “the end justifies the means” — we quote the now proverbial version — for in fact they were careful to specify: “on condition that the means not be intrinsically vicious”; if this reservation were not sufficient, legitimate defense would not be possible.
Frithjof Schuon
In every case of a contact between the Divine and the terrestrial we see this fluctuation between the metaphysical perspective of essential — not “material” — identity and the cosmological perspective of analogy or of symbolical parallelism, hence of difference. This contact between the Divine and the human is, by reason of its very elusiveness, a mystery, and even the mystery par excellence, for we touch God “everywhere and nowhere,” as Pascal would say. God is quite close to us, infinitely close, but we are far from Him; He is incarnate in a given symbol, but we risk grasping only the husk, retaining only the shadow. Idolatry, which divinizes the shadow as such, and atheism, which denies God by reason of His intangibility — but it is we who are “absent,” not God — reduce to absurdity the two aspects of symbolism: identity, which is unitive, and analogy, which is separative, but parallel.
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Manifestations of the Divine Principle”, p. 70.
In connection with this question of intellectual intuition, it would be useful to reply here to a difficulty raised by Pascal: “One cannot undertake to define being without falling into absurdity: for a word cannot be defined without beginning with the words it is, whether they are expressed or implied. Therefore in order to define being it would be necessary to say it is, and so to use the word to be defined in formulating its own definition” (Pensées et Opuscules).
It is in fact impossible, in European languages, to give a definition without using the word “is”; if in other languages, in Arabic for example, a definition can be made without the help of this word or of some other copulative, that is exactly for the same reason, namely that all is immersed in Being and that Being therefore has an a priori evidentness; if Being cannot be defined outside itself, any more than can Knowledge, it is because this “outside” does not exist; the separation necessary for every definition thus actually lies within the thing to be defined, and in fact although we are “within Being” we are not Being.
The copulative “it is” indicates a determination or an attribute according to the circumstances, and this shows the meaning of the word: we will define Being in itself as the universal determination, that is to say as the supreme Principle “insofar as It determines itself,” to use Guénon’s expression; if we start from the ternary Beyond-Being, Being and Manifestation, we see that Being is “Principle” in relation to the world but “determination” in relation to Beyond-Being. Now, given that Being is determination in relation to Beyond-Being and the source of every attribute in relation to the world, every determination and every attribute can be expressed by means of the verb “to be,” hence by “it is,” so that Pascal’s difficulty can be resolved thus: “being” manifests (or “is” the manifestation of) an aspect of its own inner limitlessness, thus a possibility, an attribute.
When we say: “The tree is green,” this is, by analogy, like saying: “Being comprises such and such an aspect,” or again in the deepest sense: “Beyond-Being determines itself as Being”; the thing to be defined — or determined — serves analogically as “Being,” and the definition — the determination — serves as “divine attribute.” Instead of speaking of “Being” and of “attribute of Being,” we could refer to the first distinction: Beyond-Being and Being. When the verb “to be” designates an existence, it has no complement; on the other hand, when it has a complement it does not designate an existence as such, but an attribute; to say that a certain thing “is,” signifies that it is not non-existent; to say that the tree “is green” signifies that it has this attribute and not some other. In consequence, the verb “to be” always expresses either an “existence” or a “character of existence,” in the same way as God on the one hand “is” and on the other “is thus,” that is to say Light, Love, Power and so forth. Saint Thomas expresses this well by saying that if Being and the first principles which flow from it are incapable of proof, it is because they have no need of proof; to prove them is at once useless and impossible, “not through a lack, but through a superabundance of light.”
Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, 1995,
“Orthodoxy and Intellectuality”, pp. 13-14.
After all, Pascal’s wager is not to be disdained; what gives it all its force are not merely the arguments in favor of God and our immortality, but also the importance — quantitative as well as qualitative — of the voices in favor of these two capital notions, that of God and that of our soul; we have in mind here the power and majesty of the Sacred Scriptures and the innumerable army of sages and saints. If these great men are not qualified to speak in the name of man, then there is no such thing as man.
Schuon, To Have a Center, 1990,
“The Primacy of Intellection”, pp. 64-65.
Pascal thought that the worst baseness is to claim glory for on oneself, which is inaccurate and unjust; the worst baseness is to discredit the glory of others and to glorify one’s own disgrace.
Schuon, Language of the Self, 1998,
“A View of Yoga”, p. 48, footnote 12.
… according to Pascal, “ there are two classes of men, the saints who consider themselves guilty of every fault and the sinners who think they are guilty of nothing.” One would like to know if the author of these words considered himsel f capable of every fault, and if not, why he attributed this sentiment to the saints; or inversely, since he attributed this sentiment to the saints, why he did not share it.
Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, 2006,
“Paradoxes of an Esoterism”, p. 51, footnote 16.
Pascal said, in substance, that we are minute, but that we know it, whereas the universe is incommensurable, but it does not know it.
Schuon, To Have a Center, 1990,
“Universal Categories”, p. 82, footnote 8.