/lit/ - Literature

>>16538355

>>13738747

Kant privileges reason above all else and thinks it can reach the universal by pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, hence his whole enterprise into categorical imperatives and critique of pure reason.
Guenon would say that 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 than anything pure rationality can achieve.

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.

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 Kant promoted. 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."

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.