/lit/ - Literature

>>23492902
René Guénon defies classification. . . . Were he anything less than a consummate master of lucid argument and forceful expression, his work would certainly be unknown to all but a small, private circle of admirers.”
—Gai Eaton, author of The Richest Vein

“Guénon established the language of sacred metaphysics with a rigor, a breadth, and an intrinsic certainty such that he compels recognition as a standard of comparison for the twentieth century.”
—Jean Borella, author of Guénonian Esoterism and Christian Mystery

“To a materialistic society enthralled with the phenomenal universe exclusively, Guénon, taking the Vedanta as point of departure, revealed a metaphysical and cosmological teaching both macrocosmic and microcosmic about the hierarchized degrees of being or states of existence, starting with the Absolute . . . and terminating with our sphere of gross manifestation.”
—Whitall N. Perry, editor of A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom

“René Guénon was the chief influence in the formation of my own intellectual outlook (quite apart from the question of Orthodox Christianity). . . . It was René Guénon who taught me to seek and love the truth above all else, and to be unsatisfied with anything else.”
—Fr. Seraphim Rose, author of The Soul After Death

“His mixture of arcane learning, metaphysics, and scathing cultural commentary is a continent in itself, untouched by the polluted tides of modernity. . . . Guénon’s work will not save the world—it is too late for that—but it leaves no reader unchanged.”
—Jocelyn Godwin, author of Mystery Religions in the Ancient World

“René Guénon is one of the few writers of our time whose work is really of importance. . . . He stands for the primacy of pure metaphysics over all other forms of knowledge, and presents himself as the exponent of a major tradition of thought, predominantly Eastern, but shared in the Middle Ages by the . . . West.”
—Walter Shewring, translator of Homer’s Odyssey

>>23192672
>German Idealism is all metaphy—
The English mentality, of course, has no aptitude for metaphysical conceptions, but it does not make any pretension in this respect either, while the German mentality, which is not really better endowed, has the greatest illusions. To realize this, we need only compare what the two peoples have produced in terms of philosophy.

The English mind hardly left the practical order, represented by morality, sociology, and experimental science, represented by the science of psychology which it invented. When the English mind is concerned with logic, it is above all induction that he has in view and to which he gives preponderance over deduction. On the other hand, if we consider German philosophy, we only find in it hypotheses and systems with metaphysical pretensions, deductions from a fanciful starting point, ideas which might seem to be profound when they are simply nebulous; and this pseudo-metaphysics, which is everything that is farthest from true metaphysics, the Germans claim to find in others, whose conceptions they always interpret according to their own