/lit/ - Literature

>>14644476
>the root ontology of Traditionalism is a hodgepodge of late 19th century esotericism and hermetic syncretism, post-Kantian Religionswissenschaft and Protestant theology, the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule and its early 20th century offshoots, which also had a post-Kantian epistemology, and a healthy dose of Romantic theory on religion and myth, which has been described by Beiser and other scholars as "neo-Platonist," or as the "archetypal" strand of Kant interpretation. Read any myth-related text of Schelling and you will see Traditionalism. Actually, read Paul Bishop's book _The Archaic_ for a decent discussion of the core concept(s) from which Traditionalism sprang. Its ontology is part of a general response to Kantian rationalism that involved a re-introduction of archetypal (i.e., Platonic) metaphysics with a vaguely emanationist structure -- that is, bootleg neo-Platonism.
>This movement was (and remains) deliberately syncretic because when you identify the primary forms or archetypes with a symbolic and mythic structure (as ALL of the traditions I just outlined did), you get a philosophy and history of religion that makes all traditions into particular instantiations of underlying immutable principles (as all of the traditions I just outlined concluded). Just read _The Oriental Renaissance_ by Schwab, which was praised highly by Mircea Eliade, about whom both Guenon and Evola complained in correspondence that he was a Guenonian Traditionalist who wouldn't cop to the fact and that he was getting credit for Guenon's ideas especially. Eliade agreed; so Guenon, Evola, and Eliade agree that Eliade is a reasonably faithful transposition of Guenonian philosophy, and Eliade embraces Schwab's diagnosis of syncretic, Fruhromantik neo-Platonism as the basis of the Traditionalist worldview, e.g., as its syncretic neo-Platonist framework effortlessly reduces and re-appropriates Hinduism, Islam, Platonism, and everything else to be simply an emanation of its own "central, really real" myths and archetypes. That is why "Hinduism looks like neo-Platonism," a favourite line of Traditionalists -- real similarities between the two systems, perhaps owing to some real underlying Indo-European metaphysics, are in fact bowled over and destroyed by Traditionalism's extremely lazy neo-Platonist framework, which has been called "all-reducing." Traditionalists did not save or invent the method of comparative religions -- they killed it, and laminated its corpse.
>tldr: Traditionalism is an esoterically-oriented synthesis of scholarly paradigms that go back to Kant, under which paradigms traditional neo-Platonism, and Christian and especially German mysticism were reinterpreted by the early Romantics. And it's a late-comer to the game at that.
Cringe.