/lit/ - Literature

>>17697827

> In the term pragmatist Guénon implicates the psychologist William James and in the term intuitionist, the philosopher Henri Bergson. That Guénon yokes James and Bergson with Blavatsky and Besant will outrage many a sensibility. Yet Bergson in fact yoked himself to James, whom he first met in London in 1908 and whom he had quoted approvingly as early as 1889 in Time and Free Will; James repaid that compliment twenty years later in A Pluralistic Universe. James’ best-known book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), might seem somewhat anti-modern, validating as it does visionary events and a type of non-empirical knowledge. In Guénon’s view, however, as he expresses it in his keynote Crisis of the Modern World (1927) Jamesian pragmatism merely exemplifies the modern tendency to emphasize action over contemplation and instrumentality over knowledge. Guenon remarks how under the Protestant dispensation religion descends towards two privative states, “moralism” and “sentimentality,” until it dwindles down to jejune “religiosity.” Guénon writes: “To this final stage [of dispirited religion] correspond theories such as that of the ‘religious experience’ of William James, which goes to the point of finding in the ‘subconscious’ man’s means of entering into communication with the divine”; thus “a limited God [of subjective rather than transcendental experience] is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God

>>17683295
Watch yourself.

>>17497671
Guenon was at least 20% negro. Look at him. His name even translate to "monkey."

>>17271524
Atrocious. Half the time it's old depressed drunks, the other, smelly mystics.

Was Guenon an anti-masker?

>>17220751
Maybe you just don’t have a burning desire for something equivalent to the return of the historical spiritual center of your faith, because modern society has raised you to become complacently placid. And maybe you have never just yourself seen a jew pitilessly ruin a good-hearted person through usury, because now its all done through out of sight high-tech financial wizardry on wall street and at the federal reserve.

>>17162161
Guenon refuted Mormonism

>>17145042
>*blocks path

Am I late to the party?
Seems like most Traditionalists just like to stroke their own cock above anything else.

>refutes them all

>There are people whose mind would recoil from actual negation, but who have no objection to complete indifference; and it is this that is the most to be feared, for, to deny something, one must think about it to some extent, however little that may be, whereas an attitude of indifference makes it possible not to think about it at all.

The Schizo Heavyweight

Did /lit/ unironically become a Sufi after reading Guenon?

>>16909582
You must initiate him.

Why the long face?

Why did Guenon dislike Theosophy? It seems like he fully recognizes a legitimacy behind Western occultism, but he disliked Theosophy so much that he wrote a whole book on it. Why is that?

Why didn't he like Evolutionism?

What is the best book to start with Rene Guenon, assuming that I am very familiar with the works of Carl Jung, and somehow familiar with the works of Freddy Neech.

>>16302572
>If mental events cannot be observed, how does an mri machine accurately predict what button a subject will press seven to ten seconds before a conscious decision is made?
You seem to be confused, if an mri machine observes the neurological activity that seems to predict a conscious decision which is experienced or reported by the participant as occurring 7-10 seconds later, it would be a mistake to regard that neurological activity as a snapshot of the physiological locus and basis of the conscious experience of taking the decision and pressing the button and associated qualia, because in order for that image to potentially accurately reflect that mental experience it would have to match it in time. To act otherwise and take the position that the neurological activity 7-10 seconds prior to the conscious experience was the neurophysiological basis of that conscious experience would be to imply that there is a seven to ten second delay between our mental experience of events and when they take place in the physical world, which is absurd and is contradicted by a mountain of research.

how will materialists ever recover?

I'm well aware Guenon is kind of a meme around here, but I want your serious opinions. Is he a real philosopher, or just some pseud? Is it worth my time to read some of his works? From some cursory reading his ideas seem... interesting, to say the least. What do you more philosophically knowledgeable anons think about his ideas, or Traditionalist philosophy in general?

Physiognomy thread

If the word ‘democracy’ is defined as the government of the people by themselves, it expresses an absolute impossibility and cannot even have a mere de facto existence— in our time or in any other. One must guard against being misled by words: it is contradictory to say that the same persons can be at the same time rulers and ruled, because, to use Aristotelian terminology, the same being cannot be ‘in act’ and ‘in potency’ at the same time and in the same relationship. The relationship of ruler and ruled necessitates the presence of two terms: there can be no ruled if there are not also rulers, even though these be illegitimate and have no other title to power than their own pretensions; but the great ability of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the people believe that they are governing themselves; and the people are the more inclined to believe this as they are flattered by it, and as, in any case, they are incapable of sufficient reflection to see its impossibility. It was to create this illusion that ‘universal suffrage’ was invented: the law is supposed to be made by the opinion of the majority, but what is overlooked is that this opinion is something that can very easily be guided and modified; it is always possible, by means of suitable suggestions, to arouse, as may be desired, currents moving in this or that direction. We cannot recall who it was who first spoke of ‘manufacturing opinion’, but this expression is very apt, although it must be added that it is not always those who are in apparent control who really have the necessary means at their disposal. This last remark should make it clear why it is that the incompetence of most prominent politicians seems to have only a very relative importance; but since we are not undertaking here to unmask the working of what might be called the ‘machine of government’, we will do no more than point out that this incompetence itself serves the purpose of keeping up the illusion of which we have been speaking: indeed, it is a necessary condition if the politicians in question are to appear to issue from the majority, for it makes them in its likeness, inasmuch as the majority, on whatever question it may be called on to give its opinion, is always composed of the incompetent, whose number is vastly greater than that of the men who can give an opinion based on full knowledge.

>>15680280