/lit/ - Literature

>>20544593
As if he was ever right

>>20544596
I'm sure he was right at least one time just not about this

>>20544593
He was too optimistic but in the english translation there is also an appendix from him where he admits that the westernization of the East went further.

>>20544593
>Hasn't the history of the East over the last century completely refuted our boy Guenon?
yes, japan, china and india are probably the most materialistic societies today

>>20544730
>He was too optimistic
he wasn't optimistic, he was naive

>>20544593
Spengler was right.

>>20544741
Korea is materialistic to the point that they are going to become transhumanist one of these days. An entire country filled with plastic people.

>>20544741
Japan had already embraced the western way at the time he wrote the book, but he barely mentions it because I suppose he didn't see (or didn't want to see) its significance

off-topic, but does anyone have the guenon starter chart?

>>20545385
Yeah but on my other PC. Sorry bro. What u interested in, metaphysics in general?

>>20545400
honestly, i dont know. this guy gets postet so often here that im now interested in checking out his work but i dont really know where to start or what even to expect. I know that he wrote some books about hinduism (a religion that always fascinated me) so i thought to start with one of these.

>>20545448
Crisis of the Modern World

>>20545448
so you could check out his "Introduction to studies of the Hindu Doctrines". It is one of his earliest works.

>>20545454
>>20545455
thanks, will check them out

>>20544819
In what sense?

>>20544593
That's why he was an anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist

>>20544593
It's nothing but greener grass gigacope paired with the eternal westoid idea that poor people are somehow more spiritual.

>>20545696
Chinese people aren't spiritual, but they are very superstitious. Western thinkers tend to confuse the two because they think of science as being opposed to traditional beliefs, mainly religion, but they ignore the fact that many of the things that non-Westerners (and even many Westerners) believe in or do have no profound mystic element or thought of a perfect divine Being behind them, but are merely old customs brought about by one person passing on their habits and ideas about how things should work so they don't get screwed up onto the next generation.
Taoism, Shintoism, and all other forms of shamanism can be explained this way, once you look past philosophical-sounding poetry made by ancients and works made by Westerners who intepreted such practices as those cultures' equivalents of the Christian mass.

the real point is how much of that is the consequence of the engulfing pressure of the west on the east and how much is real, lasting effects
maybe he was indeed too optimist, but he did take this into account as well i.e the east materially "arming" itself to keep up and suffering the spiritual "attack" of the west, question is, will it actually last, or e.g if the west goes into a cataclysmic kaputt in the next 100 years, maybe the east will slowly start to revert back to its nature
in any case, a main point of his has often been repeated, that "west" and "east" are primarily labels for a certain mentality

>>20545385

I don't think this is the original one, though.

>>20544593
Yes. Note also the childish fetishization of Islam, which far from showing itself to be a superior form of spirituality has degraded into a crass political ideology over the past 6 decades.

Really Guenon was not immune to the draw of the exotic and liked the East because it was less familiar to him than his native Christian culture.

>>20544593
Its unironically the West that looks beyond materialism, not the east.

>>20545762
>Taoism, Shintoism, and all other forms of shamanism can be explained this way, once you look past philosophical-sounding poetry
Yeah, if we just look past all of the important evidence to the contrary then we can interpret it into your myopic secular framework.

>>20545762
>Blocks your path

>>20544596
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA(pbuh)

>>20544593
The east would have never been anything worthwhile in the first place. Their thought is more about their relations with others, parent mother state, then about how they see the world. Do you know who else cares about how others see them? Women, the east is a society of women.

>>20545123
>plastic people.
Do korean pornstars have big fake tits and lip filler?

>>20545123
Korea fucking sucks. All they care about is status. It's sad.

>>20547710

>>20547733
That boob percentage is too damn small

>>20544593
As if he was ever right

>>20547691
How did you reach that conclusion?

>>20549455
>>20547691
Evola says something similar in the opening chapters or Ride the Tiger

>>20547708
I don’t know what you mean by this, relations with others is the core of the christian religion in all its many forms

>>20547733
Why isn't Japan on par with SK as if the two countries aren't socio-economically pretty much the same?

>>20549498
Korea having 0 history that isn’t a confucian tributary state for China or Japan is probably why they are so fucking vapid and superficial

>>20544596
fpbp

>>20544593
I think Guenon is interesting because, like Marx, he shows that you can interpret history in a way that is radically different to the way it is usually interpreted in our current zeitgeist. That doesn't mean he was correct though, but it does force you to think outside of the current ideological structure, and that can lead you to have more interesting perspectives. I do also think Guenon was generally correct in his assessment of history as going from the sacred to the profane, in the sense that for the stone age man almost everything had some sacred meaning behind it, while for the modern man almost nothing does. I don't know if you can say modern life is objectively worse because of this, but while we have gained many things we have undoubtedly lost something that I think is very important to us.

He was just an Orientalist, proto-hippie sexpat. Fuck him.

>>20547691
This. Even really crude spiritualism like Tarot cards and crystal neopagan shit is popular among Westerners.

>>20544593
Only Iran continued resisting the West's globohomo, but even the architects of the Revolution admitted they failed. They were heavily influenced by Heidegger, and even Ali Shariati wrote a quasi-luddite, pro-traditionalist text. I don't agree with him 100%.
Anyways, East and West don't exist anymore. The globalists have won.

>>20544593
You have to realize that most people are not original authentic thinkers and are not at all deep into any sophisticated concepts of metaphysics, regardless of culture. The average Muslim is not there pondering Rumi’s Masnavi or Ibn Arabi’s concept of the Unity of Being, and, if anything, are likely to see Sufis as “that strange, potentially heterodox sect within our culture.” If you ask them, “Have you ever heard of the rather fascinating Sufi sage Mansur al Hallaj, reputedly executed in the 10th-century for blasphemous sayings of his such as ‘A’nal-Haqq,’ ‘I am the Truth’?” or even, “Is it true that Sufism and certain concepts of Sufi psychology and metaphysics refer to timeless spiritual truths beyond yet containing Islam, being something like a perennial tradition and body of teachings like the Hindu concept of the Sanatana Dharma?” they will wonder who and what the fuck you are talking about and view all this as rather strange and suspicious, as if you do not sufficiently respect the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his centrality enough.

The average Indian is almost certainly not some enlightened jnani repeatedly permeating their thoughts, breath, and life with some Great Saying (Mahavakya) or mantra such as “Aham Brahmasmi” (I am Brahman), “Tat tvam asi” (You are That), or even “So’ham” (I am That) and seeing only the Supreme Self in themselves and every living creature, having attained moksha. You are not going to receive ecstatic kundalini shaktipat and a spontaneous blessing of the light of the Paramatman from an average modern computerized cynical Indian, in the same way that the average Christian in the West is not deep into Meister Eckhart.

If you try to tell the average person, “There is no possible conception of Being without your own individual being as having access to it. Whatever you can conceive of, think, or experience is only in relation to your own individual being, which cannot exist apart from and separate from all Being. Knowledge of the self or of the nature of Being is therefore not some type of objective, scientific, mechanistic, additive, or sociological knowledge — learning more and more about something, or various dogmas and practices around it, including societally revered and traditionally accepted ones — but a primordial phenomenologico-ontological knowledge which is prior to all these other derivative forms of knowledge” they will just look at you blankly, or think you’re trying to convert them to your cult.

All traditions, cultures and peoples are essentially stupid. You can learn from more sophisticated traditions like Advaita Vedanta like Samkhya — which are not just strictly “culture-bound” and “Indian cultural manifestations,” as Guenon rightly intuited and pointed out — without some cult-like idea that, “This other culture is in all cases better than mine. I have to be an Indianophile to learn from it.”

>>20551458
If you try to talk to people about the Gnostic tractates and how they rather plausibly present a perennial philosophy and portrayal of Christ as a Gnostic sage teaching people about the unity of their individual self with God, the self-conscious understanding and realization of which is attained through gnosis, a teaching quite organically consistent with Buddhist, Hindu, Hermetic and Neoplatonic teachings about how the divine sparks of our souls have become entrapped in a blind, sleeping, material slumber, the divine Nous having become entranced by its own creation of the material universe, and how this attempted democratization of spiritual knowledge through Christ was corrupted by false worldly archontic entities like the Roman Catholic Church, the Whore of Babylon, they will get rather worried and think it’s “some sort of Satanic New Age thing denying Christ’s unique and central Divinity and trying to get me to believe in some heretical perennial mysticism which blasphemously holds we can achieve theosis without strict and rigorous adherence to my time-and-society-bound interpretation of Christianity.”

If you point out that both Hindu and Buddhist teachings seem to be approaching a same fundamental truth of non-duality and liberation from suffering but simply from opposing poles (perhaps one pole or the other being more amenable to people of different cultures or types of psychological conditioning, and hence both traditions ultimately necessary in the grand scheme of things), the Hindus with the focus on affirmation of Sat, Being, as the fundamental dictum that all Sat, Being, Is One Being, which is also your own individual being, and the Buddhists on the opposing pole focusing on Sunyata, Emptiness, holding that All, being a interdependent whole, is essentially void of an independent self-nature as a “supremely Objective Object” you can point to as a Distinct Defined Unique Thing and name and define and give characteristics of as such — and do we not find that the later Buddhists, such as the Mahayana Buddhists, had to have recourse to a quasi-Vedantic philosophy of being through their teachings about a Buddha-nature which all sentient beings have, the Buddha being no different from all sentient beings and all sentient beings being no different from a Buddha, most people will just blank out.

If you talk about this, even the Guenon-conditioned Traditionalists tending to revere Indian Hindu metaphysics and tradition more than Buddhist-style philosophy and insights, will get rather confused and maybe even argumentative. “Is my own individual self in accordance with Shankaracharya’s conception of the Atman being one with Brahman, or is it in accordance with the Mahayana Buddhist conception that it does not exist as a separate unique individual distinct self at all, being emptiness (sunyata), or even a Buddha-nature? Which one is it, really? What is ‘myself’?”

>>20551642
They might even further go, “Whaaat? Is the Truth fundamentally Buddhist or Hindu? Which one is it? Will Zen or Vedanta give me self-realization and enlightenment the fastest? What is this guy talking about? I just want to know which tradition will get me enlightened the fastest. Do I need to learn Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic or Tibetan to get enlightened the quickest and realize the nature of myself? Is it Lao Tzu or is it Shankaracharya who will get me there the quickest? Which time-bound cultural conditioning and ideology does the very nature of my primordial unconditioned awareness most rigidly adhere to — an idea (of myself as having a primordial unconditioned enlightened awareness) which appeals to me but which I’m not quite sure of how to go about finding? Maybe I even need to travel to Central Asia and find a licensed guru for it? Is my Fundamental Self fundamentally Hindu or Buddhist? Or is it even a Taoist? Maybe it’s even a SUFI?”

>>20551458
>>20551642
>>20551652
this

even in 'traditional societies' only a small percentage of people are interested in 'metaphysics' and an even smaller percentage of people are interested beyond a merelly intellectual/academic level

>All traditions, cultures and peoples are essentially stupid.
yep, most people throughout history have done the same thing that we do today: eat, shit and live entire lives of self-delusion

>*AHEM*
start at 12:00
12:45 BASED AND PBUHPILLED
https://youtu.be/XpH3O6mnZvw?t=717

>>20552921

>>20552921
>>20552945

>>20552921
Roberto Bolaño gets accused of being a nazi in that video because of 2666 fucking hilarious

>>20545385

>>20552921
>>20552945
>>20552947
>>20552949
this guy is saying that NFTs are basically one giant Guenonian joke
holy kek
holy based

>>20552966
For doing 100’s of hours of study, he sure is conflating Guenon with Evola. But to be fair the Evola crowd loves Guenon too

>>20553080
>For doing 100’s of hours of study
I left a YouTube comment calling him a pseud

>>20553093
Strange video, I guess I come to the conclusion that they’re Nazi LARPers but so much of his evidence is unnecessarily substantiated with dishonesty. I think the Bolano comments really ticked me off. Just one look at Wikipedia is that too much?

>>20544593
Guenon even said that communism would never take hold of China and look at how that went

>>20553100
>so much of his evidence is unnecessarily substantiated with dishonesty
I cringed hard at the whole 1987-Rudolf Hess stuff
what the hell was that?

also
>muh antisemitism (regarding Guenon)
what the hell was that?

>>20544593
I think the history of the West refutes Guenon's ideas just as much.

Guenon is not a traditionalist, he is a contrarian. His main criterion for judging the worth of anything is whether it is contrary to the ideas of the "modern world".

As far as I can tell, the main effect of Guenon's ideas in the East has been to foster a reactionary, anti-modern, and often anti-rational, mentality.

That's not the kind of traditionalism I'm interested in.

Why do you consider yourself a traditionalist?

I consider myself a traditionalist because I believe in the importance of tradition and because I believe in the primacy of the spiritual over the material.

I don't think you can have one without the other.

I'm not interested in "reactionary" traditionalism, which is just a reaction to the modern world. I'm interested in positive traditionalism, which is based on the recognition of the value of tradition.

I'm also not interested in "anti-rational" traditionalism, which rejects reason in favor of blind faith. I'm interested in a traditionalism that is based on reason and common sense.

>>20552921

I didn't think that there could ever be worse commentary on Traditionalism than the Steve Bannon - Julius Evola panic of 2016, but somehow this guy achieves it. There's going to be a lot more of this level of retardation once the "White scare" begins, and the US ruling class starts seeings Nazis in every corner of society that it doesn't totally control.

>>20553424
Evola is a easy target but Guenon not so much due to his anti-eurocentrism, I've even seen a good amount of leftists interested in spirituality who are into Guenon (unfortunately).

>>20552921
>occultist
>extreme anti-semitism
is this supposed to be a shitpost or an actual serious informative video?

>>20552921
The big list he throws up at the very beginning has a couple of potent rabbit holes, at least as far as generating content, but he doesn't even touch on half the things listed in the video.

>>20553598
>This is the result of 100’s of hours of research, investigative journalism, and insight from experts in the field of art and internet culture. This investigation started 6 months ago when I was first made
>verified user
>mainly does vids about celebs, fad drama, crime shit etc
I think he' trying to be genuine

>>20554078
5 minutes of reading the whole wikipedia page is more accurate than this 6 months investigation LMFAO

>>20554078
>>20554195
Fairly obvious he was getting fed most of his info from that Ryan guy, not from the source.

>>20553598
>extreme anti-semitism
kek'd hard at that

>>20553424
>>20553598
>>20554078
>>20554195
>>20554319
>>20554323
These misinformations are actually very good, they will keep midwits and normies away while /pol/fags, after getting more into it, will realize that it is not what they were looking for. Let's push this forward, Guenon is supposed to be only for the intellectual elite, not for the average normie.

>>20550834
>proto-hippie sexpat
um, based?

>>20550834
Unironically how can Guenon monkeys recover from this?

>>20553344
any books for that feel anon? i think like Emerson fits the bill somewhat

Even in his own time he was wrong. In the Hindu Doctrine. He talks hypothetically about a root society that created both western and eastern society, then declares such a thing to be impossible, as if knowledge of the proto-indo-europeans hadn't already been known for several decades up to that point.

>>20554878
the common root is Hyperborea, not some steppe fags

>>20554906
Same thing as far as the circumstances are concerned. Guenon was convinced that all shared ideas MUST have come from the east first.

>>20554931
Hyperborea was the center during the Golden Age, the east is where knowledge was transfered during the Kali Yuga. You are a pseud if you try to refute him without understanding this point.

>>20544593
>>20544741
>>20545123
What about middle Eastern societies? Iran is pretty religious and turned toward tradition even after some modernization. Same could sort of be said of India. Both still extremely traditional despite having some access to modernism.

>>20555241
the only thing these guys know about contemporary india is /pol/tier shit

>>20544593
hate him for this. the east is very analytic, bug-like and does not resemble anything traditional in the past 50 or so years

>>20544593
Why does /lit/ take this guy seriously again?

>>20555028
Does he have ANY evidence for that? Inb4
>uhh he doesn’t need evidence, bugman

>>20555860
There are vedic astrological data for Hyperborea and more or less obscure passages from different traditional texts.

>>20555252
india is gross

>>20555264
Cuz he’s based…?

>>20555264
>Why does /lit/ take this guy seriously again?
Rene Guenon is the most correct, smartest and most important person of the twentieth century. There was no smarter, deeper, clearer, absolute Guenon and probably could not be. It is no coincidence that the French traditionalist René Allé in one collection dedicated to R. Guenon compared Guenon with Marx. It would seem that there are completely different, opposite figures. Guenon is a conservative hyper-traditionalist. Marx is a revolutionary innovator, a radical overthrower of traditions. But Rene Halle rightly guessed the revolutionary message of each of Guenon's statements, the extreme, cruel noncomformity of his position, which turns everything and everything upside down, the radical nature of his thought.

The fact is that René Guenon is the only author, the only thinker of the twentieth century, and maybe many, many centuries before that, who not only identified and confronted with each other secondary language paradigms, but also put into question the very essence of language. The language of Marxism was methodologically very interesting, subtly reducing the historical existence of mankind to a clear and convincing formula for confronting labor and capital. Being a great paradigmatic success, Marxism was so popular and won the minds of the best intellectuals of the twentieth century. But R. Guenon is an even more fundamental generalization, an even more radical removal of masks, an even broader worldview contestation, putting everything into question.

- Aleksandr Dugin

Guénon undermined and then; with uncompromising intellectual rigour, demolished all the assumptions taken for granted by modern man, that is to say Western or westernised man. Many others had been critical of the direction taken by European civilization since the so-called 'Renaissance', but none had dared to be as radical as he was or to re-assert with such force the principles and values which Western culture had consigned to the rubbish tip of history. His theme was the 'primordial tradition' or Sofia perennis, expressed-so he maintained-both in ancient mythologies and in the metaphysical doctrine at the root of the great religions. The language of this Tradition was the language of symbolism, and he had no equal in his interpretation of this symbolism. Moreover he turned the idea of human progress upside down, replacing it with the belief almost universal before the modern age, that humanity declines in spiritual excellence with the passage of time and that we are now in the Dark Age which precedes the End, an age in which all the possibilities rejected by earlier cultures have been spewed out into the world, quantity replaces quality and decadence approaches its final limit. No one who read him and understood him could ever be quite the same again.

- Gai Eaton

>>20557919
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

>>20557928
“In a world increasingly rife with heresy and pseudo-religion, Guénon had to remind twentieth century man of the need for orthodoxy, which presupposes firstly a Divine Revelation and secondly a Tradition that has handed down with fidelity what Heaven has revealed. He thus restores to orthodoxy its true meaning, rectitude of opinion which compels the intelligent man not only to reject heresy but also to recognize the validity of faiths other than his own if they also are based on the same two principles, Revelation and Tradition.”
—Martin Lings, author of Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions

“If during the last century or so there has been even some slight revival of awareness in the Western world of what is meant by metaphysics and metaphysical tradition, the credit for it must go above all to Guénon. At a time when the confusion into which modern Western thought had fallen was such that it threatened to obliterate the few remaining traces of genuine spiritual knowledge from the minds and hearts of his contemporaries, Guénon, virtually single-handed, took it upon himself to reaffirm the values and principles which, he recognized, constitute the only sound basis for the living of a human life with dignity and purpose or for the formation of a civilization worthy of the name.”
—Philip Sherrard, author of Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition

“Apart from his amazing flair for expounding pure metaphysical doctrine and his critical acuteness when dealing with the errors of the modern world, Guénon displayed a remarkable insight into things of a cosmological order. . . . He all along stressed the need, side by side with a theoretical grasp of any given doctrine, for its concrete—one can also say its ontological—realization failing which one cannot properly speak of knowledge.”
—Marco Pallis, author of A Buddhist Spectrum

“Guénon’s mission was two-fold: to reveal the metaphysical roots of the ‘crisis of the modern world’ and to explain the ideas behind the authentic and esoteric teachings that still [remain] alive.”
—Harry Oldmeadow, author of Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy

"René Guénon should certainly be considered a Master of our times. His contributions to the "world of Tradition", of symbols and of metaphysical teachings, are truly invaluable."
—Julius Evola, author of Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex.

>>20544819
He wasn’t.