/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18489452]

What did you just say to me you little hylic? I'll have you know I graduated top of my autodidact studies, and I've been involved in numerous secret initiations in the primordial tradition, and I have over 200 published articles on esoteric symbolism. I am trained in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese and Egyptian Arabic and I'm the top metaphysician of the entire 20th century. You are nothing to me but just another foolish individualist with modern assumptions that were inculcated in him by members of the counter-initiation. I will retroactively refute your whole worldview and your favorite western philosopher alike with a scathing ferocity not seen since Jesus banished the money-lenders from the temple, mark my words. You think you can get away with saying that sophistry to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of the intellectual elite all across the world and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm. The storm that wipes out the pathetic and profane garbage you call your worldview. You're fucking repudiated, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can refute your beliefs and expose their false basis in over seven hundred ways, and that's just when I’m smoking opium. Not only am I extensively trained in sacred geometry, but I have access to the entire repertoire of gnoseological methods of realization and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your pseudo-metaphysics off the face of 4channel /lit/ you pathetic fool. If only you could have known what your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price. I will expose the inner contradictions in your anti-traditional presuppositions and you will be humiliated by it. You're game is over, Tête de noeud!

[Anonymous No.18489458]

guenonfag thread

[Anonymous No.18489637]

>>18489452
basado

[Anonymous No.18489640]

>>18489458
you are significantly more deranged than guenonfag himself. Are you also the guy who always talks about 'accfag'?

[Anonymous No.18489656]

Based

[Anonymous No.18489681]

>>18489452
Guenon (pbuh) is so humble that he never once boasted or responded harshly to any of his critics. Truly a divine man.
God bless his soul.

[Anonymous No.18489744]

[Anonymous No.18489749]

[Anonymous No.18489752]

[Anonymous No.18489755]

[Anonymous No.18489760]

[Anonymous No.18489766]

[Anonymous No.18489772]

[Anonymous No.18489825]

>>18489744
>>18489752
>>18489755
>>18489760
trads won't click those images due to the lewdness, so no point to post them

[Anonymous No.18489874]

This thread will critique traditionalism, specifically the Guénonian variety, and its concomitant belief in perennialism. I will define perennialism simply as the belief in an “absolute Truth” or “perennial wisdom (sophia perennis) that stands as the transcendent source of all the intrinsically orthodox religions of humankind” (Lings and Minnaar 2007: xii). ‘Traditionalism’ I see as a specific form of perennialism which emerges in the writings of René Guénon. This is basically a form of pluralism, but unlike other pluralisms, and even some other perennialisms, it is unabashedly anti-modernist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. “Democracy,” writes Guénon, is “an absolute impossibility and cannot even have a mere de facto existence” (2001: 74). One part of this thread will be devoted to critiquing the traditionalists’ belief in perennialism/pluralism, and the other part to their critique of liberal democracy. A bibliography will feature at the end.
The first, most intuitive objection to traditionalist perennialism is that it just seems obviously false. Of course, the idea would not have any appeal if it did not have a way of addressing this concern. This is a problem which all pluralisms must confront: the world’s religions seem to disagree with one another. How can it be said that they are the same, or that they share a common origin? A pluralism will be defined by how it answers this question, and it will stand or fall on that answer. The Guénonian traditionalist variety of pluralism might be described as a ‘core pluralism’ in that it identifies a common core or essence which it views as the same between all ‘orthodox’ traditions (that qualifier will become important later). Minnaar answers the question in the following way: “Christianity,” he says, “is very clearly different from Islam or Buddhism qua form; but it is one with them qua essence” (Lings and Minnaar 2007: xv).

So, despite differences between ‘religious forms,’ things like as rules, rituals, or certain dogmatic expressions, when it comes to the essentials, the world’s religions agree with one another.
Alternatively, perennialists use the language of the ‘exoteric’ and the ‘esoteric.’ The exoteric dimension of religion would include the aforementioned rules, rituals, and dogmas which are problematized by the perennialist, while the esoteric dimension would include the common core, whatever that might be for them. For Guénon and his acolytes, the basic illness plaguing the modern West is that it has lost sight of the esoteric knowledge which constitutes its tradition (Sedgwick 2004: 21). Guénon couples this ‘realization’ with a rejection of “evolutionary optimism” (Sedgwick 2004: 50–51), which merely involves a ‘critique’ of liberal narratives of progress. The entire history of the West seems really to be little but a history of degeneration on this view.

[Anonymous No.18489875]

It is here that we first begin to see the paradoxical irony of Guénonian traditionalism. The traditionalist must in fact take on the entire liberal theory of progress in order to sustain his reactionary anger against the modern world. He simply inverts the theory and transforms this progress into a form of regression, but there is no real disagreement between progressives and traditionalists as to what has actually transpired. In order to sustain his anger against secularism, the traditionalist must fall hook, line, and sinker for the secularization thesis and the myth of disenchantment. His imagination of an ideal, ancient past cannot allow him to consider the possibility that the so-called ‘traditional societies’ were never particularly pious in the first place (Stark 2015, chap. 2). Ironically, to accept traditionalism requires one to commit to a very modern view of the world.

Likewise, traditionalism conforms to another characteristically modern prejudice with its elitist, you could even say, Protestant disdain for the ‘forms’ of religion. Schuon is not shy about the real nature of this prejudice. “Esoterism,” he writes, “is reserved, by definition and because of its very nature, for an intellectual elite” (2005: 33). The traditionalist reduces ritual to mere instrumental value, to at best a “vehicle” for the transmission of ‘esoteric truth’ (Lings and Minnaar 2007: xix). Ritual cannot possibly be an end in itself, as it is for the Hindu Mīmāṃsā. It must serve some higher truth, which the traditionalist usually must eisegetically read into the practice. This, of course, is the well-known problem with metaphorical interpretation in religion, that it admits of no limits, yet the traditionalists all suffer from a modernist repulsion to what they deride as “literalism” (Really, no such thing exists beyond the minds of liberal critics of “fundamentalism”) and a relativist obsession with metaphor. Northbourne, a translator of Guénon, laments, “This generation, with its literalism, has lost the habit of thinking in symbols” (Lings and Minnaar 2007: 7, note 3). Yet such a statement is so obviously silly I do not think it necessary to refute. The perennialists have surely seen the fruits of their own efforts in the modern, pathological obsession with reducing all scripture to ad hoc allegory, something no doubt helped along by the anti-scientific attitude of many traditionalists, Guénon included, particularly their refusal to see evolution reconciled with religion.
All of these prejudices, all of them modern, require the perennialist to be extremely selective when it comes to which elements of the world’s religions they cherry-pick and appropriate in order to form their “perennial wisdom.” Of course, they can have no patience for anything which compromises that vision, and those things they must dismiss as “heterodox,” such as Buddhism, which Guénon denies any esoteric pedigree (2004: 93),

[Anonymous No.18489880]

or “dogmatic,” a favorite, indeed, modern slur which they employ against organized religion. Likewise, his work on Hinduism betrays the fetishism of Vedānta which was so characteristic of 20th century orientalism, a tendency which the Theosophists did so much to popularize within modern spiritualist movements, in which Hinduism is so often conflated with Vedānta, or if not that, the other schools are simply made instrumental to Vedānta; the traditionalists have not escaped this sin, perhaps owing to their Theosophical heritage.
The traditionalists employ a similar orientalist trope in their writings on Islam, emphasizing their favorite token figures to the exclusion of the mass of historical Muslims, something which Said criticized Massignon for doing. A favorite of Guénon and numerous other traditionalists is Ibn ʿArabī, while someone like Ibn Taymiyya gets little love. Such a figure is revolting to the modern mind, having been misrepresented as a proto-terrorist ideologue and a simple-minded literalist—both claims are complete slander—and as we have seen, the traditionalists are little but reactionary modernists in denial.

The traditionalists must engage in intolerably arbitrary cherry picking to sustain their perennialism. In the end, they have only succeeded in remaking the world’s religions in their own image. This is something which all pluralisms eventually do, and any pluralistic analysis of world religions always ends up telling you more about the person doing the analysis than the subject being analyzed. The perennialists are fond of using an analogy in which absolute truth is compared to the summit of a mountain, while the various religions are viewed simply as different paths towards that same summit. This of course assumes that everyone is trying to reach the same goal in the first place, but as Prothero writes, “If practitioners of the world’s religions are all mountain climbers, then they are on very different mountains, climbing very different peaks, and using very different tools and techniques in their ascents” . Guénon, at least initially, was more consistent than other perennialists in that he did not try to conflate the teaching of Buddhism with Vedānta and the Abrahamic religions. A basic study of Buddhism should inform you why nirvāṇa cannot be conflated with ātman, yet even one as clever as Seyyed Nasr has not avoided this blunder; nor has he transcended the anti-scientific prejudices of Guénon. It would indeed make an idiot of Shankara if he of all people was unable to realize that the Buddhism which he so tirelessly argued against was identical to Vedānta all along. Not to mention all the Confucian and Daoist philosophers who somehow did not discover, while Guénon did, that the latter was simply the esoteric expression of the former; and perennialism would certainly have a difficult time explaining how the Jesuits and the Confucian philosophers were too stupid to realize that they believed the same thing all along.

[Anonymous No.18489885]

I should also like to point out the delightful irony of this perennialist picking and choosing, that this luxury is only afforded to them by the free religious marketplace of secular modernity in which ideas such as theirs thrive; it is their natural habitat. Only in such a context is it so easy for them to be religious cosmopolitans. This, as Schuon admits, was not a luxury which Bernard of Clairvaux had, and Schuon provides ample excuses for Bernard’s mystical outlook having done nothing to counter his prejudice against Islam (2005: 36–37). Traditionalism owes its entire existence to modernity, which itself is a vague, fictitious construct (Josephson-Storm 2017: 306). It orients itself around this fiction—its entire existence is a reaction to it—along with all its presumptions to secularization and disenchantment, and it does nothing to challenge this narrative at all. Is it not so ironic, that this ideology emerges with such hostility against the very thing which gave birth to it? Religious pluralism, in its recognizable modern form, which would include perennialism and traditionalism, is made possible only by the religious freedom and the separation of church and state supplied by modern liberal democracy. Otherwise, the traditionalists would not have the luxury to rave as they do against organized religion with its damned exoterism and dogmatism, yet they despise the Protestants who set in motion the very events which eventually afforded them that luxury. It is such a blatant form of hypocrisy, yet it is common to all forms of neoreactionary idiocy, whether it be the tradcaths who claim to oppose religious freedom while making use of that same freedom to dissent from the church, or the Islamists and jihadists in the Muslim diaspora who rail against Western morals, while they would not be allowed to agitate as they do in a Muslim country.

[Anonymous No.18489887]

In fact, all neoreactionaries seem to share the same shortsighted critique of ‘democracy,’ whether it be traditionalists, neo-monarchists, neo-Nazis, jihadists, or whomever. What Guénon views as “the most decisive argument against democracy” is plainly sophistic and arbitrarily excludes the possibility that democracy could receive spiritual sanction (2001: 73). Of course, he also conflates modern democracy (more clearly termed republicanism) with direct democracy (2001: 74), a strawman argument which all the reactionary critics of democracy are forced by their impotence to make. In modern democratic republics, power is not in fact, nor intended to be, vested in the majority, contra Guénon (2001: 72); they are specifically designed to avoid situations in which a majority can tyrannize a minority. Ironically, Guénon claims that democracy involves “the negation of the idea of an elite” (2001: 78) when one of the common criticisms of liberal democracy is that it causes power to be invested in an elite. In fact, democracy is not contrary to the aristocratic principle at all, only to hereditary aristocracy, but not to a natural aristocracy of merit. And I am not so moved by Guénon’s whining about the “relative and contingent” nature of hierarchies based on wealth, while he lauds the modern caste system, which was much more relative and contingent before British rule.

There is a lot more that I could say about Guénon and the traditionalists. I could delve deeper into Guénon’s misrepresentation of Sufism, his orientalism, his paradoxical anti-intellectualism, or his obsession with speaking of things about which he knows nothing, and which are far out of his field of expertise. However, I think I have said enough, at least for now. I should have liked to be more neutral, more charitable to Guénon, but I cannot help but hold him and his beliefs in contempt, although I used to have much admiration for him and for traditionalist/perennialist thought. It is one of those ideologies which can be so obviously false and easily irrefutable to someone with just a bit of knowledge, provided they’ve been educated against it, yet which is held up by confirmation bias and poor education. And it’s not just a benign ideology. It’s actively harmful to mutual understanding, often comes coupled with dangerous ideologies, and doesn’t make anyone into a better person. The proliferation of ideas such as this among the masses is enough justification in my mind for including mandatory religious studies classes in school curriculums to counter them.

[Anonymous No.18489893]

Guenon is counter-initiation.