/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20143725]

Is this guy just an incoherent schizo or is his stuff worth reading?

[Anonymous No.20143735]

worth like you mean worth worth worth, like someone could apreciate you reading it?

hardly

[Anonymous No.20143743]

>>20143735
I mean for personal edification. Idc if anyone else knows I read him

[Anonymous No.20143752]

>>20143725
>Is this guy just an incoherent schizo or is his stuff worth reading?
Let these quotes be your guide
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

[Anonymous No.20143759]

>>20143752

>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

[Anonymous No.20143766]

>>20143759

>“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

[Anonymous No.20143768]

>>20143743
For better or worst most people read meme writers so they can go around saying they have read the meme

self edification is not something you should expect from anon's recommendations

[Anonymous No.20143808]

He's worth reading, just ignore his retarded online fans who have done more to damage his reputation than he ever could. Read Crisis and go from there.

>>20143766
>>20143759
>>20143752
These are all Guenonians. Of course they are going to say this. Stop making Guenon into a meme, you have done enough damage.

[Anonymous No.20143819]

>>20143808
>just ignore his retarded online fans who have done more to damage his reputation than he ever could
Nooooooo.... you can't make memes about Guenon or joke about him light-heartedly or you're literally the counter-initiation!!!!!

[Anonymous No.20143822]

>>20143819
No you are a retard who makes him look bad.

[Anonymous No.20143881]

>>20143822
Only a retard who judge a complex thinker by the actions of some fans of his living a century later in another part of the world, speaking a different language...