Oriental Knowledge and Occidental Research

The question of the true meaning of Oriental traditional thought and that of the respective present situation of the Orient and the Occident are the object of a series of studies which have been published these last twelve years under the signature of Rene Guenon and which, from the very fact of their touching a great number of topics, have drawn the attention of an extremely varied public spread all over the world. The author of these studies offers to us the very rare case of a writer using a European language–French–and whose knowledge of Eastern ideas has been obtained at first hand, that is essentially from Oriental masters. It is in fact to the oral teachings of Orientals that Monsieur Rene Guenon owes his knowledge of Hindu doctrines, of Islamic esotericism and of Taoism, as well as his knowledge of the Sanskrit and Arabic languages. This characteristic feature sufficiently distinguishes him from European or American ‘Orientalists’ who have indeed sometimes worked in close touch with Oriental people, but who did not ask them for anything else than an help destined to facilitate a work mainly based on books and texts and totally inspired by the methods of Occidental erudition. On the other hand, the earnestness, the depth and the preciseness of Monsieur Rene Guenon’s works are such as to forbid any rapprochement with another group which is much less well defined, the group of those people which may be called the ‘spiritualist’ interpreters of the Orient and whose various theories are fitted less to the ‘positivist’ than to the sentimental and moralist trend of the Occident, with the result that one often meets in them the most heterogeneous things ranging from mysticism to hygiene and including occultism and the philosophical theories of the West.

Monsieur Rene Guenon’s work is rather complex and it would be difficult to summarize it. It consists of studies in which the fundamental ideas of Oriental thought are stated and explained, in books on the present situation of the Occident and in others which somehow touch these two subjects. ¹ We think we shall sufficiently show the spirit of this work by presenting here some remarks on the respective values of Oriental and of Occidental thought,–remarks which have been inspired by indications given by Monsieur Guenon in some of his books.

Whatever may be said of the respective merits of the Ancients and of the Moderns, of the inhabitants of this or of that continent, there is a superiority which the modern Occidentals claim for themselves and which seems to them to be beyond all doubt: that is, intellectual superiority. All that man has thought of and taught during the many thousand years that have preceded ‘modern’ times, and all that men of other civilisations may still think of and teach, is, as is generally believed in the West, nothing but a heap of puerile and often quaint beliefs, an expression of a naive mind, incapable of distinguishing what is real from what is imaginary; and one even speaks rather often in the Western world of a ‘pre-causal’ or ‘pre-logical’ thought, that is, of a thought which, it is believed, has been that of an extraordinarily long epoch in the course of which the most elementary laws of logic were unknown. Suddenly, by a sort of miraculous illumination, due, to be sure, to the touch of some fairy’s magic wand, ‘Science,’ it is said, appeared in Europe about the sixteenth century A.D.: an experimental science supposed to be ‘based’ on the observation of perceptible facts and which was soon to be considered as the only serious and possible science. Thus, according to the modern Westerner, mankind knew a period of false science, of fancies more or less poetical and without any relation to reality, in short a ‘mythological’ period; and it is only in recent times that, its intelligence being at last awakened, it was able to discern the rules of really ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ thought. Of course Christians do not admit that the Bible’s contents are ‘false science’; but the reservations they make on this subject rarely ever affect their satisfaction in living in a time of ‘progress’ and of ‘enlightenment.’ In any case, all representatives of ‘positive’ science, which, by the way, has become the official one, and specially all ethnologists, all ‘sociologists’ and the big majority of Orientalists–European and American–accept as an indisputable truth this bipartite conception of the history of human thought: an hypothetical, very simple, and partial conception, and such as to stupefy the learned men of other civilisations.

With regard to this theory, which the general public of the Occident indulge in the more easily as they have never thought of all its consequences, and do not perceive its difficulties, Monsieur Rene Guenon affirms with an equal decisiveness the intellectual superiority of Oriental knowledge, or in a general way of all truly traditional knowledge, over modern Occidental thought. If we consider the respective sources of the one and of the other thought, the difference is such as to exclude any sort of rapprochement: for no comparison is possible between knowledge obtained by a full intuition of the intelligible Light, such as the Hindu doctrine affirms,–not only its theoretical possibility, but even its effective realisation in the case of the jivan-mukta (and specially in the case of the rishis, authors of the Veda),–and a purely rational and human research, which can in no way release man from the ignorance and illusion belonging to his state as a manifested being. But as modern thought does not recognise the possibility of that basic knowledge and even implicitly denies it in describing as ‘myths’ the symbolical expressions of it which have been preserved in the traditional books of different peoples, one has to examine the contents and the characteristics of the two kinds of knowledge; this examination, not to speak of other considerations, ought to be sufficient to allow at least a provisional judgment on the authority which attaches to the one and the other thought. It is this we should like to do very rapidly, keeping ourselves to some particularly important and characteristic features and without entering, of course, into any detailed discussion.

One of the most apparent features of modern science is its absence of unity, and its analytical character. Far from constituting a coherent whole, that is a universal synthesis, it is divided into an ever-increasmg number of ‘specialities,’ in the interior of which scientists accumulate their knowledge of details, of ‘facts,’ without however being able to bring about a synthesis more easily in this smaller field. Now, this shows clearly enough that, if modern research suffers from any defect, it is that it does not possess the ideas which would enable it to co-ordinate and to synthesise all these details; this consideration alone would suffice to explain why Monsieur Rene Guenon has described modern science as a ‘science without principles’ and as ‘an ignorant knowing.’ But the absence of principles does not only make impossible any larger views of things and any truly deep conception: it even deprives science of any solid intellectual basis. ‘Science,’ the same author writes, ‘in constituting itself according to modern views, has not only lost in depth, but also, one might say, in solidity, for its attachment to principles made it participate in their immutability as far as its own object allowed it, whereas, being completely shut up in the world of changing things, it does not find anything stable therein, no fixed point on which to rest; not starting from any absolute certitude, it is reduced to probabilities and approximations, or to purely hypothetical constructions which are nothing but a work of the individual fancy.’ (The Crisis of the modern World, Paris, 1927, pages 99-100). Intelligence, to put it in another way, cannot judge of anything if it does not occupy a fixed place, higher than the object which it judges; and the error of modern science has been its search for immutable principles, necessary to all science, inside an essentially changing experience. As it could not find them there, it had to satisfy itself by using the limited ideas which are accessible to every-body and sufficient for the everyday material life; but in keeping to these ideas it limited its intellectual horizon and, in the same way, its scope and depth. This is what appears in a particularly striking manner if one compares it with traditional thought whose horizon and scope are not exactly limited by anything, and which possesses ideas, that is, principles of synthesis and of explanation, of a quite different level, as may be easily seen from some instances.

Modern scientific research, firstly, gives no place to the idea of the ‘Supreme Principle’ though that idea is spread among all the peoples of the world and even the most degenerate. Now, it is the ‘Supreme Principle’ which, at least under its determination as Ishwara or Brahma saguna, gives the fundament to the essential unity of the universe, a unity without which the universe could not be coherent nor, therefore, intelligible. If one does not feel the necessity of having recourse to that idea, then we must conclude that the pretensions of speculation are extremely diminished. And if that idea, on the other hand, has disappeared from modern ‘scientific’ thought, then we must find, as it seems, the reason for it in the impossibility of relating it to the phenomenal multiplicity: ‘cosmological’ ideas are necessary for this linking up, and oral traditional teaching which furnished them before has entirely disappeared from Europe at a time which, according to a series of indications, seems to lie about three hundred years . The idea of ‘cause’ (karana), for instance, is no longer understood in Europe in its profound significance, which no modern philosopher has ever perceived, of an ‘irreversible relation of identity’ implying, on the one hand, the identity of effect and cause, and on the other hand, the superiority, nay the ‘transcendence’ of the cause with regard to the effect: two faces, so to say, of the idea of causality, these appear in Hindu thought quite clearly in the relation which unites the Shakti to the Shaktiman. If the disappearance of the idea of Brahma or of the ‘Supreme Principle’ meant a beheading of Science, so to say, by depriving it of the very principle which maintains the cohesion of all things among themselves and makes possible intelligible general or universal conceptions, the disappearance of the veritable idea of ‘causality’ (karanatva) had no less serious consequences. As the effect could no longer be entirely identified with its cause, it could no longer be entirely explained and there remains between the one and the other an irreducible difference, an essential obscurity due to something else than our ignorance: the habit has thus been formed of considering that there is in things a sort of obscure principle of existence, irreducible to intellectual Light and which therefore could not have issued from it nor be brought to it; and it is easy to see the links which unite this belief to the western ‘materialism’ and ‘anti-intellectualism.’ On the other hand, where there is no longer ‘transcendence’ there is either no longer a hierarchy, as there is nothing more to justify the ‘distances’ separating the different ‘orders’ of the universe from one another: now, thought only escapes confusion by ordered conceptions rigourously maintaining the distinction of principle and application of superior and inferior; there is no intelligible conception without a certain ‘order’ of the things thought of, and in the intellectual still more than in the social domain, there is no order without hierarchy and no hierarchy without irreversible relations. Lastly, the loss of the true, intellectual notion of causality had another, not less important, consequence, which is the impossibility of Deliverance (Moksha) and therefore of total knowledge: Deliverance evidently presupposing the essential identity of jivatma with Paramatma and the transcendence of the latter with regard to the whole development of his Shakti, from Sadashiva to kshiti.

We shall keep ourselves to these three ideas of the ‘Supreme Principle,’ of identity, and of transcendence, whose importance, moreover, is obvious; they form, so to say, the triple basis of the teaching of the Upanishads: ideas which, it may be noted, are not specifically Hindu, but rather purely and simply traditional, as they are to be found, identically the same at bottom, in the Taoist works, in those of Islamic esotericism and in old books of the Occident. One could naturally quote many other ideas which have become foreign to Occidental scientific research: as, for instance, the idea of the different ‘states’ of being and that of the correspondences existing between higher and lower orders; to find a great number of them it would suffice to study any mandala or any symbolical representation of the universe, but this would take us too far away from our subject. Against all these ideas the highest principle that modern science offers to us, that which entirely inspires it, is the idea of ‘natural law’ which it considers as its own discovery, and to which it has given an exclusive importance. Now, that idea has only a very relative and purely apparent intellectual value, as it tends to establish between determined events of the corporeal world relations which are supposed to be ‘not-conditioned’ and which would constitute so many ‘closed-up systems.’ Now, there is no other ‘not-conditioned’ thing than the Absolute, and an entirely closed-up system is not reconcilable with the profound unity and harmony of the universe. However disputable and relative this idea may be, it meets certain possibilities of application in the lowest orders of reality, where the primordial Light is so much divided that it admits at least of certain appearances of ‘closed-up systems’ and thus it possesses an unquestionable and unquestioned value from the point of view of practical action, and above all of action utilising material means. But where it is no longer applicable, and where also its application would require other ideas than those concerning ‘weight and measure,’ Occidental Science finds itself without intellectual means and it cannot construe any satisfactory theory. This impotence is particularly visible in those branches which have been called ‘philosophy’ and ‘psychology’ and in the study of the thought of other civilisations: here we find western science getting embarrassed, heaping up ‘facts’ and documents without being able to explain and interpret them, or losing itself in a labyrinth of contestable theories and of ephemeral hypotheses. These three domains, we believe, are doubtless the ones where modern thought could best become aware of its own relativity.

In short, Occidental research clearly suffers from a lack of principles, which thus deprives it of a solid basis and of sufficient intellectual means. Falsely believing itself to be based on experience, it does not know either what it is or to what it may claim. Deprived of any fixed guiding mark, it is at the mercy of the slightest mirage, intellectual or sentimental, and it floats about, so to say, in the lowest orders of reality, the only ones where its limited and systematic conceptions can find some application. Having lost any notion of the universal hierarchy it puts all things on the same plane and explains anything by anything: the soul by the body, the intelligence by social forms, metaphysical symbols by natural phenomena. The systematic application of a certain experimental method has led modern technics to the realisations which are well-known and, which, astonishing the man in the street, bind him more and more to the well-being and to the amusements they procure for him. But this is a result of an extra-intellectual order whose value is, besides, disputable; from the point of view of knowledge, as Monsieur Reme Guenon has remarked, no hesitation is possible between a mere accumulation of knowledge of details, however useful they may be from some points of view, and the irreplaceable whole of the traditional ideas, which open up to man quite different prospects, not only in the order of theoretical speculation, but also in that of the ‘realisations’ at which he can aim.