Evola - Introduction to Guenon's The Crisis of the Modern World
Evola introduces and clarifies Guenon's work
Translator’s note: Evola is here introducing the first of Guenon’s works to be translated into Italian. Written in 1936, at the mid-point of Fascist Italy, and four years after The Doctrine of Fascism was published, he anticipates and clarifies many of the difficulties and misunderstandings that fascist readers might encounter with Guénon’s work (still relevant almost a century later) — his terminology, his style, his supposed admiration of the East, his universalism, and his silence on certain issues.
I have included the source and more complete excerpts for the quotations, which may be of interest.
Introduction to The Crisis of the Modern World
By Julius Evola
Rome, 14 July 1936
Taken in the fullness of its meaning, the word ‘revolution’ comprises two ideas: first, the idea of a revolt against a given state of affairs; and then, the idea of a return or conversion – thus, in ancient astronomical language, the revolution of a star meant precisely its return to its origin and its ordered motion around a motionless centre.
So, taking the term ‘revolution’ in this comprehensive sense, it may be said that, in the world today, few books are as thoroughly ‘revolutionary’ as the work of René Guénon presented here. In no other modern author is there such a violent, decisive, and undiluted revolt against our materialistic, scientistic, democratic civilization, against a ‘Western’ order which in truth was only a poorly organized disorder bearing within itself the principle of the most tragic crises.
Yet, at the same time, in no modern author is there such a radical, precise, self-aware, austere, and impersonal return to the principles which, being above time, do not belong to today or yesterday, but have perennial relevance and remain immutable prerequisites for any greatness and for any normal form of civilization.
It is true that the public today is tired of the constant talk of ‘crises’ and the ‘twilight of civilization’. But it is precisely for this reason that in Italy, where the ideas of various thinkers like Keyserling, Spengler, Massis, Berdjajeff, and Benda have already begun to be imported, that it is now time that Guénon become known to us, because here we have a personality of a very different calibre, we have someone who does not present us with constructions and interpretations that are more or less personal and ‘philosophical’, but who approaches the subject in the name of a tradition, in the highest and most universal sense of the term; here, we have someone who weighs every word of what he says and takes full responsibility for it, establishing points that are as impartial as they are definitive.
To approach Guénon's work, the best state of mind is that of someone who has had enough of words and ‘theories’, of someone who perceives his ultimate vanity in the face of the need for decisions requiring realism in a higher sense, and above all the courage of the unconditioned. Guénon does not fit into the series of modern ‘personal’ authors with their exhibitionist affectations and brilliant fireworks made to win over the ‘respectable’ European public: he is inaccessible to every compromise and concession, saying only what he must; his point of view is not that of ‘originality’ but of pure, unmitigated truth. In his world, there is no room for “arguing”: there is only declaring oneself for or against – the broader and more comprehensive his ‘orthodoxy’ compared to what is commonly labelled as such, the more rigid, exclusive, and inflexible it is. And this is what is needed for these ‘hard times’, for these ‘times of decision’ – and for individuals equal to such times.
Guénon’s work, which fills several volumes, is vast and organic, to the extent that we cannot even summarize its main features. Setting out from a constant and unchanging ‘metaphysical’ standpoint, it branches out into various domains: symbols, myths, primordial traditions, interpretations of history, civilizational morphology and criticism, religious and pseudo-religious phenomena, asceticism, the traditional science of human interiority, the doctrine of spiritual authority, and so on. All of this is encompassed in the work which Guénon has tirelessly undertaken for years, with unparalleled preparation, absence of any sectarianism, and a new method enabling one to be truly anti-modern, of having as one’s constant object the ‘third dimension’ of everything that the reader will realize he had known only superficially.
It is perhaps the present work that is of most immediate interest to many and one that can serve as an introduction to the study of Guenon’s other works, leading the best minds gradually to direct contact with the traditional spirit itself of which Guénon is the exponent. Guénon is always mindful not to overlook anything in his explanations that could give rise to misunderstandings. Nevertheless, due to the nature of his viewpoints and the need to use words unfortunately prejudiced by different usage, it is always possible that, in a less careful reading, some points in the present work might lend themselves to misunderstanding. In order to help avoid such misunderstandings, we present a few brief considerations.
Guénon makes it clear that his point of view is essentially ‘metaphysical’. In employing this term, he by no means intends to refer to some philosophical conception – he doesn’t want to have anything to do with philosophy. Beyond everything conditioned by time and space, subject to change, imbued with sensibility and particularity, or tied to rational categories, there exists a higher world – not as a hypothesis or abstraction of the human mind, but as the most real of realities. Man can ‘realize’ it, i.e., have an experience of it – as direct and certain as that which is mediated by the physical sense – when he manages to raise himself to a state of super-rationality, or, in Guénon’s terms, a state of ‘pure intellectuality’, a transcendent use of the intellect, freed from any factors that are strictly human, psychological, affective, and thus also freed from any individualistic of confusedly ‘mystical’ factor. It is in relation to this, namely to a kind of transcendent realism that means to carry itself well above the world of any particular religion or tradition (each various and contingent formulations of the one unchanging metaphysical reality) and into a much more objective frame than that of any science, a realism combined with the premises of inner asceticism and the possibilities of overcoming the human always offered by every true tradition – it is in relation to this that the term ‘metaphysics’ is used by Guénon.
Therefore, whenever Guénon speaks of ‘intellectuality’, ‘contemplation’, ‘intellectual elite’, ‘pure knowledge’, ‘world of principles’, or ‘intellectual intuition’, the reader must be careful not to suppose he speaks of a kind of rationalism or abstract universalism that these terms suggest in their common modern usage. Furthermore, it must be emphasized that – to a greater degree than is perhaps conveyed in this one book – the world of ‘principles’, as Guénon conceives and presents it, as the foundation of every true tradition, is much less a world of abstractions than it is a world of forces whose action, though unseen, is no less effective – in fact, it is much more irresistible, inexorable, and fatal than that which is related to material forces and, in general, to merely human forces. For Guénon, the destiny of the spirit is not exile in a stratospheric superworld, and the bearers of the spirit are not condemned to play, down here, the role of teary, nostalgic exiles or of impotent utopians: for Guénon, that which neither begins nor ends in the ‘human’ element bestows precise relationships of ‘dignity’, of quality, of difference on the various forms of life, and that is how the great traditions, in their luminous, oceanic, superhuman meaning, are formed. This is how the great history and true hierarchy are born, that which the great premodern traditional social organizations always knew, even in their arts and sciences, and whose last echoes continue until the feudal and Catholic-imperial Middle Ages, to which Guénon naturally attributes a special significance as a symbolic model.
This being the case, all of Guénon's statements regarding the primacy of ‘knowledge’, i.e. ‘intellectuality’, over action must not lead the reader to misunderstanding: what is inferior and subordinate is only inferior action, the desacralized and materialized action, lacking in its being any light, true purpose, or true principle, and which is better described as a kind of agitation or fever than as true action. Another source of potential misunderstanding is Guénon's treatment of the relationship between East and West. Therefore, we caution the reader never to forget what the author has explicitly stated, namely that the true opposition is not between the East and the West but between the modern West and the Traditional world. It is only because it is in antithesis to its better past that the modern West is also in antithesis to what the East still preserves of the ‘metaphysical’ in spite of the ferments of decomposition therein and which have essentially been imported from the secularized and materialized West. It is important to note that, in essence, Guénon's views in this regard not only align with those of Coppola regarding ‘Europe’s bad conscience’[1], but even more so with those expressed by Mussolini in his well-known speech to students from the East. In the speech, Mussolini acknowledged that the antithesis and misunderstanding between East and West are based only on the fact that the West is mistaken for it its more recent materialistic, mercantile, and liberalistic degeneration, that ‘civilization without soul or ideal’ that ‘can only see in Asia a market for manufactured goods, a source of raw materials, [that] anti-fascist civilization which has gained the upper hand over the world and which is reflected in the very ills that Asia is beginning to suffer from.’ Coherently developing these exact positions – Mussiloni’s – is sufficient to avoid being overly moved by the ‘strong’ statements Guénon makes against barbaric Western invasions, and to see his accusations rather as a healthy reaction clarifying the truly ‘revolutionary’ ideals that we must adopt and defend. Only these ideals can establish the true, spiritual concept of Imperium, as opposed to the ‘imperialistic’ destructions of a modern, and, let us say it plainly, essentially Anglo-Saxon stamp. Let it be clear to all – and above all to the censors – that the issue of the East, as discussed by Guénon, is not to be confused with the more extensive colonial problem, which is not addressed in this book. Do not think that what is valid for peoples of millennia-old ‘metaphyiscal’ civilizations, such as the Hindu civilization, can be extended to savage or degenerate races, such as the African ones.