Passages: Studies in Traditionalism and Traditions - Volume I

An eventful century has passed since the writings, activities, and networks of René Guénon (1886-1951), Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), Julius Evola (1898-1974), and Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) initiated what has come to be known as Traditionalism. Within recent decades, unprecedented attention has been dra

• Language: English
• Publisher: PRAV Publishing
• Release date: Jan 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781952671302

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

From the Editors: Recollecting Traditionalism

René Guénon: Traditionalism as a Language

Alexander Dugin

Regarding the Term Traditional Authors

Róbert Horváth

Traditionalism as Understood by René Guénon

and its Contemporary Understanding

Maxim Makovchik

The Realisation of the Spirit of Tradition

and the Culture of the Unrealised Spirit

Jonatán Gődény

Guénon’s Crisis, Crisis Literature,

and Negative Thought

Giovanni Sessa

Anti-Tradition in the Age of Iron

Troy Southgate

The Antitheses of Modernity

Gianfranco de Turris

The Temporality of the Tiger: Some Notes

on the Evolian ‘Riding the Tiger’

Giovanni Damiano

Traditionalism as the Tree and the Ark

of the Radical Selves for the Restoration

of the Erst Philosophy

Uligang Xanth Ansbrandt

Heart and Center in René Guénon:

On the Usage of Symbols

Jean-Pierre Laurant

Metaphysical Solipsism — A Fundamental Principle

of Tradition

Tamás Bencze

A Traditionalist Inquiry into Nature

Eduardo Zarelli

Heidegger Against the Traditionalists

Collin Cleary

Traditionalism and (Mis-)Understanding Heidegger

Askr Svarte

Yuri Mamleev’s Fate of Being as a Response

to Guénon’s Metaphysics

Charlie Smith

Tradition and Traditionalism in Contemporary

Slavic Native Faith: My Subjective View

Veleslav Cherkasov

The Political Dimension of Traditionalism

in René Guénon and Julius Evola:

Defining the Ideal Principles of Social Organization

Dmitry Moiseev

Evola and Jung: For a Reactualisation of Tradition

Roberto Cecchetti

About the Authors

FROM THE EDITORS:

RECOLLECTING

TRADITIONALISM

In 1951, in the special issue of Études traditionnelles published on the occasion of René Guénon’s death, the German philosopher Leopold Ziegler noted emerging talk of a group called traditionalists.1 Supposing that it is legitimate to speak of such a group, Ziegler wrote, one might perhaps find in its existence a last, faint ray of hope for the West. According to Ziegler, this group promised to bring forth something new that is at the same time something very ancient, and its trains of thought and networks heralded an international synergy between hitherto secret intellectual currents: In the meanwhile, many clues suggest that to this secret France [of Guénon] corresponds a secret Austria, a secret Italy, as well as a secret Germany, which, as they mature, are silently converging with one another. In his concluding remarks, Ziegler put forth that this constellation of converging thinkers inspired by Guénon is united by a common struggle and cause: "anamnesis, that is remembrance or recollection. Now, more than half a century later, Ziegler’s remarks and the notion of recollection provide a fitting point of departure for thinking about what has indeed come to be called Traditionalism." 

In Platonic philosophy, which many Traditionalists consider to be part and parcel of the Sophia Perennis, "anamnesis refers to the soul’s capacity to remember or recollect" the metaphysical knowledge that is originally innate to it, but which is lost in the course of the cycles of incarnation. Anamnesis involves an intellectual and spiritual activity aimed at regaining knowledge of the principles that are the dearest to the soul as such, yet the seemingly furthest away from the soul hic et nunc. The intellectual and spiritual project advocated and articulated by René Guénon proposed anamnesis on a civilizational, cosmic scale: in the midst of globalizing Western Modernity, the Dark Age of the KaliYuga, in which traditions have been abandoned and traditional principles and knowledge have been lost, an intellectual elite must undertake the anamnesis of Tradition, to recollect the sacred, metaphysical knowledge that not only explains the crisis of the modern world, but paves the way for re-collecting Tradition for another beginning. In the Traditionalist vein, this new beginning is not only a theoretical engagement, but an existential recognition, a response to the call emanating from the experience of what Mircea Eliade called the nostalgia for origins which motivates Homo religiosus just as much as it troubles the human being of Modernity.2 In other words, Traditionalism raises the question of human existence and thinking in relation to Tradition and in relation to a world which is ostensibly the embodiment of anti-Tradition. For Guénon and his followers, collaborators, and like-minded correspondents, i.e., for the group called traditionalists, this mission of recollecting Tradition did not mean merely reconstructing or rejoining one or another tradition; instead, the Traditional(ist) idea meant a dynamic, active, multidimensional way of interpreting and being, an existentia hermeneutica, a fully-fledged episteme for recollecting the sacred Tradition that has been manifest in various traditions, for rediscovering the metaphysical principles that have been at work in history and historical traditions, for reenacting the transformative spiritual realization of re-initiation into Tradition, and for re-sacralizing the lived world. The latter is an especially significant quality of Traditionalist thought: according to Antoine Faivre’s famous definition, one of the fundamental pillars of Western esoteric thought in the situation of Modernity is represented by the so-called practice of concordance,3 and the Traditionalists raised this concept of perennial correspondence between traditions to a practical perception of the lived world, to a hermeneutical key. In other words, the (re)discovery of the paradigm of Tradition between traditions is translated into a unique interpretive and existential orientation that goes beyond individual attachment to a surviving tradition as well as stale conceptualizing of tradition. It is in this respect understandable why Guénon himself rejected the term traditionalist, which for him rang with the connotation of only a tendency that may be more or less vague and often wrongly applied, because it does not imply any effective knowledge of traditional truths.4 By contrast, what has come to be known as the Traditional(ist) school, movement, or method after Guénon is distinguished by a sophisticated and multifaceted assemblage of philosophical and theological hermeneutics, a colorful range of aesthetic and academic applications, as well as a heritage of involvements in diverse religious and political currents. All of the latter and more has become amassed in a considerable body of literature and a rich history which have only begun to be (re) discovered. Today, still shy of a century since Ziegler’s remarks, Traditionalist thought remains a lively engagement, as does the recollection of the Traditionalist past, present, and future. The questions and interpretations posed by Traditionalists remain actual and open-ended, as does the task of interpreting the very nature of Traditionalism’s questioning and answering.

In another sense, thus, the recollection of Traditionalism pertains to how what was for Ziegler a secret landscape has since become an increasingly excavated archaeological site of academic scholarship.5 The mainstream academic discovery and chronicling of Traditionalism, at times crossing or spilling over into political journalism, has nevertheless lent credence to Ziegler’s incipient intimation that Traditionalism names a much broader and deeper current of ideas which has only begun to come into view in the wake of its initial pioneers’ legacies. On the other hand, it remains apparent that the historical or historiographical charting of various Traditionalists’ lives and works runs the risk of distracting from seriously engaging their thinking, as well as losing sight of the Traditionalist activities and trains of thought which are still unfolding. Instead of historiographical exorcism, the scholarly recollection of Traditionalism is in need of a reconnection with serious exegesis and critical reflection on the ideas, rather than individuals and authorships, in which Traditionalism consists.

Speaking of the recollection of Traditionalism is thus also a call to reconvene, to reassemble, rediscover, and rethink here and now — to re-raise the question of what Traditionalism means, has been, is, and could be. Authentically studying and discussing Traditionalism means treating not only a topic or object, but engaging a method, a pathway of thought(s), which can be (and has been) put into dialogue with other relevant sources and fields. It is in this spirit that we bring forth and open up Passages: Studies in Traditionalism and Traditions as a journal not only on, but in this current of history and thinking.

As things currently stand, Passages is emerging as the only English-language publication devoted explicitly to Traditionalism, and it is one among very few other publications across the world dealing with Traditionalist themes sensu stricto as well as sensu lato. In opening this new agora for the exploration of Traditionalism, the editors of Passages recognize ourselves to be part of a history — or better put, a Wirkungsgeschichte — of diverse attempts at establishing a textual forum for studies on and in Traditionalism. In the sphere of Guénon’s native tongue, the original Traditionalist organ, Études traditionnelles, concluded in 1992. The French academic journal Politica Hermetica, one of the foremost sites for specialist scholarship on Guénon and his associates, remains in publication and circulation, although its initial focus on Traditionalist themes has been considerably broadened and diluted in alignment with the academic field of Western Esotericism. In the English language, Studies in Comparative Religion, which prized itself as The First English Journal on Traditional Studies, ceased publication in 2013. The Initiate: Journal of Traditional Studies lived to see only two issues between 2008 and 2010. Subsequently, 2011 saw the last issue of Sophia: Journal of Traditional Studies. Most recently, Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity was discontinued at the close of 2022. In the Russian-speaking world, where the wide-ranging development of Traditionalist literature and discourse has remained little accessible to other language spheres, the journal Traditsiia — two of whose volumes covered the international conference Against the Post-Modern World: Actual Problems of Traditionalism held in Moscow in 2011 — concluded with its fifth issue in 2013. The Russian Traditionalist almanac focused on pagan traditions, Warha, which ran two volumes in English as Warha Europe, was renamed Alföðr in 2021. The future of the paganfocused American Traditionalist series Tyr: Myth—Culture— Tradition, whose last volume was published in 2018, remains unknown to us.

In Italy, several publications over the past few decades – most of them still active – have dealt with Traditionalist topics and sources, such as Vie della Tradizione, founded in 1971 by Gaspare Cannizzo, and Arthos, founded in 1972 by Renato Del Ponte. Many of them, however, have been characterized by an extreme specialization regarding the thematized doctrines and topics: for example, since 1961 Rivista di Studi Tradizionali has transmitted Guénon’s approach, while Studi evoliani records research into Evola’s thought, and Politica romana is devoted to studies on Roman tradition.

In view of this diverse array of previous publications hosting exhibitions of discourse on and in Traditionalism, many of which have since retired, Passages presents itself as an aspiring new beginning with an international scope. We seek to let the global rigor of Traditionalism, as a matrix of questions and answers to diverse philosophical, cultural, and social issues, contend itself. Let us recall Ziegler’s remark on a secret France, secret Austria, secret Italy, and secret Germany — in the decades since Guénon’s death, Traditionalist thought and scholarly retrievals of the Traditionalist heritage have expanded or been (re)discovered across even further horizons. Accordingly, Passages sets as one of its foremost tasks representing and acquainting Traditionalist currents and scholarship across continents, especially those less familiar in the domain of English-language literature. In this first volume, we are pleased to present readers with contributions from two of the homelands of Traditionalism, France and Italy, as well as from the United Kingdom, Hungary, Belarus, Russia, and the United States.

It is the conviction of the editorial board of Passages that authentic, meaningful exploration of and critical dialogue over Traditionalist ideas and histories can only unfold in the context of conversation. Like the ambassadorship between traditions that Guénon envisioned or the polylogue of civilizations proposed by Alexander Dugin, Traditionalism is a meta-discursive space for the meeting of traditions, for perspectives on and interpretations of traditions, and for critical dialogue on such perspectives and interpretations. Seeking to encourage such dialogue as a lively part of Passages, we welcome submissions of letters to the editors, responses to published articles, as well as book reviews.

The Call for Papers sent out for this first volume asked contributors to write in response to the open prompt of thinking Traditionalism. In launching the series Passages: Studies in Traditionalism and Traditions, we extend the same invitation to readers and researchers to take the leap into thinking Traditionalism — that which, in words written nearly 50 years ago, was deemed some of the most serious thinking of the twentieth century,6 yet by no means ended then.

Jafe Arnold,

Evgeny Nechkasov,

Lucas Griffin,

Luca Siniscalco

RENÉ GUÉNON:

TRADITIONALISM

AS A LANGUAGE

Alexander Dugin

Structuralism:

Language and Meta-Language

From the late 19th century onwards, so-called structural linguistics enjoyed significant development. One of its founders, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), discovered a number of this discipline’s laws. This science turned out to be so popular and interesting (especially as a methodology), and so effective and operative for solving a whole series of problems, that it provided the foundations for a whole current in philosophy and scientific methodology in the 20th century, establishing so-called structuralism together with the poststructuralism that came from it.

Our century opened with a phrase by Nietzsche, astonishing in its precision (as are the rest of his aphorisms), that served as the title of his early work We Philologists. Having understood the extent to which we (as humans, as thinking beings) are philologists, a whole group of philosophers turned their rapt attention to the problem of language.

In rather approximate terms, we can say that in structuralism, in structural linguistics, language is taken to be an autonomous category that presents us with a manifest world of predetermined themes, a world of structured and interconnected meanings. In other words, language is understood to be something that weds the intelligible, intellectual sphere, the sphere of thinking and noumena, to the sphere of the phenomenological, indirect ontic realities that are accessible to us in sensations – that to which we concretely relate. Thus, language lies between meaning (or let us say spirit) and concrete matters. As noted by the structural linguists, language possesses a certain magical autonomy — all corporeal things in this world harbor their own dissolution, their own entry into language. Wedded with the element of language, things are redeemed and recovered from the world of corporeality by taking on a name. At the same time, in the opposite direction, the sphere of the spirit affects the sphere of the flesh – matter – through language. Here we might recall Hoffman’s tale (repeatedly cited by Evgeny Golovin), in which the protagonists used ordinary grammar to evoke spirits. In employing a developed conceptual apparatus, structural linguists have rationally expressed essentially the same magical idea: a thing dissolves into a word, and the word solidifies the thing.

According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, our surrounding reality is forged by our language. If a thing does not have a name, then it simply does not exist. In principle, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis fully coincides with the notion, characteristic of the world of Tradition, that the present being of things is distilled within their names, and names are capable of creating, incarnating, and materializing concrete things. This is clear even on the level of everyday life: in a certain situation, one need only say do this or that, be quiet, die, kill or don’t kill with the proper intonation, and the material world begins to change. At this point, it matters not which mechanisms start working and in what way; it is merely obvious that the word possesses colossal theurgic significance. Theurgy is what the ancient Greeks called the priestly art by means of which people used incantations and rituals to make a Deity manifest itself in a certain way.

Accordingly, the study of the word, language, and its models is its own kind of modern counterpart to operative magic whereby one can change and transform reality and simultaneously bring the concrete world of phenomena into a conceptual, abstract model, an eidetic reality in which present objects are dissolved into some kind of conceptual ensemble. A distorted notion of the magical arts of antiquity has been established today: it is as if these magical arts served only practical aims and used the spiritual world for influencing material situations and things. In fact, this was only one side of magic, namely operative, applied magic. There existed another – speculative – side of magic, intended not to change a present material situation, but to understand and clarify it, to restore it to its archetype, to divine the sidereal meaning laid up within it.

The central topic in today’s lecture is Ferdinand de Saussure’s (and, after him, structuralist philosophy’s) division of the totality of language into two parts: the potential and the actual. This division might be expressed in different terminology across different languages. In French, le language (all language) is divided into la langue (the potential part, language proper) and la parole (word) or le discours (utterance), the actual part. In Russian, one could speak of the distinction between iazyk (language, tongue as the potential) and rech’ (speech as the actual).

What is meant here? It is difficult to convey or translate these terms with any precision, because the discourse at hand is not about strict readymade definitions, but a complex spiritual operation, a subtle differentiation (diakrisis) that divides what is thought to represent a unified reality into two component parts. Language, in itself, is the ungraspable potential reality that withdraws from its natural state; it embodies and alienates itself in becoming not itself at the very moment when a person speaks, discourses, and utters. At precisely this moment, language actualizes. When a person says something, he is using some invisible present linguistic mass that is absent in actuality and is selectively withdrawn out of potentially present language in order to utter forth speech (whether simple or complex). There are two elements in language. The first is language proper: the totality of lexical, morphological patterns, the stock of vocabulary (thesaurus), and the laws governing the structure of propositions. This language, the structuralists insisted, constitutes a certain constant, synchronic value. It is always present, simultaneously and in its entirety. Perhaps the most interesting part of structural linguistics is its recognition of the autonomous reality of a certain synchronic complex array regarding language’s being in potential space. Language exists in a certain permanent state of abstraction from concrete speech. Concrete speech (utterances, statements) withdraws fragments out of language and, in so doing, transmits the being of language from its synchronic state into a diachronic succession. All utterances or statements exist in succession, whereas language exists in simultaneity. Language is divided into two parts: that in which something is said, and that by means of which what is said, is said.

Language as the potential part inseparably merges with the sphere of meaning. When the structuralists discovered this circumstance, it turned out that language, coming about and showing through speech, is not identical to the totality of all existing utterances (and even all possible utterances); it is always broader than what is said within it, and it can figure as an autonomous object for research. Studying synchronic linguistic reality astoundingly allowed for highlighting the mechanisms of social behavior, the levels of the psychoanalytic cross-section of the personality, and the structure of norms and anomalies ranging all the way to radical somatic disorders. Hence arose the school of Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who synthesized structural linguistics and psychoanalysis, resulting in a rather capacious doctrine. It was in Freud’s book on verbal slips that I first came across the idea of synthesizing psychoanalysis, structural linguistics – of linguistics as such. Lacan developed this topic, and poststructuralist authors like Deleuze and Guattari developed a methodology that traced the emergence of language, beginning from the first movement of the vegetative level of corporeality. This was a very interesting and extremely sharp-witted line of research. For example, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze shows how a metastructure of language and logical thinking arises out of some first perturbations within the human being’s bodily reality. Despite the modern, rationalistic context, here once again emerges the ancient, archaic idea of language’s operational significance, which not only exposes and veils (the Latin verb revelare means to uncover and to cover at the same time) the state of affairs on the corporeal, unconscious-vegetative level of the human, but also, at the same time, affects a person, changes and controls his (and not only his) corporeality. Following upon this is the role of speech in psychiatric medical practice. Speech, conversation, narrating, and discourse are in some situations capable of curing severe mental illnesses.

Here we encounter an interesting moment: structural linguists and structuralists are in fact studying language with the help of language, by means of language. Here we come to the most important point: in methodologically studying language, the structuralists and structural linguists developed a certain special super-language or meta-language.

A meta-language is the language by which a language is studied. This is an even greater degree of generalization.

The very fact of dissecting a language in separation from speech is already a deep immersion into a kind of ontological revisionism, because ordinary consciousness (digital, binary, rational, proverbial common sense) cannot grasp synchronic language. Ordinary consciousness understands language simply as speech, as a totality of discourses, or as a regularity manifesting itself in speech. Ordinary consciousness is discursive, but it is not linguistic consciousness, because it is attentive to speech but deaf to language.

The next step in understanding the ontology of language is to bring into relief the problem of the meta-language by means of which a certain language is to be studied. Here lies something of the utmost importance: the fact of the matter is that, in their study of language and models of language, the structuralists were not free from certain proto-influences, from certain paradigms prefiguring and predetermining the models by which they studied what lies at the basis of language.

Why are we now speaking about the crisis of structuralism and poststructuralism, about the exhaustion of these trends? Because the meta-linguistic paradigm upon which the structuralist school itself was based, which came either completely from positivistic-Kantian source (in Saussure) or from the Marxist paradigm (in the avant-garde version of the new left), is exhausted. In other words, language was studied in the structuralist model by means of some already given (and deeply entrenched) proto-ideological yet quite definite and limited models. The nature of language was studied from the standpoints of another language.

In the structuralists’ case, the study of language was impure (whether the pure study of language is possible is still a question), deliberately set, limited, and predetermined by the models of an underlying meta-language. Hence structuralists’ prioritized interest in the dynamics of speech change rather than in linguistic ontology.

It is from this that the crisis of contemporary new left philosophy ensues. I am not talking about the complete absence of its representatives in Russia. This philosophy has never been adequately understood in our country, and now there is nothing left to understand in it. Today the same Europeans who once (even 10 years ago) understood everything perfectly have ceased to understand what Deleuze or Lacan had in mind, because the basic meta-linguistic milestones have completely changed. The implicit Marxist understanding and the new left paradigm of contestation have been exhausted (though this, of course, does not mean conclusively understood) and cannot serve as the common denominator of linguistic research. The sphere of linguistics, the sphere of the study of language, has reached a tragic line which demands a sort of radical overcoming. If we look closely at the optimism in the semiotic linguistic studies of the 1960s-70s (including in our country) and we compare how analogous problems are considered now, we will notice a sharp contrast. Nowadays this field is reigned by passivity and chaos. Scholars have lost the nerve for what they were doing, have suddenly forgotten the meaning and significance of what they were engaged in, and have lost the living content of their categorical apparatus.

But there is one person, one author (and the 20th-century philosophical current associated with his name), who remained outside of the sphere holding interest for structural linguistics. This author is very important for structuralism, even though he was never counted as a figure in the field. Now, when this sphere as a whole has lost its intellectual pulse (along with its implications), this author might enter (through his ideational heritage) into this sphere in full and unspent uniform like an irresistible cuirass, like a new kind of weapon, for this sphere is empty while he is full. I am talking about René Guénon.

René Guénon

René Guénon was the most correct, the most intelligent, and the most important person of the 20th century. There was no one smarter, deeper, clearer, or more absolute than Guénon, and there probably could not have been. It is no coincidence that in one collected volume dedicated to René Guénon, the French Traditionalist René Alleau compared Guénon to Marx.7 It would seem that these are two completely different, opposing figures. Guénon was a conservative hypertraditionalist. Marx was a revolutionary innovator, a radical subverter of traditions. But, with the utmost accuracy, René Alleau discerned the revolutionary message behind every one of Guénon’s propositions, the extreme and most severe non-conformism of his position as it overturned everything, and the radical nature of his thought. The point is that René Guénon was the only author, the only thinker of the 20th century and perhaps many, many centuries before, who not only singled out and put secondary linguistic paradigms into confrontation, but also called into question the very essence of language (and meta-language). The language of Marxism was methodologically very interesting (especially at a certain historical stage), as it subtly reduced the historical existence of mankind to the evident and convincing formula of the opposition between labor and capital (which, in fact, was a colossal, gnoseologically revolutionary move, as it allowed numerous things to be systematized and brought into a single, more or less consistent and dynamic construct). Being a great paradigmatic success, Marxism was very popular and won the minds of the best 20th-century intellectuals. But Guénon put forth an even more fundamental generalization, an even more radical unmasking, an even broader contestation of worldview that puts everything into question.

René Guénon developed one of the most important and paradigmatic intellectual schemes. Of course, it had existed in vague form before him and was used to one or another extent, but only Guénon distinguished it as a language. He did something analogous to what Saussure and other structural linguists did. The most important, inexhaustible category in René Guénon’s paradigmatic scheme which he distinguished and which is perhaps the most general and the strongest among all the terms and concepts of our time, is the category of the language of modernity.

The Notion of Modernity and Modernity as a Concept

In historical science, it is customary and justified to contrast New Time (Modernity), or modern society, and traditional society. In Guénon’s words, the word le moderne — that is the modern and modernity — takes on such colossal meaning and significance that it describes the whole metalanguage of the world in which we live. In fact, Guénon fits the notion of modernity with a notion of paradigms8 that predetermine a meta-language, a language, and only then the field of discourses belonging to modernity. Can you even imagine such a degree of generalization?!

The structuralists pointed out that, apart from discourse proper — that is diachronically pronounced utterances and arbitrarily developed, verbally logical chains — there is the synchronous, simultaneous reality of constantly existing language, which they studied with the help of a meta-language based on a special philosophic-linguistic methodology.

For his part, René Guénon incorporated this structuralist model, as well as number of other gnoseological paradigms predetermine various more specific languages (in the structuralist sense), and more specific paradigmatic complexes and socio-cultural structures all into one notion; he then enclosed all of this into clearly defined boundaries encompassing everything as a whole, disclosing and revealing the essence of modernity to be a kind of colossal field embracing everything with which we deal, with which we have become accustomed to operating, without suspecting that this is only one thing, and that beyond it exists a whole span of other possibilities and other languages. Guénon included all the languages of modernity, all of its paradigms, into a single notion that relegated His Majesty, the Language (and Meta-Language) of Modernity, to the level of one possible language alongside others. It could be said that he reduced a reality which pretended to the status of a universal language to a mere accumulation of utterances, structured according to a certain logic and strict, specific rules, having shown that there are other fully-fledged models which are much more universal. He sharply demoted the ontological degree of that which predetermines our entire civilization and all the realities of our world. This is a point of the utmost importance. If we turn to Guénon, considering him as an author who accomplished something analogous to the structuralist revolution, then we can discover a completely new meaning and significance to his works, and we can realize the most important orientation of his mission.

So, what is modernity? Modernity, according to Guénon, is a certain background paradigm, an operating system, a kind of computer language. This analogy with the languages of programming is productive. As computer technology evolves, the basic programming codes advance ever more deeply with computer language into the background sphere. Gradually, languages are appearing which already operate with the original machine language. Then come the users, who are completely ignorant of both the original language and the secondary ones developed out of it, and now hardly anyone remembers early computer technology. At first, every computer user had to be a programmer to some extent, if only a small one. Gradually, this need disappeared and the idea of how computers operate also changed. Later, there emerged ever newer operating systems until, in the end, even common ideas about the programming process itself and about the existence of a computer language, dissipated. But the original machine language did not disappear as a result of this change. It remains at it was, only from that time on it has withdrawn from the scope of attention into the realm of background realities which are not immediately apparent. We no longer see this language; we do not encounter it as we did before with the first computers. Now we can’t even imagine what this language is; it exists on a different layer of computer technology. Ultimately, there are people appearing on the scene who know how to use a computer, master it perfectly, but nevertheless have no idea as to what lies at its technological basis. They are like drivers who have no idea what an engine contains, yet nevertheless drive perfectly and can drive around like this for all of their lives.

In Guénon’s teaching, defining modernity is a matter of distinguishing some paradigmatic proto-mechanism that determines how our world is structured. We, ordinary people immersed in the process of becoming, tend to perceive our surroundings, what we are, and what is around us, as a given, as a kind of everything. It is to this everything that we defer our cognitive steps. Upon encountering some idea of what was in the past and what will be in the future, we compare such to our everything. At any given minute, our everything is everything for us without quotation marks. Outside of everything, there can only be analogies — analogies of the past (memories), analogies of the future (forebodings, prophecies, plans). Guénon argues that the whole totality of the operating system of modernity, our proverbial everything, is in fact nothing other than a malicious, anomalous, vicious, deeply inorganic, and inharmonious illusion of artificial origin, an artifact, a simulacrum, a machination imposed upon us, and by no means everything. Such a simulacrum of an operating system is called modernity and the modern world in Guénon’s teaching. From his point of view, modernity is an anomaly. It is only one model among others, or more precisely, an anomalous model within an infinitely larger set of other possibilities. It is merely one language among others and not a particular universal reality.

In opposition to the notion of modernity, Guénon introduces the notion of tradition. Thus arises one of the most interesting points which, from the perspective of philosophical structuralism, is central for Guénon. Guénon affirms that there are two types of languages: the language of modernity, which includes all possibilities inherent in the concept of modernity and predetermines all the languages and even meta-languages within the framework of modernity, and the language of Tradition. Here arises the first conflict, the first dividing line: on the one side is modernity, on the other side is Tradition. Other scholars have also employed the notions of modern society, traditional society, New Time, and what came before New Time, but ordinarily all of us, besides Guénon’s followers, tacitly share the norms of the modern paradigm, even if latently. We tend to see the terminology of traditional society as something belonging to the past and, therefore, inferior, while we perceive the modern as something present, or close to the present and, therefore, superior. Against our will, we operate within the operating environment of the modern, Modernity, regardless of whether we understand its functioning mechanisms (like programmers) or commune with it simply through inertia (like users).

This is typical of all people of the modern world without exception, insofar as the language of the modern world, its highest and deepest paradigmatic model, predetermines our relation to the process of time, to history, and to terminology. No matter how some people might have criticized modernity, all of them, even Marx, sooner or later stopped (although Marx, it bears noting, was a real revolutionary who questioned entire layers of reality and declared these not to be reality as such, but rather the game of capital – not authentic being, but the machinations of capital – and so his suspicions are akin to Guénon’s). But Guénon goes much further than everyone else. Guénon’s is already a completely different reality. He contrasts and puts into confrontation two languages: the language of Tradition and the language of the modern world. He is the farthest away from modernity and he is freer than everyone else from the illusions of the modern world. He is to be found at such a gigantic conceptual distance from the very primal element of the language of modernity, that many of his followers have been beset with the question: Who was Guénon, really?9 Some of his students, with both delight and horror, reason as follows: he cannot be a human being, because a human being is, by definition, a product of his environment (i.e., he is programmed with a basic operating language). Guénon’s, on the other hand, is something opposite to a product of the environment, including the cosmic environment. Such inferences have given rise to what is perhaps one of the most radical hypotheses concerning his avataric nature (scholars have begun to research the location and position of his home, where he was born, the cardinal orientation of the Church where he was baptized in infancy, and the street on which he lived; they have tried to make a kind of Guénonian temple out of his home10). This is how compelling have been Guénon’s followers’ intuitive suspicions over his nature of fundamental distance from the language of modernity as expressed in his theoretical description of this language as something separate, something external to him that did not touch the main paradigmatic levels of his being.

No matter how one looks at it, René Guénon does not fit into our time at all. He was, as Michel Valsan said, the greatest intellectual miracle since the Middle Ages.

A miracle he may be, but this does not exhaust everything one might say of him. René Guénon was not at all a modern author; moreover, he is perhaps the farthest removed from modernity. But something is still not entirely right with this picture, for rather few astounding personages like René Guénon were known to appear, even in the world of authentic and organic Tradition. Guénon was not simply a messenger of Tradition in an environment based on the rejection of Tradition. As it turns out, everything is somewhat more complicated.

Traditionalism and Tradition

Guénon himself says that Tradition alone is what is important. Above all, the language of Tradition, as a system of connections and understandings, stands in opposition to the modern world, to the language of the modern world, and has all the grounds for truth – an absolute truth. For Guénon, the language of Tradition is the last and highest echelon which, full of paradigmatic onto-gnoseological possibilities, has the right to pronounce its sentence and pass its judgement on any normal or abnormal fragment of reality, including the paradigm (or language) of modernity. In his book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guénon says that Tradition is more important than Traditionalism.11 Tradition and the fact of belonging to Tradition place man more seriously, more fullyblooded, and more deeply into the true operating system than any theoretical Traditionalism that is merely some intention or desire to belong to Tradition. A point of great interest arises here: if Traditionalism