The Crisis of the Modern World – René Guénon’s Invaluable Insights

From all that has been said so far it already seems to follow clearly that those Orientals who reproach modern Western civilization with being a purely material one are fully justified; it is certainly in this direction exclusively that its development has taken place, and from whatever point of view one may look at it, one is always faced with the more or less direct consequences of this materialization. Nevertheless, there still remains something to add to what we have said on the subject and in the first place it is necessary to explain the different ways in which a word like “materialism” can be understood: if we use it to describe the contemporary world, various people, who do not believe themselves to be materialists at all while at the same time claiming to be modern in their outlook, will not fail to protest in the belief that this is sheer calumny; some further explanation therefore is required in order to forestall any ambiguity which might arise on the subject.

It is a significant fact that the word “materialism” itself dates back only as far as the eighteenth century; it was invented by the philosopher Berkeley, who used it to denote any theory admitting the real existence of matter; it is hardly necessary to say that it is not this use of the word which concerns us here, the question of the existence of matter not being in dispute. Soon afterwards the same word took on a more restricted meaning, which it has retained ever since: it came to denote a conception according to which nothing exists at all except matter and its derivatives; and it is important to emphasize the novelty of such a conception and the fact that it is essentially a product of the modern outlook, corresponding therefore at least to a part of its inherent tendencies.1 But it is above all

* Editor’s Note: Chapter 7 of The Crisis of the Modern World, first published in the French original in 1927.

1 Prior to the eighteenth century there were “mechanistic” theories, from Greek atomism down to Cartesian physics, but mechanism should not be confused with materialism, despite certain affinities which may have subsequently brought about a kind of fellowship between them [Editor’s Note: A footnote included in the Arthur Osborne translation, but not present in the Marco Pallis translation].

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in a different and much wider, though at the same time quite definite sense that we propose to speak of “materialism” in the present chapter; the word is here taken as referring to an entire mental outlook, of which the conception we have just described amounts to no more than one manifestation among many others, being in itself independent of any philosophical theory. This mental outlook is one which consists in more or less consciously giving preponderance to things belonging to the material order and to preoccupations relating thereto, whether these preoccupations still retain a certain speculative appearance or whether they remain purely practical ones; and it cannot be seriously denied that this is, in fact, the mental attitude of the great majority of our contemporaries.

The whole of the “profane” science which has been developed during the course of recent centuries is confined to the study of the sensible world: its horizon is bounded exclusively by that world and its methods apply within that sphere only; but these methods have been proclaimed “scientific” to the exclusion of all others, an attitude which amounts to repudiating the existence of any science not dealing with material things. Among those who think thus, and even among those who have devoted their lives especially to the sciences in question, there are however many who would refuse to call themselves “materialists” or to accept the philosophical theory which bears that name; there are even some who readily profess a religious faith, the sincerity of which is beyond question; yet their scientific outlook does not differ appreciably from that of avowed materialists. From the religious point of view it has often been debated whether modern science ought to be denounced as atheistical or as materialistic, but this question, more often than not, has been wrongly framed; it is quite apparent that such a science does not deliberately profess either atheism or materialism, and that it is content to ignore certain things as a result of its preconceptions, though without formally denying them as this or that philosopher might do; in connection with modern science, therefore, one can only speak of a de facto materialism, or of what we would willingly term a practical materialism; but the evil is then perhaps all the more serious in that it penetrates deeper and is more widely diffused.

A philosophical attitude can be something quite superficial, even among “professional” philosophers; furthermore, there are certain mentalities which shrink from an actual negation, but which

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can accommodate themselves to an attitude of complete indifference; and this is the most dangerous attitude of all, since in order to deny something it is still necessary to think about it to some extent, however slightly, whereas an attitude of indifference makes it possible to avoid giving any thought to it whatsoever. When an exclusively material science sets itself up as the only possible science and when men have got into the habit of accepting as an unquestionable truth the doctrine that no valid knowledge can exist apart from it, and when all the education which is imparted to them tends to inculcate the “superstition” of that science (or “scientism” as it should then be termed), how can such men fail to be anything but materialists in practice, or in other words, how can they fail to have all their preoccupations turned in the direction of matter?

It seems that nothing exists for modern man other than what can be seen and touched; or at least, even if they admit theoretically that something else may exist they hasten to declare it not merely unknown but “unknowable,” which absolves them from having to give it further thought. If nevertheless some persons still are to be found who try to form some kind of idea of an “other world,” relying as they do on nothing but their imagination they picture it in the likeness of the terrestrial world and transfer to it all the conditions belonging to that world, including space and time and even a sort of “corporeality”; in speaking elsewhere of spiritualistic conceptions we have given some very striking examples of this kind of grossly materialized representation; but if the beliefs there referred to represent an extreme case in which this particular feature is exaggerated to the point of caricature, it would be a mistake to suppose that spiritualism and the sects more or less akin to it retain the monopoly of this kind of thing. Indeed, in a more general way, the intrusion of the imagination into realms where it can yield no useful results, and which ought normally to remain closed to it, is a fact which in itself shows very clearly how incapable modern Westerners have become of raising themselves above the realm of the senses; there are many who do not know how to distinguish between “conceiving” and “imagining,” and some philosophers, such as Kant, go so far as to declare “inconceivable” and “unthinkable” everything that is not capable of representation. In the same way everything that goes by the name of “spiritualism” or “idealism” usually amounts to no more than a sort of transposed materialism; this applies not only to what we have described as “neo-spiritualism,” but

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also to philosophical spiritualism, although the latter considers itself to be the very opposite of materialism. The fact is that spiritualism and materialism, in the philosophical sense of these expressions, have no significance apart from one another: they are simply two halves of the Cartesian dualism, whose radical separation has been turned into a kind of antagonism; and, since then, the whole of philosophy has oscillated between these two terms without being able to pass beyond them. Spiritualism, in spite of its name, has nothing to do with spirituality; its conflict with materialism can be of no interest to those who place themselves at a higher standpoint and who see that these opposites are fundamentally very near to being equivalent, their supposed opposition reducing itself, on many points, to a merely verbal disagreement.

The moderns, generally speaking, cannot conceive of any other science except that which deals with things that can be measured, counted, or weighed, material things that is to say, since it is to these alone that the quantitative point of view is applicable; and the claim to reduce quality to quantity is most characteristic of modern science. In this direction the stage has been reached even of supposing that there can be no science at all, in the real sense of the word, except where it is possible to introduce measurement, and that there can be no scientific laws except those which express quantitative relations; Descartes’ “mechanism” marked the birth of this tendency, which has grown more and more pronounced ever since, the rejection of Cartesian physics notwithstanding, for it is not a tendency connected with any particular theory but with an altogether general conception of scientific knowledge. Nowadays people try to apply measurement even in the field of psychology, which lies beyond its reach from its very nature; they end by ceasing to understand that the possibility of measurement rests solely upon a property inherent in matter, namely its indefinite divisibility, unless indeed it be supposed that the same property is to be found in everything that exists, which amounts to materializing everything. As we have already remarked, it is matter which is the principle of division and pure multiplicity; the predominance attributed to the quantitative point of view, and extended, as we have already shown, to the social domain, does therefore indeed constitute materialism in the sense mentioned above, although it need not necessarily be connected with philosophical materialism, which, as a matter of fact, it preceded historically in the course of development of the

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tendencies inherent in the modern outlook. We will not dwell upon the error of seeking to reduce quality to quantity or upon the inadequacy of all those attempts at explanation conforming more or less to the mechanistic type; that is not our present purpose and we will only remark, in this connection, that even within the sensible order a science of this type has but little connection with reality, of which the greater part must necessarily lie outside its scope.

While speaking of “reality” another fact should be mentioned, which might easily be overlooked by many, but which is very significant as a sign of the mentality we are describing: we refer to the habit of using the word “reality” exclusively to denote reality belonging to the sensible order. As language is the expression of the mentality of a people or of a period, one must conclude from this that for those who speak in this manner everything that cannot be grasped by the senses is illusory and even totally non-existent; it is possible that they are not fully conscious of the fact, but this negative conviction is none the less the underlying one, and if they assert the contrary one may be sure that this assertion is only the expression of some much more superficial element in their mentality, although they happen not to be conscious of the fact, and that their protest may even be a purely verbal one.

If this should seem to be an exaggeration one has only to try and ascertain, for example, what the supposed religious convictions of a great many people amount to; a few notions learnt by heart in a purely academic and mechanical way without any real assimilation, notions to which they have never given any serious consideration, but which they retain in their memory and repeat on occasion because they form part of a certain formal and conventional attitude, which is all they are able to understand by the word religion. We have already referred to this “minimizing” of religion, of which the “verbalism” we mentioned represents one of the latest phases: it is this which explains why many so-called “believers” in no wise fall short of the “unbelievers” in the matter of practical materialism; we shall return to this question later, but first we must conclude our investigation of the materialistic nature of modern science, since this is a subject that requires to be treated from various angles.