Transformist evolutionism offers a patent example of "horizontality" in the domain of the natural sciences, owing to the fact that it puts a biological evolution of "ascending" degrees in place of a cosmogonic emanation of "descending" degrees. [NA: We understand the term "emanation" in the Platonic sense: the starting point remains transcendent, hence unaffected, whereas in deist or naturalist emanationism the cause pertains to the same ontological order as the effect.] Similarly, modern philosophers - mutatis mutandis - replace metaphysical causality with "physical" and empirical causalities, which no doubt demands intelligence, but one that is purely cerebral. [Roots of the Human Condition, p. 5]. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

If the Westerner - "free thinker" or not - has a tendency to "think for himself," wrongly or rightly according to the case, this is due to distant causes; the Western mind expressed itself through Plato and Aristotle   before having undergone the influence of Christian fideism, and even then, and from the very outset, it could not help having recourse to the Greek philosophers. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

In a certain respect, the difference between philosophy, theology and gnosis is total; in another respect, it is relative. It is total when one understands by "philosophy," only rationalism; by "theology," only the explanation of religious teachings; and by "gnosis," only intuitive and intellective, and thus supra-rational, knowledge; but the difference is only relative when one understands by "philosophy" the fact of thinking, by "theology" the fact of speaking dogmatically of God and religious things, and by "gnosis" the fact of presenting pure metaphysics, for then the genres interpenetrate. It is impossible to deny that the most illustrious Sufis, while being " gnostics" by definition, were at the same time to some extent theologians and to some extent philosophers, or that the great theologians were both to some extent philosophers and to some extent gnostics, the last word having to be understood in its proper and not sectarian meaning. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis

To sum up our exposition and at the risk of repeating ourselves, we say that all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error. If "everything is true that is subjective," then Lapland is in France, provided we imagine it so; and if everything is relative - in a sense which excludes all reflection of absoluteness in the world - then the definition of relativity is equally relative, absolutely relative, and our definition has no meaning. Relativists of all kinds - the "existentialist" and "vitalist" defenders of the infra-rational - have then no excuse for their bad habits of thought. Those who would dig a grave for the intelligence22 do not escape this fatal contradiction: they reject intellectual dis crimination as being "rationalism" and in favor of "existence" or of "life," without realizing that this rejection is not "existence" or "life" but a "rationalist" operation in its turn, hence something considered to be opposed to the idol "life" or "existence"; for if rationalism - or let us say intelligence - is opposed, as these philosophers believe, to fair and innocent "existence" - that of vipers and bombs among other things - then there is no means of either defending or accusing this existence, nor even of defining it in any way at all, since all thinking is supposed to "go outside" existence in order to place itself on the side of rationalism, as if one could cease to exist in order to think. In reality, man - insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth - is intelligence; and intelligence - in its principle and its plenitude - is knowledge of the Absolute; the Absolute is the fundamental content of the intelligence and determines its nature and functions. What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept - whether explicit or implicit - of the Absolute; it is from this that the whole hierarchy of values is derived, and hence all notion of a homogeneous world. God is the "motionless mover" of every operation of the mind, even when man - reason - makes himself out to be the measure of God. To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the Absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence; nothing is fully human that is not determined by the Divine, and therefore centered on it. Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses. In our day, it is the machine which tends to become the measure of man, and thereby it becomes something like the measure of God, though of course in a diabolically illusory manner; for the most "advanced" minds it is in fact the machine, technics, experimental science, which will henceforth dictate to man his nature, and it is these which create the truth - as is shamelessly admitted - or rather what usurps its place in man’s consciousness. It is difficult for man to fall lower, to realize a greater mental perversion, a more complete abandonment of himself, a more perfect betrayal of his intelligent and free personality: in the name of "science" and of "human genius" man consents to become the creation of what he has created and to forget what he is, to the point of expecting the answer to this from machines and from the blind forces of nature; he has waited until he is no longer anything and now claims to be his own creator. Swept away by a torrent, he glories in his incapacity to resist it. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the "dynamic" and relativist or "existentialist" thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or "dynamic", and therefore "in movement", is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. The modems have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers - and all the sages of the East as well - with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the "dogmatism" they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a "type of rationality" adapted to the comprehension of "human realism"; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well. How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already - for it alone could conceive of any such idea - and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? sophiaperennis: Kierkegaard  , Nietzsche  , Klages and others like them.

There is no difficulty in the fact that pure intelligence - the intellect - immensely surpasses thought, and that there is no continuity - despite the identity of essence - between a concept as such and reality, the aseity of the real; to lament over the shortcomings of thought is to ask it to be something that it is not; this is the classical error of philosophers who seek to enclose everything in the cogito alone. From the point of view of concrete - not abstract - knowledge of the transcendent, the problem of thought is resolved in the very nature of the intellect. There are objects which exceed the possibilities of reason; there are none which exceed those of intelligence as such. If there were not something absolute in man - he is "made in the image of God" - he would be only an animal like other animals; but man knows the animals, while they do not know man. Man alone can step out of the cosmos, and this possibility proves - and presupposes - that in a certain way he incarnates the Absolute. [NA: Without this quality of absoluteness there could be no question either of his salvation or of his damnation.] sophiaperennis: What is the intellect and Intellection?

This is what Kant   with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau   and Kant, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a "doctrine" and definitively installed in European "thought," giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative "culture." Mental hypertrophy in the "cultured" man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism   posing as "positive" or "human." Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries. sophiaperennis: Use and limit of Logic

The modems have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers - and all the sages of the East as well - with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. sophiaperennis: Modern philosophers

The reduction of the notion of intellectuality to that of simple rationality often has its cause in the prejudice of a school: St. Thomas is a sensationalist - that is to say he reduces the cause of all non-theological knowledge to sensible perceptions - in order to be able to underestimate the human mind to the advantage of Scripture; in other words, because this allows him to attribute to Revelation alone the glory of "supernatural" knowledge. And Ghazali inveighs against the "philosophers" because he wishes to reserve for the Sufis the monopoly of spiritual knowledge, as if faith and piety, combined with intellectual gifts and grace - all the Arab philosophers were believers - did not provide a sufficient basis for pure intellection. sophiaperennis: Reason and Intellection

For Heidegger  , for instance, the question of Being "proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle" and: "what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial" (Sein und Zeit). Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have "discovered" their ontology by dint of "thinking"; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite "indicative" and "provisional" role of "thinking" in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a "thinker," misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: "It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology. As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently" (ibid.). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued? sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

The moderns have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers - and all the sages of the East as well - with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the "dogmatism" they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a "type of rationality" adapted to the comprehension of "human realism"; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well. How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already - for it alone could conceive of any such idea - and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? But the present purpose is not to prolong this subject; it is simply to call attention to the parallelism between the pre-Socratic - or more precisely the Ionian - wisdom and oriental doctrines such as the Vaisheshika and the Sankhya, and to underline, on the one hand, that in all these ancient visions of the Universe the implicit postulate is the innateness of the nature of things in the intellect [NA: In the terminology of the ancient cosmologists one must allow for its symbolism: when Thales saw in "water" the origin of all things, it is as certain as can be that Universal Substance - the Prakriti of the Hindus - is in question and not the sensible element. It is the same with the " air" of Anaximenes of Miletus, or with the " fire" of Heraclitus  .] and not a supposition or other logical operation, and on the other hand, that this notion of innateness furnishes the very definition of that which the sceptics and empiricists think they must disdainfully characterize as "dogmatism"; in this way they demonstrate that they are ignorant, not only of the nature of intellection, but also of the nature of dogmas in the proper sense of the word. The admirable thing about the Platonists is not, to be sure, their "thought", it is the content of their thought, whether it be called "dogmatic" or otherwise. The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with Aristotle, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists - not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus   and Epicurus   - Aristotle on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

For it is evident that if certain philosophers deny God - those precisely who detach reason from its roots - it is not because reason obliges them to do so, otherwise atheism would be natural to man, and otherwise a Plato or an Aristotle, who are nonetheless accused of rationalism, would not have taken the trouble to speak of God; the very structure of reason would have dispensed them from it. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

The Augustinian and Platonic doctrine of knowledge is still in perfect accord with gnosis, while Thomist and Aristotelian sensationalism, without being false on its own level and within its own limits, accords with the exigencies of the way of love, in the specifi c sense of the term bhakti. But this reservation is far from applying to the whole of Thomism, which identifies itself, in many respects, with truth unqualified - It is necessary to reject the opinion of those who believe that Thomism, or any other ancient wisdom, has an effective value only when we ’recreate it in ourselves’ - we, ’men of today!’ - and that if St. Thomas had read Descartes  , Kant and the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he would have expressed himsel f differently; in reality, he would then only have had to refute a thousand errors the more. If an ancient saying is right, there is nothing to do but accept it; if itis false, there is no reason to take notice of it; but to want to ’rethink’ it through a veil of new errors or impressions quite clearly has no interest, and any such attempt merely shows the degree to which the sense of intrinsic and timeless truth has been lost. sophiaperennis: Platonism   and Christianity

Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as "prejudice"; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious. [NA: This is what Kant with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a "doctrine" and definitively installed in European "thought," giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative "culture." Mental hypertrophy in the "cultured" man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as "positive" or "human." Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries.] sophiaperennis: Kantianism

As we have already remarked, the fact that a madman does not know that he is mad is obviously no proof to the contrary, just as, inversely, the fact that a man of sound mind cannot prove to a madman that his mind is sound in no way proves it to be unsound. These are almost truisms, but their sense is too often missed by philosophers as well as by men of lesser pretensions. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have "discovered" their ontology by dint of "thinking"; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite "indicative" and "provisional" role of "thinking" in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a "thinker," misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: "It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarification of the fundamental question of ontology. sophiaperennis: Heidegger

As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently" (ibid.). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued? sophiaperennis: Heidegger

This is what Kant with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a "doctrine" and definitively installed in European "thought," giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative "culture." Mental hypertrophy in the "cultured" man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as "positive" or "human." Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries. sophiaperennis: Logic

Science claims to be characterized by its refusal of all purely speculative premisses (the voraussetzungsloses Denken of the German philosophers) and at the same time by a complete liberty of investigation; but this is an illusion since modern science, like every other science before it moreover, cannot avoid starting out in its turn from an idea: this initial idea is the dogma concerning the exclusively rational nature of the intelligence and its more or less universal diffusion. In other words, it is assumed that there exists a unique and polyvalent intelligence (which in principle is true) and that this intelligence is possessed by everybody and furthermore that this is what allows investigation to be entirely "free" (which is radically false). sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies