It should be possible to restore to the word “philosophy” its original meaning: philosophy – the “love of wisdom” – is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which “perceives,” and not with reason alone, which “concludes.” Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: philosophy is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea^?; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt. [GTUFS: TransfMan, Thought: Light^? and Perversion]

Taking into account the fact that according to a – rightly or wrongly – universally recognized terminology, the word “philosophy” designates all that extrinsically pertains to thought, we would say that there is a philosophy according to the “spirit,” which is founded on pure intellection – possibly actualized by a particular^? sacred Text – and a philosophy according to the “flesh,” which is founded on individual reasoning in the absence of sufficient data and of any supernatural intuition; the first being the philosophia perennis^?, and the second, the ancient Protagorism as well as the rationalist thought of the moderns. [GTUFS: TransfMan, Concerning the Principle of Sacrifice]

According to Pythagoras  , wisdom is a priori^? the knowledge of the stellar world and of all that is situated above us; sophia^? being the wisdom of the gods, and philosophia that of men. For Heraclitus  , the philosopher is one who applies himself to the knowledge of the profound nature of things; whereas for Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for Aristotle  , it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them. In addition, philosophy implies for all of the Ancients moral^? conformity to wisdom: only he is wise, sophos^?, who lives wisely. In this particular and precise sense, the wisdom of Solomon is philosophy; it is to live according to the nature of things, on the basis of piety – of the “fear of God’ – with a view to that which is essential and liberating. All this shows that, to say the least, the word “philosopher” in itself has nothing restrictive about it, and that one cannot legitimately impute to this word any of the vexing associations of ideas that it may elicit; usage applies this word to all thinkers, including eminent metaphysicians – some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets – so that one would like to reserve it for sages and simply use the term “rationalists” for profane thinkers. It is nevertheless legitimate to take account of a misuse of language that has become conventional, for unquestionably the terms “philosophy” and “philosopher” have been seriously compromised by ancient and modern reasoners; in fact, the serious inconvenience of these terms is that they conventionally imply that the norm for the mind is reasoning pure and simple,* in the absence, not only of intellection, but also of indispensable objective data. Admittedly one is neither ignorant nor rationalistic just because one is a logician, but one is both if one is a logician and nothing more^ . . . . . . In short, the term “philosopher” in current speech signifies nothing other than the fact of expounding a doctrine while respecting the laws of logic, which are those of language and those of common sense, without which we would not be human; to practice philosophy is first and foremost to think, whatever may be the reasons which rightly or wrongly incite us to do so. But it is also, more especially and according to the best of the Greeks to express by means of the reason certainties “seen” or “lived” by the immanent Intellect^?, as we have remarked above; now the explanation necessarily takes on the character imposed on it by the laws of thought and language. (* Naturally the most “advanced” of the modernists seek to demolish the very principles of reasoning, but this is simply fantasy pro domo, for man is condemned to reason as soon as he uses language, unless he wishes to demonstrate nothing at all. In any case, one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of demonstrating anything, if words are still to have any meaning. ^ A German author (H. Turck) has proposed the term “misosopher” – “enemy of wisdom” – for those thinkers who undermine the very foundations of truth and intelligence. We will add that misosophy – without mentioning some ancient precedents – begins grosso modo^? with “criticism” and ends with subjectivisms, relativisms, existentialisms, dynamisms, psychologisms and biologisms of every kind. As for the ancient expression “misology,” it designates above all the hatred of the fideist for the use of reason.) [GTUFS: SufismVQ, Tracing the Notion of Philosophy]

Philosophy (avant-garde): 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. Philosophical skepticism takes itself for an absence of prejudices and a healthy attitude, whereas it is something quite artificial: it is a result not of knowledge but of ignorance, and that is why it is as contrary to intelligence as it is to reality. [GTUFS: LSelf, Orthodoxy and Intellectuality]

Philosophy (profane): Profane philosophy is ignorant not only of the value of truth and universality in Revelation, but also of the transcendence of the pure Intellect; it entails therefore no guarantee of truth on any level, for the quite human faculty which reason is, insofar as it is cut off from the Absolute, is readily mistaken even on the level of the relative. The efficacy of reasoning is essentially conditional. [GTUFS: StationsW, The Nature and Arguments of Faith]

Philosophy / Reason: In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presupposition, which precisely is impossible; on the other hand, gnosis^?, or philosophy in the proper and primitive sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone. What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposed reasons; that the rationalist if need be draws his inspiration from a pre-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be “free” – falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth – likewise, mutatis mutandis: that the gnostic – in the orthodox sense of the term – bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth, or proper to the Essence which by definition escapes formal constraints. Or again: whether the gnostic “thinks” what he has “seen” with the “eye of the heart,” or whether on the contrary he obtains his “vision” thanks to the intervention – preliminary and provisional and in no wise efficient – of a thought which then takes on the role of occasional cause, is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth, or with regard to its almost supernatural springing forth in the spirit. [GTUFS: SufismVQ, Tracing the Notion of Philosophy]

Philosophy (modern) / Wisdom (genuine): No sooner does one thinker believe he has found the cause of phenomena than another philosopher comes forward to accuse him of failing to find the cause of the cause, and so on ad infinitum. This shows that when philosophy has become “art for art’s sake” it is no more than a search for the cause of the cause of the cause, carried on in a state of utter mental^? deception and without the least possibility of arriving at a conclusion; in the case of genuine wisdom, on the other hand, one knows before hand that the complete truth can and must spring forth from any adequate formulation like a spark from a flint, but that it will always remain incommunicable as far as its intrinsic infinitude is concerned. To search, as do modern thinkers and as did certain ancient writers, for completely adequate formulations capable of satisfying all causal needs, the most artificial and the least intelligent included, is assuredly the most contradictory and the most fruitless of occupations; the “quest” of philosophers, therefore, has nothing in common with that of contemplatives, since its basic principle of exhaustive verbal adequacy is opposed to any liberating finality, to any transcending of the sphere of words. It is not to be wondered at that after centuries of unsatisfied ratiocination – unsatisfied because in principle not capable of satisfaction – people should have become weary of what is looked upon, rightly or wrongly, as “abstract,” and that they should turn, alas, not to the “concrete” reality that lies within and which the sages of old and the saints always knew, but, on the contrary, to an outward counterfeit, at one and the same time hardening and dispersive in its effects, and totally illusory. The innovators, nihilists and “constructivists” alike, claim that they wish “to start again from zero” in every field, as if it were possible for man to create himself over again, to create the intelligence with which he thinks and the will with which he desires and acts; in short, as if man’s existence came from nowhere else than from our own opinions and desires. [GTUFS: LogicT, Abuse of the Ideas of the Concrete and the Abstract]