The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

by René Guénon

  The notion that helps most toward an understanding of this point is that which the Hindu doctrine calls svadharma. In itself this notion is entirely qualitative, since it implies the accomplishment by every being of an activity conformable to its own particular essence or nature, and thereby eminently conformable to ‘order’ (rita) in the sense already explained; and it is this same notion, or rather its absence, that indicates so clearly where the profane and modern conception fails. Indeed, according to the modern conception a man can adopt any profession, and even change it to suit his whim, as if the profession were something wholly outside himself, having no real connection with what he really is, that by virtue of which he is himself and not anyone else. According to the traditional conception, on the other hand, each person must normally fulfil the function for which he is destined by his own nature, using the particular aptitudes essentially implicit in that nature as such;[29] he cannot fulfill a different function except at the cost of a serious disorder, which will have its repercussions on the whole social organization of which he is a part; and much more than this, if that kind of disorder becomes general, it will begin to have an effect on the cosmic environment itself, since all things are linked together by rigorous correspondences. Without developing this last point any further, although an application to modern conditions might well be made, what has been said so far can be summarized thus: according to the traditional conception, it is the essential qualities of beings that determine their activity; according to the profane conception on the other hand, these qualities are no longer taken into account, and individuals are regarded as no more than interchangeable and purely numerical ‘units’. The latter conception can only logically lead to the exercise of a wholly ‘mechanical’ activity, in which there remains nothing truly human, and that is exactly what we can see happening today. It need hardly be said that the ‘mechanical’ activities of the moderns, which constitute industry properly so called and are only a product of the profane deviation, can afford no possibility of an initiatic kind, and further, that they cannot be anything but obstacles to the development of all spirituality; indeed they cannot properly be regarded as authentic crafts, if that word is to retain the force of its traditional meaning.

  If the craft is as it were a part of the man himself and a manifestation or expansion of his own nature, it is easy to see how it can serve as a basis for an initiation, and why it is the best possible basis in a majority of cases. Initiation has in fact as its objective the surpassing of the possibilities of the human individual as such, but it is no less true that it can only take that individual such as he is as starting-point, and then only by taking hold as it were of his superior side, that is, by attaching itself to whatever in him is most truly qualitative; hence the diversity of initiatic paths, in other words, of the means made use of as ‘supports’ in order to conform to the differences of individual natures; these differences become, however, of less importance as time goes on, in proportion as the being advances on its path and thus approaches the end which is the same for all. The means employed cannot be effective unless they really fit the very nature of the being to whom they are applied; and since it is necessary to work from what is more accessible toward what is less so, from the exterior toward the interior, it is normal to choose them from within the activity by which its nature is manifested outwardly. But it is obvious that this activity cannot be used in any such way except insofar as it effectively expresses the interior nature; thus the question really becomes one of ‘qualification’ in the initiatic sense of the word; and in normal conditions, the very same ‘qualification’ ought to be a requirement for the practice of the craft itself. All this is also connected with the fundamental difference that separates initiatic teaching, and more generally all traditional teaching, from profane teaching. That which is simply ‘learned’ from the outside is quite valueless in the former case, however great may be the quantity of the notions accumulated (for here too profane ‘learning’ shows clearly the mark of quantity); what counts is, on the contrary, an ‘awakening’ of the latent possibilities that the being carries in itself (which is, in the final analysis, the real significance of the Platonic ‘reminiscence’).[30]

  These last considerations make it understandable that initiation, using the craft as ‘support’, has at the same time, and as it were in a complementary sense, a repercussion on the practice of the craft. The craftsman, having fully realized the possibilities of which his professional activity is but the outward expression, and thus possessing the effective knowledge of that which is the very principle of his activity, will thenceforth consciously accomplish what was previously only a quite ‘instinctive’ consequence of his nature; and thus, since for him initiatic knowledge is born of the craft, the craft in its turn will become the field of application of the knowledge, from which it will no longer be possible to separate it. There will then be a perfect correspondence between the interior and the exterior, and the work produced can then become the expression, no longer only to a certain degree and in a more or less superficial way, but the really adequate expression, of him who conceived and executed it, and it will then constitute a ‘masterpiece’ in the true sense of the word.

  There is thus no difficulty in seeing how far removed true craft is from modern industry, so much so that the two are as it were opposites, and how far it is unhappily true that in the ‘reign of quantity’ the craft is, as the partisans of ‘progress’ so readily declare, a ‘thing of the past’. The workman in industry cannot put into his work anything of himself, and a lot of trouble would even be taken to prevent him if he had the least inclination to try to do so; but he cannot even try, because all his activity consists solely in making a machine go, and because in addition he is rendered quite incapable of initiative by the professional ‘formation’ — or rather deformation — he has received, which is practically the antithesis of the ancient apprenticeship, and has for its sole object to teach him to execute certain movements ‘mechanically’ and always in the same way, without having at all to understand the reason for them or to trouble himself about the result, for it is not he, but the machine, that will really fabricate the object. Servant of the machine, the man must become a machine himself, and thenceforth his work has nothing really human in it, for it no longer implies the putting to work of any of the qualities that really constitute human nature.[31] The end of all this is what is called in present-day jargon ‘mass-production’, the purpose of which is only to produce the greatest possible quantity of objects, and of objects as exactly alike as possible, intended for the use of men who are supposed to be no less alike; that is indeed the triumph of quantity, as was pointed out earlier, and it is by the same token the triumph of uniformity. These men who are reduced to mere numerical ‘units’ are expected to live in what can scarcely be called houses, for that would be to misuse the word, but in ‘hives’ of which the compartments will all be planned on the same model, and furnished with objects made by ‘mass-production’, in such a way as to cause to disappear from the environment in which the people live every qualitative difference; it is enough to examine the projects of some contemporary architects (who themselves describe these dwellings as ‘living-machines’) in order to see that nothing has been exaggerated. What then has happened to the traditional art and science of the ancient builders, or to the ritual rules by which the establishment of cities and of buildings was regulated in normal civilizations? It would be useless to press the matter further, for one would have to be blind to fail to see the abyss that separates the normal from the modern civilization, and no doubt everyone will agree in recognizing how great the difference is; but that which the vast majority of men now living celebrate as ‘progress’ is exactly what is now presented to the reader as a profound decadence, continuously accelerating, which is dragging humanity toward the pit where pure quantity reigns.

  9

  The Twofold Significance of Anonymity

  In connection with the traditional conception
of the crafts, which is but one with that of the arts, there is another important question to which attention must be drawn: the works of traditional art, those of medieval art, for instance, are generally anonymous, and it is only very recently that attempts have been made, as a result of modern ‘individualism’, to attach the few names preserved in history to known masterpieces, even though such ‘attributions’ are often very hypothetical. This anonymity is just the opposite of the constant preoccupation of modern artists to affirm and to make known above all their own individualities; on the other hand, a superficial observer might think that it is comparable to the anonymity of the products of present-day industry, although the latter have no claim whatever to be called ‘works of art’; but the truth is quite otherwise, for although there is indeed anonymity in both cases, it is for exactly contrary reasons. It is the same with anonymity as with many other things which by virtue of the inversion of analogy, can be taken either in a superior or in an inferior sense: thus, for example, in a traditional social organization, an individual can be outside the castes in two ways, either because he is above them (ativarna) or because he is beneath them (avarna), and it is evident that these cases represent two opposite extremes. In a similar way, those among the moderns who consider themselves to be outside all religion are at the extreme opposite point from those who, having penetrated to the principial unity of all the traditions, are no longer tied to any particular traditional form.[32] In relation to the conditions of the normal humanity, or to what may be called its ‘mean’, one category is below the castes and the other beyond: it could be said that one has fallen to the ‘infra-human’ and the other has risen to the ‘supra-human’. Now, anonymity itself can be characteristic both of the ‘infra-human’ and of the ‘supra-human’: the first case is that of modern anonymity, the anonymity of the crowd or the ‘masses’ as they are called today (and this use of the highly quantitative word ‘mass’ is very significant), and the second case is that of traditional anonymity in its manifold applications, including its application to works of art.

  In order to understand this properly, recourse must be had to the doctrinal principles that are common to all the traditions. The being that has attained a supra-individual state is, by that fact alone, released from all the limiting conditions of individuality, that is to say it is beyond the determinations of ‘name and form’ (nāma-rūpa) that constitute the essence and the substance of its individuality as such; thus it is truly ‘anonymous’, because in it the ‘ego’ has effaced itself and disappeared completely before the ‘Self’.[33] Those who have not effectively attained to such a state must at least, as far as their capabilities permit, use every endeavour to reach it; and they must consequently and no less consistently ensure that their activity imitates the corresponding anonymity, so that it might be said to participate therein to a certain extent, and it will then furnish a ‘support’ for a spiritual realization to come. This is specially noticeable in monastic institutions, whether Christian or Buddhist, where what may be called the ‘practice’ of anonymity is always kept up, even if its deeper meaning is too often forgotten; but it would be wrong to suppose that the reflection of that kind of anonymity in the social order is confined to this particular case, for that would be to give way to the illusion of the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, a distinction which, let it be said once more, does not exist and has not even any meaning in strictly traditional societies. What has been said about the ‘ritual’ character of the whole of human activity in such societies explains this sufficiently, and, particularly as far as the crafts are concerned, it has been shown that their character was such that it was thought right to speak of ‘priesthood’ in connection with them; there is therefore nothing remarkable in the fact that in them anonymity was the rule, because it represents true conformity to the ‘order’ which the artifex must apply himself to realize as perfectly as possible in everything he does.

  Here an objection might be raised: the craft must conform to the intrinsic nature of him who practices it, and we have seen that the product will then necessarily express his nature, and that when that expression is really adequate the product can be regarded as perfect of its kind, or as being a ‘masterpiece’; now this nature is the essential aspect of the individuality, the aspect defined by the ‘name’; is there not something here that seems to point toward the very reverse of anonymity? In order to answer this, it must first be pointed out that, despite all the false Western interpretations of notions such as those of Moksha and Nirvana, the extinction of the ‘ego’ is in no sense an annihilation of the being, on the contrary, it implies something like a ‘sublimation’ of its possibilities (without which, it may be remarked in passing, the very idea of ‘resurrection’ would have no meaning); doubtless the artifex, who is still in the individual human state, can do no more than tend toward such a ‘sublimation’, but the very fact that he keeps his anonymity will be for him the sign of this ‘transforming’ tendency. It can also be said that, in relation to society itself, it is not inasmuch as he is ‘such and such a person’ that the artifex produces his work, but inasmuch as he fulfils a certain ‘function’ that is properly ‘organic’ and not ‘mechanical’ (marking thus the fundamental difference between such work and modern industry), and he must identify himself as far as possible with this function in his work; and this identification, while it is the means of his own ‘spiritual discipline’, gives to some extent the measure of the effectiveness of his participation in the traditional organization, into which he is incorporated by the practice of his particular craft itself and in which he occupies the place truly suited to his nature. Thus, however one looks at the matter, anonymity appears to be in one way or another the normal thing; and even when everything that it implies in principle cannot be effectively realized, there must at least be a relative anonymity, in the sense that, particularly where there has been an initiation based on the craft, the profane or ‘exterior’ individuality known as ‘such an one, son of such an one’ will disappear in everything connected with the practice of the craft.[34]

  If now we move to the other extreme, that represented by modern industry, we see that here too the worker is anonymous, but it is because his product expresses nothing of himself and is not really his work, the part he plays in its production being purely ‘mechanical’. Indeed the worker as such really has no ‘name’, because in his work he is but a mere numerical ‘unit’ with no qualities of his own, and he could be replaced by any other equivalent ‘unit’, that is, by any other worker, without any change in what is produced by their work.[35] Thus, as was said earlier, his activity no longer comprises anything truly human, and so far from interpreting or at least reflecting something ‘supra-human’ it is itself brought down to the ‘infra-human’, and it even tends toward the lowest degree of that condition, that is to say, toward a modality as completely quantitative as any that can be realized in the manifested world. This ‘mechanical’ activity of the worker represents only a particular case (actually the most typical that can be found under present conditions, because industry is the domain in which modern conceptions have succeeded in expressing themselves most completely) of the way of life that the peculiar ‘idealism’ of our contemporaries seeks to impose on all human individuals in all the circumstances of their existence. This is an immediate consequence of the so-called ‘egalitarian’ tendency, in other words, of the tendency to uniformity, which demands that individuals shall be treated as mere numerical ‘units’, thus realizing equality by a leveling down, for that is the only direction in which equality can be reached ‘in the limit’, that is to say, in which it is possible, if not to reach it altogether (for as we have seen to do so is incompatible with the very conditions of manifested existence) at least to continue indefinitely to approach it, until the ‘stopping point’ that will mark the end of the present world is attained.

  Anyone who wonders what happens to the individual in such conditions will find that, because of the ever g
rowing predominance of quantity over quality in the individual, he is so to speak reduced to his substantial aspect, called in the Hindu doctrine rūpa (and in fact he can never lose form without thereby losing all existence, for form is what defines individuality as such), and this amounts to saying that he becomes scarcely more than what would be described in current language as ‘a body without a soul’, and that in the most literal sense of the words. From such an individual the qualitative or essential aspect has indeed almost disappeared (‘almost’, because the limit can never actually be reached); and as that aspect is precisely the aspect called nāma, the individual really no longer has any ‘name’ that belongs to him, because he is emptied of the qualities which that name should express; he is thus really ‘anonymous’, but in the inferior sense of the word. This is the anonymity of the ‘masses’ of which the individual is part and in which he loses himself, those ‘masses’ that are no more than a collection of similar individuals, regarded purely and simply as so many arithmetical ‘units’. ‘Units’ of that sort can be counted, and the collectivity they make up can thus be numerically evaluated, the result being by definition only a quantity; but in no way can each one of them be given a denomination indicating that he is distinguished from the others by some qualitative difference.