The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

by René Guénon

  Thus the modern mentality is made up in such a way that it cannot bear any secret or even any reserve; since it does not know the reason for them, such things appear only as ‘privileges’ established for somebody’s profit; neither can it bear any kind of superiority. Anyone who undertook to explain that these so-called ‘privileges’ really have their foundation in the very nature of beings would be wasting his time, for that is just what ‘egalitarianism’ so obstinately denies. Not only does the modern mentality boast, without any justification, of the suppression of all ‘mystery’ by its science and philosophy — exclusively rational as it is, and brought ‘within the reach of all’ — but the horror of ‘mystery’ goes so far in all domains as to extend also even into what is commonly called ‘ordinary life’. Nonetheless, a world in which everything had become ‘public’ would have a character nothing short of monstrous. The notion is still hypothetical, because we have not in spite of everything quite reached that point yet, and perhaps it never will be fully attained because it represents a ‘limit’; but it is beyond dispute that a result of that kind is being aimed at on all sides, and in that connection it may be observed that many who appear to be the adversaries of democracy are really doing nothing that does not serve further to emphasize its effects, if that be possible, simply because they are just as much penetrated by the modern spirit as are those whom they seek to oppose. In order to induce people to live as much as possible ‘in public’, it is not enough that they should be assembled in the ‘mass’ on every occasion and on any and every pretext, but they must in addition be lodged, not only in ‘hives’ as was suggested earlier, but literally in ‘glass hives’, and these must be arranged in such a way that they can only take their meals ‘in common’. People who are capable of submitting themselves to such an existence have really fallen to a ‘infra-human’ level, to the level, say, of insects like bees or ants; and in addition every device is brought into play for ‘organizing’ them so that they may become no more different among themselves than are the individuals of those same species of animals, and perhaps even less so.

  As it is not the purpose of this book to enter into the details of certain ‘anticipations’, which would be only too easy to formulate and too quickly overtaken by events, this subject will now be left. It must suffice to have indicated summarily both the state at which things have now arrived and the tendency they must inevitably continue to follow, at least for a certain time yet. The hatred of secrecy is basically nothing but one of the forms of the hatred for anything that surpasses the level of the ‘average’, as well as for everything that holds aloof from the uniformity which it is sought to impose on everyone. Nevertheless, there is, within the modern world itself, a secret that is better kept than any other: it is that of the formidable enterprise of suggestion that has produced and that maintains the existing mentality, that has constituted it and as it were ‘manufactured’ it in such a way that it can only deny the existence and even the possibility of any such enterprise; and this is doubtless the best conceivable means, and a means of truly ‘diabolical’ cleverness, for ensuring that the secret shall never be discovered.

  13

  The Postulates of Rationalism

  It has just been said that the moderns claim to exclude all ‘mystery’ from the world as they see it, in the name of a science and a philosophy characterized as ‘rational’, and it might well be said in addition that the more narrowly limited a conception becomes the more it is looked upon as strictly ‘rational’; moreover it is well enough known that, since the time of encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century, the most fanatical deniers of all supra-sensible reality have been particularly fond of invoking ‘reason’ on all occasions, and of proclaiming themselves to be ‘rationalists’. Whatever difference there may be between this popular ‘rationalism’ and a real philosophic ‘rationalism’, it is at any rate only a difference of degree, both the one and the other corresponding fully to the same tendencies, which have become more and more exaggerated and at the same time more ‘popular’ throughout the course of modern times. ‘Rationalism’ has so frequently been spoken of in the author’s earlier works, and its main characteristics have been so fully defined, that it might well suffice to refer the reader to those works;[42] nevertheless, it is so closely bound up with the very conception of a quantitative science that a few more words here and now cannot well be dispensed with.

  Let it be recalled, then, that rationalism properly so called goes back to the time of Descartes, and it is worthy of note that it can thus be seen to be directly associated right from its beginnings with the idea of a ‘mechanistic’ physics; Protestantism had prepared the way for this, by introducing into religion, together with ‘free enquiry’, a sort of rationalism, although the word itself was not then in existence, but was only invented when the same tendency asserted itself more explicitly in the domain of philosophy. Rationalism in all its forms is essentially defined by a belief in the supremacy of reason, proclaimed as a veritable ‘dogma’, and implying the denial of everything that is of a supra-individual order, notably of pure intellectual intuition, and this carries with it logically the exclusion of all true metaphysical knowledge. This same denial has also as a consequence, in another field, the rejection of all spiritual authority, which is necessarily derived from a ‘supra-human’ source; rationalism and individualism are thus so closely linked together that they are usually confused, except in the case of certain recent philosophical theories which though not rationalistic are nonetheless exclusively individualistic. It may be noted at this point how well rationalism fits in with the modern tendency to simplification: the latter naturally always operates by the reduction of things to their most inferior elements, and so asserts itself chiefly by the suppression of the entire supra-individual domain, in anticipation of being able later on to bring everything that is left, that is to say everything in the individual order, down to the sensible or corporeal modality alone, and finally that modality itself to a mere aggregation of quantitative determinations. It is easy to see how rigorously these steps are linked together, so as to constitute as it were so many necessary stages in a continuous ‘degradation’ of the conceptions that man forms of himself and of the world.

  There is yet another kind of simplification inherent in Cartesian rationalism, and it is manifested in the first place by the reduction of the whole nature of the spirit to ‘thought’ and that of the body to ‘extension’; this reduction of bodies to extension is, as pointed out earlier, the very foundation of ‘mechanistic’ physics, and it can be regarded as the starting-point of a fully quantitative science.[43] But this is not all: in relation to ‘thought’ another mischievous simplification arises from the way in which Descartes actually conceives of reason, which he also calls ‘good sense’ (and if one thinks of the meaning currently assigned to that expression, it suggests something situated at a singularly mediocre level); he declares too that reason is ‘the most widely shared thing in the world,’ which at once suggests some sort of ‘egalitarian’ idea, besides being quite obviously wrong; in all this he is only confusing completely reason ‘in act’ with ‘rationality’, insofar as the latter is in itself a character specific to the human being as such.[44] Human nature is of course present in its entirety in every individual, but it is manifested there in very diverse ways, according to the inherent qualities belonging to each individual; in each the inherent qualities are united with the specific nature so as to constitute the integrality of their essence; to think otherwise would be to think that human individuals are all alike and scarcely differ among themselves otherwise than solo numero. Yet from thinking of that kind all those notions about the ‘unity of the human spirit’ are directly derived: they are continually invoked to explain all sorts of things, some of which in no way belong to the ‘psychological’ order, as for example the fact that the same traditional symbols are met with at all times and in all places. Apart from the fact that these notions do not really concern the ‘spirit’ but
simply the ‘mind’, the alleged unity must be false, for true unity cannot belong to the individual domain, which alone is within the purview of people who talk in this way, as it is also, and more generally, of those who think it legitimate to speak of the ‘human spirit’, as if the spirit could be modified by any specific character. In any case, the community of nature of the individuals within the species can only produce manifestations of a very generalized kind, and is quite inadequate to account for concordances in matters that are, on the contrary, of a very detailed precision; but how could these moderns be brought to understand that the fundamental unity of all the traditions is explained solely by the fact that there is in them something ‘supra-human’? On the other hand, to return to things that actually are purely human, Locke, the founder of modern psychology, was evidently inspired by the Cartesian conception when he thought fit to announce that, in order to know what the Greeks and Romans thought in days gone by (for his horizon did not extend beyond Western ‘classical’ antiquity) it is enough to find out what Englishmen and Frenchmen are thinking today, for ‘man is everywhere and always the same.’ Nothing could possibly be more false, yet the psychologists have never got beyond that point, for, while they imagine that they are talking of man in general, the greater part of what they say really only applies to the modern European; does it not look as if they believe that the uniformity that is being imposed gradually on all human individuals has already been realized? It is true that, by reason of the efforts that are being made to that end, differences are becoming fewer and fewer, and therefore that the psychological hypothesis is less completely false today than it was in the time of Locke (always on condition that any attempt to apply it, as he did, to past times is carefully guarded against); but nonetheless the limit can never be reached, as was explained earlier, and for as long as the world endures there will always be irreducible differences. Finally, to crown all this, how can a true knowledge of human nature possibly be gained by taking as typical of it an ‘ideal’ that in all strictness can only be described as ‘infra-human’?

  That much being established, it still remains to explain why rationalism is linked to the idea of an exclusively quantitative science, or more accurately, why the latter proceeds from the former; and in this connection it must be recognized that there is a considerable element of truth in the analysis which Bergson applies to what he wrongly calls ‘intelligence’, though it is really only reason, or more correctly a particular way of using reason based on the Cartesian conception, there being no doubt that all the forms of modern rationalism arose out of that conception. It may be remarked incidentally that the contentions of philosophers are often much more justifiable when they are arguing against other philosophers than when they pass on to expound their own views, and as each one generally sees fairly clearly the defects of the others, they more or less destroy one another mutually. Thus it is that Bergson, if one takes the trouble to rectify his mistakes in terminology, gives a good demonstration of the faults of rationalism (which, so far from being one with ‘intellectualism’, is on the contrary its negation) and of the insufficiencies of reason, but he is no less wrong in his own turn when, to fill the gap thus created, he probes the ‘infra-rational’ instead of lifting his gaze toward the ‘supra-rational’ (and this is why his philosophy is just as individualistic and ignores the supra-individual order just as completely as that of his rivals). And so, when he reproaches reason, to which it is only necessary here to restore its rightful name, for ‘artificially clipping reality,’ there is no need to adopt his special notion of ‘reality’, even purely hypothetically and provisionally, in order fully to understand his meaning: he is evidently thinking in terms of the reduction of all things to elements supposed to be homogenous or identical one with another, which amounts to nothing but a reduction to the quantitative, for elements of that kind can only be conceived from a quantitative point of view; and the idea of ‘clipping’ itself suggests fairly clearly the efforts that are made to introduce a discontinuity rightly belonging only to pure or numerical quantity, or broadly speaking to the tendency referred to earlier, namely, that of refusing to recognize as ‘scientific’ anything that cannot be ‘put into figures’.[45] In the same way, when he says that reason is not at ease except when it applies itself to something ‘solid’, wherein it finds its own true domain, he seems to be aware of the inevitable tendency of reason, when reduced to itself alone, to ‘materialize’ everything in the ordinary sense of the word, that is, to consider in all things only their grossest modalities, because quality is then at a minimum in relation to quantity; only he seems to be considering the end-point of this tendency rather than its starting-point, which renders him liable to the accusation of exaggeration, for there are evidently degrees of ‘materialization’. Nevertheless, if one looks at the existing state of scientific conceptions (or rather, as will be seen later, at a state already on the way to being past) it is quite certain that they represent as nearly as is possible the last or lowest degree of materialization, the degree in which ‘solidity’ understood in its material sense has reached its maximum, and that in itself is a particularly characteristic mark of the period at which we have arrived. There is evidently no need to suppose that Bergson himself understood these matters in as clear a light as is shed by the above ‘translation’ of his language, indeed it seems very unlikely that he did, considering the multiple confusions he is constantly perpetrating; but it is nonetheless true that these views were in fact suggested to him by his estimation of what present-day science is, and on that account the testimony of a man who is incontestably a representative of the modern spirit cannot be regarded as negligible. As for what his own theories amount to exactly, their significance will be found in another part of this study, and all that can be said about them for the moment is that they correspond to a different aspect and to some extent to a different stage of the deviation which, taken as a whole, itself constitutes the modern world.

  To summarize the foregoing, this much can be said: rationalism, being the denial of every principle superior to reason, brings with it as a ‘practical’ consequence the exclusive use of reason, but of reason blinded, so to speak, by the very fact that it has been isolated from the pure and transcendent intellect, of which, normally and legitimately, it can only reflect the light in the individual domain. As soon as it has lost all effective communication with the supra-individual intellect, reason cannot but tend more and more toward the lowest level, toward the inferior pole of existence, plunging ever more deeply into ‘materiality’; as this tendency grows, it gradually loses hold of the very idea of truth, and arrives at the point of seeking no goal other than that of making things as easy as possible for its own limited comprehension, and in this it finds an immediate satisfaction in the very fact that its own downward tendency leads it in the direction of the simplification and uniformization of all things; it submits all the more readily and speedily to this tendency because the results of this submission conform to its desires, and its ever more rapid descent cannot fail to lead at last to what has been called the ‘reign of quantity’.

  14

  Mechanism and Materialism

  The earliest product of rationalism in the so-called ‘scientific’ field was Cartesian mechanism; materialism was not due to appear until later, for as explained elsewhere, the word and the thing itself are not actually met with earlier than the eighteenth century; besides, whatever may have been the intentions of Descartes himself (and it is in fact possible, by pursuing to the end the logical consequences of his ideas, to extract from them theories that are mutually very contradictory), there is nonetheless a direct filiation between mechanism and materialism. In this connection it is useful to recall that, although the ancient atomistic conceptions such as those of Democritus and especially of Epicurus can be qualified as mechanistic, these two being the only ‘precursors’ from the ancient world whom the moderns can with any justification claim as their own in this field, their conceptions are often
wrongly looked upon as the earliest form of materialism: for materialism implies above all the modern physicist’s notion of ‘matter’, and at that time this notion was still a long way from having come to birth. The truth is that materialism merely represents one of the two halves of Cartesian dualism, the half to which its author had applied the mechanistic conception; it was sufficient thereafter to ignore or to deny the remaining half, or what comes to the same thing, to claim to bring the whole of reality into the first half, in order to arrive quite naturally at materialism.