René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

To assume that facts are identical when they are really only of the same kind, or comparable only in certain respects, while it contributes toward the illusion of an ‘exact’ science, as has already been explained, satisfies at the same time the desire for an excessive simplification, which is also strikingly characteristic of the modern mentality, so much so that this mentality could, without admitting any ironical intention, be qualified as ‘simplistic’ as much in its ‘scientific’ conceptions as in all its other manifestations. These ideas all hang together: the desire for simplification necessarily accompanies the tendency to reduce everything to the quantitative, and it reinforces that tendency, for obviously nothing can be simpler than quantity; if a being or a thing could successfully be shorn of all its distinctive qualities, the ‘residue’ thus obtained would indeed be endowed with a maximum of simplicity: at the limit this extreme simplicity would be such as can only belong to pure quantity, being then the simplicity of the exactly similar ‘units’ that constitute numerical multiplicity—a point important enough to warrant more detailed consideration.

We have seen that a desire for simplification can become illegitimate or pernicious and that it has become a distinctive feature of the modern mentality; this desire is so strong that certain philosophers have given way to it in the scientific domain, and have gone to the length of presenting it as a sort of logical ‘pseudo-principle’, in the form of a statement that ‘nature always takes the simplest course’. This is a perfectly gratuitous postulate, for there does not seem to be any reason why nature should work in that way and not in any other; many conditions other than simplicity can enter into its workings, and can outweigh simplicity to such an extent that nature seems, at least from our point of view, often to take a course that is extremely complicated. Indeed, this particular ‘pseudo-principle’ amounts to no more than a wish arising from a sort of ‘mental laziness’: it is desired that things should be as simple as possible, because if they really were so they would be so much the easier to understand; and all this is quite in accordance with the very modern and profane conception of a science that must be ‘within the reach of all’, but that is obviously only possible if it is so simple as to be positively ‘infantile’, and if all considerations of a superior or really profound order are rigorously excluded from it.

Even shortly before the beginning of modern times properly so called there can be found something like an early indication of this state of mind in the scholastic adage: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem . [38] This adage, like another according to which nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (and this is the first formulation of what was later to be called ‘sensualism’) is among those that can be assigned to no particular author, and it is likely that they belong only to the period of decadence of scholasticism, that is, to a time that is in fact, despite current ‘chronology’, not so much the end of the Middle Ages as the beginning of modern times — provided that it is right, as has been suggested elsewhere, to date that beginning as far back as the fourteenth century. All is well if the application of this adage is limited to purely hypothetical speculations, but then it becomes of no interest whatever, except within the domain of pure mathematics, for there at least it is legitimate for anyone to confine himself to working on mental constructions without having to relate them to anything else; he can ‘simplify’ then as much as he likes, just because he is concerned only with quantity, for insofar as quantity is considered in itself and by itself, its combinations are not comprised in the effective order of manifestation. On the other hand, as soon as matters of fact need to be taken into account, it is quite another affair, and it becomes impossible not to recognize that ‘nature’ herself seems to go out of her way to multiply beings praeter necessitatem ; what kind of logical satisfaction can anyone experience in contemplating, for instance, the multitude and the prodigious variety of the kinds of animals and plants that live around him? Surely this is a long way from the simplicity postulated by those philosophers who want to twist reality to suit the convenience of their own understanding and the understanding of the ‘average’ of their like; and if such is the case in the corporeal world, in itself a very limited domain of existence, how much more must it be the case in the other worlds; must it not indeed then be indefinitely much more so? [39] In this connection the scholastic adage of the decadent period could be contrasted with the conceptions of Saint Thomas Aquinas himself concerning the angelic state, ubi omne individuum est species infima . This means that the differences between the angels are not analogous to the ‘individual differences’ of our world (the word individuum thus being not entirely correct here, as supra-individual states are in question), but to ‘specific differences’; the true reason for this is that each angel represents as it were the expression of a divine attribute, as is shown clearly by the constitution of the names in the Hebrew angelology. In order to cut short the discussion of this subject, it is only necessary to recall that, as has been explained elsewhere, everything that is possible is for that reason real in its own order and according to its own mode, and that since universal possibility is necessarily infinite everything that is other than a sheer impossibility has its place therein: what else, then, but this same desire for a misconceived simplification drives philosophers, when evolving their ‘systems’, always to try to set a limit to universal possibility in one way or another? [40] That is why Leibnitz said that ‘every system is true in what it affirms and false in what it denies,’ and this means that it contains an amount of truth proportional to the amount of positive reality included in it, and an amount of error corresponding to the reality excluded; it is important to add that it is precisely the negative and limitative side of a ‘system’ that constitutes it as such.

It is a particularly strange fact that the tendency to simplicity understood in this sense, together with the tendency to uniformity, which in a sense runs parallel to it, is taken by people whom it affects as a striving for ‘unification’; but it is really ‘unification’ upside down, like everything else that is directed toward the domain of pure quantity, or toward the lower and substantial pole of existence; it is thus another example of that sort of caricature of unity that has already been considered from other points of view. If true unity is also to be described as ‘simple’, that word must be understood in quite a different sense, so that it conveys only the essential indivisibility of true unity, and so as to exclude the idea that unity is in any way ‘composite’, and this implies that it cannot rightly be conceived as made up of parts of any kind. A sort of parody of the indivisibility of unity may be found in the indivisibility that some philosophers and physicists attribute to their ‘atoms’, but they fail to see that it is not compatible with the nature of the corporeal, for a body is by definition extended, and extension is indefinitely divisible, so that a body is of necessity always made up of parts, and it does not make any difference how small it is or may be supposed to be, so that the notion of indivisible corpuscles is self-contradictory; but a notion of that kind evidently fits in well with a search for simplicity carried to such lengths that it can no longer correspond to the lowest degree of reality.