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

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] As for Descartes’ own conception of science, it should be noted that he claims that it is possible to reach the stage of having ‘clear and distinct’ ideas about everything, that is, ideas like those of mathematics, thus obtaining the sort of ‘evidence’ that can actually be obtained in mathematics alone. 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] In the classical definition of the human being as a ‘reasonable animal’, ‘rationality’ represents the ‘specific difference’ by which man is distinguished from all other species in the animal kingdom; it is not applicable outside that kingdom, or in other words, is properly speaking only what the scholastics called a differentia animalis ; ‘rationality’ cannot therefore be spoken of in relation to beings belonging to other states of existence, in particular to supra-individual states, those of the angels, for example; and this is quite in agreement with the fact that reason is a faculty of an exclusively individual order, and one that can in no way overstep the boundaries of the human domain. 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] It can be said in this connection that of all the meanings that were comprised in the Latin word ratio one alone has been retained, that of ‘calculation’, in the use to which reason is now put in the realm of ‘science’. 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.