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

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’.

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.

Leibnitz, in opposition to Descartes and his disciples, was very successful in demonstrating the insufficiency of a mechanistic physics, which cannot, owing to its very nature, take account of anything but the outward appearance of things and is incapable of affording the smallest explanation of their true essence; thus mechanism can be said to have a value that is purely ‘representative’ and in no way explanatory; and is not the whole of modern science really in exactly the same position? This is seen to be the case even when an example as simple as that of movement is taken, though movement is ordinarily thought of as being more completely explicable than anything else in purely mechanical terms; but any such explanation, says Leibnitz, is only valid so long as movement is not regarded as involving anything other than a change of situation. From this limited point of view it is a matter of indifference, when the relative positions of two bodies change, whether the first is regarded as moving in relation to the second, or the second in relation to the first, for there is a complete reciprocity between the two; but it is quite another matter when the reason for the movement is taken into account, for if the reason is found to be in one of the two bodies, that one alone must be regarded as moving, while the other plays a purely passive part in the change that has taken place; but any idea of this kind completely eludes conceptions of a mechanistic or quantitative order. Mechanism is limited to giving a simple description of movement, such as it is in its outward appearance, but is powerless to grasp the reason for it and so to express its essential or qualitative aspect, which alone can afford a real explanation. These considerations apply with even greater force in the case of things that may be more complex in character than movement, and where quality may be more predominant over quantity, and that is why a science constituted mechanistically cannot actually be of any value in terms of effective knowledge, even within the confines of the relative and limited domain that encloses it.

The conception which Descartes tried to apply to all the phenomena of the corporeal world is however no less conspicuously insufficient, in that he reduced the whole nature of bodies to extension, and in addition he considered extension only from a purely quantitative point of view; and even at that time, just like the most recent mechanists and the materialists, he made no difference in this connection between so-called ‘inorganic’ bodies and living beings. Living beings are specified, and not organized bodies only, because the being itself is in effect reduced by him to the body alone, in accordance with the all too famous Cartesian theory of ‘animal-machines’, and this is really one of the most astonishing absurdities ever engendered by the systematic spirit. Not until he comes to consider human beings does Descartes feel obliged to point out in his physics that what he has in view is only ‘man’s body’; but what is this concession really worth, seeing that everything that takes place in this body would, by hypothesis, be exactly the same if the ‘spirit’ were absent? And so, as an inescapable result of dualism, the human being is as it were cut into two parts that do not become reunited and cannot form a real composite whole, since they cannot enter into mutual communication by any means, being supposed to be absolutely heterogeneous, so much so that any effective action by one on the other would be rendered impossible. To complete the picture, an attempt was made to explain mechanically all the phenomena that take place in animals, including those manifestations that are most obviously psychic in character; it is reasonable to ask why the same explanations should not apply to man, and whether it may not be permissible to ignore the other side of dualism as contributing nothing to the explanation of things. From this stage to the stage of looking at that other side as a useless complication and in practice treating it as non-existent, and thence to the point of denying it purely and simply, is no long step, especially for men whose attention is constantly turned toward the domain of perception, as is the case with modern Westerners: thus it is that Descartes’ mechanistic physics could not but pave the way for materialism.

The reduction to the quantitative had already taken place theoretically in Descartes’ time as far as everything that properly belongs to the corporeal order was concerned, in the sense that the actual constitution of Cartesian physics implied the possibility of such a reduction; it remained to extend the same conception to cover the whole of reality as it was then conceived, but reality had by that time become restricted to the domain of individual existence alone, in accordance with the postulates of rationalism. Taking dualism as point of departure, the reduction in question could not fail to appear as a reduction from ‘spirit’ to ‘matter’, taking the form of a relegation into the latter category alone of everything that Descartes had included in either, so as to be able to bring all things indifferently down to quantity. And so, after having previously relegated the essential aspect of things to a position ‘above the clouds’ as it were, this last step served to suppress it completely, so that thereafter nothing needed to be taken into account but the substantial aspect of things, for ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ respectively correspond to these two aspects, though they only suggest a much diminished and distorted picture of them. Descartes had brought half the world as he conceived it into the quantitative domain, and it was doubtless in his eyes the more important half, for in his secret thoughts, whatever may appear on the surface, he wanted above all to be a physicist; materialism in its turn claimed to bring the whole world into its own domain; there was then nothing more to do but to strive to bring the reduction to quantity into effect by means of theories progressively better adapted to that end, and that was the task to which modern science was destined to apply itself, even when it made no open declaration of materialism.