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

Besides avowed and formal materialism, there is also what may be called a factual materialism, the influence of which extends much further afield, for many people who regard themselves as being by no means materialists nonetheless behave as such in practice in all circumstances. There is in fact a relationship between these two materialisms rather like that referred to earlier between philosophical rationalism and popular rationalism, except that the merely factual materialist does not generally parade that quality and would often protest if it were attributed to him, whereas the popular rationalist, even when he is philosophically the most ignorant of men, is all the more anxious to proclaim himself a rationalist, while at the same time he proudly adorns himself with the title of ‘free-thinker’, all unconscious of irony, for all the time he is but the slave of all the current prejudices of his period. However that may be, just as popular rationalism is a product of the diffusion of philosophic rationalism among the ‘public at large’, with all the inevitable consequences of its being put ‘within the reach of all’, so materialism properly so called is the starting-point of factual materialism, in the sense that the former has made a diffusion of its characteristic state of mind generally possible and has effectively contributed to its formation; but it must not be forgotten that all these separate happenings can always be fully explained by the development of the same tendencies, the tendencies that constitute the very foundation of the modern spirit. It is obvious that a scientist, in the modern sense of the word, even if he does not profess materialism, will be influenced by it to the extent that all his special training is oriented in that direction; and even if, as sometimes happens, this scientist believes himself to be not without the ‘religious spirit’, he will find the means to separate his religion from his scientific activity so completely that his work will in no way be distinguishable from that of the most overt materialist, and so he will play just as important a part as the latter in the ‘progressive’ building up of a science as exclusively quantitative and as grossly materialistic as it is possible to imagine. In this sort of way does anti-traditional action succeed in using to its own profit even those who ought to be its adversaries, and who might be so if the deviation of the modern mentality had not so shaped beings that they are full of contradictions yet incapable even of becoming aware of the fact. Here again the tendency to uniformity finds its realization, since in practice all men end by thinking and acting in the same way, and the things in respect of which they nevertheless still differ have no more than a minimum of influence, and are not translated into any reality in the outer world. Thus, in such a world, and with the rarest exceptions, a man who professes himself a Christian does not fail to behave in practice as if there were no reality whatever outside corporeal existence alone, and a priest who does ‘a little science’ does not differ perceptibly from a university materialist; when things have reached this stage, have they much further to go before the lowest point of the ‘descent’ is reached at last?

The materialistic attitude, whether it be a question of explicit and formal materialism or of a simple ‘practical’ materialism, necessarily imposes on the whole ‘psycho-physiological’ constitution of the human being a real and very important modification. This is easily understood, and in fact it is only necessary to look round in order to conclude that modern man has become quite impermeable to any influences other than such as impinge on his senses; not only have his faculties of comprehension become more and more limited, but also the field of his perception has become correspondingly restricted. The result is a sort of reinforcement of the profane point of view, for this point of view was first born of a defect of comprehension, and thus of a limitation, and this limitation as it becomes accentuated and extends to all domains, itself seems to justify the point of view, at least in the eyes of those who are affected by it. Indeed, what reason can they have thereafter for admitting the existence of something that they can neither perceive nor conceive, that is to say of everything that could show them the insufficiency and the falsity of the profane point of view itself?

Thus arises the idea of what is commonly called ‘ordinary life’ or ‘everyday life’; this is in fact understood to mean above all a life in which nothing that is not purely human can intervene in any way, owing to the elimination from it of any sacred, ritual, or symbolical character (it matters little whether this character be thought of as specifically religious or as conforming to some other traditional modality, because the relevant point in all cases is the effective action of ‘spiritual influences’), the very words ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ moreover implying that everything that surpasses conceptions of that order is, even when it has not yet been expressly denied, at least relegated to an ‘extra-ordinary’ domain, regarded as exceptional, strange, and unaccustomed. This is strictly speaking a reversal of the normal order as represented by integrally traditional civilizations, in which the profane point of view does not exist in any way, and the reversal can only logically end in an ignorance or a complete denial of the ‘supra-human’. Moreover some people go so far as to make a similar use, with the same meaning, of the expression ‘real life’, and this usage has a profoundly and singularly ironical character, for the truth is that the thing so named is on the contrary nothing but the worst of illusions; this does not mean that everything it contains is actually devoid of all reality, although such reality as it has, which is broadly speaking that of the sensible order, is at the lowest level of all, there being below it only such things as are definitely beneath the level of all manifested existence. It is however the way in which things are conceived that is so wholly false, because it separates them from every superior principle, and so denies them precisely that which makes all their reality; that is why, in all strictness, no such thing as a profane domain really exists, but only a profane point of view, which becomes more and more invasive until in the end it comprehends human existence in its entirety.

This makes it understandable how, in the conception of ‘ordinary life’, one stage succeeds another almost insensibly, degeneration becoming progressively more marked all the time. At first it is allowed that some things are not accessible to any traditional influence, then those things themselves come to be looked on as normal; from that point it is all too easy to arrive at considering them as the only ‘real’ things, which amounts to setting aside as ‘unreal’ all that is ‘supra-human’; and later on, when the human domain comes to be conceived in a more and more narrowly limited way, until it is finally reduced to the corporeal modality alone, everything that belongs to the supra-sensible order is set aside as unreal. It is enough to notice how our contemporaries constantly make use of the word ‘real’ as a synonym of ‘sensible’ without even thinking about it, in order at once to become aware that they have indeed fully reached the final stage, and that this way of looking at things has become so completely incorporated into their very nature as to have become so to speak almost instinctive with them. Modern philosophy, which is more than anything else merely a ‘systematized’ expression of the common mentality, subsequently reacts on the latter to a certain extent, and the two have pursued parallel courses; that of philosophy began with the Cartesian eulogy of ‘good sense’ alluded to earlier, and which is very revealing in this connection, for ‘ordinary life’ surely is first and foremost the domain of this so-called ‘good sense’, also called ‘common sense’, and is no less limited than it and in the same way; next, through rationalism, which is fundamentally only a more specially philosophical aspect of ‘humanism’, that is to say, of the reduction of everything to an exclusively human point of view, materialism or positivism are gradually attained: whether one chooses, as in materialism, expressly to deny everything that is beyond the sensible world, or whether one is content, as in positivism (which for that reason likes also to call itself ‘agnosticism’, making an honourable title for itself out of what is really only the avowal of an incurable ignorance), to refuse to be concerned with anything of the kind and to declare it ‘inaccessible’ or ‘unknowable’, the result is exactly the same in either case, and it is precisely the result of which a description has just been given.