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

Now it is particularly worthy of note, and highly significant as regards the reality of the connection between Bergsonian ‘intuitionism’ and the second phase of anti-traditional action, that magic, by an ironical turn of affairs, is now cruelly avenging the denials of our philosopher. It has reappeared in our days, through the recent ‘fissures’ in our world, in a form that is at once the lowest and the most rudimentary, in the disguise of ‘psychic science’ (the very thing that some people prefer to call, rather unfortunately, ‘metapsychics’), and it succeeds in securing admission thereto, while avoiding recognition not only as something very real, but also as destined to play a leading part in the future of Bergson’s ‘dynamic religion’! This is no exaggeration: he speaks of ‘survival’ just like any common spiritist, and he believes in a ‘deepening of the range of experiment’ making it possible to come to a ‘conclusion as to the possibility and even the probability of a survival of the soul’ (what exactly does that mean, and is it not apparent that he is thinking of the phantasmagoria of ‘psychic corpses’?), but without the possibility of knowing whether it will be ‘for a time or for ever.’ But this last annoying limitation does not prevent him from proclaiming in dithyrambic tones: ‘No more than this is needed in order to turn into a living and active reality a belief in a life after death such as is met with in most men, though it is usually verbal, abstract, ineffective.... Indeed, if we were sure, absolutely sure, of survival we could no longer think of anything else.’ The ancient magic was more ‘scientific’ than this, in the true sense of the word, if not in the profane sense, and it had not the same pretensions; but in order that some of its most elementary phenomena should give rise to interpretations of this kind it was necessary to wait for the invention of spiritualism, which could not come to birth until a late stage of the modern deviation had been reached. It is in fact the spiritualist theory concerning such phenomena, that and nothing else, that is finally accepted by Bergson, as it was by William James before him, with ‘a joy’ that makes ‘all pleasures pale’ (this incredible statement, with which his book ends, is quoted word for word). His ‘joy’ establishes for us the degree of discernment of which this philosopher is capable, for as far as his good faith is concerned, that certainly is not in question, and profane philosophers are usually not suited to act otherwise than as dupes in cases of this kind, thus serving as unconscious intermediaries for the hoaxing of many others: but apart from that, talking of ‘superstition’, never before has there been so good an example of it, and it is this fact that gives the best idea of the real worth of all the ‘new philosophy’, as its partisans are pleased to call it!

In passing from philosophy to psychology it will be found that identical tendencies appear once again in the latter, and in the most recent schools of psychology they assume a far more dangerous aspect, for instead of taking the form of mere theoretical postulates they are given practical applications of a very disturbing character; the most ‘representative’ of these new methods, from the point of view of the present study, are those grouped under the general heading of ‘psychoanalysis’. It may be noted that, by a curious inconsistency, their handling of elements indubitably belonging to the subtle order continues to be accompanied in many psychologists by a materialistic attitude, no doubt because of their earlier training, as well as because of their present ignorance of the true nature of the elements they are bringing into play; [137] The case of Freud himself, founder of ‘psychoanalysis’, is quite typical in this respect, for he never ceased to declare himself a materialist. One further remark: why is it that the principal representatives of the new tendencies, like Einstein in physics, Bergson in philosophy, Freud in psychology, and many others of less importance, are almost all of Jewish origin, unless it be because there is something involved that is closely bound up with the ‘malefic’ and dissolving aspect of nomadism when it is deviated, and because that aspect must inevitably predominate in Jews detached from their tradition? is it not one of the strangest characteristics of modern science that it never knows exactly what the object of its studies really is, even when only the forces of the corporeal domain are in question? It goes without saying too that there is a kind of ‘laboratory psychology’, the end-point of the process of limitation and of materialization of which the ‘philosophico-literary’ psychology of university teaching was but a less advanced stage, and now no more than a sort of accessory branch of psychology, which still continues to coexist with the new theories and methods; to this branch apply the preceding observations on the attempts that have been made to reduce psychology itself to a quantitative science.

There is certainly something more than a mere question of vocabulary in the fact, very significant in itself, that present-day psychology considers nothing but the ‘subconscious’, and never the ‘superconscious’, which ought logically to be its correlative; there is no doubt that this usage expresses the idea of an extension operating only in a downward direction, that is, toward the aspect of things that corresponds, both here in the human being and elsewhere in the cosmic environment, to the ‘fissures’ through which the most ‘malefic’ influences of the subtle world penetrate, influences having a character than can truthfully and literally be described as ‘infernal’. [138] It may be noted in this connection that Freud put at the head of his The Interpretation of Dreams the following very significant epigram: Flectere si nequeo superos , Acheronta movebo (Virgil, Aeneid , VII, 312). There are also some who adopt the term ‘unconscious’ as a synonym or equivalent of ‘subconscious’, and this term, taken literally, would seem to refer to an even lower level, but as a matter of fact it only corresponds less closely to reality; if the object of study were really unconscious it is difficult to see how it could be spoken of at all, especially in psychological terms; and besides, what good reason is there, other than mere materialistic and mechanistic prejudice, for assuming that anything unconscious really exists? However that may be, there is another thing worthy of note, and that is the strange illusion which leads psychologists to regard states as being more ‘profound’ when they are quite simply more inferior; is not this already an indication of the tendency to run counter to spirituality, which alone can be truly profound since it alone touches the principle and the very center of the being? Correspondingly, since the domain of psychology is not extended upward, the ‘superconscious’ naturally remains as strange to it and as cut off from it as ever; and when psychology happens to meet anything related to the ‘superconscious’, it tries to annex it merely by assimilating it to the ‘subconscious’. This particular procedure is almost invariably characteristic of its so-called explanations of such things as religion and mysticism, together with certain aspects of Eastern doctrine such as Yoga ; there are therefore features in this confusion of the superior with the inferior that can properly be regarded as constituting a real subversion.

It should also be noted that psychology, as well as the ‘new philosophy’, tends in its appeal to the subconscious to approach more and more closely to ‘metapsychics’; [139] Incidentally it was the ‘psychist’ Myers who invented the expression ‘subliminal consciousness’, which was later replaced in the psychological vocabulary for the sake of brevity by the word ‘subconscious’. and in the same way it cannot avoid making an approach, though perhaps unwittingly (at least in the case of those of its representatives who are determined to remain materialists in spite of everything), to spiritualism and to other more or less similar things, all of which rely without doubt on the same obscure elements of a debased psychism. These same things, of which the origin and the character are more than suspect, thus appear in the guise of ‘precursory’ movements and as the allies of recent psychology, which introduces the elements in question into the contemporary purview of what is admitted to be ‘official’ science, and although it introduces them in a roundabout way (nonetheless by an easier way than that of ‘metapsychics’, the latter being still disputed in some quarters), it is very difficult to think that the part psychology is called upon to play in the present state of the world is other than one of active participation in the second phase of anti-traditional action. In this connection, the recently mentioned pretensions of ordinary psychology to annex, by forcible assimilation to the ‘subconscious’, certain things that by their very nature elude it, only belong to what may be called the ‘childish’ side of the affair, though they are fairly clearly subversive in tendency; for explanations of that sort, just like the ‘sociological’ explanations of the same things, are really of a ‘simplistic’ ingenuousness that sometimes reaches buffoonery; but in any case, that sort of thing is far less serious, so far as its real consequences are concerned, than the truly ‘satanic’ side now to be examined more closely in relation to the new psychology.