Academics From France

"The universe is not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. ... Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose."

"If [the emergence of the human species] was unique, as may perhaps have been the appearance of life itself, then before it did appear its chances of doing so were infinitely slender. The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game."

"Anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants."

"The first scientific postulate is the objectivity of nature: nature does not have any intention or goal."

"What I consider completely sterile is the attitude, for instance, of Bertalanffy who is going around and jumping around for years saying that all the analytical science and molecular biology doesn’t really get to interesting results; let’s talk in terms of general systems theory ... there cannot be anything such as general systems theory, it’s impossible. Or, if it existed, it would be meaningless."

"One day, almost exactly 25 years ago - it was at the beginning of the bleak winter of 1940 - I entered ’s office at the Pasteur Institute. I wanted to discuss with him some of the rather surprising observations I had recently made. I was working then at the old Sorbonne, in an ancient laboratory that opened on a gallery full of stuffed monkeys. Demobilized in August in the Free Zone after the disaster of 1940, I had succeeded in locating my family living in the Northern Zone and had resumed my work with desperate eagerness. I interrupted work from time to time only to help circulate the first clandestine tracts. I wanted to complete as quickly as possible my doctoral dissertation, which, under the strongly biometric influence of Georges Teissier, I had devoted to the study of the kinetics of bacterial growth. Having determined the constants of growth in the presence of different carbohydrates, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to determine the same constants in paired mixtures of carbohydrates. From the first experiment on, I noticed that, whereas the growth was kinetically normal in the presence of certain mixtures (that is, it exhibited a single exponential phase), two complete growth cycles could be observed in other carbohydrate mixtures, these cycles consisting of two exponential phases separated by a complete cessation of growth."

"From then on I read avidly the first publications by the "phage-church", and when I entered Lwoff’s department at the Pasteur Institute in 1945, I was tempted to abandon enzyme adaptation in order to join the church myself and work with bacteriophage."

"Multiplicity, considered apart from its principle, and therefore as no longer capable of being reduced to unity, takes the form in the social realm of a community conceived only as the arithmetical sum of its component individuals; in fact, a community is no more than this, once it has ceased to be attached to any principle superior to these individuals."

"'Aristocracy', […] taken in its etymological sense, means precisely the power of the elite. The elite can by definition only be the few, and their power, or rather their authority, deriving as it does from their intellectual superiority, has nothing in common with the numerical strength on which democracy is based, a strength whose inherent tendency is to sacrifice the minority to the majority, and therefore quality to quantity, and the elite to the masses."

"It is contradictory to say that the same persons can be at the same time rulers and ruled […] The great ability of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the people believe that they are governing themselves; and the people are the more inclined to believe this as they are flattered by it, and as, in any case, they are incapable of sufficient reflection to see its impossibility. It was to create this illusion that 'universal suffrage' was invented: the law is supposed to be made by the opinion of the majority, but what is overlooked is that this opinion is something that can very easily be guided and modified; it is always possible, by means of suitable suggestions, to arouse, as may be desired, currents moving in this or that direction. We cannot recall who it was who first spoke of 'manufacturing opinion', but this expression is very apt."

"Protestantism denied the authority of the organization qualified to interpret legitimately the religious tradition of the West and in its place claimed to set up "free criticism," that is to say interpretations resulting from private judgement, even of the ignorant and the incompetent, and based exclusively on the exercise of human reason. What happened in the realm of religion was therefore analogous to the part to be played by rationalism in philosophy: the door was left open to all manner of discussions, divergencies and deviations, and the result was what it was bound to be: dispersion in an ever growing multitude of sects, each of which represents no more than the private opinion of certain individuals. As it was impossible under such conditions to come to an agreement on doctrine, this was soon thrust into the background, and the secondary aspect of religion, namely morality came to the fore: hence the degeneration into moralism which is so patent in present-day Protestantism."

"The guiding function exercised by a true elite, and its very existence–since of necessity it plays this role if it exists at all–is utterly incompatible with democracy, which is closely bound up with the egalitarian conception, and therefore with the negation of all hierarchy; the very foundation of the democratic idea is the supposition that one individual is as good as another, simply because they are equal numerically and in spite of the fact that they can never be equal in any other way. A true elite, as we have already said, can only be an intellectual one; and that is why democracy can arise only where pure intellectuality no longer exists, as is the case in the modern world."

"Where is the notion of a real hierarchy still to be found in the modern world? Nothing and nobody is any longer in the right place; men no longer recognize any effective authority in the spiritual order or any legitimate power in the temporal; the 'profane' presume to discuss what is sacred, and to contest its character and even its existence; the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the Divine, earth has priority over Heaven, the individual sets the measure for all things and claims to dictate to the universe laws drawn entirely from his own relative and fallible reason. 'Woe unto you, ye blind guides,' the Gospel says; and indeed everywhere today one sees nothing but blind leaders of the blind, who, unless restrained by some timely check, will inevitably lead them into the abyss, there to perish with them."

"In civilizations of a traditional nature, intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality. Not only is this true of social institutions, but also of the sciences, that is, branches of knowledge bearing on the domain of the relative, which in such civilizations are only regarded as dependencies, prolongations, or reflections of absolute or principial knowledge. Thus a true hierarchy is always and everywhere preserved: the relative is not treated as non-existent, which would be absurd; it is duly taken into consideration, but is put in its rightful place, which cannot but be a secondary and subordinate one; and even within this relative domain there are different degrees of reality, according to whether the subject lies nearer to or further from the sphere of principles."

"If an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it."

"There is an exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere 'becoming', leaving no place for the changeless and the permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this 'becoming', thus implicitly denying true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, namely transcendent and universal principles."

"Philosophy […] is interesting mainly because it expresses, in as clear a form as possible, the tendencies of this or that period, much more than it actually creates them; and even if it can be said to direct them to a certain extent, it does so only secondarily and when they are already formed."

"Is it because Westerners have come to lose their intellectuality by over-developing their capacity for action that they console themselves by inventing theories that set action above everything else, and even, as in the case of pragmatism, go so far as to deny that there exists anything of value beyond action; or is the contrary true, namely, that it is the acceptance of this point of view that has led to the intellectual atrophy we see today?"

"Matter is essentially multiplicity and division, and this-be it said in passing-is why all that proceeds from matter can beget only strife and all manner of conflicts between peoples as between individuals. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more the elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches that unity which can only be fully realized by consciousness of universal principles."

"Since equality is in fact impossible, and since, despite all efforts toward leveling, the differences between one man and another cannot in practice be entirely suppressed, men have been brought, by a curious illogic, to invent false elites–of several kinds moreover–that claim to take the place of the one true elite; and these false elites are based on a variety of totally relative and contingent points of superiority, always of a purely material order. This is obvious from the fact that the social distinction that counts most in the present state of things is that based on wealth, that is to say on a purely outward superiority of an exclusively quantitative order, the only superiority in fact that is consistent with democracy, based as it is on the same point of view."

"Metaphysics, because it opens out a limitless vista of possibilities, must take care never to lose sight of the inexpressible, which indeed constitutes its very essence."

"Europeans, since the days when they began to believe in "progress" and in "evolution," that is to say since a little more than a century ago, profess to see a sign of inferiority in this absence of change, whereas for our part, we look upon it as a balanced condition which Western civilization has failed to achieve."

"It seems scarcely possible to account for this attitude except by means of the following explanation: because their own civilization hardly goes any further back than the Graeco-Roman period and derives for the most part from it, Westerners are led to believe that it must have been the same in every other case, and they have difficulty in conceiving of the existence of entirely different and far more ancient civilizations. It might be said that they are mentally incapable of crossing the Mediterranean."

"We are now in the fourth age, the Kali Yuga or 'dark age', and have been so already, it is said, for more than six thousand years, that is to say since a time far earlier than any known to 'classical' history. Since that time, the truths which were formerly within reach of all have become more and more hidden and inaccessible; those who possess them grow fewer and fewer, and although the treasure of 'nonhuman (that is, supra-human) wisdom that was prior to all the ages can never be lost, it nevertheless becomes enveloped in more and more impenetrable veils, which hide it from men's sight and make it extremely difficult to discover. This is why we find everywhere, under various symbols, the same theme of something that has been lost-at least to all appearances and as far as the outer world is concerned-and that those who aspire to true knowledge must rediscover; but it is also said that what is thus hidden will become visible again at the end of the cycle, which, because of the continuity binding all things together, will coincide with the beginning of a new cycle."

"First of all, if we speak of two powers, and if we do so in cases where it becomes necessary for various reasons to maintain a certain external symmetry between them, we prefer to use the word 'authority' rather than the word 'power' for the spiritual order. The word 'power' can then be reserved for the temporal order, to which it is better suited when taken in its strictest sense. In fact, the word 'power' almost inevitably evokes the idea of strength or force, and above all the idea of a material force, a force which manifests itself visibly and outwardly and affirms itself by the use of external means, for such means indeed characterize the temporal power by very definition. On the contrary, spiritual authority, interior in essence, is affirmed only by itself, independently of any sensible support, and operates as it were invisibly. If we can speak in this context of strength or force, it is only by analogical transposition, and, at least in the case of a spiritual authority—in its purest state so to speak—it must be understood that it is an entirely intellectual strength whose name is 'wisdom' and whose only force is that of truth."

"We have in fact entered upon the last phase of the Kali Yuga, the darkest period of this 'dark age', the state of dissolution from which it is impossible to emerge otherwise than by a cataclysm, since it is not a mere readjustment that is necessary at such a stage, but a complete renovation. Disorder and confusion prevail in every domain and have been carried to a point far surpassing all that has been known previously, so that, issuing from the West, they now threaten to invade the whole world; we know full well that their triumph can never be other than apparent and transitory, but such are the proportions which it has reached, that it would appear to be the sign of the gravest of all the crises through which mankind has passed in the course of its present cycle. Have we not arrived at that terrible age, announced in the Sacred Books of India, 'when the castes shall be mingled, when even the family shall no longer exist'?"

"There can be only one way out of the chaos, in the social domain as in all others: the restoration of intellectuality, which would result in the formation once more of an elite."

"The true function of the priesthood, then, is above all one of knowledge and teaching, and this is why, as we said above, its proper attribute is wisdom."

"There are people whose mind would recoil from actual negation, but who have no objection to complete indifference; this is what is most to be feared, for to deny something one must think about it to some extent, however little that may be, whereas an attitude of indifference makes it possible not to think about it at all."

"In order to subsist, then, temporal power needs a consecration that comes from spiritual authority; it is this consecration that confers upon it legitimacy, that is to say conformity with the very order of things. Such was the raison d'être of the 'royal initiation' […] and it is in this that the 'divine right' of kings properly consists, what the Far-Eastern tradition calls the 'mandate of Heaven' […] All action that does not proceed from knowledge is lacking in principle and thus is nothing but a vain agitation; likewise, all temporal power that fails to recognize its subordination vis-à-vis spiritual authority is vain and illusory: separated from its principle, it can only exert itself in a disorderly way and move inexorably to its own ruin."

"If the 'priesthood' is in essence the depository of traditional knowledge, this is not to say that it has a monopoly on it, since its mission is not only to conserve it integrally but also to communicate it to all who are fit to receive it, to distribute it hierarchically, so to speak, according to the intellectual capacity of each."

"It is strange that people should talk so much about ending all war at a time when the ravages it causes are greater than they have ever been, not only because the means of destruction have been multiplied, but also because, as wars are no longer fought between comparatively small armies composed solely of professional soldiers, all the individuals on both sides are flung against each other indiscriminately, including those who are the least qualified for this kind of function. Here again is a striking example of modern confusion, and it is truly portentous, for those who care to reflect upon it, that a 'mass uprising' or a 'general mobilization' should have come to be considered quite natural, and that with very few exceptions the minds of all should have accepted the idea of an 'armed nation'. In this also can be seen an outcome of the belief in the power of numbers alone: it is in keeping with the quantitative character of modern civilization to set in motion enormous masses of combatants; and at the same time, egalitarianism also finds its expression here, as well as in systems such as 'compulsory education' and 'universal suffrage'."

"It is true that the masses have always been led in one manner or another, and it could be said that their part in history consists primarily in allowing themselves to be led, since they represent a merely passive element, a 'matter' in the Aristotelian sense of the word. But, in order to lead them today, it is sufficient to dispose of purely material means, this time in the ordinary sense of the word, and this shows clearly to what depths our age has sunk. At the same time, the masses are made to believe that they are not being led, but that they are acting spontaneously and governing themselves, and the fact that they believe this is a sign from which the extent of their stupidity may be inferred."

"If during the last century or so there has been even some slight revival of awareness in the Western world of what is meant by metaphysics and metaphysical tradition, the credit for it must go above all to Guénon. At a time when the confusion into which modern Western thought had fallen was such that it threatened to obliterate the few remaining traces of genuine spiritual knowledge from the minds and hearts of his contemporaries, Guénon, virtually single-handed, took it upon himself to reaffirm the values and principles which, he recognized, constitute the only sound basis for the living of a human life with dignity and purpose or for the formation of a civilization worthy of the name."

"Carl Schmitt believes René Guénon is the most interesting person of our time. (I don’t believe this always, but often I do. Although I consider Aurobindo Ghose more “perfected.”)"

"It was however only in the nineteenth century that men began to glory in their ignorance–for to proclaim oneself an agnostic means nothing else–and claimed to deny to others any knowledge to which they had no access themselves; and this marked yet one more stage in the intellectual decline of the West."

"If Guénon is correct, then all my work is for naught."

"The criticism which Guénon levels against modern scientism in all of its materialistic, pragmatist and evolutionary trajectories, is the most serious and the most radical of all the criticisms ever made. On the other hand, once it is applied to a social and practical plane, any knowledge which tradition draws from its metaphysical premises can be translated into principles which can properly situate and organize mundane activities and bestow on them a higher meaning; these principles can also create institutional forms adequate to this purpose and prolong "life" into something which is "more than life." In this context, Guénon's deductions assume a radical character: hierarchical, aristocratic, anti-individualist, anti-social and anti-collectivist … the knowledge and the study of the works of this author should be recommended to the best elements and to those who are most anxious to receive an authentic spiritual orientation in our new Italy. … These elements would find in Guenon’s works perspectives which are far removed from any particularism and personalism. … I feel this to be case, since the promise of Guenon’s “radical traditionalism” is the same as Mussolini’s idéal of the attainment of a “permanent and universal reality,” which is the necessary requirement for any person who wishes to act spiritually in the world with a “dominating human will.”"

"No living writer in modern Europe is more significant than René Guénon, whose task it has been to expound the universal metaphysical tradition that has been the essential foundation of every past culture, and which represents the indispensable basis for any civilization deserving to be so called."

"A philosopher's renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others."

"In any case, Guénon belongs in essence to the culture of the Right. His work is a radical negation of democracy, socialism, and individualism. He goes even further, into areas barely touched upon by current Right-wing critiques."

"There is thus all the more reason to exercise extreme vigilance ... against anything that may lead the being to become "fused," or preferably and more accurately "confused" or even "dissolved," in a sort of "cosmic consciousness" that shuts out all "transcendence" and so also shuts out all effective spirituality. This is the ultimate consequence of all the anti-metaphysical errors known more especially in their philosophical aspect by such names as "pantheism," "immanentism," and "naturalism.""

"In the higher degrees of Scottish Freemasonry, there are two mottos whose meaning is related to some of the considerations we have outlined above: one is Post Tenebras Lux and the other Ordo ab Chao; and in truth their meanings are so closely connected as to be almost identical, although Ordo ab Chao is perhaps susceptible to a broader application. In fact, they both refer to initiatory "enlightenment", the first directly and the second consequentially, since it is the original vibration of Fiat Lux that determines the beginning of the cosmogonic process as a result of which "chaos" will be ordered to become the "cosmos". In traditional symbolism, darkness always represents the state of undeveloped potentialities that constitute chaos; and correlatively, light is related to the manifested world, in which these potentialities will be actualised, that is, to the “cosmos”, an actualisation that is determined or measured, at each moment of the process of manifestation, by the extension of the “sun's rays” that depart from the central point where the initial Fiat Lux was uttered. Light is therefore effectively “after darkness”, not only from a "macrocosmic" point of view, but also from a "microcosmic" point of view which is that of initiation, since, from this point of view, darkness represents the profane world from which the recipient comes, or the profane state in which he initially finds himself, until the precise moment when he becomes initiated by “receiving the light”. Through initiation, the being therefore passes “from darkness to light”, just as the world, at its origin (and the symbolism of “birth” is equally applicable in both cases), passed “from darkness to light” by virtue of the act of the creative and ordering Word; and consequently initiation is truly, according to a very general characteristic of traditional rites, an image of “what was done in the beginning”."

"Let us probe still more deeply into the question: what is this law of the greatest number which modern governments invoke and in which they claim to find their sole justification? It is simply the law of matter and brute force, the same law by which a mass, carried down by its weight, crushes everything that lies in its track. It is precisely here that we find the point of junction of the democratic conception and materialism, and here also is to be found the reason why this conception is so firmly rooted in the present-day mentality."

"Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries."

"From the social point of view as from all others, instability is as it were at its maximum, disorder and confusion are everywhere, and humanity has surely never been further from the 'Terrestrial Paradise' and from primordial spirituality."

"Among those who in spite of all have kept something of the traditional spirit (and we address them because they are the only ones whose thought could have any value in our eyes), how many envisage the truth for its own sake, in a totally disinterested way, independent of every sentimental preoccupation, of every party or ideological passion, of all concern for domination or proselytism?"

"Dante's corpus as a whole is in certain respects like a testament to the closing medieval age; it shows what the Western world would have been had it not broken from its tradition."

"The relationship between these two powers may be expressed by saying that the pope must keep for himself the golden key to the 'Celestial Paradise' and entrust to the emperor the silver key to the 'Terrestrial Paradise'."

"[T]he revolt of the Kshatriyas prepares the way for that of the Vaishyas and the Shūdras; and so, from one stage to another, we descend at last to the lowest kind of utilitarianism, the negation of all disinterested knowledge (even of the lowest rank) and of all reality beyond the perceptible domain. This is precisely what one witnesses in our own time, where the Western world has nearly arrived at the final stage of this descent which, like the fall of heavy bodies, keeps accelerating."