Mark Sedgwick on Sylvain Lévi’s Criticism of Guénon’s Thesis

In his book Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004), Mark Sedgwick lists Sylvain Lévi’s three main reasons for rejecting the Sorbonne “thesis form” of René Guénon’s Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues. Sedgwick cites Lévi’s report to Dean Ferdinand Brunot as quoted in Marie-France James, Ésoterisme et Christianisme: Autour de René Guénon (1981). The first reason (I will comment on the other reasons later) is that the thesis “ma[de] light of history and historical criticism”.

Sedgwick remarks that this was “a criticism of Guénon’s methodology that was in many ways justified”, and that Guénon “made no pretense of following the standard scholarly methods of Indology: for reasons examined later, his approach was theological rather than anthropological or sociological. For Guénon, Hinduism was a repository of spiritual truth, not the body of beliefs and practices modified over time that late nineteenth-century Western scholarship recognized.” [Sedgwick, 22-3; James, 194.]

Having only read the book published in 1921, I don’t know what the difference is between it and the thesis form. Sedgwick does not – as far as I can see right now – say anything about this. It is hard to think there could be no difference. The book does not have the form of a doctoral thesis at all. But if there is no difference, or if there is no difference with regard to what Lévi criticized and Sedgwick discusses, Sedgwick’s formulations, while certainly true, are at the same time a little strange in view of the nature of the thesis.

For reasons discussed in the thesis/book, Guénon would have objected to the description of his approach as “theological”. He would not even have accepted that his approach is a “methodology” at all: not only did he not make any “pretense of following the standard scholarly methods of Indology” – he did not follow any standard modern scholarly methods. And something needs to be said about the relation between “history and historical criticism” on the one hand and an anthropological or sociological approach. But these are not the main reasons why I find Sedgwick’s formulations somewhat curious.

The reader unfamiliar with Guénon’s work would, I think, be inclined to take Sedgwick to mean that Lévi’s criticism, the criticism from the position of historical criticism, is justified “in many ways” but not in every way since Guénon does not only “make light of” historical criticism but also to some extent, alongside the theological approach, himself correctly applies or practices historical criticism.

The problem for such a reader is that this interpretation is impossible in light of Sedgwick’s other formulation that Guénon “made no pretense of following the standard scholarly methods of Indology”. If, or since, this is so, i.e. since there is in Guénon’s book no historical criticism but only a “theological” approach, Sedgwick must mean something else.

The reader might then think that what Sedgwick means to say is that criticism from the point of view of historical criticism is not in every way justified, that it is in some ways acceptable to make light of historical criticism, that a “theological” approach is also in some ways valid, and that Lévi is wrong not to allow this. Lévi’s criticism is thus justified “in many ways” but not in every way.

Unfortunately, Sedgwick does not make clear that this is what he means, and, left to itself, there is nothing in the formulation except the barest semantic possibility to indicate that this could indeed be what he means. It is not a natural interpretation.

If, quite regardless of the legitimacy of other approaches, it is not acceptable to make light of historical criticism, Lévi’s criticism is justified in every possible way. Probably there were also other formulations in Lévi’s report, which Sedgwick and perhaps James do not cite. But taken alone, even Lévi’s formulation that Guénon’s thesis just “makes light of” historical criticism is a little surprising.

For the thesis, if the same as the book or the same as the book in the respects here discussed, cannot be said to be one that simply applies a “theological” “methodology” and that also, alongside it, “makes light of” historical criticism. The thesis is a Guénonian traditionalist exposition of Hinduism related to a continuous, extensive polemic against the non-traditionalist approach of modern scholarly methodologies, primarily historical criticism. There is almost as much criticism of historical criticism as traditionalist exposition. The criticism, the “making light” of historical criticism, is a basic theme. Throughout the book, Guénon seeks to show that, how, and why the historical critics have failed to understand the “spiritual truth” of which Hinduism is “a repository”. Indeed, several separate chapters are devoted to this subject alone.

Thus, it is not just the case that Lévi’s criticism is justified in every possible way if making light of historical criticism is inadmissible. It is also the case that the statement that the thesis makes light of historical criticism is justified in every possible way as a description of the thesis. There is no way in which it is not justified to say this about the thesis. The statement that it is “in many ways” justified to say by way of description that it “makes light of” historical criticism while adopting instead a “theological” approach would be much too weak, absurdly weak. Lévy must have rejected the thesis as the totally uncompromising, elaborate attack on historical criticism that in reality it is.

Of course, one cannot doubt that Sedgwick must be thoroughly familiar with the thesis, the foundational work in the whole intellectual current which his book is about. It is a little difficult to understand how he could describe it in the way I have discussed. But this is a minor criticism. After all, his book is not a philosophical or theological study of traditionalism, nor does the lack of philosophical and theological and other analysis qualify it as a proper work in intellectual history. Rather, it is an ambitious piece of a kind of journalism (as is signalled already in the subtitle’s sensationalist use of the word “secret” – at the most, the intellectual history he writes about could be said to be comparatively “unknown”); but in that genre, it sometimes does a good job.

The real, substantial questions that must be asked here are related to what, if Sedgwick had meant it, he would have made much clearer. To what extent – in how many ways and in which ways – is the justified descriptive statement about Guénon’s thesis also justified as criticism, and to what extent it is not? And these are important questions indeed, which I hope to be able to return to shortly.

Uppfostringsprogram, personlighetstyp, mänsklig natur

Det dröjer innan Rousseaus idéer på allvar slår igenom som dominerande pedagogiskt ideal i något institutionaliserat utbildningsväsende. Den tyska humanitetskultur som nu börjar utvecklas vill förena subjektiviteten och individualiteten med en förnyad klassicism och en ny idealism. Ändå är det avgörande att förstå hur väsentliga moment av Rousseaus verklighetsuppfattning, främst hans “naturindividualism” men också den frigörelsetematik som ju är å det närmaste förbunden med naturindividualismen, återfinns i större eller mindre utsträckning, mer eller mindre tydligt förändrande de övriga momentens innebörd, även i den humanism, klassicism och idealism som efterträder Sturm und Drang-rörelsen.

Viktigt är dock här också att den enligt Rousseaus program fritt uppfostrade och utvecklade individens instinkt på grund av den förment resulterande styrkan och godheten anses spontant bringas i överensstämmelse med plikten – i vilken senare vi inte torde ha att göra blott med allmänviljans tillfälliga konkreta uttryck utan också med själva grundprinciperna för samhällskontraktet och dess resultat, exempelvis vad Lindbom kallar jämlikhetens arketyp. Uppfostringsprogrammet tillhandahåller på intet sätt någon lösning av den samhällsfördragets och allmänviljans ekvation vars svårigheter Lindbom och Ryn – i en lång tradition av Rousseaukritik – framlyfter. Men det ingår som en väsentlig faktor i den. Hur Rousseau tänker sig det individuellas och det allmännas, det privatas och det offentligas konvergens måste förstås i termer av den personlighetstyp i modern mening som antas bli resultatet av detta program.

Detta tema, den rousseauanska personlighetstypens ideal, skall jag strax återkomma till i samband med Rousseaus självbiografiska skrifter, i vilka dock åter skönjes paradoxen att personlighetstypen bara tycks kunna förverkligas som resultatet av de reformer den själv endast som redan förverkligad kan initiera. Även Émile och de självbiografiska verken bekräftar Lindboms och Ryns analys såtillvida som denna personlighetstyp explicit förklaras behöva minimera sin individualitet: samtidigt med uttrycken för Rousseaus egen individualism och hans obestridliga, faktiska bidrag till individualitetsförståelsen i dessa skrifter, är det en ny allmän mänsklig natur som lanseras, en Rousseaus nya generalism.

I vissa avseenden vidareutvecklar, som Gillespie framhåller, Rousseau den nya läran om människans frihet gentemot naturen. Tidigare kunde endast Gud initiera nya kausalkedjor i den yttre verkligheten – nu kan även människan göra det. Rousseau förnekar överhuvud den materialistisk-mekaniska människosynen, och tillskriver människan, fastän ursprungligen god, förmåga till självförbättring och perfektion. Men denna frihet sammankopplas med läran om allmänviljan. Och när denna av Rousseau ofta identifieras med folkkollektivitetens tillfälliga, genom majoritetsval fastställda känslomässiga uttryck för “godhet”, innebär det att ingen annan lag finns för den “mänskliga” friheten än den på godtyckligt sätt manifesterade allmänviljans.

Här är åter den tappade voluntaristiska tråden från Descartes upptagen. Gillespie hävdar som vi sett att Occams nya absolut fria och potentiellt nyckfulla Gudsvilja via Descartes åtminstone potentiellt överförs till “människan” – genom insikten om att Gud icke bedrar och därmed ger människan “fria händer” i förhållande till naturen. Gillespie uppehåller sig inte vid hur hos Rousseau denna Guds vilja blivit kollektiviserad i den i folkdjupet dolda känslomässiga allmänviljan. Men han framhåller själva viljans och frihetens irrationella natur och potentiella nyckfullhet även i den nya form den erhåller hos Rousseau: de drag som den cartesianska rationalismen i sin grundintention ville övervinna men som nu åter tydligt framträder. [Nihilism Before Nietzsche, 72, 86, 99 f., 104 f.; utförligare än Gillespie om de idéhistoriska viljelinjerna bakåt från just Rousseau är Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (1986).]

Vi ser här inte bara, på nytt sätt, hur den klassicistiska objektivismen har vikit för romantiken, och hur rationalismen har övergått i sentimentalism, utan också hur den teistiska subjektivistiska voluntarismen (hur vi nu teologiskt skall bedöma den) trätt tillbaka till förmån för mänskligt-kollektivistisk subjektivistisk voluntarism. Tvivelsutan var friheten ett av de temata i Rousseaus tänkande som mest uppmärksammades av samtid och eftervärld. Lika uppenbart är emellertid att hans frihetsuppfattning på grund av det oskiljaktiga sammanhanget med hans övriga ståndpunkter blev problematisk. Och en irrationell och ur “naturgodheten” sprungen rent mänsklig spontanitet är för övrigt naturligtvis, som moralens garant, oacceptabel även ur den biblisk-teistiska, teologiska tolknings perspektiv som i vissa avseenden även Lindbom och Gillespie måste finna lika problematiskt. Vi befinner oss här redan långt inne i vad Lindbom kallar Människorikets nya overklighet, den nya drömvärlden av sagor om den psykofysiska Människan.

Ferdinando Sardella: Modern Hindu Personalism

The History, Life, and Thought of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati

Oxford University Press, December 2012 (estimated)     Amazon.com

From the publisher’s website:

– This is the first monograph about the life and thought of a key religious figure of modern Hinduism

– It questions the perception of an alleged nondualistic (monistic) essence within modern Hinduism and presents an alternative view

– It contributes to a global history of bhakti movements in the modern period

– It presents an important aspect of the modern development of Vaishnavism in Bengal based on little known or previously unknown primary sources in Bengali and other languages

– It provides a comprehensive history of the roots in Bengal of the Hare Krishna movement

– It fills a gap in the history of the interactions between India and the West during the colonial period with particular reference to Britain and Germany

Modern Hindu Personalism explores the life and works of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1874-1937), a Vaishnava guru of the Chaitanya school of Bengal. Ferdinando Sardella examines Bhaktisiddhanta’s background, motivation and thought, especially as it relates to his forging of a modern traditionalist institution for the successful revival of Chaitanya Vaishnava bhakti. Originally known as the Gaudiya Math, that institution not only established centers in both London (1933) and Berlin (1934), but also has been indirectly responsible for the development of a number of contemporary global offshoots, including the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Hare Krishna movement). Sardella provides the historical background as well as the contemporary context of the India in which Bhaktisiddhanta lived and functioned, in the process shedding light on such topics as colonial culture and sensibilities, the emergence of an educated middle-class, the rise of the Bengal Renaissance, and the challenge posed by Protestant missionaries. Bhaktisiddhanta’s childhood, education and major influences are examined, as well as his involvement with Chaitanya Vaishnavism and the practice of bhakti. Sardella depicts Bhaktisiddhanta’s attempt to propagate Chaitanya Vaishnavism internationally by sending disciples to London and Berlin, and offers a detailed description of their encounters with Imperial Britain and Nazi Germany. He goes on to consider Bhaktisiddhanta’s philosophical perspective on religion and society as well as on Chaitanya Vaishnavism, exploring the interaction between philosophical and social concerns and showing how they formed the basis for the restructuring of his movement in terms of bhakti. Sardella places Bhaktisiddhanta’s life and work within a taxonomy of modern Hinduism and compares the significance of his work to the contributions of other major figures such as Swami Vivekananda. Finally, Bhaktisiddhanta’s work is linked to the development of a worldwide movement that today involves thousands of American and European practitioners, many of whom have become respected representatives of Chaitanya bhakti in India itself.

Author Information:

Ferdinando Sardella is a researcher and the Director for the Forum for South Asia Studies for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University. He is a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. In 2010 he received the Donner Institute Prize for outstanding research in the field of Religious Studies at the Åbo Akademi University in Finland.

Idealism and the Renewal of Humanistic Philosophy, 5

Idealism and the Renewal of Humanistic Philosophy, 1

Idealism and the Renewal of Humanistic Philosophy, 2

Idealism and the Renewal of Humanistic Philosophy, 3

Idealism and the Renewal of Humanistic Philosophy, 4

Bradley’s account of the relational stages through which experience develops is problematic in some respects – and I will return to this shortly – but it does seek to describe the philosophical approximation to the absolute through the increasing grasp of the connectedness of things, their constitution through their relations to each other, and the vision of contradictions as reconciled in the absolute.

Bradley also outlines modes of experience as distinguished by content, independent of each other and neither hierarchically related nor successive. Collingwood gave a more systematic account of these modes, although partly under the influence of Croce he retained the Hegelian view of succession. While Croce’s absolute historicism, taken over by Collingwood, is problematic, Croce had a clearer understanding of the precise role of philosophy in relation to the modes. It is true that the modes are not wholly autonomous or independent of each other.

Like Green, Caird, and Bosanquet, Collingwood is also right that philosophy can to some extent and in a certain sense throw its own light on the modes. In this sense he retains idealism’s general claims on behalf of philosophy which had been challenged since the mid-nineteenth century and were again raised in a different mode by phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics. But this means that it is not clear that, as some of these thinkers hold, the mind can know itself only through the modes, or that the absolute is merely the modes taken together. This would still be the familiar consequence of philosophy’s resignation or surrender. Clearly philosophy does not simply supplant the modes, but neither is it wholly reducible to the function of their cartographer and intrinsic explicator.

Oakeshott again insists that the modes must be autonomous. The presuppositions and methods, or the “reason” appropriate to one of them, cannot be applied to any of the others. But although he rejects the interference of philosophy in the operations of the modes, in his early work he also insists on the independent nature of the distinct perspective of philosophy, which preserves the wholeness of the flow of experience in the course of its advance in reflection on the mutually independent modes. But since he defines rationalism as the belief in one uniform kind of independently valid reason which is externally applied to or imposed on modes which because of its externality it can never adequately know, and which thus, for the purpose of reorganization, overrides their own postulates and rationalities, it is no mystery that Oakeshott, who from the beginning rejected the absolute as “beyond conception and outside of the world of experience”, later tended to think that this independence of philosophy and its higher or larger perspective vis-à-vis the modes in itself implied a return of rationalism, and that after all it had to lead to the imposition not of the rationality of one mode upon another but of that of philosophy upon all of them.

The reason why I think Oakeshott was wrong in moving in this direction is the problem with the understanding, which motivated it, of the distinct perspective of philosophy and of the absolute, and not least of the nature of the reason which is specific to philosophy. Like Collingwood, Oakeshott relinquished too much of his basic idealist inspirations. It is time to reconnect to them.

Along with the discovery of the experiential whole there came in early idealism the discovery of the distinct speculative reason of philosophy, Vernunft, the reason which, as was gradually understood, discerns and describes the conditional modes of experience and is critically aware of the nature of the other kind of reason, Verstand, which produces abstract classificatory fictions and indeed constitutes some of the modal discourses (Vernunft can also have different meanings in idealism, meanings which, however, do not invalidate this one and are also distinct from Verstand). Only through this distinct, philosophical reason is it possible to perceive the modes qua modes, their nature, their limits, and their relations to each other and to the whole.

Against the kind of realist empiricism that emphasizes sense experience as giving access to objective reality independent of it, idealism teaches not only that both sense experience and reason are experience, but that, as such, they are reality. Oakeshott, with other British idealists, was aware that there is reason in sense experience, that sense experience is not distinct from judgements. But it seems to me that this awareness needs to be deepened and sharpened. Not only does the simplest perception of a “table” include the judgement “this is a table”. Leander and Ryn also uphold the position that any such simple perception also involves the judgement “this is something perceived”, in contradistinction to something merely imagined. Perception is a unity of immediacy and thought, or concrete thought. This becomes especially evident in the observations of the self-knowledge which Leander’s and Ryn’s kind of idealism accepts as fundamental in philosophy. Empirical observation is inseparable from self-observation in the same act. I can know a modal arrest, an abstractive découpage or pragmatic fiction only if I am aware of the context from which it is made.

It is thus not, Ryn continues to explain in accordance with Crocean Hegelianism, merely a question of classificatory reason being applied to sense experience. The reason operative in sense experience is a distinct kind of reason, a concrete reason in which experience and concept coincide, inseparable from the experientially given, from the content on which it works, a philosophical or historical reason with a logic of its own. It is through this reason that experience is intrinsically rational and acquires conceptual self-awareness. Perception implies concrete, historical thought, which is inseparable from philosophical reflection, the ideally evolving phenomenology of mind that is human self-knowledge and that carries with it the evidence of its own completeness.

The advance of philosophy proper is thus not only the identification of the place of the modes in what Oakeshott calls “the spectrum of knowledge as a whole”. It is also, negatively, the progressive elimination, for specifically philosophical purposes, of merely pragmatic classifications and the partialities, limits and incoherencies of modal thought, and, positively, the gradual, tentative discernment, identification, and formulation of what Croce calls categorial realities and distinctions, the permanent structure and order of experience and reality.

This is not a matter of the rationalist or explorative hypothesizing about the hidden structures of the modes. Humanistic philosophy seeks the universal as concretely experienced. It necessarily combines its own pre-theoretical language, interpretive and explicative, with a language that could be said to be explanatory in the “speculative” sense. Its improvement upon its concepts is an infinite task, but the structures it begins to discern if properly pursued are real, and they are what is presupposed in the formation also of such concepts as concept, mode, abstraction, pragmatic thought, perception, imagination, explication, categorial thought, exploration, fact, hypothesis, and verification. Ryn also accepts the position that philosophical reason is the reason which can articulate the experience of freedom, whereas abstractive reason or Verstand, left to itself, invariably produces deterministic theories.

W. J. Mander: British Idealism

A History

Oxford University Press, 2011     Amazon.com

From the publisher’s website:

– The first history of British Idealism to be written

– Establishes detailed historical context for this philosophical movement

– Presents philosophical positions clearly and accurately

– Covers a wide range of thinkers and philosophical fields

– Includes detailed notes and bibliography

W. J. Mander presents the first ever synoptic history of British Idealism, the philosophical school which dominated English-language philosophy from the 1860s through to the early years of the following century. Offering detailed examination of the origins, growth, development, and decline of this mode of thinking, British Idealism: A History restores to its proper place this now almost wholly forgotten period of philosophical history. Through clear explanation of its characteristic concepts and doctrines, and paying close attention to the published works of its philosophers, the volume provides a full-length history of this vital school for those wishing to fill a gap in their knowledge of the history of British Philosophy, while its detailed notes and bibliography will guide the more dedicated scholar who wishes to examine further their distinctive brand of philosophy. By covering all major philosophers involved in the movement (not merely the most famous ones like Bradley, Green, McTaggart, and Bosanquet but the lesser known figures like the Caird brothers, Henry Jones, A. S. Pringle-Pattison, and R. B. Haldane) and by looking at all branches of philosophy (not just the familiar topics of ethics, political thought, and metaphysics but also the less well documented work on logic, religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy), British Idealism: A History brings out the movement’s complex living pattern of unity and difference; something which other more superficial accounts have tended to obscure.

Table of Contents:

Preface

1  Introduction

2  Beginnings and Influences

3  The History of Philosophy

4  The Metaphysics of the Absolute

5  Idealist Philosophy of Religion

6  The Idealist Ethic of Social Self-Realisation

7  Idealist Political and Social Philosophy

8  Idealist Logic

9  Aesthetics and Literature

10  Developments in Idealist Metaphysics

11  Developments in Idealist Philosophy of Religion

12  Developments in Idealist Logic

13  Developments in Idealist Ethics

14  Developments in Idealist Political and Social Philosophy

15  The After-Life of Idealism

Bibliography

Index

Review:

“The first really comprehensive and systematic overview of the British Idealist movement to date…an authoritative and immensely detailed synopsis of the movement as a whole, including, for any potential research students, a splendid
biographical resource…a welcome and extremely well-done history…it provides a valuable and detailed corrective to the way British philosophy has constructed its own historical self-image in the later twentieth century.”  Andrew Vincent, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Author Information:

W. J. Mander was educated at University College London and Corpus Christi College Oxford. After holding a Junior Research Fellowship at St Anne’s College, he became a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. Although he is also interested in Early Modern Philosophy, his main area of research is in Nineteenth Century British Philosophy.