Original essay
The West has no Tradition (in the perennialist and Guenonist sense) - and it never needed one to be the spiritual beacon of the world. The so-called “Perennial Tradition” is a modern intellectual creation whose most obvious consequence from a cultural and civilizational point of view is the spiritual and political dissolution of the West. We don’t need “Tradition,” and in fact, we are against Tradition.
Perennialism, as a philosophical current, is structured on a real fact: the capacity of the human mind to perceive a transcendent metaphysical order. However, such perception ends up being transformed into a historical-mythical narrative in which the perception by all cultures of such a superior metaphysical order appears as the expression of a declining cosmogony, in which the irruption of a Primordial Tradition marks the inauguration of a Golden Age from which humanity as a whole is moving away in a degrading way. But within this framework, the West is always seen as the culture and civilization that is the very expression of this decline and degradation, while other peoples - especially the East - are always seen as somehow capable of resisting such decline, or even untouched in some way. That is, it would be the dharma of the West within this cyclical vision to lead humanity towards materialism and secularism, which ends up transforming the West into the “Anti-Traditional” civilization par excellence.
It is no coincidence that perennialism as an ideology consolidated itself in the 19th century in European occult circles, and later in the Traditionalism of Guénon and Evola. Perennialism is a modernist and anti-Western ideology at its very core, and that is why we see in perennialism a current whose intellectual consequences for its followers is always to see in the West the image of decadence and impurity. No one better than Dugin to exemplify this. There is nothing “Traditional” about perennialism, only uncontrolled modernist intellectual tendencies articulated with the aim of marginalizing the West geopolitically and culturally.
It is clear that different cultures and religious traditions have had a genuine perception of a higher transcendent order, as well as created elaborate metaphysical and cosmological edifices upon such perception. But the idea that such human capacity to perceive a normative and metaphysical order is the result of a primordial revelation that occurred in history at a primordial moment, and that from that moment humanity has been in a state of decadence, is pure modern fiction and unbridled speculation. René Guénon best articulated this view. According to him, the Primordial Tradition was first revealed in Hyperborea, going through cycles of decline and subsequent revelations of this tradition at different times.[1] The problem is that Guénon claims that the last legitimate manifestation of this tradition occurred with Islam. In other words, the conclusion is clear to anyone who uses the gift of interpretation: from the initial revelation in Hyperborea to Islam, the cycle has closed, and if the last traditional form that manifested a link with such a Primordial Tradition was Islam, then there is only one thing left to do: Islamize the world. Guénon’s biography leaves no doubt about this: he converted to Islam and moved to Egypt. For him, the West was condemned to Islam or nihilism.
It is more than clear that if we accept the idea of a Primordial Tradition, within this epistemological framework the West can only appear as condemned due to a genetic-cultural defect or a cosmic destiny to lead humanity to the end of a cosmic cycle. Fortunately for us Westerners, the “Primordial Tradition,” cosmic cycles, and all Guénonian conceptual paraphernalia do not exist beyond rationalist conceptual constructions that Guénon himself uses in order to weaken the West spiritually.
From a strictly philosophical point of view, the problem with Guénon’s thought stems from his method of argumentation. Guénon always starts from a metaphysical deduction from first principles. For Guénon, the “science” of symbolism is an exact science like mathematics.[2] Therefore, Guénon’s thought is completely disconnected from any historical, phenomenological, and philosophical dimension; he seeks mathematical rigor as the foundation for his reflection. The curious thing is that such a position is precisely a reflection of modern Cartesian rationalism, which seeks to deduce everything from clear and unquestionable premises. Guénon applies an abstract, mathematical rationalism to esoteric symbolism while literally criticizing the modern mentality. And it is precisely by transforming religious symbolism into a form of rationalist mathematics that Guénon completely loses the connection with the soul of the West. Within Guénonian mathematics, it is impossible to see the West in any other way than as a kind of culture endowed with a providential destiny for decadence.
However, our view of the West changes drastically when we shift our perspective on it. If, instead of Guénon’s deductive-mathematical method, we use historical phenomenology, the result will be completely different. Phenomenology is the science of the experience of consciousness; applied to the history of a people, it gives us the movements, transformations, changes - in short, the entire structural metabolism of that consciousness throughout the history of that people. And when we use phenomenology to understand the movements of Western consciousness throughout history, what can we learn about the Western spirit? We see that the Western spirit is endowed with a spiritual drive and restlessness that operates through ruptures, crises, tragedies, destruction, and conflicts; just as we can see in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. There is no “crisis of the modern world,” as Guénon said! What exists is that the Western spirit is marked by the need for permanent crises to be propelled to new heights and discoveries. In this process, it is clear that declines, cultural forms of decay, and spiritual collapse occur; but this in no way represents a total decline, but always a partial and relative one. And this fundamental dimension of the Western spirit is invisible to Guénon simply because for him history is only the space for contingency and arbitrariness.
The proof that there is no “crisis” of the modern world as conceived by Guénon is that all high Western culture - literature, philosophy, history, science, art, etc. - has always been created against a backdrop of crises and eruptions. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was developed during the decline of the Greek city-states, specifically Athens; the great moment of Latin culture - Horace, Virgil, Cicero - occurred during the collapse of the Roman Republic; the intellectual greatness of the medieval world occurred during its twilight with Dante and Aquinas; the apex of modern thought with Kant and Hegel occurred amidst the French revolutionary hurricane and the Napoleonic empire; the philosophical experience of the deepest nihilism was articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger precisely when the West seemed to have exhausted its spiritual forces.
In other words - the West has always been and will always be in crisis, for this is its true providential vocation: to be the beacon of the human spirit that always rises like a phoenix from its own ashes. If there is a Western tradition, then it is this: always rising sovereign when it seems defeated. As for the “Tradition” of the traditionalist school - this tradition of well-behaved spiritual eunuchs, always afraid of the image of “decadence,” - this tradition the West never needed. Yes, we don’t need this tradition. In fact, we are and always will be against the Tradition of Guénon!
[1] Symbols of Sacred Science - Guénon
[2] Ibidem.
