A small anti-Traditionalist war machine: Bergson against Guénon

A recent article presents a critique of Guénon’s metaphysics using the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). It is Fernando Monegalha, “A tradição e seu outro: Bergson contra Guénon” (Tradition and its Other: Bergson versus Guénon), Revista Ética e Filosofia Política 28:2 (December 2025), available here (open access). It is in Portuguese, but with the help of AI we can all read Portuguese nowadays.

Monegalha suggests that “the far right is a symptom of [the] return of metaphysics, not its cause,” even if many people think the opposite, as the Traditionalist rejection of modernity is metaphysical, not sociological. 

He then attempts “to construct a small anti-Traditionalist war machine by opposing Bergson’s conception of metaphysics to that presented by Guénon in his writings,” beginning with Guénon’s criticism of Bergson and then attempting “a kind of Bergsonian metacritique of Guénon.” We must understand his need for an anti-Traditionalist war machine in terms of Brazilian politics, where the Bolsonaro famiy are associated with Traditionalism through Olavo de Carvalho (see here).

• Guénon understood time as a function of manifestation. The Principle is necessarily timeless; time, including decline to the Kali Yuga, comes with manifestation. 
• Bergson, in contrast, held that duration and creative change characterize even the ultimate Principle.
• For Guénon, this showed that Bergson’s metaphysics was wrong and distinctively modern.
• Monegalha argues that Guénon misunderstood Bergson. 

What is less clear, however, is whether Monegalha has achieved his objective of critiquing Guénon’s metaphysics in general, rather than just his understanding (and so critique) of Bergson. Bergson’s conception of duration is certainly incompatible with Guénon’s conception of the relationship between time and eternity, so they cannot both be right, but how do we know that Bergson was right, not Guénon?

Ivan Aguéli in Paris

The Swedish Institute in Paris is launching an exhibition entitled “Soleil et Lune. Andreas Eriksson en dialogue avec Ivan Aguéli” (“Sun and Moon: Andreas Eriksson in Conversation with Ivan Aguéli”) 20 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 at the Swedish Institute, 11 rue Payenne, 75003 Paris, Tuesday to Sunday, 12 pm to 7 pm. Late opening on Thursday, to 9 pm. Free admission.

Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975) is a contemporary Swedish artist who “works… in the fields of painting, photography, sculpture, film, and printmaking. Nature—especially trees—is an important source of inspiration for him,” according to Wikipedia.

According to the Swedish Institute,

At first glance, one might think that the differences between the two artists could not be greater. Ivan Aguéli, the anarchist, the Sufi, whose life of wandering in search of wisdom led him to an early grave, in extreme poverty. And Andreas Eriksson, whose art emerges from a single place. One constantly on the move, the other making immobility a necessary condition of painting. Yet, when we see their works side by side, the biographical differences seem to fade away. What unites them is the presence of the sensory in their work. Earth, stones, trees for Andreas Eriksson; sky, sun and moon for Ivan Aguéli. These paintings live in the same atmosphere and reflect a common quest for truth.

Further details at https://paris.si.se/en/events-projects/exhibition-soleil-et-lune-andreas-eriksson-in-dialogue-with-ivan-agueli/

In addition, there is a book by Sara Arrhenius, director of the Institute, that “presents the works of the two artists in parallel.”

My thanks to Marco Pasi for bring this exhibition to my attention.

Guénon, Coomaraswamy, and Eliade: who inspired whom?

There is a chapter on “Philosophia Perennis: Critical Syncretism in Coomaraswamy’s Native Hermeneutics of Asiatic Art” in Orientophilia and the Birth of Asian Hermeneutics (Brill, 2026) by Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay. Other chapters deal with “Orientophiles” of purely European origin: Goethe, Hegel, Herder, and Schopenhauer, before turning to Vivekananda and then Ananda Coomaraswamy. Or rather to Coomaraswamy, Mircea Eliade, and René Guénon—in that order. He introduces Guénon and Eliade as among “those who followed” Coomaraswamy.

The chapter’s decentering of Guénon raises interesting questions. Mukhopadhyay focuses instead on the Coomaraswamy-Eliade relationship, drawing extensively on Eliade’s long 1979 review of Roger Lipsey’s three-volume Coomaraswamy (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1977). This review, naturally enough, focuses on Coomaraswamy rather than Guénon. It also makes a comparison between the two to Guénon’s disadvantage: “contrary to René Guénon… Coomaraswamy developed his exegesis without surrendering the tools and methods of philology, archaeology, art history, ethnology, folklore, and history of religions.” One has to admit that Eliade’s judgment is justified, but one still wonders what Eliade would have said had he written at equal length on Guénon, which he did not.

So, who mattered most for Eliade, Coomaraswamy or Guénon? Perhaps it was indeed Coomaraswamy, as Mukhopadhyay’s treatment suggests. Alternatively, Coomaraswamy might have replaced Guénon. Eliade might have learned his perennialism from Guénon and then found Coomaraswamy’s more scholarly version more satisfying. The order may still have been Guénon to Coomaraswamy and Eliade, then, not Coomaraswamy to Guénon and Eliade. One can in fact see both Eliade and Coomaraswamy as adding a rigorous use of the tools and methods of philology, archaeology, etc. to Guénon’s basic schema.

Mukhopadhyay has an unusual view of the origins of Guénon’s thought:

Both Guénon and Coomaras¬wamy’s orientalist aesthetics are rooted in a select mix of orthodox Catholic doctrine and Protestantism, Oxford Idealism and Cambridge Neoplatonism, Bradleian Idealism and German Transcendentalism (whose dialectical philosophy of art follows from the same orthodox sources of Thomism, Spiritualism and the preceding Geistwissenschaft).

To some extent for Eliade, perhaps, but certainty not for Guénon.

Guénon in Russian

Readers of Russian are probably well aware of this, but I have only just come across the Minsk Corpus of René Guénon, at https://guenon.ru. This is the work of Maxim Makovchik, a Belorussian translator and Traditionalist who has been working on Guénon’s works since 2013. He has taken all existing Russian translations and improved them, having now covered (according to the website) all books published in Guénon’s lifetime, 55% of posthumous editions, 69% of joirnal articles, and 25% of letters. A valuable resource, comparable to the Index de l’œuvre et de la correspondance de René Guénon at https://www.index-rene-guenon.org.

Wendell Berry (1934–2026)

 

Wendell Berry, farmer, novelist, poet, and (perhaps) soft Traditionalist, died on August 31, 2026, at the age of 92. See earlier post and subsequent discussion here.