Official UK price is £25, but Amazon.co.uk is selling for £22 and £12.99 on Kindle. In Canada, $53.95 and $17.99 Kindle, and in Europe €22.19 and £18.75 Kindle.
One of the first reviews is in The Scotsman, and says (in part) "This very fine book is a forensic look at the movement and its influence, and has several points where you both realise something and ponder 'why did I never realise that?'”
That is rather what I had hoped for.
The book looks at the intellectual foundations of Traditionalism, its application both to various projects, and "post-Traditionalism." Each chapter looks first at the general intellectual background to the issue it discusses, and then at Traditionalist understandings, starting in most cases with René Guénon and ending as much as possible with living Traditionalists.
10 comments:
I am still perplexed why the cover of the US edition is so much uglier. I want the one with the tree, and I hope I will be able to find it when I visit this month for ESSWE!
Excellent news, I shall order my copy now. Your previous books, Against the Modern World and Western Sufism have been very helpful in giving us the background story to some of the most interesting spiritual and intellectual movements of modern times.
Could you share the table of content?
I'm just reading it now and it's great. In the third chapter, I was surprised to see that you portray Guenon as not too hostile to science, but just regarding it as dealing only with the material domain. I've read six of Guenon's books, and it seems to me that he is very hostile to science. For example, he emphatically rejected the theory of evolution. He also sees scientific theories as expressions of metaphysical developments - for example, classical physics (and general relativity) are based on the idea of a continuum, but the idea of the continuum still contains a qualitative aspect according to Guenon, and so physics eventually developed quantum mechanics based on discrete quantities, moving in the direction of the purely quantitative. This would seem to imply that the theories of physics are not true, but only reflect a particular phase in the metaphysical cycle. He seems to hold to an idealist view that reality itself actually changes as metaphysical forces unfold, so that a theory of physics might be true today but not true in one hundred years time (see e.g. his views on the "solidification of the world"). Guenon, in this respect, was just as anti-science as are creationists. Similarly, you argue that he doesn't depend too much on historical chains of transmission, but it seems to me that he does believe in such historical transmission in Europe as elsewhere, and he makes pretty ludicrous historical claims on many occasions. I think these are the weakest aspects of his theory.
Some of his most implausible claims, I think, are found in "the metaphysical principles of the infinitesimal calculus". He does have a good explanation of the traditional Neoplatonist and Advaitic view of the pure infinite, distinguished from the quantitative infinite (or infinites, if you accept transfinite numbers). But one could just as easily read Plotinus or Shankara and understand the same thing. Much of the rest of what he says about modern mathematics, however, is extremely implausible. For example, he argues that complex numbers are just distorted inventions of moderns and not true numbers, which in mathematical terms is ludicrous. He only accepts numbers as being "real" that were known and understood by ancient civilizations. He is simply unable to give credit to modernity for anything at all. I agree with him that modernity is terrible, but that doesn't mean it hasn't achieved anything at all. At least give credit where credit is due.
ToC at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/traditionalism-9780197683767?cc=us&lang=en#
In your latest book you see a connection between the thought of Guenon ( or so -called "traditionalism " in general )and Neoplatonism .
i think Guenon hardly refers to Neoplatonism anywhere although Schuon ( who is a thoroughly discredited figure as far as i'm concerned ) described himself as a " neo - platonist ".
I would suggest even that Guenon had no time for neoplatonism because its emanationist cosmology is incompatible with his metaphysic ( read his masterly essay " Creation and Manifestation "
En effet, I'idée d' < émanation
, est proprement celle d'une sortie ;
mais Ia manifestation ne doit en aucune
façon être envisagée ainsi, car rien ne peut
réellement sortir du Principe; si quelque
chose en sortait, le Principe, dès lors, ne
pourrait plus être infini, et il se trouverait
limité par le fait même de la manifestation;
la vérité est que, hors du Principe, il n'y a et
il ne peut y avoir que le néant.
.
In theory, if Guenon was consistent then he would also disqualify the kabbalah with its sephirothic emanations. However , he doesn't mention this .
Congratulations, Mark!
To Avery et al:
To get a copy with the tree on the cover, order from a bookseller with access to the UK edition.
Found my copy on the abebooks dot com website.
Their set up is helpful - it gives pictures of the US and UK editions.
The key people to watch out in the Western World are Charles III and his Indian political guru Ravi Kumar Kandamath of the London School of Mindfulness Wellbeing who has connections in the Commonwealth political world and to the ultra traditionalist Christians in Walsingham in rural Norfolk close to the royal palace in Sandringham and figures like Kallistos Ware and the patriarchs of Mount Athos. He is also from a royal spiritual lineage of South Indian Sankaracharyas who follow caste and sex based segregation and purification rituals. Keith Critchlow of Temenos Academy was also a key disciple of the Hindu Sufi Swami Sathya Sai Baba on whom the BBC produced an expose. I studied in a group organised by Temenos Academy where a very traditionalist view of Hinduism was presented as opposed to a more reformed pluralistic view. He insisted during lectures that I read Guenon's Crisis of the Modern World as a preliminary to any serious study of Hinduism.
I have now read this from cover to cover and it is an excellent book, very fair and balanced, as well as comprehensive. Obviously, it is written from an etic perspective, not by a committed Traditionalist. It is unquestionably the best scholarly book on this subject in the English language.
I have left a longer review on amazon.com, unfortunately it has not yet appeared, although my 5-star rating has. I assume they will put it up eventually. Note: I would request people not dox me on this thread by posting my full name. You can refer to me by my initials AH if you want to respond.
Regarding anonymous's comments above denying any influence of Neoplatonism on Guenon, can I respond. I am a scholar of Neoplatonism with publications in that field and I have read Plotinus and other Neoplatonist authors in the original Greek. I have also read six of Guenon's books. I can tell you that Guenon is massively influenced by Neoplatonism, whether he recognized it or not, and if anyone thinks differently, I can only conclude they have never read any Neoplatonism at all. The resemblances between Guenon's thought and Neoplatonism are massive, and this should not surprise, since the resemblances between Neoplatonism and Advaita Vedanta are also massive, and you can hardly deny that Guenon used Shankara as a source, since he says so explicitly.
The problem is that Guenon often does not document his sources, and he may even be unaware of them since Neoplatonism had hugely influenced the mystical traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and Guenon may simply not be aware of this. For example, another poster above mentions Kabbalah. But Gershom Scholem, who was the greatest scholar of Kabbalah in the 20th century, wrote, "The speculative expositions of kabbalistic teaching largely depend upon the ideas of neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy, as they were known in the Middle Ages, and were couched in the terminology customary to those fields" (p. 87, "Kabbalah"). Also, "within a conceptual Platonic system a theosophic understanding of God came to the fore" (p. 101, ibid.). Similarly, Sufism in Islam, and the Christian mystics, were all heavily influenced by Neoplatonism. There would be no such thing as a mystical tradition within the Abrahamic religions without Neoplatonism, and Guenon's whole theory depends upon the existence of such as esoteric strand.
Where Guenon departs from Neoplatonist ideas in his general metaphysical system, as he sometimes does, this is usually precisely where Advaita Vedanta departs from Neoplatonism. However, the overall influence of Neoplatonism is massive. To deny this is ridiculous.
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