Aristotle (FS)

According to Pythagoras, wisdom is a priori the knowledge of the stellar world and of all that is situated above us; sophia being the wisdom of the gods, and philosophia that of men. For Heraclitus, the philosopher is one who applies himself to the knowledge of the profound nature of things; whereas for Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for ARISTOTLE, it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them. sophiaperennis: What is a philosopher?

If the Westerner – “free thinker” or not – has a tendency to “think for himself,” wrongly or rightly according to the case, this is due to distant causes; the Western mind expressed itself through Plato and ARISTOTLE before having undergone the influence of Christian fideism, and even then, and from the very outset, it could not help having recourse to the Greek philosophers. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

Wearied by the artifices and the lack of imagination of academic rationalism, many of our contemporaries in rejecting it reject true metaphysics as well, because they think it “abstract” – which in their minds is synonymous with “artificial” – and seek the “concrete,” not beyond the rational and in the order of ontological prototypes, but in crude fact, in the sensory, the “actual”; man becomes the arbitrary measure of everything, and thereby abdicates his dignity as man, namely his possibility of objective and universal knowledge. He is then the measure of things not in a truly human but in an animal way; his dull empiricism is that of an animal which registers facts and notices a pasture or a path; but since he is despite all a “human animal,” he disguises his dullness in mental arabesques. The existentialists are human as it were by chance; what distinguishes them from animals is not human intelligence but the human style of an infra-human intelligence. The protagonists of “concrete” thought, of whatever shade, readily label as “speculations in the abstract” whatever goes beyond their understanding, but they forget to tell us why these speculations are possible, that is to say what confers this strange possibility on human intelligence. Thus what does it mean that for thousands of years men deemed to be wise have practiced such speculations, and by what right does one call “intellectual progress” the replacement of these speculations by a crude empiricism which excludes on principle any operation characteristic of intelligence? If these “positivists” are right, none but they are intelligent; all the founders of religions, all the saints, all the sages have been wrong on essentials whereas Mr. So-and-So at long last sees things clearly; one might just as well say that human intelligence does not exist. There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, ARISTOTLE or Thomas Aquinas – not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia – were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

What is certain is that ARISTOTLE’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; ARISTOTLE had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. The modems have reproached the PRE-Socratic philosophers – and all the sages of the East as well – with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well. How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already – for it alone could conceive of any such idea – and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? sophiaperennis: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Klages and others like them.

This book is founded on a doctrine which is metaphysical in the most precise meaning of the word and cannot by any means be described as philosophical. Such a distinction may appear unwarrantable to those who are accustomed to regard metaphysic as a branch of philosophy, but the practice of linking the two together in this manner, although it can be traced back to ARISTOTLE and the Scholastic writers who followed him, merely shows that all philosophy suffers from certain limitations which, even in the most favourable instances such as those just quoted, exclude a completely adequate appreciation of metaphysic. In reality the transcendent character of metaphysic makes it independent of any purely human mode of thought. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with ARISTOTLE, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists – not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus – ARISTOTLE on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out. sophiaperennis: Modern philosophers

In other words, rationalism does not present itself as a possible – and necessarily relative – development of a traditional and sapiential point of view, but it usurps the function of pure intellectuality. But there are degrees to be observed here, as for example with ARISTOTLE: his fundamental ideas – like those of “form” and “matter” (hylomorphism) – really flow from a metaphysical knowledge, and so from supra-mental intuition; they carry in themselves all the universal significance of symbols and become rational – and therefore “abstract” – only to the extent that they become encrusted in a more or less artificial system. sophiaperennis: Modern philosophers

It is the sophists, with Protagoras at their head, who are the true precursors of modern thought; they are the “thinkers” properly so called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with “perceiving” and taking into account that which “is.” And it is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and ARISTOTLE the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned – Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well – but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit. sophiaperennis: Protagoras

The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with ARISTOTLE, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists – not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus – ARISTOTLE on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out. sophiaperennis: Protagoras

As for the profane and properly rationalistic philosophy of the Greeks, which is personified especially by Protagoras and of which ARISTOTLE is not completely free, it represents a deviation of the perspective which normally gives rise to gnosis or jnana; when this perspective is cut off from pure intellection, and thus from its reason for existence, it becomes fatally hostile to religion and open to all kinds of hazards; the sages of Greece did not need the Fathers of the Church to know this, and the Fathers of the Church could not prevent the Christian world from falling into this trap. Moreover through the civilizationism which it claims as its own, so as not to lose any glory, the Church paradoxically assumes responsibility for the modern world – described as “Christian civilization” – which nevertheless is nothing other than the excrescence of that human wisdom stigmatized by the Fathers. sophiaperennis: Protagoras

Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas ARISTOTLE represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that ARISTOTLE was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, “reason” is synonymous with “intellect”: reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration. sophiaperennis: Plato

It should be noted that Meister Eckhart called Plato ” the great priest”, and that Jili had a vision of him “filling the whole of space with light”; also, that the disciples of Rumi see in Plato (Sayyid-na Aflatun) a kind of prophet. Moslem authors in general see in him an eminent master of music, like Orpheus charming wild beasts with his lute in virgin nature whither he had withdrawn after a disagreement with ARISTOTLE, which is full of meaning. It may be added that Plato, like Socrates and Pythagoras, was the providential spokesman of Orphism. sophiaperennis: Plato

In Plotinus the essence of Platonism reveals itself without any reserves. Here one passes from the passion-centered body to the virtuous soul and from the soul to the cognizant Spirit, then from and through the Spirit to the suprarational and unitive vision of the ineffable One, which is the source of all that exists; in the One the thinking subject and the object of thought coincide. The One projects the Spirit as the sun projects light and heat: that is to say, the Spirit, Nous, emanates eternally from the One and contemplates It. By this contemplation the Spirit actualizes in itself the world of the archetypes or ideas – the sum of essential or fundamental possibilities – and thereafter produces the animic world; the latter in its turn engenders the material world – this dead end where the reflections of the possibilities coagulate and combine. The human soul, brought forth by the One from the world of the archetypes, recognizes these in their earthly reflections, and it tends by its own nature toward its celestial origin. With ARISTOTLE, we are much closer to the earth, though not yet so close as to find ourselves cut off from heaven. If by rationalism is meant the reduction of the intelligence to logic alone and hence the negation of intellectual intuition (which in reality has no need of mental supports even though they may have to be used for communicating perceptions of a supramental order), then it will be seen that Aristotelianism is a rationalism in principle but not absolutely so in fact, since its theism and hylomorphism depend on Intellection and not on reasoning alone. (NA: Hylomorphism is a plausible thesis, but what is much less plausible is the philosopher’s opposition of this thesis to the Platonic Ideas, of which it is really only a prolongation, one that tends to exteriorize things to a dangerous degree just because of the absence of those Ideas.) And this is true of every philosophy that conveys metaphysical truths since an unmitigated rationalism is possible only where these truths or intellections are absent. (NA: Kantian theism does not benefit from this positive reservation; for Kant, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of ARISTOTLE.) sophiaperennis: Plato

According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great received from ARISTOTLE not only the doctrines concerning morality and politics, but also “those enigmatic and profound” theories that certain masters intended to “reserve for oral communication for initiates, without allowing many to learn about them.” Having heard that ARISTOTLE had published some of these teachings, Alexander reproached him in a letter; but Plutarch assures us that the books of ARISTOTLE treating of metaphysics are “written in a style that renders them unusable for the ordinary reader, and useful only as memoranda for those who already have been instructed in this subject.” Let us add however that according to the Kabbalists, “it is better to divulge wisdom than to forget it”; this is perhaps what Joachim of Fiore thought of when foreseeing an “age of the Spirit.” sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

The evolutionist rationalists are of the opinion that ARISTOTLE, being the father of logic, is ipso facto the father of intelligence become at last mature and efficacious; they obviously are unaware that this flowering of a discipline of thought, while having its merits, goes more or less hand in hand with a weakening, or even an atrophy, of intellectual intuition. The angels, it is said, do not possess reason, for they have no need of reasoning; this need presupposes in fact that the spirit, no longer able to see, must “grope.” It may be objected that the greatest metaphysicians, hence the greatest intellectual intuitives, made use of reasoning; no doubt, but this was only in their dialectic – intended for others – and not in their intellection as such. It is true that a reservation applies here: since intellectual intuition does not a priori encompass all aspects of the real, reasoning may have the function of indirectly provoking a “vision” of some aspect; but in this case reasoning operates merely as an occasional cause, it is not a constitutive element of the cognition. We will perhaps be told that reasoning may actualize in any thinker a suprarational intuition, which is true in principle, yet in fact it is more likely that such an intuition will not be produced, as there is nothing in the profane mentality that is predisposed thereto, to say the least. sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

In the preceding considerations, we do not have ARISTOTLE in mind, we blame only those who believe that Aristotelianism represents a monopoly of intelligence, and who confuse simple logic with intelligence as such, something which ARISTOTLE never dreamed of doing. That logic can be useful or necessary for earthly man is obvious; but it is also obvious that logic is not what leads directly and indispensably to knowledge – which does not mean that illogicality is legitimate or that the suprarational coincides with the absurd. If it were objected that in mysticism and even in theology there exists a pious absurdity, we would reply that in this case absurdity is merely “functional” – somewhat as in the koans of Zen – and that it is necessary to examine the underlying intentions in order to do justice to the dialectic means; in this domain, there is a case for saying that “the end justifies the means.” sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

Man must “become that which he is” because he must “become That which is”; “the soul is all that it knows,” said ARISTOTLE. sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

Every language is a soul, said ARISTOTLE; that is to say a psychic or mental dimension. There are languages that are parallel, such as French and Italian, as there are those that are complementary, such as French and German; it could also be said that there are linguistic families, hence genera, that on the one hand include and on the other exclude. sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

God is both unknowable and knowable, a paradox which implies – on pain of absurdity – that the relationships are different, first of all on the plane of mere thought and then in virtue of everything that separates mental knowledge from that of the heart; the first is a “perceiving,” and the second a “being.” “The soul is all that it knows,” said ARISTOTLE; it is necessary to add that the soul is able to know all that it is; and that in its essence it is none other than That which is, and That which alone is. sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

From the standpoint of integral rationalism, ARISTOTLE has been reproached with stopping halfway and thus being in contradiction with his own principle of knowledge; but this accusation stems entirely from an abusive exploitation of Aristotelian logic, and is the product of a thinking that is artificial to the point of perversion. To ARISTOTLE’s implicit axioms, which his detractors are incapable of perceiving, they oppose a logical automatism which the Stagirite would have been the first to repudiate. If ARISTOTLE is to be blamed it is for the quite contrary reason that his formulation of metaphysics is governed by a tendency toward exteriorization, a tendency which is contrary to the very essence of all metaphysics. Aristotelianism is a science of the Inward expanding toward the outward and thereby tends to favor exteriorization, whereas traditional metaphysics is invariably formulated in view of an interiorization, and for this reason does not encourage the expansion of the natural sciences, or not to an excessive extent. It is this flaw in Aristotelianism that explains the superficiality of its method of knowledge, which was inherited by Thomism and exploited by it as a religious pretext to limit the intellective faculty, despite the latter being capable in principle both of absoluteness and hence also of reaching out to the supernatural; the same defect also explains the corresponding mediocrity of Aristotelian ethics, not to mention the scientism which proves ARISTOTLE’s deviation from the epistemological principle. The important point to retain here is that the Monotheists, whether Semite or Semitized, could not have incorporated ARISTOTLE in their teachings if he had been exclusively a rationalist; but in incorporating him they nonetheless became poisoned, and the partial or virtual rationalism – or rationalism in principle – which resulted has finally given rise to totalitarian rationalism, systematic and self-satisfied, and consequently shut off from every element that is subjectively or objectively suprarational. (NA: It might seem surprising that Scholasticism chose ARISTOTLE and not Plato or Plotinus, hut the reason for this is plain, since from the viewpoint of objective faith there is everything to be gained by promoting a wisdom that offers no competition, and which makes it possible, on the one hand, to neutralize that interloper Intellection, and, on the other, to give carte blanche to any theological contradictions that may occur by describing them as “mysteries.”) The Aristotelian Pandora’s box is scientism coupled with sensationalism; it is through these concepts that ARISTOTLE deviates from Plato by replacing the interiorizing tendency with its inverse. People say that the Church has kept science in chains; what is certain is that the modern world has unchained it with the result that it has escaped from all control, and, in the process of destroying nature, is headed toward the destruction of mankind. For genuine Christianity, as for every other traditional perspective, the world is what it appears to be to our empirical vision and there is no good reason for it to be anything else; herein lies the real significance, on the one hand, of the naïveté of the Scriptures, and, on the other, of the trial of Galileo. To try and pierce the wall of collective, normal, millenary experience is to eat of the forbidden fruit, leading fatally to the loss of essential knowledge and earthly equilibrium through the euphoria engendered by a completely unrealistic autodivinization of man. sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

A man such as ARISTOTLE provides a classic example of a qualification that is exclusively intellectual and, by this very fact, unilateral and necessarily limited, even on the level of his genius, since perfect intellection ipso facto involves contemplation and interiorization. In the case of the Stagirite, the intelligence is penetrating but the tendency of the will is exteriorizing, in conformity moreover with the cosmolatry of the majority of the Greeks; it is this that enabled Saint Thomas to support the religious thesis regarding the “natural” character of the intelligence, so called because it is neither revealed nor sacramental, and the reduction of intelligence to reason illumined by faith, the latter alone being granted the right to be “supernatural.” Not that Saint Thomas thereby excluded direct intellection, which would indeed have been impossible for him, but he enclosed it to all intents and purposes within dogmatic and rational limits, whence the paradox of an interiorizing contemplativity armed with an exteriorizing logic. sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

Contrary to too widespread an opinion, the moral doctrine of ARISTOTLE, who advocated the golden mean inasmuch as this is situated between two excesses, is not an invitation to mediocrity, nor is it responsible for the secular bourgeois respectability that it may have occasioned. However, this moral doctrine is to be distinguished from Christian morality which sees in morals a spiritual means – whence its sacrificial character – whereas for the Greeks, as for most Orientals, moral equilibrium is spiritually a basis and not a means. sophiaperennis: ARISTOTLE

For Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for ARISTOTLE, it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and ARISTOTLE

The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by ARISTOTLE, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more “concrete” and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and ARISTOTLE

Aristotelianism is a kind of exteriorization of Platonism, that is to say of the doctrine represented by the line Pythagoras-Socrates-PlatoPlotinus. The Middle Ages showed at times an awareness of the superiority of Plato over ARISTOTLE; it is thus that Saint Bonaventure attributes “wisdom” to the former and “science” to the latter. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and ARISTOTLE

For Heidegger, for instance, the question of Being “proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and ARISTOTLE” and: “what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial” (Sein und Zeit). Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and ARISTOTLE should have “discovered” their ontology by dint of “thinking”; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite “indicative” and “provisional” role of “thinking” in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a “thinker,” misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: “It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology. As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently” (ibid.). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued? sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and ARISTOTLE

A certain underlying warrior or chivalric mentality does much to explain both the theological fluctuations and their ensuing disputes (NA: Let us not lose sight of the fact that the same causes produce the same effects in all climates – albeit to very varied extents and that India is no exception; the quarrels of sectarian Vishnuism are a case in point.) – the nature of Christ and the structure of the Trinity having been, in the Christian world, among the chief points at issue – just as it explains such narrownesses as the incomprehension and the intolerance of the ancient theologians towards Hellenism, its metaphysics and its mysteries. It is moreover this same mentality which produced, in the very bosom of the Greek tradition, the divergence of ARISTOTLE with regard to Plato, who personified in essence the brahmana spirit inherent in the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, (NA: It goes without saying that in the classical period – with its grave intellectual and artistic deviations – and then in its re- emergence at the time of the Renaissance, we have obvious examples of luciferianism of a warrior and chivalric, and therefore, kshatriya type. But it is not deviation proper that we have in mind here, since we are speaking on the contrary of manifestations that are normal and acceptable to Heaven, otherwise there could be no question of voluntarist and emotional upayas.) whereas the Stagirite formulated a metaphysics that was in certain respects centrifugal and dangerously open to the world of phenomena, actions, experiments and adventures. (NA: But let us not make Aristotelianism responsible for the modern world, which is due to the confluence of various factors, such as the abuses – and subsequent reactions – provoked by the unrealistic idealism of Catholicism, or such as the divergent and unreconciled demands of the Latin and Germanic mentalities; all of them converging on Greek scientism and the profane mentality.) sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and ARISTOTLE

Platonism, which is as it were “centripetal” and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is “centrifugal” and separative, tends to sever the world – and with it man – from its divine roots. This can serve theology inasmuch as it needs the image of a man totally helpless without dogmatic and sacramental graces; and this led St. Thomas to opt for ARISTOTLE – as against the Platonism of St. Augustine – and to deprive Catholicism of its deepest metaphysical dimension, while at the same time immunizing it – according to the usual opinion – against all temptation to “gnosis.” Be that as it may, we could also say, very schematically, that Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas ARISTOTLE represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that ARISTOTLE was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, “reason” is synonymous with “intellect”: reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and ARISTOTLE

There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, ARISTOTLE or Thomas Aquinas – not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia – were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

In reality, the philosophia perennis, actualized in the West, though on different levels, by Plato, ARISTOTLE, Plotinus, the Fathers and the Scholastics, constitutes a definitive intellectual heritage, and the great problem of our times is not to replace them with something better – for this something could not exist according to the point of view in question here – but to return to the sources, both around us and within us, and to examine all the data of contemporary life in the light of the one, timeless truth. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

The cosmological proof of God, which is found in both ARISTOTLE and Plato, and which consists in inferring from the existence of the world that of a transcendent, positive and infinite Cause, finds no greater favor in the eyes of those who deny the supernatural. According to these people the notion of God merely compensates, in this case, for our ignorance of causes, a gratuitous argument, if ever there was one, for the cosmological proof implies, not a purely logical and abstract supposition, hut a profound knowledge of causality. If we know what total causality is, namely the “vertical” and “descending” projection of a possibility through different degrees of existence, then we can conceive the First Cause; otherwise we cannot do so. Here again we observe that the objection arises from ignoring what is implicit: rationalists forget that “proof,” on the level in question, is a key or a symbol, a means of drawing back a veil rather than of providing actual illumination; it is not by itself a leap out of ignorance and into knowledge. The principial argument “indicates” rather than “proves”; it cannot be anything more than a guideline or an aide-mémoire, since it is impossible to prove the Absolute outside itself. If “to prove” means to know something by virtue of a particular mental stratagem – but for which one would perforce remain in ignorance – then there are no possible “proofs of God”; and this, moreover, explains why one can do without them in symbolist and contemplative metaphysics. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

ARISTOTLE, in erecting his table of categories – substance, quantity, quality, relation, activity, passivity, place, moment, position, condition – seems to have been more concerned about the rational classification of things than about their concrete nature. (NA: The Greek word kategoria, “argument,” means in the last analysis: an ultimate form of thought, that is to say a key-notion capable of classifying other notions, or even all the notions having a bearing on existence.) Our own standpoint* being closer to cosmology than to Peripatetic logic – although the boundaries fluctuate – we give preference to the following enumeration: object and subject, space and time, which are container-categories; matter and energy, form and number, which are content-categories; quality and quantity, simplicity and complexity, which are attribute categories; the first term of each couple being static, and the second, dynamic, approximately and symbolically speaking. This being granted, we cannot exclude other possible angles of vision, whether they be more analytic, or on the contrary more synthetic; and always prefigured by some symbolism of nature. (NA: Let us mention this fundamental enumeration: space, time, form, number, matter – fundamental because of its relation to the symbolism of the pentagram, the human body, the hand, the five elements. There are some who put “life” in place of matter, thinking no doubt of energy, which penetrates everything.) sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

It is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and ARISTOTLE the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned – Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well – but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

One must react against the evolutionist prejudice which makes out that the thought of the Greeks “attained” to a certain level or a certain result, that is to say, that the triad Socrates –Plato -ARISTOTLE represents the summit of an entirely “natural” thought, a summit reached after long periods of effort and groping. The reverse is the truth, in the sense that all the said triad did was to crystallize rather imperfectly a primordial and intrinsically timeless wisdom, actually of Aryan origin and typologically close to the Celtic, Germanic, Mazdean and Brahmanic esoterisms. There is in Aristotelian rationality and even in the Socratic dialectic a sort of “humanism” more or less connected with artistic naturalism and scientific curiosity, and thus with empiricism. But this already too contingent dialectic – and let us not forget that the Socratic dialogues are tinged with spiritual “pedagogy” and have something of the provisional in them – this dialectic must not lead us into attributing a “natural” character to intellections that are “supernatural” by definition, or “naturally supernatural”. On the whole, Plato expressed sacred truths in a language that had already become profaneprofane because rational and discursive rather than intuitive and symbolist, or because it followed too closely the contingencies and humours of the mirror that is the mind – whereas ARISTOTLE placed truth itself, and not merely its expression, on a profane and “humanistic” plane. The originality of ARISTOTLE and his school resides no doubt in giving to truth a maximum of rational bases, but this cannot be done without diminishing it, and it has no purpose save where there is a withdrawal of intellectual intuition; it is a “two-edged sword” precisely be-cause truth seems thereafter to be at the mercy of syllogisms. The question of knowing whether this constitutes a betrayal or a providential readaptation is of small importance here, and could no doubt be answered in either sense. (NA: With Pythagoras one is still in the Aryan East; with Socrates-Plato one is no longer wholly in that East – in reality neither “Eastern” nor “Western”, that distinction having no meaning for an archaic Europe – but neither is one wholly in the West; whereas with ARISTOTLE Europe begins to become speci fically “Western” in the current and cultural sense of the word. The East – or a particular East – forced an entry with Christianity, but the Aristotelian and Caesarean West finally prevailed, only to escape in the end from both ARISTOTLE and Caesar, but by the downward path. It is opportune to observe here that all modern theological attempts to “surpass” the teaching of ARISTOTLE can only follow the same path, in view of the falsity of their motives, whether implicit or explicit. What is really being sought is a graceful capitulation before evolutionary ” scientism”, before the machine, before an activist and demagogic socialism, a destructive psychologism, abstract art and surrealism, in short before modernism in all its forms – that modernism which is less and less a “humanism” since it de-humanizes, or that individualism which is ever more infra-individual. The moderns, who are neither Pythagoricians nor Vedantists, are surely the last to have any right to complain of ARISTOTLE.) What is certain is that ARISTOTLE’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; ARISTOTLE had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

The moderns have reproached the PRE-Socratic philosophers – and all the sages of the East as well – with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well. How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already – for it alone could conceive of any such idea – and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? But the present purpose is not to prolong this subject; it is simply to call attention to the parallelism between the PRE-Socratic – or more precisely the Ionian – wisdom and oriental doctrines such as the Vaisheshika and the Sankhya, and to underline, on the one hand, that in all these ancient visions of the Universe the implicit postulate is the innateness of the nature of things in the intellect (NA: In the terminology of the ancient cosmologists one must allow for its symbolism: when Thales saw in “water” the origin of all things, it is as certain as can be that Universal Substance – the Prakriti of the Hindus – is in question and not the sensible element. It is the same with the ” air” of Anaximenes of Miletus, or with the ” fire” of Heraclitus.) and not a supposition or other logical operation, and on the other hand, that this notion of innateness furnishes the very definition of that which the sceptics and empiricists think they must disdainfully characterize as “dogmatism”; in this way they demonstrate that they are ignorant, not only of the nature of intellection, but also of the nature of dogmas in the proper sense of the word. The admirable thing about the Platonists is not, to be sure, their “thought”, it is the content of their thought, whether it be called “dogmatic” or otherwise. The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with ARISTOTLE, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists – not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus – ARISTOTLE on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

It is said nowadays of Plato, ARISTOTLE and the Scholastics that they have been “left behind”; this means, in reality, that there is no longer anyone intelligent or normal enough to understand them, the acme of originality and emancipation being to mock things which are evident. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

For it is evident that if certain philosophers deny God – those precisely who detach reason from its roots – it is not because reason obliges them to do so, otherwise atheism would be natural to man, and otherwise a Plato or an ARISTOTLE, who are nonetheless accused of rationalism, would not have taken the trouble to speak of God; the very structure of reason would have dispensed them from it. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or ARISTOTLE

It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the “depths of the heart,” which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all others. They are accessible, intuitively and infallibly, to the “gnostic,” the “pneumatic,” the “theosopher” – in the proper and original meaning of these terms – and they are accessible consequently to the “philosopher” according to the still literal and innocent meaning of the word: to a Pythagoras or a Plato, and to a certain extent even to an ARISTOTLE, in spite of his exteriorizing and virtually scientistic perspective. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

Apart from the forms of sensory knowledge, Kant admits the categories, regarded by him as innate principles of cognition; these he divides into four groups inspired by ARISTOTLE, (NA: Quantity, quality, relation, and modality; the latter no doubt replacing the Aristotelian ” position.”) while at the same time subjectivizing the Aristotelian notion of category. He develops in his own way the peripatetic categories that he accepts while discarding others, without realizing that, regardless of Aristotelianism, the highest and most important of the categories have eluded his grasp. (NA: Such as the principial and cosmic qualities which determine and classify phenomena, or the universal dimensions which join the world to the Supreme Essence and which include each in its own manner the qualities mentioned above. ARISTOTLE for his part had the right not to speak of them in that he accepted God as being self-evident and his approach was in no way moralistic and empirical; since he accept ed God, he did not consider his categories to be exhaustive.) The categories are a priori independent of all experience since they are innate; Kant recognized this, yet he considered that they were capable of being “explored” by a process he called “transcendental investigation.” But how will one ever grasp the pure subject who explores and who investigates? sophiaperennis: Kantianism

For Kant, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of ARISTOTLE. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and ARISTOTLE should have “discovered” their ontology by dint of “thinking”; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite “indicative” and “provisional” role of “thinking” in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a “thinker,” misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: “It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarification of the fundamental question of ontology. sophiaperennis: Heidegger

Rationalism, taken in its broadest sense, is the very negation of Platonic anamnesis; it consists in seeking the elements of certitude in phenomena rather than in our very being. The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by ARISTOTLE, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more “concrete” and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved. Rationalism is the thought of the Cartesian “therefore,” which signals a proof; this has nothing to do with the “therefore” that language demands when we intend to express a logico-ontological relationship. Instead of cogito ergo sum, one ought to say: sum quia est esse, “I am because Being is”; “because” and not “therefore.” The certitude that we exist would be impossible without absolute, hence necessary, Being, which inspires both our existence and our certitude; Being and Consciousness: these are the two roots of our reality. Vedanta adds Beatitude, which is the ultimate content of both Consciousness and Being. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

Frithjof Schuon