The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

by René Guénon

  The conclusion is this: quantity will predominate over quality in individuals to the extent that they approach a condition in which they are, so to speak, mere individuals and nothing more, and to the extent that they are thereby more separate one from another; and it must be emphasized that this does not mean that they are more differentiated, for there is also a qualitative differentiation, which is properly speaking the opposite of that quantitative differentiation in which the separation in question consists. This separation turns individuals into so many ‘units’, and turns their collectivity into quantitative multiplicity; at the limit, these individuals would be no more than something comparable to the imagined ‘atoms’ of the physicists, deprived of every qualitative determination; and although this limit can never in fact be reached, it lies in the direction which the world of today is following. A mere glance at things as they are is enough to make it clear that the aim is everywhere to reduce everything to uniformity, whether it be human beings themselves or the things among which they live, and it is obvious that such a result can only be obtained by suppressing as far as possible every qualitative distinction; but it is particularly to be noted that some people, through a strange delusion, are all too willing to mistake this ‘uniformization’ for a ‘unification’, whereas it is really exactly the opposite, as must appear evident in the light of the ever more marked accentuation of ‘separativity’ implied. It must be insisted that quantity can only separate and cannot unite; everything that proceeds from ‘matter’ produces nothing but antagonism, in many diverse forms, between fragmentary ‘units’ that are at a point directly opposite to true unity, or at least are pressing toward that point with all the weight of a quantity no longer balanced by quality; but ‘uniformization’ constitutes so important an aspect of the modern world, and one so liable to be wrongly interpreted, that another chapter must be devoted to a fuller development of this subject.

  7

  Uniformity against Unity

  If the domain of manifestation that constitutes our world is considered as a whole, it can be said that the existences contained therein, as they gradually move away from the principial unity, become progressively less qualitative and more quantitative. Principial unity, which contains synthetically within itself all the qualitative determinations of the possibilities of this domain, is in fact its essential pole, whereas its substantial pole, which evidently must become nearer as the other becomes more remote, is represented by pure quantity, with the indefinite ‘atomic’ multiplicity it implies, and with the exclusion of any distinction between its elements other than the numerical. This gradual movement away from essential unity can be envisaged from a twofold point of view, that of simultaneity and that of succession; this means that it can be seen as simultaneous in the constitution of manifested beings, where its degrees determine for their constituent elements, or for the corresponding modalities, a sort of hierarchy; or alternatively as successive in the very movement of the whole of manifestation from the beginning to the end of a cycle: needless to say it is to the second point of view that attention will chiefly be directed in this book. In all cases however the domain in question can be represented geometrically by a triangle of which the apex is the essential pole, which is pure quality, while the base is the substantial pole, which in our world is pure quantity, symbolized by the multiplicity of the points comprised in the base, and contrasted with the single point which is the apex; and if lines are drawn parallel to the base to represent different degrees of remoteness from the apex, it becomes clear that multiplicity, which symbolizes the quantitative, will be all the more accentuated as the base is approached and the apex left behind. Nevertheless, to make the symbol as exact as possible, the base must be supposed to be indefinitely remote from the apex, firstly because the domain of manifestation is in itself truly indefinite, and secondly so that the multiplicity of the points in the base may be, so to speak, brought to its maximum; this would also indicate in addition that the base, that is to say pure quantity, can never be reached in the course of the development of manifestation, though manifestation tends always more and more toward it; it would also indicate that from below a certain level the apex, that is to say essential unity or pure quality, would be more or less lost to view, and this corresponds precisely to the existing condition of our world.

  It was said earlier that in pure quantity the ‘units’ are only distinguished one from another numerically, there being indeed no other category in which a distinction can be made; but this alone makes it clear that pure quantity is really and necessarily beneath all manifested existence. It is useful to recall here what Leibnitz referred to as the ‘principle of indiscernibles’, by which he meant that there cannot exist anywhere two identical beings, that is to say, two beings alike in every respect. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is an immediate consequence of the limitlessness of universal possibility, which carries with it the absence of all repetition in particular possibilities; it can indeed be said that if two beings are assumed to be identical they would not really be two, but, as coinciding in every respect, they would actually be but one and the same being; conversely, in order that beings may not be identical or indiscernible there must always be some qualitative difference between them, and their determinations can never be purely quantitative. Leibnitz expresses this by saying that it is never true that two beings, whatever they may be, differ solo numero, and this, in its application to bodies, overrides ‘mechanistic’ conceptions such as those of Descartes; and Leibnitz goes on to say that if they did not differ qualitatively ‘they would not even be beings,’ but something like divisions, exactly resembling each other, of a homogeneous space and time; such divisions have no real existence, but are only what the scholastics called entia rationis. In this connection it may be remarked that Leibnitz himself does not seem to have had an adequate idea of the nature of space and time, for when he defines space simply as an ‘order of coexistence’ and time as an ‘order of succession’ he is only considering them from a purely logical point of view, thereby reducing them to homogenous containers quite without quality and so with no effective existence, and he is taking no account whatever of their ontological nature, that is to say, of the real nature of space and time as manifested in our world, wherein they really exist as conditions determining the special mode of existence distinguished as corporeal existence.

  The conclusion that emerges clearly from all this is that uniformity, in order that it may be possible, presupposes beings deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical ‘units’; also that no such uniformity is ever in fact realizable, while the result of all the efforts made to realize it, notably in the human domain, can only be to rob beings more or less completely of their proper qualities, thus turning them into something as nearly as possible like mere machines; and machines, the typical product of the modern world, are the very things that represent, in the highest degree attained up till now, the predominance of quantity over quality. From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic’ and ‘egalitarian’ conceptions tend toward exactly the same end, for according to them all individuals are equivalent one to another. This idea carries with it the absurd supposition that everyone is equally well fitted for anything whatsoever, though nature provides no example of any such ‘equality’, for the reasons already given, since it would imply nothing but a complete similitude between individuals; but it is obvious that, in the name of this assumed ‘equality’, which is one of the topsy-turvy ‘ideals’ most dear to the modern world, individuals are in fact directed toward becoming as nearly alike one to another as nature allows — and this in the first place by the attempt to impose a uniform education on everyone. It is no less obvious that differences of aptitude cannot in spite of everything be entirely suppressed, so that a uniform education will not give exactly the same results for all; but it is all too true that, although it cannot confer on anyone qualities that he does not possess, it is on the contrary very well fitted to suppress in everyon
e all possibilities above the common level; thus the ‘leveling’ always works downward: indeed, it could not work in any other way, being itself only an expression of the tendency toward the lowest, that is, toward pure quantity, situated as it is at a level lower than that of all corporeal manifestation—not only below the degree occupied by the most rudimentary of living beings, but also below that occupied by what our contemporaries have a habit of calling ‘lifeless matter’, though even this last, since it is manifested to our senses, is still far from being wholly denuded of quality.

  The modern Westerner is moreover not content only to impose an education of that sort at home; he also wants to impose it on other peoples, together with the whole gamut of his own mental and bodily habits, so as to make all the world uniform, while at the same time he imposes uniformity on the outward aspect of the world by the diffusion of the products of his industry. The consequence, paradoxical only in appearance, is that to the extent that more uniformity is imposed on it, the world is by so much the less ‘unified’ in the real sense of the word. This is really quite natural, since the direction in which it is dragged is, as explained already, that in which ‘separativity’ becomes more and more accentuated; and here the character of ‘parody’, so often met with in everything that is specifically modern, makes its appearance. In fact the imposition of uniformity, while actually leading in a direction exactly opposite to that of true unity, since it tends to realize that which is most remote therefrom, takes shape as a sort of caricature of unity, and it does so because of the analogical relation whereby, as was pointed out very early in this book, unity itself is inversely reflected in the ‘units’ that constitute pure quantity. It is this inversion that justified the earlier reference to a topsy-turvy ‘ideal’, and it can be seen that these words must in fact be understood in a very precise sense; nevertheless, it is by no means suggested that a rehabilitation of that word ‘ideal’ is in any way desirable, for it serves indifferently almost any purpose nowadays, and particularly that of masking the absence of all true principle; it is indeed so misused that it has by now come to be almost devoid of meaning. It is tempting however to observe that, according to its actual derivation, it ought to denote a certain tendency toward the ‘idea’ understood more or less in the Platonic sense, that is to say toward essence and toward the qualitative, however vaguely these may be conceived, whereas most frequently, as in the case in question, it is used to designate their exact opposite.

  The existing tendency to impose uniformity not only on human individuals but also on things has already been alluded to: indeed the men of today boast of the ever growing extent of the modifications they impose on the world, and the consequence is that everything is thereby made more and more ‘artificial’, for this is the very result that these modifications are calculated to produce, since all their activity is directed toward a domain as strictly quantitative as possible. Besides, as soon as the desire to produce a purely quantitative science arose, it became inevitable that the practical applications derived from that science should share its character; these applications as a whole are generally designated by the name of ‘industry’, and modern industry can be said to represent from all points of view the triumph of quantity, because its operations do not demand any knowledge other than quantitative, and because the instruments of which it makes use, that is to say machines properly so called, are developed in such a way that qualitative considerations come in to the least possible extent, while the men who work them are themselves limited to activity of an entirely mechanical kind — quality also being completely sacrificed to quantity in the actual products of industry. A few more observations can usefully be made in order to cover this subject adequately, but before proceeding with them, a question which will be returned to later may be interpolated: whatever may be thought about the value of the results of the action that modern man applies to the world, it is a fact, independently of any estimation of values, that this action succeeds, and that at least to a certain extent, it reaches the ends at which it aims; if the men of another period had acted in the same way (but this is a wholly ‘theoretical’ and unrealistic supposition, in view of the actual mental differences between these men and those of today) would the results have been the same? In other words, in order that the terrestrial environment may be suitable for such action, must it not be in some way predisposed thereto by the cosmic conditions of the cyclic period in which we now are; that is, must there not be something in that environment which, with reference to earlier periods, has undergone a change? It would be premature to go fully into the nature of that change at this point, or to do more than characterize it as being necessarily of the nature of a qualitative diminution, allowing a firmer hold to everything that springs from quantity; but what has been said about the qualitative determinations of time at least makes the possibility of a change of this kind conceivable and renders understandable the idea that the artificial modifications of the world, in order that they may come about, must presuppose natural modifications to which they merely correspond or conform in one way or another, by virtue of the correlation that invariably exists in the cyclical movement of time between the cosmic order and the human order.

  8

  Ancient Crafts and Modern Industry

  There is a great contrast between what the ancient crafts used to be and what modern industry now is, and it presents in its essentials another particular case and at the same time a practical application of the contrast between the qualitative and quantitative points of view, which predominate in the one and in the other respectively. In order to see why this is so, it is useful to note first of all that the distinction between the arts and the crafts, or between ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’, is itself something specifically modern, as if it had been born of the deviation and degeneration which have led to the replacement in all fields of the traditional conception by the profane conception. To the ancients the artifex was indifferently the man who practised an art or a craft; but he was, to tell the truth, something that neither the artist nor the artisan is today, if those words are used in the modern sense (moreover the word ‘artisan’ tends more and more to disappear from contemporary language); he was something more than either the one or the other because, at least originally, his activity was bound up with principles of a much more profound order. If the crafts used to comprehend in one way or another the arts properly so called, since the two were not then separated by any essential characteristic, it is because the nature of the crafts was truly qualitative, for nobody can refuse to admit that such is the nature of art, more or less by definition. Nevertheless the moderns, for that very reason, narrowly restrict their conception of art, and relegate it to a sort of closed domain having no connection with the rest of human activity, that is, with what they regard as constituting ‘reality’, using the word in the very crude sense it bears for them; and they go so far as freely to attribute to art, thus robbed of all practical significance, the character of a ‘luxury’, a term thoroughly characteristic of what could without any exaggeration be called the ‘silliness’ of our period.

  In every traditional civilization, as there has often been occasion to point out, every human activity of whatever kind is always regarded as derived essentially from principles. This is conspicuously true for the sciences, and it is no less true for the arts and the crafts, and there is in addition a close connection between them all, for according to a formula postulated as a fundamental axiom by the builders of the Middle Ages, ars sine scientia nihil; the science in question is of course traditional science, and certainly not modern science, the application of which can give birth to nothing except modern industry. By this attachment to principles human activity could be said to be as it were ‘transformed’, and instead of being limited to what it is in itself, namely, a mere external manifestation (and the profane point of view consists in this and nothing else), it is integrated with the tradition, and constitutes for those who carry it out an effective means of participation in the
tradition, and this is as much as to say that it takes on a truly ‘sacred’ and ‘ritual’ character. That is why it can be said that, in any such civilization, ‘every occupation is a priesthood’;[27] but in order to avoid conferring on this last word a more or less unwarrantable extension of meaning, if not a wholly false one, it must be made clear that priesthood is not priesthood unless it possesses something that has been preserved in the sacerdotal functions alone, ever since the time when the previously non-existent distinction between the sacred and the profane arose.

  To see what is meant by the ‘sacred’ character of the whole of human activity, even only from an exterior or, if preferred, exoteric point of view, it is only necessary to consider a civilization like the Islamic, or the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages; it is easy to see that in them the most ordinary actions of life have something ‘religious’ in them. In such civilizations religion is not something restricted, narrowly bounded and occupying a place apart, without effective influence on anything else, as it is for modern Westerners (at least for those who still consent to admit religion at all); on the contrary it penetrates the whole existence of the human being, or better, it embraces within its domain everything which constitutes that existence, and particularly social life properly so called, so much so that there is really nothing left that is ‘profane’, except in the case of those who for one reason or another are outside the tradition, but any such case then represents no more than a mere anomaly. Elsewhere, where the word ‘religion’ cannot properly be applied to the form of the civilization considered, there is nonetheless a traditional and ‘sacred’ legislation that plays an equivalent part though it has a different character, similar considerations thus applying to all traditional civilizations without exception. But there is something more: looking at esoterism rather than exoterism (these words being used for convenience although they do not strictly apply to all cases in the same way) it becomes clear that there exists, generally speaking, an initiation linked to the crafts and taking them as its base or its ‘support’;[28] these crafts must therefore be capable of a superior and more profound significance if they are to provide effectively a way of access to the initiatic domain, and it is evidently by reason of their essentially qualitative character that such a thing is possible.