Knowledge and Action
René Guénon — The Crisis of the Modern World (1)
“ The Eastern doctrines are unanimous, as also were the ancient doctrines of the West, in asserting that contemplation is superior to action, just as the unchanging is superior to change.
Action, being merely a transitory and momentary modification of the being, cannot possibly carry its principle and sufficient reason in itself; if it does not depend on a principle outside its own contingent domain, it is but illusion; and this principle, from which it draws all the reality it is capable of possessing -its existence and its very possibility- can be found only in contemplation, or -if one will- in knowledge, for these two terms are fundamentally synonymous, or at least coincide, since it is impossible in any way to separate knowledge from the process by which it is acquired.
Similarly change, in the widest sense of the word, is unintelligible and contradictory; in other words, it is impossible without a principle from which it proceeds and which, being its principle, cannot be subject to it, and is therefore necessarily unchanging.
Knowledge alone gives the possibility of leaving this world and the limitations that are inherent in it, and when it attains to the unchanging -as does principial or metaphysical knowledge, that is to say: knowledge in its essence- it becomes itself possessed of immutability, for all true knowledge essentially consists in identification with its object.
This is precisely what modern Westerners overlook: they admit nothing higher than rational or discursive knowledge, which is necessarily indirect and imperfect, being what might be described as reflected knowledge; and even this lower type of knowledge they are coming more and more to value only insofar as it can be made to serve immediate practical ends.
Knowledge alone gives the possibility of leaving this world and the limitations that are inherent in it
Absorbed by action to the point of denying everything that lies beyond it, they do not see that this action itself degenerates, from the absence of any principle, into an agitation as vain as it is sterile. This indeed is the most conspicuous feature of the modern period: need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed, matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another.
It is dispersion in multiplicity, and in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle; in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders in which this can still be exercised; hence the inaptitude for synthesis and the incapacity for any sort of concentration that is so striking in the eyes of Easterners.
These are the natural and inevitable results of an ever more pronounced materialisation, for matter is essentially multiplicity and division, and this -be it said in passing- is why all that proceeds from matter can beget only strife and all manner of conflicts between peoples as between individuals. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches unity which can only be fully realised by consciousness of universal principles. ”
René Guénon — The Crisis of the Modern World 1927
