[Renaissance, Science and God: Paradox of Modern Western EducationVII] Individualism and Decline of the West – Greater Kashmir

This write-up is in continuation to what has previously been written about the post-renaissance humanistic-individualism. I intend to base this writeup on what has been argued in The Crisis of the Modern World, a book written by Rene Guenon wherein the author states that the modern Western civilisation, due to its exclusive materialistic-rationalism, is bound to fall.

He argues that the Western civilisation is based upon so many faulty foundations of which individualism is the most prominent and dangerous one. Individualism, which we have tried to understand in one of the previous issues of this series is the characteristic feature of the materialistic renaissance humanism.

Actually, humanism and individualism are merely different names of the same thing with an anti-traditional outlook which lies at the root of modernism which has now overrun the whole world through the profane outlook of the Western education.

This writeup constitutes the sum and substance of what Rene Guenons has argued in great detail. While only the articulation and presentation are mine, some notes have also been added from various other sources.

The modern world is abnormal in character as it is founded on a purely negative principle absence of principle that there is no superhuman principle. Hence it is the individualism which is becoming the decisive cause of the present decline of the West because it is the mainspring for the development of only the lowest possibilities of mankind which develop only when it is assumed that there is no God, and which can only expand freely if every superhuman element be absent, since they, as a matter of fact, stand at the opposite sides of all spirituality and genuine intellectuality. This view makes the modern world a sort of a huge ugly building.

Individualism in the first place is the negation of intellectual intuition which is essentially a very important source of knowledge. Intellectual intuition is metaphysical knowledge or belief obtained neither by reason nor by perception, and individualism essentially negates metaphysic things.

Due to its aversion to anything superhuman, what individualism understands as metaphysic is nothing but rational structures or imaginative hypotheses, purely individual conceptions, most of which, belong to physics or nature.

The problems of individualism in research and scholarship can be gauged by the fact that individuality by its nature demands originality which means fame and renown lie in putting your name to a thing i.e., it is exclusively your own creation.

Hence the desire to be original, even if truth should have to be sacrificed to this originality, means to invent a new error than by repeating a truth which has already been expressed by others for in fact, a true idea cannot be new, because truth is not the product of human mind; it exists independently of us and all we have to do is to get to know it. therefore, whatever is out of it is mere error. Although this form of individualism is most apparent in philosophers, it is to be found also in modern scholars and artists.

If seen deeply, even Protestantism was a form of individualism against the Catholic tradition. Although this general statement needs some explanation which may be made in some other writeup, lets understand here one important thing about Protestantism, as this is what the modernist hermeneutics intend to do even with the traditional understanding of the Qurn.

In one way Protestantism denied the authority of the organisation of the qualified to interpret legitimately the religious tradition of the West and in its place claimed to set up free criticism, that is to say interpretations resulting from private judgement, even of the ignorant and the incompetent, and based exclusively on the exercise of human reason.

View post:

[Renaissance, Science and God: Paradox of Modern Western EducationVII] Individualism and Decline of the West - Greater Kashmir