A Masterpiece for the Elect; an Enigma for Others
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times is a masterpiece by the enlightened perennial intellectual René Guénon, and is considered by many of those who can comprehend it to be his magnum opus. That having been said, beware of reading this for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong grounding.
I cannot stress the latter point any further than it has been, but I must say this: If you have never read René Guénon before, do not read this book! To those without proper grounding in Guénon's other works, such as 'East and West' or 'The Crisis of the Modern World', this book will seem full of strange enigmas and asides, and things that may not, on the surface, appear to be related to the topic at hand. However, for those who have read and properly comprehended one or both of those, particularly 'Crisis', what is said here will make far more sense, a great many enigmas will be cleared up, and many things that may have seemed to be off-topic and/or useless information will be put in their proper place in the reader's mind.
I can say little that hasn't been said by other reviewers (or that Guénon didn't say himself!), so instead I would like to devote a few moments to do what they didn't, and clear up any doubts that may've been put in your mind by the two reviewers who didn't recommend 'The Reign of Quantity'.
To answer the one-star review, one person's inability to comprehend something does not make it a waste of your time and money if you can, and no, Guénon's references to the Indian and other revealed traditions are not at all out of place; he points to one unified Truth through all of them (and if you wonder how, when there are so many apparent contradictions between them, keep reading; they're not as contradictory as you might think), and understanding them all in this light is the key to everything Guénon teaches (one might leave it at 'the key to everything'), for he relates everything, as it should be related, back to the one universal Truth that guides all things. In fact, to have omitted the references he made to those revealed traditions would have been irresponsible: The real confusion would come by separating those revealed traditions which point to the Truth from the very Truth by which he makes his arguments; they are all interconnected, and must all be understood.
And as for the three-star review, René Guénon is not relentlessly negative. As other reviewers have stated, he is purely intellectual and not the least bit sentimental, and he is also describing the crisis and downfall of the modern world; the end of a Manvantara. The former may not sit well with many modern readers, since sentimentalism is so prevalent, but as another reviewer stated, "sentimentalism is nothing more than a transpose of a catatonic and truculent rationalism in which the Western man has been drowning since the tide of senility began in 14th century under the guise of 'Renaissance'", and to do the latter, that is, describe the downfall of the modern world, one can do little not to sound 'negative', although he actually does that very well: He describes it in a purely intellectual light, which may come out sounding 'negative' to some, but in the end stresses that the end of the cycle and the very 'malefic' influences he speaks of are nonetheless part of the universal Order.
As for his 'tortured prose', yes, his style of writing is rather unorthodox and can be difficult to get one's head around, but as a reviewer of 'Crisis' put it: "Guenon is probably one of the few authors who uses semicolons and colons more frequently than periods in his ultra-dense prose. His train of thought is difficult to follow but once concentrated upon closely it is apparent how insightful Guenon is explaining his subject." I would add first that part, but by no means all, of it has something to do with the translation. Even with that said, I must say that it is actually, while unorthodox, a wonderful style of writing that has influenced my own greatly. While there are many asides and the basic 'gist' may be made harder to grasp, his preference for stating things in full over 'cutting corners' to reduce wordiness help to explain his point with crystal clarity; to put it another way, he does not sacrifice content or meaning to simplicity (remember his words when he says that he's not trying to make his work accessible to the majority of readers, but to the Elect, and he compromises nothing in that regard; also, to those who've read 'Reign', recall his comments about simplification and modernity).
Also, his 'meaningless' asides are not so at all, unless you lack, as I've said before, a proper understanding of Guénon (read 'Crisis' first!). They serve to give a greater, fuller understanding of the subject, as opposed to the narrow, metaphysically-deprived critique that it would be without them. They also 'connect the dots', if you will, between his various works (in fact, many of them can be seen as a preparation for reading his other works, so if you don't plan to do that, yes, I suppose those of them are literally meaningless for you), and at any rate they enlighten those of us who care to understand his work beyond the topic at hand; they are, to those who understand him, actually a vast treasure-trove of information. His asides are by no means reduced in worth simply because one person cannot understand the author's reason for putting them there, and I hope that new readers of his don't take that comment about them to heart during their reading experience.
And with that, I end this review with an iteration of my dismay that I couldn't give this work 10+/5 stars for the author's brilliant insight and critique of the modern age that has stood fast against the quickly-changing tide of the modern world. René Guénon is quite possibly the most enlightened man to have lived since at least the dawn of the 'modern age' (by his reckoning; c. 1400), alongside other great thinkers such as A. K. Coomaraswamy, and his works shall until the end of our present Manvantara be a bonanza of wonderful information and metaphysics that have their base in the revealed traditional doctrines which, as Guénon spent his life doing, all point to the one universal Truth.
Badly in need of retranslation
The book is a masterpiece. However, it is extremely hard to read since it is in need of a re-translation.
Wonderful work, but not for beginners
I must admit, it's taken me several tries to work my way through this. Guenon's use of quotes and semicolons to extend the length of phrases ranks here at an all time high. Many sentences here stretch for half a page.
That said, I'm convinced that may be the fault of the translator, as not all of Guenon's works are quite so bad in that regard.
Regardless, I won't dwell much in this short review on the topics of the book itself, for one reason alone: either you are already familiar with Guenon and his definition of Tradition, in which case you don't need my introduction to his ideas and thought streams, or else you are new to Guenon and to the Traditional.
If you fall into the former category, by all means charge ahead into this work and digest it. It will pay off. Quite a few of the chapters - Time Changed Into Space, The Fissures in the Great Wall, and Psychic Residues, to count several - are downright illuminating and thought proviking, provided you've had the proper grounding in Guenonian thought necessary to assimilate the contents of this book.
If you fall into the later category, do not start here. I cannot stress this enough. Between the enormous phrase structure and the complexity of the ideas here presented, you will be turned off. Start instead with the easier-to-digest 'Crisis of the Modern World' or perhaps 'East and West', and then come back to absorb 'Reign.' Your efforts will pay off in your ability to actually comprehend this book.
Do not buy this book!
Because it is the most incomprehensible book I have ever tried to read.
I was originally triggered by the title, hoping this book would offer me insights from French philosophy relevant to Weberian issues around rationalization etc. It may be the case that someone in human history is able to establish whether this is the case or not.
For me this book has proven to be completely inaccessible twice now. It contains essays of app. 5 pages each, that usually are unclear, contain irrelevant and distracting references to unrelated issues (e.g. Indian mythology) and proceeds with pointless texts. A complete waste of time and money!
Falling Down
Like "The Crisis of the Modern World", a smaller work written years earlier, "The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times" falls into that group of Rene Guenon's works which have been called "intellectual reform and criticism of the modern world." These works evaluate the principles (or as Guenon would insist the "pseudo-principles") behind the modern mentality in the light of traditional principles. However, "Reign" differs from "Crisis" in being a much more metaphysically challenging exploration of the nature and trajectory of the modern thing. For that reason, "Crisis" is a better book than "Reign" to begin your exploration of the country that is Guenon.Guenon is a metaphysician with a wide but highly integrated vision of reality. You do not get the fullness of his thought in any one of his books, although some are more central than others. But because of the integrity of the whole corpus one book fills out or illuminates the ideas found in the others. This fact should be kept in mind when approaching him. Frustrations and perplexities will dissipate with further reading. For all that, there is no getting around the demanding nature of Guenon's thought.
Guenon sees modernity, in its materialist stage, as the "reign of quantity" i.e. a state of affairs in which an attempt is made to reduce all of reality to that which can be measured by the senses. This state of affairs is a "sign of the times" in that it tells us that we are at the end of the "Kali-Yuga" or "time of troubles." According to tradition, time is cyclical. One of the most significant of these cycles is the "Manvantara" which is made up of four "Yugas." The time covered by each of these "Yugas" is qualitatively different. The first, the "Krita-Yuga", is a time of light and closeness to the principle while the last, the "Kali-Yuga", is a time of darkness and distance from the light of the principle.
Guenon's book in made up of forty chapters which can be divided into three general sections. The first six or seven chapters lay out and explain the metaphysical principles needed to understand his critique of the modern world. In the next sixteen chapters he applies these principles to various aspects of modernity. In the remaining chapters he delineates the stages of the continuing movement away from the light of principles.
The first section is the most challenging but is essential for a full appreciation of the rest of the book. To begin, Guenon distinguishes two correlative metaphysical principles "Purusha" and "Prakriti." These are Hindu terms for the what, in the West since Aristotle, has been known as "act" and "potency." However, although he acknowledges their equivalence to the Aristotelian "act" and "potency, Guenon translates these terms as "essence" and "substance." While there are reasons for this, such a translation opens up much room for confusion. This is because these terms have been used in a different way for hundreds of years by Christian Philosophy. This is an involved subject, but not merely one of terminology. Rather it opens a window on to two very different, although not diametrically opposed, metaphysics, one Christian the other (Guenon's) Vedantist. In any case, the reader should study these first chapters with care in order to properly grasp Guenon's meaning.
All of what Guenon calls "manifestation" (i.e. the created universe) is composed of "Purusha" and "Prakriti." On the terrestrial plane these principles can be spoken of analogically in terms of "quality" and "quantity." Thus the conditions that limit the earthly world also participate in the principles of quality and quantity. Among these conditions are space and time. One of the most significant of Guenon's points is that while the modern mentality sees only quantitative aspects of space and time they cannot be so reduced. What Guenon has to say on this matter is very interesting, but the key point to see, in order to understand the shape of the book as a whole, is that symbolically the qualitative aspect of space is "above" and the quantitative aspect "below" just as in time the qualitative aspect is "before" and the quantitative aspect "after." As a result, just as terrestrial manifestation in space is an issuing forth of multiplicity from unity, so manifestation in time is a cyclic falling away from paradisal unity into dissolution.
Having set the stage with these principles, Guenon proceeds in the second section to examine the ways in which the modern life is a dwelling in these lower regions of time and space. He examines in depth and, as always, in the light of traditional principles, a series of modern movements and characteristics: industrialization, the cult of originality, dependence on statistics, the tendency to oversimplify, the hatred of secrecy, rationalism, materialism, mechanism, the love of "ordinary life", the degradation of coinage, popularization, etc.
In the last section Guenon distinguishes two sub-phases of the final phase of the "Kali-Yuga": "solidification" and "dissolution." "Solidification" characterizes the hardcore materialist sub-phase of the "Kali-Yuga", which is identical to the "reign of quantity" of the title. There is a kind of stagnate and hopeless "security" that sets in during this sub-phase because man has cut himself off from all influences outside the corporeal world. However this "security" is an unstable illusion and soon "malefic" influences begins to penetrate his materialist shell. This penetration marks the beginning of the second sub-phase.
This sub-phase is "dissolution." It is does not exist in air-tight distinction from "solidification" rather the two overlap, just as "postmodernism" overlaps "modernism." In "dissolution" the materialist pseudo-edifice of "solidification" crumbles to dust. "Pseudo-initiatic", anti-traditional movements such as Theosophy and Spiritualism embody the "spirit" of the "dissolution" sub-phase. These clear the ground a much greater danger which comes at the very end of the "Kali-Yuga", a full-blown "counter-tradition" with a "counter-initiation." If anti-traditional movements are a "deviation" i.e. a straying from the traditional way, "counter-traditional" movements lead their followers down the way opposite tradition i.e. into the abyss
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