East vs. West?
Max Frantel
Max Frantel engages in an interview with René Guénon, who scathingly criticises Western materialism and predicts the West’s downfall due to its neglect of spiritual values in contrast to the East’s contemplative traditions.
(Originally published in Comœdia1, 14 February 1927. This interview was translated and annotated by Yaro Deli.)
Will this be an interview or a tale of the time that Queen Bertha was spinning?2 I met the orientalist Monsieur René Guénon in an old house on the Île Saint-Louis, where Bishop Affre was brought back to whilst he was dying. M. René Guénon, the author of Orient et Occident (East and West) and Le Roi du Monde (The King of the World), was leafing through Hindu books with a friend, and, near them, by the fireplace, a mother and a venerable grandmother were sewing or embroidering.
M. René Guénon, though young, does not ply to the American fashion: he has a black moustache which, at the top of a tall, lean body, falls vaguely from an elongated, dreamy, pale face. He has a very soft voice, and it is with a veiled timbre, with hints of pianissimo, that he launches an anathema against Europe.
Guénon: ‘One talks about a threat from the East? I think we should rather talk about a threat from the West. It seems to me that it is the West that has invaded the East! It is the West that seeks to impose its spirit everywhere. Changing things? It is part of the mentality of the West. And the West is heading straight for its doom and risks dragging the rest of the world with it! It is the West that is the evil spirit.’
Frantel: ‘And the Oriental spirit?’
Guénon: ‘It is the one who is in the right. For it admits the predominance of intelligence. Spirituality is essential for it. It prioritises the contemplative life. The Orientals do not despise action, but they consider it inferior to thought and subordinate it. These relations of knowledge and action were the subject of one of my latest articles, in which I studied the possibility of an understanding between East and West. One thing is certain, and that is that the West of the Middle Ages was much more like the East, which has changed little over the centuries. But the West has been transformed, and the West is now the antithesis of the East. The Orient represents the spirit of tradition; the West is the very negation of this spirit. No conciliation is possible. You only have to hear the Orientals speak about this.’
Frantel: ‘Have you been to the East?’
Guénon: ‘No. But I have conversed for many years with Orientals, especially Hindus. However, the Orientals I’ve seen aren’t Orientals one would mock. Those who have a famous name in Europe have, for the most part, been trained in the school of the West.’
Fantel: ‘But what about Tagore3?’
Guénon: ‘He is a man whose intelligence I certainly esteem greatly. But he is very far from having the authority in his country that he has here. We know him better here at home than people know him where he comes from. And besides, he is not a racially pure Hindu. Do you believe that he can really speak for the East? Remember his visit to China. His message from the East was very badly received there. ‘Tell us’, he seemed to have been told, ‘aren’t the Chinese as Oriental as you are?’ I know friends of Tagore who deplore his easy conciliations, and the concessions he made at one moment to the English. Did he send back their decorations? Yes! But he did accept them in the first place! There are so many Hindus who have never abandoned their haughty intransigence towards foreigners!
’For, it must be said, the English behaved there in an odious manner. It is not so much their administration that has irritated the Hindus as that spirit of arrogance which the English possess more than any other nation in Europe. Their character has an unbearable insolence. Besides, what European country doesn’t have vanity? We imagine that it is only our civilisation that counts! You must admit that this is a strange spirit! You study the ideas of other peoples, and you think you understand them better than they do themselves? What pretentiousness! So, one should talk to Orientals who are not cheap Orientals!’
Frantel: ‘What do they think of us?’
Guénon: ‘Nothing good! They despise us for attributing superiority to the material force and for regarding intelligence as pure nothingness. If there are any among them who think of using this force themselves, it is only to get rid of us and this with our own weapons! There are others who do not even think of it and for whom this very force cannot count.’
Japan?
Frantel: ‘But what about Japan?’
Guénon: ‘The case of Japan is an anomaly. Besides, did it ever have a culture of its own? The Japanese have, above all, a spirit of imitation! They once went to the school of China; they are now at that of the West. This is no doubt suited to their restless, active character. Japan, I repeat, is an exception. It doesn’t seem to have a truly Oriental mentality. It is a hybrid race. They are the only ones who are not peaceful.’
Frantel: ‘But the war in China?’
Guénon: ‘Don’t judge China by the Chinese who are fighting. These are just a few factions. There are perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand of them! And there are four hundred and fifty million Chinese! These soldiers belong to whoever pays them; this is nothing but a struggle for foreign influence! Believe me, if there were ever to be a yellow peril, it wouldn’t come from China.’
Frantel: ‘And from India?’
Guénon: ‘No way! The Moslem element spread out throughout Asia is the only one that could, if possible, go on a crusade against the West. No! The danger is not there, it is within ourselves! Henri Massis4 pretends that the Orient is being manipulated by Germany and Russia. I don’t think they can unite against us at all! By the way, no matter what anyone says, Russia and Germany are Western powers! There is nothing Oriental about Keyserling’s5 ideas! And then, who made Keyserling’s reputation, if not Massis and a few others? Even in Germany, Keyserling doesn’t have a lot of influence. His ideas, no doubt, may be a danger. They are, at bottom, only the product of that decomposition of the intellect which is the characteristic sign of modern times. No! I don’t understand Henri Massis.
‘Rather, we who wish to safeguard the intellect should seek support, a moral alliance with the true Orientals. This Hindu elite, which, disdainful of modern science, is still occupied only with pure metaphysics, must be an example to us. Let us become contemplative again, and these men of the East will feel close to us. There will be between them and us, in spite of the diversity of philosophies and religions, a tacit understanding of souls. We can only gain from this. It’s up to us to correct ourselves! If the West has to defend itself, it is above all against itself!’
Thus spoke M. René Guénon, and as he did, I often saw two familiar and beloved faces nodding in agreement. Occasionally, three whispered words would express their assent: ‘Yes! Of course!’ It was infinitely charming.
(Link to the original: Index de l’œuvre de René Guénon)
Comœdia was a French literary and artistic paper founded in 1907 and which operated from Paris. The publication ceased to exist in 1944.
Queen Bertha was the queen of the Anglo-Saxons at the time of the mission of St. August to England (late sixth century A.D.). Being Christian herself, she is known for religiously influencing her pagan husband, King Æthelberht. She was a very popular historical figure in French-speaking Switzerland. The French expression ‘in the days when Queen Bertha was spinning’ originated in the wake of the industrialisation of Western Europe. The saying expressed a nostalgia for the time when weaving was still prevalent in its traditional form before being eliminated by industry (and the spinning jenny in particular). This nostalgia, as well as the expression connected with it, is captured well in the 1888 painting La reine Berthe et les fileuses (Queen Bertha and the Spinners) by Swiss painter Albert Anker. The painting shows Queen Bertha teaching three young girls the ways of traditional spinning. The painting was a paean to anti-modernist values and its glorification of traditional crafts at a time when the Industrial Revolution was taking spinning from the distaff to the spinning jenny, destroying the cottage industry and alienating the workers forced into factories. Additionally, the work shows that the expression was a widely known and established one in 19th-century Francophone regions.
Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was born into a wealthy family as the son of philosopher and social reformer Debendranath Tagore. He was a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and, later in his life, painter. He was born in India under British rule, more specifically in Calcutta to a rich Brahmin family. He was the first non-European as well as the first lyricist to ever win the Noble Prize in Literature, which he did in 1913. About this achievement, Tagore said the following: ‘It is an outreach of sympathy between the East and the West across the seas — it has expressed the unity of us humans.’ His literary work was praised by such giants of prose and verse as William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and André Gide.
He also wrote the Indian and Bengali national anthems and played an important role in the liberation of India, where his name is linked to that of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1901 Tagore founded an agrarian school/ living community in rural West Bengal at Shantiniketan (‘Abode of Peace’), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled permanently at the school, which, thanks to the money granted to him with winning the Nobel Prize, he could transform into the Visva-Bharati University in 1921.
Tagore had thorough knowledge of both the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions. One can observe in his literary oeuvre a conscious attempt at establishing harmony between Western and Eastern philosophies, religions and cultures. Indeed, he was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa. This was also the subject of a series of lectures that he gave from 1912 onwards in both of the Americas, Europe and East Asia. During these lectures, he also pleaded for the case of Indian independence. Many of Tagore’s works were of a religious or spiritual kind, with a lot of emphasis on (finding harmony in) the beauty and divine power of nature. The focus is often on love, which is said to be the true path to development and inner freedom.
Henri Massis (21 March 1886 – 16 April 1970) was a French conservative and Catholic essayist, literary critic and literary historian. He was a follower of Charles Maurras and his movement Action française. In light of this, he worked from 1920 onwards as the editor of the newly formed Revue Universelle, a magazine closely associated with Action Française and which worked to spread Christian political philosophy. In his political writings, Massis expressed his concerns over what he viewed as threats to post-World War I French society, including Bolshevism and Oriental mysticism.
Massis held a positive view of fascism and right-wing authoritarianism during the interwar years. He expressed his support for General Franco and the nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War in his Les Cadets de l’Alcazar (1936; in English as The Cadets of the Alcazar, 1937), which he wrote together with Robert Brasillach. He visited Portugal in 1938, expressing admiration for the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1939, Chefs (‘Chiefs’), a collection of interviews with Franco, Salazar and Benito Mussolini, was published. However, Massis condemned Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist regime in Germany, as he shared the Germanophobe views of the Action française.
Massis also collaborated with the Vichy regime in his home country of France, where he was a member of the National Council (parliament) from 23 January 1941 onwards. However, he invariably refused to collaborate with the National Socialists. After the war he was arrested and imprisoned for one month. After his release from prison, he continued his career as a writer, devoting himself to writing biographical studies of Ernest Renan, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and António de Oliveira Salazar. Still a follower of the integralist and nationalist philosophy of the Action française after the war, his writings from this period reflect his continued disdain of National Socialism in Germany and Bolshevism in the Soviet Union.
Hermann Alexander Graf von Keyserling (20 July 1880 – 26 April 1946) was a German philosopher. He was born in Konno, a town in Livonia situated on the borders of what is nowadays Estonia and Latvia but at that time was still a part of the Russian Empire. He was the heir to an old family of Baltic nobility of German origin (the House of Keyserlingk). He was born as the son of state politician and farmer Leo Graf Keyserling and was the grandson of Alexander Graf Keyserling (1815-1891), again an important state politician and naturalist. A friend of Otto von Bismarck, Keyserling attended the grammar school in Pernau. He studied natural sciences, chemistry and geology in Geneva, Dorpat, Heidelberg and Vienna (1897-1902). He lived alternately in Paris, London, Scotland, Italy, Germany and, from 1902, again in Estonia.
Later in his life, he was naturalised as a Russian citizen during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great. An avid traveler, he undertook a trip around the world in 1911-1912, visiting places like Europe, Japan, India, China, America and North Africa. These trips were described in his best known book Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen (‘Travel-journal of a Philosopher’). He married Goedela Countess Bismarck-Schönhausen, a granddaughter of Prince Otto von Bismarck, in Friedrichsruh.
In 1920 he founded and directed the ‘School of Wisdom’ in Darmstadt. From 1939 to 1943 he lived in Schönhausen (Elbe), and finally in Tyrol, where he laid the foundation stone for the re-establishment of the School of Wisdom in Innsbruck. Keyserling wanted to contribute to the spiritual reconstruction of the world through numerous conferences, lecture tours and worldwide international relations. The Keyserling Society for Free Philosophy, founded in 1920, cherishes his memory.
His philosophy and political outlook were characterised by a rejection, like Oswald Spengler, of both liberalism and communism, defiance in the face of the all-powerful philosophy of the ‘Enlightenment’, and a quest, like René Guénon, for a spiritual symbiosis between East and West, an alignment of the pure intellect, judged by him to be too cold and abstract, with the richness of cultures, of instinct and blood, and of the wisdom of peoples. He was also the originator of the term ‘Führerprinzip’. He used to argue that, in a social-Darwinist manner, certain ‘gifted individuals’ were ‘born to rule’. His main work, Das Spektrum Europas (The Spectrum of Europe), dealt with European unification on aristocratic principles. His ideas were especially popular after the First World War. He died in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1946 at the age of 65.
