{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat finds that the topic of nihilism has an uncanny appeal, both to those who welcome it and to those who stand athwart it, hollering “Stop!” For instance, the philosopher/musician Billy Preston shared his discovery that “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing,” an insight which earned him the Nobel Prize for Philosophical Funk. On the other hand, the sainted Augustine claimed that evil, from a metaphysical standpoint, does not exist; it is, quite literally, Nothing. This world then, with its abundant evils, may be considered Nothingness Incarnate, or Nothingness Inc. The point is, it is never difficult to say something about nothing; Pascal, for one, does it all the time.}
The world is a theophany, an epiphany of things themselves unseen. (A.K. Coomaraswamy)
Is it necessary that we be deceived regarding the nature of our reality? (Philip K. Dick)
All the new thinking is about nihilism, of which there are many forms, ranging from (roughly) “nothing matters” to (roughly) “nothing is real” to (roughly) “nothing exists”. The latter view is often associated with Buddhism, although no true Buddhist (as the saying goes) would accept that association. In any case, to quote Bob Dylan, “Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease,” and the same holds true for discussions of nihilism, which is why the subject is avoided at dinner parties and family gatherings.
The late Ananda Coomaraswamy was a metaphysician, a historian, and a transmitter and interpreter of the culture and art of ancient India. Born in what is now Sri Lanka, Coomaraswamy lived and was educated in Britain; he later moved to the United States. He is generally associated with Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon as one of the iconic figures of what is called Traditionalism (or Perennialism).
The ‘Tradition,’ as its adherents see it, is a repository of ancient universal wisdom, traces of which are said to be detected in all religious traditions. Traditionalists reject Modernity, with its emphasis on instrumental reason, science, and other repugnant practices; they believe that higher knowledge is to be found through spirituality and through esoteric practices like alchemy and magic. While they cannot deny the success of modern science, they claim that it distracts us from a deeper Reality, one not accessible either to empiricism or to discursive reason, much less to technological machinations. For a variety of reasons not relevant here, Traditionalism has appealed to, and has been associated with, postwar neo-Fascist thinkers like Julius Evola, Alexander Dugin, Viktor Orban, and Steve Bannon. Political implications aside, Traditionalism’s claims have been appropriated by New Age cults (and charlatans) of all kinds; the movement’s distaste for empiricism serves it well, as its assertions can neither be proven nor disproven in the lowly material realm in which we are trapped.
Traditionalism teaches that there are three basic sources of genuine wisdom: intuition, contemplation, and revelation. This excerpt from an essay (“In the Wake of the Fall”) by Frithjof Schuon helps to illustrate the Traditionalists’ worldview:
It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall 1 and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world, and the soul. This also presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that modern science rejects.
Science, in its arrogance, does not stop with denying the pure Intellect, but also denies “Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall.” Schuon offers an example of science’s folly:
According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere. From this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. But it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heavens and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things but from ignorance mixed with imagination and sentimentality. The blue sky is a direct and adequate symbol of the higher, supra-sensory degrees of Existence, indeed, a distant reverberation of those degrees. It is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples.
In case further explanation is needed, Schuon is happy to oblige:
A symbol is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, ‘descend’ to earth and ‘ascend’ to heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which it reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly ‘exact’ and ‘positive’ symbolism of appearances and its connection (at once analogical and ontological) with the celestial or angelic orders. The fact that the symbol itself may be no more than an optical illusion in no way impairs its precision or its efficacy, for all appearances, including those of space and the galaxies, are strictly speaking only illusions created by relativity.
Once you have dismissed sensory reality as composed of nothing but “illusions,” you have thoroughly deconstructed, well, everything; your work is done, and you can return to contemplating the Reality behind (and symbolized by) the illusions. 2 Of course, you will still have to eat, sleep, get dressed, find shelter, and perform all the other quotidian rites of mundane lower-case reality; however, you will do those things secure in your knowledge that they are ultimately meaningless, which should help you sleep at night.
That, at least, is better than nothing—isn’t it?
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Frithjof Schuon quotations are from “In the Wake of the Fall,” included in the anthology Science and the Myth of Progress. The quote from Coomaraswamy was the epigraph for that volume. Information on Traditionalism and on significant Traditionalists can be found at (where else?) Wikipedia:
Ananda Coomaraswamy - Wikipedia
Traditionalist School (perennialism) - Wikipedia
1 The “fall” to which Schuon refers was man’s fall from his original connection to the divine and into the abyss of the human ego. No fruit was involved, nor a serpent or even a God.
2 You will know when you are in touch with Reality because it will be capitalized. Should you reach that State, please tell the pure Intellect I said hello.
Nothing to See Here
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