Overview
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In this chapter, René Guénon argues that the modern world suffers from a profound confusion between knowledge and action, a confusion that inverts their true hierarchical order. He begins by stating that, in traditional civilisations, knowledge is always superior to action and constitutes its necessary principle. Action devoid of knowledge is blind and cannot be truly effective on a spiritual level. Modernity, however, has reversed this relationship by exalting action for its own sake and by reducing knowledge to a mere instrument of practical utility.
Guénon explains that this reversal is intimately linked to the modern conception of the individual, who sees himself as the center of all things. From this follows a disdain for purely speculative knowledge, which seeks only the contemplation of eternal truths, in favor of an activism that is always restless and superficial. He observes that modern philosophy, especially since Francis Bacon and Descartes, has substituted the quest for wisdom with the quest for power over nature. Thus, knowledge is no longer sought as a means of intellectual liberation but as a tool for material domination.
This degradation of knowledge leads to a parallel degradation of action. According to Guénon, traditional action, whether ritual or social, is always the application of a higher principle that transcends the individual. It is a reflection, in the temporal domain, of an eternal and immutable order. Modern action, by contrast, has cut itself off from any transcendent principle and has become purely profane and chaotic. It is a “feverish” action that moves in a void because it no longer recognises any fixed point above the human level.
He then distinguishes between two types of knowledge: rational knowledge, which is discursive and limited to the domain of the individual, and intellectual intuition, which is supra‑rational and opens directly onto metaphysical truth. Modern Western thought, since Descartes, has imprisoned itself within rationalism, denying the existence of any faculty superior to reason. This rationalism is inseparable from individualism, for it refuses to admit any principle that transcends the individual human self. Consequently, the modern West has lost all contact with true tradition, which is nothing other than the transmission of a supra‑human wisdom.
Guénon emphasises that intellectual intuition, by which alone pure metaphysical knowledge is attained, has nothing in common with the so‑called intuition of certain modern philosophers, such as Bergson. That modern intuition is infra‑rational, belonging to the sensory order, whereas true intellectual intuition is supra‑rational and pertains to pure intellect. Ancient and medieval doctrines, even when merely philosophical, explicitly recognised the superiority of the intellect over reason. The very possibility of a traditional civilisation rests on the effective presence of this intellectual intuition, which is infallible in itself and to which everything is “suspended” as to its source.
He concludes that as long as Westerners persist in misunderstanding or denying intellectual intuition, they will be incapable of possessing a genuine tradition. They will also be unable to understand the authentic representatives of Eastern civilisations, where everything is organised in reference to this immutable intuition, the sole point of departure for any development conforming to traditional norms. The modern crisis is therefore the direct consequence of a fall from knowledge into action, from the intellect into mere reason, and from the universal into the individual. Only a restoration of the primacy of pure knowledge can put an end to this subversion, but such a restoration requires a return to principles that modernity has definitively rejected.