The Essential Rene Guenon by Herlihy John Lings Martin

Author:Herlihy, John, Lings, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-933316-57-4
Publisher: World Wisdom

16

The Realization of the Being through Knowledge

We have just said that the being assimilates more or less completely everything of which it is conscious; indeed, there is no true knowledge in any domain whatsoever, other than that which enables us to penetrate into the intimate nature of things, and the degrees of knowledge consist precisely in the measure to which this penetration is more or less profound and results in a more or less complete assimilation. In other words, the only genu ine knowledge is that which implies an identification of the subject with the object, or, if one prefers to consider the relationship inversely, an assimilation of the object by the subject,1 and conse quently the measure to which such an identification or such an assimilation is actually implied constitutes precisely the degrees of knowledge themselves.2 We must therefore maintain, despite all the more or less idle philosophical discussions that this point has given rise to,3 that all true and effective knowledge is immediate, and that mediate knowledge can have only a purely symbolic and representative value.4 As for the actual possibility of immediate knowledge, the whole theory of multiple states makes it sufficiently comprehen sible. Besides, to wish to cast doubt upon it is merely to give proof of complete ignorance of the most elementary metaphysical princi ples, since without this immediate knowledge, metaphysics itself would be impossible.5

We have spoken of identification or assimilation, and we can employ these two terms almost indifferently here, although they do not arise from exactly the same point of view; in the same way, one can regard knowledge as proceeding simultaneously from the sub ject to the object of which it becomes conscious (or, more generally, and in order not to limit ourselves to the conditions of certain states, from which it makes a secondary modality of itself), and from the object to the subject that assimilates it to itself; and in this context it is worth recalling the Aristotelian definition of knowledge in the sensible domain as “the common act of perceiver and per ceived”, which in effect implies such a reciprocity of relationship.6 Where the sensible and corporeal domain is concerned, the sense organs are thus the “entryways” of knowledge for the individual being;7 but from another point of view they are also precisely the “outlets” in that all knowledge implies an act of identification start ing from the knowing subject and proceeding toward the known (or to be known) object, like the emission of a sort of exterior prolon gation of itself. And it is important to note that such a prolongation is only exterior in relation to the individuality envisaged in its most restricted sense, for it is an integral part of the extended individual ity; in extending itself thus by a development of its own possibilities, the being has no need at all to go outside of itself, which, in reality, would make no sense since under no conditions can a being become other than itself. This

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