The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times

By René Guénon

Book Overview

Ren Gu non (1886-1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization.

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times is Ren Gu non's most prophetic work. Having seen his telling analysis of Western culture, The Crisis of the Modern World, swiftly overtaken by events, he based this his final and most profound critique squarely on changeless metaphysical principles. He exposes with his fabled clarity the precise nature of the modern deviation, devoting special attention to the part played by modern philosophy and science (with their accompanying notions of progress and evolution) in the formation of the industrial and democratic society that we now regard as "normal." He sees history as a descent from Form (or Quality) toward Matter (or Quantity). But following after the Reign of Quantity (modern materialism and the "rise of the masses"), Gu non predicts a reign of "inverted quality" just before the end of the age: the triumph of the "counter-initiation" the kingdom of Antichrist. Although Gu non bases his critique on "abstract" principles, his examples are satisfyingly concrete: his remarks on "the degeneration of coinage" could easily be updated to include the transformation of money into electronically-stored digital information; his treatment of "the significance of metallurgy" as regards its occult dangers points directly to our own well-founded fear of such man-made elements as plutonium; and his chapter on the "cracks in the Great Wall" gives solid metaphysical grounding to our twenty-first century demonology, including the UFO phenomenon. This text is considered the magnum opus among Gu non's works of civilizational criticism, as is Symbols of Sacred Science among his studies on symbols and cosmology, and Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta among his more purely metaphysical works.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0900588675
• ISBN13: 9780900588679
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Sophia Perennis et Universalis
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

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.

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

Best Book Money Can Buy

It's extremely unfortunate that this book, "The Reign of Quantity" is out of print since it's the only book that presents a successful structural critique of "evolutionary" spirituality -- the cutting-edge of western propaganda.Guenon's insights from the 1940s are even more relevant today since he described so well the nascent New Age scene and it's ability to lure potentially level-headed people into a cloud of deception.Apparently Ramana Maharshi, the guru and sage promoter of Advaita Vedanta through self-enquiry, called R. Guenon, "the Great Sufi" and Guenon's associates visited Ramana Maharshi.According to the website www.realization.org Ramana Maharshi stated, "There is no evolution."Guenon argues this case in the context of the spiritual cycles of space-time based on the ratios 1:2:3:4. Guenon's degree thesis in France was on the calculus and transcendental values. "The Reign of Quantity" is the only book that develops the logic that western math, starting with the squaring of the circle, is inherently unjust, disharmonic and representative of the Kali Yuga.This is the only book that cuts through the b.s. and gives the reader a clear view of current times but at the same time a clear vision of how to cut through these times.Guenon gives great detail to the disharmonic forces that even call themselves "traditionalists" based on his writing yet are not accurate representatives of his work.This inaccuracy proved to be the case with the two other so-called "traditionalist" founders -- Schuon and Evola.Unfortunately Guenon's work has been dismissed by those who have not read him and Guenon's work has been ignored since it is too radical.Hopefully, after Oxford University Press's forthcoming book on traditionalism, there will be a reprint of "the Reign of Quantity"drew hempel

The roots of our unbalanced world.

The Reign of Quantity & The Signs of The TimesNowadays, there are so many signs of unbalance in our contemporary world that almost everybody is aware that something serious is happening, at many levels. Nor it would be necessary to mention the mockery done with religions and doctrines all over tha world. If the misfortune called communism accomplished its disastrous and devastating role as genocide and destructor of religions, the "democratic liberalism" also accomplished its side in another style: it placed above all the adoration of money, relegating the religions as a type of moral or ethics decoration. The nature, constantly violated and "defeated", manifests clear signs: the global temperature increases and phenomenons as "El Niño" are each year more devastating. The family, as institution, is in undoubtly disaggregation from decades and today we see children not only disrespecting their parents, but challenging them. Even in the vestiments we can verify disturbing signs: the masculine and the feminine less and less is distinguished and, with torn clothes, many seem to search the identification with the poverty, the dirty, the debauchee. Even the duration of things is dramatically abbreviated, at this times of "disposable", denouncing the inconstancy and the remainless, the mischievous consumistic voracity tending to incredible ends. Less and less are distinguished permanent values, principles and foundations. The visible result is the generalization of the unbalance, external and internal. People lives anxious, without understanding the true reasons of this state of things. "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" is a masterly work, without parallel, that investigates and exposes, step by step, all the gears of the plan of "desconstruction" and annihilation of the world, from the so called "Renascence", - that in fact constitutes the death of authentic values much more than the birth of other - until our days, with pseudo-religions, "holistics" movements and "ecumenicals" anything, converging for the establishment of a homogeneity and hegemony of the laica and materialistic mentality today dominating everything and all with hallucinating speed, prefiguring the coming of the "Anti-Christ", whose arrive is foreseen, under different names, by all the authentic traditions. The Institute René Guénon of Traditional Studies since several years dedicates its efforts to the teaching of traditional themes based in René Guénon's work. We indicate as a complement to the reading of this book "The Crisis of the Modern World" and "East and West", of the same author. Luiz Pontual IRGET

A radical critique of our age

Perhaps Guenon's greatest work, this book analyses the metaphysical roots of the crisis of this age, explaining the causes of the present condition to lie in modern civilization's rebellion against tradition -- not just one tradition, but the recurring and perennial tradition of every premodern civilization. The author's penetrating insight into modern science and the results of its monopoly over our age is fascinating. His critique of modernity is grounded in the traditional religious view which views human temporal existence not as an evolution, but a degression culminating in the "signs of the hour" and the emergence of the dajjal or the anti-christ. Guenon's radical critique of the 20th Century will no doubt be unpalatable for those to whom the wisdom of the ancients is ignorance relative to the quantum physics of today; but Guenon was well aware of the intellectual totalitarianism of the modern world-view. His objective was not a mass conversion to tradition. He sought rather to help open the eyes of a small number of people to the realities of the modern world and the illusion of progress. And this he did. A good number of prominent intellectuals were influenced by his works; among them: Huston Smith, Martin Lings, Gai Eaton, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, James Cutsinger, Toshiko Izutsu and host of others. Guenon died in the late 50's in Cairo, Egypt where he lived for almost twenty years as an adeherent of the Muslim faith. His last words were "Allah, Allah".