Jean-Pierre Laurant, Jean-Marc Vivenza and Bruno Bérard discuss around this table about symbolic timeless work of René Guénon : "The Crisis of the Modern World", edited in 1927. What is a crisis? From a metehistorical point of view (or individual) is the history of each civilization (or each Man) not a chain of uninterrupted crisis, breaking? What about Adamic fall? Adoption of sedentary lifestyle during the neolithic? Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Revolution of 1789? Excessive industrialization during the 19th century and hyper consumption?
What do we have to understand by "modernity"? Do we have to refer to Leibniz' works who was the first to define the notion of "materialism" in 1702? Or is it a simple nostalgia which regrets "the good old days". In Homer's time already, Greek philosophers complained that new times didn't worth the past times...
Our three authors try to answer the following questions: - does the crises evoked by René Guénon ushered in a new era linked to the four ages of humanity such as it is defined by Hindu cosmology of the Manvantara? Or must we, retrospectively of the past century, read it like a simple apocalyptic text? What is the universality part and intuition part in this work?
- What filiation can we establish between René Guénon's way of thinking and the Joseph de Maistre's, the radical right-wings which thrived during the 19th century, and traditionalists catholics? Is their common reject of modernity based on analogue basis and are their argumentation placed on the same level of understanding?
- What influence does the French occultist movement have on the work of René Guénon? The formidable propensity that this time had to "want to explain everything", even the indescribable, has it brought our author to bad habits, especially his considerations on the Agartha, hidden center of the world?
So many questions which lighten pertinently demythologization of our whole world. As reminds Jean-Pierre Laurant: "René Guénon is the disposal of all the world but salvageable by nobody"... in these two parts which last 70 minutes.
Jean-Pierre Laurant, Jean-Marc Vivenza and Bruno Bérard discuss around this table about symbolic timeless work of René Guénon : "The Crisis of the Modern World", edited in 1927.
