Section VI. Traditionalism and the problem of language

1. The language problem is one of the main lines in the philosophy of the twentieth century. There is every reason to apply it to traditionalism.

2. We will immediately start from the assumption that traditionalism operates not just the existing languages (what are, for example, religious and metaphysical traditions), acting as a kind of artificial and purely technical metalanguage, but is itself a language.

3. If traditionalism is the language, then it is their denotatum- connotatum system. With connotatum understandable if we consider the traditionalism as text, then review the text (Guenon classics / Evola, commentators and successors) will give us the connotative structure.

4. What is the denotative multitude of traditionalism? Mark Sedgwick, in his book "Against the Modern World" hypothesizes that Guenon’s concept Sophia Perennis learned of Platonic Renaissance. Hence this Primordial Tradition, adding Platonism Hindu details (Shankar and polar geography Tilak - Tilak through Wirth directly influenced Evola). Extending this hypothesis one can say a lot: denotativ traditionalism as a language is denotative variety of Platonism, or rather neo-Platonism. What was the neo-Platonism II-VI centuries? Not religion, but not against religion. Not philosophy, although based on philosophy (, but what philosophy is in «Chaldaeans oracle»?!). Not a sect, but a sect to. Not a political organization, but paying much attention to the normative ideal politics. This neo-Platonism had lived in parallel to official theology of the Middle Ages (hermetic, esoteric, orders), and then broke out in Renaissance. Al-falasafa, al-tasawwuf and Ishraq - its manifestation in the Islamic world. Merkaba-gnosis, the Rhine Hasidism and Kabbalah - in Jewish. Modern traditionalism is the neo-Platonism. Denotative multitude of traditionalism and neo-Platonism match.

5. But what sort of multitudes they are? Whether we clarified them? To clarify, you have to experience signified. According to Augustine, it suggests signification pact. It can be concluded with people and other entities. This signification pact creates empirical multitude of referent. In religion, this pact is with God. In modern times (according B. Latour and T.Kuhn) between people in a series of social rituals (see Latour’s  description of the social nature of the discoveries vacuum or microbes of Pasteur). And who in traditionalism? Here, the structure of the pact and therefore denotatum experience are extremely complex. We can say (arbitrarily) that it is tearing the veil, the radical throw away. That is the pact concluded with his own will to the transcendent, to overcome, to the exit for the brink. Evola called someone who took the experience and made a pact "differentiated man". Sohravardi spoke of "the brotherhood of the differentiated individuals." Denotative multitude of traditionalism (Neoplatonism) is rooted in the willful and radical and traumatic break in metastructure. In these metastructures there is the experience, but no one who experiences it and what is the object of experience. In other words, the denotations of traditionalism are such that they coincide with the theory of strictly praxis. You can call this a radical form of cognition, knowledge, facing directly the root reality.

6. Guénon spoke to Primordial Tradition. In Sohravardi we find the concept of "involvement in the community Sakina (Shekinah)." These concepts refer to a particular semantic field, which develops a radical experience. And in this special isolated environment connotatum run into denotation. In this merging is implemented the signification pact of traditionalism.

7. The difference between Guenon’s traditionalism and Neoplatonism is that Guenon refers to the East. It belongs to Hinduism, Taoism or Buddhism as a traditionalist (ie considering the language of these traditions as a substitutes those empirical realities, which Guenon sign in the bosom of his development of denotational set). But it does not impose his (Neoplatonic) projections of the East, but  deconstructs the East, it extracts metastructure and adds to the Western monotheistic and Neoplatonic beds new, oriental. The result is an advanced neo-Platonism, which does not explain the eastern esotericism through the western, but extends western at the expense of eastern and further explain both in terms of the extended model.

8. So, traditionalism can be considered as an extended Neoplatonism. Such attempts were in India and a number of digesters, the same Shankara, Patanjali or Kashmiri shivaists built integral generalizing models to find the correspondence between the various schools, terminology and structure of specific schools, exercises, directions. In Iran, something similar is in the basis of school Ishraq. Sohravardi steps to incorporate into the denotative system the Zoroastrian tradition and its notation. Guenon puts the widest extension model.

9. Here arises the question: how does this differ from theosophism, the occultism and new age today? Claims to syncretism or synthesis are the same ... Drawing the demarcation line between traditionalism and neospiritualism was a constant concern of Guenon and Evola. They put forward a number of criteria. The most important is in the denotative multitude and the radical experience. Neospiritualism are not dealing with a metastructure, but with her chaotic simulacrum. Their expertise includes human and his inner circle, while the traditionalist with the first step beginning to move in Over-human dimension. Traditionalism and the New Age operate with different sets of denotative.

10. Neotraditionalism must constantly keep in focus the issue of denotatum. It is important today (and always). Experience of  denotatum is the constant validation that the traditionalist says or does. Traditionalism, paraphrase Evola, this is purely an experimental discipline. It requires intellectual intuition, which in this case must be supported with concrete meeting with the empirical denotation. And this meeting whenever fulgurantiv. In this sense, we can put the problems: 1) sharpen attention to the radical traditionalist cognition ("the dawn of knowledge" on Sohravardi), 2) again and again a tight line between traditionalism and neospiritualism (translations of Guenon published in neospiritualism publishers is our common shame) 3 ) promptly reconsider Neoplatonism and move the center of gravity to it, instead of "esoteric", which gives reason to slip into "new age", and 4) to revive the internationalist and interconfessional "brotherhood of separated" ("ihvani Tajrid"), as an environment  of signification pact and localization dispositif’s access to denotata 5) focus on the denotative set of eschatological discourse and reconstruct the traditionalist model of the "end times" (including experiences with its denotative nodes).