Counter-Currents
Frithjof Schuon
2,154 words
Aside from some of Julius Evola’s writings, there is a dearth of writing on worldly matters from a Traditionalist standpoint. As John Morgan mentioned in a recent review, most Traditionalist writers focus solely on spirituality while evading the implications that Tradition has on more practical matters. Considering this, it was refreshing when I first discovered Frithjof Schuon’s two expansive essays, “The Meaning of Race” and “The Meaning of Caste.”[1]
In these two essays, Schuon describes the significance of castes and races in regard to human nature, or more aptly, human being. His view rejects the notion of these categories as being fundamentally socially conditioned, constructed, or accidental, and instead analyzes them as expressions of human nature.
Schuon’s two essays discussing race and caste were published together and are complementary, but here I will only discuss “The Meaning of Race.” However, a quick overview of what the terms “caste” and “race” mean for Schuon is first necessary.
Unlike Evola, who put forward the idea of the “race of the Spirit,” Schuon classifies race in a completely separate category from psychic or spiritual heredity. While Evola and Schuon both believe there is a metaphysical component of the human being, Schuon denotes the “spirit” of a person strictly by the term “caste.” For those unfamiliar, “caste” for Schuon refers primarily to the fundamental character types present throughout all of humanity. The Indo-Aryan caste system, according to Tradition, was merely founded upon these natural distinctions. However, like Evola and the rest of the Traditionalist school, Schuon holds the view that the metaphysical component of a human being is more “absolute,” or more “real,” than the physical. He writes:
Caste takes precedence over race because spirit has priority over form; race is a form while caste is a spirit. Even Hindu castes, which were in origin purely Indo-European, cannot be limited to a single race: there are Tamil, Balinese and Siamese brahmins.
It is not possible, however, to hold that race is something devoid of meaning apart from physical characteristics, for, if it is true that formal constraints have nothing absolute about them, forms must nevertheless have their own sufficient reason . . . (147)
For Schuon, race has no metaphysical component, but rather is a “formal constraint” upon the expression of spirit: race is essentially a “style” through which the formless spirit is expressed, defining the “being,” and by extension the activity, of a people. In the same way that artistic genius has different ways of expressing itself depending on the particular culture it is expressed within, so spirit, which is universal, expresses itself through various racial styles. It could be compared to a single light shining through different colors of glass, the light gaining a different appearance and character depending on the color through which it shines. For Schuon, race is the root of culture, for culture is the creative activity of a race in which its inherent qualities and predispositions are exteriorized and formalized.
Schuon considers “black,” “white,” and “yellow” to be the three principal races. Of course, these are extremely broad categories, but he believes that all peoples fit into these categories, or else fit somewhere between them. The logic behind these three categories lies partly in his understanding of race as correlating to the three gunas, or modes, of Hinduism (tamas [sleep, ignorance], sattva [goodness], and rajas [passion], respectively) and lies partly in his analysis of racial styles. For example, while the Chinese and Japanese have distinct languages and cultures, Schuon would claim that they both exemplify the yellow race because both races exhibit a non-dramatic, “intuitive delicacy” in the field of art, and other qualitative similarities, such as a disdain for eloquence and a penchant for sober, elliptical expression in language. These qualities can be observed in most Asian cultures.
In elaborating on the qualities of the races, Schuon waxes rather poetic, using a method of what I would call “cultural physiognomy.” His descriptions of the qualities of the races attempt to link the physiognomies commonly found in certain peoples with the culture of a people. For example:
The originality of each of the various races is especially apparent in the eyes: those of the white man, generally deep-set, are mobile, piercing and transparent; his soul “goes out” in his look and at the same time shines, in its passivity, through it. The eyes of yellow men are quite different: physically at skin level, they are generally indifferent and impenetrable; their look is dry and light like a brush stroke on silk. As for the black man, his eyes are slightly prominent and heavy, warm and moist . . . it is the deep and latent look of the earth. (149)
It should be noted that Schuon’s idea of “white” is much broader than is commonly understood by the term. Under the category “white,” Schuon does not only categorize Europeans, but also Semitic whites (Arabs and Jews) and (Aryan-descended) Indians. For Schuon, there is a great diversity of style within the white race: it exemplifies a greater “disequilibrium” than the yellow and black races, which is why it has given birth to such different cultures and civilizations. The mental diversity of white peoples can be evidenced by the diversity of religions (Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Greco-Roman, and Germanic paganism) that have gained predominance in white cultures. However, all the languages of these peoples produce “long, rich, incisive sentences,” and all the white cultures are marked by a dramatic opposition between man and nature, at least compared to black and yellow peoples. Likewise, a higher degree of mental proclivity is present in white peoples. Schuon writes that the element of the white race is “fire.” Fire can either be tame like a burning candle, or wild, consuming, and restless. The former is best represented by the contemplativeness of the Hindus, and the latter is represented by the strong inclination towards action and expansion in Westerners.
As stated earlier, Schuon correlates the three races with the three gunas of Hinduism. According to Schuon, the white race exemplifies sattva through the bright and ascending fire element, the yellow race exemplifies rajas through the mobile and clear water element, and the black race exemplifies tamas through the heavy and inert earth element. He writes:
The precarious nature of the ascending tendency explains both the Greco-Roman and modern deviations: that which is intellectual penetration and contemplativity among Hindus has become mental hypertrophy and inventiveness among Westerners . . . The conquests of the yellow peoples swept along like a tidal wave throwing down everything in their path but not transforming their victims as did the white man’s conquests; the yellow races conserve like water and do not transmute like fire . . . As for the black race, they are, as we have said, “existential” and this explains their passivity and inaptitude for radiating outwards, even within the fold of Islam. (164)
As evidenced by the Spanish rule of South America that completely reshaped the people of that continent, and the lasting British influence in India, as well as the Arab conquests, one can understand Schuon’s claim that the territorial expansion of whites completely changes the language and character of a people. English is the current lingua franca across the world. On the other hand, the imperialism of yellow peoples, such as Japan’s half-century rule over Taiwan, often leaves the subject people’s culture comparatively intact. Black peoples are mostly stagnant and self-contained, with no significant or reshaping influence on any non-black people of note in the present day.
According to Schuon, while the elements of the races are unique, they are all, in a way, contained in each other:
It could be said that the white and yellow races, insofar as they correspond to the elements “fire” and “water,” meet in the element “air.” Air has the two qualities of lightness (sattva) and mobility (rajas) . . . But there is also destructiveness (tamas) in fire and transparency (sattva) in water . . . (165-166)
While the predominant character of each race is dominated by different elements, the races are not in watertight compartments, and each race exemplifies the predominant element of another, to a greater or lesser degree, in its own predominant element. As stated above, the luminous, fiery, creative quality of Westerners (sattva) also has a certain destructiveness (tamas) about it. The earth element is heavy (tamas), but also fertile (rajas), and earth, by its nature, contains luminous crystals and minerals (sattva).
On the topic of race-mixing, Schuon has a nuanced view. Like Spengler, he believes that race-mixing can sometimes be positive for a racial stock, albeit the positivity is dependent upon the races being mixed. In his words, if the mix is compatible, race-mixing has the ability to “aerate” a stock that has become too “compact.” However, if the races are too distinct from each other, mixing will corrupt a race with unique qualities. In one of the footnotes, Schuon defends the phenomenon of black Africans mixing with Mediterranean whites in North Africa, claiming that both races have been inhabiting the same climate and environment for thousands of years, rendering a similarity of type. On the other hand, Schuon staunchly opposes race-mixing between blacks and whites in North America, where the whites are predominantly Germanic, going so far as to defend segregation between blacks and whites, if the segregation were truly “unilateral” and “conceived in the interest of both races.”
While Schuon takes a firm stance against the “anti-racists” of his day, he is quick to critique Eurocentrism with regard to the judgment of certain physical traits in other races that have historically been viewed as marks of inferiority. For Schuon, the prognathic jaw line, low forehead, and thick lips, historically referenced by Westerners to compare blacks with apes, are not marks of inferiority, but rather signify a racial type that is less predisposed to thinking, more vital, and more “centered on being” than races in which the orthogonal jawline is more common. These traits are not indicators of barbarism: he cites certain barbarous peoples that are predominantly orthogonal and civilized peoples that are predominantly prognathic. I found this particularly interesting, as it puts forth a fundamental reason for why black peoples typically have lower IQs than whites, since it is due to their consciousness being generally less mental. On the upside, blacks are usually more grounded or “down-to-earth” than whites, which is perhaps why they are underrepresented in fields that require abstract thinking, but otherwise seem less prone to the anxiety, overthinking, and unrest that engulfs many white minds.
Schuon is sure to emphasize that, for the individual of a particular race, the race to which he belongs is of secondary importance to the condition of his soul. He writes:
. . . for us the question is not: “What is our racial heritage?” but rather: “What are we making of that heritage?” To talk about racial value is, for the individual, quite meaningless, for the existence of Christ or of the Vedantic doctrine adds nothing to the value of a white man with a base nature any more than the barbarism of certain African tribes takes anything away from a black man of saintly soul; and as for the effective value, not of a race, but of an ethnic atavism, this is a question of “spiritual alchemy,” not of scientific or racist dogmatism. (168)
If Schuon can be said to be an ethnonationalist, his ethnonationalism is anti-egalitarian. As stated earlier, for Schuon and other Traditionalists, being part of the same race is no justification for disregarding the natural differences between individuals. In fact, since caste takes precedence over race, it logically follows for Schuon – and he explicitly states – that individuals of a different race, but of the same caste, are more fundamentally, or metaphysically, similar to each other than individuals who are of the same race, but of different caste. However, this view should not be confused with the view that sharing the same caste makes two people equal, regardless of race. Rather, Schuon means that they share the same type, and a “vertical” equality of caste is more real than a “horizontal” equality of race.
Schuon’s essay, like his other writings, is rather scattered and spontaneous, so this is just an attempt to lay out the essentials of Schuon’s thoughts on race. As a result, there are many remarks that were not covered here, so I would highly recommend reading the essay itself. Schuon offers an extremely balanced and fair view of the human races, and the love he has for human diversity is strongly apparent in his writing, to the extent that even an honest Leftist would be hesitant to label his views “racist.” I even think that this essay would offer a great entry point for people of a spiritual and intellectual bent to the concepts of ethnonationalism. Schuon offers a very positive view of a diverse, yet unified, humanity, in which all races are different, yet all uniquely aspire to the same divine reality.
Note
[1] Language of the Self (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1999), pp. 147-175.
20 comments
Very interesting. I find the view that race-mixing is okay given the races involved to be utterly false however. I think race-mixing benefits probably every race except for us. I’m sure that Arabs, Blacks, etc. gain by mixing with whites because they have more intelligent children thereby. Whites on the other hand have such a precious genetic code that mixing with someone outside your race is fatal to it.
The fact that most of the world’s races have something to gain through miscegenation is a huge reason why they are so enthusiastic in their promotion of race-mixing. They have an instinct that tells them that having access to our genes would put their children at an advantage. Blacks, Latinos, etc will always argue for multiculturalism because they know it leads to access to our genes.
At the end of the day, Whites will always have an instinct that separation is good and most non-Whites will always have an instinct that integration is good, so they can tear us down and raise themselves up through miscegenation.
Man, this commentary makes me happy ! This is such a plausible argument that race-mixing is not symmetrical but that POCs win with it while Whites lose with it – yet I think I never heard it anywhere before. Point being: it´s used against Whites to show how morally superior the POCs are because they are not racist ! You cannot fight this argumentation when you fall for the “symmetrical”-fallacy ! YES POCs are not racist against Whites: because they win when race-mixing with Whites. Mejorar la raza, eh… effing hypocrites…
It is also never pointed out that POCs consider White HIGHER. Nobody has the courage to go there. It may be tactically useful to avoid that field… but the fact in itself is remarkable and important. It´s part of the war on noticing, you are just not supposed to notice this totally obvious situation.
Lajos Kassai, one of the intellectual leaders of the Hungarian Right says this: someone’s true race is shown by the kind of archetypal image that stirs his soul. So true. Show me a sandy beach with palm trees, or an image of a rainforest, and to me, it could be on another planet. Show me Mediterranean or Nordic images, and I say, “Hm, nice”. But when I see an image of the steppe, it feels like coming home. I’m a descendant of White people who did not migrate to the West.
HungarianFashionista,
That is an excellent point that you bring up. Here is a link from an article that claims we prefer the savannas of Africa based upon our evolutionary development.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249624620_Evolutionary_Influence_on_Human_Landscape_Preference
I think this is the one problem of evolutionary psychology, it wants to stop our mental development in the Veldt. If we view this more from the perspective of depth psychology (Jung), then what you speak about is correct. There are certain environments that stir our soul more than others, and that has to do with the archetypes that developed as we developed our religious and spiritual identities. I wonder if the person who longs for his ancestral “pagan” religion has a much stronger attraction to the landscapes that gave birth to that religion than the average deracinated white person. The deracinated white person returns to the savanna in his soul because he is a spiritual negro. I just google image searched “savanna” and “Pontic Caspian Steppe”, and definitely the images of the Pontic Caspian Steppes feels more like “home”. I know that Arkona has a song titled, “Arkaim”, where the beginning of the song has lyrics that deal with the steppes.
Actually, the steppe stretches from Siberia to the Carpathian basin (present day Hungary) and it was like a highway on which herders of large animals constantly moved back and forth. And originally it was covered by patches of light forest and crossed by many rivers. This combination of thick grasses, shade and water was the ideal environment for herding cultures. So the savanna theory might be onto something, we just have to discount the Africa worship and adjust the geography to our own history.
This seperation of biological and spiritual race, or the seperation of race and caste are in my opinion nothing more then an attempt to promote racemixing through the backdoor. There is of course no spiritual seperated from the material, just reality that expresses itself in a lower material and a higher spiritual way.
So no, there aren’t caste types that are similar to every race. just races, which are divided into castes. A British farmer is not similar in caste to an African farmer, or a Chinese priest to a French priest, the human race is made out of hundreds of subspecies, some mostly pure, others of mixed stock and every race has dozens to hundreds of castes or types.
Trying to be funny and using some quasi-mystical system to divide races into three element groups, or three vague castes is not true and it’s completely vulgar. Anyone with half a brain can understand this mans views on race and caste, because they are simple, trying to understand DNA, haplogroups, bloodtypes, skulltypes, migration patterns, language groups and how these create the hundreds of different subspecies of human on Earth, is difficult to understand, but true, therefor not plebian.
Equally, Jungian archetypes or those of by Myers and Briggs have far more meaning, solidity and truth to them, then anything this man has too say about about humanity. the truth is that Western racial sciences and psychology are more true then the quasi-mystical occultism of a fortune telling old woman.
This entire school of traditionalism is nothing more then a big waste of time, the West isn’t going to embrace antiquated Greek, Abrahamic or Indian ideas, it’s going to keep it’s own culture, clean it, remove the useless junk from it, integrate it, create a unified science out of it and leave the past behind.
Sure- DNA, haplogroups, skulltypes, bloodtypes, etc give us a scientific understanding of how races came to be and these things are perfectly valid within their field, but the claim that the scientific/biological understanding of race is true and that Schuon’s claims are false because they have no scientific grounding and are “quasi-mystical,” I am afraid, is merely based on the assumption that science is the best means of understanding reality, which in itself is unscientific and “quasi-mystical.”
There is nothing “woo-woo” about Schuon’s ideas. The three gunas are easily observable in all of experience; they are present right here and now. According to Hinduism, the three gunas form the foundation of manifested reality, so naturally, a Traditionalist perspective, being a science which sees reality from the top-down rather than the bottom-up, ( i.e. Platonists, not Aristotelians) would attempt to link the lower particulars(the human races) as manifestations of the universal.
I don’t think Schuon had any reason to “promote race-mixing through the backdoor.” And just because something is simple does not make it plebian or untrue, inasmuch as something is not de facto true just because it is difficult. Schuon’s claims relate to a different order of knowledge than the scientific, namely the knowledge of experience which the Traditionalist school attempts to view from the “top-down”, namely as manifestations of universal and metaphysical principles. You can surely argue that Schuon is wrong, but to merely claim that the scientific understanding of race is “more real” is pointless.
But they don’t present any “arguments”. Their theses have to be recognized and accepted at face value. Like when you look at 2 apples and 3 apples, and you just know that the second group contains more apples than the first one. It’s not something that we can address on a mental level.
The only way to disprove the Traditionalists is by having a feeling in our guts that something is not entirely OK with them. African spirituality shines like luminous crystals? Really?
(Look at the photo at the top of the article. Isn’t this a bit… over the top? Instagram-ish? Considering Greg Johnson’s well-known reservations about cat persons, I think the picture was selected on purpose!)
I am sorry, what are you even talking about, science is science, regardless if it deals with chemistry, physics, mathematics, metaphysics or mysticism, this idea that there is one material reality which has it’s own rules and another reality with is spiritual and has another set of rules is ridiculous, there is one reality.
It’s not the case that if I sleep with a negress I am being a pervert in material reality, but a saint in spiritual reality, because we both belong to the warrior caste. Again, this is racemixing through the back door, by reintroducing asiatic ways of looking at reality.
My entire argument isn’t mainly that this is just cheap theosophist bullshit, but that a 18th century philosopher or scholar, going with the Bible and the classics and mixing it with then modern scientific thinking, would end up creating a deeper, broader and more meaningful (and more spiritually true) essay about race then this guy would have.
Not only that, his worldview isn’t only cheap, it just isn’t true. Are Dravidians White people, or some mixed subgroup, are abbo’s blacks, are khoisan blacks, are the many Siberian groups or those of America Asiatic, or somewhat more European, what exactly are Somali’s. See, subspecies groups are not that easy to quantify by putting them in three broadcategories and applying quaint poetic descriptions to them, again some scholar from the 18th century could do that and do it better.
Also, the caste system is dependent on the race and the culture, the seperation of European castes into an aristocracy that fights and prays, a burgerclass that is primarily managerial and a working class, which is expressed both in regismol, medieval society and even in the modern world as upper, middle and lower class, is superficially similar to those in India, but that doesn’t take away that the seperation between warrior or priest is never completely clear, or that the West has partically elevated the economic and the technocratic to a semi-priesly role and down-graded the military to an auxiliary position, or that a labouring class is mostly meaningless in a technocratic society.
In other words, traditionalists are just a bunch of guy who think that by adopting a bunch of badly understood medieval hindu ideas and mixing them with theosophist tier scientific ideas, they are going to save a civilization they barely understand, when what our society needs is for intellectual to cut the cancer out of our intellectual tradition and integrate whats left.
I am sorry, what are you even talking about, science is science, regardless if it deals with chemistry, physics, mathematics, metaphysics or mysticism, this idea that there is one material reality which has it’s own rules and another reality with is spiritual and has another set of rules is ridiculous, there is one reality.
Science is science. But your beliefthat all of reality can be explained by science, or that science “is more true” than metaphysics is not scientific. Where is the evidence for this belief? I’m just saying that you, and the rest of scientific materialists, are guilty of the same fault you level against metaphysics- that fault being a “leap of faith”, an assumption about the ultimate nature of reality, an assumption that is not rational, nor scientific, nor is capable of being proved rationally.
This video explains the rest of the “scientistic” assumptions in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmkBqbm8Y4g
It’s not the case that if I sleep with a negress I am being a pervert in material reality, but a saint in spiritual reality, because we both belong to the warrior caste. Again, this is racemixing through the back door, by reintroducing asiatic ways of looking at reality.
It is indeed not the case… if you actually read the article closely, you would know no one claims it is.
Not only that, his worldview isn’t only cheap, it just isn’t true. Are Dravidians White people, or some mixed subgroup, are abbo’s blacks, are khoisan blacks, are the many Siberian groups or those of America Asiatic, or somewhat more European, what exactly are Somali’s. See, subspecies groups are not that easy to quantify by putting them in three broadcategories and applying quaint poetic descriptions to them, again some scholar from the 18th century could do that and do it better.
No, Dravidians are not white. Note how I specified Aryan descended Indians. You are right, there are a lot of subspecies and subgroups and mixes. I suppose I should have clarified that Schuon means that these are the three pure races, the rest of human races being various mixes and subgroups of these categories.
In regards to your comments about caste, I agree that caste in different societies is more nuanced than portrayed here. Maybe I’ll write an article on this in the future.
I never stated that everything can be explained by science, I never stated science is more true then metaphysics, I never stated directly or indirectly that I am a scientific materialist, therefor I will not give you an awnser to something I never said.
Equally, there is no reason to claim that the three highly artificial groups of White, Yellow and Black are somehow more pure. Who is more pure, a Bantu, a Khoison an Abo, a Melanesian? Aren’t these completely different groups, adapted to different environments, with different temperaments who get lumped together because they are both dark skinned and primitive.
Do you think a steppe Indian is somehow less pure then a Chinaman or Mongolian?
You could just say Ryan Faulk is right. Lol
This book was critically reviewed on the Evola As He Is message group (message no. 1420).
The author of this piece may want to read that review.
Thank you, I’ll check it out!
Do you have the link?
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evola_as_he_is/info
But it is a closed group and you will need to register.
Thank you for this, you’ve done a great service, as Schuon is ordinarily neglected in favor of the other two of the “Great Triad.” The Anglophone Right needs an infusion of more of the Traditionalist perspective, to get it out of the narrow-minded materialism and prejudices which have been plaguing it for centuries.
A most excellent article! Long ago, I had a book of Schuon’s, Castes and Races, published by Perennial Books and long since lost. It was very short, about 60pp!, and so could have been these two essays you reference, or contained them with some others. It doesn’t seem to have been reprinted since, despite World Wisdom’s extensive program of republishing new, expanded editions of Schuon’s books. I wonder why?
As referenced in the note at the end of this essay, both of Schuon’s essays on race and caste are contained in “Language of the Self,” which is currently in print from World Wisdom.
Very interesting point of view, I’d like to see more articles on Frithjof Schuon in the future.
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