The Set of the Real: Mathematical Implications of the Metaphysics of René Guénon – Peter Samsel

Abstract:

“René Guénon, the seminal founder of the Traditionalist School, was also perhaps its preeminent metaphysician. More particularly, he was the plenary expositor of a metaphysics through which mathematical conceptualization runs like a golden thread. As Frithjof Schuon, another remarkable metaphysician, has observed, “Guénon was like the personification, not of spirituality as such, but uniquely of metaphysical certainty; or of metaphysical self- evidence in mathematical mode…”2 As is well known, Guénon’s primary intellectual formation prior to his plunge into the esoteric was that of mathematics, which he both studied and taught for many years.3 In this, he followed a well established tradition of linkage between mathematics and metaphysics extending back to such figures as Pythagoras and Plato.4 Indeed, mathematics in”