The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

8 Ancient Crafts and Modern Industry

There is a great contrast between what the ancient crafts used to be and what modern industry now is, and it presents in its essentials another particular case and at the same time a practical application of the contrast between the qualitative and quantitative points of view, which predominate in the one and in the other respectively. In order to see why this is so, it is useful to note first of all that the distinction between the arts and the crafts, or between ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’, is itself something specifically modern, as if it had been born of the deviation and degeneration which have led to the replacement in all fields of the traditional conception by the profane conception. To the ancients the artifex was indifferently the man who practised an art or a craft; but he was, to tell the truth, something that neither the artist nor the artisan is today, if those words are used in the modern sense (moreover the word ‘artisan’ tends more and more to disappear from contemporary language); he was something more than either the one or the other because, at least originally, his activity was bound up with principles of a much more profound order. If the crafts used to comprehend in one way or another the arts properly so called, since the two were not then separated by any essential characteristic, it is because the nature of the crafts was truly qualitative, for nobody can refuse to admit that such is the nature of art, more or less by definition. Nevertheless the moderns, for that very reason, narrowly restrict their conception of art, and relegate it to a sort of closed domain having no connection with the rest of human activity, that is, with what they regard as constituting ‘reality’, using the word in the very crude sense it bears for them; and they go so far as freely to attribute to art, thus robbed of all practical significance, the character of a ‘luxury’, a term thoroughly characteristic of what could without any exaggeration be called the ‘silliness’ of our period.

In every traditional civilization, as there has often been occasion to point out, every human activity of whatever kind is always regarded as derived essentially from principles. This is conspicuously true for the sciences, and it is no less true for the arts and the crafts, and there is in addition a close connection between them all, for according to a formula postulated as a fundamental axiom by the builders of the Middle Ages, ars sine scientia nihil; the science in question is of course traditional science, and certainly not modern science, the application of which can give birth to nothing except modern industry. By this attachment to principles human activity could be said to be as it were ‘transformed’, and instead of being limited to what it is in itself, namely, a mere external manifestation (and the profane point of view consists in this and nothing else), it is integrated with the tradition, and constitutes for those who carry it out an effective means of participation in the tradition, and this is as much as to say that it takes on a truly ‘sacred’ and ‘ritual’ character. That is why it can be said that, in any such civilization, ‘every occupation is a priesthood’;[27] but in order to avoid conferring on this last word a more or less unwarrantable extension of meaning, if not a wholly false one, it must be made clear that priesthood is not priesthood unless it possesses something that has been preserved in the sacerdotal functions alone, ever since the time when the previously non-existent distinction between the sacred and the profane arose.

To see what is meant by the ‘sacred’ character of the whole of human activity, even only from an exterior or, if preferred, exoteric point of view, it is only necessary to consider a civilization like the Islamic, or the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages; it is easy to see that in them the most ordinary actions of life have something ‘religious’ in them. In such civilizations religion is not something restricted, narrowly bounded and occupying a place apart, without effective influence on anything else, as it is for modern Westerners (at least for those who still consent to admit religion at all); on the contrary it penetrates the whole existence of the human being, or better, it embraces within its domain everything which constitutes that existence, and particularly social life properly so called, so much so that there is really nothing left that is ‘profane’, except in the case of those who for one reason or another are outside the tradition, but any such case then represents no more than a mere anomaly. Elsewhere, where the word ‘religion’ cannot properly be applied to the form of the civilization considered, there is nonetheless a traditional and ‘sacred’ legislation that plays an equivalent part though it has a different character, similar considerations thus applying to all traditional civilizations without exception. But there is something more: looking at esoterism rather than exoterism (these words being used for convenience although they do not strictly apply to all cases in the same way) it becomes clear that there exists, generally speaking, an initiation linked to the crafts and taking them as its base or its ‘support’;[28] these crafts must therefore be capable of a superior and more profound significance if they are to provide effectively a way of access to the initiatic domain, and it is evidently by reason of their essentially qualitative character that such a thing is possible.

The notion that helps most toward an understanding of this point is that which the Hindu doctrine calls svadharma. In itself this notion is entirely qualitative, since it implies the accomplishment by every being of an activity conformable to its own particular essence or nature, and thereby eminently conformable to ‘order’ (rita) in the sense already explained; and it is this same notion, or rather its absence, that indicates so clearly where the profane and modern conception fails. Indeed, according to the modern conception a man can adopt any profession, and even change it to suit his whim, as if the profession were something wholly outside himself, having no real connection with what he really is, that by virtue of which he is himself and not anyone else. According to the traditional conception, on the other hand, each person must normally fulfil the function for which he is destined by his own nature, using the particular aptitudes essentially implicit in that nature as such;[29] he cannot fulfill a different function except at the cost of a serious disorder, which will have its repercussions on the whole social organization of which he is a part; and much more than this, if that kind of disorder becomes general, it will begin to have an effect on the cosmic environment itself, since all things are linked together by rigorous correspondences. Without developing this last point any further, although an application to modern conditions might well be made, what has been said so far can be summarized thus: according to the traditional conception, it is the essential qualities of beings that determine their activity; according to the profane conception on the other hand, these qualities are no longer taken into account, and individuals are regarded as no more than interchangeable and purely numerical ‘units’. The latter conception can only logically lead to the exercise of a wholly ‘mechanical’ activity, in which there remains nothing truly human, and that is exactly what we can see happening today. It need hardly be said that the ‘mechanical’ activities of the moderns, which constitute industry properly so called and are only a product of the profane deviation, can afford no possibility of an initiatic kind, and further, that they cannot be anything but obstacles to the development of all spirituality; indeed they cannot properly be regarded as authentic crafts, if that word is to retain the force of its traditional meaning.

If the craft is as it were a part of the man himself and a manifestation or expansion of his own nature, it is easy to see how it can serve as a basis for an initiation, and why it is the best possible basis in a majority of cases. Initiation has in fact as its objective the surpassing of the possibilities of the human individual as such, but it is no less true that it can only take that individual such as he is as starting-point, and then only by taking hold as it were of his superior side, that is, by attaching itself to whatever in him is most truly qualitative; hence the diversity of initiatic paths, in other words, of the means made use of as ‘supports’ in order to conform to the differences of individual natures; these differences become, however, of less importance as time goes on, in proportion as the being advances on its path and thus approaches the end which is the same for all. The means employed cannot be effective unless they really fit the very nature of the being to whom they are applied; and since it is necessary to work from what is more accessible toward what is less so, from the exterior toward the interior, it is normal to choose them from within the activity by which its nature is manifested outwardly. But it is obvious that this activity cannot be used in any such way except insofar as it effectively expresses the interior nature; thus the question really becomes one of ‘qualification’ in the initiatic sense of the word; and in normal conditions, the very same ‘qualification’ ought to be a requirement for the practice of the craft itself. All this is also connected with the fundamental difference that separates initiatic teaching, and more generally all traditional teaching, from profane teaching. That which is simply ‘learned’ from the outside is quite valueless in the former case, however great may be the quantity of the notions accumulated (for here too profane ‘learning’ shows clearly the mark of quantity); what counts is, on the contrary, an ‘awakening’ of the latent possibilities that the being carries in itself (which is, in the final analysis, the real significance of the Platonic ‘reminiscence’).[30]

These last considerations make it understandable that initiation, using the craft as ‘support’, has at the same time, and as it were in a complementary sense, a repercussion on the practice of the craft. The craftsman, having fully realized the possibilities of which his professional activity is but the outward expression, and thus possessing the effective knowledge of that which is the very principle of his activity, will thenceforth consciously accomplish what was previously only a quite ‘instinctive’ consequence of his nature; and thus, since for him initiatic knowledge is born of the craft, the craft in its turn will become the field of application of the knowledge, from which it will no longer be possible to separate it. There will then be a perfect correspondence between the interior and the exterior, and the work produced can then become the expression, no longer only to a certain degree and in a more or less superficial way, but the really adequate expression, of him who conceived and executed it, and it will then constitute a ‘masterpiece’ in the true sense of the word.

There is thus no difficulty in seeing how far removed true craft is from modern industry, so much so that the two are as it were opposites, and how far it is unhappily true that in the ‘reign of quantity’ the craft is, as the partisans of ‘progress’ so readily declare, a ‘thing of the past’. The workman in industry cannot put into his work anything of himself, and a lot of trouble would even be taken to prevent him if he had the least inclination to try to do so; but he cannot even try, because all his activity consists solely in making a machine go, and because in addition he is rendered quite incapable of initiative by the professional ‘formation’ — or rather deformation — he has received, which is practically the antithesis of the ancient apprenticeship, and has for its sole object to teach him to execute certain movements ‘mechanically’ and always in the same way, without having at all to understand the reason for them or to trouble himself about the result, for it is not he, but the machine, that will really fabricate the object. Servant of the machine, the man must become a machine himself, and thenceforth his work has nothing really human in it, for it no longer implies the putting to work of any of the qualities that really constitute human nature.[31] The end of all this is what is called in present-day jargon ‘mass-production’, the purpose of which is only to produce the greatest possible quantity of objects, and of objects as exactly alike as possible, intended for the use of men who are supposed to be no less alike; that is indeed the triumph of quantity, as was pointed out earlier, and it is by the same token the triumph of uniformity. These men who are reduced to mere numerical ‘units’ are expected to live in what can scarcely be called houses, for that would be to misuse the word, but in ‘hives’ of which the compartments will all be planned on the same model, and furnished with objects made by ‘mass-production’, in such a way as to cause to disappear from the environment in which the people live every qualitative difference; it is enough to examine the projects of some contemporary architects (who themselves describe these dwellings as ‘living-machines’) in order to see that nothing has been exaggerated. What then has happened to the traditional art and science of the ancient builders, or to the ritual rules by which the establishment of cities and of buildings was regulated in normal civilizations? It would be useless to press the matter further, for one would have to be blind to fail to see the abyss that separates the normal from the modern civilization, and no doubt everyone will agree in recognizing how great the difference is; but that which the vast majority of men now living celebrate as ‘progress’ is exactly what is now presented to the reader as a profound decadence, continuously accelerating, which is dragging humanity toward the pit where pure quantity reigns.