The central gesture
If one were to read only one purely metaphysical book of Guénon, it would be this one. The Multiple States of the Being is the central doctrinal treatise — the piece that gives its coherence to the whole work. It directly prolongs The Symbolism of the Cross: there where the cross figured the states of being, this book expounds them.
The founding intuition can be stated simply, even if it overturns everything: being does not have a single mode of existence. We believe spontaneously that “to exist” is “to exist as we do” — in a body, in time, in space. An error, says Guénon. Corporeal existence is only one state among an infinity of states. The true being traverses them all; and the supreme “spiritual realisation” consists precisely in recognising that one is this totality, not the single fragment one believed oneself to be.
The key concepts (made accessible)
- The metaphysical Infinite — Beware: not the infinite of the mathematicians (which is only an “indefinite,” a quantity without an assignable term). The Infinite of Guénon is that which has absolutely no limit — therefore that which contains every possibility. The Infinite can only be one: if there were two, they would mutually limit one another, and so would not be infinite.
- Universal Possibility — The Infinite, being without limit, contains all the possibilities — without any exception. All that is possible must, by this very fact, find its place in universal Possibility. And — a decisive point — that which is possible cannot remain eternally unrealised: every possibility tends to manifest itself. It is from this that the infinity of states comes.
- Possibles and compossibles — Not all possibles can coexist in one same world: some mutually exclude one another (a being cannot be in two places at once in the corporeal world). The possibilities that can coexist in one same state are called compossibles. Each “world,” each state of being, is defined by a coherent set of compossibles.
- Being and Non-Being — The summit of the doctrine, and the most difficult. Being (capitalised) is the first determination: it is the principle of all manifestation, but it is already a determination, therefore a limit. Above Being, Guénon posits Non-Being — not the “nothingness” (which would be pure absence), but the non-manifested, the unlimited from which Being itself proceeds. Non-Being is the supreme degree: what the Vedānta names Brahma nirguṇa, the Absolute without attributes.
- The multiple states of the being — The eponymous concept. One same being — let us say: you who are reading — is not only “this corporeal individual.” This individual is only one modality, in one state (the human state), among an infinity of states that the same being possesses simultaneously. The “person” you believe yourself to be is to the total being what a single note is to the whole symphony.
- The analogy of the dream — To make the plurality of the states sensible, Guénon has recourse to the experience of the dream. In the dream, the being produces a whole world, with its places, its characters, its time — a world as “real,” while one dreams, as the world of waking. The dream gives an image of what the subtle states are: complete worlds, but of an order other than the corporeal.
- The mental is not the summit — Guénon insists: the mental (discursive thought, reason) is what characterises human individuality — but it is not its highest faculty. Above the mental are found supra-rational modalities. To confuse the human being with his thought is to reduce him to his most visible storey, not his highest.
- The indefinite and its bounds — The corporeal world is indefinite (it extends without one being able to assign it a term), but it is not infinite. It has “bounds” — limits, even remote ones. The error of scientism is to take the indefinite for the infinite, and so to believe that science will end by knowing everything.
- The realisation of the being through knowledge — The goal. For Guénon, the supreme spiritual realisation is not an individual “salvation” (saving one's little self for a paradise) — it is the Supreme Identity: the recognition, through pure knowledge, that one is the totality of the states, identical to the Principle. It is not to become something one was not; it is to know what one has always been.
- Necessity and contingency — The final chapter. Necessary is that which cannot not be (the Principle, Being). Contingent is that which could not be (all that is manifested, including ourselves). To understand this liberates: what is contingent in us is not our true reality; our true reality participates in the necessary.
The architecture of the work
The book comprises seventeen chapters, in a progression that descends from the Principle toward the human being, then rises again toward realisation:
The foundation (chapters I-V)
The Infinite and Possibility, Possibles and compossibles, Being and Non-Being, Foundation of the theory of the multiple states, Relations of unity and multiplicity. The metaphysical heart of the book.
The application to the human being (chapters VI-XIV)
The analogy of the dream, The possibilities of individual consciousness, The mental, The hierarchy of the individual faculties, The bounds of the indefinite, Principles of distinction between the states, The two chaoses, The spiritual hierarchies, Answer to the objections drawn from the plurality of beings.
The realisation (chapters XV-XVII)
The realisation of the being through knowledge, Knowledge and consciousness, Necessity and contingency. The book closes upon the goal: the Supreme Identity.
A few voices
“Metaphysical realisation in its entirety is nothing other than the effective and actual becoming-conscious of what already is virtually.” The Multiple States of the Being, ch. XV
“Human individuality is nothing more than one state of being among an indefinitude of other states.” The Multiple States of the Being
To read it
It is the most abstract book of Guénon — a treatise of pure metaphysics, without any concession to illustration. One must above all not begin with it. The recommended order: East and West → The Crisis of the Modern World → Man and His Becoming according to the Vedānta → The Symbolism of the Cross → and only then The Multiple States of the Being.
But the effort is worth it: it is here that the kernel of the whole Guénonian thought is found. Chapters I-III (the Infinite, Possibility, Being and Non-Being) are of an extreme density — to be read very slowly, one sentence at a time. Chapter XV (The realisation of the being through knowledge) is the summit: it states clearly what every authentic spiritual way aims at.
Resonances
- Directly prolongs The Symbolism of the Cross (1931)
- The Supreme Identity — a resonance with the Sufi fanāʾ and tawḥīd: see fanāʾ and the root WḤD
- The Guénonian Non-Being and the Vedāntic Brahma nirguṇa — see Metaphysics
- Schuon would take up and nuance these categories in From the Divine to the Human