originally posted 6/24/22
Guenon holds the metaphysical interpretation of Fichte- a Frenchman- but Guenon also says once you remove the mind-matter distinction the question resolves itself naturally and I assume he means people are by nature idealists- that is unrestricted. However, When Guenon makes this claim, he is really alluding to the neutral monism of Averroes of the Renaissance. I in fact made this claim about 3 years ago that the ancients are in fact idealists by nature. But now I am not so sure. The reason is you have to posit some sort of substance to constitute the body in order to know whether the body is restricted or not. For how does one know how the body acts without positing a substratum for the body? Really, I don’t think a person such as Marcus Arruleous would have known one way or another how he obtained success and whether other people would be able to obtain the success that he had. The reason is you have to follow the nature of the philosophy that he subscribed to- stoicism- which is some form of skepticism. What about the other ancient philosophers? The Ionian philosophers posited, for example, that all is water, or all is fire. This means that the body probably would act smoothly, or sporadically, respectively. With Eleatic philosophers such as Zeno- with change is an illusion- again he would say the bodies actions are an illusion and not restricted or unrestricted and so forth. Thus this makes idealism and all of the developments associated with it a specifically renaissance and modern development in the West.
Idealism Studies 