Perrenialism is sometimes attacked or ignored because its teachings are viewed as an “appeal to tradition”, a type of logical fallacy. This is a dangerous misunderstanding.
Ideas are neither confirmed nor disproven through their inclusion in a historical account. Such a belief constitutes a “historicist” viewpoint, (one against which traditionalist authors have argued¹) that is in opposition to formal logic. If traditionalists were to participate in this historicist fallacy as it is claimed we do² , then we would be forced to accept a whole record of historically confirmed ideas and behaviors which we, in fact, actively condemn. Need we be reminded of the pornography common to ancient Roman, Greek, and Indian civilizations?
Traditionalism therefore does not claim authority on the basis of historical corroboration with its directives. So from whence does it derive authority?
The answer lies in that the upholding of tradition is, counter-intuitively, an a-historical task. We see this idea’s explication most succinctly in this passage by Hegel, quoted in Evola’s Men Among the Ruins:
“It is a matter of recognizing in the apparitions of temporal and transitory things, both the substance, which is immanent, and the eternal, which is actual.”³
Furthermore, that which is eternal is necessarily actual. Elsewise, it would be subject to change, and could not be called eternal. Following from this, we could correctly conclude that if the eternal is not conditioned by the passage of time, then it may indeed be possible to find examples of the eternal in our own era. This is very different from the picture usually painted of traditionalists as overly-mystical history buffs.
So while it may seem that here we focus on ancient history, let us be reminded of the traditions associated with Native Americans, Monastic Orders, and other small communities that exist in the present. The Golden Age can exist at any point in time, and it is precisely because that it is Golden that it transcends time in this way.
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¹Cutsinger, James S. “An Open Letter On Tradition.” Modern Age 36.3 (1994). Cutsinger.net. Web. <http://www.cutsinger.net/pdf/open_letter_on_tradition.pdf>.
²Dawkins, Richard. A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Essays. London: Phoenix, 2004. Open Parachute. Web. <http://openparachute.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/prayer-for-my-daughter.pdf>.
³Evola, Julius. Men among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002. Print. , p. 116
^Passage originally appeared in the author’s introduction to Philosophy of Right.