Der Mensch und die Gewissheit

Metaphysics and transcendence are concepts that do not mean very much to the materially oriented human being of our day. They are ways of trying to explain what lies behind things, ideas that lie beyond the horizon of our immediate experience but can be sensed at times of religious devotion, in confrontations with great works of art or when we are being creative ourselves. Frithjof Schuon is considered to be one of the most important metaphysicians of our time. He has been known for a long time in the French-and English-speaking world as the leading proponent of the philosophia perennis -- the source of metaphysical wisdom that forms the basis of all religions and permeates them from within. T. S. Eliot said of Schuon's book "The Transcendent Unity of Religions", have met with no more impressive work on the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religions. And Professor Huston Smith wrote: "The man is a living wonder; intellectually a propos religion, equally in depth and breadth, the paragon of our time. I know of no living thinker who begins to rival him." Schuon was born in 1907 to German parents in Basel. After his father's early death he lived and worked for some years in Paris before undertaking several journeys to North Africa and the Near East. In 1938 he met the Islamic mystic Ahmad al-Alawi in Algeria, and in 1936 and 1939 the French philosopher and orientalist Rene Guenon in Cairo. After the Second World War he married a Swiss diplomat's daughter and travelled with her to America to examine the Red Indian culture from close quarters. He spent time with various Indian tribes and was solemnly admitted to the Sioux tribe in 1959. Der Mensch und die Gewissheitis Schuon's principal philosophical work. It is an analysis of basic theological questions, in which Schuon, who also made a name for himself as a painter, ascribes particular significance to art and aesthetics. von Schuon, Fritjof;