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The Perennial Philosophy and Its Critics
No discussion of convergence between traditions can avoid the concept of perennial philosophy. It is the idea that beneath the surface differences of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions lies a common core insight, endlessly rediscovered, endlessly forgotten, endlessly rediscovered again. It is an old idea with an old history and a serious set of critics. We need to look at both.
Origins of the Concept
The Latin phrase philosophia perennis was coined in 1540 by the Italian scholar Agostino Steuco, who used it as the title of a book in which he argued that there is “one principle of all things, of which there has always been one and the same knowledge among all peoples.” Steuco’s book drew on the Renaissance revival of Hermetic, Platonic, and Kabbalistic thought associated with Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the Florentine Platonic Academy. Pico famously tried, in his 1486 Rome debates, to demonstrate that nine hundred propositions drawn from Hermetic, Jewish, Christian, Platonic, and Aristotelian sources could all be reconciled into a single coherent philosophy. He came close to being excommunicated for the effort.
The phrase came into wider currency through Leibniz, who used it to name the tradition he saw himself continuing: a rational metaphysics that gathered into one coherent system the best of Plato, Aristotle, the Church Fathers, and the Hermetic sources. In the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley gave the concept its most famous modern statement in his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy.
Huxley defined the perennial philosophy as follows. First, the metaphysical claim that there is a divine Reality beneath the world of things and minds. Second, the psychological claim that in the human soul there is something akin to, or even identical with, that divine Reality. Third, the ethical claim that the final end of human life is to come to know this Reality directly. The central formula Huxley proposed was the Sanskrit tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” drawn from the Chandogya Upanishad: the individual self and the absolute Reality are, at the deepest level, one.
The Strongest Case for Perennialism
Huxley’s argument, and the broader perennialist tradition, rests on an empirical observation. Across cultures that had no significant contact with each other, a strikingly similar set of claims appears in the mature mystical traditions. The Hindu Upanishads say Atman is Brahman. Mahayana Buddhism teaches the emptiness of separate self and the interpenetration of all phenomena. Taoism speaks of the Tao that cannot be named, underlying the ten thousand things. Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross describe union with a divine Ground beyond description. Sufi poets like Rumi use the language of the Beloved to point at the same non-dual insight. Jewish Kabbalah speaks of the Ein Sof, the infinite, beneath all manifestation. The Hermetic tradition, in its own vocabulary, says the same thing.
The perennialist claim is not that all these traditions are identical. It is that beneath their manifest differences, they describe something recognizable as the same territory. The perennialist holds that when separate cultures, using different languages and symbols, converge on similar insights, the most economical explanation is that they are all reporting on something real.
This is the view that most naturally accommodates the convergence we have been tracking in this module. If the perennialist is right, then the fact that Bohr reached for yin and yang, Heisenberg for the Upanishads, Schrödinger for Advaita Vedanta, Pauli for alchemy, Bohm for Krishnamurti, and Wheeler for information at the ground of reality, is not accidental. They were all, in different vocabularies, approaching the same territory. The territory was accessible to contemplatives two thousand years ago, and it has become partially accessible to physicists now.
The Critics of Perennialism
The strongest critics of perennialism are scholars of religion who have spent their careers inside the detailed textual study of the world’s traditions, and who argue that the perennialist picture is superficial. The philosopher Steven Katz and the religious studies scholar Jorge Ferrer have led this critique. In their view, the perennialist flattens important differences. Buddhist emptiness is not the same as Hindu Brahman, which is not the same as Christian union with God, which is not the same as the Taoist Tao. Each tradition develops its insight in a specific ritual, social, and historical context, and that context shapes the insight in ways that cannot be removed without distortion.
The Ferrer critique is worth naming specifically. Ferrer argues that perennialism inherits an outdated model of knowledge in which there is one objective Reality “out there” and various traditions try to describe it with varying accuracy. He suggests replacing this with a “participatory” view in which different traditions genuinely participate in different but overlapping aspects of a richer reality than any single one captures. In this view, the convergences are real but so are the divergences, and neither can be explained away.
There is also a sharp political critique. Perennialism has sometimes been used as a way of implicitly ranking traditions, with the non-dual traditions of India and Tibet placed at the top and the devotional theistic traditions (including most of Christianity and Islam) placed lower. This ranking typically reflects the preferences of twentieth-century Western seekers rather than any neutral comparative principle. Careful readers of Huxley have pointed out that his own ranking operated exactly this way.
Holding the Tension Honestly
My own view, after many years of holding this question, is that both the perennialists and their critics are right about something. The perennialists are right that something genuinely recurrent shows up in mature mystical traditions across cultures. The critics are right that the recurrence does not mean the traditions are saying the same thing in different words, and that the differences matter as much as the similarities. The responsible position is not to pick one side and dismiss the other. It is to hold both seriously.
For this course, we can formulate the position this way. There is a recurrent structural insight across traditions that can reasonably be called the perennial insight. The insight has to do with the non-dual character of the relation between consciousness and its objects, with the interpenetration of apparent opposites, and with the primacy of the unified over the fragmented. That insight shows up, in different vocabularies, in Hermeticism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Sufism, and Christian mysticism. It also shows up, in still another vocabulary, in several of the most serious interpretations of modern physics. That convergence is real. Whether it rises to the level of genuine isomorphism or is best understood as deep analogy across very different domains, is a question that has to be worked out case by case, not settled in advance. That is the work the rest of this course will do.