Political Platonism- the Philosophy of Politics

by Alexander Dugin

  Twenty years is a relatively short period of time for a difficult-to-understand doctrine to be introduced, and then disseminated by conferences for Russian assimilation. Nevertheless, as the European classics of this approach noted, the Russian school of traditionalism has not only been successful, but represents an original, living, and to a significant extent, reactive orientation, absorbing into its ranks many intellectual youths, students, graduate students, and scholars. The connection of Russian traditionalism with the academic milieu, not usual for Western representatives of this movement, were underscored by the fact that the organizers of the conference were the sociological faculty of Moscow State University together with the Center for Conservative Research, which has been very actively engaged with traditionalism in recent years. Many doctors and candidates of sciences, graduates, and students participated in the work of the conference. Academic interest in traditionalism was vividly demonstrated.

  The well-known traditionalist and conference participant Claudio Mutti spoke as follows in the final plenary session about the state of contemporary Russian traditionalism:

  I’m amazed by what I’ve seen here, coming to Moscow twenty years after my first visit. Twenty years ago this country was falling apart, and strange people were walking the streets. I couldn’t imagine that twenty years later questions of traditionalism would be interpreted here on such a level and with such enthusiasm. This differs significantly from all traditionalist events I’ve attended in Western Europe. I’d like to note that when we talk about the discussion of those questions of traditionalism that were raised in this conference, an altogether different atmosphere prevails in Western Europe. First, the audience there, even in large European capitals, has practically no chance of gathering as many people interested in the problematic of traditionalism as here, but most of all I’m impressed by the elaborateness and depth with which the participants expounded their arguments. Second, while in Western Europe traditionalism is mainly a conservative movement, which insists either on the preservation of what is or the reproduction of what was, or is a sort of alibi for many to do nothing, here, in Russia, I saw that traditionalism is permeated by a creative, innovative spirit. Even the very fact that this conference is dedicated to postmodernity is a sign of the creativity and originality of the approach.

  René Guénon: The Foundations of Philosophy

  So, what is traditionalism? It is a school [of thought] associated with the works and ideas of the French philosopher René Guénon (1886–1951). If we look at Guénon from a sociological point of view, he will not seem to be quite the complex and confused mystic he is sometimes made to be. Moreover, while being an extreme conservative, Guénon in many respects anticipated the philosophical methodology of postmodernity, though in a very peculiar sense.

  The essence of Guénon’s theories consisted in the following. There are two types of society, traditional and modern, entirely different in their basic arrangements, value systems, and socio-political modes (any humanities scholar or sociologist would agree), but the majority of people today automatically identify with modern society and uncritically absorb, through suggestion, the arrangements of the modern world. Thus modern man also forms an impression about the world of Tradition, about traditional society, starting from a completely pre-given basis: traditional society is seen by default as something under-developed, dark, based on superstition and irrational assumptions, as something unscientific, uncivilized, and technologically backward. In other words, traditional society is thought of as the first step of a program, preceding “real society,” the society of modernity. This approach is based on axiomatic acceptance of the claim that the world develops in the direction of perfection (from small to large, from worse to better, from simple to complex) and that progress governs the course of world history.

  René Guénon proposed looking at things from an opposite perspective. He showed that progress is nothing but an ideology, a social model for explaining complex processes around us, and so it cannot be taken as an axiom. It is a hypothesis, nothing more, which won for itself the right to be a dogma during the course of what Guénon thought was not an altogether fair fight, hence the lack of understanding about Tradition and its values, the idolatry of material, time, technique, individualism, and the series of ever newer automatons. We need only discard the prejudices of progress, however, and the world will reveal itself in a new light. Traditional society will prove to be not “insufficiently modern” but simply radically other, based on eternity, sacrality, hierarchy, appeal to God and the spirit, and not to matter and sense experience. We need only tear our gaze away from the earth towards the sky to understand that precisely Tradition, including religious tradition, says what our soul requires from itself, about spirit, about being, about the world, and about God, while modern society serves only corporeal needs. At the same time, the value of the body and lower psychic impressions are not only taken into account but begin to prevail and displace spiritual values. With modernization comes a total break with the world of being, the Primordial. Man is distanced from his archetype. Society loses order and is scattered into fragments, atoms, parts, and individuals. Tradition is integrity [wholeness]. Modernity is entropy, dispersion, and dissipation elevated into the rank of a value and actively spread everywhere.

  Thus, in his work Crisis of the Modern World Guénon provides a devastating critique of the basis of all of Western civilization, predicting its impending and inevitable end. At the same time, he advances an alternative system of values found in traditional society, established on the foundations of religion, spirit, faith in hierarchy, and metaphysics. In this way, the proportions are reversed: instead of the idea of progress, customary for modern people, and the placement of modern society above traditional society, Guénon advances the directly opposite idea that modernity is not progress but regress, decline, the fall of humanity into the abyss of matter, sensuality, corporeality, and mechanicalness. Modernity is the degradation of Tradition; progress is the collapse of values, and a path into the abyss. Accordingly, those forces, philosophies, and socio-political tendencies that are oriented toward the modernization of traditional society are, according to Guénon, bearers of evil perversion leading humanity to its death. For Guénon everything modern is depraved, everything traditional deserves respect and veneration. Religion, hierarchy, sacrality, and metaphysics are true; democracy, profanism, and rationalism are false. We get a radically new perspective on the essence of the historical process: it is not a path upwards, but a slide down, not a drawing near to the truth, but a falling away from it, not a movement to spiritual horizons, but immersion into the material abysses of nothing.

  Can this last long, Guénon asks? And he answers: no, it can’t. We stand face to face with a fateful feature of Western civilization that carries the rest of the world with it. In his fundamental book, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guénon depicts the material world as a “great parody” that must come to the final limit of materialism and atheism. In this parody we recognize the figures of traditional religious eschatology, the figure of the anti-Christ, for Christians, the Dajjal, for Muslims, and the “erev rav,” the great confusion of the Kabbalists.

  What should we do? Guénon suggests that it is too late to do anything; nothing can stop the West in its expansions, in its globalization. It is a matter for unique personalities capable of recognizing the entire drama of the historical situation to exert heroic efforts to tear themselves from the captivity of modernity’s hypnosis, to unite into a sacral elite of the end times, and to raise the flag of traditionalism as the final custodian of the holy before the face of hell arises. The community of traditionalists, those professing traditional religions and able to recognize the true character of the surrounding world, becomes, in his theory, the “ark of salvation.”

  In the end, though, Guénon’s philosophy is optimistic. After describing the horrors of the modern world and its inevitable collapse, he declares that all cosmic manifestations are
nothing but illusions, and beyond the end of this world another begins. The truth always remains eternal and hidden behind the veil of a mirror game, but the spirit of metaphysics is capable of penetrating into it even in the most difficult circumstances.

  Guénon himself converted to Islam, moved to Cairo, became a Sufi sheikh, and broke for good with the West and with Western society, which he regarded as the source of the global infection of the spirit. By his example he showed how it is possible to leave the modern world of the West and find a spiritual homeland in the East which is, as of now, less permeated by the devilish structures of modernity.

  Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World

  Guénon’s followers drew various conclusions from his worldview. Some followed their teacher into Islam. Others tried to apply his ideas to Christianity and Judaism. Significant, too, is the case of his follower, the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola (1898–1974), who can rightfully be regarded as the second most eminent figure after Guénon in this school. By temperament a warrior and soldier, Evola did not agree with the passive rejection of modernity but proposed to put up a fight, to join with the European Conservative Revolution movement in order to challenge it, and to try to revive society on principles of Tradition, despite the difficult circumstances of modernity. Evola asserted that the West was first to descend into the phase of perversion, decline, and degradation, having adopted the decadent values of democracy, liberalism, humanism, and materialism, but that it is also destined to be the first to exit the crisis. Evola called not only for the recognition of the “crisis of the modern world,” but for revolt against it, too. Thus, his major work is called Revolt Against the Modern World. In it he describes the structure of traditional society, shows the trajectory of its degeneracy and collapse, and outlines a plan for the restoration of Tradition in the course of an active and full-blooded metaphysical and spiritual, but also political and existential struggle. Evola was convinced that it was necessary to destroy the root of European decline and return to Europe’s spiritual foundations, reestablishing a sort of “New Middle Ages.”

  Evola tried to embody his ideas by the most diverse means and despite the failure of some political efforts connected one way or another with the Conservative Revolution in the 20th century, he remained true to his initial plans of giving traditionalism a practical, operational dimension, of changing both the outside world and the subject himself. At the end of his life Evola concentrated on the strategy of “riding the Tiger” (as one of his later works is called), which is to say not simply to oppose the tendencies of modernity, but to stand on the side of certain revolutionary tendencies directed against the modern world, though not for conservative reasons, and later to shift them into another direction. Thus, he advanced the thesis of the “differentiated man,” who is able to preserve a vertical posture among the collapsing, disintegrating world of modern liberal degradation. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, another conservative revolutionary, also advanced the idea that: “Formerly, conservatives strove to oppose revolutions, but we must join them, and be at the head of them, and lead them into a different direction.” Evola’s late ideas fit this logic perfectly.

  Traditionalism and Non-Conformism

  Guénon and Evola had a tremendous influence on certain circles of Western intellectuals. They inspired many philosophers, in particular, René Daumal, Georges Bataille, and Gilbert Durand; André Gide, Antonin Artaud, Ezra Pound, Jean Parvulesco, and Éric Rohmer were under their influence. Of course, on account of their radical critique of modernity and its foundations, they could not count on broad dissemination or a deserving place in the general context of modern philosophy. All those who were interested in non-conformism, however, those who strove to get out from under the oppressive frames of liberal political correctness, could not pass them by indifferently. They either filled such people with hatred, or, on the contrary, seized them.

  Regardless, in the course of a century, the philosophy of traditionalism took shape as a kind of independent ideational movement [i.e. school of thought]. It was discovered in Russia by members of the so-called Yuzhinsky Circle (Mamleev, Golovin, Dzhemal) in the 1960s, but the works of traditionalists started to be published at the end of the 1980s.

  Reasons for the Relevance of Traditionalism

  In our time all the conditions are present to give this philosophy heightened attention. This is important to do for the following reasons:

  1. The crisis of modern civilization, the inner contradiction of Western ideology, clearly obvious dual standards of international politics, and the moral crisis of technological society are evident. These things are no longer possible to deny. In order to correctly comprehend and describe what we are dealing with, to accurately comprehend the crisis of the modern world, theoretical philosophical instruments are necessary to help us find the right formulas. Formerly this function was served in part by Marxist criticism, which strictly criticized liberal capitalism, concealing even more painful contradictions, but in our time the ideational potential of Marxism as a critical theory has been exhausted. It lacks the correct means to describe the processes unfolding in the modern world, and it received a very difficult, or even fatal, blow in the collapse of the socialist system. As a result, critique from the left is becoming unpopular. The time of critique from the right is arriving. The French traditionalist René Alleau foresaw this when he wrote his highly astute article “Guénon and Marx,” which showed the similarity of these thinkers in their relentless critique of the Western bourgeois world. Indeed, this criticism is even more total in Guénon.

  2. Alongside disappointment in progress, the influence of conservative ideas is increasing, but conservatism will remain vapid if it insists on only the presently existing state of affairs, the status quo. What exists now will change, which means that the conservative ideology will also change, so it is necessary to turn toward deeper values, unchanging and related to eternity. That is precisely what traditionalism proposes to do in its fundamental critique of historical time, rejection of progress, and apologia for the invariable vertical spiritual order. With traditionalism’s uncompromising faith in, and summons to a return to, the roots, customs, and religion and its invariable truths, traditionalism is the core of consistent conservatism.

  3. Russia must choose its path in a rapidly deteriorating world. This deterioration presents itself as technical and social improvement, but in fact it leads the situation to an ever greater dead-end. The creation of a speculative financial economy drove the global economy into a deep crisis. The American model of controlling the world through the control of finances and the reserve currency brought many countries, including the US itself, to the brink of bankruptcy. In this situation, what is necessary are not technical measures, but some kind of radical decision, a certain decisive turnabout. Traditionalism offers the entire necessary philosophical, ideational, conceptual, and sociological apparatus for that.

  That is the relevance of traditionalism, and that is why the first congress of traditionalists in Russia took place at the right time, precisely when the right historical circumstances were there.

  Towards Political Platonism

  In the world of ideas and philosophical concepts, time flows differently than it does in ordinary life. A minor change in the structure of one or another theory, or an original formation of concepts or philosophical speculations, can bring about very serious changes, so it would be too naïve to await ready-made decisions from the traditionalist congress; but nevertheless, there were such results.

  First, many presenters set themselves the task of showing that the philosophical background of Guénon and his followers’ traditionalism is extremely close to the Platonic tradition and its full-fledged, and radical, idealism, as well as its assertion of the invariability of the world of principles, ideas, models, and the circulation of reflections in the world of phenomena and material bodies. The further a copy moves from the original, the more it loses its similarity to it and the more isolated it
becomes from it. Thereby it loses its meaning, essence, being, beauty, and verity.

  In other words, traditionalism can be taken as radical Platonism, and, consequently, it can qualitatively enrich its language through broad appeal to Platonic sources in the most diverse traditions, from the Christian dogmatics of the Cappadocian Fathers to the mysticism of Dionysius the Areopagite or to the Hesychasts. In Islam, besides the philosophers proper, al-Farabi or Ibn Sina, Platonism permeates the Sufi tradition, Shiite gnosis, and the philosophy of Ishraq. In Judaism, Platonism is the basic map for the Kabbala and its theories of emanation. Thus, Platonism provides a serious philosophical basis for the development of dialogue of traditional confessions to the extent that they strive to defend their identity and withstand the pressure of secular globalization. On a dogmatic basis, inter-confessional dialogue beyond a certain point is not possible because of the fear of losing identity and falling into syncretism. A properly traditionalistic language is too extravagant and sophisticated to be applied universally, but read through the eyes of traditionalists who have first digested Guénon and Evola, precisely Platonic philosophy provides the basis for the elaboration of a consolidated position of all those forces in the world that stand on the side of the sacral.

  Moreover, armed with Platonism, traditionalism can easily enter the academic sphere and present its perspectives in a language considered appropriate in that domain.

  This conclusion will still need to be defended and secured, but the direction has been set. In the most extreme and radical case we can speak of political Platonism and even of Platonic revolution.