Political Platonism- the Philosophy of Politics

by Alexander Dugin

  And Heidegger agrees with him fully. The narod and God are inextricably bound. There is no god without the narod. After all, God, who is, creates man, but from an existential perspective, man is Dasein, and consequently the narod (Volk). Creating a reasoning, speaking, thinking principle [nachalo], God creates the narod, and without the narod, outside the narod, this principle does not exist. If it doesn’t exist, then there is no one to witness God, to praise Him, to glorify Him. That is why thought about God outside thought about the narod, separately from it, will be meaningless: in what language, in what formulas, and in what order would such speech take place?! Theology can ignore the narod, but by itself this won’t lead to anything but profound distortions. If religion is living, if it is existential, it must be narodnoy [i.e. of or related to the narod, Volk] in the deepest sense of the word.

  Hence, thinking about the project of the narod’s awakening, Heidegger writes:

  Will we dare once more to have gods and with them the truth of the narod?15

  God (or gods) is the truth of the narod (die Wahrheit des Volkes), but it is also its being, the being that it itself is, in its inner source, in its identity, in its Selbst. It is not important whether we are dealing with polytheistic or monotheistic versions, whether we assert creation or manifestation.

  The relation of the narod to God is deeper than these secondary parameters. The narod is, when it has God. If it decides to exist, it decides to have God and, accordingly, to be had by God, to belong to him.

  In the Heideggerian version the concretization of religion is not definitive. Something else is more important: how alive God is, how powerful his being is, and, accordingly, how vivified by him is the narod that creates its historical dimension. There cannot be a narod at all without God, and nothing can be said of any historial in that case, but the presence of cults, institutions, and rites is not yet enough. Religion can also exist in the society of das Man. Then it will be another field of care, i.e. a political, economic, or social thing [instantsiya]. In this sort of religion, God dies, and when purely secular political regimes of modernity come (liberalism, communism, fascism), they do not so much “kill” Him as confirm His already accomplished death. Heidegger appeals not to the consequences, but to the causes: faith must be hazarded, decided for. After all, God is the death of man.16 He embodies in himself that proportion in which the limits of the thinking principle [nachalo] are established strictly and ruthlessly. We become mortal only before the face of the Immortal, but we also become persons in that same moment. God creates only that which is, but that is Dasein.

  In the Fourth Political Theory, religion is not a contribution of tradition, not simply a rudimentary feature of the past — all the more so since our past is atheistic modernity. In the Fourth Political Theory, the narod decides to have God, and Dasein itself makes this decision, Dasein as the narod (Volk). If in metaphysics, philosophy, and sociology, the Fourth Political Theory is revolutionary (conservative-revolutionary), in the sphere of religion it must also be. Thus, the faith of the narod awakened to history is hazarded faith in the Living God, in the Selbst of God, in God as an antithesis of his institutionalized simulacrum, the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is the title that das Man carries in the sphere of religion. The religion of the narod will be living and authentic only if it will be the religion of Selbst.

  10.

  Thinking Chaos and the Other Beginning of Philosophy

  Chaos did not make it into the context of Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy was developed exclusively as the philosophy of Logos, and we are so accustomed to that state of affairs that we — probably justly from a historical perspective — identify philosophy with the Logos. We do not know another philosophy, and in principle, if we believe, firstly, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and then also contemporary postmodern philosophy, we will have to acknowledge that this philosophy, discovered by the Greeks, and built around the Logos, has today fully exhausted its content. It was embodied in technē, in the subject-object distinction, and proved sound for two or three centuries, until the final setting chord of Western European philosophy. Today we stand at the limit or end of this philosophy of Logos.

  From here we can grasp at a glance the entire process of development of logocentric philosophy. It began with Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics, reached its apogee in Platonism and Socrates, developed rapidly in Greco-Latin patristics, and later in Scholasticism and the Neo-Platonism of the Renaissance, finally turning into modernity altogether, with Descartes and his subject-object distinction through to the last, self-reflexive stage, ending with Nietzsche. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche put an end to Western European philosophy. Thus, before us is a complete account [or story, rasskaz] of logocentric culture, with a beginning, apogee, and denouement. The Logos from birth to death. Who, then, was Heidegger?

  On one hand, Heidegger closes this process of Western philosophy for good and gives it its final seal; on the other hand, he lays the potential foundations for something new. The end of philosophy is indisputable; the question about “another beginning,” die andere Anfang is open.

  Western European philosophy, being logocentric, has exhausted its potential. However, we should raise a question here: what role did Chaos play in this logocentric philosophy? It was discarded from the beginning, bracketed, crossed out, because Logos is based on the exclusion of Chaos, on the affirmation of a strict alternative to it. What is the fundamental difference between Logos and Chaos? Logos is exclusivity, Logos is division, Logos is a clear-cut notion of this and the other, and it is no accident that Logos was formalized in Aristotle’s logic, in its basic laws: the law of identity, the law of contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. It is necessary to emphasize that contemporary modern and postmodern studies show, correctly, that the logocentric understanding of the world is masculinoid, i.e. exclusively male and exclusivist.17 Men regard the world and order in just that way, as disconnected. Logos is the male, hierarchic principle; it emptied itself in Western European philosophy, reached its highest point, and … collapsed, was overthrown, and dissipated. Today, the “great man,” the “cosmic man,” has disintegrated into fragments. He collapsed, and together with him, his philosophy, since Logos and the male principle are essentially the same thing, hence the competence of the postmodern, critical term phallo-logocentrism. All Western European philosophy was built on the male principle from beginning to end. The end is here. We are living through it. The Logos is exhausted, so it remains either to slip compliantly into the night or to search for new paths.

  Here it must be said at once that the Chaos dealt with by modern science, modern physics, and chaos theory, in fact, represents structures of order, though more complex forms of it. This Chaos is nothing other than complex systems; not at all an alternative to order as such, but only an extravagant, baroque version of a complicated, distorted, and to a significant extent perverted order (relevant here are the ideas of the postmodernist Gilles Deleuze, set forth by him in the essay The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque). What the representatives of science, and, in part, culture, call “chaos” today is a condition of the post-logical world, which is still nevertheless found on this side of Logos, within its orbits, though on its periphery, and in its outermost district. René Guénon gave a very precise name to this state of affairs, calling it la confusion.

  The understanding of “chaos” prevalent in contemporary science does not at all correspond to Greek Chaos as something primordial, organic, and spontaneous, but is rather a product of the collapse of logocentric philosophy and the logocentric culture based on it. What we are dealing with today with the so-called “chaos” is a product of the collapse of Logos, the dissipation of it, and its dispersion into separate fragments. That is precisely why scientists researching “chaos” find in it the residual, or extravagant, eccentric structures of Logos. These structures lend themselves to studying and counting only in more complex procedures with the help of a specific
apparatus adapted to the calculation and description of bifurcational processes, non-integrable equations (Prigogine), and fractals (Mandelbrot). “Chaos” theory studies processes that are highly dependent on initial conditions. “Chaos” is defined commonly as a dynamic system with the following features: sensitivity to initial conditions, the property of topological mixing, and density of periodic orbits.18

  This “chaos” isn’t the Greek Chaos at all, but the product of the dispersion and collapse of Logos. We still have not left the limits of the Logos: the Chaos that contemporary science deals with is enclosed within Logos, splashing around in its inner expanses, although in the furthest orbit. It lies at the greatest distance from the vertical, ordering, and logocentric axis, at the outer regions of the Platonic, speculative cosmos, and in the world of the Titans.19 Thus, strictly speaking, we should call this reality “a very distant copy,” which has almost entirely lost its connection with the original. This is not at all “chaos.” The term “confusion” (Guénon’s la confusion) or the postmodern notion of a “simulacrum” interpreted by Baudrillard as “copy without an original” fits best here. This inner-logical zone, though maximally remote from the center, has nothing in common with the primordial Greek model of Chaos, which, according to myth, precedes Logos, or order, i.e. cosmos. True Chaos is pre-logical and pre-ontological. The “confusion” or “chaos” of contemporary science is post-cosmic, and although practically no being remains in it, it nevertheless is there, which means that it is to a certain extent ontological. Fully pertinent here is Zeno’s paradox about swift-footed Achilles and the tortoise. However much “confusion” might strive to rid itself of ontology, it is not able to do so; the limit of x, when x approaches zero, will never be equal to zero, but will only constantly approximate zero. It will always remain at an ever decreasing, but nevertheless infinitely large (though also infinitely small!), distance from it.20

  In studying “chaos” (Gilles Deleuze describes this as the means of co-existence of impossible monads; he calls such “monads” “nomads”),21 contemporary science studies an inner-logical, post-logical, dissipative order, and not at all an alternative to order, as the nihilistically oriented postmodernists had hoped.

  Here it is important to pay attention to the concept of “nothing.” Logos gathers everything into itself and ascribes to everything the property of self-identity in connection with itself, i.e. with Logos. Logos is everything, and it gathers everything into itself except for what it is not; but what it is not is nothing. Logos excludes everything that it does not include, but since it includes everything, only nothing remains outside it, but it treats this nothing harshly. In the words of Parmenides, non-being is not. Nothing encircles order, serving as its boundary, but since we are looking at nothing through the eyes of Logos, this boundary cannot be reached. However much we might strive toward nothing, whatever nihilism we might cultivate, we remain within the limits of something, but not nothing. We remain within order, under the hegemony of Logos. Although this hegemony weakens at the remote periphery, it never disappears entirely. That is why, on the path of liberation from power and domination, moderns, and after them, postmoderns, discover after God and traditional society the figure of the “despot” in society as such, then in reason, then in the human himself, then in structures, then language, and finally context (post-structuralism), etc. The fact that non-being is not makes being insuperable for those to whom its weight is a burden. All evocations of “chaos” or appeals to “nomadic,” impossible monads, cannot produce the desired result: a final and irreversible uprooting of “the will to power,” which is the main aim of the emancipatory program of the Enlightenment. It will not succeed and can never succeed by definition.

  Those who understand the profound crisis of modernity (Martin Heidegger in particular) turn to the roots of the West, to the Greek matrix from which philosophy was born. Heidegger thoroughly investigates the birth of Logos and monitors its fate through to the reign of technique, Machenschaft. To describe this [process], he introduces the concept “Gestell,” which he uses to sum up the self-referential theory of truth — from Plato (and even Heraclitus) to the mechanical commercial-material civilization of extreme contemporary decadence (which is planetary, but still Western-centric). Taking in the history of philosophy at a glance, which is history as such, from beginning to end, Heidegger discovers that it ended so wrongly precisely because it began so wrongly. As an alternative he outlines the project of “another Beginning.”22

  After describing the first Beginning of philosophy, which led first to the Logos, and ultimately to the dissipative post-logical (and post-masculine) ontology in which we are living, Heidegger identifies it as the consequence of a fundamental mistake made in the first stages of Western European philosophy. In his perspective, the history of Western European philosophy, culture, and religion, is the result of a small initial error in metaphysical contemplation. Two and a half thousand years of human history, according to Heidegger, were in vain, because in the very beginning, somewhere in the zone of the initial formulations of the status of Logos, a mistake was inadvertently made. This, Heidegger thinks, it is necessary to become aware of, first, and, second, to overcome. That is how his conception of two Beginnings in philosophy is formed. The first Beginning of philosophy began, took shape, came into its own, blossomed, and then degraded, and has now come to naught (let’s remember contemporary nihilism, discovered by Nietzsche, and thoroughly analyzed by Heidegger). Another Beginning might have been found in the origins of philosophy, but this did not happen and the result is evident: Logos and its deprivation. In any case, it must be emphasized and begun now, when everything is clear. This beginning, however, begins only if everything becomes truly clear. It became clear to Heidegger — for the rest, [there was] a “delay” and [things are] apparently “not yet” [clear], noch nicht, the eternal “not yet.” This other beginning is die andere Anfang.

  If we carefully examine what Heidegger means by “another Beginning,” an alternative possible Beginning that hasn’t yet taken place or occurred, and if we follow the line of the grandiose deconstruction of Logos he undertook, we shall be able to take in at a glance all Western European philosophy, culture, and history, including [the] religious [aspects], since religion is nothing other than the development of logical constructions (which is why Heidegger talks of “theology” — Christian religion, like Islamic kalam and theological Judaism, is based on Logos; in principle we do not have any monotheistic religions besides the religions of Logos). The logocentrism of religions is extremely important to understand: it shows that it is useless to appeal to religion in search of an alternative to or defense against the failure of Logos: the crisis of contemporary religions is a crisis of Logos; when Logos fails, its entire vertical topos [topika] falls with all its variations, including theological ones. This is interconnected: monotheism loses its fascination, since the attraction of Logos weakens, and vice versa. Religions without Logos cease to be themselves, but even in this case, Logos will be present in them, as phantom pain, as “confusion,” and as the bustle of desemantised fragments (as we see around us today in the doubtful phenomenon of the so-called “religious awakening,” which unambiguously gives us simulacrum and parody).

  This is why Heidegger proposed to look for an exit rather differently: on the one hand, in the very Beginning, in the sources of Greek philosophy, even at the threshold of that Beginning, and on the other hand, beyond the limits of our world, thereby uniting the problematic of the moment of origin of philosophy, its dwelling in an embryonic, ante-natal state, with the problematic of the moment of its final agony and death. Before Heraclitus, philosophy was in the womb, Logos “swam” in maternal waters, in the matrix. Today, Logos lies in the tomb. Tomb and womb on one hand have antithetical meanings: death in the former, birth in the latter; but at the same time we know that in the collective unconscious they are synonyms, reciprocal systems. Figuratively, we can say that in both cases it is night, darkne
ss, existence without distinction, the erasing of borders, and nocturne,23 the more so since many initiatory rituals are connected with immersion in a tomb as the beginning of resurrection, i.e. another, second birth. Such is the rite of Orthodox baptism: water in Orthodox baptism symbolizes the earth, tomb, and death. The complete triple submersion of the baptized in the font is a symbol of Christ’s three days in the tomb. This submersion into the earth, the tomb, “entombment to Christ,” is a pledge for a new birth.

  Thus, if in the first beginning of Greek philosophy, Logos was born through the rejection of Chaos as the principle of division, hierarchy, and exclusion, and order was placed exclusively in the center of the All, then, essentially, the male principle was elevated into the absolute. If all this began and ended with what we have in the contemporary world, then, accordingly, following Heidegger, we must trace what was overlooked. We must find what the mistake was in the first impulse that gave the start to the unfolding of logocentric civilization. Heidegger develops his vision in the summarizing and exceedingly complex work Beitrage zur Philosophie, with which I encourage everyone to familiarize themselves (the work is not translated and that, I would say, is wonderful: it cannot be translated. There are some things that are not only difficult to translate, but criminal to translate. One must learn the language to understand).24 “Another beginning” is discussed there directly and we find a short and relatively “easy” synopsis of these ideas in Geschichte des Seyns as well.25

  Heidegger proposes thinking radically different than is usual in existing philosophical, or philosophico-religious thought, but how is it possible to philosophize differently? How can there be “another Beginning” of philosophy? If we carefully examine the birth of Greek philosophy, we will see one fundamental thing: philosophy is born together with exclusion, and what is more, the first to be excluded is Chaos. Chaos is not a philosophical concept and never was one, but it enters philosophy exclusively through its intermediary, through its substitute in the figure of Khôra, the Platonic “space” in the Timaeus, or as the later “matter” (hyle) of Aristotle. However, the perspective on Khôra in the Timaeus and on matter in Aristotle is already the perspective of Logos,26 but everything said by Logos about that which it has already excluded in the course of its accession is like “political propaganda” or a “news release.” That which Logos tells us about matter is entirely a constructivist Wille zur Macht, “will to power,” the deployment of a biased and aggressive strategy of male domination, the establishment of hierarchical hegemony, the projection of wishful thinking, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. From the very beginning of philosophy, “the tail wags the dog.”