Political Platonism: The Philosophy of Politics
Alexander Dugin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49518274-political-platonism
Alexander Dugin’s Political Platonism offers a
seminal analysis of the contemporary philosophical crisis from one of the
best-known writers and political commentators in post-Soviet Russia. Through a
series of essays, course transcripts, and a single long interview—each
remarkable for the depth of its learning and the boldness of its vision—Dugin
exposes the profoundest roots of the Western philosophical tradition, offering
his view of why it has reached its final terminus, and his indication of where
a new beginning must be sought.
The works collected in this volume present
Dugin’s theory of Political Platonism as a fundamental philosophical and
political orientation, capable at once of reviving higher political and social
forms and furnishing solid ground for resistance to the collapse of the
contemporary world. His multi-perspective thesis offers a thorough and
thought-provoking critique of modernity and a masterful survey of Western
philosophy, reaching from before Heraclitus to beyond Heidegger. In its
provocative, clear-sighted analyses and its visionary flights, this book
provides an invaluable reference for those already familiar with Dugin, and an
intriguing introduction for those coming to him for the first time.
Summary
Aleksandr Dugin’s Political Platonism: The
Philosophy of Politics (Arktos, 2019) offers a seminal analysis of the
contemporary philosophical crisis from one of the best-known writers and
political commentators in post-Soviet Russia. Through a series of essays,
course transcripts, and a single long interview—each remarkable for the depth
of its learning and the boldness of its vision—Dugin exposes the profoundest
roots of the Western philosophical tradition, centered around the thought of
Plato, offering a Platonic view of why it has reached its final terminus, and
his indication of where a new beginning must be sought. The works collected in
this volume present Dugin’s theory of Political Platonism as a fundamental
philosophical and political orientation, capable at once of reviving higher
political and social forms and furnishing solid ground for resistance to the
collapse of the contemporary world. His multi-perspective thesis offers a
thorough and thought-provoking critique of modernity and a masterful survey of
Western philosophy, reaching from before Heraclitus to beyond Heidegger. In its
provocative, clear-sighted analyses and its visionary flights, this book
provides an invaluable reference for those already familiar with Dugin, and an
intriguing introduction for those coming to him for the first time. Aleksandr
Gelyevich Dugin is a philosopher, former Professor and Advisor to the Kremlin,
and one of the best-known writers and political commentators in post-Soviet
Russia. He is a leading theorist of Eurasianism. A Soviet dissident in the
1980s, Dugin has authored more than 60 books, among them Foundations of
Geopolitics (1997), which has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the
General Staff of the Russian military, and The Fourth Political Theory (2009).
Alexander
Dugin Explained
Michael
Millerman
February 1,
2023
https://firstthings.com/alexander-dugin-explained/
Many sense
that the West needs to reconsider its philosophical foundations. Reflexive
appeals to old pieties no longer persuade. But those who look to modern
philosophy for answers run into a problem best articulated by Leo Strauss:
“Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the
great trouble, the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.” Heidegger is
notoriously difficult, fundamentally anti-modern, and tainted by Nazism. Yet
Heidegger can indeed help us, if we liberate ourselves from narrow readings of
his thought. And to do that, we have something to learn from a Russian
Heideggerian who reads the famous German philosopher very differently than do
most Western interpreters.
It was in
2011 that I first learned about Alexander Dugin, the now infamous Russian
political theorist and activist. I was an undergraduate philosophy student at
the University of British Columbia. My interest in Strauss had led me to Azure,
the now defunct neoconservative journal of Jewish ideas, in which I read an
article by Yigal Liverant titled “The Prophet of the New Russian Empire.”
Liverant’s account of Dugin engaged three of my intellectual concerns: the
unique character of Russian thought, the mystical tradition as a counterweight
to modern rationalism, and the Platonic figure of the philosopher-king. Dugin
addressed all three. He appeared to me as a mystical philosopher-king whose
thought held the key to understanding Russia as a specific civilization.
Today, Dugin
is generally thought of as an enthusiastic war propagandist and neofascist who
proposes to unite the global far right into an anti-Western alliance. But all
that was in the future. When I googled Dugin after reading Liverant’s article,
I happened upon a five-minute talk on what Dugin calls “the fourth political
theory.” His argument is that the twentieth century was defined by an
ideological struggle between three political theories: liberalism, communism,
and fascism, the last of which was most powerfully expressed in Nazism. The
defeat of the third political theory in 1945—and the end of the Cold War, which
saw the triumph of the first over the second—ushered in what the late Charles
Krauthammer called the unipolar moment. Liberalism appeared to stand as the
last viable ideology, the end of history. But what if someone wants to oppose
liberalism, and to do so neither as a fascist nor as a communist? In a world
defined by the three political theories, that option seems impossible. Those
who oppose liberalism are either accused of being communists of one sort or
another, or derided as fascists.
To break
through this dead end, Dugin announced a fourth political theory. His goal was
to provide intellectual breathing room for those who were trapped in an
outdated framework. As he wrote in his 2009 book The Fourth Political Theory
(which I co-translated), he doesn’t understand “why certain people, when
confronted with the concept of the Fourth Political Theory, do not immediately
rush to open a bottle of champagne, and do not start dancing and rejoicing,
celebrating the discovery of new possibilities.” I am one of those who was
happy to raise a glass. From my first encounter with Dugin, I was grateful for
the freedom to think about the political future of the West outside the
confining framework of the three political theories that claim to be our only
options.
Closer to
home, Dugin’s fourth political theory helped me to solve a puzzle. Reading Leo
Strauss and the Zionist Azure as an undergraduate, I had often heard both
Strauss and Zionism labeled “fascist” by students and professors. It was
obvious to me that they are not. But why do otherwise intelligent commentators
draw such an untenable conclusion? Dugin’s approach provides an answer: If
you’re not a liberal and you’re not criticizing liberalism from the left, then,
of necessity, according to the tripartite scheme of modernity, you’re a
fascist; there’s no other option. This kind of reasoning is stultifying,
especially when one is trying to understand a political thinker as deep and
enigmatic as Leo Strauss.
What is the
fourth political theory? That’s not an easy question to answer. It rejects
liberal democracy but, like democracy, it is concerned to do justice to “the
people” in the sense of peoples, a topic Dugin develops at length in his book
Ethnosociology and elsewhere. Peoples create civilizations, and Dugin argues
that political sovereignty rests in large civilizational spaces and blocs.
Small nation states often enjoy only the semblance of sovereignty, because in
fact they do the bidding of greater powers, the politically organized,
militarily capable civilizational centers that represent the poles of a
multipolar world.
This
analysis led to a surprising point of agreement in an otherwise hostile debate
at the Nexus Institute in 2019 between Dugin and the French-Jewish intellectual
Bernard-Henri Lévy. Both affirmed that American decline, if not reversed, will
bring forth a world of several civilizational empires. (Levy highlighted
Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and radical Sunni Islamism; Dugin’s list is
longer.) Levy laments that prospect, whereas Dugin welcomes it as a return to
the truth of the primacy of peoples and civilizations over the unencumbered
liberal individuals who reside in a unipolar world that considers liberalism
the only humane basis for political life.
Dugin shows
that liberalism is leading, in the name of freedom, to our liberation from
human identity altogether. Soon, the affirmation that we are human will be
denounced as fascistic, just as today a proponent of nationalism or an opponent
of transgenderism is called a fascist. (Dugin spells out this trajectory in The
Great Awakening vs. The Great Reset.) The most important task for those who
wish to preserve a humane way of life is to preserve the possibility of human
freedom as such. That task requires resisting the forces that are destroying
the very being of the human, which is enmeshed in shared bonds and collective
structures. Dugin makes a crucial distinction between the individual and the
human being or person: “The individual is the product of subtraction of the
personality from the human being, the result of the liberation of the human
unit from any bonds and collective structures.” He identifies the Great Reset
and related globalist ideologies as a continuation of erroneous teachings that
encourage individualism and artificial group identity, teachings that began
with the nominalist rejection of universals. (In this regard, Dugin’s thought
parallels a long tradition of modernity critique in the West.)
Dugin’s
geopolitical cosmos contains several suns and moons, not a single center of
gravity; many “globes,” cosmoses, oikoumenes, not one; civilizations in the
plural, not “civilization” as a single standard. Freedom, for him, means more
than the freedom to choose among the options available within the context of a
liberal political society. It must also mean the freedom to choose something
other than a liberal political society. Man “has been given the freedom to
choose his own political philosophy on a paradigmatic level.” Perhaps, Dugin
speculates, there will be as many notions of freedom and what it entails as
there are peoples and civilizations.
The
culture-specific reflection that we find in Dugin sounds a bit like leftist
postmodernism, which sometimes champions multiple, relativistic ways of
knowing. But the similarities are deceiving. Precisely as leftist,
postmodernism operates within the constrained vision of the three political
theories. Its fashionable relativism therefore renders some alternatives
untouchable (fascist!), even as it makes others available. Postmodernism loves
to love the Other, provided it is the politically correct Other. There is no
affirmative action for bearded young Eastern European conservatives. Dugin, by
contrast, opens up the framework of political theory for discussion. He attacks
Western political modernity from both premodern and postmodern directions, and
his postmodernism goes beyond the familiar leftist variants to include a kind
of right-wing postmodernism, one of rooted traditionalism. In the American
political context, Dugin’s fourth political theory supports “Trumpism” (though
not necessarily Trump), because that movement expresses a spontaneous protest
against the destruction of all that is sacred. Dugin would be quick to point
out, though, that this kind of populism does not understand the problem of man
philosophically.
The fourth
political theory must be understood in light of its philosophical orientation.
Dugin insists that the three political theories are to be rejected because they
share a faulty modern metaphysics. He draws on Heidegger’s account of the
history of philosophy, especially his idea of inceptual thinking, to challenge
their hegemony. Dugin’s specific understanding of this aspect of Heidegger’s
philosophy makes him distinctive among political theorists.
Heidegger
argues that the history of philosophy in the West has a beginning, middle, and
end, and that the movement of this history is not that of an accidental
sequence but an unfolding of the destiny of being itself. Put differently,
according to Heidegger, philosophy has made our world; it has been inceptional,
giving being its “shape” or “way of being.” And by his account, the making has
been a mis-making, an eclipse of being, a silencing of being. By contrast with
almost all of Heidegger’s Western interpreters, who detail the ways in which
Heidegger plots the trajectory toward modernity’s loss of being, Dugin recounts
Heidegger’s history of philosophy with an emphasis, not on the dead end, but
rather on the opportunity we have to make another beginning of philosophy, to
think “inceptually.”
According to
Heidegger, to think inceptually requires more than questioning the inherited
concepts of the Western philosophical tradition. One must think beyond them, as
it were, and this is done by returning to the source from which they first
arose. Heidegger eventually employed the archaic spelling of the German word
for “being,” captured in English awkwardly but adequately as “beyng,” to
demarcate the source of philosophical reflection. We are called to turn our
thoughts from the mainstream metaphysical tradition, which talks of being and
beings, toward the source of the thought-worthy as such.
The western
tradition of metaphysics encourages us to think about being as the being of
beings, the quality or feature that all beings share. Heidegger argues that
this mode of reflection operates on being rather than remaining open to its
origins. He invites us to “leap” into “beyng” in our thinking. He doesn’t say
what the source of being “is.” If it isn’t a being, can we even say that it
“is”? Instead, he invites us to enter into the momentous question of why and
how we are compelled to speak about fundamental things in terms of being at
all. He meditates on a host of basic words and concepts, including history,
culture, time, life, change, motion, reason, and truth. In Heidegger’s view,
progress in philosophy does not consist of an ever-growing stock of answers to
problems, but rather involves “a deepening and renewed posing of questions.”
“In questioning,” he writes, “reside[s] the tempestuous advance that says ‘yes’
to what has not been mastered and the broadening out into ponderable, yet
unexplored, realms.” This questioning sparks inceptual thinking, fresh
possibilities for thought, and if we participate fully in the questioning that
belongs to inceptual thinking, he claims, we undergo an “essential
transformation of the human being: from ‘rational animal’ (animal rationale) to
Dasein.” (Dasein is another Heideggarian formulation meant to evoke a
particular “being there” rather than the generic notion of being.) Inceptual
thinking is a fundamentally transformational questioning, a re-grounding of the
self.
Heidegger
does not provide a comprehensive sketch of what the world looks like from the
standpoint of Dasein. How could he? “Comprehensive” invites abstraction,
whereas Dasein seeks rootedness in the real. But Heidegger does indicate, over
hundreds of pages, how we must learn to think and speak differently in order to
prepare the possibility of that transformation. For instance, he takes the
Enlightenment notion of self-certain self-consciousness, the Romantic idea of
nature, and the Renaissance concepts of culture and genius, and shows the
specific manner in which each of them closes us off to deeper concern with
beyng and reinforces its distorted interpretation in terms of being.
Heidegger
thought that the saying-power of our words had undergone exhaustion and
destruction, precisely because at the end of the first history of philosophy we
are no longer essentially related to beyng in our speaking. Ordinary
philosophical language “must by necessity now sound dull, ordinary, and empty,”
at most giving the impression that it is concerned with scholarly advancements
to the academic field of philosophy. With Heidegger we have to learn to let
words bring forth a blossoming. His language is strange not because he strives
for obscurity but because he strives for a clarity that has become obscured to
us over the course of our history, and which may yet be recovered.
Heideggerian
political thinking is also aware of the emptiness of a great deal of our
political language. Freedom is an obvious example; democracy another. To regain
a freshness of insight, Dugin employs many of Heidegger’s reflective
techniques: the language of authenticity and notions such as
being-towards-death, care, projection, thrownness, historicity, and
everydayness. He also uses evocative neologisms such as the fourfold, Dasein,
selbst, beyng, and the event. These are among the “essential words” of
Heidegger’s philosophy, meant to redirect our thinking, allowing us to make new
beginnings in thought reconnected to the animating source of philosophy.
Heidegger’s
critics dismiss these “essential words” as obscurantist mumbo-jumbo. But there
was a time when it would have been unusual to think of every human being as an
“individual”—an inception that has been fruitful, spawning entire life-worlds
that we now take for granted. Likewise, it will be unusual to see man in terms
of his fundamental openness to beyng; that seeing, too, will be inceptual.
According to Heidegger, we face a decision: either another beginning of
philosophy, one open to beyng and seeking Dasein, or else the exacerbation of
our alienation, technological manipulation, and willful destruction—a posthuman
nightmare. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Heidegger
invites us to reconsider everything from a strange new perspective, attained
with difficulty but worth the effort. It’s an invitation Dugin takes up
enthusiastically, and he does so in relation to political theory. In The Fourth
Political Theory he urges us to reject the individual, class, race, and the
state as fundamental units of analysis and replace them with Dasein—understood
as an interpretation of the human being in terms of our openness to beyng, our
capacity to be moved by the mysterious ground of our existence. Dugin
elaborates a set of topics: “Dasein and the state, Dasein and social
stratification, Dasein and power (the will to power).” Whereas in The Fourth
Political Theory he lists only the themes to be explored, in other works, such
as the still untranslated Experiments in Existential Politics, he begins the
exploration.
Dugin’s
proposals are admittedly “abstract.” They are less about institutions and more
about underlying concepts. But we sometimes forget that our institutions and
hardheaded political realities are animated by underlying concepts. I’ve
already mentioned “the individual.” Sovereignty is another core concept that is
not self-explaining. Fruitful analysis can often be undertaken without a
concrete link between the concept and something already established and easily
understood. The state is another concept. Strauss insisted that the Greek word
polis should not be translated as “city-state,” because the modern theory of
the state is wholly distinct from the classical teaching on political
organization. The state isn’t just an empirical reality. It is an idea,
antithetical to other ideas and filled out by the concrete realities that evoke
its use.
Dugin
rejects the concept of the modern state and the theory underlying it. He
prefers the term politeia (the title of Plato’s Republic). The politeia,
according to Dugin, is not established to protect individual liberties, as some
liberal theories insist, but neither does it operate in accord with fascist
theory, which asserts the priority of the state. Rather, the best kind of
politeia is configured around the founding moment of authentic existence native
to a people’s most outstanding figures, its philosophers and poets. Consider
this formulation from a speech Dugin gave in 2013, in which he discusses the
Islamic philosopher al-Farabi:
The head of
state in al-Farabi’s perfect state is considered in Plato’s sense the one who
is united with the divine Intellect, the prophetic ruler, the Philosopher King.
Authentically existing Dasein is the Philosopher King. My alternative [to the
modern political theories] is Platonopolis where the phenomenologists
rule—Philosophers of Martin Heidegger’s school. So humanity is concentrated in
the Dasein of those who exist authentically.
In other
words, a well-formed polity arises from the capacity of those who lead it to
think in accord with its “genius,” and thus give political form to the
thought-world that animates its populace.
The idea
that a politeia is the political embodiment of foundational, constitutive
thoughts is not far-fetched. Consider C. Bradley Thompson’s work on America’s
revolutionary mind, which presents an interpretation of America’s founding as
the triumph of a certain way of thinking. Because Thompson believes that
America has gone astray, he calls for a return to those arguments, ideas, and
principles. The original founding—and now necessary refounding—is
philosophical. Heidegger, for his part, seems to have thought that there were
no genuine regimes when he was writing, because America, Nazi Germany, and
the Soviet Union, the three great powers, despite their differences, were
“metaphysically the same,” all technological enterprises uprooted from the soil
of genuine philosophy and poetry. In Heidegger’s formulation, a mass becomes a
people when its outstanding figures emerge. A people is not a biological entity
you can poke with a stick or study in a lab. It’s an existential-cultural
phenomenon. (This idea runs completely counter to official Nazi dogmatism,
incidentally, which Heidegger criticized at length throughout his Black
Notebooks—an irony, given that they have a reputation for being the smoking-gun
proof of his Nazism owing to the anti-Semitic remarks they contain.) Dugin
applies that insight to his theory of global multipolarity, which affirms a
plurality of civilizational spaces, interpreting civilizations in terms of
their greatest souls, those who awaken and guide the Dasein of the people, the concrete
expressions of its public life.
Dugin’s
political theory is compatible with Russian imperialism: “I am in favor of an
existential Empire.” His ideas justify a narrative of Russia’s special mission
in the world as not-quite-West and not-quite-East—in other words, as
Eurasian—and his notions of civilizational great spaces and historical destiny
provide a basis for disregarding the legally established, widely recognized
borders of neighboring states. (They also self-servingly put intellectuals like
him at the apex of the regime.) But even those who loathe Russian imperialism
can learn from Dugin’s reading of Heidegger, because it cuts against the
standard post–World War II Western reception of Heidegger.
In
mid-century Germany, France, and America, Heidegger was read in a way that made
him less of a threat to the post-war consensus. German Heideggerians thought
“with him and against him” to develop rationalistic theories of liberal
dialogue and community through communication—and often refused to say more
about him. French Heideggerians turned him into a man of the deconstructive
left. Heidegger showed, they thought, that any appeal to Truth, Reason, Nature,
and the like rested on a historical contingency, underneath which could be
found a nihilistic abyss. They embraced what Gianni Vattimo celebrates as the
“weakening of Being,” because it served their political ends. American
interpreters appropriated Heidegger to the American tradition of pragmatism, fashioning
a kind of hopeful, positive nihilism that produced freely created narratives of
social solidarity that invariably turned leftward. As Richard Rorty quipped,
“Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself.” All these traditions
of interpretation ignored the importance of beyng as the ground and
source—indeed, the “authority.” Dugin, if nothing else, corrects this
imbalance.
Dugin
regards our openness to beyng as the deepest dimension of our freedom (a view,
I submit, that was Heidegger’s as well). This is not “individual freedom” as
liberals understand it. In Dugin’s account, the history of liberalism is one of
false liberation from collective identities and external sources of authority,
culminating in man’s attempt to liberate himself from gender identity and human
identity in favor of “cyborgs, artificial intelligence networks, and products
of genetic engineering.” To be free in the liberal way is at last to liberate
the human being from himself: Individual freedom leads to the destruction of
man.
Against
freedom as liberation from our humanity, Dugin emphasizes the freedom that
belongs to man only if he is open to beyng. He gestures toward something much
grander, nobler, and holier than liberation, the state of belonging to “homo
maximalis,” one of several terms he uses to evoke an expansive sense of the
human being who is free for the greatest tasks, especially the task of
philosophizing. Freedom is for excellence. The measure of the good polity,
according to Dugin, is the degree to which it provides the greatest space for
its greatest figures to develop their highest capacities. In doing so, the
polity does not discriminate against the others; rather, lesser souls find
excellence befitting their character and condition only in a polity held together
by authentic philosophizing, like iron filings in the presence of a magnetic
force. Not everyone must be a philosopher. But for anyone authentically to be
what they are, philosophers must be holding open the space of beyng.
As a Russian
interpreter of Heidegger, Dugin can show us more about Heidegger’s philosophy
than we’re used to seeing in the overly ideological environment of the postwar
West, where American pragmatism, French deconstructionism, and a kind of German
liberalism have dominated, and skewed, readings of Heidegger the philosopher.
If the only thing he were to have accomplished was to remind us of the
inceptual dimension of Heidegger’s thought and make the case for its centrality
in understanding Heidegger, Dugin’s writings would be a welcome contribution.
But today we
are concerned not only with pure philosophy, but with the crisis of
contemporary politics. We need the help of great thinkers, and it is still the
case that the greatest thinker of our time is Heidegger. Can Dugin’s Heidegger
help us think through today’s political crisis?
Since 2016,
there has been a kind of intellectual renaissance on the right. Figures who had
been appropriated by the left after World War II—Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl
Schmitt, for example—are starting to return to their more natural place on the
political spectrum. The conversation has changed so as to restore some balance
to what had become a lopsided caricature of our political options. Even obscure
figures such as René Guénon and Julius Evola are receiving attention. A serious
consideration of Dugin’s political theory fits into this relatively new
intellectual context, and does so in challenging ways. His thinking is
anti-liberal and anti-modern, positions held by other important thinkers in the
West today, at least at a theoretical level. Dugin’s philosophy is more or less
at home with movements critical of transgenderism, post-humanism, uncontrolled
technology monopolies, atheism, myriad forms of extreme egalitarianism, and the
rejection of rank, holiness, and order.
Dugin has
said of Putin, “I believe both he and I are reading the same writings, written
in golden letters on the skies of Russian history.” Words such as these remind
us of other philosophers who wedded themselves to tyrants. Heidegger’s support
for Hitler offers an unsettling example. As was the case with Heidegger,
Dugin’s ill-starred political alliance causes many to dismiss him, writing him
off as the source of intellectual legitimation for a fascist, kleptocratic thug
who wishes to recreate the Russian empire. Duginism is indeed compatible with
Putinism, but we need to see that it is not reducible to it. It is more
accurate to say that Dugin is the chief philosophical mastermind of an
ideologically coherent alternative to Western political modernity. And like it
or not, that is a remarkable accomplishment, from which even those who wish to
defend political modernity in the West can learn a great deal.
Michael
Millerman is the author of Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida,
Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political.
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