On the other hand, all opponents of democracy are instantly enlisted in the class of persons professing an ideology the very name of which has long since become a curse-word and an insult, and unscrupulous hypnotists use this technique more and more. Instead of this word, grown hateful and made senseless, which I do not even wish to pronounce in this essay, it is better to call us “Platonists.” Yes, we are bearers of political Platonism. We build our conception of the world and society starting from the first thesis of the Parmenides and the first four hypotheses. Others builds theirs starting from the second thesis and second four hypotheses. For heaven’s sake — would it be so bad to know about this allegiance beforehand?
Being philosophers, that is free beings, we can full well say “yes” to the metaphysical status quo, consisting in the dogmatization of the second [thesis] of the Parmenides (i.e. democracy), but we can also say “no.”
I say “no” to methodological individualism and the second thesis of the Platonic Parmenides and thereby clearly establish myself in the ranks, in the army of the supporters of Plato.
Plato burned the books of Democritus. Democrats, and in particular, Soros’s spiritual guru Popper, in his catechism The Open Society and its Enemies, call to burn the books of Plato. Popper says directly: either enemies of the open society, liberal democracy, the second thesis of the Parmenides, or friends. This is a true war of hypotheses, a battle of epistemologies, a struggle of gnoseological paradigms, a fight of ideas.
Thus, for us, Platonists, democracy is a false doctrine; it is built on a world that doesn’t exist and a society that cannot exist.
If that is so, the Platonist comes to a choice: democracy, by its false pretensions, conceals beneath itself something else, but something in any case very bad, unjust, and unhealthy, for instance a secret oligarchy or disguised tyranny, but that is a topic for another essay.
3.
Political Platonism and Its Ontological Bases
Part 1. Total Homologies of Power in Platonism
1. Platonism is based on the fundamental unity of the structures of knowledge, society, and cosmos. All these domains are three aspects of order.
2. The order of Platonism is based on a vertical topography, structured around the pairs: this — another, one — many, original (paradigm) — copy (icon, eidolon), idea — phenomenon.
3. A complete description of Plato’s categories ([from] the dialogue Parmenides):
This (tauta) — another (allo, eteron);
One (hen) — many (polla);
Being (on) — non-being (me on);
Itself (identitas, tauta) — other (alteritas, etera);
Equal — unequal;
“Absolute” — “relative”;
Resting — moving (kinestai);
Big (megale) — small;
Old/constant (paleo) — young/new (neo);
Indivisible/whole (holon) — divisible (partial);
Like (homo) — unlike (me homo);
Finite (peiras) — infinite (apeiron);
Intangible (me aptesthai) — tangible (aptesthai).
4. A vertical order extends between these categories. It descends from ideas to phenomena and ascends from phenomena to ideas.
5. This order predetermines the normative structure of man, world, society, and cognition. Man is a link in the chain of gods. He is stretched between origins [nachala], and he accomplishes by himself, by his existence, the transference of one into the other — like a demiurge, gods, luminaries [or celestial bodies: svetila]. He creates the order of the cosmos, organizes copies, and he dissolves phenomena in the contemplation of ideas. Creation (poesis) and contemplation (noesis) are man’s two aspects.
6. The cosmos is a cosmos (i.e. beauty) because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful because it is ordered. It also has a structure from the meta-cosmos to the cosmos. At the center of the cosmos is the world soul, animating it. The cosmos is a big man [i.e. person, human, chelovek]. The cosmos is created by the demiurge (eternally) and is eternally dissolved in the luminous world of ideas.
7. Cognition is realized the same way: it brings ideas down to objects (theurgy, among Neo-Platonists) and raises objects to ideas.
8. The Republic [Gosudarstvo] — Politeia — is a slice of the cosmos (the Republic of souls, in the Platonist Chrysippus). Order is not reflected but expressed in it. The Republic (Platonopolis) is arranged from low to high and high to low (poesis/noesis). It establishes in law truths, given by philosophers; the impulse is delegated to guardians, and the artisans embody the directive in the production of empirical things. Philosophers create the Republic demiurgically. The World Soul stands at the center of the Republic. This is the gold of being. It is the noetic concentration of the dynamic exchange between the world of ideas and the world of things. What is worthiest? The ideas. Who is occupied with them? Philosophers. The politeia is ordered when the worthiest is placed above and the least worthy below. Above are the ideas and those who contemplate them. Below are artisans, those who produce things.
9. Power in Platonism is sacral, rational, clear, and ideal. It is the crystallization of the world of paradigms. All the attributes of the One apply to power, hence it must be one [single], and monarchic. At the head of the philosophers stands the king of the philosophers, Prestor John, “the king of the world,” chakravarti. The categories of the One apply to the king-philosopher.
10. Politics, as the art of the politeia, is the same as the art of philosophy. Not similar, but identical.
11. No will to power whatsoever. Power is truth. He who is in the domain of truth is already thereby in the domain of power. He who strives for power (truth) will never attain it. Truth (power) is like lightning. It is not, and then it is. And that is the event. It is not extended in time. It is vertical.
Part 2. The Structures of Platonopolis and the Hypotheses of the Parmenides
1. The homology of the politeia and ontology in Plato permits the application of the henology of the Parmenides to the structure of the Platonopolis (the normative case of the Politeia), leading us, thereby, to the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and Proclus. Platonopolis should be constructed not only around the Republic, Statesman, and Laws: [but on] Plato’s teaching completely and coherently in all its aspects.
2. In that case in the bed of Platonopolis we can distinguish layers corresponding to the first four hypotheses of the Parmenides. Everything begins with the postulation of “hen,” the One. Plato’s Republic is a Republic of the One.
3. The first hypothesis postulates the transcendency of the One, which is “epikeina ta panta.” That means that the normative Republic must be open at the top. It cannot be self-identical, since the One does not exist immediately. Hence, the Republic is built around something greater than itself. An apophatic hole must gape at the center of the Republic. Only then will the Republic be holy. That does not detract from the order of the political cosmos but on the contrary ensures its noetic respiration. Thus, the Republic should not be self-identical; it is always something non-identical to itself. This is not simply the Republic but the Republic of philosophers (the predicate is necessary). As soon as it becomes simply a Republic and self-identical, it at once loses the wave of ontological resonance with the paradigm and turns from a copy into a caricature, cartoon, parody, anti-politeia.
4. The second hypothesis. If the One is, it is Many. Hen polla. The Neo-Platonists interpreted this as the second hypostasis Nous. In the Republic, monarchy (hen) must be realized in the field of the philosophers as a noetic caste. There must be many philosophers around the throne of the king of philosophers. They make channels for him that are in contact with many things. But these channels must be intellective. The philosophers around the king of philosophers release [snimayut: also, remove, take off, gather] many things of the Republic by their awareness, harmonize them, open their eidetic sequences, and reveal their semantics.
5. The third hypothe
sis. One and Many. Hen kai polla. The Neo-Platonists interpreted this as the hypostatization of the World Soul, the third hypostasis of the Triad. “Kai” appears, the union “and.” This is the union of guardians. With the philosophers, plurality exists in displaced form: intellectiveness (noera) displaces the particular (Many). Guardians encounter the Many as placed alongside. Their task is to marshal the Many. They guard the World Soul and do not allow the Many to overwhelm it. They destroy the superfluous. They transfer [perevodyat: transfer, translate] the Many into the One. The guardian stands between friends (Soul and philosophers) and enemies (the Many, detached phenomena pretending to be autonomous).
6. Iamblichus introduces between the third and fourth hypotheses an intermediate one. It can be related to the lower story of hen kai polla occupied by artisans. They also relate to the “kai” (“and”), but if guardians stand in the field of the “kai” closer to the hen, artisans (demiurges) are closer to the polla. They superimpose on the Many the likeness of the One, giving things and elements forms. Thereby they make things beautiful. Beauty is permeated by nostalgia. Nostalgia is the seal of the One. The artisans are artists, but they are lower than the guardians, because they are connected with matter. The first artists were blacksmiths. They descend into mines of matter (properly, polla, the fourth hypothesis) and procure metals therefrom. From metals they forge forms. Blacksmiths bear the seal of Tartarus. Hence guardians stand above them, and sometimes punish them.
7. The last level of Platonopolis is polla. That is plurality. This plurality is, because it is found inside the Republic, and the Republic is a form of existence of the One (hen). The many (polla) does not exist outside a correctly established Republic. In the Platonopolis, to the many (polla) relate slaves, frogs, metals, animals, plants, soils, idlers, the ungifted, two-legged, three-legged, four-legged livestock, mosquitos, and civil society. All this, including mountains, lakes, seas, and clouds, has a political significance, since it relates to the field of the order-forming Polis. Without the Polis they lose ontology.
Part 3. The Aristomorphosis of Politics in Aristotle
1. Neo-Platonists included Aristotle in the context of Platonism; they did not exclude him. Porphyry’s texts were ascribed in the Middle Ages to Aristotle. It was a platono-centric interpretation of Aristotelianism and the Stoics. Theoretically, there could also be another interpretation but now we will follow the Neo-Platonists.
2. Aristotle distinguishes three pejorative forms of rule: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, and three superior: monarchy, aristocracy, and politeia. I already spoke about the fact that the three pejorative forms relate to the second series of Parmenides’s hypotheses — from the 5th to the 8th — based on rejection of the One. The politics of modernity strictly corresponds to these four hypotheses of a meontological character (as the Neo-Platonists thought). The analysis of the political deviancy of modernity led to the schema of the co-existence of all three pejorative types of the Political in the contemporary global model. At the center, the secret tyrant (the golden calf, the anti-Christ), around it the global oligarchy (multinational corporations, the hundred richest families in the world), and on the outer periphery, democracy as the power of the frenzied, swinish plebeians (who overthrew the feudal system of the guardians).
3. Professor Claudio Mutti, at a meeting of the Florian Geyer Club, justly noted that there is also an example of the superior, positive combination of these three regimes. He pointed to the Roman Empire. In it the principle of monarchy (the consul) was combined with aristocracy (senate) and the committees (politeia).
4. Developing Mutti’s idea, we can correlate Platonopolis, based on the first four hypotheses of Parmenides, with the synthesis of the three superior forms of the Political in Aristotle. The monarchy of the king of philosophers can neighbor the assembly of guardians (the Gerousia of Sparta) and the local self-rule of artisans. We get a subsidiary imperial federalism in the spirit of Johannes Althusius.
5. Without monarchy, aristocracy will become oligarchy, politeia will degrade into democracy.
Conclusion
1. We obtained a structured system of political Platonism, complete and well-founded from every perspective.
2. It is entirely contrary to the spirit of modernity and post-modernity, which go against order, power, transcendency, sacrality, vertical topography, and models of homologies of man, world, politics, and knowledge.
3. The choice between political modernity and political post-modernity, which continues the anti-Platonic program of modernity, on one hand, and political Platonism, on the other, is a matter of free philosophical decision. Any effort to denounce political Platonism with reference to historical examples is nothing but empty and vacuous political propaganda, a primitive means to impose one’s rightness by unfit methods of suggestion, pressure, and hypnosis, containing nothing rational, nothing philosophical, and nothing properly human. It is tendentiously interpreted and deliberately selected facts torn from context, and accidental, unfounded generalizations of a purely rhetorical, not analytical character.
4. The construction of Platonopolis is an open, rational project. There are no arguments, none at all, for why not to be occupied with this, not to wish for it, not to believe in it, and not to strive for it. There is also nothing obligatory in this. This is precisely the domain of free political choice, carried out by a free being.
4.
Traditionalism against Devilopolis
Reflections on the First Russian Congress of Traditionalists
From Progress to Eschatology: A Change of Reference Points
Today, more and more people are coming to the conclusion that humanity is not at all moving down the path it should be moving down, and that the promises of progress, development, and universal enlightenment have proved false or altogether unattainable. A hundred years ago a majority of people looked into the future with optimism, awaiting a transition to something better, in some sense guaranteed by the very logic of history. Today an entirely different mood prevails in societies: if it isn’t directly apocalyptic, it is at least skeptical regarding the “unrestrained burst of humanity forward into progress and enlightenment.” Although technical development continues at full speed, mechanisms are perfected, machines become “smarter,” and means of communication improve their possibilities, this does not affect human happiness directly at all, does not guarantee any moral or spiritual heights, and does not increase justice in the social order. The Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka correctly remarked that “if before the first quarter of the 20th century the idea of progress prevailed in the humanities, later the theory of cyclical crises and the theory of catastrophes became more popular.”
If at the beginning of the century only a few intellectuals struggled with anxiety about the problematic future of humanity, like Spengler, who pronounced the “Decline of the West,” or Nietzsche, who pointed to the rise of nihilism and “the death of God,” then in our days the sense of catastrophe is becoming widespread in the broadest spheres. It is penetrating into mass culture and becoming the prevailing outlook. The promised eternal world, humanism, justice, the constant growth of wealth, the eradication of poverty, the impending moral ascent of humanity — these are no longer expected to ever be realized. Alienation grows alongside the improvement of technical devices, technology displaces life, and new scientific achievements are used for the perfection of the military complex of global, hegemonic states. The more the talk of peace and calm, the greater the bloody sacrifices and violence.
Now is the time to start thinking about how to explain such a turn. What are its ideational bases? After all, the obvious psychological condition should be accompanied by more systematic, structural principles that raise all of that into a system. Just as hopes for the bright future gave rise to the theory of progress, so shouldn’t the growth of skepticism and disappointment lead us to a theory of regress?
Traditionalism as Philosophy and Its Appearance in Russia
Such a t
heory, in fact, has long since been created and developed, although it was until very recently the property of a relatively narrow circle of intellectuals. I’m talking about traditionalism: a philosophy, worldview, ideology, style. It’s time to give it more steadfast attention.
Although traditionalism came to Russia more than twenty years ago, when the first translations of the classics of this philosophy were made (the texts of René Guénon, Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade, Titus Burckhardt, etc.), the first texts of properly Russian traditionalists, and the first representative conference of traditionalists, occurred altogether recently, in the fall (October 2011). Several eminent figures of the European branch of this movement — notably, a sheikh of the Sufi order ‘Abd al-Wājid, Sergio Yahya Pallavicini, Claudio Mutti, traditionalist publisher and professor, and publisher and scholar Christian Boucher — as well as Russian traditionalist philosophers participated. Although in the congress almost a hundred papers and presentations on the classical themes of this movement were discussed — Tradition against the modern world, society’s loss of the spiritual, the vertical, and the notion of sacral order, critiques of Western civilization, and studies in the domain of traditional religions (Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, etc.) — some unconventional themes were also raised: the metaphysical interpretation of postmodernity, the philosophy of chaos, and the structural-linguistic analysis of religion and spiritual philosophies. The organizers of the conference also accented the philosophy of Plato and its influence on classical religions and various philosophical systems.
Political Platonism- the Philosophy of Politics Page 3
