the creation of a school of Orthodox Neo-Platonism.
8. An extremely important element is the task of the precise reconstruction of the condemnation of Platonism and Origenism at the time of Justinian, the condemnation of John Italus, the Hesychast controversy, and the battle against Imiaslavie [onomatodoxy]. It is necessary to reconstruct precisely the context, meaning, and aims of all these moments, in order to execute a deconstruction. We must understand the structure and ideational bases of the criticism of Platonism at various stages of the establishment of Christian dogma and Christian history as such.
9. It is useful to carry out a comparative analysis of how Neo-Platonist tendencies played out in other monotheistic religions: in Islam (al-falasifa, at-tasavvuf, Ishrak, Shiite gnosis) and in Judaism (Kabbala). Moreover, it is important to study more carefully the influence of Neo-Platonism on the Renaissance and numerous mystico-occult trends (from Bruno to the Rosicrucians and Hermetics).
10. The significance of Neo-Platonism is fundamentally understated in contemporary Orthodoxy. Intellectualism is not the sole path of the Christian, but the absence of intellect, or systematic, emotional weak-mindedness and blind devotionalism, are not likely, for their part, to be the correct paths. Not everyone understands Christian doctrine deeply. Neo-Platonic philosophy can help us understand it better.
7.
Heraclitus and Contemporary Russia
Theses Towards the Modernization of Russian Society
1. Western philosophy began with Heraclitus and his teaching concerning logos. Heidegger shows that it also ended with him. Hegel and Nietzsche, who completed Western philosophy, gave special attention to precisely Heraclitus.
2. Russian philosophy has not begun at all. What there was, was only the first efforts to think philosophically, which slipped away. Logos in its European understanding is clearly not Russia’s lot. Chaos is our lot. But…
3. We saw (in previous seminars) that chaos is not the exclusion of logos, but its inclusion. Logos is in chaos. The chaos that does not have logos WITHIN it is a rubbish heap, the archeomodern, not chaos. Chaos is teeming; it is always pregnant.
4. There must be Logos in Russian chaos. It got mixed up in chaos’s folds. If [that which is] Russian [russkoe] is chaos, and not a rubbish heap, then logos must definitely be there. It can be helped out, but no one — no one! — can or should force us to repeat the path of the radical severance of logos from chaos (as happened in Western European philosophy). We can allow that we will share the structure of the moment of the appearance of logos from chaos with Western European philosophy, but everything else will most likely be completely different, all the more so the end, which there cannot be at all in a philosophy of chaos.
5. Continuing the hypothesis: Russian philosophy should begin with Heraclitus, but it is not yet a fact that it must make the same subsequent steps as Western philosophy did. That is not even the most important thing. Let’s BEGIN with Heraclitus. That is enough. If that proves possible, it will be a BEGINNING.
6. Already from the first fragment, and you can read him from any fragment, Heraclitus calls us to the Logos (to sophon), to another. “Listening not to me but to the logos, all is one.” Russians at once seize upon “all is one,” and they forget that it is necessary to listen not to oneself, or Heraclitus, but the logos. For Russians, in our chaos, all is one as it is, without Heraclitus. That is what the logos dissolved in chaos says (Vladimir Solovyov’s all-unity), but in this way we won’t go far into philosophy. The way we understand that “all is one” is nonsense. We must start from the fact that Heraclitus himself did not understand that all is one, but understood that all is diverse and separate and does not gather together. That is, Heraclitus divided everything. And in order to stop dividing it, he had to be struck by the incursion of the logos, hit by lightning. Here Russians cease to understand anything: “What lightning? Everything is already clear to us: all is one. Of course it is one…” You see how everything is neglected… Before Heraclitus, it had to be explained to us that all is not one. Russians lack a psychological foundation for philosophy. The force of chaos is too strong in us. That is very good, but while that is so, we will not find logos in our Russian folds.
7. One must eradicate Solovyov from oneself and become, at least for a while, a bit saner. Around us is a multitude. Whoever does not admit this now loses his audience. Not with shame, but with honor, the Russian narod [i.e. people] thinks, and thinks correctly, but then it doesn’t need Heraclitus: it already knows everything. It doesn’t even need Solovyov. The Russian narod is just fine by itself. But in its natural state the Russian narod does not want to look for logos, won’t start looking for it, and never looked for it earnestly. What does it need a part of chaos for, an infinitely small part, at that?! It is all of chaos at once — the richer choice. The narod does not miscalculate, but there can be no philosophy under these circumstances until something changes.
8. Heraclitus is the limit of complexity for a Russian. The lack of understanding of him blocks us here and now from philosophy as such, both far Western and Eastern (religious, Hindu, Chinese), and from the possibility of creating an original philosophy. Until we inquire into Heraclitus, at least his first fragments, but also all the rest, we stand firmly in place, i.e. we sleep.
9. The search for the logos consists of two steps. The first step: to leave enchanted sleep and establish wakefulness in the world of multiplicity. That is painful. It is almost unbearable. It is entirely not the [usual] Russian way. When Russians apprehend it, they curse. Russians have no givens for that: not in culture, not in education, not in psychology. But without that, everything else is debarred. As carriers of chaos, Russians are magical; to understand that the world is manifold, they must become ordinary. They must disenchant themselves. That is exceedingly unpleasant to do. It is possible only outside chaos. It is necessary to come out of chaos — not into order, but into the space of pain, or more likely into disorder.
10. The second step: it is necessary to be consumed in the rays of the vertical axis that pierces the human who is gazing perplexedly at the surrounding multiplicity. The axis is fire and lightning. “Pur” (fire) and “keraunos” (lightning) are two names of being in Heraclitus, but they hit only one place: the field of tension between the vigilant human and the multiplicity that oppresses him. If something is lacking — the human, the oppression, or the multiplicity — the fire won’t have a place. The lightning will have nowhere to strike. Lightning only strikes outside chaos. There, outside chaos, is also where all Heraclitus’ formulas come together: there is discovered phusis, aeon, gods, and people, “ethos anthropo daimon,” Zeus, which “to sophon” loves and does not love to be called, etc.
11. Outside chaos, the majestic architecture of order is built. Order is a construct stretched out around lightning and fire, around the logos. That is how the space of philosophy is created. For this we must go outside (from a philosophical perspective, we live in the center of the earth, under the earth; our skies and luminaries are artificial; it is a hollow earth, mother-earth, earth-water, earth of the abyss, liquid earth) and from without become worthy [spodobytsya] of the strike. There along the axis of lightning will be hierarchies, ranks, levels, ladders and orders; there is height and depth there. They are one and the same, according to Heraclitus, because for residents of chaos there is neither one nor the other, and when height appears, depth does, too. Humans and gods dwell there, and also animals and spirits. There. That is important: THERE. That is, not here.
12. Western European philosophy, which found itself on the outside and lightning-struck, remained captivated by the majestic edifice of logos for centuries, and it was spoiled there. Logos initially pulsated, then cooled, then froze and withered. Then it split into myriad remains. Each Western European person got a piece, like rock from the Berlin wall. That is his personal logos — more precisely, what remains of it. It is no longer living and is a relic. Logos dissipated among lost multi
tudes is the society of the rubbish heap (contemporary Western postmodernity). According to Heidegger, such a world should either start from the beginning (another Beginning) or vanish. All of that does not concern us: we have not yet seriously begun a first time.
13. We have other problems. I described two steps. The third step consists in recognizing chaos in logos, in seeing that the same is outside as inside. We must see in foreign logos native [rodimyy] chaos and make logos native. We must not go the path of Icarus; we must return to the lowlands, along the path of Orpheus (it is possible that we must turn and look at what they did with Eurydice…); return, but illuminated by light, pierced by fire, consumed by lightning. Only then will we be able to understand the secret dimension of Heraclitus the Dark: all is one — logos is chaos. Darkness is light. THERE is here.
14. Westerners did not understand Heraclitus. They thought that “all is one” applies ONLY to what is outside. They forgot the breath of the abyss they climbed out of, the smell of raw non-being. “All” for them is only the vertical of illumination and the horizontal of the commonplace. “All” for us is that which is on the outside, the place where lightning strikes, but also that which sleeps in the depths of the earth, pretending to be the Russian narod.
15. Heraclitus is an ethnic Russian philosopher, or rather he can become one, if we take the three steps.
16. The teaching of philosophy in Russia should begin and end with Heraclitus. Until we develop a Russian relation to him, until we understand him, the way forward is harmful and lacking for us.
17. That is the first (and last) law of modernization.
8.
A Conversation about Noomachy
Natella Speranskaya: In the five-volume work Noomachy, you develop the themes of In Search of the Dark Logos where you first present the model of three Logoi, three intellectual worlds, to which you gave names of Greek gods: Apollo, Dionysus, and Cybele. Your new book is called Noomachy (Wars of the Intellect), which refers us back to Heraclitus’ Polemos (Πόλεμος), and also to the Titanomachia (Τιτανομαχία) and Gigantomachia (Γιγαντομαχία), found at the center of attention of a number of ancient authors (Hesiod, Homer, Apollodorus, Ovid, Sophocles, etc.). Please tell us about this concept.
Alexander Dugin: To tell you about it is the same as to give a brief account of the content of all five volumes and In Search of the Dark Logos. You ask me to do something beyond my strength. But I’ll try to do it as briefly as possible. At some moment, I became keenly interested in the problem of the pluralism of types of consciousness. This is the basic idea of Eurasianism: the plurality of civilizations and the baselessness of the Western pretension to universalism. Alain de Benoist affirms the same thing in his theory of the pluriverse and critique of Eurocentrism. The plural anthropology of Boas and Levi-Strauss also applies here. Accepting the thesis that structures of rationality can be organized differently in different cultures, I tried to develop my own model, which would systematize more general types of rationality.
I began by trying to discover an alternative to the system of rationality that is regarded as classical and stems from Greco-Roman antiquity. Following Nietzsche, I called this the Logos of Apollo. From there, I tried to determine the structures of an alternative rationality that I again following Nietzsche called the Logos of Dionysus. In Search of the Dark Logos was dedicated to clarifying the structure of Dionysus. Initially I thought that two Logoi, i.e. two types of rationality, would be enough for the basic model of the plurality of structures of consciousness. But the more I studied the dualism of Apollo/Dionysus, the exclusive/inclusive, I came to the conclusion, empirically and phenomenologically, that this pair does not cover all types of rationality and that another absolutely distinct fundamental structure could be detected: the Logos of Cybele. So Dionysus transformed from the black Logos to the dark Logos; his secret color was discovered against the backdrop of Cybele’s darkness. That is how I came to the idea of three Logoi, on which Noomachy is based.
In developing this theme, I constructed a noology (a term first used by the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga) based on a cartography of the three types of rationality: Apollonian, Dionysian, and Cybelean. Each of them corresponds to a distinct and irreducible paradigmal structure, which is not an idea-variant [neideovariativnaya], capable of unfolding into an indeterminately large number of mythologies, philosophies, religions, theologies, scientific disciplines, or styles of art. This paradigmal structure is the Logos. Neo-Platonists (Plotinus in particular) saw the concretization of Nous in Logos. If we accept my model, we get not one concretization but three. These are three camps found in essential, irremovable enmity, in opposition. At the same time, the three Logoi allow us to move away from the direct opposition of Apollo/Dionysus taken from Nietzsche and to get a much more complex and detailed picture. Moreover, asymmetrical alliances are possible among the Logoi: Indo-European culture is based on the union of Apollo and Dionysus. The Semitic world opposes to this an alliance of the black double of Apollo, Titan, with Cybele, the Great Mother, though in the context of inner opposition within the limits of the matriarchal, Androgynate Agdistis. And in the five volumes of Noomachy, I study all these correspondences, interweavings, superimpositions, and differentiations of layers, as well as a triple model of basic hermeneutics (each thing, each word, each narrative thus implies the possibility of a triple reading depending on which Logos we choose as our starting point). The first volume is a general introduction to the three Logoi and an analysis of their connections with the three groups of philosophical schools in ancient Greece. Then I move to a more detailed examination of the influence of the Logoi in concrete civilizations, where the proportion and balance is different each time, while histories and historials give this balance an additional dynamic component. The body of Noomachy took shape as a result of these noological studies. It is most likely a preliminary survey, a sort of broad introduction to the problematic. After writing five volumes, I realized that that was only a table of contents, each part of which contains myriad semantic universes. Thus, Noomachy is an open project. First, we all participate in it. Second, we can do so thoughtfully and consciously.
The prospects are exciting, but to understand what I have in mind, it is first necessary to read, and as much as possible, to gain an understanding of the content of the five volumes. After that, many things will become clear, but others, by contrast, will prove dark as night.
NS: In 1900, Merezhkovsky called Nietzsche a great European philosopher who managed to resurrect “two Olympian gods, Apollo and Dionysus, in the old European graveyard.” A hundred years later, another great philosopher discovers the three Logoi, resurrecting the names Dionysus, Apollo, and Cybele, thereby producing a universal key to the enigram of all philosophical and religious teachings, domains of knowledge, and civilizational paradigms. In this way, the very approach to the interpretation of any phenomena, systems, symbols, etc., changes fundamentally, and today the “revaluation of all values” will mean nothing other than the revaluation of the reigning values of the contemporary world through comprehension of the predominant type of interpretation. Is it possible to say for sure which type of interpretation, which picture of the world (Apollonian, Dionysian, Cybelean), predominates today, and if it is possible, what system of values this predominant view offers?
AD: Three Logoi is not simply two + one. It is not the mechanical addition to Apollo and Dionysus of one more figure. It is something much more important and profound. Nietzsche’s dual topos, genius in itself, from which I began and without which there wouldn’t even be the possibility of approach to the theme of three Logoi, conceals a fundamental difference between Dionysus and Cybele, which does not allow us to correctly diagnose our time, and more precisely, the contemporary [kontemporal’nomu] condition of modern [sovremennoy] European and Eurocentric civilization. And the diagnosis is: the complete predominance of the Great Mother, Cybele. Cybele today reigns supreme [absolutely, sovereignly; polnovlastno, with fu
ll power]. That is the most dramatic thing in Noomachy: we are dealing not with Dionysus, who replaces the Apollo of classical rationality. We are dealing with Titans and the reign of quantity (Guénon), with the Empire of Matter. This matter has its own Logos, setting out interpretational paradigms that predetermine the essence of modernity and postmodernity, and instead of Dionysus, his black counterpart, Adonis, acts here. This is Dionysus’s double, his titanic simulacrum. At the same time, the astonishing thing is that Europe’s essence is the Logos of Apollo in union with Dionysus. The fact that Cybele rules today means the following: we are dealing not with Europe, but with anti-Europe. But what is Europe? Does it still exist? Yes, but it must be sought in the zone of other Logoi. To break through to it, it is necessary once again to overcome the Great Mother, to defeat and overthrow the rebellious Titans in Tartarus, i.e. to win Noomachy. After all, precisely that was the start of Indo-European civilization, and in particular, Greco-Roman Mediterranean culture. We have to either say goodbye to Europe, or begin Europe anew. That could be another approach to what Heidegger called “Another Beginning.” We can call it the “return of Apollo” or “the final epiphany of Dionysus,” “the Dionysus of the Dawn, without which the return of Apollo will not occur.”
NS: In a seminar on Heraclitus, Heidegger’s student Eugene Fink talks about how the Greeks represent a massive challenge for us, and, despite the fact that the voice of Heraclitus of Ephesus, like the voice of the Pythia, reaches us through a thousand years, we still have not reached Heraclitus himself. In this first volume of Noomachy, you write about the necessity for distance from the “contemporary moment,” since only that will allow us to delineate the structure of the “historial” and to immerse ourselves in the life world of one or another philosopher. This seems rather difficult to do, especially concerning the removal of Eurocentricity. This, after all, entails nothing else than the intellectual practice of delineating the philosophical slice (and proto-philosophical) of already not one civilization (Western), but many civilizations, each with its own Logos. In order to grasp Heraclitus, we must “become Heraclitus,” but to the same extent, we must also become Suhrawardi, Avicenna, Nagarjuna, Nichiren, and others. How can a contemporary thinker attain the necessary distance and become absolutely open for the understanding of various schools and tendencies of thought? Does a sort of “map” of civilizations exist that brings to light Logoi different from the Logos of Western European philosophy, the end of which was established long ago?
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