Dugin's Political Platonism (Book Summery & Review)
Dugin believes that philosophy and politics are deeply linked. In fact, politics is literally just the outgrowth of philosophy, there can be no politics without philosophy (although philosophy exists without politics). Philosophy is the essence of politics. "Politics without philosophy is not possible at all."
Politics cannot move in any direction that contradicts the direction of philosophy. Philosophy is the father of politics. "In fact, a person who does not know philosophy cannot engage in politics." All history can be summarized as the history of ideas and kingdoms, and this history begins with Plato.
According to Dugin, Plato formulated once and for all-time the philosophical agenda, and his influence extends into all monotheistic religious traditions: "all Christian dogma is based on Plato." Plato is literally equivalent to philosophy: "all philosophy is nothing other than the movement between a few of Plato's theses." The person who does not understand Plato understands nothing at all. Dugin lays out a kind of Platonic curriculum that should be taught to all Russians and all politicians and religious leaders should be tested on it before taking office.
Dugin argues that democracy is a religion, it's a choice. Plato's dialogue 'Parmenides' describes four bad political systems and four good ones. Dugin says: "We build our conception of the world and society starting from the first thesis of the Parmenides and the first four hypotheses." Rather than trying to prove that democracy is a terrible system, he says: "for us, Platonists, democracy is a false doctrine."
Platonism is based on unity while democratic liberalism is based on fragmentation. Platonic philosophy is based on a vertical opening of the "world-egg," towards sacred heaven which allows rays of light to enter our world from the top. "Demonocracy" however, is based on the world-egg opening from the bottom and allowing democratic demons to enter (chaotic unthinking mobs and depraved spirits and ideas). Our contemporary globalized society is influenced from the bottom, hell, which has established a clownish antichrist mockery of Jesus and his global kingdom (the liberal capitalist world order). Satan creates simulacrum of God’s righteous world as a form of insult against heaven.
Dugin recognizes that the Traditionalism of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola have had a huge impact on public discussion since entering Russia twenty years ago. He summarizes Traditionalism's main idea: materialist modernity in contrast to sacred traditional society, modernity is not progress but "regress, decline, the fall of humanity into the abyss of matter, sensuality, corporeality, and mechanicalness." "For Guenon everything modern is depraved, everything traditional deserves respect and veneration." Dugin writes that Guenon saw the modern world as a "giant parody that must come to the final limit of materialism and atheism."
"What should we do? Guenon 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.'"
Julius Evola broke somewhat from this pessimism and suggested that we should fight against decay rather than passively accepting it as inevitable while trying to find personal salvation. Evola wanted to launch "conservative revolutions." He wanted to revolt against the modern world.
Dugin, who was born in the Soviet Union, rejects Marxism as a usable critique of the modern liberal world. We must use the tool of Traditionalism because: "Marxism as a critical theory has been exhausted" and lacks the ability to correctly describe the processes of the twenty-first century. If we want to turn away from the American model of world domination: "Traditionalism offers the entire necessary philosophical, ideational, conceptual, and sociological apparatus for that.” Traditionalism is also "extremely close" to the Platonic worldview, and it might even be viewed as a form of "radical Platonism" that leads to a "Platonic revolution."
Chapter eight, 'A Conversation About Noomachy,' is a long interview discussing Dugin's 24+ volume work on thought-war. The interview revolves around Dugin's identification of the "Logos of Cybele" as a spiritual power alongside that of Apollo and Dionisius in the original Nietzschean theory. These three Logoi are in essential enmity with one another and create a "triple model of basic hermeneutics" which opens the possibility for three legitimate interpretations of any single text (there is no one truth, every civilization has its own truth). Our postmodern world is no longer dominated by the logical masculine approach of Apollo and has sunk into the quagmire of the "great mother" Cybele which Dugin later equates to Plato's empty space in which things come into being, and then later he equates it with the dark Chaos that Logos rejected at the beginning of philosophical history.
I'm just going to insert the following Dugin quote related to the relationship between science and alchemy:
"'black water,' i.e. to matter and its vortices. Modern science is well-organized Satanism, operating with that which, in the world, is the most chimerical, illusionary, and infernal, a collection of material bodies, atoms, and particles, disappearing into the matrix of the lord-mother, and emerging therefrom, only to disappear again. Eliade said something similar when he spoke of the origins of modern European science and its connections with hermeticism."
I have two major criticisms of this book. Firstly, Dugin takes it as axiomatic that everyone believes that the present world is falling apart, that we've reached the end of history, and that Western philosophy has been utterly exhausted. Secondly, Dugin seems to contradict himself numerous times throughout the book on major issues.
In all Dugin's public writings and statements he seems to assume that it's self-evident and obvious that everyone hates the modern world and that American led liberal democracy has entered a state of irreversible collapse. I question whether this is the experience of most people when comparing our present era to past eras which experienced huge catastrophes. Have people lost hope in today's era more than in past eras? I don't think this is self-evident.
Dugin spends most of the first section of this book advocating the revival of Platonic philosophy, but then he uses the end of the book to claim that Logos centered Platonism was a mistake that must be remedied by appealing to the dark "Chaos" of a post-Heideggerian philosophy that recognizes Logos to be a rotting corpse. He calls for the construction of a Chaos philosophy that contrasts itself with the masculine Platonic Logos philosophy, but at the beginning of the book he called for the construction of a "Platonopolis." He spends half the book praising a Platonic worldview over that of the dark female "mother" figure of Cybele and Chaos before ending with a claim that we must reject Plato and embrace Chaos (which he earlier equated to the materialist postmodernity he believes to be satanic).
Perhaps the most generous interpretation of this contradiction is that Dugin is specifically discussing what he perceives as a primitive contemporary Russia that can only move beyond Platonism into Chaos philosophy after it has properly embraced Platonism. Dugin often speaks and writes about how Russia has no philosophy of its own, and thus now is the time for Russia to finally develop its own philosophical foundation. Another interpretation of these contradictions might be that Dugin thinks that Chaos represents the tomb of civilizational death which we must learn to convert into a womb of civilizational birth (achieved through a Heideggerian "turning").
I found myself agreeing with much of what Dugin wrote about political Platonism, and I see potential good in reviving knowledge of Plato and his top-down transcendent sacred worldview. However, by the end of the book, I found myself lost in a labyrinth of apparent contradictions between Dugin's alleged re-sacralization program and his desire to summon the spirit of underworld Chaos. Perhaps his re-sacralization program is nothing but a nice facade covering his deeper purpose of summoning a philosophy of Chaos to overthrow and replace Platonic Logos and its resulting Christian religion. Dugin claims in the book that he's an Orthodox Christian who looks forward to the second coming of Christ, but he also argues that God is just a creation of the "narod" (ethnic volk?) who cannot survive without attachment to a human community.
There are other contradictions that I won't mention in detail; for example, he writes about how we must begin with Plato and enforce a level of minimal Platonic knowledge on the population, but in a later chapter he claims that "Russian philosophy should begin with Heraclitus" because Heraclitus came before the Platonic failure diagnosed by Heidegger and because "Heraclitus is the limit of complexity for a Russian." So, somehow, Russia should enforce a society wide test of Platonic knowledge on all public officials but it’s also allegedly impossible for Russians to understand Plato and thus the Russian philosophical limit is Heraclitus?
Unfortunately, I suspect the string that holds all these apparent contradictions together is something deeper, something unspoken, something occult. Dugin is known to have been heavily involved with the occult in his earlier years, and I think it's probably elements of that worldview which reconcile the disparate contradictions of Dugin's public statements into some concealed unity. Or, are these contradictory statements nothing more than a cynical political calculation to unite various anti-liberal audiences into a grand alliance meant to ideologically and physically overthrow American hegemony?