Western Society Is in Decay. Can Russia Fill the Void?
Aleksandr Dugin’s view of Western society at the precipice, his concern over the loss of our basic humanity, his openness to the mystery of our very being, and his concern for the central role of technology in destroying what is fundamentally human…this seems a brave new starting point for whatever lies ahead.
There is quite a bit of commotion these days over the state of our world, including the state of our States. We are witnesses to architectonic shifts in the geopolitical arena, as well as shifting sands in the increasingly stressful social and economic relations among peoples — a leading, or maybe trailing, indicator of shrinking resources on a grossly overpopulated and overheated planet. We seem to be witness to more ‘terrorism,’ more street protests, more conflicts, more retribution, more genocide, more war, more mischief, more propaganda and disinformation, more maneuvering for position, and much less understanding, giving, or sharing in the world today… but quite a bit more taking and privatizing.
The cult of the Individual — characterized by accumulation, privatization, and the preponderance of selfies — has taken on new meanings of somewhat frightening global proportions. While the cults of Nationalism and Statism are also ascendant, demonstrating, in turn, their own assertive need for global priority and self-edification (e.g., ‘we are the exceptional people’), along with the necessary and concomitant reduction-via-objectification of the ‘Other’ (‘the evil empire’).
We can trace such modern philosophical, political, and social preoccupations back to the Greeks, and to some extent long before that to the emergence of cities and nation-states in the ancient Near East, in the area of the Fertile Crescent, where we find the earliest instantiations of hierarchy, and what would eventually give birth to the institutions of modern Western Civilization.
Seeking to get beneath this propensity of the ‘Western Curriculum’ to articulate and highlight an alterity that does little more than generate conflict and manipulation, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger re-described human existence on the far-side of objectification, and the concomitant politics of control. Heidegger recognized in our modern (technological) temperament, at least since Aristotle, a tendency to interact with the world from two seemingly self-evident perspectives: viewing the world (a) as “present-at-hand” (objects to be observed, spectacles to be seen), or (b) as objects “ready-to-hand” (to be used, manipulated for our projects or purposes). These perspectives, while evidently commonplace, are not strictly foundational for the philosopher. Such attitudes themselves presuppose a prior “thrownness” or Geworfenheit, our own pre-thematic being-there-in-the-world, pre-reflectively embodied and intertwined with things, vitally attached to the world in which we always, already find ourselves embedded and engaged.
This suggests, in Heidegger’s view, a fundamental ‘Care’ structure to human existence (Dasein or Being-there); an intertwining with the world prior to any objectification or manipulation. ‘Being-with’ is how the philosopher describes this engagement in terms of our interactions with other Dasein. Care defines our relations to other persons with whom we always, already find ourselves thrown (even when one is ostensibly alone). Our very being-there presupposes ‘being-with,’ underpinning our natural concern for people, our ability to share, prior to any project of objectification or control. It implies a fundamental condition of openness (Gelassenheit) or availability for the other, and concern for the mystery of our mutuality… as equal epicenters of meaning, and not simply as objects ‘present’ or ‘ready-to-hand’. In my reading, it thus implicates us in a profound circle of reciprocity with the other — the core of being-human.
These concepts also inform the philosophic backdrop to the work of Aleksandr Dugin, Russian sociologist, philosopher, and founder of neo-Eurasianism. Heidegger’s thought apparently underlays much of Dugin’s new politics – The Fourth Political Theory. In this regard he intends to address neither the individual (i.e., democracy), the collective (i.e., communism) nor the State (i.e., fascism); for each of these political concepts, in their own right, objectify the Other. As Dugin confirms:
There is a certain root of ourselves that recognizes, as Heidegger notes, that it has been ‘thrown in’. In other words, this is the root of human existence before we learn that we are people, part of a country, members of a society, rich or poor… belonging to a certain nation, ethnic group, culture or religion…” (Liberalism, Communism, Fascism, and the Fourth Political Theory)
In this respect Dugin wants to find a contrary path, a way to address the person as Dasein, recognizing its essential care structure, its rootedness — providing a foundation to guide human relations among the body-politic. He seeks an approach “in sharp opposition to those surrounding structures which alienate Dasein from itself,” looking to overcome the neo-liberal ideology of the West on the one hand, and presumably, the harsh ideology of radicalized Islam, on the other.
There are at least two conclusions that may be drawn, tentatively, from Dugin’s reliance upon Heidegger.
First, real community must be egalitarian. Hierarchy — be it ‘democratic,’ communist, or fascist — must be suspect from the beginning, generally manipulative and controlling, contradictory to our primal existential core. These modern political systems are grounded in structural hierarchies that militate against Dasein’s foundational care structure, our availability to the other and our natural (human) tendency to share. And, as Morton Fried confirmed in his classic study, The Evolution of Political Society,
The paramount invention that led to human society was sharing because it underlay the division of labor that probably increased early human productivity…Of almost equal importance was the concomitant reduction in the significance of individual dominance in a hierarchical arrangement within the community. In part, the structural possibility for such a hierarchy was undermined by the demands of sharing… (1967:106)
Second, our rootedness is being squandered in the ever-expanding panoply of spectacle (objectification) and technology (manipulation), dissipating our essential humanity, virtualizing our contacts and our commitments with one another as well as to the earth. As Dugin suggests, we are at risk of losing the “last vestiges” of what makes us human, our embeddedness, our facticity, our embodied being with the other and our openness to the mystery of our own thrownness.
Putting this discussion into higher relief as regards Russian character (soul), Dugin states in another place:
To be modern is to have two qualities: reason and will. These two things are missing in principle from modern Russian society. We [Russians] are only approaching the first stages of modernity. Our transition to modernity occurred in a special way—a Russian way. It effectively demolished the tenants of tradition without building in their stead structures of modernity. And so the most important part of the change from the archaic to the modern did not take place. Much more of our society is archaic than is modern. We were never able to form the ‘subject’ – that which is filled with reason and will, and, more importantly, which acts upon that reason and will. Aleksandr Dugin, (00:00-01:24) Pure Satanism
Recalling his philosophical commitments above, we should recognize that Dugin is not now claiming that Russians are irrational or that they can’t think. Rather, what he is suggesting is that the idea of an independent, autonomous subject — ‘I,’ ‘me,’ or ‘my’ ego, as an entity separate from the ‘objects’ outside of my head –- this concept was somewhat foreign to the Russian psyche. In other words, what we see in the European Enlightenment — the notion of “I” as a self-contained, rational agent, independent of the external world — this ideal may not have seemed natural to a more visceral (earthy) Russian experience.
Now that’s still a serious confession for a Russian thinker. But it’s not a negative. In fact, I think it points to something rather profound. It suggests a recognition of something more primal in the Russian psyche, the Russian soul — a recognition of being NOT simply a rational agent locked up within a bag of skin or staring out from behind the screen of a mechanical man. Rather, Dugin’s claim may point in the direction of a more fluid, forgiving sense of being-in-the-world, a sense of being always, already outside-of-oneself, where the boundaries between self and world, or between self and other, are less rigid – more elastic; where one is absorbed in the world, wedded to the land (rodina), and more intimately involved with other kinfolk there (rodstveniki).
In this regard, I recall Dostoyevsky’s many references to Русская душа as bound to the soil. In The Idiot, he calls this soul a “dark place” — where natural instinct overrides abstract reason. The Russian soul, like nature, remains wild and passionate — rooted in the soil, under the spell of the earth, of the flesh. This is why Vladimir Dal, in his Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Russian Language, claims that all five senses can be reduced to just one – the sense of touch. Again the primacy of the flesh stands out as key to grasping the Russian soul.
It seems then, that this modern ideal of ‘self’ as a solitary and independent subject, with NO apparent anchors or attachments in the natural world -– that this notion runs contrary to a more primal sense of ‘who I am’ that finds a home within a pre-modern Russian experience. One hundred years ago, Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, wrote:
[There is] insufficient development of the personal principle in Russian life. The Russian people have always loved to live in the warmth of the collective, a sort of dissolving back into the element of earth, into the bosom of the mother… The Russian people desire to be of the earth. (Psychology of the Russian People, The Soul of Russia, 1915)
Observations from ethnography and anthropology may also be valuable here. We find that in most simple, kinship-based (rodstvo) societies (e.g., early hunter/gatherer tribes), the notion of an independent self does not yet exist. In such cultures, persons only find meaning in relation to the community, fully participating in the life of the tribe, and immersed within its territory. More recently, American anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins wrote:
In kinship relations, other [people are part] of one’s own existence, and vice versa… There is a participation of certain others in one’s own being. As members of one another, kinsmen live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. (The Western Illusion of Human Nature)
French anthropologist, Levy-Bruhl, calls this phenomenon ‘participation mystique,’ the commingling of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in nature, an openness and fluidity between apparently separate entities, where human and non-human elements fuse, become one, and interanimate one another.
Some, however, are fearful of an underlying mysticism in Dugin’s thought; that his metaphysical assumptions may lead to a new type of totalitarianism. However, on that score I will reserve judgement. Notwithstanding any reservations about the possible political manipulation of such thought, Dugin’s view of Western society at the precipice, his concern over the loss of our basic humanity, his openness to the mystery of our very being, and his concern for the central role of technology in destroying what is fundamentally human… this, for me, seems a brave new starting point, perhaps providing an avenue for retrieving what had been lost — opening us to an authentic act of “recollection,” not anticipating what newness the future might hold, but rather forcing the rediscovery of a foundational past that lies hidden perpetually within us.
But, after many millennia of hierarchic objectification and control, such a return seems highly dubious and unlikely given our current frame of reference. Perhaps, the only stage upon which such an approach might find a foothold, would be the post-apocalyptic stage that seems to lie just ahead of us on this, our current road to perdition. And perhaps Russia can lead the way.
http://russia-insider.com/en/deconstructing-dugin-heidegger-neo-eurasianism-and-russian-soul/ri6644