This will be a very long post. I apologize in advance to all the people who hate long posts. If you hate reading long posts about philosophical things, please hit the back button now and try not to notice it. Anyway, consider yourself warned.
The post is a spin-off of sorts from the Inside the 40 thread on Ukraine. For a couple reasons I didn’t think all this material would be good for that thread, and so I’m placing the bulk of it here in the Corral. For some time, I've wanted to gain a better understanding of contemporary Russian thought, especially Dugin, and in the last few weeks I've had the time to do that. Anyway, I’m sharing my findings here, along with some of my own comments on the nature of that thought. I did it primarily for myself. If anyone finds it useful or even objectionable, then that's fine. If nobody reads it, I honestly can't blame them. I'm just parking it here.
The thought of Aleksandr Dugin is regarded by many to be the key ideological component behind Putin’s expansionist policy in Crimea and now Ukraine and perhaps beyond (a point I'll come back to at the end). The arc of Dugin’s career has proceeded from street politics to geopolitical strategist to political philosopher. It would be wrong to say that he has withdrawn from public life, but he has receded somewhat from the day-to-day scene of Russian “politics” in order to concentrate more on philosophic things. Dugin had been known in Russia for his ideas since he published Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), a book which outlined a Russian plan for world domination. But since 2009 he has devoted himself to more intellectual or philosophic themes, exploring a new concept of enthosociology while also exploring what he called the Fourth Political Theory. Let’s look at ethnosociology first.
Dugin’s Ethnosociology & the Narod
ethnosociology: n. the study of how a people develops from primitive grouping to advanced society.
Dugin has developed his own framework for ethnosociology, according to which a people begins as an ethnos which is pre-political. We may think of the ethnos in terms of scattered families or even tribes. Not every ethnos develops out of this pre-political form into something political. But some do. The transition is associated with language, not merely the having of a language, but with the power of that language to communicate a tradition specific to this people. That tradition becomes a mythos, by virtue of which the people begin to develop a consciousness of Self, a collective self-identity. Importantly, consciousness of Self is linked up with consciousness of some Other which will necessarily be regarded as a threat to the people, to its way of life. The ethnos is transformed by that consciousness into what Dugin calls narod. In the simplest sense, narod is the Russian word for people but in fact it carries a connotation more in line with the German idea of volk or folk. It is the common man, living up to his best conception of Self; it is populist in character. Narod is the people’s primary and authentic political form. Later political forms such as city- or nation-states, or empires or kingdoms, are perhaps necessary, but also necessarily inauthentic. To say it another way, the institutional forms, no matter how developed or sophisticated–no matter how necessary–can never become more than a degraded image of the original idea, a simulacrum of the authentic narod which has brought them to life and whose essence they serve. If the institutional forms become too distant or too remote from the narod, a collapse will occur–a collapse back into the narod which will then express itself somehow through new institutional forms. Thus the failures of the Tsarist and Soviet regimes can begin to be seen as collapses back into the Russian narod, and it remains to be seen what new institutional forms the narod will bring forth in the post-Soviet period. As will be seen, that project can in no sense be regarded as complete. For Dugin the new institutional forms remain in a state of becoming. It becomes the particular task of Russian intellectuals to articulate that future.
Eurasianism
Dugin remains the foremost theorist of modern Eurasianism. Of all Dugin’s ideas, Eurasianism has had the most influence in the Kremlin. It was a key component of his earlier geopolitical writings, although his own sense of Eurasianism seems to have been refined since those days, in light of his later intellectual turn. Dugin’s sense of Eurasianism as presently conceived is primarily conceptual. Its geographic component is secondary, i.e. its geography defers to and depends upon its conceptual coherence. The key concepts are anti-modernism and anti-liberalism: a rejection of the liberal premise that the vector of history moves inexorably toward progress; a rejection of the idea of a universal cosmopolitan society, since such a society can no longer claim any existential authenticity. By negative implication, we can say that Eurasianism is illiberal, traditional, and multipolar. History is chaotic, not progressive. The project is “Eurasian” largely because Eurasia roughly describes that section of earth where liberalism is weakest and most likely to be opposed. Eurasia’s wealth of material resources–the fact of the “world-island”--must be leveraged in defense of the anti-liberal concept.
Note that Dugin’s Eurasianism is understood in purely negative terms; it is characterized by what it opposes. For this reason it cannot be the long-term answer for Russia. Eurasianism is, for Dugin, a stop on the road to what he calls the Fourth Political Theory. Dugin’s book entitled The Fourth Political Theory (2012) begins to articulate the philosophic project that awaits.
The Fourth Political Theory
Liberalism, Socialism/Marxism, & Fascism are the first three political theories, according to Dugin, who means to convey some new theory, a fourth theory.
Liberalism. At the center of the liberal project is the individual. At the center of socialism/Marxism is class. At the center of fascism is race and the state. In his view, liberalism points beyond the political to the post-political, toward something like Kojeve’s idea of a Universal Homogeneous State. It’s inhabitants, referred to by Dugin as the idiotes (originally a Greek word, ἰδιώτης, meaning private as opposed to public people) will not be a people in the strict sense. They will be isolated. They will have no mythos and no narod. Because the global state is unipolar it will have no enemy, therefore it will have no sense of Other & therefore can have no sense of Self. In the strictest sense its inhabitants will be post-human–either beasts or gods–precisely because they are post-political.
Socialist/Marxian Left. Dugin is more dismissive of the narrow-mindedness of the Marxian Left and its reduction of the human problem to class and to the fantasy that those problems will be solved by liberating human beings from the oppressive relations of production. He does share with the Marxian Left a disdain for bourgeois cultural primacy, but not for materialist reasons cited by Marxism, i.e. because it is a tool of oppression, but rather because it tends toward degradation of the spirit and the lowering of man to the state of animal. But for Dugin, the Marxian Left (unlike western liberalism) no longer poses a credible civilizational threat.
Fascism. Dugin is of course routinely condemned as a fascist or a Nazi, due in part to his earlier association with the Black Hundreds as well as flirtations with Nazi iconography, which as far as I know he has never formally repudiated; and also due to his self-described illiberalism. But at least since 2009 Dugin has drawn a distinction between his narod-centered notion of the political and the statism that belongs with fascism and Nazism. Along the same lines, Dugin insists that the racial character of Nazism was also inauthentic: not race but language is central to the formation of the narod which is fully conscious of Self and Other. In theory, at least, whoever belongs to the language is in principle capable of belonging with its consciousness.
Ok, but what exactly is this fourth theory? The name itself (Fourth Political Theory) is a place-holder for the real substance or character which remains to be understood in the future. It is less an X than a recognition of the need for an X. At the heart of this project is the need to understand Martin Heidegger. For Dugin: “the main strategic task of the Russian people and Russian society” is to understand Heidegger; understanding Heidegger is “the key to the Russian tomorrow”. For Dugin, Heidegger’s existentialism has cleared the way, for the first time, to the possibility of a Russian philosophy, of a Russian idea of itself.
Russia has had no philosophers of the first rank. They have had great writers of literature, but no great philosophers. Whatever philosophy Russia had was derived from Western cultures stretching back to Socrates’ Athens and even the pre-Socratics. Dugin stumbled across the possibility of Russian philosophy as a result of studying Heidegger, and in particular as a result of his struggle to translate the various Heideggerian terms into Russian. The un-translatability of Heidegger’s lexicon suggested to Dugin the possibility a uniquely Russian Dasein which Heidegger’s terminology could not quite capture, into which it did not quite fit. Various forms of the verb to be are present in either German or in Russian but not in both; Dugin regarded this as an indicator that there are two separate Dasein disclosing themselves to us. The possibility of a unique Russian philosophy is opened up. That possibility is synonymous with the possibility of a uniquely Russian Dasein. It also suggests the possibility of many unique philosophies and many unique Dasein alive in the world. In other words, Dasein in Dugin’s conception is not the individual Dasein imagined by western liberals interpreting Heidegger, but it is also not a universal Dasein. Instead, an existential plurality of Dasein which are not simply nations or states but rather are organically constituted as narods or volks or peoples or equivalent phenomena. Thus we begin to understand what is meant when Dugin speaks about a multipolar world.
The X at the heart of the 4th Political Theory is the question that Russian philosophy must answer but cannot yet answer since the possibility of a Russian philosophy was only recently discovered. Dugin describes the situation as follows:
How does Heidegger relate to political things?
To make a very long story as short as I can, Heidegger aimed at a return to ontology, to the question of being, a question which had not really been raised since Aristotle. He aimed to return to Aristotle and to Plato, to go back behind them, and to question their understanding of being in the light of the insights gained in the field of phenomenology prior to the Great War. For Heidegger, Being in its various forms, including its highest form which is Dasein (i.e. the particular mode of Being that considers ‘being’) was disclosed by our moods and our thoughts, and in particular through discourse, including self-discourse. Language (logos) was primary to consciousness of being and therefore to being as Being as Dasein.
If Heidegger is correct, then politics–understood in the broadest sense–is a mode of Being. Being expresses itself into the world in various ways, including “being-with” or “being-in” or the “everydayness” of things, or “being-ahead-of-itself”. These and other modes give Dasein its sense of Self and Other, its “existenz”, its “ownmost possibility” to establish life on its own terms among a world of things.
The name Heidegger is not so well known to the American public, but his philosophy of existentialism or its derivatives have certainly become central to the way Americans see the world. Even before Heidegger, Americans saw the world in terms of rugged individualism, and they were bound to interpret Heidegger’s existentialism through individualist eyes, oblivious to whatever else Heidegger might have thought or written or done. For Americans it is natural to associate existentialism with the 1960s, with the sexual revolution, and with the the more radical doctrines of individual freedom which have gained currency in the years since WW2. We can find this individualist interpretation of Heidegger in the happy talk that permeates in grade-school platitudes like “you have to be yourself” or “find yourself” or “be yourself” or in the notion of “self-discovery”. This Americanist / individualist take on Heidegger’s existentialism is what we might call the “liberal” view. It is also prominent in European capitals among the cosmopolitan upper classes with money to burn. The liberal elite’s infatuation with this kind of existentialism began as early as the 1920s especially among the “Lost Generation” writers in France: Hemingway, Stein, Pound, Fitzgerald, et al.
But Heidegger’s thought contained other possibilities, one of which was quick to be embraced by the radical Left, i.e. Marxists and socialists. In the 1930s, Herbert Marcuse was the first to pioneer the idea of “Heideggerian Marxism”. This was followed a series of books by the giants of the hard Left, published with titles which are oblique references to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927): including most famously Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943); Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968); and Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (1988). The Frankfurt School in particular put Heidegger’s analytic method at the very center of its project to deconstruct capitalist society & bourgeois culture. That project, known as “Critical Theory”, was not particularly interested to understand or interpret the whole of Heidegger’s teaching. It was rather interested in how Heidegger’s analytic of Destruktion could be used to draw distinctions between authentic and inauthentic modes of being: i.e. the “authentic” modes of production in a communistic society versus the “inauthentic” modes of production (including cultural production) in a capitalist society. This distinction has become a staple of the Marxian social critique, most famously through the Gramscian take on alienation but also through the themes of fetishism and reification. Critical legal theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical pedagogy, Intersectionality, and gender theory, among others, draw heavily upon those themes.
Thus modern liberalism as well as the radical Left are, for different reasons, enmeshed in Heidegger; they are enmeshed to such an extent that it is too late to prevent the influence of Heidegger’s existentialism upon our politics. He is in our universities and in our protest movements and in our television commercials and in our gender theories and in our mania for tattoos and purple hair. Perhaps at some point he can be shown the exit, but his entry into our political consciousness can no longer be prevented. He is already here. He has been here for a long time.
All that having been said about the importance of Heidegger both for modern liberalism and the radical Left, I must now draw your attention to the elephant in the room which is that Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933. He never renounced that decision. Some postulate that Heidegger engaged in a “secret resistance” to Nazism, but that theory is at best speculation. It is true that he never explicitly identified his philosophy with Nazism; it is also true that he rejected the more official Nazi political philosophy expounded in Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. But that does not mean, and we should not assume, that Heidegger’s link to the Nazis was purely a career move. It is safer to assume that he was able to justify Nazism by some other route than the one Schmitt put forward.
How could Heidegger have justified Nazism from the point of view of his political philosophy?--The most direct answer is that Dasein or the primary mode of Being which contemplates being is not necessarily an individual mode but a collective mode. The Self and Other is not necessarily, as was assumed on the Left Bank and in Greenwich Village, the individual Self and the individual Other. People do not come to consciousness of Self except through language, a language that does not belong to them but to which they belong & through which they are created in the fullness of their understanding of “being-in-the-world”.
Dugin denies that Heidegger’s philosophy is necessarily fascist in character, and he rejects the notion that Heidegger’s philosophy is invalidated by Heidegger’s own involvement with the Nazi Party. Heidegger’s thought cannot be reduced to fascism, nor can it be contained within or explained by Western philosophy. For Dugin, Heidegger succeeded in reaching back behind Aristotle and Plato: the Dasein that Heidegger detected was not the outcome but rather the source of Western philosophy. As the source rather than the outcome of Western philosophy, Dasein remains available for the possibility of a Russian philosophy even in the event of the decline or destruction of the West.
My own conclusions
Like so much about Russia, nothing ever really comes into sharp focus. There is a great distance, there is a language barrier, and there is an even more basic absence of any clear Russian identity which makes Russian attempts to articulate such an identity very difficult if not impossible for non-Russians to understand. So all this is still fairly provisional. Dugin’s works are hard to find in English, both because much of his material is still un-translated and because even when he is translated, most of the usual distributors such as Amazon & Barnes & Noble won’t touch him. There are various articles one can piece together on the internet. Michael Millerman’s book Inside “Putin’s Brain” has been very helpful. But there’s still very much that remains murky. The subject matter itself, delving into Heidegger’s existentialism, is exceedingly murky.
I see no evidence to support the popular view that Dugin is the lurking genius that is actively guiding the Kremlin in its expansionist policies, although it certainly may be true that the Kremlin & military remain influenced to some degree by Dugin’s earlier Eurasianist material. It is far more likely that Putin is proceeding under his own momentum and for his own reasons. The notion of Putin summoning Dugin to the Kremlin in a moment of crisis for key advice is certainly a fantasy. For all the talk of Dugin being “Putin’s brain”, there is not very much evidence to indicate any contact between them since about 2014, almost a decade ago. Among other things, Dugin has been far more active than Putin in speaking to an international audience of like-minded groups in various parts of the world, perhaps most notably in Iran and in Turkey. Dugin seems to be preparing the ground for a wider movement than what Putin is currently interested in. Putin is in need of more directly patriotic messages than Dugin’s place-holder 4th Political Theory can deliver.
And with that, we might consider another possibility if we remember that Dugin, at 60, is nearly 10 years younger than Putin. It is exceedingly unlikely that Dugin aims to replace Putin in any official capacity: even at his worst, he’s a Machiavelli and not a Cesar Borgia. But it seems to me entirely likely that Dugin is trying to complete the task of giving birth to a Russian philosophy which can be established in the aftermath of Putin’s departure, whenever that is; that he aims to establish in the minds of Russia’s emerging intellectual elite the specific content characterizing the Russian Dasein; that he aims to become for Russia what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle became for the West.
I’m willing to give Dugin the benefit of the doubt that he’s not a fascist and that his philosophic project is in good faith. I can’t prove that, but I’ve seen him do too much intellectual heavy lifting to deny him the benefit of doubt. But I think Dugin’s attempt to ground a Russian philosophy of the future in Heidegger is problematic, not because Heidegger wasn’t brilliant and full of insight but because his notion of Dasein is so infinitely interpretable that any attempt to nail it down is bound to reflect some outside contamination of the pure state of pure philosophic contemplation which it presupposes. Marxists found “capitalist alienation” in Heidegger; liberals found the “individual true self” in Heidegger; fascists found the volkisch ethno-state in Heidegger. I have no doubt that Dugin can find what he wants there, but I do not think he will find a philosophic certainty that is more powerful or more valid than the rhetoric or “poem” which he uses to advance it. He aims to be a new Plato, but in fact his project, even if it “succeeds”, will resemble the work of a new Homer more than a new Plato.
So while I am impressed with Dugin’s intellect and energy, and perhaps above all by his imagination, I am skeptical that he has any practical influence, and I think the prospects for his philosophic project bearing fruit are pretty dim.
It will come as no surprise that I share with Dugin the belief that something has gone very wrong with “liberalism” as it is currently expressed through our culture and our institutions here in the West. I am deeply sympathetic to the anti-modernist character of his thought. I agree with him that we have come loose from something fundamental. But I’m not a Heideggerian. I will not call it Dasein. But whatever the fate of Dugin’s philosophic project in Russia turns out to be, we in the West who grow increasingly doubtful of the wisdom of our “liberal” future cannot look to Russian philosophy for any guidance, since by its very terms it is closed off to us. We in the West still possess within our own tradition the resources to avert the disaster we see approaching and to recover a liberalism which does not need quotation marks, one that does not tend toward a tyrannic global monoculture. For various reasons it is not currently possible to make those resources visible to the masses. But with luck or by change of circumstance or by the grace of God it may become possible to make them visible at some future point.
Notable Dugin Publications
1995, “The Magic Disillusion of a Nationalist Intellectual”
1997, “The Metaphysics of National Bolshevism”
1997, Foundations of Geopolitics
2009, Fourth Political Theory Conf. in Moscow
2010, Sociology of the Imagination
2011, Martin Heidegger: The Possibility of a Russian Philosophy
2011, Ethnosociology
2011, Arkheomodern
2012, The Fourth Political Theory
2012, “Eurasian Keys to the Future”
2012, In Search of the Dark Logos
2013, “Dasein and the Structures of Death”
2014, Heidegger: The Last God
2014, Noomakhia: Wars of the Intellect (1st volume, which continues)
2014, Eurasian Mission
2014, Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning
2015, Imagination: Philosophy, Sociology, Structures
2015, Last War of the World-Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia
2015, Russkiy Logos, Russkiy Khaos, Sotsiologiya Russkogo Obshchestva
2016, “The Existential Theory of Society”
2016, Martin Heidegger: Metapolitics. The Eschatology of Being
2017, Rise of the Fourth Political Theory
2017, “Modern Populism”
2017, “Plural Anthropology–Fundamental-Ontological Analysis of Peoples”
2018, Ethnos and Society
2019, Political Platonism
2019, Ethnosociology: The Foundations
2021, Theory of a Multipolar World
The post is a spin-off of sorts from the Inside the 40 thread on Ukraine. For a couple reasons I didn’t think all this material would be good for that thread, and so I’m placing the bulk of it here in the Corral. For some time, I've wanted to gain a better understanding of contemporary Russian thought, especially Dugin, and in the last few weeks I've had the time to do that. Anyway, I’m sharing my findings here, along with some of my own comments on the nature of that thought. I did it primarily for myself. If anyone finds it useful or even objectionable, then that's fine. If nobody reads it, I honestly can't blame them. I'm just parking it here.
The thought of Aleksandr Dugin is regarded by many to be the key ideological component behind Putin’s expansionist policy in Crimea and now Ukraine and perhaps beyond (a point I'll come back to at the end). The arc of Dugin’s career has proceeded from street politics to geopolitical strategist to political philosopher. It would be wrong to say that he has withdrawn from public life, but he has receded somewhat from the day-to-day scene of Russian “politics” in order to concentrate more on philosophic things. Dugin had been known in Russia for his ideas since he published Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), a book which outlined a Russian plan for world domination. But since 2009 he has devoted himself to more intellectual or philosophic themes, exploring a new concept of enthosociology while also exploring what he called the Fourth Political Theory. Let’s look at ethnosociology first.
Dugin’s Ethnosociology & the Narod
ethnosociology: n. the study of how a people develops from primitive grouping to advanced society.
Dugin has developed his own framework for ethnosociology, according to which a people begins as an ethnos which is pre-political. We may think of the ethnos in terms of scattered families or even tribes. Not every ethnos develops out of this pre-political form into something political. But some do. The transition is associated with language, not merely the having of a language, but with the power of that language to communicate a tradition specific to this people. That tradition becomes a mythos, by virtue of which the people begin to develop a consciousness of Self, a collective self-identity. Importantly, consciousness of Self is linked up with consciousness of some Other which will necessarily be regarded as a threat to the people, to its way of life. The ethnos is transformed by that consciousness into what Dugin calls narod. In the simplest sense, narod is the Russian word for people but in fact it carries a connotation more in line with the German idea of volk or folk. It is the common man, living up to his best conception of Self; it is populist in character. Narod is the people’s primary and authentic political form. Later political forms such as city- or nation-states, or empires or kingdoms, are perhaps necessary, but also necessarily inauthentic. To say it another way, the institutional forms, no matter how developed or sophisticated–no matter how necessary–can never become more than a degraded image of the original idea, a simulacrum of the authentic narod which has brought them to life and whose essence they serve. If the institutional forms become too distant or too remote from the narod, a collapse will occur–a collapse back into the narod which will then express itself somehow through new institutional forms. Thus the failures of the Tsarist and Soviet regimes can begin to be seen as collapses back into the Russian narod, and it remains to be seen what new institutional forms the narod will bring forth in the post-Soviet period. As will be seen, that project can in no sense be regarded as complete. For Dugin the new institutional forms remain in a state of becoming. It becomes the particular task of Russian intellectuals to articulate that future.
Eurasianism
Dugin remains the foremost theorist of modern Eurasianism. Of all Dugin’s ideas, Eurasianism has had the most influence in the Kremlin. It was a key component of his earlier geopolitical writings, although his own sense of Eurasianism seems to have been refined since those days, in light of his later intellectual turn. Dugin’s sense of Eurasianism as presently conceived is primarily conceptual. Its geographic component is secondary, i.e. its geography defers to and depends upon its conceptual coherence. The key concepts are anti-modernism and anti-liberalism: a rejection of the liberal premise that the vector of history moves inexorably toward progress; a rejection of the idea of a universal cosmopolitan society, since such a society can no longer claim any existential authenticity. By negative implication, we can say that Eurasianism is illiberal, traditional, and multipolar. History is chaotic, not progressive. The project is “Eurasian” largely because Eurasia roughly describes that section of earth where liberalism is weakest and most likely to be opposed. Eurasia’s wealth of material resources–the fact of the “world-island”--must be leveraged in defense of the anti-liberal concept.
Note that Dugin’s Eurasianism is understood in purely negative terms; it is characterized by what it opposes. For this reason it cannot be the long-term answer for Russia. Eurasianism is, for Dugin, a stop on the road to what he calls the Fourth Political Theory. Dugin’s book entitled The Fourth Political Theory (2012) begins to articulate the philosophic project that awaits.
The Fourth Political Theory
Liberalism, Socialism/Marxism, & Fascism are the first three political theories, according to Dugin, who means to convey some new theory, a fourth theory.
Liberalism. At the center of the liberal project is the individual. At the center of socialism/Marxism is class. At the center of fascism is race and the state. In his view, liberalism points beyond the political to the post-political, toward something like Kojeve’s idea of a Universal Homogeneous State. It’s inhabitants, referred to by Dugin as the idiotes (originally a Greek word, ἰδιώτης, meaning private as opposed to public people) will not be a people in the strict sense. They will be isolated. They will have no mythos and no narod. Because the global state is unipolar it will have no enemy, therefore it will have no sense of Other & therefore can have no sense of Self. In the strictest sense its inhabitants will be post-human–either beasts or gods–precisely because they are post-political.
Socialist/Marxian Left. Dugin is more dismissive of the narrow-mindedness of the Marxian Left and its reduction of the human problem to class and to the fantasy that those problems will be solved by liberating human beings from the oppressive relations of production. He does share with the Marxian Left a disdain for bourgeois cultural primacy, but not for materialist reasons cited by Marxism, i.e. because it is a tool of oppression, but rather because it tends toward degradation of the spirit and the lowering of man to the state of animal. But for Dugin, the Marxian Left (unlike western liberalism) no longer poses a credible civilizational threat.
Fascism. Dugin is of course routinely condemned as a fascist or a Nazi, due in part to his earlier association with the Black Hundreds as well as flirtations with Nazi iconography, which as far as I know he has never formally repudiated; and also due to his self-described illiberalism. But at least since 2009 Dugin has drawn a distinction between his narod-centered notion of the political and the statism that belongs with fascism and Nazism. Along the same lines, Dugin insists that the racial character of Nazism was also inauthentic: not race but language is central to the formation of the narod which is fully conscious of Self and Other. In theory, at least, whoever belongs to the language is in principle capable of belonging with its consciousness.
Ok, but what exactly is this fourth theory? The name itself (Fourth Political Theory) is a place-holder for the real substance or character which remains to be understood in the future. It is less an X than a recognition of the need for an X. At the heart of this project is the need to understand Martin Heidegger. For Dugin: “the main strategic task of the Russian people and Russian society” is to understand Heidegger; understanding Heidegger is “the key to the Russian tomorrow”. For Dugin, Heidegger’s existentialism has cleared the way, for the first time, to the possibility of a Russian philosophy, of a Russian idea of itself.
Russia has had no philosophers of the first rank. They have had great writers of literature, but no great philosophers. Whatever philosophy Russia had was derived from Western cultures stretching back to Socrates’ Athens and even the pre-Socratics. Dugin stumbled across the possibility of Russian philosophy as a result of studying Heidegger, and in particular as a result of his struggle to translate the various Heideggerian terms into Russian. The un-translatability of Heidegger’s lexicon suggested to Dugin the possibility a uniquely Russian Dasein which Heidegger’s terminology could not quite capture, into which it did not quite fit. Various forms of the verb to be are present in either German or in Russian but not in both; Dugin regarded this as an indicator that there are two separate Dasein disclosing themselves to us. The possibility of a unique Russian philosophy is opened up. That possibility is synonymous with the possibility of a uniquely Russian Dasein. It also suggests the possibility of many unique philosophies and many unique Dasein alive in the world. In other words, Dasein in Dugin’s conception is not the individual Dasein imagined by western liberals interpreting Heidegger, but it is also not a universal Dasein. Instead, an existential plurality of Dasein which are not simply nations or states but rather are organically constituted as narods or volks or peoples or equivalent phenomena. Thus we begin to understand what is meant when Dugin speaks about a multipolar world.
The X at the heart of the 4th Political Theory is the question that Russian philosophy must answer but cannot yet answer since the possibility of a Russian philosophy was only recently discovered. Dugin describes the situation as follows:
Attempts to advance a “Russian doctrine,” a “Project Russia,” a “National Idea,” and so on all lack much value, since all initiatives to develop such general systems can under present circumstances give no results and only sow the seeds of empty and conceited dogmatism. It is much more constructive to honestly admit that there is something we don’t know, that something is missing, that we need something, and try to learn about it, to acquire it, to discover it, rather than pretend that everything is in order and that only some purely external factors, “evil forces” or “competitors,” hinder the realization of self-evident steps and plans. There are no such steps and plans. There is no Russian philosophy. There is no Russian national idea. And there won’t be until we take upon ourselves the task of beginning by digging to the fundament, which we tried to do by studying Russian Dasein. (2011, Martin Heidegger: The Possibility of a Russian Philosophy)
How does Heidegger relate to political things?
To make a very long story as short as I can, Heidegger aimed at a return to ontology, to the question of being, a question which had not really been raised since Aristotle. He aimed to return to Aristotle and to Plato, to go back behind them, and to question their understanding of being in the light of the insights gained in the field of phenomenology prior to the Great War. For Heidegger, Being in its various forms, including its highest form which is Dasein (i.e. the particular mode of Being that considers ‘being’) was disclosed by our moods and our thoughts, and in particular through discourse, including self-discourse. Language (logos) was primary to consciousness of being and therefore to being as Being as Dasein.
If Heidegger is correct, then politics–understood in the broadest sense–is a mode of Being. Being expresses itself into the world in various ways, including “being-with” or “being-in” or the “everydayness” of things, or “being-ahead-of-itself”. These and other modes give Dasein its sense of Self and Other, its “existenz”, its “ownmost possibility” to establish life on its own terms among a world of things.
The name Heidegger is not so well known to the American public, but his philosophy of existentialism or its derivatives have certainly become central to the way Americans see the world. Even before Heidegger, Americans saw the world in terms of rugged individualism, and they were bound to interpret Heidegger’s existentialism through individualist eyes, oblivious to whatever else Heidegger might have thought or written or done. For Americans it is natural to associate existentialism with the 1960s, with the sexual revolution, and with the the more radical doctrines of individual freedom which have gained currency in the years since WW2. We can find this individualist interpretation of Heidegger in the happy talk that permeates in grade-school platitudes like “you have to be yourself” or “find yourself” or “be yourself” or in the notion of “self-discovery”. This Americanist / individualist take on Heidegger’s existentialism is what we might call the “liberal” view. It is also prominent in European capitals among the cosmopolitan upper classes with money to burn. The liberal elite’s infatuation with this kind of existentialism began as early as the 1920s especially among the “Lost Generation” writers in France: Hemingway, Stein, Pound, Fitzgerald, et al.
But Heidegger’s thought contained other possibilities, one of which was quick to be embraced by the radical Left, i.e. Marxists and socialists. In the 1930s, Herbert Marcuse was the first to pioneer the idea of “Heideggerian Marxism”. This was followed a series of books by the giants of the hard Left, published with titles which are oblique references to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927): including most famously Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943); Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968); and Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (1988). The Frankfurt School in particular put Heidegger’s analytic method at the very center of its project to deconstruct capitalist society & bourgeois culture. That project, known as “Critical Theory”, was not particularly interested to understand or interpret the whole of Heidegger’s teaching. It was rather interested in how Heidegger’s analytic of Destruktion could be used to draw distinctions between authentic and inauthentic modes of being: i.e. the “authentic” modes of production in a communistic society versus the “inauthentic” modes of production (including cultural production) in a capitalist society. This distinction has become a staple of the Marxian social critique, most famously through the Gramscian take on alienation but also through the themes of fetishism and reification. Critical legal theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical pedagogy, Intersectionality, and gender theory, among others, draw heavily upon those themes.
Thus modern liberalism as well as the radical Left are, for different reasons, enmeshed in Heidegger; they are enmeshed to such an extent that it is too late to prevent the influence of Heidegger’s existentialism upon our politics. He is in our universities and in our protest movements and in our television commercials and in our gender theories and in our mania for tattoos and purple hair. Perhaps at some point he can be shown the exit, but his entry into our political consciousness can no longer be prevented. He is already here. He has been here for a long time.
All that having been said about the importance of Heidegger both for modern liberalism and the radical Left, I must now draw your attention to the elephant in the room which is that Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933. He never renounced that decision. Some postulate that Heidegger engaged in a “secret resistance” to Nazism, but that theory is at best speculation. It is true that he never explicitly identified his philosophy with Nazism; it is also true that he rejected the more official Nazi political philosophy expounded in Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. But that does not mean, and we should not assume, that Heidegger’s link to the Nazis was purely a career move. It is safer to assume that he was able to justify Nazism by some other route than the one Schmitt put forward.
How could Heidegger have justified Nazism from the point of view of his political philosophy?--The most direct answer is that Dasein or the primary mode of Being which contemplates being is not necessarily an individual mode but a collective mode. The Self and Other is not necessarily, as was assumed on the Left Bank and in Greenwich Village, the individual Self and the individual Other. People do not come to consciousness of Self except through language, a language that does not belong to them but to which they belong & through which they are created in the fullness of their understanding of “being-in-the-world”.
Dugin denies that Heidegger’s philosophy is necessarily fascist in character, and he rejects the notion that Heidegger’s philosophy is invalidated by Heidegger’s own involvement with the Nazi Party. Heidegger’s thought cannot be reduced to fascism, nor can it be contained within or explained by Western philosophy. For Dugin, Heidegger succeeded in reaching back behind Aristotle and Plato: the Dasein that Heidegger detected was not the outcome but rather the source of Western philosophy. As the source rather than the outcome of Western philosophy, Dasein remains available for the possibility of a Russian philosophy even in the event of the decline or destruction of the West.
My own conclusions
Like so much about Russia, nothing ever really comes into sharp focus. There is a great distance, there is a language barrier, and there is an even more basic absence of any clear Russian identity which makes Russian attempts to articulate such an identity very difficult if not impossible for non-Russians to understand. So all this is still fairly provisional. Dugin’s works are hard to find in English, both because much of his material is still un-translated and because even when he is translated, most of the usual distributors such as Amazon & Barnes & Noble won’t touch him. There are various articles one can piece together on the internet. Michael Millerman’s book Inside “Putin’s Brain” has been very helpful. But there’s still very much that remains murky. The subject matter itself, delving into Heidegger’s existentialism, is exceedingly murky.
I see no evidence to support the popular view that Dugin is the lurking genius that is actively guiding the Kremlin in its expansionist policies, although it certainly may be true that the Kremlin & military remain influenced to some degree by Dugin’s earlier Eurasianist material. It is far more likely that Putin is proceeding under his own momentum and for his own reasons. The notion of Putin summoning Dugin to the Kremlin in a moment of crisis for key advice is certainly a fantasy. For all the talk of Dugin being “Putin’s brain”, there is not very much evidence to indicate any contact between them since about 2014, almost a decade ago. Among other things, Dugin has been far more active than Putin in speaking to an international audience of like-minded groups in various parts of the world, perhaps most notably in Iran and in Turkey. Dugin seems to be preparing the ground for a wider movement than what Putin is currently interested in. Putin is in need of more directly patriotic messages than Dugin’s place-holder 4th Political Theory can deliver.
And with that, we might consider another possibility if we remember that Dugin, at 60, is nearly 10 years younger than Putin. It is exceedingly unlikely that Dugin aims to replace Putin in any official capacity: even at his worst, he’s a Machiavelli and not a Cesar Borgia. But it seems to me entirely likely that Dugin is trying to complete the task of giving birth to a Russian philosophy which can be established in the aftermath of Putin’s departure, whenever that is; that he aims to establish in the minds of Russia’s emerging intellectual elite the specific content characterizing the Russian Dasein; that he aims to become for Russia what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle became for the West.
I’m willing to give Dugin the benefit of the doubt that he’s not a fascist and that his philosophic project is in good faith. I can’t prove that, but I’ve seen him do too much intellectual heavy lifting to deny him the benefit of doubt. But I think Dugin’s attempt to ground a Russian philosophy of the future in Heidegger is problematic, not because Heidegger wasn’t brilliant and full of insight but because his notion of Dasein is so infinitely interpretable that any attempt to nail it down is bound to reflect some outside contamination of the pure state of pure philosophic contemplation which it presupposes. Marxists found “capitalist alienation” in Heidegger; liberals found the “individual true self” in Heidegger; fascists found the volkisch ethno-state in Heidegger. I have no doubt that Dugin can find what he wants there, but I do not think he will find a philosophic certainty that is more powerful or more valid than the rhetoric or “poem” which he uses to advance it. He aims to be a new Plato, but in fact his project, even if it “succeeds”, will resemble the work of a new Homer more than a new Plato.
So while I am impressed with Dugin’s intellect and energy, and perhaps above all by his imagination, I am skeptical that he has any practical influence, and I think the prospects for his philosophic project bearing fruit are pretty dim.
It will come as no surprise that I share with Dugin the belief that something has gone very wrong with “liberalism” as it is currently expressed through our culture and our institutions here in the West. I am deeply sympathetic to the anti-modernist character of his thought. I agree with him that we have come loose from something fundamental. But I’m not a Heideggerian. I will not call it Dasein. But whatever the fate of Dugin’s philosophic project in Russia turns out to be, we in the West who grow increasingly doubtful of the wisdom of our “liberal” future cannot look to Russian philosophy for any guidance, since by its very terms it is closed off to us. We in the West still possess within our own tradition the resources to avert the disaster we see approaching and to recover a liberalism which does not need quotation marks, one that does not tend toward a tyrannic global monoculture. For various reasons it is not currently possible to make those resources visible to the masses. But with luck or by change of circumstance or by the grace of God it may become possible to make them visible at some future point.
Notable Dugin Publications
1995, “The Magic Disillusion of a Nationalist Intellectual”
1997, “The Metaphysics of National Bolshevism”
1997, Foundations of Geopolitics
2009, Fourth Political Theory Conf. in Moscow
2010, Sociology of the Imagination
2011, Martin Heidegger: The Possibility of a Russian Philosophy
2011, Ethnosociology
2011, Arkheomodern
2012, The Fourth Political Theory
2012, “Eurasian Keys to the Future”
2012, In Search of the Dark Logos
2013, “Dasein and the Structures of Death”
2014, Heidegger: The Last God
2014, Noomakhia: Wars of the Intellect (1st volume, which continues)
2014, Eurasian Mission
2014, Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning
2015, Imagination: Philosophy, Sociology, Structures
2015, Last War of the World-Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia
2015, Russkiy Logos, Russkiy Khaos, Sotsiologiya Russkogo Obshchestva
2016, “The Existential Theory of Society”
2016, Martin Heidegger: Metapolitics. The Eschatology of Being
2017, Rise of the Fourth Political Theory
2017, “Modern Populism”
2017, “Plural Anthropology–Fundamental-Ontological Analysis of Peoples”
2018, Ethnos and Society
2019, Political Platonism
2019, Ethnosociology: The Foundations
2021, Theory of a Multipolar World
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