Spiritual Differentialism
Discussion
Slavoj Zizek:
"For Dugin, the transcendental-ontological analysis of Dasein that Heidegger deploys in his Being and Time is not universal: every civilization gives birth to its specific form rooted in a specific collective spirituality. There are many figures of Dasein, the Russian one is different from the German one, it is focused on “narod,” the people in the sense of German Volk, not state, not just nation (nationalism), not race (Fascism), not class (Marxism), and especially not liberal individualism. “Narod” is thus an ontological category, it designates a historically-specific form of the disclosure of Being, of how its members perceive what matters in their lives, what gives their lives meaning, what freedom and dignity mean in their spiritual universe. For an authentic Russian, “freedom” is something different from the liberal notion of human rights and freedoms, it is a mode of free immersion into the spiritual substance of one’s people which only provides dignity to him.
For Dugin, philosophy is thus immanently political, inclusive of advocating war: war in Ukraine is a war between Western global modernism and the Eurasian spirituality. There is war because (as Heidegger saw) the West reached its deepest decline in global liberal hegemony, Western modernity is Evil embodied, while Russia did not yet fully articulate its Eurasian spiritual identity – this task still lies ahead, and only Russian philosophy grounded in Heidegger can do it. Here Dugin replaces Germany (as, for Heidegger, the unique spiritual nation) with Russia: a “new beginning” - the awakening expected by Heidegger, a new Ereignis - will take place in Russia, not in Germany, not even in the West. Dugin refers here even to Russian language itself: he notes how the terms that sound artificial in Heidegger’s German (like “in-der-Welt-sein,” being-in-the-world) have much more natural everyday equivalents in Russian.
Dugin is not simply a Rightist against the Left, he notices how at a certain point Bolshevism itself took an Eurasian turn. One should mention here Aleksandr Blok, the great Russian poet who wrote TheTwelve, the great ode to the October revolution: he was quickly disappointed by the Bolshevik Revolution and his last work before his early death in 1921 was a patriotic poem “Scythians” which advocates a kind of “pan-Mongolism,” a clear precursor to today’s Eurasianism - Russia should mediate not only between the East and the West but also politically between the Reds and the Whites to end the self-destructive civil war. This is also why Dugin prefers Stalin to Lenin: in 1921 Lenin conceived the task of Bolsheviks to bring Russia as fast as possible to Western modernity, while this reference to the West disappears with Stalin.
Dugin is not simply opposed to the West: his target is modernity which culminates in liberal individualism. One should note here that a similar reading of Heidegger as a tool to keep at a distance global Western modernization is practiced not only in Russia or some other Slavic countries but also in non-Slavic countries from Romania to Iran. (In my own country, Slovenia, some Heideggerians were interpreting Dostoyevski - whom otherwise Dugin rejects - as a case of overcoming Western nihilism.) Dugin solicits every country, every people, to get rid of the liberal-individualist yoke of global modernity and discover its own specific spirituality. The role of Russia is to defeat the global West and thus to give each country, the Western ones included, the freedom to discover its own spirituality – one may say that Dugin provides a philosophical version of the idea of multipolar world embodied in the political notion of BRICS."