I have nothing to add to my statement.

Posted by cladrastis on June 13, 2009, 12:34 AM | #

Are the self-aware beings about which Singer is writing on the cusp of becoming Dugin’s subject w/o confines?

Posted by Søren Renner on June 13, 2009, 10:17 AM | #

Singer is what Dugin is reacting against.

Posted by nonuthin on June 13, 2009, 04:04 PM | #

Why can’t people write clearly and simply.  Dugin doesn’t need to embellish his writing with such esoteric terms.  Anyone can write poorly and obfuscate a subject with erratic thinking.  The trick is to write about complicated subjects in a way that is clear for the average reader to understand.  That accomplishes three things:  first it shows that you really know what your talking about; second, it demonstrates that you’re secure about your intellect; and third it shows that you really want people to understand what you’re saying.

It sounds like a convoluted tour of evolutionary psychology 101 to me, but otherwise I think I agree with what he’s said.

Posted by James Bowery on June 13, 2009, 07:53 PM | #

One of the reasons philosophy doesn’t make much progress is the tendency to refer to philosophers more often than to their concepts.  Sciences tend to refer to concepts more often than to the scientists to which they are credited.  This tendency to treat philosophers as primary also characterizes Jewish intellectual movements and seems to be based on the tendency to deify rabbis rather than reify concepts. 

I ran across a great example of how this intellectually bankrupts not only philosophy but social sciences today while looking up information on the horizontal transmission of virulence out of Frankfurt via the Frankfurt School diaspora when I saw this ‘definition’ of “critical theory” given by Horkheimer:

The initial meaning of the term critical theory was that defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of social science in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it.

It’s as though Horkheimer thought the Frankfurt School was the first to discover the distinction between science and engineering.  I guess you can’t blame them since they didn’t hang out at the Scottish-English Border and pick up on such elementary distinctions.  Or I suppose they could have consulted with Gauss or any of a number of probability theorists about the distinction between probability functions and expected value functions which result from multiplying probability distributions against their payoffs.  But now I’m running out of excuses—not that they need any help making things up for themselves.

Posted by Guessedworker on June 13, 2009, 08:00 PM | #

nonuthin,

I imagine Dugin wrote the English translation himself.  But fair enough - I don’t know about your Russian, but mine is non-existent.

Soren,

I am not really sure what this Subject Without Confines thing is about.  To be on the safe side, I’m going for volume here.  It seems to bleed into three things:-

1. I take it that it is, first and foremost, a name for the notional state of absolute freedom, in fact the freedom or creativity of God itself,

2. Because of that notionality, it is also the lesser process of striving that is the real and perpetual experience of all men, and possibly of all living organisms.  It is, therefore, written into life like wind on a hillside, training everything towards its lodestar.

3. Rather obviously, it is the sole and inevitable line of attack of all elements set upon taking worldly power to themselves.

I take it that “aggression” is Dugin’s characterisation of the driving energy in this process.

One point I have tried hard to make at this website is that notionality is no use to anyone interested in the political realisation of nationalist philosophical forms.  Possibly, it has value in conceptualisation, but it can’t go beyond that and nothing it produces in the real world will be as intended.

The other point I want to make at this stage concerns Dugin’s connection of the Union with God with the ontological, including the goals of nationalism.  He refers to “the will to the Absolute, to attaining the total character, to the maximum extension of a subject up to the sphere of the Divine”.

I guess he is well aware that he is mixing up two aspects of the life divine here.  But it is material to his argument (in an unflattering way) to separate them out.

Union with God is the attainment of the state of divine consciousness.  But the beatific is passing and not permanent.  A man’s permanence is marked in being, and his lack of it in not being.  It is, therefore, the other half of religious esotericism, self-perfectionment, which is actually ontologically rooted and which connects, in the sense of running parallel, with nationalism, and with all the familiar products of “being” as we Westerners would understand it, including individualism, pacifism, materialism, etc, etc.

That will do for now.

Posted by Søren Renner on June 13, 2009, 08:36 PM | #

SUBJECT WITHOUT CONFINES is a chapter from Russian “eurasist” Alexander Dugin’s book The Knight Templars of the Proletariat - translation by Vladislav Ivanov.

Posted by Captainchaos on June 13, 2009, 10:23 PM | #

We must ask ourselves just how subsistent is subsistent nature, quantifiably, if an organizing, descriptive, prescriptive philosophy is be rooted in that, and root the will to power in that; and not have it rooted in the will to power.  It seems Dugin has the latter preference, if not interpretation.

Posted by Guessedworker on June 14, 2009, 06:17 AM | #

CC,

It seems Dugin has the latter preference, if not interpretation.

I was hoping Soren might explain Dugin’s highest value.  I think it is nobility of the soul - in terms of social order, the natural heirachy of perfected men - something akin to Schuon’s Sufic vision, shared in one or other form by all the perennialists and traditionalists.

As ultimate authority, then, he seems to be taking le soleil absolue, and the divine order that flows downward into life from that, sacralising and philosophically authenticating all that it touches, and all those who strive to touch it.

Dugin is plainly NOT saying that striving to break the bounds per se is the big deal.  It is a question of this sacralisation.  Liberalism from John Locke to the Jews in Frankfurt and their heirs in the Parisian left has commended us to break the bounds, but Dugin finds the process fatally compromised by its ceasura from the sacred.

I am interpolating a great deal here, because I do not know.  But ... his closed loop of reason whereby the ontological way of seeing (in which he would obviously include science and the English analytic tradition) is conveniently rendered secondary and inadequate, does point that way.  It can only stand on an appeal to the universal power.  He is saying, “only nearness to God ennobles Man, and the rest is a mistake.”

For subsistent Nature, Dugin offers this:

There is abundant example of aggression in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, in which the existence of a species or an individual is often sustained by doing violence to others, that makes the continuous round of transformations, assimilation and adaptations of Universe’s environment and of beings, inhabiting it.

Here, he is particularly self-serving.  The violence and aggressivity in the natural order serves balance, and by serving balance it serves continuity in time (anyone who does not understand that should consider the story of the goats in Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons).  Dugin takes this aggressivity out of Nature and posits it as the force which breaks the bounds.  In esoteric self-perfectionment, however, it is inner strength, hope and love which breaks the (inner) bounds, not aggression.  This will to be is the will to cease not-being, and isn’t aggressive.  This fascination with the aggressive is why Dugin’s prescription would all too likely deliver a militant and frightening future in which ordinary, unperfected, possibly even brutalised men - not a preisthood class - commission violence as the means to a supposedly sacred end.

We have been here before.

Posted by Guessedworker on June 14, 2009, 06:33 AM | #

But now I’m running out of excuses—not that they need any help making things up for themselves.

That was the point I was itching to make while reading your comment, James.  Then I got to the end, and you did it yourself!

One of the more interesting questions about aggressive Jewish cultural movements in the West is the extent to which they are internally conscious of their effects.  Did these delightful folks in Frankfurt ...

http://www.metapedia.com/wiki/images/The_Frankfurt_School.jpg

http://www.wsws.org/images/2009apr/a22-arts-hork-ador-480.jpg

... get together over supper and debate, for example, Horkheimer’s assertion that true reason can only be fostered in an environment of free, critical thinking, or did they gloat over the cleverness with which the toxicity of critique had been elided into the universal good of freedom?

I suspect that their self-deception conquered all thoughts of conspiracy washing at their feet with the tide.  I suspect that this was but the first lie in the tower of lies that is Critical Theory, and was key to the successful promotion of the programme.