René Guénon and Julius Evola played important roles in the early intellectual development of Russia's Alexander Dugin, and Dugin still refers approvingly to the Traditionalist critique of modernity. In recent years, however, Martin Heidegger has become increasingly important to him. Dugin gave Heidegger in 2009 as "the most profound-ontological-foundation" for his "Fourth Political Theory," and published an entire book on Heidegger, Мартин Хайдеггер: философия другого начала (Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning) in 2010. This book is now available in English translation (Radix, $28), with a preface by the American Paleoconservative Paul E. Gottfried.The question of the relationship between Heidegger and Traditionalism has been raised before in this blog, in response to an article on the topic by John J. Reilly. An anonymous comment pointed out that Heidegger was anti-metaphysical, and so fundamentally at odds with Traditionalism. Much this point was accepted by Thomas Vašek in a recent article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in the context of a discussion of the implications of Vašek's discovery that Heidegger had copied into his notebooks a long passage from the 1935 German translation of Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World. Vašek points out that Evola and Heidegger both understood and condemned modernity as the "reign of quantity." He accepts that Heidegger had no interest in what he calls "mythical high culture" (i.e. Tradition), but thinks that for Evola "mythical high culture... served only as a place-holder for the lost relation to transcendence, to true Being (Sein)." I am not convinced: I think mythical high culture was a lot more than a place-holder for Evola. What is not clear to me is how important "mythical high culture" now is for Dugin.
My thanks to J.W. for bringing Dugin's new book to my attention.
3 comments:
In holding the thought of Plato as the point where Western metaphysics was derailed, and depicting human existence as thoroughly finite (as invariably temporal and inseparable from its environment) the opposition of Traditionalism to Heidegger (a “decadent philosopher” according to Schuon in a personal letter to Huston Smith) is little surprise. At the same time, there are Heideggarian notions that Traditionalism, as I understand this movement, would very much appreciate: namely a sort of bemoaning of the calculative and scientific character of late modernity, the importance of retrieving a long-buried receptivity to a more primordial truth, among other themes.
Heidegger was anti-metaphysical, but so are some schools of Buddhist thought, which oppose metaphysics as just more conceptuality that needs to be cut through by the sword of direct perception and experience. I think one can read Heidegger in a similar way. Supposedly he responded to the works of D.T. Suzuki by saying: "If he is saying what I think he is saying, then this is what I've been trying to say in all of my books."
Sorry for jumping in so late, but I do have some comments on this. There are actually two crucial differences between Heidegger and Guenon, not just one. The first is, of course, that Heidegger (like much contemporary thought) was anti-metaphysical, whereas Guenon was metaphysical. There is another difference, however, which is also quite crucial. This is that Heidegger saw Western thought as essentially continuous throughout the Christian era (and even further back into ancient Greece), whereas Guenon saw a radical discontinuity in the fourteenth century. This is extremely important, because if we accept the thesis that "modernity is bad", then if Heidegger is correct and there is continuity backwards, it must also follow logically that "Christianity is bad". Guenon can only avoid this conclusion by supposing that there is a radical discontinuity in the fourteenth century - he wrote, “… the beginning of this breach is to be found in the fourteenth century, and it is at this date, and not a century or two later, that the beginning of modern times should be fixed”, and that this was "… a change so radical that it seems difficult to admit that it can have occurred spontaneously, without the intervention of some directing will whose exact nature must remain rather enigmatic”. By these means, he tries to differentiate the modern era from earlier Catholic Christianity, which he considers to be a "normal order". But Heidegger would not accept this discontinuity.
Secondly, as regards Jack's comments on Buddhism above, it is precisely because of the anti-metaphysical nature of much Buddhist thought, that Guenon had strong reservations about whether it was in fact a valid tradition. He wrote, for example: “certain schools of Buddhism … should moreover be regarded as deviant or degenerate forms although in the West it has become customary to consider them as representing “original Buddhism”. In reality … it never in any way denied Ātman or the “Self”, that is, the permanent and immutable principle of the being …”.
Finally, I would argue that while Heidegger's account of "ontotheology" has a lot of relevance for the development of Christian theology since at least the 4th century CE, he badly misunderstood the Platonic tradition, and especially Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism is not an "ontotheology" as he claimed, it is a henology. For more detail on this, see the writings of Wayne Hankey, e.g.: “Why Heidegger’s ‘history’ of metaphysics is dead.” (2004) American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78:425–443. Heidegger was too influenced by Aristotelianism, and never understood Platonism on its own terms.
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