Daria Dugina’s Revolution of the Spirit

by Natalia Melentyeva

Natalia Melentyeva tells the story of Daria Dugina as a philosophical and spiritual revolt against the disintegration of the modern world.

The Vertical Uprising

Life in the modern world demands enormous effort from us—and not only in everyday affairs or outward actions. What is at stake is an effort of the mind, of thought, of intellect. In monastic practice among the Holy Fathers this was called “intelligent doing” (“noetic work”). And such work must be carried out at every moment, not only so that the world does not dissolve into an indistinguishable chaos, so that we can still tell good from evil, the valuable from the worthless, the accidental from the fateful—performing diakrisis, discernment, as the Platonists said—but also in order to carry out the labor of filling the world with meaning: structuring it, designing and goal-setting within it, keeping proportions so as not to let entropy turn everything into a homogeneous mush.

We live in a totally damaged, twisted world, in a broken civilization where all proportions are distorted. Its backbone—its vertical, its notions of higher hierarchies—has been broken. And intelligent tension is needed in order to restore the proportions of an intellectually ordered, hierarchical world, whose ideal model was described by Plato and the Platonists.

In her electronic Diary on Telegram, Daria Dugina wrote: “We are thrown into this world[1]… We bear a duty and a mission… We need an inner revolution, a revolution of the Spirit…”[2] And elsewhere: “We are on the central axis of the vertical uprising.”[3]

But an even more radical inner revolution, an even greater effort of the mind, is required in order to uncover or awaken in a person the capacity to think—to think in an authentic way and not to imitate thought; to think about the deepest things, to think the essential; to enter the territory of full-fledged thinking, into the very element of thought. For the calculating, computing understanding or the surface-skimming, pragmatic, hurried discourse of modernity, which parodies what the sages once called “thought,” is absolutely unsatisfactory and has in fact brought humanity to the edge of the abyss.

Dasha [Daria] was born, raised, and formed as a person in a family of philosophers. From infancy we taught her to think, and when she grew older she chose philosophy—the element of thought—as her destiny.

The one who managed to pose anew the question “What is thinking?” was the great German philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, and he did so piercingly and with great complexity. He devoted one of his most enigmatic works to this topic—Was heißt Denken? (“What Is Called Thinking?”), which in our family we considered something like an initiatory path for anyone who claimed to be reasonable. Alexander Dugin devoted several of his books to this German thinker. Daria was especially impressed by Heidegger’s revolutionary intention—to subject the fundamental quality of the human being, “thinking,” to deconstruction.

There was, however, one “but”: Heidegger nominally opposed orthodox Platonism, in particular regarding the transcendence of ideas as paradigms of things. He felt much closer to Aristotle, who rebelled against his teacher Plato and constructed a horizontal ontology not along the axis “up–down” (as in the Timaeus, Republic, and other dialogues of Plato) but along the line “center–periphery.”[4] This eternal story of the opposition between vertical and horizontal, God and the world, apophatic and cataphatic, supramundane and intramundane qualities of the Divinity (the One, the Absolute) has become a path of quarrels and battles for very many philosophers in world history. Daria tried this conflict on herself, working through the intricacies of vertical and horizontal metaphysics. Plato was closer to her in spirit, yet horizontal ontologies of the phenomenologists, and especially the refinement of Heidegger’s reflections, attracted her no less.

She named her musical project “Dasein may refuse,” using the main structural component of Heidegger’s philosophy—Dasein, “being-there.” By this Heidegger understood the immediate fact of a person’s presence in the world as a thinking principle. But I will return to this later.

Dasha graduated from the Chair of History of Foreign Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, and she sought to understand and make sense of the logic of the historical-philosophical process—its paradigmatic foundations, teleology, maneuvers, and nuances.

The Meaning of the Pseudonym “Platonova”

She chose the pseudonym “Platonova” (“of Plato”) and dedicated her youth to the study of Platonism, to the works and theories of various Platonists and Neoplatonists—both Christian and belonging to other religions. At one time, the American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked that all of world philosophy is nothing more than footnotes to Plato. When we engage with Platonism, we truly find ourselves at the center of a typhoon, at the core of the problem of generation, of the creation of meanings and structures of history, culture, thought, and mind. Dasha understood this and chose this path—a dangerous one, even if one remains on the surface. People often fear the mind like fire. In their day the common townsfolk of Athens executed Socrates[5], and the inhabitants of Alexandria killed Hypatia. Today the ruling elites of the world likewise furiously shun free, substantive thought. Indeed, in the modern world the orbits of thinking are gradually narrowing; “grand narratives” are subjected to disparaging criticism; the practice of philosophy is deliberately reduced to a technical parsing of microscopic details. No generalizations are allowed. And of course, the first target of this epistemological policy of fragmentation were Plato and the Platonists with their sweeping global generalizations. They have quite literally been subjected to “cancel culture.” Yet even the latest attacks of the postmodernists on thought, and the extreme perversion of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), are still not the end and not the last word in the persecution of philosophers.

Today philosophers—naturally, those who do not submit to the role assigned to them as intellectual service staff for the ruling elites and who defend the dignity of truly free thought—are deliberately and purposefully killed. Dasha knew that all this obscurantism must be opposed first and foremost with thought itself, with ideas, with new concepts, designs, projects. And she chose Platonism as her point of departure in this struggle. She suspected that the path would be difficult. But how difficult, and how it would end—of course, she could not even imagine. She knew that philosophers are killed and wrote about this in her articles and in her Diary. But perhaps she herself did not fully realize that she, too, was a philosopher. And therefore that this was her own fate, freely chosen and lived to the full in her short but bright and pure life.

“Footnotes to Plato”

When we read the philosophical texts of Daria Dugina—her notes and articles about politics, and even her Diary—we must understand that her explicit and implicit system of coordinates was Platonism. Dasha joyfully and enthusiastically immersed herself in Plato’s dialogues, each time discovering new dazzling arguments, the deepest insights, the subtlest nuances of logic and polemic. Platonism built an orderly, coherent, two-story world. On the upper story floated ideas, paradigms, forms of things and events in the world; on the lower story remained matter and the things themselves, which existed by contemplating the ideas/logoi and imitating them as their heavenly paradigms. Thus a hierarchy of Heaven and earth was set, a hierarchy of ideas crowned by the highest idea—the Good, the Ineffable, the Inexpressible, the One. Platonism described the intellectual, noetic structure of the world, in which the human being stood on the vertical axis as a kind of mediator between two worlds—the world of paradigms, patterns (ideas), and the world of phenomena (things and appearances). At the same time the whole system was open from above, since the One was thought as something ineffable, apophatic, unnameable, and preceding even being itself. In religion the One was understood as God. Under the subtle guardianship of the transcendent Good (the One), the world was built by repeating heavenly archetypes; things were produced. And once created, things and beings—especially the most exalted and perfect among them, humans and angels—contemplated the ideas and sought paths of return back to their source, to their heavenly Homeland, closer to the One, from whom all had received their Beginning. Exitus and reditus—departure and return—are the eternal rhythm of the sacred world.

This model existed for millennia. Its structures, hierarchies, ladders of ascent and descent are reflected in many world religions. Within it the human being is a creature that ascends (toward Spirit, Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Justice), and sometimes returns, and again ascends the ladder of Jacob—the ladder of spiritual perfections. This ascent of the human being, his perfection and transfiguration (in Christianity, deification) is the highest goal of man.

It was precisely this picture of an ensouled world that served as the ontological map and guide for Daria Dugina in her philosophy, worldview, and personal cultural code. Plato was always by her side—even in the name she chose.

The Rags of Postmodernity

But the world grows shabby; the human being grows foolish. Plato himself talks about this in the dialogue Statesman, vividly describing what happens when creation moves away from its Creator. And virtually all religions affirm that as the end of times, the eschatological “omega point,” approaches, the world and humanity degenerate, decay, lose their spiritual qualities, and lose their resemblance to their original. One way or another, Modernity arrived, and then Postmodernity. And in the eyes of a traditionalist philosopher—and Daria was precisely a traditionalist philosopher—Western European modernity appeared as a process of sharp decline, of falling away, of loss of meaning and purpose. Postmodernity turned out to be the logical finale of civilizational degeneration.

The prophet of Postmodernity in the 20th century, the Frenchman Gilles Deleuze, mockingly falsifies Plato (precisely “in the margins” of his works, that is, starting from the Platonic picture and distorting it). He maintains that Platonism does not speak of a dualism of ideas and matter but of a duality within matter between that which is receptive to ideas—that is, copies—and that which entirely avoids the influence of ideas, hides from them, slips away from the power of intelligible paradigms, of logoi. In other words, there are things in the world that slide and evade any form, any determination. Deleuze calls this “pure becoming,” “boundlessness,” or “the shadow of the copy,” while Jean Baudrillard calls it the “simulacrum”—a “copy without original.”

Daria, though wholly faithful to Plato, also took an interest in these distorted, inverted ontologies of Postmodernism, trying to untangle their intricacies, to sort out their counterfeits, to decode their irony and understand how these mendacious yet in some ways hypnotically attractive theoretical constructions are arranged—constructions based on ironic leakages, shifts, and transgressions.

In the modern world, when we converse with people, a strange feeling often arises: any thought, remark, observation that contains at least some clarity, some attempt at minimal structuring of a phenomenon, as soon as it is communicated to a person, falls somewhere—as if into a whirlpool, into an abyss, into the darkness of a will-less refusal of definiteness. People have been excommunicated from Platonic orderliness, hierarchy, mental discipline, structure, and from understanding what essence is. People, in general, have been cut off from thought. The modern liberal world suggests that freedom is disorder, chaos, carefree gliding along the surface. And this suggestion is accepted—whether consciously or unconsciously.

Dasha often complained wearily that, when meeting with certain interlocutors—often random ones—she got the impression that she was dealing with people of constant changeability, of pure becoming, not subordinated to any idea at all—people without ideas, with a “boundless,” unstructured psyche, dwelling in a pure “flow” of momentary existence, in the instant of fleeting interest. Such a person avoids the idea as such, regarding it as an excessively “strong” reality, shuns any hierarchy of values, slipping out from under it. What matters most is that such a person does not remain free. Or rather, this fluidity of the human being is a dark freedom.

Observing around her the typical products of Postmodernity in her own generation, her milieu, among acquaintances, Daria tried somehow to correlate these knowingly fragmentary, fractal entities with her notion of an integral Platonic personality. And despite all the difficulties of this undertaking, she never gave up, bringing philosophy into the most ordinary—and at times banal—human relationships and situations.

Dark Freedoms

According to Deleuze, things and people that elude the idea—that is, the Logos—cannot exactly be said to have no measure at all, but their measure lies not above them, but below them, in the underground of their existence. It is as if they are under hypnosis, under the spell of a mad element that lies on the reverse side of that order which things ought to receive from the Logos, from the world of ideas—from under the spell of unenlightened matter.

Although Dasha loved Plato and spent her short life studying him, she was also very attentive to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and she worked through his texts with great interest during her studies at the Faculty of Philosophy and later, constantly returning to them again and again.

Deleuze deliberately rewrites the Platonic idea of two worlds: first, the world of paradigms, ideas, eidē, spiritual essences; and second, the world of phenomena, copies, becoming, reflecting the upper “intelligent” world. Following the nominalists of the modern age, Deleuze abolishes the Platonic, spiritual universe governed by the cosmic Mind (Nous), rejecting its alleged rigidity, lack of freedom, violence, totalitarianism—or in fact, its “out-of-timeness.” In Postmodernity, the world turns into a disconnected extravagant ensemble, into a liquid, blurred space with sliding meanings, without stops and pauses, with scattered multitudes “unmoored” from one another and from anything.[6] This is the new brave world of “pure quantity,”[7] a streaming expanse of movement and “rebellious becoming,” which excludes both recourse to abolished spiritual archetypes and the fixation of any gleams of eternal truths amid the stream of deliberate dissolution of things and meanings.

The army of postmodernists insists that this picture of a world shimmering with indeterminacies is very attractive for the man of the “open society” and of universal liberation. The philosophy of Postmodernity confronts us with the paradox of becoming: the unity of the meanings of past and future, the mixing of the worlds “before” and “after” any event, the mutual flowing of excess and deficiency. It is a space where anything may be reversed into its opposite—crime and punishment, greater and lesser, good and evil. It is a place (if it is a place at all) of the loss of names, of the renunciation of stability in knowledge:

Thus the personal ‘I’ needs the world and God. But when nouns and adjectives begin to melt, when the names of pauses and stops are swept away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, every identity of I, God, and world disappears.[8]

In other words, postmodernists cannot guarantee us any stable definiteness; they recommend that we live in continuous fluidity, having said farewell to God, the world, and our own Self. We are offered a medium (no longer a world) in which there is no vertical, where the symbol of the tree as a vertical axis and hierarchy is replaced by the territory of the rhizome, a tuber like a potato that grows who knows where—to the side, sideways, downward, somewhere outward. Dark freedoms are achieved at the price of final loss of the soul. Welcome—to the “liquid society” (Zygmunt Bauman), to the virtual world of the Net (Manuel Castells)!

The Mushroom-Man

The rhizome is usually defined as a horizontal structure of connection as opposed to the vertical structure of the tree. The rhizome as a model of a decentralized network appears at the end of the 1970s. Its inspiration is biology—the root system of fungi; its relevance is decentralized states, the constant accretion of connections, an unintended growth with unexpected encounters and random events that alter the nature of the network. Neither the encounters nor the new content are predictable or pre-established… The network includes contexts of experiences and analogies… In the Internet-organized society, any node can be a new and turning point. All this was uncritically taken up also by Russian philosophers, especially those from the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who practically admire “dark freedoms,” swearing allegiance to Postmodernity and its strategies. This is precisely the impression formed by most of their publications. And although Daria graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University with honors, and her competence—including in the area of postmodernism—was obvious, she never managed to find a common language with the professional community of Russian philosophers, captured by the element of liberal postmodern degeneration. For most of them (though not all) have slid even from the margins of Plato, breaking their last links with the element of full-fledged thinking—that is, vertical thinking, oriented toward eternity.

The trouble is that all these seemingly innocent apologias and promotions of the principle of decentralization, chaos, and indeterminacy in the life of humanity—while emphasizing moments of creative novelty and the emergent quality of network root-systems—never mention that the rhizome’s horizontal is deliberately limited and exclusive: it radically excludes any possibility of creativity and novelty within strategies of vertical organization of life and knowledge, on which all traditional, religious, archaic types of culture are based, and on which rests the entire splendor of intellectual treasures and the abundance of cultural worlds created by non-Western civilizations as well as by the West itself in premodern and even modern times. In the name of freedom and creativity, everything is allowed in postmodernity—everything except Goodness, except God, except faith, Tradition, ontology, metaphysics, eternity, meaning, essence, rootedness, morality, and identity.

“Dark freedoms” rest on a colossal totalitarian foundation of grandiose prohibitions. You no longer have the right to anything except the “dark freedom” itself. The mycelium, the rhizome, the colony of cunning mold becomes the fate of humanity. A step down, up, right, or left—and you are liquidated (canceled, deplatformed, ostracized, shamed, and if none of this works—your car is blown up).

The rhizomatic strategies of Postmodernity are full of omissions and carefully concealed constraints; they rest on double standards. For the masses of dehumanized humanity, “rhizome” (chaos), “de-ideologization,” “liquid society” are proposed, with no ideas, principles, ideologies, hierarchies, or projects (as remnants of an allegedly totalitarian vertical); while on the opposite pole—for the so-called “world elites,” the designers and managers of the future of humanity (or rather, non-humanity) from the lands of the setting West—a rigid and consistent ideologeme, or even mythologeme, of the post-human and post-history is being assembled.

Today this problem of double standards is revealing its true face: the great battle between the elite groups of the West, together with their attached Artificial Intelligence and their concept of the “man-rhizome,” who tomorrow will be dissolved and lost without a trace on platforms of universal genetic modification, and the rest of humanity, which still retains some rudiments of not yet fully erased and lost, modernized and digitized vertical structures of a Platonic type, sometimes called “traditional values.”

The Melted Language

As Deleuze shows, the world of “total becoming” presupposes the melting of language, where nouns are swept away by verbs as more mobile and active agents, and where, in the avalanche of becoming, meanings and concepts dissolve and disappear. Entirely law-governed, then, is the sad inability of the modern young person to think consistently and express his thoughts coherently, and his inclination toward slang, inarticulateness, jargon, the language of gestures, and ultimately toward a wordlessness, muteness that implies irresponsibility and lack of accountability.

Internet space is built according to strict algorithms of dissolution—with constant changes of nicknames and genders, anonymity, impunity, obscene outbursts, aggression, humiliation, and persecution of others. This gives rise to the phenomenon of the “rhizome of electronic jungles,” and the younger the representative of the rising generation is, the deeper the Net penetrates into the structures of his consciousness. Offline turns into a boring shadow of online; reality becomes a copy of virtuality, an imitation of it.

Daria was very upset by the senseless pastime of youth on the Internet—games, banal chatting, scrolling through Instagram. “We can’t stop poking at Instagram ourselves? Then the Higher Powers will shut it off for us! To the books! To the books! To the books!”[9] she wrote in her Diary. But she rejected this world not from outside, but from within, for objectively she was part of her cultural environment, surrounded by peers for whom the Internet, social media, and gadgets had become a way of life, a priority existential territory.

Pay attention to Dasha’s expression: “we can’t stop by ourselves.” This is an important acknowledgment of the dark potency of digitalization, which hypnotizes above all the new generations, fused with the screen and virtuality from early childhood.

Dasha tried to decode the worlds of these “dark freedoms.” This did not always succeed; at times relations with people turned into misunderstanding, perplexity, and misinterpretations of intentions and communication strategies. Dasha was modern and open to avant-garde searches in art, fashion, and innovative creative practices, yet at the same time she saw everywhere the postmodernist “folds” of a decaying socio-psychological fabric, the twitching of rhizomatic connections and the pull of sub-individual attractors, which did not allow people to preserve wholeness and identity and, indeed, actively and consistently undermined them.

Tales of Object-Oriented Ontology

It may seem that Postmodernity is the limit of dissolution of the vertically oriented philosophical cosmos—but no such luck. After Deleuze came even more infernal philosophical strategies, collectively called “Object-Oriented Ontology” (OOO) or “speculative realism.” Here too Dasha was guided by Nietzsche’s principle: “The knower does not like to wade into the water of truth when it is dirty, but when it is shallow.”[10] Therefore this trend of contemporary thought also interested her, especially in the persons of Reza Negarestani and Nick Land, who combine ultra-materialism with references to symbols and figures of various, sometimes exotic, mythologies. Dasha discerned in this current an inverted traditionalism: for Platonic traditionalists had warned that at the end of history the egg of the world would open at the bottom, and from under the lower boundary of the corporeal there would burst into the world dark “hosts of Gog and Magog.”[11] Dasha easily recognized them in the speculative realists.

The object-oriented ontologists encroached even on Postmodernity itself, in which the human subject, although almost dissolved, still retained some place. They decided to carry classic materialism to its logical extreme. Now becoming itself—chaotic and purposeless—became an object of criticism. There was too much life in it, and thus—though dispersed and melted—too much subjectivity. The complete and final abolition of all subjectivity is the goal of speculative realism, which sets itself the task of describing the world from the standpoint of things themselves and from within them.

In this perverse attempt to build structures of anti-thinking, not only the human being, but the very element of becoming and of life—generating constant conflicts of dynamic differentials—was called into question. Things, in their depth, “do not know” such splits, the speculative realists claimed, and do not correlate with anything at all. Hence their critique of all correlationism. Quentin Meillassoux,[12] for example, insists that we have long been mistaken in taking the human being as the privileged epistemic instance through which thinking is performed and in whose name cognition occurs. We have vainly regarded man as the sovereign of a transcendental arsenal of knowledge, of a priori categories, principles, ideas. In reality, there is neither God nor man—as His viceroy on earth—neither the transcendent nor the transcendental. There is “nihil unbound”—unleashed nothingness[13]—and its rotations, which for now are still called “the world of objects.” But soon even that will cease.

Nick Land[14] bluntly proposes destroying not only humanity but life on earth as such, believing that our civilization’s obsession with drilling in search of oil and gas will inevitably lead to the earth’s core bursting outward, breaking through the crust, and bringing an end to life—which is nothing other than “the suffering of the core,” grown into the organic cell and then into the human being, constantly striving beyond limits, and further into civilization, which surpasses itself in Artificial Intelligence (such are the fruits of Darwinism and abiotic theories!). And after this infernal cataclysm only a dead, flaming ember of what was once the earth will rush toward the sun, assaulting yet another dead, burning fragment of meaningless material presence.

To some degree Dasha felt the fascination of this anti-myth, and in some social networks even used the pseudonym “Nick Land” with irony. And she named her closed Diary on her Telegram channel “Oleonaft”—so enchanted was she by the theory of another speculative realist, Reza Negarestani, about the role of fuel oil in a mystico-technocratic civilization of the last days. Boring wells continues the work of rats, also “envoys of the core,” whose burrows perforate the integrity of the earth’s crust, Negarestani claims. Man, obsessed with oil, with “extraction,”[15] becomes the servant of fuel oil, the lubricant of the historical process, whose purpose is to help the Earth emancipate its core and send it toward the sun.

Yet over and above Daria’s philosophical and human sympathy for the hooligans and madmen of object-oriented ontology—who to some extent have taken upon themselves the burden of heavy reflections on the infernal essence and macabre fate of the modern world—there always towered and prevailed her responsibility, as a traditionalist, for the human being who has been lost and decomposed in the modern world. She considered herself personally responsible for the uprising against the modern world—from any point along its fall, from any limit of the descent of the human creature. She was especially anxious for her own generation:

“Friends!” she wrote in her Diary, “We have been thrown into this world not by accident. If we… will senselessly lose ourselves, disconnect from this world… fall apart, we will not get far… We need inner aggression as a form of consolidating subjectivity and as a form of nurturing it.”[16]

And further: “The strength of the human soul lies in the complete absence of boundaries, as Attila went to the West to bear witness to the Sunset. And I will be merciless to my weakness, I will conquer the inner spaces, I will block them all, I will annihilate them…”[17]

As a traditionalist, it was clear to Dasha that the modern world and its philosophy insistently provoke the contemporary person to completely dissolve his “I.” Deleuze saw in what was recently considered the “solid things” of the world only effects, events on surfaces, no longer existent but merely stubbornly persisting for a moment in their manifestation, possessing the bare minimum of being. Object-oriented ontologists went further still, accusing the disintegrating, being-less human of unrestrained Bonapartist conceit about his own uniqueness and predicting his death in the conflagration of great objects rising up against him.

Dasha sensed acutely that people were turning with offensive rapidity into the rustle of paper on the surface of nothing, into a mist playing on the edges of things. In a world without a Whole, where there are no causes, goals, or projects, no thought of totality and verticality, no knowledge of God, the human being is indeed doomed.

The Consolidation of the Subject

Daria believed that under such conditions we are commanded to a forced, “artificial” consolidation of subjectivity. In the face of death, the person is allowed all sorts of methods, sometimes grotesque, in order to make his way toward the metanoia bequeathed by Tradition: through ritual (church, cultural, everyday), through intensive reading and reflection, through overcoming procrastination and laziness, through withdrawal, like the Sufis, “into one’s hidden caliphate,” through bodily practices, sports, control over food and sleep, through management of the psyche. Dasha believed that everything must become ritual—books, poetry, philosophy, thinking, psychic reactions, suffering, wearing clothing, high heels and dresses, food, communication, the body, cosmetics. She intended to turn the cultural space of her life into something very bright, gathered, perfect.

“A person who at the very least chooses uncomfortable shoes, high heels, or puts on that dress which slightly constricts the whole structure of his body and compels him to be collected, straighten his back—that person is absolutely beautiful. In this sense, the frameworks of baroque dresses, and not only baroque ones, reveal and manifest absolute beauty…”[18] she wrote.

And further: “Every thing that is worn within the framework of culture must be overshadowed by some kind of overcoming… (…) Look how attentively, during ritual and cult, priests vest themselves, how much importance they attach to the smallest details. And we, ordinary people thrown into the commonplace, must likewise occupy ourselves with a similar task: constantly think about creating an artificial barrier between nature and man. If we do not understand and recognize this, then, I think, we will decay into some strange substance that will resemble something pre-human.”[19]

But in this struggle against decay and dissolution, she considered the main thing to be not the aesthetics of mediation, distance, or dandyism, but the will to overcoming—and thought. As well as a “hot heart,” an “inner fire,” “the joy of rebellion,” “exhausting and tormenting oneself in labors and deeds,” “striking sparks from oneself,” “nurturing the inner spark”… “Keep a sun inside!” Yet the most important task is to think, to learn to think, to rethink everything anew.

I would say that Dasha’s philosophy is a precious thread stretched between Plato on the one side and Postmodernity and speculative realism on the other, passing through the incredibly rich intermediate territory of phenomenology and Heideggerian thought.

Political Traditionalism

Alongside philosophy, Daria was interested in political processes. Above all she supported political traditionalism, that is, an ideology aimed at affirming the norms of sacred tradition, traditional values, and principles. Her ideal was the politics of the vertical.

Her political agenda, which she formulated in lectures, livestreams, and analytical TV programs, included several main theses. Dasha understood perfectly that behind the rustling of liberating postmodern chatter there stands a palpable power that does not merely encourage but constructs and imposes the destruction of human subjectivity. It offers base scenarios of human liberation at the level of his material nature, sub-human manifestations, while at the same time covertly preparing the ground for ontological restriction of man and his subsequent elimination and replacement by artificial intelligence, imposing this scenario on countries as an inevitable and non-alternative trend.

This power structure provokes bloody wars and imposes on the world an unavoidable liberalization—liberation from everything that still prevents humanity from plummeting into the abyss. And it knows exactly what it is doing when it establishes new rules for understanding the world and dwelling in it.

In her appearances Daria always emphasized the moment of the extra-natural, “artificial” determinateness of the human being, who always lives within frameworks of social and cultural construction, within certain value and epistemological paradigms whose focal points and foundations can be shifted. In other words, a human being deals not with the order of things themselves, but with the order of demands placed on the perception and construction of things, meanings, theories, the image of man himself, his activity, cognition, goal-setting. And while humanity has so far been distinguished by diversity and has existed within different paradigms, creating diverse images of the world, worldviews, and civilizations, today it is being forced to hand the privilege of constructing social reality over to an “advanced” empowered group of elites claiming a global monopoly on the design of the future.

This group has today, without hesitation, unleashed a Third World War. And it has a name: the Anglo-Saxon civilization in the person of its oligarchic and financial elites. It is precisely this civilization that claims unipolarity, globalism, and hegemony—that is, global domination on the planet.

Dasha strove to show that the image of the world and of the human being transmitted to Russia from the global center of decision-making is the product of another civilization, another cultural identity, the result of a historical practice that is different from ours, and indeed hostile to Russia. And that we must be fully aware that this paradigm is imposed on us and on other peoples in a totalitarian way—both by force, aggressively, through bloody war, and via soft power and cultural subversion.

For Daria there was no doubt that a group of “methodologists” and managers belonging to a civilization hostile to us Russians—through theories and forecasts, wiles and ruses, through nonsense about “principles and rules,” through grants and bribery of official Russian philosophers and political scientists, through the propaganda of liberating strategies in mass culture—sticks us onto the standards of perception, ways of thinking, and behavior desired by this globalist elite. And Dasha resolutely tried to raise the issues of the injustice of globalism and the unipolar world in the public sphere.

Where did these imaginary standards and rules come from, introduced into circulation without understanding or consent of the people? Are they not different among different nations, given that they live within different cultural traditions? And why and for what reason does the West, while calling itself liberal, resort to the idea of hegemony and intends to homogenize the peoples? What are the strategies of world hegemony of a single civilization? And how will the implementation of the utopia of turning the “flowering complexity” of the cultures of the earth into a monotonous global ghetto look?

In her electronic Diary Daria spoke of the beauty of the idea of the “flowering complexity” of humanity, and of the inevitability of an alternative to the monotonous world in the form of a multipolar world:

From a unipolar regime, from the triumph of the liberal hegemony of the American world order, we are moving toward a completely new world. In it there is no longer one player, but many strong players, each with its own traditions, history, and culture. In it there is no universal human being, but there are many kinds of human beings.[20]

She sought to awaken—in others and in herself—an interest in the traditions of various peoples, in the history of civilizations, in the idea of traditionalism as a meta-theory of the harmonious and equal coexistence of a constellation of different civilizations. It is at this point in her reasoning that Dasha’s favorite traditionalists appear: René Guénon, Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Carl Schmitt, Antonio Gramsci, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Pyotr Savitsky, and many others.

She was always perplexed that the slippery, counterfeit discourse of mendacious propaganda functions so efficiently and cleverly in the Anglo-Saxon West. And here, in Russia? It would seem that Providence itself enjoins us to promote traditionalism, Christianity, Orthodoxy, Eurasianism, multipolarity—systems and values organically corresponding to our civilization. Dasha’s political views consisted precisely in this. She felt that we act without sufficient resolve and allow the globalists to attack us totally, at all levels.

We are faced with the iron will of liberal ideology, which conceals the fact that it is an ideology and that everything in it—including politics, economics, culture, and the information space—is totalitarianly interconnected. Russia must respond just as totally, appealing in its confrontation with the modern world to the heritage of world and Russian classics, while carefully analyzing and breaking the dogmas of Anglo-Saxon civilization, which in its absolutization and lust for domination has reached the limit of outrages.

The Political Science of Depths

Daria was very happy and put a “pass” in her mental gradebook if she managed, in a short appearance on the Zvezda TV channel, a brief remark on Russia’s Channel One, or in radio programs, livestreams, and countless interviews, to say something essential and profound—about philosophical and religious doctrines, about deep political science, about poetry—for example, about Novalis, Jean Genet, or Hölderlin. She regarded placing any cultural phenomenon in the context of the information agenda as her personal victory. For her, philosophy was the essence of politics, and poetry cast rays of understanding into the thicket of philosophical concepts. Poetry as the other, secret dimension of philosophy; philosophy as the core of politics. That is how we tried to raise her—and not only her. That is how we, her parents, Alexander and I, thought, wrote, lectured, and raised a generation of youth.

“Novalis lies on the bed, guarding sleep,”[21] Dasha wrote in her Diary. She believed that all the culture lost and annulled (“cancel culture”) in a West gone mad from Postmodernity had secretly gone over to Russia’s side and that we had become its heirs, successors, and restorers.

She started from the concept of Politica Aeterna, “eternal politics,” according to which philosophy—and more broadly, culture and religion—lies at the foundation of any Realpolitik, any political action or statement. She was always astonished at the strange superficiality and complacency of Russian political analysis (less so in American and European), utterly out of keeping with the cultural potential of the country or with the moment of history. It was as if Russian political analysts, exactly following Deleuze’s recipe, had stopped delving into the depth of problems and venturing beyond trivial generalizations, observing only the surface of events and their deceptive trajectories, not daring to give a serious, deep, civilizational rebuttal to the suffocating, barbarized Western propaganda.

Dasha felt that the shallow, one-dimensional mode of research adopted by modern political analysts (both Russian and Western) in discussions, for example, of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine or between Russia and the West, in no way reflected the deep, fundamental dynamic of interaction between “great spaces,” civilizations, cultures, religions, worldviews, national psychologies, and stereotypes—or touched on them only tangentially, utilitarianly, situationally.

It was as if our political science had—through carelessness or intentionally—forgotten much of what the geniuses of geopolitics and cultural theory and of the “science of civilizations” had written: people such as Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pyotr Savitsky, Nikolai Danilevsky, Konstantin Leontiev, Karl Haushofer, Halford Mackinder, Carl Schmitt, Fernand Braudel, Antonio Gramsci, and many others, whose works, devoted to the logic of large-scale geopolitical and cultural contacts, confrontations, and clashes of civilizations, are today extremely relevant.

Dasha was amazed that even the approach of Spengler—who regarded world cultures or “spiritual epochs” as parallel and independent organisms, each living its own cycle of birth, flourishing, and death and animated by its own soul-type—“Apollonian,” “Magian,” or “Faustian”—was forgotten and unused as an argument in configuring the multipolar world. This approach is highly fruitful. Even the contemporary American political scientist Samuel Huntington, with his concept of the “clash of civilizations,” has fallen out of operational attention—even though his theory has fully proven its validity, unlike the collapsed theory of his opponent Francis Fukuyama about the “end of history.”

As a family we wondered why Russia’s own advances in political science, geopolitics, history of world and Russian philosophy, and the foundations of civilizations—those of Dasha’s father (author of the epochal intellectual epic Noomakhia: Wars of the Mind)—are so weakly used, though they lay out clearly and logically the paradigms of world civilizations and the logic of their diachronic and synchronic confrontation.

Dasha dedicated virtually all her time and energy to studying and popularizing these endlessly valuable concepts, strategies, and systems of thought. What interested her in politics could be called “the political science of depths,” by analogy with Carl Gustav Jung’s “depth psychology.” Even the banal carries within itself a hidden dimension of depth, and the correct decoding of an ordinary news bulletin may become a revelation in understanding the great meanings of history.

A Digression on Heidegger

Daria was convinced that we stand at a very responsible point in history, where all moments of truth once thought by great minds of the past are being actualized. She followed Heidegger in his assertion that “the most dangerous thing is that we are still not capable of thinking, and even though the state of the world is becoming ever more and more dangerous,”[22] we are not ready for thought, we do not dare turn toward what must be thought. “It is the philosophers who are thinkers, and it is primarily in philosophy that thinking comes to pass,”[23] Heidegger believed. Hence the responsibility of the philosopher, who must by an act of will free himself from the unbearable everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) and move on to fulfilling his mission—thinking.

Dasha believed that the corridor to thought opens only when there occurs a certain inner transformation, a resolute effort over oneself.

Heidegger proposed that we “make the leap into thinking that carries us not only to the other side but into a wholly other region.”[24] And here tension, will, concentration, and a rupture of level, a break with gradualness, are necessary. Daria often turned to the problem of the “rupture of level”[25] (Julius Evola), the initiatory transition from one level of being and understanding to another, higher one, in her articles and public appearances.

“One must stop drifting away, running away, traveling away from oneself and from the collision with thought,”[26] she wrote in her Diary.

She was always very attentive to Heidegger’s work and to our endless family conversations about this prince of the philosophers of the last times, akin to the royal Plato of Antiquity. Understanding Heidegger presupposed a thoughtful interpretation—deconstruction and hermeneutics, subtle tuning of soul and mind, attentiveness and patience. Dasha was just beginning her path to Heidegger. But the ideas of this philosopher were not simply crowding her head like volumes in an academic library; they intertwined with her life—between the lines of her thoughts and deeds, shimmering in the strange transitions of her poetry, emerging in her sense of the world.

She sensed that thought is pain, that sometimes one wants to flee from thought and its burden, that thought seizes our entire being, screws itself into life, and remakes it. She knew that thought is heavy and bottomless. Heidegger called the original task of philosophy “making things more difficult and more complex,”[27] believing that “philosophy is akin to madness” and “always untimely.”[28] But following Heidegger and alongside us, her parents, Dasha also understood that “philosophy is one of the rare possibilities of independent and creative existence.”[29]

From her first semesters at the Faculty of Philosophy, Daria was captivated by the idea of apophatic theology in Dionysius the Areopagite; she wrote term papers on this subject. Yet alongside lofty Christian Platonism she was inspired by Heideggerian antithesis and dialectic, where truth as “unconcealment” shines alternately with cataphatic and apophatic facets, opening and hiding simultaneously, withdrawing into concealment and luring the human being out of his self-satisfied individual existence, out of his self-sufficient, autonomous “I,” conceptually established by modernity and now in Postmodernity breaking up into atoms and particles, turning into a divisible, externally controlled something rushing toward some precipice.

Heidegger wrote that what reveals itself as truth (“aletheia,” unconcealment) “cannot be demonstrated (…); we can only point to what, revealing itself, has opened up to us in its unconcealment, and at the same time point to ourselves in this pointing. This simple showing is the main mark of thinking.”[30]

What Thinks in Us?

Heidegger explained the difficulty of thinking about what is essential to the human being in this way:

What calls for thinking turns away from man. It withdraws from him, concealing itself. But the withdrawing is not nothing. The withdrawing is rather the vestige of what in itself is worthy of thought. It is the track of what in its own manner has always already reached man. The track is not made by us. It occurs of itself. It occurs by taking us along with it, so that in thinking we must follow it. In this way what withdraws may even concern and claim us more essentially than all that strikes and touches us, by appearing and making itself present.[31]

And further:

Since we are drawn into this ‘tending toward’… what draws us, our essence is already stamped through it, namely: through this ‘tending toward’ we are we ourselves, such as we are. This pointing is our essence. We are that which we show in the withdrawal. As those who point there, man is a pointer. (…) Man is a sign.[32]

How is all this to be understood? What is the “withdrawal” of man, and where does this withdrawal lead? Why is “man a sign”? And a sign of what? Can all this be said in other words? Probably not. Yet we can try a small deconstruction of Heidegger himself. Deconstruction was a favorite element of our family leisure; Dasha acquired some skill in this serious linguistic and intellectual work.

Let us ask again: “What is thinking according to Heidegger?” Heidegger is a representative of a philosophical tradition in which the paths of the long Western phenomenological tradition converge. Consciousness in this tradition is the only place where the phenomenologist dwells; the territory of consciousness covers everything: the external world is that which is presented in consciousness and constitutes the result of its work. But not work that is too aggressive, storming, imposing, full of the arbitrary will of the individual “I,” but rather delicate, catching contexts and backgrounds of perception, the vibrations of the world “in between.”

The phenomenologist considers phenomena—those integral flashes of our consciousness in which the elements of the vital (cognitive) act are merged, joined, and dissolved in one another. Before phenomenology, philosophers (Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and others) had a habit of thinking from the rationalist Cartesian standard, that is, in terms of mutually external, independent, and “outside” subject and object in modernity. Phenomenologically understood thinking is the thought-being of the person, a process, a flow, a river of representations and accompanying experiences, perceptions, and fantasies. The phenomenologist is always inside consciousness. The external world is not beyond its limits, but at its boundary.

Within the structure of consciousness, phenomenologists distinguish noesis (νόησις)—that is, the holos (ὅλος), the integrity of the very vital and cognitive act, simultaneously including the intention of consciousness (intentio), its directedness, the representation (Vorstellung) that arises in the process of the intentional turn toward the world, and that which becomes the object (the “content of the intentional act,” Inhalt des intentionalen Akten), the point of fixation of the knowing gaze, called in phenomenology “noema” (νόημα).

Is there, in the phenomenological act, a source of the gaze, a point from which the beams of the searchlight radiate to examine the sphere of consciousness and its surroundings? In other words, is there something (or someone) that looks and represents? Dasha was very fond of this important and elegant phenomenological problematic of Heidegger’s, which we repeatedly analyzed in our family from different angles and in different contexts. And she gave a witty and enigmatic answer to the question of the “who” or “what” of Dasein.

To grasp who or what this someone or something is, to understand something about this unnameable “subject” of the subject, who by all signs peers into the depths of human Dasein, enters into it, hides there, and gives signs of itself—is possible only if Dasein refuses. The enigmatic title of her musical project, “Dasein may refuse,” comes up again.

Ideas of what in modernity was called “subject” and “object” become more complex, flexible, and intricate in phenomenology. Who first sends an impulse of interaction toward the conditionally “external world”? Is it the human being? In what capacity? Autonomously and self-sufficiently? What transforms a fragment on the periphery of vision into the center of attention? And how—with what forces and “helpers”—do we do this? (Though bringing an object-representation into the center of attention and fixing this representation is still not thinking proper, but only its structural component.) What, then, is thinking?

Heidegger speaks of something mysterious that draws and at the same time turns away from the human being, hides, touches him more essentially than any being, addresses him essentially, seeks him and demands him. This mysterious principle “touches” man and “arrives,” increasing, “fulfilling its coming” and “stamping” our essence (unser Wesen … geprägt), making us human. What is this source of our presence, our existence, our essence?

To this question we, together with Dasha, can respond only indirectly.

We live within an Orthodox culture, and our interest in a German philosopher who formally rejected Christianity may appear problematic. But if one looks more attentively, one can notice that many movements of Heidegger’s thought have direct analogues in our Orthodox tradition—especially in the monastic ascetic tradition—if we only understand that the elusive, yet at the same time alluring, attractive something beyond the concrete act of perception-experience of the world, on the flip side of the phenomenon, is nothing other than the call of God and the inner pull toward Him. In other words, Heidegger’s existential analysis can quite well be correlated with the stages of noetic work, the search for God by a soul craving the higher world, as understood in the Orthodox tradition.

Jobim May Refuse

What, then, is Dasein if we describe it poetically? It is the thin, subtle element of the life of human consciousness. It is the play, the flow of a river, choice, the free arrangement of one’s representations, hierarchies, and preferences, their discarding, mixing, and reconfiguration into new constructions… Perhaps Dasein is what Antônio Carlos Jobim sang about in “Águas de Março” (“Waters of March”—March is autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, where the great bossa nova composer wrote his songs[33]):

It’s a tree, it’s a rock,
It’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of a stump,
It’s a little alone.
It’s a shard of glass,
It’s life, it’s the sun,
It’s the night, it’s death,
It’s the trap, it’s the hook (…)
It’s the waters of March, closing the summer.
It’s the promise that I’ll live in your heart.

É pau, é pedra,
é o fim do caminho
É um resto de toco,
é um pouco sozinho
É um caco de vidro,
é a vida, é o sol
É a noite, é a morte,
é o laço, é o anzol
(…)
São as águas de março fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida no teu coração.

From early childhood Dasha listened to the classics of bossa nova, since this is her father’s favorite musical direction. Later she began to read Heidegger and to listen to endless analyses and translations of his texts—above all in family conversations, at seminars and lectures by Alexander Dugin. Somehow it happened that Jobim’s meditative, impressionistic music, his refined and restrained musical language—so contrasting with the explosive, piercing meaning of his words—was superimposed on Heidegger’s motives of human “thrownness” into the world and coincided with the German philosopher’s insight into man’s poetic relation to the things of the world and his idea that only man knows of his own finitude, of death, and knows this as the only, unique, living being in the world. Heidegger’s existential of “being-toward-death” and Jobim’s idea of saudade, borrowed from Portuguese poetry, resonate in an astonishing way.

The enigmatic sadness of saudade—an untranslatable word (the “presence of absence”) with a multi-layered field of meaning including nostalgia for people and events of the past, unquenchable longing for lost loved ones, yearning for lost love, for people and possibilities, the experience of loss of the present, tenderness and sadness (tristeza), joyless mood, melancholy, mourning—contrasts in Jobim with a light, seemingly carefree, atonal minor-major melody inspired by the impressionist academic tradition (Chopin, Debussy, Brahms) and reinforced by the rhythms of cool jazz and samba.

In short, at some point in our lives we entered, in a single breath, both the philosophical Escorial of Heidegger and the melancholic halls of Brazilian bossa nova. And here Dasha was with us.

The Ideal City of the Soul (“The Castle of the Soul,” “the Spark,” and Abditus Mentis… and Other Beautiful Themes)

If we try to characterize Heidegger’s central notion of Dasein (“being-there”), it appears as the sphere of human freedom, of the fullness of human inclusion in the world understood not as an external object confronting consciousness but as the inner presence of consciousness-in-the-world or world-in-consciousness—a presence that reveals itself in the instant experience of “here-and-now,” that manifests in language, in mood, in the movement of the soul, that illumines actions, lives in philosophical and political practices. Dasein is the state of total experiencing by the human being of the moment of “being-there” and at the same time the foretaste of meeting some special, unnamed (by Heidegger) attentive being, a weighty observer whose secret presence quietly reveals itself from within us, at the boundary of our consciousness, just beyond our gaze, and directs it.

Martin Heidegger was born into a Catholic family, in 1909 intended to take monastic vows in a Jesuit monastery, then studied theology for two years before transferring to the philosophical faculty at the University of Freiburg. Naturally, he read the works of medieval theologians and took a close interest in German mystics—Johannes Tauler, Meister Eckhart, Dietrich of Freiberg, Jakob Böhme.

Needless to say, all these circumstances allowed us to consider Heidegger from the perspective of that crucial problematic which had been outlined by medieval German theologians and philosophers. For us, acquaintance with this problematic was not only a sign of intellectual refinement but also a key to phenomenology itself, to understanding Heidegger’s phenomenology, and above all to the problem of the subject—including the Radical Subject[34]—in the history of humanity and in the contemporary world.

These themes, especially the theme of the Radical Subject, born in Alexander Dugin’s mind, perhaps in conversations with his intellectual friends (Heydar Jemal and Evgeny Golovin) in his youth, by his own account illuminated his thinking with a kind of grand philosophical illumination. These themes figured often in our family’s professional and private life and activity.

The main theses of the religious mystics relevant to understanding the Radical Subject were reduced principally to how the German mystics interpreted Aristotle’s distinction between active and passive intellect and their relation in God and in man.

Each of the German mystics “invented” something philosophically beautiful, vivid, and valuable in this perspective. Meister Eckhart wrote about the spark (Vünkelin) of the soul—the point of unity between man and God, about the light of the Godhead that falls into the depths of the human heart, into the inner enclosure of its castle (Seelenburg), creating the ideal city of the soul through which a person, in the Christian perspective, comes into direct contact with God, is born as the Son, and experiences the actualization of the Son. Jakob Böhme spoke of Revelation that strikes the human soul like a shower, like lightning, like a golden string of divine touch. Only the one who is sensitive to this moment, who awaits it, who hears the call and experiences the longing for such a union, will not remain an eternal profane standing at the threshold of his own inner palace but will make his way to the treasures of his soul.

Dietrich of Freiberg (Teutonicus) revived the question “Who thinks in us?” Following Aristotle and Hegel, who believed that in the philosopher it is God Himself who philosophizes, Dietrich noted that two types of intellect operate in man: the active—nous poiētikos, the “creative mind,” and the passive—nous pathētikos, the “suffering mind,” which reflects, “mirrors” the active intellect. The active intellect in the human being was regarded as a projection of the unmoved mover—God—thinking through us. In man this intellect is created, while in God it is uncreated. Therefore God thinks in man through intermediaries—the angelic hierarchies. The active intellect is thus akin to a created divinity in man, a divinity by grace.

The mystery of the union of the divine and human minds takes place in the secret room of a person’s inner chambers, in the hidden part of his mind—abditus mentis, which never slumbers, remaining in unceasing noetic work, activity, and prayer, thereby preserving the structures of the world in wholeness and inviolability.

Jakob Böhme considered the union of the human mind in the “divine spark” to be simultaneously a descent of divine participation toward the human being and an ascent of the human soul beyond earthly possibilities, a rising toward intelligibility, toward the divine mind, where the human soul, partaking of Divine Wisdom, takes part in the creation and salvation of the world. Incidentally, Böhme called the end of the world the “time of lilies” (Lilienzeit), the harvest of mystical illumination and the acquisition by the human soul of a heavenly dimension.

In other words, the religious mystics of the Middle Ages spoke quite openly and fearlessly about the presence of God in the human mind, believing that man receives from God the gift of being a creator, while God comes to self-realization in the human soul, following the idea of the Apostle Paul: “God became man so that man might become God.” Do we not see here a hidden, unspoken analogy with Heidegger’s reflections on thinking? And is not the influence of this theological-mystical tradition on Dugin’s understanding of the Radical Subject and on Daria’s reflections about the escalation of subjectivity in the lost modern world quite evident?

Unbearable Everydayness

Heidegger believed that modern man’s tendency to remain within the lulling structures of everydayness (doxa, Alltäglichkeit) is only the first, ordinary side of the human being. The second is the possibility of spiritual awakening, of passing over to the side of active presence-of-Self in oneself—that is, to the side of the active intellect.

All of us, together with Dasha, rejoiced to discover in Heidegger the theme of the active intellect (in the spirit of Aristotle and the German mystics)—the principle of divine inspiration which grounds the potential of a strong, stable human subject and his path toward transfiguration, toward “metanoia.”

With Heidegger it turned out that the structures of “everydayness” are not autonomous, that they are pierced by a sharp, splitting gaze from within, that in man there is an unknown to him, apophatic and unnameable dimension that blows up his apparent well-being, bringing into existence an incomprehensible nostalgia in its origins and aims.

In our family philosophical “layouts” it turned out that even in Heidegger’s phenomenological process (noesis) there passes through an unnamed mysterious figure of an invisible guardian, standing at the doors of the “inner altar,” the “secret room” in man, guarding and watching over him. And further we see that this same bright shadow extends over the circle of man’s “thrownness” into a concrete “here,” into his Dasein. It likewise overshadows Antônio Carlos Jobim’s meditations, his saudade and tristeza.

And then it is Dasein itself that addresses us through them, using in its rich vocabulary the structures of day and night, of water, of road, of glass, of sun, of life and love and death, and even the gesture of that invisible conductor, the watchman of being, who guards and directs our noetic gaze.

Saving Dasein

We can choose another interpretation of what Dasha meant by the formula “Dasein may refuse.”

Once we discussed with her the fact that Dasein is by no means guaranteed to us; it may open to us or it may refuse, as a bride refuses a groom. Dasein may turn away. Then the human being remains in a state of inauthenticity, impenetrable everydayness and banality, in the clichés of ordinary consciousness, of doxa, in what Heidegger called Gerede, idle talk, meaningless chatter.

Then Dasein turns into das Man, that is, into a state in which it is not “I” who lives with piercing intensity and contrast, but “one lives somehow by itself”; in which it is not “I” who speaks and not “I” who thinks, but “it is spoken” and “it is thought” by someone indefinite—apparently by the anonymous “they” of everyone and no one.

The alternative to Dasein is not death, but the curse of existence in the concentration camp of the modern world, in the zoo of beings, beyond authenticity, truth, and thought—in the labyrinths of the endlessly looping record of das Man.

Thinking requires not beings, but the being of beings. “The being of beings means the presence of the present and the availability of what is at hand,”[35] Heidegger tells us. Perhaps by now we understand what this means. If we take into account the influence of the German mystics on Heidegger, then perhaps, using their language, we can speak about the presence within the human being of the breath of the Godhead or of gods, who endowed, for instance, the ancient Greek hero with insight into the future, a sure hand in battle, and who guarded and guided heroes—that is, only those among them who went beyond everydayness and beheld other worlds, other heavens, other dimensions and powers.

And this is precisely what it means to be a hero. Dasha dreamed of becoming a hero in this sense—to be overshadowed by presence, to cross the boundary of the merely human in the name of the movement toward perfection, to remain with her Homeland and her spirit to the very end and against everything.

Are We a Meaningless Sign?

“We are a meaningless sign, and feel no pain,”[36] says Hölderlin, quoted by Heidegger, about us—the people who dwell in the painful state of everydayness, lack of awakening, insensitivity to the perverted turn in the decline of humanity.

A sign of what are we? And do we not feel pain because we are not on that shore, not in that region where the element of true thought, true understanding lives? Why do we become the futile sign of something accidental, inessential, meaningless?

Heidegger gives a penetrating and troubled answer. And what answer do we give today?

Perhaps today, in the situation of war, we will begin to feel and understand something—to feel pain, to be wounded by the situation in humanity that we, people, have allowed by our silent consent? asks Dasha in her Diary.

Perhaps we have hope that we will choose the authentic. For it has happened that we have suddenly passed into that region where the element of thought is about to open, where historical events (Ereignis) are already occurring, where myths are laid bare, where theories, concepts, principles, paradigms, and armies meet and clash.

Do we not now see clearly and distinctly the globalist order’s assault upon us, the colonialism of the Anglo-Saxon civilization? Do we not now stand witness to the new rise of the idea of a multipolar world, of the flowering diversity of civilizations that opposes the Western mono-concept of a global humanity from which life will be pumped out?

We increasingly agree that the Western civilization’s development program, directed by a group of global oligarchs, financiers, and political technologists of dubious intellectual and moral standing, who present themselves as a worldwide center of decision-making, is absolutely unsatisfactory for humanity. We see ever more clearly the signs that liberal globalists are elaborating and imposing crude and brazenly anti-human views of man, that they see the meaning of world history in the criminal transfer of all intelligent functions to machines and artificial intelligence, and that, through controlled epidemics, gender change, genetic modifications, electronic prostheses, and so on, they plan to carry out the extermination of the human as such.

They mix and discriminate against the traditions and religions of ethnic groups and peoples, introducing insane standards of modified people without kin or tribe, and develop strategies for destroying families and states, languages and cultures.

This program has its philosophical expression as well. What is Postmodernity if not a call for the dissolution of the human being, the blurring of his identity? And does not Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) prepare civilization for a post-human reign of soulless machines? Politics and philosophy are inseparably linked. We are not a meaningless sign, but they are forcibly making us one.

Opening the Sacred Storehouses of Tradition

Daria hoped that today, in spite of all obstacles, we are witnessing the magical opening of storerooms holding humanity’s intellectual achievements. She believed that the time has come to learn to bring into our reflections on pressing political and practical tasks the themes of high philosophy, theology, religion, mysticism, eschatology, and art.

She was convinced that in understanding the modern world, the themes of Platonism are relevant, as is clarifying the reasons for the modern world’s aggressive anti-Platonism; she believed that the apology of Christianity has become urgent again and that we must understand what motivates the furious attacks on it. She saw that mystical ideas and currents are scattered everywhere in modernity. But what is their true nature—where are the treasures of genuine wisdom, and where are simulacra, parodies, and perversions? Dasha hoped that humanity would be able to draw more fully on the inexhaustible intellectual resources of the traditions of different peoples.

Dasha’s father wrote Noomakhia, a grand epic in 24 volumes about world cultures and civilizations, and proposed that we begin a conversation about various Logoi, psychologies, structures of man, spiritual and psychic configurations of national and ethnic worlds, worldviews, and understandings of the world.

Following him, Daria dreamed of learning and teaching people to think multidimensionally and multipolarly; she dreamed of a genuine encounter with authentic thought and wanted to be called upon by a true idea addressing its call to her soul. She strove to expose the manipulations of the sellers of intellect in the service of global elites, who blow up our discourses, turn them into chaos, and send them into oblivion with the help of false accusations, falsified conclusions and annotations, direct prohibitions, and taboos.

With paid voices of false interpretations and glosses on serious topics they cut us off from truth and wisdom, flood the world with commissioned judgments, sponsored theories, and “prophecies.” They place a veto on thought, impose an embargo on books, and prescribe sanctions against truly (not “liberally”) free thought.

Dasha fought against this. She was a true little warrior of Tradition. And she remained faithful to it to the end. It is symbolic that she died on her way back from the “Tradition” festival. She wanted to live and to die within the structures of the Spirit. With all the tragedy of her beautiful and radiant life—cut short by the forces of darkness on the rise—she achieved her goal.

On the last day of her life she said to her father: “Papa, I’ve realized that I am a warrior.” And that is what she was—a warrior of Tradition.

Taking the Kingdom of Heaven by Storm

The depth and wide horizon of an intelligent overview of the world situation are inaccessible to everyday consciousness, which overfills modern analytics. The mind of the modern political technologist or expert bursts at the seams and cannot contain the transcendental dimension of what is happening; he does not know or understand myth; he does not know the cultural codes of peoples; he ignores the secret logic of history, the depths of philosophy, tradition, and religion. He brushes these aside as something “unscientific.”

Yet myth, culture, worldview, religion, tradition—these are the main, most essential part of the life of the human being in any civilization. They are his structure, the framework of his being. To remove, exclude, or silence all this is to take away from a human being what Postmodernity calls the “grand narrative” and what we, supporters of Tradition, call the “true life,” the “authentic existence” of a person or of a people, of a civilization or a culture.

Today we observe, for the first time in many decades, the breakthroughs of a paradoxical invasion of myth, history, philosophy, Tradition, and religion into the territory of political science and international relations, which in the past fifty years has been mastered only by the pragmatic, dry, calculating understanding.

And, conversely, we cannot fail to notice the offensive absence of deep thought where it should have been, where it is still vitally in demand. It is utterly incomprehensible why institutions such as the Institute of Philosophy are still in the hands of the postmodernist enemy. This fortress has not yet been taken, unlike Azovstal.

There Are Still Birds in the Heart

Daria believed that it is precisely now that the time has come for us—thinkers of the limit, of sacred service, heirs of Christ. She considered it necessary to undertake a super-effort and return myth, Tradition, geopolitics, philosophy, culture, and thought as such to lost peoples and to ourselves, so as to build worlds of a new heavenly order on earth. It was precisely this incursion of culture and philosophy into the territory of dry political management that was her humanitarian task, her goal.

She reflected on distance—on a possible alternative to modern liberal individualism with its characteristic estrangement of man from the divine design for him, from meaning and purpose in history. In one of the compositions on her album “Dasein may refuse” the words of the Romanian Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara sound: “There are still birds in the heart.” She wanted to let those birds out of her heart. And for this she was killed, annihilated by ignoble nonentities with faces warped by hatred and drugs… And in fact, it was no longer even they… Behind them stood the intelligence services and information and computing centers of the global West, the land of the setting sun… A portrait of the underworld. And in its center—its master himself, Satan.

The Street

It so happened that Dasha’s death made her a true hero of our society. Many people in Russia and beyond shuddered at the monstrous crime whose victim was a young Russian philosopher and beauty. Intellectuals and ordinary people alike discovered her books, notes, articles, poems, and songs. Her works began to be translated into Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Japanese. Her charm conquered everyone. She became a symbol, an image, a horizon of what many parents would wish for their children, what the children themselves would like to become—bearers of luminous and elevated thought, of pure intentions and moral truth.

In Melitopol, the last city that Dasha visited during her trip to Donbass in June 2022, a street formerly called “University Street” was named in her honor—at the initiative of the residents themselves and with the consent of the administration.

And on the façade of the University building there now shines her enormous image—a portrait of a graceful and fragile young woman—painted by the wonderful Russian artist Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt, who had known Dasha since early childhood. Next to this image is an inscription that has become a formula for an entire generation of Russians, especially for those who went to defend the Idea and the Motherland in Donbass, into the sacred trenches of the great war with the modern world: “Dasha is our soul.”

As I write these lines, the outcome of the decisive battle is still unclear. Everything trembles on an edge. And the image of Daria Dugina on Daria Dugina Street stands at the frontier, on that philosophical strip where the line of division and union passes—between one and the other, our own and alien, heavenly and earthly.

As befits a true hero, Daria Dugina is on the front line. And so it will always be.

(Translated from the Russian)

Endnotes

[1] Geworfenheit — “abandonment,” one of Martin Heidegger’s most important existential structures.

[2] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Dasha Dugina. Moscow: AST, 2023, p. 175.

[3] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Dasha Dugina, p. 413.

[4] For more on this, see A. Dugin’s lecture course The Phenomenology of Aristotle.

[5] In the Republic, Plato acknowledges that ignoramuses irritated by difficult truth generally tend to kill philosophers who descend to the bottom of the cave to free the prisoners from their illusions.

[6] Hardt, M., Negri, A. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Moscow: Cultural Revolution (Kultúrnaya Revolyútsiya), 2006.

[7] Guénon, R. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Moscow: Belovod’e, 1994.

[8] Deleuze, G. The Logic of Sense. Moscow: Academic Project, 2011, pp. 11–12.

[9] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Dasha Dugina, p. 295.

[10] Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in Works in 2 vols., vol. 2. Moscow: Mysl’, 1996, p. 40.

[11] Guénon, R. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.

[12] Meillassoux, Q. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Ekaterinburg; Moscow: Kabinetny Ucheny, 2016.

[13] Brassier, R. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

[14] Land, N. Spirit and Teeth. Perm: Gile Press, 2020. Complete edition: Land, N. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. London: Urbanomic, 2011.

[15] Yergin, D. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Moscow: Alpina Publisher, 2018.

[16] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Daria Dugina, p. 175.

[17] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Daria Dugina, p. 241.

[18] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Daria Dugina, p. 180.

[19] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Daria Dugina, p. 180.

[20] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Daria Dugina, p. 387.

[21] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart: The Diary of Daria Dugina, p. 359.

[22] Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000, p. 130.

[23] Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 130.

[24] Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 133.

[25] Evola, J. Ride the Tiger. St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dal’, 2005.

[26] Dugina, D. The Bogs and Heights of My Heart. The Diary of Daria Dugina, p. 244.

[27] Interview with M. Heidegger in L’Express, 20–26 October 1969, pp. 79–85.

[28] Interview with M. Heidegger in L’Express.

[29] Interview with M. Heidegger in L’Express.

[30] Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 134.

[31] “That which calls for thought turns away from human beings. It withdraws from them by withholding itself from them. Yet what is withheld is always already held before us. What withdraws in the mode of withholding does not disappear. But how can we know even the least about that which withdraws in such a manner? How do we come to speak of it at all? What withdraws refuses arrival. And yet—withdrawal is not nothing. Withdrawal here is withholding, and as such it is an event. What withdraws can concern human beings more essentially and lay claim to them more intimately than any present thing that strikes and affects them.”
— Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 134.

[32] “But if we, as those who are thus drawn, find ourselves on the way toward… toward that which draws us, then our essence is already shaped—shaped by this ‘on the way toward…’ As those who are thus shaped, we ourselves point toward the withdrawing. We are only ourselves, and are only who we are, insofar as we point into the withdrawing. This pointing is our essence. We are, insofar as we point into the withdrawing. As the one who points there, the human being is the pointer. (…) The human being is a sign.”
— Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 135.

[33] Dasha listened to the classics of bossa nova from early childhood, since it was her father’s favorite musical genre.

[34] Dugin, A. The Radical Subject and Its Double. Moscow: Eurasian Movement, 2009.

[35] ISein des Seienden heißt: Anwesen des Anwesenden, Präsenz des Präsente.”
— Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 141.
(“The being of beings means: the presencing of what is present, the presence of that which presents.”)

[36] “Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos / Schmerzlos sind wir.”
— Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 135.
(“A sign we are, without interpretation / Painless we are.”)