From Mind to Multipolarity

An epistemological note

Map of the world by Claudius Ptolemy, c. 150 AD

• The world is not reducible to the categorization of illusion. The world arises from consciousness in communion—interacting and combining qualia—as it intersects with primordial chaos and the natural manifold.¹ For things to manifest in that way, consciousness must be a priori permeated with an ideal, Platonic capacity related to ordering.

• In other terms: for the system to survive, its complexity must be superior to that of the environment, which is defined by variety.

• A priori because as man extracts order from the quantum domain, he acquires experience and forms an identity, an intentionality.

• Intentionality is the concomitant “towardness” embedded in the mind.

• Phenomenal objects which consciousness acts upon also act upon each other and upon consciousness—stacking non-linear resonance.

• The married pair of subject-object is unstable and continuous, for it is a process. Sometimes it can convert into direct opposition between the poles. But there is not one without the other. The synthesis of subject and object is not static, but a struggle. A dialectic that unfolds as the drama that is history.

• A nation springs from the soil and a landscape. The individuals who compose the nation are, in turn, composed by it.

• Oswald Spengler explains that civilizations differ not only in outward forms—such as costume—but more importantly in their fundamental perceptions of mathematics, time, and space.

• The central thesis is not simply “civilization = living organism.” Instead, building from this, it moves on to the mysterious, more or less atomic nature of the different civilizations, each of which owes its origin to the ur-idea formed from the so-called prime symbols, that is, the spatial, physical, and geographical elements emerging out of the established subject-object relationship. It was also separately characterized by Petr Savitsky as “place-development” or “topogenesis” (месторазвитие). As Spengler was a proponent of the correction and deepening of German-Russian relations, Savitsky was, not by chance, a co-founder of the Eurasianist school.

• A civilization capable of being sovereign will form its own unique cosmos of meaning (Logos). Multipolarity means cosmic pluralism.

• The ideal epistemic capacity of consciousness—the soul—rests at the core of the individual being, for it possesses personal free will and its own “karma.” Yet the individual is far from an atom; it is a complex composition of multiple realities: mind, physical space, ethnos, and historical continuity.

• The individual always, necessarily, springs from a greater whole; both in the sense of the co-constitution of physical reality and the historical game of signs which he is a part of and takes part in—but since a distinctive borderline between the elements at play simply does not exist, it is all one single symphony.

• The dialectic of history is, therefore, parallel to that of the universe.

• An individual self, on its own scale, can indeed assume the path of total impartiality, effacing itself by overcoming—internally and completely—the disorder of the world and that of the collective.

• Another pathway lies on the scale of collectives, which are by nature disordered because of their organic character. From the “ideal” capacity of consciousness, the notion of “ideocracy” naturally descends as its extension into political form—an outward continuation of ourselves into others, expressed in the domain of pure concepts. The communion of consciousness seeks order so that it may act in the world. Whether, on the universal scale, it can truly envision itself in this way and thereby deepen this capacity and process—that is the decisive question.

1. For a mathematical model of consciousness, see here.