Thread by @Porfyreos

I look forward to this book, and hope Dugin will answer. As one who aprecciate both Dugin and Upton, who I discovered at about the same time, and who both have had a significent influence on me, I have been waiting for this encounter for many years.

Inspired by Upton’s critique of Dugin, I will add some thoughts and clarifications relevant to what he brings up.

Dugin is not a bourgeois intellectual trying to present a coherent system meant for everybody as if everybody were equal. But he is not an Apollonian initiate speaking only to the aristocrats of the soul either.

He is a Dionysian initiate traversing different levels of reality, creating clearings, liberating light trapped in dark places. There is an esoteric and exoteric side to him.

Speaking to spiritually superior minds he will appeal directly to their will toward freedom, speaking to inferior minds he will emphasize the need of discipline and loyalty to superior ideas and their superior representatives.

The Fourth Political Theory and Eurasianism is not the same. Eurasianism is his suggestion for 4PT applied to the Russian context, it is not something he tries to impose in other civilizations of the world, who should have their own projects.

Highlighting particularly Crowley as if he was a significant influence on Dugin is misleading, which anyone who has read much of Dugin can confirm. Dugin has praised elements from thousands of intellectual and esoteric figures, also figures he strongly disagrees with.

Dugin’s critique of our notions of spirit and the divine today and his move toward chaos is a problem with the inauthentic simulacrum and dead letter of the spirit and the divine, not the spirit and the divine itself.

His approach is to be true to his purpose, in fidelity to revelations given in the open, the clearing, which he consciously provocatively terms chaos.

Dugin’s language is consciously antinomian to save the spirit from the milquetoast NPC and grant it to the hero who can think instead of automatically reacting based on associations.

Of course, there will be plenty of smoking guns to find for everybody who want to associate Dugin with something bad, to make a case in bad faith.

As there may be tensions in a work of art culminating in something sublime, uncontained, but integrating, sacred, with a sense of purpose, so there may be when your life is a work of art, as it is for the initiate and his words.

The question to be asked is not whether or not Dugin is coherent with his words, but whether or not he seems to have a purpose as an integrating and refreshing force in the contexts where he chooses to operate.

It’s not my main concern to offer advice to Muslims about what to prioritize but let me offer my thoughts about Upton’s critique of Dugin also here.

Dugin is aware of the origin of Al-Qaida, ISIS, and generally the concept of radical Islam used as a catspaw serving US interests, and that the background of 9/11 is different than the lies served in the main stream media and academic discourse.

However, in the game of power politics Dugin is willing to employ the weapons of his enemies against them if there is an opportunity for that. They manufactured the lies and the groups based on them, while Dugin tries to creatively turn the lies and these groups against them.

If a liberal unipolar order is the main enemy, and they seek to win by a strategy of divide and conquer, it makes sense that every other interest stop fighting against each other. Other differences can be settled later when the most pressing existential threat is removed.

As for Upton’s second point, Dugin recognizes that the common man today is so far removed from God that to talk as if he is an immediate presence is inauthentic. People talk about God from the position of social conformity and inertia.

Therefore, you have to meet the people on their horizontal, passional level, and from there gradually reinforce a connection to the vertical axis. The absolute will first be encountered in the particular you authentically can love.

Starting with the unique Volk, the Narod may not be so different approach from what Upton himself advocates in “The Shadow of the Rose”, the romantic approach of encountering God in the unique woman, except that the last option is only available to the aristocrat of the soul.

I’ve always been repelled by the idea of a relation to God as submitting to a Him. This may be the spiritual approach for a feminine spirituality, but for me it feels gay.

Dugin is a magical idealist; ideas as powers striving against each other, where the absolute individual, the magus, the prophet, the philosopher, the king, serves the purpose of integration. This may be a problem for Upton and Islam, but it is not a problem for me.

Let’s now watch the last of Upton’s videos on Dugin, and then I will add my comments.

Dugin was correct in his assessment that a war between Russia and the USA was inevitable, where Ukraine and Syria lately have played part in this war, which so far has been cold, and which hopefully will never get hot.

Partly because of Dugins work to prepare Russia for this encounter they have been able to stand their ground. His purpose as a public figure has partly been to instill courage and readiness for war in the Russian people.

The irresponsible Western leaders seems less likely to provoke an all-out nuclear war against a Russia perceived to be a bit mad and unpredictable. They showed more diplomatic tact towards the Soviet Union than they do against the measured talk of the Russian leaders of today.

As Dugin says; in order to prevent war, you have to prepare for war. Russia needs to have both credible means and credible resolution to act if they want to survive.

Upton quotes the old text of Dugin “The Knight Templars of the Proletariat” as if this is his current position, which is a bit misleading.

There seems to have been an excess of the Titanic element in Dugin’s early career. This is what is to be expected in the initiation of a hero. The question is whether these titanic elements will be or has been overcome in the alchemical process of his personal development.

To measure this we would have to judge his current position in good faith, which would mean the Dugin from “In search of the Dark Logos”, “Noomachia” and open Platonism, and his interpretation of history as a strife between Apollo and Dionysus against Cybele and the Titans.

For those who want to understand Dugin’s current Weltanschauung, his NOOMAHIA lectures is a good place to start.
youtube.com/playlist?list=…

The path Dugin invites us to follow is not without material and spiritual risks. Dionysism often got perverted in the ancient world, ultimately failed. The dream of multipolarity may in the end fail as the Concert of Europe did. But what is safe today anyway?

Whatever spiritual dangers threatens Dugin are the same that threatens me, dare is say threatens us all. I have yet to see a good critique of Dugin showing an intimate understanding of his project, including this well-meant critique by Charles Upton.

An intimate understanding of a man like Dugin is hard, and not only intellectually. Those far away in spirit will be repelled due to the distance, and those close in spirit is likely to be repelled due to the proximity.

The last is perhaps the greatest tragedy. Both those distant and close will have problems to treat him objectively. It is sad seeing a noble man like Upton, who I respect, with the best of intentions misrepresent a great man.

Dugin has been a central concern for me for the last ten years, and I have attempted to understand his works as a whole, in addition to his hermeneutical context.

Which among other influences include Nietzsche, Plato, Heidegger, Guénon, Evola, and the Moscow circle who had a strong personal impact of him; Dzhemal, Golovin, and Mamleev. The first five thinkers were central concerns before I started to read Dugin.

As a young man I read a lot, from all kinds of schools, which helps in understanding a ferocious reader like Dugin. But a more important key to understanding him is the sense of being on a similar path, wrestling with the same angels, forging a particular existential mood.

I can identify with the position of the radical subject and the metaphysics of pain described by Dugin in “In Search for the Dark Logos”. The pain becomes the compass leading to the existential and intellectual nourishment you need, which for me after a long journey led to Dugin.

The enigma of Dugin