A Review of Martin Heidegger: Philosophy of Another

Beginning by Alexander Dugin

July 11, 2015 - Culture, Dugin, Eurasianism, Philosophy - 4 comments

Forty years after his death Martin Heidegger (1889 1976) remains a lightning-rod for controversy.
Heidegger might be the central philosophical figure of the Twentieth Century, as many of his
enthusiasts have claimed. He might be a polysyllabic blowhard, as Theodor W. Adorno himself
an accomplished polysyllabic blowhard contended in his Jargon of Authenticity (1973). Whether
Heidegger is one or the other, the man has exercised considerable influence over the last four
decades over the philosophical discourse calling itself post-structuralism, post-modernism, or
deconstruction. Quite apart from all that the author of Being and Time (1927) has recently
inveigled his name into the news again on account of his Black Notebooks.
These notebooks, issued in the ongoing uniform edition of his works, belong to the war-years. They
appear to bolster the accusation that Heidegger invested himself heavily in National Socialist
ideology. The Black Notebooks have not yet been translated into English although there can be
little doubt that such an event is forthcoming, but a recent sympathetic study of Heidegger, by a
Russian writer who is no stranger to controversy, has rather surprisingly been translated for the
Anglosphere.
I refer to Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning by Alexander Dugin (born
1962), translated by Nina Kouprianova (Radix / Washington Summit Publishers, 465 Pages, with an
introduction by Paul Gottfried).
Dugin gained currency with the American New Right through his earlier book The Fourth Political
Theory (English, 2012). Dugin identified Western Europe and the USA as the two aggressive
halves of a single, ideologically driven power (Atlantis) that seeks global Imperium. The Fourth
Political Theory has inspired vehement denunciation in Neoconservative journalism for being the
blueprint of an ideological cult (National Review). Dugin for his part equates Liberalism with
everything corrupt in the modern world. He hopes for active concerted subversion and suppression
of liberalism, which can only mean subversion and suppression of Western Europe and the USA.
Advocating an anti-liberal Russian ethnostate that reasserts its influence in Eastern and Middle
Europe, Dugin earns plaudits from the American Far-Right, such as the white nationalists who run

the Counter Currents website. Any sane assessment of Dugins Heidegger must steer clear of this
often hyperbolic crossfire, but no matter how objective the reviewer manages to be, his observations
will undoubtedly provoke a hot-tempered response from one side or the other, if not both.
Dugin emerges from no vacuum: The Russian critique of the West stems from the split between
Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whom many readers of
Traditionalist leaning greatly admire, blamed Western ideas for Russias woes already in the midNineteenth Century. Dostoyevskys spiritual child, the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874 1938),
devoted his authorship to a sustained attack against what amounted, in his view, to the wicked
Americanization of the planet. Ironically, Berdyaev attracted his largest audiences in French and
English Lenin had exiled him from the USSR and he lived out his life in Paris, dying there in 1948.
Berdyaevs thought, which now and again informs the Western right-wing indictment of liberalism,
runs oddly in parallel with Heideggers, at least where it concerns the emptiness and inhumanity of
the modern world. Vladimir Putin, who alludes to Berdyaev, also alludes to Dugin, who, in the
National Review article quoted earlier, is supposed to be Putins sinister advisor the Rasputin to
his Alexandra, as it were. So much for the tangled background: In what lies the interest, if any, in
Dugins Heidegger study?
Dugin forecasts his essential point in the books subtitle: The Philosophy of Another Beginning.
According to Dugin, Heideggers opus of widest currency, Being and Time, far from summing up its
authors thought, merely consummates the philosophers first, but by no means most important,
phase, dominated by even while departing from Edmund Husserls phenomenology of
consciousness. Dugin narrates how Heideggers second phase did not begin immediately after the
publication of Being and Time, but slowly gestated before expressing itself in lectures, essays, and
short books beginning with the Introduction to Metaphysics (1934) and finding a larger, nonsystematic form in the thematically varied meditations on essential concepts gathered together
under the title of Forest Paths (1950) and in stand-alone essays from the 1940s and 50s on
language and poetry.
In Being and Time, Heidegger articulated his philosophical anthropology, defining human nature as
Dasein or There-Being, and emphasizing temporality as central to self-awareness and the
cognition of the world. After the Kehre or Turn, Heidegger wrote less about human being and
more about Being, as something prior to humanity, to which the authentic consciousness responds.

A penchant for etymological argument and quirks of orthography betoken the new approach.
Heidegger begins spelling Sein or Being with an archaic y in place of the modern i, as Seyn.
Dugin remarks that, in addition to the new emphasis on philology and etymology, Heidegger,
following up Friedrich Nietzsches earliest book, commences the explication of two themes: First, the
achievement of the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers of the Sixth Century BC in coming to grips
with Being; second, the failure, with its terrific consequences, of Western metaphysics, beginning
with Plato. The thesis taking up the two themes is that the metaphysical failure expresses itself as
technique, which Heidegger characterizes as a seductive but virulent diminution of consciousness.
Technique subordinates to itself everything or makes the attempt to do so; technique distorts and
enslaves, but it never delivers its promise. Thus far Dugins account of Heideggers post-Being and
Time phase rehearses nothing that readers might not find elsewhere, in idiomatic English, in the
secondary literature on the topic for example, in William Barretts Illusion of Technique (1976).
Dugin departs from other commentators in re-emphasizing the vehemence of Heideggers attack
on the metaphysical tradition, a destructive but unavoidable endeavor that clears the way for a new
and necessary type of thinking.
The metaphysical tradition, in Dugins reading of Heidegger, fell into irremediable error when Plato,
following the lead of Socrates, divided the world into phenomenal things and eternal forms, positing
the forms as more real than the things. Dugin, glossing Heidegger, writes: Plato, as well as
Socrates before him, and Aristotle after him, is the actual name and historical legalization of the
greatest catastrophe. Concerning the catastrophe, again glossing Heidegger, Dugin writes of
Plato how he reduces the basic operations of cognition to clear vision and recognition of ideas,
which are the heavenly models of things and phenomena. Things and phenomena become
objects. As Dugin puts it, contact with ideas presupposes being across from them they can only
be seen in this manner. Such a configuration inaugurates an era of very specific rationality, in
which man is no longer in the world, as he was in Pre-Socratic thinking; but rather man stands
before the world, studying it, but at the same time exiled from it and no longer participating in it.
Here is how Dugin sees it: Whereas for the Pre-Socratics, the cosmos had revealed itself vitally as
that, in which consciousness participated, and from which it drew its very life; for Plato and all postPlatonic philosophers as Dugin, taking Heidegger as his authority, upholds existence consists
of the mere reference of one contingent thing to another, lacking any significant structure. Thus
Aristotle, far from revising Plato by rejecting the eternality of the forms, simply took the next logical

step implied by Platos own theory. Aristotelianism, while entirely consonant with the direction in
which his teacher had taken philosophy, constituted nevertheless a decisive stage on the way to the
Wests cul-de-sac of nihilism. This summary of Dugin forces an important question for the
assessment both of Heidegger and his Russian commentator. Suspending the issue whether
Heideggers critique of Plato is valid, not only is Heidegger not the unique diagnostician of a longterm retraction of Western consciousness expressing itself finally as dogmatic Nominalism or
Nihilism; but neither can Heidegger claim chronological precedence among those other
diagnosticians
Berdyaev, for example, was active a decade or more before Heidegger ever came to public notice.
Berdyaev could see as well as Heidegger that technocracy could be nothing other than an inhuman
tyranny. Aspects of Heideggers anti-modern critique appear in English, as well as in German
Romanticism. Heidegger indeed saw himself as working in a continuum with the activity of certain
poets Friedrich Hlderlin and the Teutonic Symbolists such as Georg Trakl and Stefan George,
who took up in poetry where Hlderlin left off. Heidegger wrote essays explicating poems and
passages by Hlderlin, Trakl, and George. And what of Edmund Husserl (1859 1938),
Heideggers teacher? Husserls case against scientism in The Crisis of European Sciences (1936)
forecasts many elements of Heideggers work of the post-war period. Dugin comments that,
Heideggers phenomenology is phenomenological ontology, whereas Husserls general thought
remains within the framework of the theory of knowledge. Let it be said that Ren Gunons
Crisis of the Modern Age (1927), contemporary to the year with Being and Time, is more compact
and readable than its German counterpart.
What we might call Martinolatry hounds Dugins exposition. In the very least, Dugin writes,
Heidegger is the greatest contemporary thinker, joining the constellation of Europes best thinkers
from the Pre-Socratics to our time. Beyond that, Heidegger is not only the greatest [philosopher]
of them all; he is, according to Dugin, a prophet: The last prophet, the bridge to a new
philosophy; and, as if those encomia were insufficient, an eschatological figure whom the
encomiast regards as taking the phrase out of Dugins double inverted commas the envoy of
Being itself. Even for a reader sympathetic to Heideggers idiosyncratic presentation, such
hyperbole makes itself a stumbling block in the way of persuasion. So does the recurrent translatedto-English discussion of how Heideggers archaic German constructions might best be translated
into Russian, which paragraphs the publisher might harmlessly have omitted from the American
edition.

Dugins epochal Heidegger, making an end-run around the catastrophe of Platonism,

Aristotelianism, and Cartesianism, seeks to recover that authentic consciousness which participated
fully in Being. This herculean labor of redeeming the cognitive-existential fall of mankind entails,
among many other deeds, implicating religion in that fall. Dugin writes, Heidegger is convinced that
Christian philosophy is completely enslaved by the Platonic doctrine of ideas and Aristotelian logic,
which only serve the need to justify the Semitic religion. This assertion, which Dugin takes for a
fact, justifies the condescension with which Heidegger always treated Biblical religion and its
speculative offshoots. Even Heideggers lectures (1921) on St. Augustine condescend noticeably.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible to agree with Dugin when he paraphrases Heideggers
assessment of the modern trio of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant: They rehearse old notions in
recycled ways while contributing to the retraction of consciousness into a rigid framework what
Heidegger named Gestell (Scaffolding) and which he proposed as the characteristic mental
gesture of Post-Pre-Socratic thinking, so to speak. Dugin also works within the realm of plausibility
when he links scientism explicitly to the nihilistic tendency: Scientific thinking is one of the most
extreme forms of nihilist thought; that is, the kind of thought in which the question about the Being
of beings not only fails to be raised but cannot be raise.
Heideggers recovered, participatory consciousness, as Dugin reconstructs it, will root itself in a
redeemed Geviert or Fourfold. Dugin indeed gives Part 2 of The Philosophy of Another Beginning
the section-title, Das Geviert. One who comes to understand Das Geviert will also come to
understand the chasm between ontology and fundamental-ontology. The fundamental status of
Das Geviert in Heideggers philosophy is related to Heideggers hostility to Christian doctrine.
Western thinking has been a case of triplicity since Plato, but the new beginning requires the
passage from triplicity to The Fourfold. It is extremely important, Dugin writes, to understand
that Geviert does not amount to an ontic perception of the world. Elsewhere, Dugin writes, Geviert
is given to us like an open window to the abyss as the greatest gift, and it is assumed that we will
value it accordingly. Das Geviert is the apocalyptic wholeness of Sky, Gods, Men, and Earth.
Dugin arranges these elements in a chart where a St.-Andrews Cross joins them together, with Sky
and Gods left to right atop and Men and Earth left to right below.
In The Fourfold, Heidegger obviously returns not only to Pre-Socratic, but to pre-philosophical
terms. Something like The Fourfold structures the cosmos in Hesiods Theogony, in the Homers
epics, in Snorris Edda, and in Richard Wagners myth-based yet philosophically informed Ring of

the Nibelung. The Fourfold appears in the conceits of Heideggers favorite poets. Under The
Fourfold, the Sky establishes order. Earth serves as the stage of presence: Thanks to the
Earth, many things, objects, sensations become present, actual. The Gods function as demonic
messengers of Being such that their divinity endows on all of Being a certain kind of transparent
intoxication. Dugin quickly adds that Heidegger conceptualizes [his] gods outside any particular
religion, as manifestations of the ecstatic horizon of fundamental-ontology. For his part Man,
under The Fourfold, refuses the roles both of Cartesian subject and Marxian object-of-history; he
likewise disdains the Aristotelian office of rational animal. Dugins Heideggers Man fulfills a
quasi-priestly function, as a guardian of Seyn-Being, who embraces his Being-toward-death.
Consciousness operates in a zone of The Fourfold that Dugin, taking up Heideggers terminology,
designates as the In-Between.
Let us quietly take stock. That phrase, the In-Between, might strike an informed reader as oddly
familiar. It should and it bears on the question how original Dugins commentary on his master,
the gnomic Swabian, really is. Consider this passage from a non-Heideggerian source: God and
man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community, with its quaternarian
structure is, and is not, a datum of experience. For this writer, the quaternity, which is and is not a
datum of experience, is therefore also not a thing, and the discussion of it is not in the realm of what
Heidegger dismisses as the ontic. This non-Heideggerian source also remarks that
consciousness can only become aware of the quaternity by participation in the mystery of its
being. Because there is no vantage-point outside existence from which its meaning can be
viewed, consciousness must take place in an in-between. The same writer also sees the history of
philosophy as one of degeneration, beginning however not with Socrates but rather with his
opponents, the sophists, whose medieval successors, the nominalists, led the way directly into the
sopho-babble of every modern ism.
The writer is Eric Voegelin. The quotations come from the first page of Order and History, Volume I,
Israel and Revelation (1956). In his later Science Politics and Gnosticism (1962), Voegelin
characterizes Heidegger as that ingenious Gnostic of our own time, whose construct of the closed
process of being, while replete in its exposition with insights about the nature of modernity, is yet a
mimetic parasitism on the Christian doctrine, which it seeks to supplant. In Heideggers vision, as
Voegelin writes, the power of being replaces the power of God and the parousia of being, the
Parousia of Christ. Voegelins description of Heidegger differs minimally from Dugins, departing
from Dugins only in the evaluation. Everywhere, and yet nowhere so much so as in his conclusion,

Dugins language waxes worshipful: As a result of the calm, passionately indifferent acceptance,
not yet has lost the fatality of its hypnosis in Heideggers philosophy; and we are no longer
fighting in its snares, feeling nervous, but we accept it as it truly is, trying to find the sign of another
Beginning with solemn gratitude in the last smouldering ruins of Western culture.
Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning is not a book to be casually set aside. It
contains much valuable provocation and much that beckons siren-like to anyone who turns in
disgust from the modern liberal self-parody. When Dugin denounces Americanism and the
Planetary Idiocy of Liberals, one relishes the rhetorical scourging: [The] man of the global world, a
Liberal, accepting and recognizing the normativity of the American way of life, is [a] kind of
patented idiot from the philosophical and etymological point[s] of view, a documented idiot, an idiot
parading his foolishness above his head like a banner. Dugins study must count as a useful
refresher-course in Heidegger, which will send the student back to Heideggers own texts. Curious
parties should nevertheless approach The Philosophy of Another Beginning skeptically, maintaining
vigilance against its authors rash enthusiasm for his subject.
Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning by Alexander Dugin is available here.

Thomas F. Bertonneau earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of

Califonia at Los Angeles in 1990. He has taught at a variety of institutions, and has been a member
of the English Faculty at SUNY Oswego since 2001. He is the author of three books and numerous
articles on literature, art, music, religion, anthropology, film, and politics. He is a frequent contributor
to Anthropoetics, the ISI quarterlies, and others.

4 thoughts on A Review of Martin Heidegger: Philosophy of

Another Beginning by Alexander Dugin
1.

Martin Sellner July 12, 2015 at 9:15 am

Thanks for this interesting review. First of all: I hate conversations about Heidegger in english (also
the book was painful to read, although the translation is great).

I think you brought up a very interesting subject: the fine line between Heidegger and traditionalism.
The Difference between the Seinsfrage and the ideas of Guenon, Evola, Voegelin, one might even
add Jung, Spann, etc.
Not really caused by Dugin but in a strange synchronicity, a lot of young people in the german new
(and identitarian movement) right are now reading Heidegger (Im one of them). And If youd ask my
friends, they would surely call me guilty of Martinolatry
I think Heideggers Philosophy is opposed to the metaphysical project of traditionalists, as much as
it is against the heroic nihilism of NIetzsche. His question for being refutes the conservative notion
of Being as cause/fundament (Sein als Grund), as well as the revolutionary one Being as will
(Sein als Wille).
I think what you are saying is that everything Heideggers says is a overcomplicated version of basic
traditionalist doctrines. And with Voegelin you are accusing him of an Existenzialist, ripp of of
Christianity.
I think thats a total misconception. Heideggers Beeing is not a god. Its a horizon for thinking and
asking. Its a possibility space for those events and revelations that form the history of beeing.
The onto-theological structure of metaphysics, that has a dialectic tendency in itself to lead to
progress and modernity (as also Nietzsche showed in his genealogical critique) forces us to see
being as a personal God, or a abstract universality.
But Being is more than god. Just like in premodern religions the demiurgos was not identitcal
with the cosmos, or ishvara is not brahma, a saving god is possible in the history of being but he is
not being itself i suppose.
However all this are speculations and attempts of systematizations, that Heidegger ultimatly rejects.
While most traditionalists are in fact all in all neoplatonics that must see modernity as a fatal failure
of Man and are somehow ignoring the event of gods death, Heidegger is in my eyes the only one
who asks for truth, sense and god accordingly, to our ontological era.
Reply

People of Shambhala July 12, 2015 at 11:58 am

Thomas F. Bertonneau asked us to post the following response:

Mr. Sellner is generally appreciative of the review, for which I thank him, but he registers a cavil
when he writes: I think what you are saying is that everything Heidegger says is a overcomplicated
version of basic traditionalist doctrines. And with Voegelin you are accusing him of an
Existenzialist, rip-off of Christianity.
Actually, in citing Adorno in my first paragraph, I went a good way in excusing Heidegger from the
charge frequently made against him that he expresses old ideas in deliberately overwrought
sentences and unnecessary coinages. On the other hand, I do contend against Dugin concerning
the degree of Heideggers originality: Dugin thinks that Heidegger is unique and unprecedented
(except perhaps by the Pre-Socratics) whereas I think that Heidegger is much less original and
unprecedented than his claimants, whether Dugin or anyone else, makes out.
As Mr. Sellner must know, Heidegger explicitly disclaimed the label of Existentialist. Nevertheless,
that is how many perceptive people interpret him, including his one-time and much-abused student
Hans Jonas, in the epilogue to whose Gnostic Religion, the former teacher prominently figures
and where he is also treated with surprising dignity considering the nature of the broken relation. In
the question whether Heidegger really is an Existentialist, I have no stake. I can take him as he is,
without worrying about labels. I therefore exonerate myself from accusing [Heidegger] of an
Existenzialist rip-off of Christianity. To the extent that Heidegger was hostile to Christianity, I part
company with him and in respect of some of his pronouncements feel motivated to criticize him. In
failing to understand Christianity, however, Heidegger was a typical modern thinker, so that his
judgments should not surprise anyone.
I cited Voegelin precisely to criticize Dugins claim that Heideggers thought resembles no one elses
or that he uniquely diagnosed modernity and appreciated the Pre-Socratic achievement. While I
indeed value Voegelin far above Heidegger, I am unbothered by the opposite assessment and
would not dream of evicting anyone from judgments long in formation and heavily invested.
Reply

2.

People of Shambhala July 18, 2015 at 7:15 pm

People of Shambhala contributor Michael Presley has asked us to post the following comment on the
article:
As the standard Amazon review goes, I have not read this book, but So with that in mind I do not
want to be unfair either to Dugin, or Professor Bertonneau; it is easy to be unjust in the context of a
book review where space and arguments must be necessarily limited. I would, however, like to point
out that Dugin is (albeit not really originally) correct in his critique of Plato, at least as far as the
schism between the phenomenal world and the realm of forms is concerned. That is to say, and
after Plato, in what way are phenomenal things real if they are but a confused representation of
something metaphysically higher?
Aristotle, for his part, resolved to fix it by integrating a things essence (that is, its essential nature)
into the very phenomenon itself, making things composites comprised of both form and matter, the
latter existing in a state of pure potential until actualized by its formal aspect. Both then make the
phenomenal substance. Of course form had to be immaterial, separable from that which it informs,
and in some cases at least able to exist or survive the substances dissolution.
None of this is very happy, but they are an attempt to explain rationally what cant be explained, and
in a world of pretty bad, their explanations are actually pretty good.
However it is, the idea that our present nihilistic alienation can be thrown back on either Plato or
Aristotle has to be greatly tempered. One cannot be so definite. It is just as much a problem
derivative from other sources, often sources that are not, strictly speaking, philosophical at all. For
instance, if alive today, both Greeks would have been surprised to find out that human nature(s) are
mostly contingent (if such nature is said to even exist), and they would be quite chagrined to find
themselves held responsible for our modern-day understandings. Yet against this reductionist move
(the name of Nietzsche always comes up in this regard as one of the usual suspects), our current
denial of human nature is more likely a result of the rise of technology, and the subsequent
destruction of the traditional patriarchal family. Traditional hierarchical relations are rent, and to cite
just one example from modern drone warfare, it is now as likely for a woman to be an efficient killer
as any man. Indeed, as a group women may even have more of an aptitude for it.
Anent Dugins disdain for man as rational animal, it must be remembered that Aristotle was writing
at a time when man meant something different than what it means today. It signified only a few,
mostly Greek men. And even so, Aristotle was speaking a formal definition, and not a description of

any particular man, or even race of men (apart from Greeks). Like the point made earlier, the
teacher of natural slaves would have been very surprised to find out that his notion of a universal
type could be imputed equally to all men, even those who on their face seem hopeless. And he
would have been dumbfounded to know that with only the help of just a little liberal education, along
with the elimination of a variety of isms and phobias (i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia,
feminism,etc), everyone could be both individual and equal.
Next, it is doubtful that what is taken for Christian philosophy (in Dugins sense) has much to do with
the present state of affairs within the Catholic church. To even bring it up seems rather quaint and
anachronistic at this late stage of the game.
Anent Guenon. He moved away from philosophy proper because he understood that it offered little
practical interest. At the same time, as Professor Bertonneau writes, his analysis of modernity was
more succinct than anything ever written by Heidegger. But so is Evolas, a man who took a little
different track. The latters critique of Heidegger (and Nietzsche) must be considered by anyone
approaching the modern project. As an aside, and however we parse it, both Heidegger and Evola
will never be very well mainstreamed due to their respective associations (as they were or were not)
with the German Reich of the last century. One could in this regard easily point out the hypocrisy on
the left vis--vis their intellectuals, but some things are just not even worth the effort.
Anent Putin. His use of philosophy has to be tempered by the his KGB schooling, and the
demands of realpolitik. Still, when one looks at leaders of major countries one has to be surprised at
the Russians tolerance for, if not embrace of, traditionalism, especially the Orthodox church. One
can also see something similar in Xi Jinping, where a Confucian revival of sorts is taking place in
China. Contrast this with the West, where the big news is how a man pretending to be a woman is
such great a thing. So we have it. Two erstwhile communist regimes move inward, while the West
continues to plumb the depths of individual freedom. Perhaps the first person to truly understand
the implications of liberal individualism, Thomas Hobbes, realized that once a people have rights
the only thing that can ever hope to restore the resulting social chaos is for them to immediately give
up their rights (the so-called individuals Right of Nature) to a sovereign who is charged with keeping
the peace. It is a paradox, and a seeming contradiction that few today understand very well. We in
the West have yet to understand it, however if it is not understood soon, the sovereign we get will
not be the sovereign we want.