A LIGHT IN THE END OF THE TUNNEL: PART II AND FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The Civilization of the West which was built upon Faustian values, finds itself in the latest stage of its existence: one dominated by uncertainty, one in which the values and certainties of before have evaporated, giving place to Nihilism and self loathing as a form of a perverted zeitgeist. In other words, the defining character of the modern world is marked by the predominance of fear, shame and guilt as its defining characteristics, together with self-loathing.

The so-called “civilized world” of today, then, has lost all of its self respect and its decency. And all of this has not only existential, or factual historical foundations, but also deep so-called metaphysical ones.

The old Nietzschean drive, was was a dominant characteristic and feature of Europe during they heydays of the Second Industrial Revolution, has given way towards the so-called “Last Man” of Nietzschean parlance, devoid of every sign of masculinity, of every drive towards transcendence, and of every wish to live beyond his mere regime of superficial comfort and immediacy.

Nihilism can be seen, then, as the fundamental characteristic and also the central stepping stone of modern civilization.

The disproportional emphasis and value given upon the Subject, the predominance of the individual in detriment of everything else, contains in itself the hard kernel of the decadence of modern values. Taken as a zero sum, the individual is the true “God” of modern times, and the perversity of this notion together with its dominance in our Era constitute – in light of the genuine, esoteric doctrines – a massive perversion of the dominant mentality and a sign of the Times.

As such, I determine that the future of Civilization as “Civilization”, and not as a refined form of thinly disguised barbarity, depends upon the destruction of the so-called metaphysics of subjectivity which has dominated Modern Times and which has its origins in Cartesianism, Humanism, and the Renaissance. This metaphysics is the central stepping stone of the so-called Faustian man, and in the times of its ruin, the Faustian man must necessarily be blinded by the deep ontological nihilism in which this very same foundation of Promethean hybris placed him in early Modern times.

The individual must be sublimated, or even destroyed, but he must not become the Patron Deity of a culture such as what has catastrophically happened to the West in the last centuries. In a civilization such as ours, corrupted by this fundamental Nihilism and the distortions of the Promethean cult of the profane human figure, the taghut or “idolatry” mentioned by the Iranian Revolutionary ideologue Ahmad Fardid, is the byproduct of centuries of epistemological distortion. Of centuries of attempts to destroy man’s immediate perceptual relationship with the Cosmos, and then turn it towards a sort of “magical” subjectivism, a waking dream in which reality is dictated only by the ideas of the thinking subject and supported by genuine “Faustian” magic (one needs only to refer to the Renaissance magical grimoires of the same name to understand what kind of root and drive went beyond this, and the secret societies that propagated it).

This distortion must be undone, as I have outlined in Part I. The new metaphysics must carry the weight of Traditional authority and orthodoxy. In lieu of this, we should be aware of the place of the individual in Sufi, Vedantic, Shia and even Neoplatonic and Christian Orthodox esotericism: the nafs, the ego, the jiva, is a physical subordinate and an image projected by a superior principle which alone constitutes the true “I”. As “Atman” is not “Jiva”, we must apply the principle of Apophasis – found in St. Dyonisus within the Christian tradition – as a powerful tool to destroy the fundamentally misguided and limited knowledge brought upon us by Modernity.

Within this metaphysics, which assign the individual to its natural, inferior and naturally base place in the Cosmic hierarchies, we can begin towards the intellectual construction of a new civilization over the ruins of the old decaying modernity.

The false Gods of modernity, the Ego and subjectivity, have proven themselves unable to create a lasting foundation. All they have done was to create an ephemeral building, an ephemeral civilization, the civilization of Modernity, which now finds itself rotting and decaying thanks to its own poison of individualism. This world of massive dystopia, thus, constitutes the end phase of Modernity in a stage of complete, utter, dissolving nihilism simultaneous with its utter destruction.

The humanistic cosmology of the West must give way to Apophasis, to “Emptiness”, or “Shunya”, which is the hallmark of Traditional understanding, and which was known to Buddhists, to the Advaitins of India, to Sufis, and finally to the Platonizing Christian Fathers of the East who resisted – up to St. Gregory Palamas and beyond – the cosmological rationalism and the chemise de force of Western conceptions founded upon discursive superficiality. There can be no better guide for us, Eurasian Slavs, than St. Gregory Palamas, St. Dyonisus, and finally the Slavophiles – some of whom, like Ivan Kireyevsky, had a deep intuition of these divergences between “Traditional” Russia, centered upon Apophasis, Metaphysics and Orthodox Christianity, and the “Aristotelian” West, which was condemned towards the fantasy of its own abstract schemes and its hallucinated spirit stepped upon the so-called “Metaphysics of Presence”, so brilliantly deconstructed by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the others.

In other words, while the East possessed Being in a more intimate fashion, and was connected towards Being by means of its Traditional Orthodoxy (as per R. Guenon), its esotericism, the West became lost in the fantasy of its own shadows, the objects of its own mental representations confused with “Truth”. In the words of Heidegger, men ceased to understand Being as Being, and began to understand “Being” as a ghost, as a mental representation called “a being”, and thus all hopes and beliefs in genuine Truth have disappeared and given way to utility. This nihilism is very strong, especially within the Marxist-Hegelian strands of Western philosophy, and is also one of our primary targets in the construction of a genuinely Traditional civilization.

Thus Heidegger’s central question, “Was its die Sein des Seiendes?”, is the core and an important reference in our own struggle against Modernism, Scientism, and the pretentious logocentrism; that which gives an air of superiority to the byproducts of a corrupt and degraded modern civilization, thus reversing what should be the fundamental intellectual discernment of a healthy human being that was still dominant in more spiritual ages preceding ours.

We must put into Scientism into its due place, as a contingent and relative truth that is the byproduct of an egocentric intellect, and not as the central intellectual hallmark of the progress of a society.  The very antidote to Scientism lies not in a weak apologetics, as propagated by the timid and limited intellects of Western Christianity, but in the true power of Apophasis, allied to a complete erasure and deconstruction of the modern mentality that now finds itself decomposing rapidly and naturally as a matter of course. This deconstruction will finally tear apart the myth of Western civilization and its so-called “progress” mentality, and with it, it will be possible to build a new world that is devoid of the values of the old decaying humanistic society, towards genuine Tradition as idealized by Kireyevksy, R. Guenon and others.

This will be our fundamental “Science”. Just as the science of Hesychasm and Orthodoxy, and the Church Fathers of the East, was the science of genuine Traditional Byzantine and Russian civilization, so we must take their standards in our new epoch. And we must use it, to fight the darkness of the perverted Science of the West. The fight against this “Science” of the world, and of the last days, and of perverted modernity, is the key towards a Traditional restoration of not just Russia, and the Slavic world, but the whole world itself.

Of special help is the great intellectual Konstantin Leontiev, and I would recommend that everyone who has not peeked through this savant’s wonderful and wise words, that he might do so in order to uncover the mystery of Western decadence, and of Russia’s inevitable stride into the false alternatives of liberalism and socialism.

Thus, with Western nihilism overcome, we can build a new society free of the values of the old.

The intellectual triad of Heidegger, Trubetzkoy and Guenon – all with their patent critiques of Romano-German civilization, must be our strong intellectual foundation against the onslaught of Western Scientism and their perennial attempts to discredit all those who are not “enframed” by the values of this perverted Science (to use a Heideggerian term). To this, it is only important to remark N. Trubetzkoy’s words on the egocentric character of Western civilization and its own cosmological views:

“We have already noted that acceptance of Romano-Germanic culture as the most perfect of all historical cultures is rooted in the psychology of egocentricity. In Europe the notion of the absolute superiority of European civilization is viewed as a fundamental principle which has been established more or less scientifically. But the scientific nature of the proof is illusory, since the understanding of evolution present in European ethnology, anthropology, and the history of culture is itself permeated with egocentricity. Concepts such as the “evolutionary scale” and “stages of development” are all thoroughly egocentric…

Even if we acknowledge that this conception of the relationship between reality and evolution is correct, we still will not be able to reconstruct the evolutionary process. To ascertain which evolutionary phase is represented by any given culture, we need to know where both ends of the straight line of world progress are located. Only then would it be possible to measure the distance separating a given culture from both ends of the scale and to determine its place in the evolutionary scheme. But we cannot locate those beginning and end points without first reconstructing the evolutionary scheme. The result is a vicious circle: to reconstruct the evolutionary scheme, we must know its beginning and end points, and to ascertain its beginning and end points, we must reconstruct the evolutionary scheme. The only way out of it is to discover in some suprascientific, irrational way that some particular culture is the beginning or end point of evolution.”

- Nikolai Trubetzkoy

Once these due intellectual powers are weaponized and used as a post and anti-modern force against the West, we must then begin by discerning here the way in which, through our victory, this intellectual conflict will bring us closer not only to Being, and Truth, taken in their due metaphysical, ontological, and logical senses, but also will ensure in the destruction of Scientism, Positivism, Materialism, and also Cartesianism, as something fundamentally alien, hostile not only to “Truth”, but to the subjective character and hard kernel of Slavic and Eurasian Civilization themselves, as defined by pan-Slavism, Orthodoxy, and genuine and profound nationalists like Lev Gumilev and Alexey Khomyakov. We shall march, and these will be our weapons against the bloated hybris, the stupid self-confidence and the destructive technocracy of Western Globalism and its own deformed liberal universalism, which in this moment threatens our very existence.

These shall be, as I hope, the weapons of the Cultural Revolution, of de-modernization, of “progress without modernity”, that must give us the necessary paradigms of societal, cultural and intellectual Change towards a new paradigm, untainted by the degeneracy of the old, and allying simultaneously what is organic and deep in the reality of local cultures with what is Eternal.