Noomakhia and the search for the Brazilian Logos

What is  Noomakhia?

First of all I would like to say that it is very difficult to outline such an extensive and complex theme in such a short presentation. Therefore, my first words should be in the tone of a warning and invitation so that, once the proper reflections have been raised regarding the theme presented, everyone will feel moved in the direction of a better and greater understanding of Dugin's concepts about Noomakhia and its importance to the multipolar ideal. Much of this content can be found in all of Professor Dugin's writings, widely disseminated and debated by the Nova Resistência, as well as in the translation of the introductory classes on the subject of Noomakhia, available in the Legio Victrix blog collection.

About the question above, its answer is complex, but we will try to take some initial steps. Our question is, fundamentally, who we are, and our struggle is, fundamentally, a struggle of ideas, a mental struggle. The 20th century was marked by this struggle, but this struggle took place on a deeply unequal field, in which the essence of who we are was given, even if almost imperceptibly, by only one side. This makes it clear that ideological arguments that do not conform to our essence are not enough. A cultural, political and economic integration within one civilizational pole can be, as we see in the case of the EU, an integration in favor of imperialism. A nationalism, as recently advocated by the prophet of liberal end of history, Francis Fukuyama, can be a manifestation of this very liberalism. It is not enough for us to be a nationalist Ibero-American hub, if we do not understand how to be one. Resistance must therefore be of essence. Noomakhia is the revelation of this battle, its manifestation in the cultural world, culture understood here as perspective, worldview (Weltanschauung), that is, the existential vision of the world.

Noomakhia is a colossal undertaking, whose 24 original publications extend over a period of 6 years, from 2014 to 2020, but which origin certainly goes back to the whole process of Alexander Dugin's intellectual formation. Roughly speaking, Noomakhia begins with a search for something not so clear until then, the possibility of resistance to a dominant existential principle enslaving all peoples: liberalism, in all its dimensions, as a worldview, as logocentrism, that is, a Logos that organizes the world mentally and is the only possible world. Let's reflect further on this.

Within the context of a unipolar world that subjugates everyone, a new philosophical effort had to be made in the search for an alternative. Right. But liberal dominance, Dugin accepts, is not merely a political and economic imposition, but profoundly philosophical. The argument is that the world becomes liberal because in the depths of thought the germ, the liberal virus, is inserted into all peoples, without exception, and they come to exist as zombies (das Man) of this world. It is necessary, then, to return to what makes us human, to the principles that form our worldview, and to investigate if it is possible, finally, at that essential and fundamental threshold, to think the world in a radically different way, not in the sense of opinions built upon the same structure, but if it is possible to structure the world itself in a way totally opposed to liberalism, if it is possible to escape from liberal clutches or if we are doomed to inevitable assimilation, if our resistances are real or if they are products of liberalism itself.

It is in this endeavor that Noomakhia will then emerge as a reality, which Dugin confronts and exposes. This begins, therefore, with a noology.

Noology, or deconstruction of the mind

Noology is the discipline of study or investigation of the human intellect, the "nous", a deep degree of human consciousness, the intellect that forms our existential relationship to the world. It is the quality that effectively makes us human. Noology is, therefore, an investigation of ourselves and our possibilities. The search for the multiplicity of the mind is the basis of multipolarity because it fundamentally presupposes that in the world there is not just one general way for the human intellect to operate.

What makes us human is not the multiplicity of intellects, with the intellect being a general thing, but multiplicity as a fundamental characteristic of the manifestations of the nous. The nous is our awakening to the world, it is the consciousness of existing. The Logos, the word, the verb, speech, as we shall see, are the possible "forms" of this intellect manifesting itself, the very structure of human vision operating over specific spaces and times.

Noological investigation is carried out at various levels or disciplines through which the operations of the human mind are unveiled and where the logoi can shine through, as in a mirror.

Mythology, religion, philosophy, culture, science, daily practice, economics, language, art, etc.

The three logoi, the revelation of the mind

The idea of Logos is somewhat polysemic and needs further clarification. Dugin operates from Nietzschean philosophy, which identifies the existence of the Apollonian and Dionysian logoi as those fundamental structures that shape a view of and relationship with the world, whose dialectics underlie human tragedy. This key would later be used in the formation of many ethnosociological studies that divide the different cultural manifestations between, primarily, Apollonian and Dionysian, to whom it may concern, it is worth reading Nietzsche's own conceptualization in this regard, or, for example, the ideas developed later by Ruth Benedict.

The use of the concept of the logoi and the Greek gods is not an absolute, much less a specific devotion, but an analytical category, a mechanism for studying and understanding structures from an already known and expanded model. Moreover, the use of these Greek gods is appropriate because Greek myth, so well known to us, has in itself quite clear elements of this war between distinct perspectives of existence that guide human life, and also because myth and philosophy are two distinct structures through which the nous, intellect, the fundamental point of noology, operates. Finally, if the West is recognized as a logocentric structure, focused on this category, it is therefore extremely expedient to counterattack by deconstructing the very philosophy that will be countered, in its primordial contradictions.

Nevertheless, Alexander Dugin's noological turn corresponds to a discovery subsequent to the process of deconstructing the Western Logos and trying to read the world with Dionysian lenses. In trying to investigate philosophy, culture, metaphysics, the sciences, in short, the various dimensions of human thought, Dugin realizes that despite the multiplicity of perspectives on the world, the two logoi that had been studied up to then cannot explain all these phenomena, while Dugin realizes how all of them are composed of certain fundamental patterns that are accommodated in three large preconscious or imaginary models (inspired by the three durandian regimes of the imaginary), the now three logoi.

The three logoi appear then as 3 fundamental paradigms that structure the worldview of the human being according to its characteristics, its metaphysical structures. To try to make this clearer, we can say that between our consciousness, our intellect operating directly, and the world, there are these pre-conscious structures that help shape this spirit-soul-world relationship. They "shape" the perceived world, through space and time, within us, in their own way.

• The Logos of Apollo is the solar, diurnal Logos, it is a domain of vertical structure, focused on aerial images, the straight line, the sword, the light, sky, the transcendent and masculine. In philosophy, we identify it with Platonic philosophy, always facing upwards, towards the world of ideas, towards the transcendent plane.
• The Logos of Dionysus is nocturnal, but with a dramatic characteristic, as in Nietzsche. It is the Logos of mobility and equilibrium, of the dialectical Aristotelian philosophy, between hot and cold, high and low, between shallow and deep. It is what can be seen of the light, in the deepest darkness, and the shadow perceived within the brighest light. The Chinese Tao or Jesus Christ are examples of a Dionysian perspective.
• The Logos of Cybele is a mystical nocturnal Logos, linked to the feminine, it is the materialistic philosophy of Democritus, the world of the earthly womb, the earth that generates everything and kills everything itself. There is no transcendence, because it is already within the world itself, life and death correspond to a closed cycle; it is the closed space, the indissociable, the spiral.

Thus, each Logos composes a series of " animic" elements that structure our way of seeing and existing in the world in completely different, irreconcilable ways.

Noomakhia and its symphony

Noomakhia is the fundamental understanding that these three logoi are in conflict, especially Apollo and Cybele. Noology is the study that shows us the existence of this conflict, while to live the noomakhia is to recognize oneself existentially within this noological war, at a specific pole, understanding that the only possible existential path is the just approximation of one's noomakhical position, because it is not merely instrumental, it fills all existential possibility.

The main principle of Noomakhia is this: three logoi are in an insoluble conflict. They fight among themselves over the form of the Nous that should dominate the culture. The struggle of the three logoi is the key to understanding the internal structure of culture, civilization and identity of society. And it gives us the explanation of inter-ethnic and intercultural relations. NOOMAKHIA explains all that is human and explains how man explains what is not human. These we have described so far constitute the fundamental principles of NOOMAKHIA as the metaphysical basis of the multipolar world. (DUGIN, Alexander. Introduction to Noomachy (Lesson I) - Noology: The Philosophical Discipline of Intellectual Structures).

When the nous awakens and consciousness begins to operate about the world, the three logoi act immediately and constantly for its mastery. The mind itself possesses the three dimensions of the logoi pre-consciously, but it is their war and outcome, the moment of noomakhia that will determine the existential horizon of each culture.

The moment of noomakhia is a decisive moment in the war of the logoi, a portentous logoic victory that gives rise to a specific horizon and sets the civilizational north. It does not end the war, but produces an orientation that is to be strengthened by culture itself and its people. The fundamental point of this moment is to grant harmony within a pre-conscious space that is, in origin, a war. It will face new moments of conflict, new existential thresholds will be crossed, but the moments, or movements, define the process. To exemplify: let's say that a culture is formed through a moment of Apollonian impetus, an Olympian victory against the chthonic forces operating in our soul. The tendency is that the culture then develops more toward this Logos, but the war is not over, and the continuity of this culture depends heavily on the cultural effort to maintain its form, which will be attacked from within by the restrained logoi.

Let's take an example: Early Indo-European societies, unreachable in time, are often presumed to be between notoriously patriarchal ( Apollinean, nomadic) or matriarchal ( Cybelinean, sedentary) societies, depending on various contexts and elements; they are distinct moments of noomahia, Apollinean or Cybeline. When these cultures clash, which is conflictual due to the ontological alterity between the worldviews, the result and the assimilation of the defeated culture also implies an assimilation, generally, of aspects of its Logos. From there, a new moment of noomahia is operated, a restructuring, which can be either of almost total maintenance of the dominant Logos, or a slight or radical rebalancing.

Thus, the cultural process of noomakhia is like a symphony. When there is a moment of noomahia, the originary myth (understood mythically and philosophically) appears as the choice of the theme, the constant presence of the leitmotif, a recurring figuration; from there one starts from a horizon that gives timbre to the music and a tempo that is its historial (as in Henry Corbin), composed of specific movements, which above a monotonous temporal coherence, have particular meanings within the general theme. The continuity of the theme and of the same symphony depends on the effort undertaken by the people in maintaining their existential, if not, the noomakhia can turn and the melody go another way.

Noomakhia is the war of the minds, it is the one true total war in the world. Noomakhia means that there are countless ways to exist and to understand precisely "what" and "how" it is to exist. Noomakhia is the basis of the multipolar world, because it understands the unipolar imperialism of the anglo-saxon liberal world as the global attempt to impose the victory of one Logos over all others. Not through conquest, through a new moment of noomahia that could modify this Logos itself, but through subjection by different mechanisms. The war we are fighting is within all of us, in defense of the true desire to exist authentically.

In search of the Brazilian Logos

The search for the Logos is, as we have seen, an existential search. If, as Heidegger supposed, the being finds itself thrown into the world, which is always a specific, historial there (da), being presupposes this particularity. Which brings us to the real reason of this presentation. If the Logos is linked to the being of the peoples, what is it to be Brazilian (dasein), Brazil as there (da)? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand history, the victories, the successive forms of state, the defeats and historical mistakes, since the existential horizon is linked to space, time and the people in a holistic way.

Dugin deals with Brazil within one of the specific volumes of Noomakhia, The Logos of Ariel, about the Iberoamerican civilization as a whole, dedicating parts of this text specifically to the Brazilian singularity within noomakhia. In this sense, we are an open civilization, whose formation processes, deeply influenced and interrupted by external forces, have placed us in a stage of under-formation.

Brazil is formed by three great cultural macro-structures:

• An apollinean, Portuguese, imperial domain.
• The African diaspora of an archaic diurnal form with dionysian overtones.
• Tupi civilization, linked to the earth, to the chthonic, to the Great cybeline Mother.

This combination is essential to understanding the Brazilian Logos, still deeply open, an unfinished work. Although it is quite clear that the Portuguese domain exerts a clear civilizational power over the other two throughout history, the influence of our miscegenation is undeniable. That is, it is not a matter of thinking exclusively in terms such as "genocide" or "extermination" of the indigenous and african peoples, but rather an incorporation in the formation of our new "cosmic race". However we look at this process, we must steer clear of moralizing colorations, because they take away the perception of the fundamental genesis of our destiny.

The solar Portuguese imperial impetus merges with two distinct noological dimensions toward another imperial impetus, the New Rome, which existential horizon and time need to be read with due attention. Within this, we can emphasize some very elucidative elements, as in the post-Republican relation of the Lusitanian element of "saudade," the post-imperial sebastianism that will be rescued, for example, in bossa nova. Saudade corresponds to a particular sense of longing not of the monarchy in its shallowest sense, since the institution itself had begun to crumble. Saudade composes an element of indifference or non-recognition of the process that lays ahead, a universal and westernizing republicanism. Saudade is not totally tied to the past in the sense of an empire that has dissolved, but in the constant presence of an element of becoming, the expectation of an empire already present within us but on the horizon of the reversibility of time. The bandeirantes, before this, combine for the first and most fundamental time the elements of the apollinian, nomadic, pioneering force with the telluric force of establishment, with the formation of settlements. This serves to show how all civilizational elements, from politics to popular culture, integrate the process of formation and strengthening of the Logos.

Finally, since this exposition is already running too long, it is important to point out that the external influence, especially British and North American, at different stages of the process of Brazil's construction, infused us with a noxious aspect of modernity of imperialist colonization, gradually separating us at various moments from our existential horizon. This phenomenon still exists and is one of the great producers of a civilizational schizophrenia that fills both the right wing with false nationalism and the internationalist left that hates its roots. Going back to the notion of a symphony, imperialism always operates as a dissonant force that paralyzes the composition, an alienating cultural malaise, hiding in its own tempo the next notes, paralyzing us in our space and time, dissociating us.

The fact that Brazil is an open Logos imposes this challenge of searching for it, of crystallizing it, but it is much more comfortable for the majority to search for the answers to our civilizational challenge in this dissonance, that at the same time that it paralyzes, it intones a song of appeasement.

Our challenge is precisely to recognize and strengthen this process, in several dimensions and directions: Our history, our art, our philosophy, our science, our language. All these elements need to gain centrality, because they are not finished and in them lies that deep impetus that is genuinely ours (the dasein), of our Logos. Through the identification of these structures that are most intimate and deep within us, the way will be open. Our language will no longer be only syntactic, but existential, and our melody will echo until the foundation of our final symphony, the Tropical New Rome.

Thank you.

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