In December 2022, the A.M. Katz State Concert Hall in Novosibirsk hosted the First Siberian Forum of WRNS with the participation of the heads of the Government of the Novosibirsk Region and the Novosibirsk Metropolia of the Russian Orthodox Church. Among the speakers at the event was the most famous philosopher of modern Russia, Alexander Dugin, with whom Leaders Today correspondent Alexander Zonov spoke shortly afterwards in Moscow. We would like to thank Evgeny Tsybizov, co-chairman of the Russian People's World Council and head of the Tsargrad NGO, for his help with the organisation.

ALEXANDER ZONOV: Aleksandr Gel'evič, what is the importance of philosophy in our times and who can benefit from it?

ALEXANDER DUGIN: In my opinion, philosophy is intended for a particular type of people who gravitate to the vertical: to depth, to height. In this sense, Plato's idea of a state run by people who have approached the light of philosophy, which is related to religion and spirit, is very correct. In fact, this is my goal: to convey the idea that, in our culture, we should reserve a central place for that 'golden throne' that should be the core of the state. So, what I am calling for is not so much the practice of philosophy, but rather reverence for it and placing it at the centre of everything: economics, social life, politics. After all, even most of the sciences are just applied aspects of philosophy. It is no coincidence that in the West the doctorate is called a PhD, i.e. 'doctor of philosophy', and those who ignore philosophy do not deserve such a title. That is, strictly speaking, he is not a scientist at all.

A.Z.: So what is the difference between philosophy and science? That is why, for example, mathematics is often regarded as a discipline at the crossroads between philosophy and science, physics is regarded more as a science and ethics as a philosophy. Where do these boundaries lie?

A.D.: There is no doubt that in traditional society, philosophy and science represented a single continuum. Contemplative and applied hypostasis were not separate from each other. Pure mathematics was always the occupation of the theologians, because it dealt with the fundamental principles and laws of thought, distributed in the Logos, the divine principle within which the logical and mathematical laws applied. The transition to applied disciplines, the movement towards matter, nature (which is the field of other sciences - such as physics, etc.) required other methods, elevated to unity, but with some essential changes.

For example, with Albertus Magnus, one could read treatises on angels and the properties of minerals. Everything is fine in its place. Angelology requires certain intellectual procedures, mineralogy others.

In Western European culture, however, in the transition from traditional to New Age society, this unity began to break down. New Age philosophy and New Age science emerged. Science, ever since the days of Newton and Galileo, began to claim to be the bearer of the ultimate truth about the structure of external reality, but New Age philosophy - from Leibniz to the phenomenology of Brentano and Husserl - followed a different trajectory: it continued the cultivation of the Logos, preserved the value of the subject and, in general, sought to save the dignity of thought. In the 19th century, Wilhelm Dilthey divided all sciences into spiritual and natural - Geistwissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften.

However, this division is insidious; it contains a trap. Those who do science today assume that they are dealing with something objective, unlike philosophy, which wanders in the labyrinths of a subjectivity that is difficult to ground. Members of the natural sciences tend not to think about the philosophical paradigm that underlies their work; but when they begin to think about it - like Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrödinger - they discover that science has nothing to do with anything other than certain projections of philosophical consciousness.

This is my final conclusion on the basis of many years of research into the philosophy of science and the history of science: modern science is nothing but philosophy, just a materialistic, titanic, false philosophy. It is essentially anti-philosophy. If we read Quentin Meyasu's After Ultimate, it will become clear that there has finally been that encounter between the black implicit philosophy (anti-philosophy) previously hidden under the name of 'science' and the ardent philosophy of the West, still coupled with the vanishing subject, with the dissipating Logos. We have reached the point of unravelling this secular drama. Modern science is more than the application of the principles of modern philosophy (the philosophy of modernity) to fields of application. It is precisely a philosophy that is subversive and destructive from the start. It is essentially a philosophy of falsehood, since it is based on completely false and unnatural premises - atomism, materialism, nominalism.

New Age science has played a huge, decisive role in what is happening in Western society today - its degeneration, its loss of verticality, of ethics, of religion. The aggressive and offensive atheism implicit in science has led civilisation to the abject conviction that there is no God and, if there is a God, only as a logical cause - something like a Big Bang, a causal chain deduced in a purely rational way

A.Z.: Is that why you prefer Orthodoxy, which is literally 'Christian orthodoxy' and has a more traditional nature?

A.D.: For me, Orthodoxy is absolute truth: both religious truth, theological truth, and philosophical truth. This choice seems random at first sight (I was just born in this country and was baptised here as a child), but in reality it is a conscious choice. I came to the Church as an adult. I have studied various traditional religions and continue to hold them in high regard and philosophise about them; for me, truth is absolute in Orthodox Christianity and is the direct route to the truest vertical dimension of heaven. For the Russian people, our Church, with its traditions, its connection with the depth of the centuries, with eternity, is a sacred luxury, and it would be unreasonable to reject it.

A.Z.: Well, from science and culture I propose we move on to politics. It is said that compared to the 20th century, where the fascist, communist and liberal ideological blocs were strongly pronounced, the 21st century is de-ideologised. How do you assess this statement?

A.D.: The term 'de-ideologisation' partly correctly describes our situation, but if you look deeper, this is not the case. The three ideologies that had already been definitively shaped in the 20th century - fascism, communism and liberalism - have ceased to exist in their former classical form. They did not simply retreat and disappear, they fought bitterly - even through world wars - throughout the 20th century.

At the end of the 20th century, liberalism won: it became not just an ideology, a set of attitudes, but something akin to an absolute and indisputable truth. Liberalism entered into things, into objects - science, politics, culture - and became the universal measure of things. The other two mainstream ideologies - communism and fascism - have collapsed, lost and become simulacra, which today's victorious liberals freely and cynically manipulate.

What better way than liberalism to support the new basic ideas of market economics, representative democracy in politics, human rights and post-modernism in culture, technological progress in ideology, and the highest level of individualism in the definition of human nature, including the abolition of gender in politics and domination over artificial intelligence? Liberalism has brought universal human reality under its control and today this ideology has become openly totalitarian and obsessive. We therefore live in an era of hyper-ideologisation, only this ideology in the name of which global dictatorship is being perpetrated is liberalism, which permeates objects, gadgets, networks, technology, digital codes.

On the other hand, there is a growing will to resist this liberal dictatorship, but in the light of the failure of communism and fascism in the 20th century, without referring to them as ineffective and defeated ideological constructs. This is the moment of detachment from all three old ideologies. We must therefore focus on criticising liberalism from new positions and looking for completely new scenarios and alternatives - preferably outside Europe and European modernity. The destiny of humanity does not end with the European culture of the last 500 years. It inspires many people today, but it is not a question of de-ideologising, but of finding ways to crush the liberal hegemony with the support of new ideas. I call it the fourth political theory.

A.Z.: Can it be said that Russia is among them?

In the 1990s, Russia tried to become a model student of liberalism. And it still remains, alas, a kind of our operating system. But now, in fact, we are present at the attempt to defend our sovereignty, to free ourselves from our complete dependence on the language, the syntax, of liberal globalism. We have challenged the Matrix, but we are still within it. In the SMO situation, this has been made clear. Yes, it is a claim to civil sovereignty and thus its own ideology. Of course it cannot be liberal in any way, but neither can it be communist or nationalist.

Yet we have not broken out yet, we have only rebelled, so far it looks like a protest of the slaves of liberalism against the masters of liberalism, but to win this rebellion of sovereign civilisation, the rebels must offer another alternative model, their own language, their own ideology.

A.Z.: Speaking of model. In 2020, changes were made to the Constitution, but they did not touch Article 13, which says that 'no ideology may be established as a state or compulsory ideology'. Why, in your opinion, did President Putin decide not to change this article? So that the liberal ideology does not become the state ideology? And how can there be a state without an ideology?

A.D.: We are facing a global liberal civilisation, and it is impossible to resist without our own ideological platform. The demand for our Russian idea, which justifies our civilisation, the protection of traditional values (which the presidential decree of 09.11.2022 'On the approval of the fundamentals of public policy' aims at), is obvious and recognised by both the people and the authorities. I still think that the country's leadership does not question the fact that Russia needs its own position of civilisation. And that means its own idea.

As for the Article 13 you mentioned, it can be interpreted as another subversive initiative by liberals who wanted to avoid a relapse into communism, which they were afraid of. In the 1990s, liberal reformers believed that if ideology was banned altogether, liberalism would remain the only ideology as a synonym for 'normality' and 'progress'. So it is in the West, so it should be in our country. And, they say, this is not an ideology, but a kind of self-evidence.

Today the liberals do not have the political hegemony in Russian society that they had in the 1990s, but they still maintain their positions at many levels of the state apparatus, in management structures, in business, in politics - in the elite as such. And so this liberal-oriented ruling class resists constitutional change, continuing to pursue its clannish and globalist interests as a kind of totalitarian sect. It is clear that the new state ideology in Russia can only be anti-liberal. When this becomes an issue, the majority of the population will speak out and traditional values will be legitimised and a traditional ideology will be established.

A.Z.: The central concept of your philosophy is Dasein, a philosophical concept used by Martin Heidegger. It is a difficult term to translate and little understood in Russia. For readers unfamiliar with academic philosophy, what is it?

A.D.: Dasein is indeed a difficult concept, and Heidegger himself resented the way it was translated into other languages. For Heidegger, dasein is a thinking presence in the world that exists through a people, so in a sense we can say that a people is synonymous with dasein. A people is not a totality of individuals (this would be the liberal explanation of a people), it is not a class (this would be the communist justification), it is not a political nation, much less a race (this is the political or biological definition of a people), but it is an autonomous subject of history, which passes through its presence in the world of being.

This is really difficult to understand immediately, and I advise those who are willing to do so to read up on Heidegger's works, and in particular Sein und Zeit, preferably in the original, in German, because, unfortunately, this book is not translated correctly into Russian.

A.Z.: And then read his Fourth Political Theory. How would you describe it for the non-expert reader?

A.D.: The core of the 4PT is the sacredness of the historical being, of a people as a whole, and of man's spiritual-intellectual mission in the world. This is closest to the ideas of Father Sergius Bulgakov, his 'philosophy of economics' constructed as a project to transform economic activity into a national liturgy, a Sofia transfiguration of the world.

A.Z.: The 'national liturgy' sounds high. But what is the economic basis of the 4PT?

A.D.: The well-known Russian economist Alexander Galushka, author of the book The Growth Crystal, has developed, in my opinion, an effective and efficient model of economics beyond the three political ideologies: liberal, communist and nationalist. Galushka sees the solution to the main economic problem - in liberal terms, inflation - in the creation of a two-circuit financial system. The money in the 'first circuit' is ordinary money; the 'second circuit' is money used for strategic construction, major projects, defence and the creation of a powerful infrastructure. This money does not enter the market, and the creation of this 'second circuit', reserved for strategic projects, was also discovered by Galushka in the reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt (based on state reforms). Roosevelt (based on Keynes), and in Nazi Germany in the strategy of Yalmar Schacht and under Stalin. Galushka found the most compact expression of this strategy in the early 20th century German-Russian economist Franz Ballod. Whenever the two-ring model is accepted by society, there is a powerful turning point in the development of the state and this is completely independent of liberalism, communism or fascism. It is not about these ideologies, but something else. Specifically, a combination of state and people, plan and free enterprise.

Accepting his proposal, I am ready to recognise Galushka's approach as a 'fourth economic theory', ideally suited to Russia, where today we have completely exhausted liberalism, sporadic attempts at statism, nostalgia for socialism and... everything. We have to move on.

A.Z.: But, however, the liberals have the bourgeoisie, the communists lean towards the working class and the fascists lean towards big capital in one way or another. And who will implement your idea and the approach that Galushka suggests?

A.D.: The people! In thinking about how we should understand what the people are, I would turn to a subtle secular ritual that was established a few years ago: the Immortal Regiment. A nation is both the ancestors and the descendants, all those who make up the invisible community of the concrete dead and the concrete living. By the way, the ancient Slavs used to hold a ritual called 'Earth Name Day' at the beginning of May, on St. George's Day and related dates. It was the time when the living and the dead came together, but this is what forms the nation. If we need a phenological description of a nation, this is what we feel when we all march together with portraits of our dead, our heroes in the Immortal Regiment, and it does not matter who you are - a president, a patriarch or a guest worker: we all had ancestors who fought for our Motherland, and everyone remembers that. The presence of the dead becomes tangible through the living, and the living discover the presence of death and eternity. This is unique. This is the meaning of the nation!

When the state becomes estranged from the people, the economy disintegrates and culture begins to drown in meaningless chimeras, all this will have to be corrected by the people. The people is the subject of 4PT, the people as Dasein, as a thinking presence in the world, in its homeland, in the flow of blood and memory that unites ancestors and descendants.

It is the people who stand at the centre of the 4PT. When the state becomes estranged from the people, the economy disintegrates and culture begins to sink into meaningless chimeras, all this will have to be corrected by the people. The people is the subject of 4PT, the people as Dasein, as a thinking presence in the world, in its homeland, in the flow of blood and memory that unites ancestors and descendants.

Of course, if we study Heidegger carefully, much more will be revealed to us: for instance, that everything is a living being, and even every technical means must have its place in being. Warriors named their swords, farmers named their horses and cows. Thus, the relationship between man and the world forms an indissoluble bond. The people is the yardstick, the living subject, which we can experience when we immerse ourselves in its historical element. It explains many things to us. Philosophy, like science, economics and politics, must start building from the most secure foundation, from a concrete people and its identity, its traditional values, its being.

A.Z.: On the subject of 'living beings': many futurists today are extremely wary of technological progress; genetic engineering, cybernetics, they say, can lead the rich and powerful - those who have the money to modernise, to improve themselves - to be superior to the rest of the people. Are we talking about a society in which inequality is not only social, but also, to some extent, biological?

A.D.: These fears are justified. We are on the threshold of the end of humanity and this has been brought about by the principle of radical individualism which, by freeing man from almost all forms of collective identity, has in fact freed him from all content and, ultimately, from himself. This is an ideological and historical problem. Since liberalism still remains the main operational matrix on a global scale, the process of transition to post-humanist practices and technologies is actually embedded in the inertia of world civilisation formation. We are moving towards changing the biological structure of man, genetic engineering, the creation of chimeras, of cyborgs, which will gradually replace human beings. We will thus arrive at what futurologists call the singularity: the end of man and the transfer of power to a strong artificial intelligence.  This is now synonymous with progress. When we say progress, we mean digitisation, and digitisation is the dismemberment of the whole, it is the domination of the code, and it is all associated with extreme individualism. Such is the new liberalism, 'progressivism', in which the old ideas about human beings and ethical constraints are seen as something already outdated. For example, the Midjourney neural network is already quite capable of conventionally generating any artistic idea, plot and hallucination. Another neural network, ChatGPT, is already capable of writing articles not only on par with professional journalists, but even better than them. With the click of a button, all journalism will be entrusted to the network. Universities will only teach how to map out an article - keywords, conclusions, evaluations. Soon, however, even this will no longer be necessary...but what will happen next?

Another thing is that artificial intelligence, which is beginning to dominate more and more, does not care whether you are rich or poor, progressive or conservative. Right now it is programmed by the global oligarchy and NATO military strategists. This, however, is temporary. It is bigger than the plans of globalists like Schwab and Soros to subjugate humanity with new technologies. After all, even world government may at some point become a victim of artificial intelligence, and the fate of unleashed technology will drag those who naively consider themselves its masters into the abyss. So not only the passive oppressed masses, but also the globalists themselves could become victims. It is not certain that one day some hacker, some poor guy who has reached the Net, will not erase Abramovich's or Schwab's consciousness from it. Or else the Net itself will feel that these arrogant scoundrels who claim the right to rule humanity are far from their norms and values and follow double standards, and the Net will blast Soros just in the name of an 'open society', because for some it is 'more open' than for others. You can hide it from human beings, but you cannot hide it from artificial intelligence.

This is not simply a conspiracy of bad people against good people, but the logic of the principled choice that western society made at the dawn of the New Age. The choice in favour of pure technology, which means alienation, oblivion. This fundamental philosophical decision was made some 500 years ago in Western Europe and then rapidly spread throughout the world, finally leading to where we are today.

I pay attention to the fact that almost all 19th century science fiction images were made in the 20th century, because fantasy - in a sense - is a projection of the future. In the West, therefore, post-humanist motifs have already been deliberately introduced. There are human rights activists demanding the right to vote for the hoover (Bruno Latour's 'parliament of things' theory) or the wasp (Italian environmentalists). The transfer of certain elements of human existence to non-human subjects, as humanity itself becomes increasingly mechanistic and predictable, will cause the human and the non-human to merge until they become inseparable. It is possible that at some point artificial intelligence will decide that the human species is obsolete, redundant and too toxic. Without it, the world will be much cleaner and tidier... Who knows when that will happen?

A.Z.: One last question: Aleksandr Gel'evič, how do you see your role in contemporary Russia?

A.D.: Oh, I don't know. I am just a son of my people, nothing more. For me, Russia is an absolute value. My people are the highest I can imagine. I serve my people, my homeland, my history, my culture and my Church as best I can. I think it is not enough, so I value my role very modestly.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini