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FAINT PRAISE FOR DUGIN
Dugin's book is a readable - indeed quite powerfully written - systematic account of Heidegger's thought. To the extent that I can judge the matter it is also quite accurate. But this immediately poses the question of why Heidegger himself did not write such a readable, powerfully written and accurate systematic account of his own thought. It cannot have been for a lack of ability to do it. It must have been a matter of deliberate choice. A choice made in the full knowledge that the bits and pieces of his thought his readers would pick up would be assembled in a large variety of different ways, some of them quite antithetical to his own intentions. Whatever about intentions, there is between Dugin and Heidegger a radical difference in character. Dugin is a propagandist, out to have an immediate impact on the world. Heidegger (except perhaps for the period of his hopes in the German national revolution) believed any impact he might have on the world could only mature over a long period of time - 'It may be that it needs 300 years in order to have an "effect"' as he says in the famous 1966 interview with Der Spiegel.
Indeed one is reminded of Shelley's statement that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Heidegger's philosophy, as we can see from John Minahane's article on the 'Poet-philosophers of Greece' in the Heidegger Review no 2, poses the question of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. His theory of the apprehension of truth could be understood as a theory of the way in which truth is apprehended in poetry. Indeed he has a certain scorn for facts - in dramatic contrast to Dugin who, in one of his other roles as a 'conspirologist' is fascinated by facts. Heidegger wants his readers to experience the realities he is talking about - hence his insistence that certain Greek-derived words such as 'idea', 'theory', 'logic' as well as the Greek 'alethea' (truth) have more to do with vision/experience/revelation than with anything arrived at after a process of rational deduction. The very obscurity of Heidegger's language (rather like the obscurity of some modern poetry) is a matter of obliging the mind to go to places it might rather not go, of breaking 'habits of mind'.
So though we might be grateful for Dugin's clear presentation, even perhaps welcome it with a feeling of relief, we should also regard it with a degree of suspicion and certainly not take it as a substitute for reading Heidegger himself, tempting as that might be.