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DASEIN AND 'TRADITION'

The point is worth raising in a 'review' (if that's what this is) of Dugin's book because Dugin does subscribe to the conventional view that Being and time is Heidegger's most important book. He calls it (p.283) 'his main work' while insisting (p.287) that it 'must only be read in German'. (20) In tribute to the importance of Being and time, Dugin's book is rather oddly constructed. While Heidegger begins with dasein (human-reality) and moves on in his later works, Introduction to metaphysics, What is called thinking etc to Being itself, Dugin starts with Being and ends with dasein.

(20) Without suggesting that Dugin is wrong about this it may be said that he is writing in the context of an existing Russian literature. Dugin tells us that Heidegger became fashionable in the samizdat literature of the late Soviet Union but this initial Russian research on Heidegger was conducted under unfavourable circumstances with a particular westernising agenda in mind and in Dugin's view it is almost entirely useless.

Which means that after dancing with the earth, the sky, gods and men, we are brought back in something of an anti-climax to where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. In particular we are faced with the distinction between 'inauthentic dasein', slumped in an armchair, zapping from channel to channel on the TV, living in a world of mere 'seeming' (veils of Maya?), and 'authentic dasein' in whom Being, or Beyng, is made manifest.

And here I think I see what might be a contradiction which is more obvious in Dugin than it is in Heidegger. It is more obvious because Dugin, much more than Heidegger, is concerned with politics, with the well-being of society. And the well-being of society is very largely dependent on the consistency of the 'seeming' of inauthentic dasein.

Dugin, like Guénon, is a 'traditionalist'. A traditional society is a society with strongly established conventions, where everyone knows their place, as in the Indian caste system, and everyone subscribes to the same ... difficult to say what given that Heidegger has rendered so many of the words that come easily to mind - 'worldview', 'values', 'ideas' - problematical. But regardless of the chosen word, this is almost a textbook definition of 'inauthentic dasein'. Heidegger tells us that ''our interpretation has a purely ontological intention and is far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein' (Being and time, p.161). Inauthentic Dasein, living out its 'everyday life' with its head full of 'idle talk' (as opposed to the authentic 'logos' - legein - laying out or gathering together, which may and probably will occur in authentic silence (p.159)) is determined by das Man which can be roughly translated as 'they' or 'everyone' as in 'Everyone is doing the Locomotion' or 'Everyone knows that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction'. Inauthentic dasein picks up and relays whatever happens to be floating about the atmosphere - a bit like Richard Dawkins' notion of 'memes', phrases and ideas that replicate themselves in human society often independently of any actual human initiative. What 'everyone knows' in a traditional society may well be very different from and superior to what everyone knows in a society dominated by TV chat shows but the principle surely remains the same.

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