The Significance Of Heidegger And His History Of Philosophy For Russia (Part 4)
Translated by Michael Millerman. Founder of https://millermanschool.com/ - online philosophy and politics courses on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dugin, Strauss, and more.
The Middle Ages
Heidegger studied medieval philosophy meticulously in the early stages of his teaching at the University of Freiburg; later he paid very little attention to it. From his point of view, Nietzsche’s formula that “Christianity is Platonism for the masses” is an exhaustive axiom for summing up the philosophical state of affairs with medieval philosophy. For Heidegger, Christian scholasticism is the development of the philosophical step that Plato made in principle, putting the idea (the highest idea, the idea of good) in the place of being, thus fundamentally removing being from the sphere of philosophical thinking, replacing epistemological and ontological problems. Theology continues the same tendency, putting God in the place of the highest being, that is, remaining in the same Platonic paradigm.
For Heidegger nothing fundamentally new happens in the Middle Ages. Philosophy moves in the path predestined for it by the pre-Socratics and especially Plato and Aristotle.
Modernity – Descartes
But a truly interesting time for Heidegger is modernity. He defines it as the “Beginning of the End” (symmetrical to how Platonism was for him the End of the first Beginning). Modernity unfreezes medieval scholastic Platonism and gives free rein to the nihilistic power of the logos. At the center of this process is Descartes with his dual construction of subject and object. The subject replaces logos, the object physis. At the same time, Heidegger believes that in this modern philosophy approaches a more direct formulation of the problem: the rejection of ideas and the appeal to rational logical thinking directly as a subject reveals the very essence of the philosophical problem laid down in the era of the Beginning of philosophy. Cartesian rationalism, English empiricism, Newton and all other areas of modern philosophy (from Spinoza and Leibniz to Kant) develop in the field of more acute problematisation of ontology, where things are called by their own names.
Thus, Descartes, with his cogito, openly places the argument about ontology in the field of epistemology, making it a derivative of the logos, of reason. According to Heidegger, this is the beginning of the clear domination of the technical attitude to the world and man; man becomes a technician in relation to nature-object, and Gestell, earlier veiled, exposes its historico-philosophical power. Philosophy itself becomes more and more a technical occupation, a technique of thinking, which boils down to methods of calculation and evaluation. In other words, in modernity nihilism as the essence of Western European philosophy is revealed in full.
Hegel and Nietzsche
Modernity ends, according to Heidegger, in Hegel’s philosophy, and Nietzsche is its last chord.
Hegel makes his history of philosophy a grandiose, monumental creation of the Western European spirit, concentrating in itself the destiny of the Absolute Idea, embodied during the “end of history” in the subjective spirit of the Western European culture of modernity. Hegel seriously poses the question of the relationship between being and nothing, being and knowledge, building his dialectic on that. In his summarizing work, Hegel, according to Heidegger, still remains within the framework of Western European metaphysics, thinks with the help of “concepts” and “categories,” that is, he is still in the space of the referential theory of truth and the common European philosophical topos. Hegelian ontology for Heidegger is the maximum approximation to what true ontology should have been (hence Hegel’s enormous attention to Heraclitus and the pre-Socrates, who thought on a symmetrical segment of the history of philosophy - but only in the era of the Beginning, while Hegel himself thinks in the era of the End), but the approximation is fatally incorrect due precisely to its belonging to the old metaphysics, its structures and methods.
Nietzsche philosophizes even more honestly and frankly. He directly proclaims “European nihilism,” the crisis of Western metaphysics and the “death of God,” exposes the “will to power” as the basis of the historical process and, therefore, the basis of philosophy and the history of philosophy. At the same time, Heidegger believes that Nietzsche, who demolished metaphysics, did not make a single step beyond its borders, but became precisely the last metaphysical thinker of the Western European tradition. The Nietzschean “superman” and “will to power,” according to Heidegger, do not at all indicate a new horizon of thinking, but only the absolutization of the nihilistic nature of logos and the highest concentration of Gestell.
In other words, Nietzsche is not only not an alternative, but represents a genuine and accomplished End, the End of Western European philosophy and, accordingly, the end of philosophy itself.
So, along with Hegel and Nietzsche, Western European philosophy goes through a full cycle from the first (great) Beginning through the middle (medieval, in a broad sense) period to the Beginning of the End in Descartes and the complete and irreversible End in Hegel and, especially, Nietzsche. Starting with a somewhat inaccurate definition of being as physis, and only as physis, Western philosophy entered its fatefully predetermined history (destiny), the only content of which was progressive deontologization, loss of being, growth of nihilism, techne, Gestell, nihilating reason as an expression of the will to power. Being declined [ubyvalo] until it had declined completely.
But this, according to Heidegger, is the destiny of the West as the “Land of Evening” (Abendland). The decline [Ubyvaniye] of being is the lot of the West and the meaning of the history of philosophy as a purely Western phenomenon. Deontologization, concealment of being, and the onset of a nihilistic night are not an accident and not a catastrophe, and even not a consequence of error — this is a statement of philosophical geography. The light goes out there and then when it must. And when it must, the darkness sets in, the “Great Midnight”.
According to this reconstruction, Western philosophy is over. The remaining time can be devoted to understanding this ending, describing and interpreting the meaning of this event.
But Heidegger has another theme that predetermines the cutting edge of his thought in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. This is the thought about another Beginning or about “Ereignis.”
Another Beginning
In the middle period of his work, Heidegger focuses his attention on the concept of “Ereignis” and the theme of another Beginning that is directly connected with it. Ereignis is, according to Heidegger, another Beginning. 17 But this is not just an “event” (“event” is a literal translation of “Ereignis”), but the possibility of an “event,” an “accomplishment” having a fundamental philosophical meaning.
Another Beginning – that is that Beginning which did not begin in pre-Socratic thought. It is an understanding of being that includes nothing in being as its necessary component; which, identifying being with existence and physis, emphasizes that this identification does not exhaust being, since being is simultaneously non-existent, non-being, nothing, as well as that which makes a being not only existent but non-existent, that is, that which is nihilates. Being in another Beginning must (should) be recognized both as that which is, and as that which is not, but that, although not a being, nevertheless is (non-being is, in spite of Parmenides).
The whole history of philosophy is distancing from the possibility of Ereignis, is primarily non-Ereignis, as embodied in deontologization and oblivion of being, in Gestell and techne. But the negative Heideggerian interpretation of the historico-philosophical process as a non-Ereignis carries an opposite indication of Ereignis itself, if only to decipher this process as a narration not of what it is in itself, but of what it is not, and that non-manifestation is its highest and chief meaning. Western philosophy, recognized as a progressive distancing from truth, its gradual concealment, is a paradoxical form of finding the truth itself through its dialectical denial and veiling. Therefore, Ereignis and another Beginning should be sought not elsewhere, beyond the limits of Western European philosophy, but in it, in its inversely interpreted content. The very fact of distancing from being in the course of the unfolding of the history of philosophy is a reverse indication of the significance of being and how one should think of it.
Heidegger describes the correct thinking of being in the framework of “authentic” (eigene) existence through the graphic figure of Geviert, the fourfold.18 Two pairs of opposites intersect in it, representing ontological unity: 1) Sky (“world”, in some versions) and 2) Earth, 3) mortals (people) and 4) gods (immortals). This image, borrowed from Hölderlin’s poetry, leading, by the way, to Plato, where in Heraclitan enmity four world domains of being converge among themselves, describes how one should understand being in another Beginning.
Another Beginning, according to Heidegger, must be born directly from the End of philosophy, if only this end is correctly decoded and recognized. On this point, Heidegger quotes lines from Hölderlin: “Where the danger is, grows the saving power also.”19 To transition to another Beginning, you need to take not a step to the side, not many steps back, but a step forward. However, this is a very difficult step, during which nihilism itself, the loss of being in Western European philosophy, techne itself and Gestell itself, will be revealed as the unconcealment of the truth of Seyn-being through its self-concealment. From this perspective, Western philosophy, which is, in the first approximation, a progressing crisis and fall into twilight, will reveal itself as a path to salvation: the one who first reaches the bottom of the abyss can be the first to push off from it and begin to rise.
[17]. Heidegger M. Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event)
I think that this is a compelling and richly layered exposition from Alexander Dugin, reflecting not only his engagement with Heidegger but also his philosophical dramaturgy in the way he stages the great metaphysical narrative of the West. Reading through it, one immediately notices how Dugin appropriates Heidegger’s epochal framework to dramatize the unfolding of Western philosophy as a decline, a twilight march away from Being. I find this narrative both profoundly provocative and, at times, strategically mythic in tone. It’s a history less concerned with empirical details or academic nuance and more with establishing a metaphysical topology East and West, Beginning and End, Being and its Oblivion.
So, Dugin begins by situating Heidegger’s neglect of medieval philosophy as a deliberate philosophical gesture. Heidegger’s early engagements notwithstanding, the Middle Ages for him amount to little more than an amplification of Platonism under the guise of Christian scholasticism. Nietzsche’s phrase, “Christianity is Platonism for the masses,” becomes an axiom that justifies a sweeping dismissal. This point is made with admirable clarity by Dugin: scholastic theology, for Heidegger, merely continues Plato’s foundational move of placing the Idea (the Good) above Being, thereby displacing Being itself from thought. This removal of Being from the philosophical core is not, in this account, a flaw unique to Christianity, but a systemic element of Western metaphysics from the start. I agree with Dugin’s reading that for Heidegger, this Platonic shift marks the original distortion, a turning away from the pre-Socratics, who still had some sense of Being’s primordiality.
It’s in Heidegger’s treatment of modernity, however, that Dugin finds real philosophical tension. Descartes emerges not as a reformer but as a catalyst for the “Beginning of the End.” This phrase a counterpoint to the original “Beginning” in pre-Socratic thought captures the dual role Descartes plays: on one hand, he strips metaphysics of its theological garments, and on the other, he intensifies the ontological crisis. Dugin is right to underscore how, for Heidegger, Cartesian dualism turns Being into a function of epistemology. The subject-object split becomes the birthplace of technical rationality, of logos wielded like an instrument. There’s something chilling in this transformation. The world is no longer revealed, it is calculated. The thinker no longer dwells in Being, he masters it or tries to in my opinion.
I think that this is the moment when Gestell begins to assert itself historically. Gestell, that peculiar Heideggerian term for the technological enframing of reality, is no longer latent; it starts to structure the entire human relation to Being. Dugin’s reading emphasizes how Heidegger sees modern philosophy whether Cartesian rationalism, British empiricism, or Kantian critique as variously deepening the forgetfulness of Being while simultaneously clarifying the metaphysical structure of that forgetting. The irony, as Dugin makes plain, is that modernity renders nihilism more transparent. It says what metaphysics always did, but more bluntly.
The discussion then pivots to Hegel and Nietzsche. Here Dugin is especially insightful. Hegel is framed as the last great systematizer of Western metaphysics, the one who tried to close the philosophical narrative by sublimating it into the Absolute Idea. He represents the moment in which the metaphysical tradition becomes self-aware, yet still operates within the old structures concepts, categories, the referential theory of truth. Heidegger, as Dugin notes, respects Hegel’s ambition and his attention to Heraclitus, but he sees in Hegel an ultimate failure: the failure to break free of metaphysics by still thinking Being in terms of the conceptual.
Nietzsche, then, is treated not as a radical outsider, but as the final insider. The will to power, the death of God, the transvaluation of values these are not new beginnings, in Heidegger’s view, but terminal intensifications. Nietzsche, says Dugin via Heidegger, is metaphysics distilled to its most nihilistic essence. I find this assessment particularly compelling: Nietzsche’s break with tradition is only apparent. His Superman and will to power are not liberations from metaphysics but its consummations. Dugin’s phrase “accomplished End” captures this neatly. Nietzsche is both the gravedigger and the last priest of metaphysical thinking.
Thus I think in Heidegger’s view, as interpreted by Dugin, Western philosophy unfolds as a tragic arc. From the Greek inception, through medieval distortion, to modern dissolution, it is a history of deontologization a progressive forgetting and loss of Being. This process is not accidental, not correctable, and certainly not morally condemnable. It is a fate—a destiny of the Abendland, the Land of Evening. Here Dugin makes one of his most philosophically resonant points: this is not an intellectual mistake but a geographical and ontological condition. The West had to forget Being. It was bound to.
But all is not despair. Dugin then takes us to Heidegger’s later thought the notion of another Beginning, the possibility of Ereignis. Now, this part of the text, while dense, is profoundly hopeful in a dark way. Ereignis, which is often mistranslated as simply “event,” is something far more radical in Heidegger: it is the event of appropriation, of Being giving itself. Dugin is careful to stress that this new Beginning is not a return to pre-Socratic wisdom but a step forward through the End, not away from it.
This “another Beginning” is structured through paradox. Being must be thought as including nothing, as both Being and non-Being. Heidegger challenges Parmenides here: non-being is, too. The whole of Western philosophy, then, becomes a history not of Being, but of its concealment. Yet that concealment, says Dugin via Heidegger, is also a form of unconcealment. It’s negative theology applied to ontology. We know Being not through its presence, but through the marks its absence leaves.
And then there is Geviert, the fourfold—sky and earth, mortals and gods—this poetic topology drawn from Hölderlin and reoriented by Heidegger. Dugin’s inclusion of this image is apt, because it signals the turn away from conceptual thinking toward poetic dwelling. This is the sort of ontological grammar that cannot be translated into logic or epistemology. It has to be inhabited, lived.
Dugin’s reading culminates in a powerful inversion: the very darkness into which Western thought has fallen becomes the place from which a new light might emerge. But not a light of clarity—rather, a “saving power” hidden within danger itself. The fall into nihilism is not a dead end but the abyss from which a new relation to Being might emerge. The way down is the way through.
In sum, Dugin does more than summarize Heidegger; he performs a kind of metaphysical liturgy. His interpretation is passionate, mythic, and unapologetically grand. While it may lack the cautious sobriety of analytic commentary, it more than compensates with philosophical intensity. Whether one agrees with Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger or not, it is impossible to ignore the depth and drama he brings to this reading. He asks us not just to understand philosophy, but to see its death, and maybe, just maybe, its rebirth.
The thing is even Heidegger still stood without what he would usher in. Ultimately all he had were more ideas of the Next. It did take a German to embody it, in the research of Goethe we already have a beginning experience of the identity of being and thought/'interiority' in his experience of the Urplanze, and his colour investigations. It took an Austrian, in R. Steiner, to make a science of this, and it should have taken some Anglos to make it mundane, industried, and commercial rather than only more individual, substantial, and articulated. But this has not been forthcoming, perhaps we will have to wait for the returning tide back to the european East, slavs, or Russians, who will manage to transmute their current tendancy to ritualize it. Transmute RS's work into a re-sacralized scientia... a profoundly human wisdom full of technique and practic.