Toward a General Theory of Horror

In this article, Alexander Dugin explores the concept of horror, drawing from Heidegger's distinction between fear (external and explained) and horror (internal and undefined).

Gradually, work is progressing on a new direction - a general theory of horror. Heidegger contrasts horror (Angst, anxiety) with fear (Furcht, fear). Fear makes us flee, while horror makes us freeze in place. In psychiatry, the distinction between anxiety disorder and fear is somewhat different but complements Heidegger's dualism. Horror arises from within, confronting something undefined and inexpressible. Fear always comes from outside and has - even if it's just a phantasm - a cause, form, and explanation.

David Lynch's films beautifully convey Angst, but this is quite different from the genre of horror. Intense internal horror makes a person fearless. Conversely, immersion in petty, trembling fear (the "trembling creature") protects against the impact of horror from within.

The prospect of dehumanizing man, becoming increasingly acute and close, can generate both fear and horror. Fear makes us dodge, horror pushes us to face-to-face combat. Horror is closer to eternity. Fear is inherent to time.

Eugene Thacker in "Horror of Philosophy" explains horror through three types of "world" in the spirit of critical realism (OOO - Object-Oriented Ontology):

The World-with-Us, i.e., the world as Heidegger's existential (in-der-Welt-sein). This theme is developed by Heidegger's friend and Husserl's student, Eugen Fink - kosmologische Differenz - the difference between the things of the world and the world as a whole. Fink interprets this in the spirit of Heidegger's distinction between being and beings (The Game as an Image of the World).

The World-in-Itself. The materialist theory of the object.

The World-without-Us. According to Thacker, this is what instills horror, as it lies between the world-with-us and the world-in-itself. This intermediate dimension is the experience of contact with something that actively and concretely abolishes our very nature. This is the zone of pure horror, not fear. Contact with the world-without-us is far more acute than personal death. When we perish, our species remains. But the experience of the species' extinction is truly horrifying. Elon Musk has recently pondered this.

This theme appears among other speculative realists like Meillassoux and Harman in a similar context. Building an ontology of objects, they model the end of the subject (and any correlationism) and come to the hypothesis of the being of the other side of things, where absolute horror concentrates. They illustrate this with Lovecraftian motifs and plots, integrating his images and ideas about idiot gods and underwater civilizations into philosophy.

Heidegger himself hints at this, as horror (Angst) for him acts as the experience of nothingness or pure being ("What is Metaphysics?"). However, critical realists adapt Heidegger to their obsession with objects and the dismantling of life, the subject, and Dasein, whereas for Heidegger, Dasein is central.

Of course, a general theory of horror should begin with the nature of the sacred and the Fear of God (here, clearly, we're talking about horror, Angst - God does not scare, He horrifies). Then, Boehme, Pascal, Hegel, Kierkegaard. And only then Heidegger and post-Heideggerian thought - from Sartre and Camus to Deleuze and OOO.

Incidentally, for Pascal and Kierkegaard, horror is evoked by the very autonomous Universe opened by the physics of the New Age - cold and infinite. Perhaps it is this that is responsible for the grotesque descriptions of the dark nature in God in Boehme's theosophy.

Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite's thought about the pre-being One, about apophatic theology, set the stage for another - transformative, elevating, deifying - type of horror.

The Fear of the Lord is the vertical axis of being.

What could be the phenomenon or concept closest to Russian horror? How do Russians experience and interpret horror?

At first glance, a Russian does not know horror before the world because, for us, the world is an organic continuation of oneself - the roots of the words "мир" (world) and "милый" (dear) are one, according to Kolesov. The dear does not inspire horror. Neither does the world as a community.

Thus, Russians do not know nature as such (in itself, as an object). Russians tend to animate and spiritualize it (hence Andrei Platonov's techno-animism, his magical Bolshevism). And of course, Fedorov, for whom matter is the dance of particles of our fathers' ashes. The atoms of Tsiolkovsky, having tasted the sweetness of life.

Our science is not materialistic but pantheistic.

What horrifies a Russian is not so much the absence and alienation of life, but its excesses and aberrations. Hence, the predominantly Slavic theme of the vampire. A vampire is an excess of life. It should be dead, but somehow, it is not.

The stubborn love for life in a Russian person, it seems, shifts horror too deep inside - so deep that we don't notice it ourselves. But others do notice.

Horror is what we inspire.