Translated by Michael Millerman. Founder of http://MillermanSchool.com - online philosophy and politics courses on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dugin, Strauss, and more.
Archaics and αρχη
Now we can take a closer look at the archaic pole, focus A (Figure 1).
The very naming of this pole as “archaic” (hence the “archeo-” in “archeomodern”), corresponds, on one hand, to the phenomenological statement of its main functions (the influence of focus A on the interpretation of concepts and judgments within the framework of the hermeneutic ellipse brings to this interpretation a meaning that does not coincide with the modernist semantics of European philosophical discourse, due to the fact that it is “ancient,” “non-modern,” “backward”). On the other hand, we can take the word “archaic” even more carefully and see in it the concept of “beginning” (in Greek “αρχη”), not only in the historical, but also in the most general sense. Focus A, being the “archaic” pole, is the focus of the Beginning [nachala] (or even the First Beginning [Pervonachala, Origin]). And if we think through this meaning, we will be able to reconsider our attitude towards archeomodernity altogether. The pathology in this phenomenon is its inseparability, its indivisibility, the appearance of its integrity, the claim that it should be so. The lie relating to it is to pass off something artificial, contradictory, compound, painful and ugly as natural, consistent, orderly, integral and aesthetically acceptable. The pathology of archeomodernity consists in its refusal to recognize this pathological nature. As soon as this pathological nature will be recognized and accepted, attention will automatically be attracted to finding out the causes of the disease. And the search for causes, in turn, sooner or later will lead to the discovery of the hermeneutic ellipse and awareness of the composite nature of the archeo-modern, as well as to the correct naming of its components. As soon as we recognize archeomodernity as a disease, we recognize it as archeomodernity. And vice versa, as soon as we realize that we are dealing with the archeomodern, we will immediately disclose it as a disease. A careful analysis of the morbidity of archeomodernity and its structure, reflection on its name and the meaning of the concepts included in it, will lead us to a fundamental conclusion: the reason for the emergence of archeomodernity is the collision of two antagonistic (or at least having a different root) principles [nachal], which are at different stages of relation with their own proper cores. This is a clash between the Western hermeneutic circle (Western philosophy, culture, history), which is in the phase of comprehensive development and at the peak of modernization, and another, Russian, principle [nachal] that is in a different cycle of development, at the initial stage of self-development, that is, in a state of maximum proximity to its core, in a state of “initial beginning [nachal'nogo nachala]” and even of “a not-yet-begun beginning.”
Modernity as the final product of the development of the Western principle
Western modernity is the result of the development of the Western principle [nachala]. And it finds its meaning only in comparison with this principle [nachala] and with the previous stages of its development, from the Western archaic to Western modernity.
It is easy to see that the West began to make claims to universality not only in modernity, insisting that its path of development is the universal fate of mankind, which Europe simply “lived faster and more fully than others.” Even at the dawn of Western civilization, in the Greek and Roman era, Greeks and Romans dismissively ranked representatives of other, non-Greek and non-Roman, cultures, even the most developed ones, as “barbarians” and considered them less “full-fledged” than they themselves, justifying thereby their “ imperial ”and“ civilizational” ambitions. This is, however, not a property only of the Greeks and Romans, but is characteristic of all empires and even of individual tribes, classifying only their fellow tribesmen or citizens as “persons” or “people.”
Therefore, the claims of Western modernity to universality are not properties of modernity, but properties of any culture, in whatever condition and at whatever stage it may be. If in recent centuries the West has imposed itself as the “universality of modernization,” then earlier it imposed itself as the “universality of civilization” (Western Greco-Latin civilization), the “universality of the Christian ecumene,” and in relation to Eastern Christians (equated with “schismatics”), as the universality of the Western Christian (Catholic, or Catholic-Protestant) ecumene. No matter how the West justifies and substantiates its claim to universality, in the final analysis, it was and remains its will to power on a planetary scale. Therefore, besides “propagandistic” rhetoric, the meaning of Western culture is given only and exclusively by its correlation with its own roots, origin [nachala], and Western αρχη. The modernization that the West brings with it today is the fruit of the development of its inner potential, nucleus, germ.
Versions of the merger of two different cultures
Russian archeomodernity cannot be viewed as the overlap of two different historical stages or phases of the same process: an advanced stage on a lagging, slowed down, decelerated stage. At issue is precisely the imposition of a foreign (and modernized) principle [nachalo] on [Russia’s] own principle [nachalo] (less modernized and closer to the origins), and not about imposing the new on the old. Moreover, this imposition is disharmonious, malformed, ugly, and sickly.
There are many examples of other impositions of cultures on each other, many versions of the acculturation, assimilation, integration and interpenetration of cultures. And we see in history that the conquerors and colonialists who manage to seize power and become the elite in the conquered societies are not always distinguished by a higher level of culture or technology. Examples are the Germanic barbarians who conquered the Western Roman Empire or the Seljuk Turks who conquered Byzantium. The ratio of the level of the differentiation of cultures (the measure of their distance from their own core and the development of the potentialities inherent in it) among ruling and subordinate peoples can be diverse. Therefore, in the case of emerging semantic dualities, it is far from always the case (although it happens quite often) that the modern is dominant and the archaic is subordinate, and it can be vice versa, as in the case of the capture of more developed agrarian societies by nomads and their subordination. Each of the cultural principles [nachal] has its own structure, history and internal coherence. At the same time, it is absolutely not necessary that the superposition of these cultures gives rise to something similar to the pathological ellipse that we meet in Russian archeomodernity. In some situations, the cultures find a harmonious balance with each other and either distribute legitimate zones of domination (for example: in caste societies, and in societies divided into separate cultural enclaves according to territorial, ethnic or professional characteristics), or they gradually synthesize their semantic circles, creating a new original circle that unfolds around a new single focus, which can be located at different points in relation to the two previous focuses of the ellipse, closer to the focus of the conquerors or the conquered or between them, or even off to the side. In some situations, the conquered peoples assimilate the culture of the conquerors and begin to identify with it; in others, on the contrary, the conquerors dissolve into the conquered. In each case, it is important to trace the gradual emergence of the harmonious structure of a new hermeneutic circle, which predetermines such properties of a culture as its health and harmony or its pathology, artificiality and unnaturalness.
In the case of Russian archeomodernity, we are dealing with the case when there is a complete discord between the poles of the hermeneutic ellipse: neither of them can outweigh the other nor, moreover, enter into an intelligible and meaningful dialogue with the other. This is not a synthesis, not a complete displacement, not a transformation, not a fusion or combination. This is an uneasy conflict a stalemate where there is no way to compromise, create something new or clearly state the positions of both sides.
In any case, being recognized as sick, this hermeneutic situation opens up a whole spectrum of its possible solutions, since even purely theoretically we can split this ellipse into two components and, at first, separate them as far from each other as possible.
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