The Meaning of the Pseudonym “Platonova”
She chose the pseudonym “Platonova” (“of Plato”) and dedicated her youth to the study of Platonism, to the works and theories of various Platonists and Neoplatonists—both Christian and belonging to other religions. At one time, the American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked that all of world philosophy is nothing more than footnotes to Plato. When we engage with Platonism, we truly find ourselves at the center of a typhoon, at the core of the problem of generation, of the creation of meanings and structures of history, culture, thought, and mind. Dasha understood this and chose this path—a dangerous one, even if one remains on the surface. People often fear the mind like fire. In their day the common townsfolk of Athens executed Socrates[5], and the inhabitants of Alexandria killed Hypatia. Today the ruling elites of the world likewise furiously shun free, substantive thought. Indeed, in the modern world the orbits of thinking are gradually narrowing; “grand narratives” are subjected to disparaging criticism; the practice of philosophy is deliberately reduced to a technical parsing of microscopic details. No generalizations are allowed. And of course, the first target of this epistemological policy of fragmentation were Plato and the Platonists with their sweeping global generalizations. They have quite literally been subjected to “cancel culture.” Yet even the latest attacks of the postmodernists on thought, and the extreme perversion of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), are still not the end and not the last word in the persecution of philosophers.
Today philosophers—naturally, those who do not submit to the role assigned to them as intellectual service staff for the ruling elites and who defend the dignity of truly free thought—are deliberately and purposefully killed. Dasha knew that all this obscurantism must be opposed first and foremost with thought itself, with ideas, with new concepts, designs, projects. And she chose Platonism as her point of departure in this struggle. She suspected that the path would be difficult. But how difficult, and how it would end—of course, she could not even imagine. She knew that philosophers are killed and wrote about this in her articles and in her Diary. But perhaps she herself did not fully realize that she, too, was a philosopher. And therefore that this was her own fate, freely chosen and lived to the full in her short but bright and pure life.
— Natalia Melentyeva
Read the full essay here:
https://www.multipolarpress.com/p/daria-duginas-revolution-of-the-spirit
