The question of the order model that supports the cultures is a fundamental question of human beings. The human being always strives to recognize an order in things and to overcome the condition of the primal chaos (1) understood in many mythologies through a higher consciousness. Based on the teachings of the Integral Tradition, this article is intended to seek this order in the model of empire and to distinguish it from the idea of ​​the nation state as a stage of decay. At the same time, the empire resembles a development of a vertical patriarchal logos, where the particularisms remain stuck on the matriarchal side of existence.

The dualism of mind and world

The Russian philosopher Nikolai A. Berdiayev put forward the theory of refraction (2). After assuming the relation of spirit and world or of the divine and the human, man is always in an intermediate position. On the one hand man is called to an overworld, on the other hand his freedom and concrete situation is based on turning towards this world. This harbors the danger of distortion and thus of losing oneself in the world and its constraints. If we apply Berdiayev's theory to the field of cultures and institutions, these are comparable to a prism of light refraction which allows them to appear in their own particular way and gives a share in the divine without the latter having the light completely for itself. The human being cannot therefore recognize the unified superordinate spirit in its pure form, but he does experience it in various aspects, which can be distorted into pure materialism but also turned toward transcendence. With regard to the institutions and orders, but also the cultural life of the peoples, there is a separate perspective on them, which is connected with the idea of ​​sinfulness but also with the possibility of human elevation. The human being in his concrete place faces a higher dimension of being, the "nous" as the Greeks called it. This dimension of being is unitary as ultimate truth but multifarious in its expression as given reality. The thinkers of the integral tradition like Rene Guenon (3) came to similar conclusions which are strictly opposed to modern materialistic and purely vegative thinking as a kind of relapse into unconsciousness. The higher being is the ultimate basis of man and every thing is to be looked for in how far it corresponds to a double value, it lies on the one hand in the level of worldliness, on the other hand in the level of the deeper divine core. So the church is not to be reduced to the secular institution that can err, but to its divine origin, so the state is not to be reduced to the real political, but to the embodied image what this represents. Here one arrives at a traditional conception of the empire.

nationality and empire

In the tradition there are different stages of life. On the one hand we see the close and unconscious subjection in the form of a physical and mental bond to the environment, which one shares with the animal world. This maternal earthbound stage can be considered the infancy of humanity. From this childhood of man comes the turning of man to a higher value, one sees the paternal here, which rises from the purely natural and seeks its core in higher laws. In man, a higher dimension of consciousness and of the underlying ideas that give things beauty, form and content opens up. Man's relationship to his environment is changing; he no longer sees it as something blindly given, but as a symbolic part of a spiritual sphere that forms the basis of her and him as a part. This higher dimension of the spirit in its concrete representation is also embodied politically, where at first there was a simple tribal life with changing alliances among each other, the idea of ​​a final unity opens up. The development of culture, supported by its own deeper ethics, is aimed at a higher truth that opens up the possibility of inner growth and self-improvement for people. Only the elevating spirit makes the human being a bearer of consciousness and helps him to separate the qualitative part from the purely quantitative bondage in the closer bonds. Through this stage of the awakening spirit, which is embodied in the imperial idea, the narrower ethnic groups and peoples are also faced with the possibility of a peaceful, cooperative development of their diversity within a superordinate context of unity. This in turn is reflected in its own way in the individual sub-units and also grants them access to high culture. At the same time, however, it is that spirit that can only recognize the goods of culture in the form of a hierarchical stratification within them, which also leads to the artistic and cultural achievements of transfiguration. (4) As described in the previous chapter, man has a double affiliation, he stands on a threshold between the world of spirit, which he embodies in his consciousness, and the world of matter, which also includes the unconscious impulses. After the development of high cultures and the execution of the higher spiritual part of the human being, there are failures of the institutions, which first have an effect through a materialization of the last ideas and their secularization. Ultimately, you have that phase of chaos and decay as a result when these become too visible. Gradually, the sub-units cease to recognize the ultimate principles of alignment of their inherent part of the spirit, they fall into various varieties of collective egoism and secession. Finally, they replace their part in the higher spiritual culture and also the foundations of their narrower culture through the development of chauvinism, attachment to the quantitative of the masses and economism instead of inner growth as an aristocratic ideal and outer virtue as its manifestation through saints and heroes.

Of true universality and its perversion

This stage can also be described as an interregnum, man is in a middle, through the material enrichment and the material ossification of the institutions man loses his access to the higher part of himself. That time is characterized by strife, conflict and finally total disintegration, until a new turning to higher things and thus to the spiritual-imperial principle leads to pacification and transcendental alignment of cultures. At the same time, however, that case is characterized by a falsification and direct reversal of the principles, this is what can be understood as an anti-Christian principle. Thus contemporary universalism is an extension of the apostasy of true universality. Where universality helped people to grow beyond their closer bonds and thus to ennoble themselves and their environment, universalism is the negation of any kind of bondage through egoism, atomization and the pure attachment to superficial goods. Where freedom lay in the ability to lead people out of their subservience to a sense of self-confidence, from which the elites of asceticism and martial virtues were formed, these former models of modernity are deeply hated. This is also because they remind them of their own shortcomings, which are reflected in a rationalized mediocrity. Today, all properties are turned into their opposite and live from their reflection of unconscious longings that no longer manifest themselves in their true form in consciousness. Reversal in modernity is characterized by using true content to place it directly in an opposite context. The idea of ​​ethnicity, social justice and also freedom are adopted as true principles, but they are twisted in their meaning. Ultimately, this was also recognized by the thinkers of postmodernism, who actively opposed such fragments of falsified truths through deconstructivism (Derrida), but basically a total ultimate annihilation of them. Postmodernism is striving to achieve all spiritual liberation and therefore also to destroy the consciousness and the divine component of man, because it only recognizes in them those perverted deviations of modernity. Nevertheless, the postmodern critique can be very helpful, it can help in its deconstructivism to negate modernity, exposing the fragments that have been colonized by it to appear in the face of true principles. Here you come to the fourth political theory of Alexander Dugin (5), which is based on an invitation to think the world away from the modern matrix, also through the state of looming disillusionment, which means that the same no longer appears so solid in its canon of values. The deconstruction of modern ideologisms in their falsifications of pre-modern principles can help to clearly see those elements and separate them from the non-values ​​of the main tendency. One can think of ethnicity without racial materialism, social justice without leveling out conformity, freedom without reducing it to vain egoism and hedonism.

epilogue

The doctrine of the cyclical worldview, as proper to the tradition, clearly recognizes the moment of supreme decline as the possibility of supreme exaltation through the fall of illusions and a return to the basic principles of the order that arose from chaos to liberate man . One is faced with nothingness today and this is the state of contemplation and assertion of the spirit in response to the immature unconsciousness that is imminent. This has some implications for the current situation. Within this world situation, contemporary Russia is again committed to an imperial logic as a way out of modernity and the postmodern moment of a spiritual low point, where Europe is completely committed to the end as great nothing and the negation of everything human itself. Especially the New Right, the integral traditionalists, true conservatives and other forces have to take a clear position on Russia with regard to the current Ukraine conflict. Furthermore, it is characteristic of such a turning point in the form of borderline situations that these manifest themselves in conflicts and that these conflicts can first restore order internally and externally and ultimately preserve it (6). They thus represent the core of future peace and a shift in the world order in its underlying paradigms.

references

1. In Norse mythology, that state of primordial chaos corresponded to the Ginnungagap.

2. Nikolai A. Berdiajew - Im Herzen die Freiheit, Renovamen Verlag, 2018

3. “Being is in itself one, and consequently the whole world is one at its core. For in the world the possibilities of being make themselves known. Neither the unity of being nor the uniqueness of the world excludes the diversity of this manifestation..." Rene Guenon - Stufen des Seins, page 29, Aurum Verlag, 1987

4. “They forget that in history those epochs were characterized by the greatest state power and the greatest social stability, in which the social order was particularly diverse despite all inner unity and the human characters in their plasticity and diversity came into their own ." Konstantin Leontyev - Der Durchschnittseuropäer, page 78, Karolinger Verlag, 2001

5.Alexander Dugin - The Fourth Political Theory, Arktos 2013

6. "The 'legitimate war', that is, war to restore order to those who disturb order, is an act of justice and balance, whatever the outward appearance." Rene Guenon - Die Symbolik des Kreuzes, page 49, Aurum Verlag, 1987