Speech by N.V. Melentieva at the presentation of the book "Eschatological Optimism" by Daria Dugina at the "Eurasian Congress of Philosophers" 17.02.2024

The book 'Eschatological Optimism' consists of the texts of Daria's speeches, broadcasts, lectures and dissertations. It was difficult for us as parents to realise at a short distance that a philosopher was forming near us. We looked into the future and believed that her growth and blossoming was still ahead of us, but now we can see that what she has written is a philosophical book, with original thoughts, ideas and concepts that can be reflected upon and developed further.

In her e-journal "The Heights and Heights of My Heart" Dasha wrote: "We are abandoned in this world.... We have a duty and a mission... We need an inner revolution, a revolution of the Spirit...", and that "We are on the central axis of vertical rebellion".

Dasha was first and foremost a traditionalist philosopher. Plato and Christian theology were her main ideological platform. Dasha was an orthodox Platonist with a distinct identity. Traditionalism sees the historical movement not as a unilinear progress, but as a series of cycles with phases of degradation and regression. In the traditionalist perspective, the New Age of Western Europe appeared to Dasha as a process of a sharp decline in thinking, compared to antiquity and the Middle Ages, of man's estrangement from meaning and loss of purpose, while Postmodernism appeared as a natural end to the degeneration of civilisation, spent a year as an intern in Bordeaux, France, and told us that in contemporary France, as in the rest of the world, the orbits of thought are gradually narrowing, 'grand narratives' are subjected to pejorative criticism, and philosophy is deliberately turned into a technical examination of microscopic details. Broad generalisations are discouraged and allowed only for institutionalised philosophers of certain ranks. The one-year philosophy course at the University of Bordeaux that he took consisted mainly of reading Plato's dialogue The State, where most of the time was devoted to dissecting the nuances of an interesting but very narrow topic such as 'The Problem of the 'Divided Line' in Plato's dialogue The State'.

But it is not only the shattering of interests and attention to detail without regard for general patterns that characterises postmodernity. Postmodernity seems to have already transgressed the prohibitions on culture, on ideas, on philosophers, on thought as such. The basic principles of postmodernity have become 'rhizome' and 'plateau' - symbols of flat ontology, anti-hierarchy, absence of centre, disintegration of the individual into parts. Being fully faithful to Plato, Dasha became interested in these distorted and overturned ontologies of Postmodernism, trying to understand their forgeries, to decipher their irony and to understand how these false, but in some ways hypnotically attractive, theoretical constructions based on ironic escapes, displacements and transgressions are organised.

Observing the typical products of Postmodernity in her generation, in her environment, among her acquaintances, Daria tried to relate these deliberately fragmentary and fractal entities to her ideas of a complete Platonic personality. And despite the difficulties of this idea, she never gave up, bringing philosophy into the most ordinary, sometimes mundane human relationships and situations.

Growing up in a philosophical family, Dasha considered thought, the mind, the Logos as the main things in human life and believed that philosophy should be vital, passionate, with a slight transformative power. Logos must be connected to the life of the soul. Thought must go hand in hand with feeling, with living events, it must be connected to understanding, to hermeneutics, to philosophising in hermeneutic circles. Philosophy is a kind of alchemical union and transformation of the fragments of everyday life, a transmutation of elements, an alchemical infusion in which layers of reality, theses and antitheses collide and the synthesis of concepts, notions, nodes of thought that organise and maintain the order of reality is realised. She believed that true thought is a kind of production and development of living concepts, these concepts must first be fished out of the murky flow of impressions and then revived, accentuated, made the point of assembly, crystallisation and consolidation of the Mind and minds. Dasha has found several such bright spots: interesting, voluminous and even hypnotically revealing concepts.

One such concept is 'Eschatological Optimism'.

What is it? It is a heroic ethics of the end, of the finitude of human existence. It is the realisation that we are facing our end, the death of man and humanity. And this understanding does not fade with time, but is refined and overcome by the transcendent action of the Spirit. Eschatological optimism is another name for the Tragic in antiquity, when the doomed hero engages in a struggle with destiny and loses, but the very fact of his rebellion gives meaning to existence. In defeat is contained the dignity of man as a species. Eschatological optimism is not the expectation of a reward, a reward for action, but the action itself, the very act of rebellion, against all odds.

Another concept that the writer has noted and emphasised, deepened and powerful, is that of the Frontier. Dasha's third book, already prepared for publication, is entitled Russian Frontier. Frontir is a volumetric, spatial territory, an area, a place, a topos, almost sacred, where old forms are destroyed and new ones are created. In contrast to frontiers as delimiting and prohibitive lines, frontiers are rather connecting and permissive spaces. The frontier is a special place where the outline of the nation's future destiny is being created, where the sketch of our Russian future is being drawn. At the frontier, reason is clouded, truth is messy, beauty is questioned, but it is there that wars and revolutions end up reforming history, giving birth to new eras with their myths, ideologies and key worldviews. The frontier is at first confusion and uncertainty, a time when it is unclear whether God and truth exist, it is a grey area with traces of gods, with threshold guards - as if everyone left their earthly fiefdoms, and sublunary things fell into chaos and began to change shapes and names, without paying attention to us, the witnesses.

Dasha perceived that the past and present plans of our homeland's life path have not been fully realised, and today we are at a crossroads, perhaps in a kind of interregnum. In March 2024, Dasha's book 'Russian Frontier' will be published, in which this aspect will be explored.

Another theme that Dasha has carefully developed in her research is that of the 'weak subject' in Russian philosophy. Dasha used the image of the 'poor subject' to describe the peculiarities of Russian identity. This 'poverty' or 'weakness', in her view, is not only a disadvantage - lack of rigid rationality and strong will - but also a virtue. The Russian heart is capable of compassion and empathy towards people and the world, absorbing in its entirety the humanity of being. Unlike the Western subject that attacks nature in the spirit of Francis Bacon or competes with other subjects in the spirit of Hobbes' 'wolf-man', the Russian subject makes its weakness its strength, reconnects the world, makes it whole, heals its wounds.

Dasha's life was cut short by a terrorist attack organised by the Ukrainian security services. But the real instigator of our daughter's murder was the fallen spirit of Western civilisation with its specific ideology - liberalism - and the values derived from it - individualism, consumerism, pragmatism, one-dimensionality, a perverted conception of man and his meaning. Dasha sought only to oppose this totalitarian discourse, which claims to be globalism without alternatives.

When Cicero lost his daughter Tullia, he went to the provinces and wrote comforting letters. My philosophical lament for his daughter and the vicissitudes of her fate is inexhaustible, but I like to think that my words about Dasha are not just 'comfort talk', and that this is not just our own personal family tragedy, but that Dasha's passion for life and thought, her desire for perfection and beauty, for spirit and poetry will not leave many people indifferent, and will capture their minds, feelings and thoughts. It will seize us all as spirits of the High and the Sublime! And that we can hope for a soulful response from our contemporaries, especially the young, in the intellectual enthusiasm, in the intellectual passion, in the empathy, in the solidarity of those who will think of themselves, of the Motherland, of the meaning of life, of happiness, of the will, of their own authenticity, of the gap between the earthly beginning of life and its earthly end, of Eurasianism, of war, of the choice of the path of our Motherland and of Victory.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini