The End of History and the Radical Subject

by Xantio Ansprandi

Excerpt from Eurasian Universism: Sinitic Orientations for Rethinking the Western Logos (PRAV Publishing, 2022) + 20% discount code for subscribers below

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, a book that deals with philosophy of history and morphology of civilisation from a politological perspective. He analyses the underlying processes of modern history after the French Revolution of 1789, the event that brought to reality for the first time the purportedly universal homogeneous nation-state based on the ideology of egalitarian human rights, that is to say, the liberal state.

Building upon the theoretical systems of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Alexandre Kojève, among others, Fukuyama gives an insightful analysis about the roots and the possible outcomes of the processes of modernity. The book has been oftentimes, and perhaps superficially, read as endorsing liberal democracy. Rather, it merely shows why such a political system has been so successful in the modern era, and forecasts its triumph, identifying it with the Kojèvean “end of history” and the hegemony of the Nietzschean “Last Man” (der Letzte Mensch). This triumph would mark the arrest of the dynamic evolution of humanity through competition and reciprocal recognition and would start the involution of man into a beastly entity yearning only for material pleasure.¹

Fukuyama says that, as opposed to lower animals that are driven only by selfish instincts of bodily survival, men primarily long for dignity, honour, and value, which depend on being recognised by others (by other worthy men) as peers, as men of the same worth.² Such longing for recognition is what Fukuyama calls thymos. He bases his idea on the theory of the tripartite soul found in Plato’s Republic, in which the thymoeidés (θυμοειδές, “spiritedness”) is the life force driven either by the logistikón (λογιστικόν, human reason informed by the sight of the metaphysical Sun, the Form of the Good, the One that begets all lesser forms) or by the epithymitikón (ἐπιθυμητικόν, the chthonic part of the soul that longs for the satisfaction of bodily needs of sustenance and reproduction).³ In accordance with Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and thralldom (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft), one who qualifies as a true man, that is to say, a lord, is willing to risk his own life in order to quieten and sublimate his lower instincts for the sake of dignity and higher truths. At the dawn of history, the desire for dignity provoked wars for life or death. Those who overcame the fear of death emerged as lords and masters of those who were whelmed by it.⁴ The former were the aristocrats, whose life and culture was shaped by an ethic of war and honour, while the latter became the classes of serfs.⁵

Fukuyama believes that liberal democracy is destined to be the ultimate political form in a globalised economy. This is because liberal democracy has the power to satisfy, by egalitarian means, the type of desire of recognition common to the majority of human beings, at the same time defusing what Fukuyama calls megalothymia, that is to say the stronger spirituality of superior men. Liberal democracy smothers megalothymia by strengthening isothymia, the desire for equality based on the only type of spiritual longing that is shared by all humanity, i.e., the lower instincts of sustenance, thus working for a downward levelling of all men.

Purportedly (pseudo-)universal human rights, based on the idea of equality, may be traced back to the seventeenth-century philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, famous for the hypothesis of the “social contract”.⁶ The American Revolution, and especially the later French Revolution of 1789, were the first large-scale political actualisations of these hypotheses.⁷ They are brought to the extreme in today’s pervasive nihilistic relativism, which questions any norm based on higher principles and, by doing so, opens the way for the actualisation of any abnormality. We are living in a period in which morality is on the wane, distinctions between right and wrong are denied, limits and boundaries are questioned, and the very existence of any community is threatened.⁸

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) introduced the concept of “anomy” to describe such a state of things, in his book Suicide (1897). Anomy, the absence of nomos, means the breakdown of society, of the bonds that hold together individuals and groups. According to Durkheim’s definition, anomy ensues when a mismatch occurs between individual aspirations and social standards so that individuals are no longer involved in the life of society. I proffer that “anomy” might also be employed to define an active denial of the norm (antinomy) preceding and initiating the process and the condition of dissolution. Liberalism, believed by its supporters to be a “rational” way of living, is merely a product of human ratio inferior, that is to say calculative reason (logism),⁹ which arises when the latter separates itself from the Logos. As explained hereinbefore, the denial of spiritual qualities is intrinsically related to the denial of the hierarchy of the Logos itself. Egalitarian and liberal ideologies, quantitative indistinction, and anomy threaten the very essence of humanity and its role within the cosmos.¹⁰

Instead of working in the dynamic interaction between the megalothymia of the warrior aristocrats and the isothymia of the masses, early liberalism tried to deaden the thymotic impetus by overwhelming it with the unchaining of primordial instincts.¹¹ According to Nietzsche, liberal democracy represents the unconditional victory of the lower types of humanity and their twisted moralism, Sklavenmoral, which glorifies weakness and fault.¹² Such a type of humanity, devoid of any pride and dignity, is what Nietzsche calls the “Last Man”.¹³ Nietzsche believed that nihilistic relativism would have ultimately eroded the foundations of the same Sklavenmoral, opening a new era of freedom for the superior spirits (Übermenschen) and their creative reaffirmation of true values (Herrenmoral).¹⁴

The liberal state, based upon the separation of powers and legal positivism, which confers the same rights and citizenship to anyone, and its liberal economy, joined by modern techno- science which has removed any constraint to the production and the accumulation of wealth and money (capitalism, limitless chrematistics), constitute the machinery and the merely material growth that has made possible the actualisation of any earthly desire and the exponential reproduction of the amoral masses of kinless men teeming in the urban centres¹⁵, and the transcription of any lies useful for oiling the anomic machination channelling the chthonic forces thanks to the popularisation of printing and “journalism”, outcomes of the Protestant world. Alexis de Tocqueville believed the organisation of true communities of sense to be the way to curb the overflow of inferior humanity.¹⁶

Notwithstanding his acknowledgement of the evils of liberalism, Francis Fukuyama apparently maintains a sociological perspective on facts, neither approving nor disapproving of the tendency of modern politics. He indeed seems to lack a deeper understanding of the events and a spiritual notion of reason, especially when he defines phenomena such as ethnicity as “irrational”.¹⁷

Aleksandr Dugin lucidly analyses the political anthropology of postmodern postliberalism (which he characterises as post- politics and post-anthropology¹⁸) as an overturning of Hegel’s lord-thrall dialectic: those whom Dugin calls “political soldiers”, the creators of traditional societies willing to kill or die for politics, are nowadays swamped within the decomposing horizontal multitudes, the debris of collapsed political structures; instead, modern “politicians”, those endowed with power in postmodern postliberal society, are people willing to change or give up their ideas whenever they confront risks and threats.¹⁹

Dugin studies the three post-Enlightenment mass ideologies as “hermeneutic circles”, each one spinning around a different subject. While the subject of fascism was the racial state, and the subject of communism was class, the subject of liberalism is the atomised, isolated individual, freed from all historical and contextual bounds and roles; the “idiot”, as the Greeks would have called it. Such “freedom from” is fictitious freedom, since it reveals itself as limited to the microscopic orbit of individuality as such, to the “small people” (the only ones that liberalism tolerates, revealing its totalitarian flip side). The hermeneutic circle of liberalism has the smallest orbit in comparison with the other two ideologies; within it, the small men are allowed to do anything they want, but they are actually made unable to do anything since they are deprived of the ability to interact with the world. To break this circle, anomic individuality has to be stricken; the individual has to be recontextualised, and thence reëndowed with meaning. Champions of liberalism, such as Karl Popper with his The Open Society and its Enemies, fought any kind of ideology that integrates the individual in supra-individual communities (even anachronistically labelling Plato and Aristotle as “totalitarian fascists”).²⁰

Real freedom, the “freedom for” (true libertas) that the Fourth Political Theory wants to bring into play once again, may be achieved by leaving the small circle of individuality. One who leaves individuality finds itself, at first, “crushed by the elements of life and by dangerous Chaos”, and thence acquires the will and ability to establish order. Such a man may be embodied in individual forms; this is not anomic individuality, but rather “individuation”; not the fictitious liberty granted by the liberal machination, but liberty to act authentically, taming oneself and one’s context. This is the Dasein.²¹

Dugin construes the Dasein as comprehending both Edmund Husserl’s “transcendental subjectivity” and a deeper state of consciousness, which he calls“radical subjectivity” (or better “radical self ”). In Husserlian terminology, transcendental subjectivity is the deep layer of the “subject” that emerges in the experience of the “short-circuit”, the experience of the source of reality. Such experience is a trauma, in which consciousness perceives nothing else than itself in the present time, and is explained by Dugin as a tensional void. In order to escape the present and the unbearable confrontation with itself, self-referential pure present perception, and to discharge its tension, the transcendental subjectivity articulates as the Heideggerian three ecstasies of time (past, present, and future; Dugin ontologically characterises them as, respectively, “documentary”, “immediate” and “probabilistic”), and at the same time in dual logics (yes-no, subject-object, before- after, and any other dualities that thread reality) and intentionality. Thus, time is the entity and the entity is time, the phenomenon is intrinsically temporal, and it is intrinsically future (projection); it is Kant’s “thing as such” (Ding an sich) which establishes itself in “practical reason”, Husserl’s “continuous instance” and the metaphor of time as music (the past resonates in the present, which in turn projects the future), and Heidegger’s “thrownness” (Geworfenheit).²² It is the Italian philosopher and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino’s “presentification”, his own reading of the Dasein which emphasises its world-making activity.²³ It is also Jullien’s “propensity”, discussed hereinbefore.

The short-circuit of consciousness is an eternal refrain pattern, a return of the same, or a “circular time” in which past and future overlap, with the iity placed in the centre as the spring and doer of all times. Emerging out of this circular time, the three ecstasies may be interwoven in different ways, through the schemes of different looms. Dugin proposes three constructions of time: (1) “traditional time”, in which the short- circuit is placed in the past and is reëvoked through Platonic anamnesis and steadily reproduced in the present; (2) “chiliastic time”, in which the short-circuit is placed in the future, and history is a “perpetual state of waiting” for a future fulfilment; and ultimately (3) “material time”, in which time melts in the objective world, which in turn is fixed. This last is the “time of slaughter” and the death of the subject.²⁴

Consciousness needs the future in order to escape from the encounter with itself; otherwise, without a future as in the case of the frozen material time, the subject does not find space to extend itself, and it short-circuits. As already explained, this is at the same time the experience of death, of the primordial source of reality, but also of the potentiality of novum, of new construction.²⁵ Since the future is subjective, societies — as organisms, emerging spatiotemporally from different acts of consciousness and united by the “structures of the collective consciousness of the individuals” who belong to the “expanding forces of the constituent subject” — have their own distinguishing futures. What follows from this understanding is that “global humanity” as a whole (it itself an abstract concept) may not have an objective future.²⁶

The “end of history”, ultimately coming in the form of globalism (globalisation of liberal democracy), “the logical conclusion of universalism”, erases history and abolishes the future. By blocking the future, space-time collapses in the present, short-circuits in a whirl that Dugin (building upon Husserl’s metaphorisation of time as music) compares to a senseless cacophony in which all notes play simultaneously, ultimately being the same as absolute silence. In such a state there is no space for the temporalisation of the inner tension of the transcendental subjectivity, which grows exponentially towards a conflagration. According to Dugin, the forces of globalisation are trying to extinguish the Dasein in order to prevent the blaze, by trapping consciousnesses into the virtual web of a “world machine”, ensnaring it in what he calls “simulacra” of the past, that is to say false, fabricated, unnatural memories. Future is thence petrified and semantics, which should say the truth of reality,“blur, fork and multiply”²⁷ in a loss of meaning, perversion of language and proliferation of lies which do not address the reality of things. For De Martino, “the repetition compulsion which in nature is without drama [...] in mankind manifests itself as psychic illness”²⁸, a whirl of inner and private descent, which in those societies provided with tradition is reintegrated in publicity by means of mytho-ritual symbolism; the latter is an operation of imitatio naturae, of remoulding the circle of the eternal return of nature within the spiral dynamic of a culturalising time, which frees human consciousness from matter, avoiding its petrification, establishing a being-in-the- world (the Heideggerian in-der-Welt-Sein), a common world²⁹, and a syntonisation of all participating particular times into a greater time-being.

Then, Dugin introduces a deeper layer of the iity that Husserl did not reckon: the radical subject. While the transcendental subject establishes reality in the three times as a manifestation of its self-awareness, the radical subject, the deepest Dasein, shows itself only “in the moment of the ultimate historic catastrophe”, the implosion of space-time, in the strongest and longest short-circuit, enduring it. While the transcendental subjectivity reacts to the experience of the short-circuit by creating time, the radical subject reacts to it by withdrawing into non-time (the same as eternity), non-duality, and ultimately non-identity, since reality and time itself are, for it, a torturous trap. The radical subject, incompatible with any form of time, awaits the “end of history” (and of humanity, the last men) as its “drastic gesture”, and the anti-time rebirth of the radical light.³⁰ The radical subject is the “first man”, and the novum, remaining after the end.

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READ MORE: Eurasian Universism: Sinitic Orientations for Rethinking the Western Logos (PRAV Publishing, 2022)

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