Noomachia (Serbia 2018) Lecture 2. Geosophy
Lecture 2. Geosophy
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Geosophy is the field of application of Noology (the Noomahia principle) to the study of cultures, peoples and civilizations. Its is deepest level of ethnosociology.
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The basic idea of geosophy is that there are different organization of the balance of three Logos that defines the identity of concrete human society. Apollonian culture, Cybelean culture and so on.
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The society where the Logos dominates can change its form in space and time. The balance of Noomahia can change also. Here Apollo rules, there Cybele. Now here Dionysus dominates, then Apollo outbalances it. SO Noomahia is essentially dynamic, the process.
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The borders of people or cultures in the moment of Noomahia in space are defined as existential horizon. It is multilevel structure close to Dasein concept. It is the basis of people, its roots. The Logos is build and founded over the existential horizon. It is living space. Da-sein, being t/here being in concrete world organized with the help of dominating Logos. So it is also ontho-logical space. There is no universal space. Space is existential and understood and studied through dominating Logos.
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The borders of people or cultures in the moment of Noomahia in time are defined as the Historical (not the historic). The French term l’historial. H.Corbin has translated so the heideggerian term das Seynsgeschichtliche or simply da Geschichtliche in opposition to das Historische. So the history of people is defined by the ruling Logos. The history is not the consequence of facts but the consequence of meanings, senses. The history is semantic chain, the structure. So in the history – as semantic history or ontohistory , the history of being we can trace the manifestation of dominating Logos. There is no universal time. Time is existential and understood and studied through dominating Logos.
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The main principle of geosophy is perspectivism. We are dealing not with unique space and time differently understood by with different times and spaces because they have no existence outside of their interpretation in the context of concrete – factual – culture. We think otherwise just because we are under over overwhelming influence of modern (in the historical sense) and western (in the existential horizon sense) culture. We think that the modern western understanding of nature of space and time is universal. Every man of every space and time thinks the same. It is ethnocentrism.
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The geosophy doesn’t fight the ethnocentrism: without it there is no human. To be ethnocentric is the same as to have Da in Dasein, to be t/here. Da is defined by ethnos – ethos, culture, people, language. But geosophy reflects the ethnocentric nature of any thought. So it is perspectivism: there is no one world there are many worlds imbedded in each other – as many as there are peoples. We can not be and think without cultural structure that is ethnocentric. We need understand it in full measure.
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The geosophy as perspectivism is not anti-ethnocentric: it is anti-racist and anti-universalist. We accept plurality of ethnocentrism as something factual, as given as unavoidable condition. But we need to fix the borders or limits. The univeralism is in itself titanic. It seeks to transcend the borders of Apollo. Hybris the essential sin of titans, it is excessive. So ethnocentrism is legitimate until it recognizes the limits. When is pass the borders it becomes racist and universalist. So it looses its legitimity.
What is geosophy? It is application of the principles of noology to the study of the concrete culture and societies. It is a kind of civilizational analysis with the help of the methods of three Logois. So the idea of geosophy is the following - it is close to what is called in philosophy and anthropology, ‘perspectivism.’ There is an interesting Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro that has developed this attitude of perspectivism. Perspectivism is the idea that we consider, for example, modern western man thinks there is one physical world and there is one culture of understanding of this world. That is modern western European culture. That is the kind of truth. There is the world and more and more correct understanding of this one world, one truth, and western culture as a kind of one way from this one world to one truth of this world. So that is a kind of pure genocide of other cultures because everybody who is not on this way is out, considered to be undeveloped and should be colonized and taught to follow the white man’s example. It is colonial vision.
Against that, there is so called multicultural position or postmodern position that affirms that 'there is one world. Let it be. But there are multiple interpretations of this one world.’ That is multiculturalism. It is already not so bad because it gives the possibility to other to think differently. But some anthropologists remarked that 'what is going with this one world with different interpretations? Why are we so sure there is one world? What is the ontological basis of this one world that is differently interpreted?’ And they have remarked finally that this one world is the projection of the modern western European mind on the nature. And the concept of nature is European and the interpretation of nature is modern European scientific world that we have taken as granted, as some objective reality that is differently and subjectively interpreted. That is multiculturalism. These new anthropologists started creating a kind of cannibal metaphysics. They tried to destroy this concept of this one world differently interpreted and replace by different worlds. So they invite us to believe to what the people of different cultures say about worlds. Not to say ‘that is their interpretation of this world.’ No. That is correct description of what they see and feel and what they live in. So that is completely new attitude. And noology and geosophy is most radical example of this recognition of the multitude of the worlds. We have spoken in the first lecture about three universes that are linked to the three Logos. But we could put it on the vertical axis because we see this Logos in any culture. So we could in any culture, explain with these three Logos the verticality. But geosophy is application of this verticality to the horizontal aspect. It is not vertical interpretation but horizontal interpretation.
Geosophy is based on the principle that any culture creates the world of its own. And that does not explain the universal world around earth, turning around the axis. But living in different worlds, with maybe flat earth, or concave earth, and if they think they are living there, we need to accept that and not consider from the beginning that it is not correct interpretation of the reality, we know better than them. Because in multiculturalism, there is the old racism of ‘we know better than you but we let you to stay with your illusions.’ That is multiculturalism. And that is multi naturalism. ‘You are living in the world that is real for you and because we could not project on you our own vision, your world is correct for you. You’re living inside this world and not in your interpretation of world we know better than you.’ That is a kind of new anthropological approach based on the recognition of the dignity of any culture. So if you think so, it is so for you. And in order to understand you and to speak with you and to deal with you, we need to understand not your illusions but your truth, and to put ourselves in your position. That is very important and geosophy is based on that. That is the idea that we have not one space, one time, and one timeline. People by different cultures interpret their landscape, their history and so on in different ways. ‘We know better but let them have their illusion.’ No. Geosophy is based on that passing from our civilization, our people, our culture to the other, we need first of all to ask these people how they understand the world and not to explain to them what the reality of the world is.
So that is geosophy. Geosophy is not our understanding of the earth (geo, our understanding). It is the idea that in any culture, in any point, there are different worlds coexisting in the same context. Deleuze and Guattari, in one book, tried to apply this but from their postmodernist, leftist, liberalist, western center way, speaking about geo-philosophy. In order to make a difference in their approach that is too dogmatic and open approach of noology, I have introduced the word ‘geosophy’ (not geo-philosophy but geosophy), in order to make a difference. The concept of geosophy is studying the other culture, we need to believe absolutely in what they believe the world is. When we are coming back we could return to our belief, but dealing with them and studying them, we should not impose on them or project on them our vision about subjective and objective aspect of reality but to try to understand what for this culture, archaic or developed, North American or Oceanic (Australian for example) what the world is for them, objectively and subjectively, if they have something like that. Maybe they have no object and subject. The wisdom for them will be absence of object or subject. And I have discovered some cultures with very particular absence of subject. For example in the Paleo-Asiatic groups of very archaic people living in the extreme north of Chukotko-Kamchatka in Eurasia in the North of Russia, and as well in the North American tribes, there are cultures with no concept of subject. For us it is incredible. For Africans as well, because the majority of African culture is based around subject of different kind, completely different from our subject, as a ghost or as a returning ancestor but the subject is. In their way, no. In every culture, no.
But there are so many different cultures that we could not imagine. And we need to accept them as such and not judge them, not try to hierarchize them, for example; animism, fetishism, not yet animism, already fetishism, as in evolutionist anthropology. But we need to accept them as they think the things are. And that will create a new vision of earth. Not civilization where the same try to get the power, the resources, and fighting against each other as we do. But for example, some people are fighting, and the other not. For example, arrow. The people in civilization living beside them refuse to use arrow. For example, Australian aborigines. Because it is immoral to kill someone in one way movement. You kill, you are not killed. So the boomerang is something that can kill you. You hit and it returns. That is idea of reciprocity, of killing and being killed. That is against the arrow. Such simple things as arrow could be negated, could be denied on the moral consideration. And that is difference between Melanesian and Australian population. There are so many things because the ethics between black and very similar Papua type of civilization, they have completely different Logos and completely different reality and they are living in different worlds and we should not judge them who is more developed, with arrow or without arrow. We should understand both. We should understand them in the same way, North American. What are they doing here and why are they bombing Belgrade? It is not so easy. ‘Because they hate us’ is not an explanation. How do they understand the world? Maybe in this case we know better how they understand the world. But there are so many people thinking completely different, living in completely different worlds, that we will be astonished when we will know that. The richness of geosophy is not only Americans against everybody, everybody good and Americans bad and so on. No such things. There is rich reality without good and bad, but with not only different re-interpretations of reality. There are realities inside of the world. And that is the mankind. Mankind is not only one way to one thought. It is many thoughts coexisting in different ways. Sometimes dramatically opposed and conflictual and sometimes very peaceful. So geosophy is methodology of how to describe the civilizations.
In the first volume I’ve made a kind of surveyal, full existing, of almost all the main schools to study civilizations in the plural (not one civilization but civilizations) starting from Danilevsky, Spengler, Toynbee, Huntington (modern American) and many others. The idea is that we should recognize civilizations as cultures and as worlds, worlds absolutely defined by the living people and not by us. So that is a kind of introduction to other volumes where concrete worlds or civilizations are studied. What is important here as in the sense of methodology? First of all I have remarked that any civilization or people or some entity that shares the main aspects of culture, some community, we could call it people, we could it call it society, or culture, something where the people are living more or less in the same world, because there are borders between the worlds, not the same as between individuals. They are linked to the language for example, to the religions, and to other things. There are many borders but one of the entities we are dealing with, speaking about civilization or geosophy is people, or kind of cultures or civilizations more or less the same without differences, where there is organic community of language, of value, the same world. Maybe it is very small as tribe. Sometimes it is great civilization with millions of people inside. But that is not so important the quantity. The quality of this world is what is important. Some collective community sharing the same world vision and living in the same world. That is civilization.
And studying these entities and trying to make a kind of list of these entities, to find a kind of measure what we could treat as entity or part or supra-entity. That is the question as well as nomenclature here discussed in this book. And I have arrived to more important conclusion that dealing with entity, we always see the moment of noomahia. The concept arrives. What is moment of noomahia? That is concrete balance of the fight of the three Logos. Three Logos are in fight. It’s clear. And the concrete moment of this fight is the concrete identity of such entity as culture or civilization. For example, Greek culture. That is based on the domination and the victory of the Logos of Apollo over Logos of Cybele. All Greek culture is based on that. There was Pelasgian pre-Greek tradition of Great Mother represented in Mycenaean and Minoan culture. And there was the Hellenic invasion with completely different Apollonian values. And what is the identity of Greek culture? We understand of the Greek, the moment of noomahia where this Logos of Apollo as in Diós overcomes Python and kills Python. That was the oracle of the Great Mother. That is moment when Logos of Apollo overcomes, outweighs the Logos of Great Mother. It is a kind of victory in titanomachy. Greek civilization is based on the moment of the victory of titanomachy. Titans, the sons of Great Mother, attack Gods. Gods fight back and they win. The Gods win. It’s not always the case. In Greek civilization, Gods win. Olympian Gods, Apollo wins over Cybele.
And that is as well the war of interpretation. It is the war of the thought and over interpretation of any kind of religious, cultural symbol, or political organization and so on. So that is patriarchy that has won over matriarchy. And that is to be Greek in concrete moment. Greek civilization is based on the moment of noomahia. The other civilization, for example Iranian civilization, is based on the idea very similar to Greek because that is the victory of Ohrmazd (the God of light) over Ahriman (the God of darkness). So two different names but the same symmetry, the same titanomachy, and the same victory. So two kind of different civilizations based on the similar moment of noomahia and with other culture the same. So in order to find what is the Logos in the horizontal way, in the horizon of concrete Hellenic civilization, we need to define what Logos, where we are in the noomahia. For example, because we are citing the majority of Indo-European society (German, Celt, Roman, Greek, Iranian, and Indian) are based on the same moment of Noomahia. It is the victory of the Logos of Apollo over the Logos of Cybele. We have the idea that every civilization is based on the same moment. Not at all. A very important example in this situation is Chinese civilization. Chinese civilization is quite different. It is the purely Dionysian civilization where there is the balance between the Yin and Yang, between male and female, between heaven and earth, and not the domination of heaven over earth as the value and the norm. The norm is the balance. When there is too much heaven, there appears arrower with arrows that kills the suns, heaven. There begins the flute and there appears the new hero that tries to diminish the quantity of the cold water. So the balance is norm and not the victory of the Gods over the Titans. So zero result is the norm of Chinese civilization. It is completely different logic. There is no linear Apollonian Logos. There is always Dionysian civilization. It is not always so but everything we know about Chinese civilization from the first so called Jade Emperor up to now, to Hu Jintao (actual leader of China), that is this Dionysian moment. And any change of balance is inside of this Dionysian version. So the Chinese are living in Dionysian world, with a little more Apollonian in some moments and more Cybelian in other, but inside of this moment. That is not the destiny of the Chinese. We should not say ‘that will last forever.’ We don’t know. Maybe there will be the change, maybe not so always. But we constate. It is constation. It’s not rule. It’s not law. It’s not the final truth. It is moment of noomahia.
So we need, in order to deal with different civilizations, to define the moment of noomahia. That is first. After that we should presume that the moment of noomahia could change. It is not frozen moment. Noomahia is going inside. For example, in order to keep Dionysian balance, Chinese culture during many thousands of years applied and applied all the efforts, all the powers to conserve, to guard, to save this balance, because if they for example sit back and let the thing be, the Dionysian balance could be overthrown. So it is not easy and taken for granted that they will be always Dionysian. If they stop to be Chinese, they could stop to be Dionysian. If they will be for example colonized or destroyed from inside, they could stop to pay all their existential efforts in order to keep things going in that way of not too much Yang and not too much Yin. It’s very important. It’s almost fight for the Logos of Dionysus (Yellow Dionysus I’m calling this book about Chinese civilization). In Indo-European as well, if we stop to fight for Apollo there will appear Cybele immediately because she is always there. She will attack immediately when we stop to impose this Apollonian will over matter. So that is very important. The moment of noomahia shouldn’t be considered as a kind of eternal and taken for granted identity of the culture of civilization. It could change.
That is the meaning of the history because the history is the fight of the Logos. And every people has its own version of this fight. And every people, every culture is in the different moments of this noomahia defined by its own proportions. There are people with domination of Cybelian or for example, Afro-Asiatic people as Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber people or Kushit people, there is the huge influence and power of Cybele. They could overcome it from time to time but that is a kind of natural inclination. But it is not the fate. They could change that and they could create something completely different. But identity is the process. Identity of the people is changing and is dynamic. So the moment of noomahia could be the same or could change. Proportion of the three Logos in the same people and same society could be different from the other society and could change during the history of the same people without ethnical or social change. So we receive at the end, very dynamic and multi-level structure of geosophy. So there are horizontal differences between one society and the other society living in the other geographical space but they have the same or the different moments of noomahia. They have different identity. Including if they share some moments, they could be expressed differently. In the relations between them, all that is very important. The relation of Greeks with moment of noomahia where Apollonian aspect has victory over Cybelian, with Iranians with the same moment of noomahia where the Apollonian has victory over Cybelian, were conflictual. Those were two forms of Apollonian Logos. Because the balances, proportions, and combinations were different. So if there is more or less the same moment of noomahia that doesn’t mean that there will be completely agreement and correspondence. So, the situation is different.
At the same time, in any culture or geosophical entity we take into consideration, could be historical change. And the change of this element of noomahia, domination of Logos of Apollo over Logos of Cybele or the Logos of Cybele over Logos of Dionysus or Dionysus domination over both and so on could change. So the history and the direction of this change is not universal. It is kind of the product of the inner dynamic of the people. So we have many civilizations going with many worlds, with many different moments of noomahia, going in different ways. So there is no way for example. We don’t all go to Cybele or Apollo. Everybody is going its own way. So that is geosophy. Geosophy is recognition of multiplicity of the culture in any sense in the space and in time. So everybody is different, going in different directions with different speed, and with open end. Compare that with the major existing concept of the history. There is only one goal, for example, in Christian way or Muslim way, there is only one truth, there is maybe one or two possibilities or ways to reach this truth, one wrong and the other right, and that’s all, and there is universal norm. And there is one space, one time, one object, maybe more than one subject, one better than the other, liberal better and not liberal worse, and that’s all. And compare that narrow, purely racist, purely ethno-centrist understanding of the human history with what geosophy proposes. Geosophy proposes to discover so many worlds without quitting the earth. The new worlds, the other worlds are living here beside ourselves, new to us. But we don’t remark them because we are projecting our own narrow vision about that. For example, Russian author and Eurasianist Count Trubetzkoy has said once ‘if we consider, for example, the structure of book written about law in the west, how it is universal law. There is Roman law. It is thousand pages dedicated to Roman law and its development and two pages about Chinese law.' And that is universal law with no mentioning of other kind of law. That is more or less comparable situation with for example; Roman law is law of law. But to be universal is not enough to put very profoundly studied Roman law, compared with very superficially observation of Chinese law from the Roman law point of view and that is universal law. It is not universal law at all. It is Roman law with two pages of Chinese law interpreted from Roman law point of view and there’s nothing universal in that.
So geosophy is invitation to the real universality, to the real acceptance of the richness of any people, any society, and any civilization in the serious way. It is serious multipolarity and serious tolerance. It is not this kind of disguised racism that is modern liberal globalization that projects the result of only one civilization, western civilization, as universal, one of everybody else, pretending that is universal because it’s not so white based on the mixture. It is not enough because everything we see in the mixture of the culture is the western culture with something taint skin. Obama is absolutely white. He is white supremacist. He is white as Hitler. He has nothing African about him. He has nothing black. He is purely W.A.S.P. because there is nothing that would be outside from his American Anglo-Saxon mentality. It is semi-black puppet of white man. And all globalization is the same. It is transmission of the same very narrow result of the modern and post-modern western culture over humanity. It is not dialogue, it is not multiplicity, it is not pluralism, it is not tolerance. It’s pure colinizatory racism based on the most savage prejudices and that is what we are dealing with.
So geosophy obtains in this situation, revolutionary mission to destroy this attitude, to rediscover the world, to decolonize any kind of civilization, in order to give the right to the other to be other, without asking permission from globalists, from Soros, from Americans, and to affirm identities how these identities are, bad or good, accepted or rejected, radical, extremist, archaic, based on human rights or not based on human rights, no matter. Human rights is purely racist concept because in human and in rights; that's Roman rights in the modern interpretation and the western understanding of what is human (so individual). So it is liberal totalitarian idea of human rights, because they don’t ask no one what you think. For example, ‘you Chinese - what is human?’ No asking only question. ‘You should be more strictly in the same granting human rights for your Chinese dissidents.’ That’s all. That is complete colonizational attitude. Nobody asks Chinese what is human for them, nobody cares. Because the globalists know better what is human because they are human and they put the norms what is human. What all that has to in the real pluralism or real democracy or real human, there is pure racism. So geosophy is against that, not ethically but methodologically because it is perspectivism that is based on careful study of civilization without prejudices. So for example, you are Serbian, we are Russians. We are Orthodox. We are past all the Christian Indo-European civilization. We are going to Cannibal society. We are projecting our idea. That is bad society because they eat each other. It is satanic, daemonic, devilish, or underdeveloped. We don’t ask that. We try to change them immediately with our understanding. And that is the same practice. We are dealing with neighbors, with far or near people living around us and that is the source of misunderstanding and source of almost all errors. Maybe it’s natural but it’s erroneous, erroneous human but nevertheless the error. So we need to change that and the idea is to study the society, accepting what the members of the society think the reality and the values and the nature, the subject, the object, the history is.
But here we encounter a serious methodological problem. How could we study different society with the same languages, for example, with the same criteria? So we need at least small things of common criteria that we could try to apply to different society in order to see whether there is some correspondence or not, in open way. So three Logos as I have explained, I have tried to apply to any civilization, any culture that I have studied, and everywhere I have encountered the clear traces of all of them. So that is something seriously universal but in open combination. There is no one law but they are present and they are fighting. So maybe that is something universal that there are three Logos. And there is the fight and there is open end of that. And in geosophy, I have tried to find the other criterion that could be useful in studying the civilizations, in order to have something in common between them. And first of all, following Heidegger and phenomenology, I have chosen the concept of existential horizon, or existential space. What is existential space? It is ‘Da’ of Dasein. It is space, where in German ‘Da.’ That is space but that is not the space of the science, not the space as a concept. It is the space where the being is. The existential space is the space where the thinking, living human being is. And this space doesn’t exist without this living thinking being. So it is special. It is not geographical. It is existential. If there is the thinking man and collectivity with languages, with culture, with roots, with some symbolic system, there is this existential space, existential horizon. And where we have the same structure of existential horizon, we have the same existential space, we have the same Dasein, and we have the same people or the same culture. Where is the border? There begins the other.
So that is very important in order how to separate, how to create a nomenclature of peoples, of cultures, of civilizations. If we apply the other criterion, more sophisticated, more developed, we will be dealing with secondary results of what is already constructed over this existential space. So this existential space is very important. And that is linked to the concept of the multiplicity of Daseins. I have spoken with the direct student of Heidegger and his continuator, Professor Herrmann (in Freiburg, Germany). We have spoken about the multiplicity of Daseins. He has said that Heidegger thought that the Dasein was universal, that there is only one Dasein (because he was racist). He thought that German, European, Greco-Roman Dasein was the only one. And he carefully put aside the other Dasein as something not Dasein. For him the Dasein was only one as philosophy was only one, as Logos was only one. That was Western European Logos. It’s normal for you to recognize that as absolutely legitimate ethnocentrism. Herrmann has said ‘but Dasein was defined by Heidegger as the relations to the death and that death is the same for every living human being.’ I have responded ‘not at all. Absolutely not at all. In nothing the same.’ Every culture, every Dasein has its own relation to death. And precisely, in this relation to death, which I agree is the most important characteristic of Dasein, represent a particularity and originality of Dasein. And I have studied that in my book on Heidegger. I have written four books on Heidegger. The second one is called Martin Heidegger: The Possibility of Russian Philosophy, where I have applied Heidegger’s criterium, existentiells (with s), to the Russian Dasein. And I have discovered that the majority of them don’t work in Russian situation. We have different relations to very core of existential realities with death, with God, with each other, with the place of human. So Daseins are multiple. That is very important. And existential horizon defines the natural border of Dasein. That corresponds, some partly, with geographical borders. That is normal because the people live in some concrete space.
And we could regard this existential horizon as space where the people live, Lebensraum. But at the same time, it could not exist without human being, without people, without language, without tradition. If you put the mixed population in some space you don’t get this existential space. It is not Dasein. And that is very difficult example in our history - Kalingrad people by Russian that was Prussia people by Baltic tribes, invaded by Germans, assimilated, and after that taken by us and we have put the Germans aside. So that is space Russian, not so German, no, Baltic, no. There is the place, the people there living, the culture, and the history but there is no Dasein. So a part of territory of the space is evacuated from existential aspect. It’s very special conditions. I have studied Serbian history and that is kind of this idea of migration of Serbs that created the similar idea where are the borders of Serbia. Where is Serbians, the bearers of Serbia? Or could the Serbs exist without Serbian motherland or not? It is open question. So that is a kind of exilic tradition. So it deals with the problem of existential Dasein. Existential Dasein is not the territory. And that is not only the people. It is the relation, the Sein (being) to the place, existential relations of the being to the place that passes through the people, through the cultures, through the humans, through the thought. It’s very particular concept but it’s very important to geosophy because geosophy studies precisely existential horizons. It is the relations of the being to the space that goes through the culture, through the language, through the tradition, through the identity. So that is very important category of geosophy.
We can say we are studying the people but not the people as ethnology studies the people because ethnology studies that from some demographical aspect or some statistical or some formal material. This is a study of Dasein. For example if we are studying Serbs, we should put first the question, 'what means to be Serb?’ It’s not easy. Any formal answer is not enough. Or Russians. And here begins our poetry, our philosophy, our imagination, our political aspirations, everything is here. 'What it means to Serb.' 'What it means to be Russian.’ And it is not abstract. We could not say ‘these things to be Serb, these things to be Russian.’ No. We are giving the answer through all our history, through our victories. For example, we could say this is our empire. But empire grows and diminishes and to be Russian, what borders? And our defeats and our errors can be our answer to what it means to be Serbian or Russian. So it is existential horizon linked to the space, linked to the people, but not to them in material way. So nobody can answer this question of what it means to be Serb. Neither Englishman nor Russian can give the satisfactory answer. Maybe Serbs as well cannot respond. But that is the process. That is open question of identity, understood existentially.
So practical result from geosophy, we need to begin to study what is Serbian Dasein. Put the question in these terms, not to try to find our Slavs identical term. We will be lost in this way. We could accept that technically. Heidegger thought that Dasein is unique. We agree that we have multiplicity, multiple Daseins. And starting with this, we could concretely put the question ‘what does it mean to be Serb?’ And that is not a futile question. It is not only a slogan. It is something that you and your ancestors have paid with the blood, with the body, with Kosovo, with King Lazar, with all your history, all your existence is kind of solving this problem of what it means to be Serb. And the future is here. And the future of Kosovo and Metohija is here and the future of the Serbian identity is here. And the answer doesn’t belong to the past or only to the present. It is eternal question. You are Serb because you are inside of this existential horizon because you are solving this problem. Maybe not solve, but you are part of this. And the culture and the language, and the tradition, and the values, and as well maybe the body are the parts of this. So creation of ancestors, and the future, and the children, and the families all are inscribed in this existential horizon.
But I think that why we so badly need this concept of existential horizon is because without that we could not correctly put the right questions we need to solve now. Because seeing as population or for example, GDP, for how much income we have or where is better to live and where is more possibility for social mobility. If we consider Serbs for example, Russian in that way, we receive completely different answer that could not explain absolutely nothing in our history. So existential horizon is key concept for geosophy and without that we could not come into real study of deep identity of the entities we are trying to study. Existential horizon is basic methodological principle of noology and geosophy. And the second term is as well very important. If existential horizon deals with so-called space but space in the sense of the ‘between,’ somewhere where the human thinking presence is. It is existential space. So we should deal as well with existential time. That is second category of geosophy. That is as well Heideggerian in its origin. Heidegger in his Sein und Zeit (time and being) has made distinction between two German terms; ‘Geschichte' and ‘historische.' It is translated the same. 'Geschichte' is history and 'historisch' is historic. Sometimes Heidegger uses as well the term ‘Seinsgeschichte.' That is onto-history, the history of being. And that is already a kind of important clarification of the term. So ‘Geschichte’ or ‘Seinsgeschichte’ in German is time that is linked to the being. If for example ‘da’ is space linked to the being, ‘Geschichte' is time linked to the being. So it is the time of being or existential time we could name it.
And interesting that the continuator of Heidegger, great French philosopher Henry Corbin that is best specialist in the Islamic esoteric tradition, trying to translate difference between ‘historisch’ and ‘Geschichte' in French has introduced two words in French; historique (historische) and l’historial (Geschichte). In English there is no such difference. In Russian and Serbian as well, everything is conceptual, we are dealing with concept. So we could try to use historical and historic. The historical substantive, and the historic. It’s purely pragmatic but the meaning is different. Let’s call historical the kind of history of being. So it is the history of the Sein. It is not the consequence of the facts but the consequence of the meanings. So the historical is a kind of intellectual existential reading of historic. Historical is ontological aspect of historic. Historic is a fact that is documented. But historical is the explanation of fact. But when we are living through the historical, we are not explaining afterwards. Living in the history, we are committing the deeds that could be historic or could be historical. If they’re historical they have to do something with Dasein, with our identity, with our deep roots. We are existing historically. And historic, all elements seen from outside are documented.
So historic is something that has to do with the facts and historical is something that has to do with the meaning and with the being. And in French, Corbin uses this l’historial (historical) as substantive (l’historial - the historical). I am using in Russian, the term ‘историал.’ It's very strange word but that has concrete meaning in geosophy, in noomahia. So we have existential horizon, existential space, and we have existential time. Existential time is our interpretation of our history. And that is our interpretation of our history. For example, the facts in this interpretation of the history speak to us, to our soul, to our blood, to our spirit, everything. And to other, that could be the event with no significance. So formal events, the other measure this event with their measure. And we are measuring these events not materially, not quantitatively, but we are living through them. For example, the struggle in Kosovo field is Serbian event. It is key part of Serbian historical, not historic. Historic we could say is one battle against the other and King Lazar was not so great and so on. But in your methodological understanding of what it means to be Serb, the key moment that is basis of being after Kosovo and before Kosovo, because Kosovo was the end of something and beginning of something and eternal Kosovo fight. And the eternity of this event has something to do with the existential aspect of Serbian Dasein. For us it’s the same, for example, of the Kalka fight, or Poltava, or Second World War. So there is not only one meaning of that. The meaning to this event belongs to the people, belongs to the Dasein, to the Serbian Dasein, to the Russian Dasein, to the American Dasein, to the French Dasein, to Chinese Dasein. And the meaning and the reality of what is, was, and will be depends directly on this existential relations to the time.
Husserl said time is like a melody. If you hear one note and after that the other note and other note, there is logic. So you know tonality, you know chords, and when the note is not correct, you are shocked by that. You try to improve, to play the right note if there is not the correct note. And the next note is predefined by previous notes. Because history is not the fact, fact, fact. There is melody. It is logical. And we could miss the note or we could delay. For example there should be chords and there is no chord. And we are living, waiting for the chords that we already are anticipating. So that is the history that should happen. If that doesn’t happen that is as well maybe a kind of introduction of silence in the melody, of new Stockhausen version of melody. But that is the music. The history is music. And only the people or Dasein can understand this historical music. It is not universal. You could not say hear something and everybody deciphers from the noise on the special frequency. So the historical of any people has its own frequency. Russians are hearing our Russian melody and we understand it very well. And you hear your Serbian melody but they are played on different frequencies. So from outside, it is difficult to say whether you are at good stage, bad stage, you are developing or you are in decadence. So there are no universal criteria in the historical, because relations to the time is existential property of Dasein. And after that it is a kind of all that, existential horizon and existential time (the historical) are defined by noomahia because in any moment you could not express your melody in the history or your identity as a people placed in the space without three Logos. You use them or they use you.
So that is a kind of balance in dynamic of the Logos. So if your Logos for example is centered around Apollo and there is for example coming Cybelian moment, this moment is for you, if you stay loyal to your previous Logos you consider to be essential. It is a kind of experience, the test, you pass through, you don’t assimilate. And that separates Bosniaks from Serbs. Where the Turks came, the part of the Serbian people have decided that you should integrate in the new condition. That is forever. And the other made, as King Lazar, the different decision. You should stay with Orthodoxy, with the previous identity and defend it through the night of the Turkish rule. Two decisions; to give in or to stay with the Logos. That is decision of the people. And two people, Bosnian and Serbian, appeared after that. So the distinction is on the weight of one Logos. It is very concrete thing. I am speaking about how we go from the same melody but after one moment we could split and the people could split; Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, and Anglo-Saxon. So there are many interesting points of this bifurcation of this melody. So creation of new Dasein, of new people. And all that is linked to the noomahia as a fight between three Logos. So we could explain the historical of every people and the existential horizon of every people as a kind of element, they are expressed with the help of the Three Logos or we could use the other image. We could represent Three Logos as three grain put in the existential fields and these grains grow. And some of them prevail, some is in the shadow, some win, the other fails. So this existential ground could exist and grow different fruits but grains are always there in this existential horizon. And dynamic of their growth, combinations, and conflicts is always different and is proper only to one people with only one historical. So that is the people’s history (народа история) as special thing that could not be explained or understood from outside. Noomahia is not something artificial. It is the process we are living through. It is kind of our identity. And that is the second very important aspect of geosophy.
And the last thing that I would like to explain here is that we are living with very interesting contradiction because if we have many worlds, and many cultures, and many identities that are developing in different directions, in different ways, with different results, how we could really understand that because we, for example, Russians, are absolutely defined by Russian Dasein and I could be nobody but Russian. I represent Russian Dasein. I have only one vision - Russian vision, because I belong to my existential horizon. I am living in the moment of my Russian melody, how we as existential being understand that. And I could judge, for example, what is going on outside of Russia only with my eyes. Exactly the same with Serbs. You could not imagine yourself to be Albanians, against possibility including game playing. We are trying to use Ossetian in one ethno-sociological school. We have said ‘lets imagine you are the enemy, you are the other. Let’s imagine you are Georgian.’ They could not accept that including in the game playing, in the role playing. No. There was no Georgian. Everybody will play Ossetes. It is ethnocentric aspect that is embedded in the searcher mind. For example, it is logical to presume that all noomahia is Russian vision of everything. It reflects Russian ethnocentrism. That is very comfortable for Serbs but maybe will be not so much comfortable for Croats, or Polish, or Americans, or Chechens. So how could we solve in that situation the problem that we are defined by own Dasein and how could we deal with other Dasein being the part of this Dasein? So that is very difficult methodological question but without answering that we could not come to geosophy. That will be only pure hallucination about the multiplicity. So the idea is the measure. So if we, for example, insist on pure universality, and if we try to overcome any ethnocentrism, we come to nothing. We have no position. There is no such existential space and there is no such melody that could be the earth for all of humanity or universal history. That will be the same as in Trubetzkoy's example. That will be a thousand pages about our civilization history and two pages about everything else. So that will be just our own «objective» understanding of multiplicity of Dasein. That will be absolutely ethnocentric and therefore wrong. So if we pretend to create the system without ethnocentrism, universal, that will be our ethnocentrism in some perverted, titanic, gigantic version.
So the problem how I solve it, it recognizes the right for ethnocentrism. We could not exist without ethnocentrism and trying to deny that, we become more ethnocentrism. That is because globalism and liberalism is much more racist than National Socialism because it thinks one fate, one destiny for everybody. And Germans were racist but they tried to impose their Germanity over more or less limited quantity of the people. The people were against. They fought against. We have fought against and we have won. And that was more or less with limit. Globalists try to do the same on the global scale, to impose their identity, to turn everybody into globalists without distinction. Trying to avoid racism, under pretext to be anti-fascist, they became the real fascists, the serious fascists, the hyper fascists because they tried to impose in a very racist way their understanding of what is human, what is good, what is progress, what is time, what is technology and so on. So we could not pretend that we are universalists. But we could not stay ethnocentric. Because that will not be noomahia but history of Russian Dasein or Serbian Dasein. The idea how to solve that is to recognize the natural limits of this existential space and positive appreciation of the Dasein of the other. Positive doesn’t mean that we should exchange our Dasein against the Daseins of others. But positive appreciation recognizes the rights of the other to be completely different without no hierarchy. Difference could sometimes provoke conflicts but if there is not conflicts, it’s not the destiny of the difference. So we shouldn’t eliminate the differences in the so-called universalist direction but we shouldn’t overgrow, we shouldn’t put our own recognized ethnocentric identity as something that should be imposed over other. And that is very interesting. What I’m speaking about is borders that should not be fixed once for all, that could change because the people could develop, they could change their identity. They are dynamic entities. They are inside of the historical (not historic) process of the balance of their noomahia. They are fighting with each other. They are changing religions. They are open in any way, in positive or negative way, in any way, in conflicts, in war and peace (war and peace of Tolstoy). There are always possibilities. War and peace, changing. And this changing situation, the identity could change. We are not obliged to stay absolutely with one and the same moment of noomahia. It depends on so many factors that it is always open question.
And if we consider a kind of concert of these ethnocentric groups, if we recognize the right to be ethnocentric in some borders, not overcoming them, not in the universalist nor in the purely chauvinist xenophobic way, if we are staying clung to our own identity, defending it sometimes, imposing it when its the possibility, but at the same time if we recognize the inner right of difference to the other, we don’t eliminate ethnocentrism, we don’t overcome ethnocentrism, and we don’t glorify excessively ethnocentrism. And that is Apollonian methods, because as Friedrich Jünger, the brother of Ernst Jünger, has described it in his famous book about Greek Gods, 'the essence of titanism, of this Cybelian Logos, is not knowing the measure.' So if you are ethnocentric, you are imperialist colonialist. You impose your ethnocentrism over everybody. If you are universalist it is the same. It is titanism. If we stay in the borders we could not over-reach that, not to fall in one or the other, not pretend to be the center of the world but we are center of the world, everyone of us. If we are not center of the world, we are not in Dasein. If we do not have the center of our identity, of our sacred territory, of our tradition, of our symbols without churches and sacred places, we are not people. We should be center of the world but we should recognize the right to the other to be center of the world as well in their eyes, in their world, in their borders. And the borders should not be just. They’re always unjust, because we are living beings. These existential horizons are living. So we could not say ‘lets be the Great Russia and nobody will pass.’ There comes the time when someone other pass the border. And the borders should not be titanic. They should be open as well. We should fight for our borders. We should live with our borders because our borders are kind of our bodies, our skin. We are living in that. They should let something in, something out, as the skin. They should be different. But they should exist. They should be recognized in the clear and the logical and the metaphysical way; so the borders between one horizon and the other, without pretending to creature the common measure, to put them together, to overcome our ethnocentrism.
We could call it self-reflecting ethnocentrism. We understand that we are the center of the world and we are happy with that. But we understand and we should recognize the right to think the same and to be the same in the other borders of the other. That is very important. That is the only solution to create balanced geosophy and the world based on multipolarity because otherwise we will come to completely kind of humanism without the essence, without the nature, without the content, pure form. That will be at the end of the day pure racism, the other side of pure racism as pure humanism, because if you don’t agree with the values of this liberal humanism, you are not human and finally you should be destroyed, as is the case with Muslims or with Slavs in Anglo-Saxon version. Or we try to impose our own ethnocentrism without understanding the measure.
So maybe we could call it measured ethnocentrism, self-reflecting ethnocentrism that recognizes the dignity of this existential entity of these people but recognizing the right to have the same for those who we like or we don’t like as well. With those who we like, it’s no problem but with those who we don’t like at all, it’s the problem. For example, following this path in concrete, in writing noomahia, I have written and published the book on North America, North American Logos. You can imagine my relation to North American culture. I simply hate it. But dealing with North American Logos, I have discovered that was a challenge for myself. Because if I would write Russian version of criticism of American imperialism and so on, that will be caricature. That will not be American Logos. It’s pity but that will not be noomahia. And going into depth of American Logos, I have discovered completely different things. I started to understand them. I don’t approve them but now I understand them. I understand what they are doing because everything fits in their context. And they are kind of consequential in their attitude, in their titanism, in their creation of artificial, post-traditional civilization. They are doing what they should do. They are creating some kind of American society on the global scale because it was based on this universalism from the very beginning. I don’t approve that but that is quite logical if we consider that there is American world and there is the Logos of American world. And I have identified that in the pragmatist philosophy, a very special philosophy, very different from European philosophy. It’s not good, not bad but it’s purely American. It’s based on inexistence of object and subject. Very interesting. I have passed the test I think. Because dealing with American Logos, I didn’t write a caricatural critical volume of how awful they are and how we should fight against them but it was written with some sympathy for them. For me it was really a challenge. After that, I could write a volume of Noomahia on any people after overcoming this challenge. For example, after this test, I have discovered the logic of Croats, of Polish, and with great astonishment I have found that the Slavophile tendency and tradition was started not by Russian but by Croats. Croats were the first Slavophiles. And Czechs, and there was a Slavophile tendency in Polish tradition. Not for Russia but Croatian was pro-Russia. It’s very strange.
So there are so many things that we could discover overcoming our ethnocentrism and at the same time destroying completely universalism imposed by globalists. So that is new way. It is not rehabilitation of nationalism. It is not the return to the nation states. It is not pure revanchism noomahia. It is new way of thinking that is new for Russian, for myself. And I think that if we learn to use that methodologically, we could solve many details in political, cultural, scientific, in any sense, and very concrete challenges. So that’s for today. We have covered today, two most important methodological aspects of noology as a philosophical discipline. We have spoken about three Logos and geosophy with most important terms and concepts introduced in two first lectures. And I invite you to think about that, to try to use that in concrete aspect, and follow next eight lectures because in the next eight lectures, we will apply what we have spoken about today to the concrete cases, as examples to show how that works, because it works as concrete tools. If they are tools they should help us to do something with that. That is all for today.
