A constructive criticism of Dugin's interview with Carlson, posted on X by US journalist Darren Beattie:
Some have asked me about this, so I figured I'll go against my better judgement and say a few words. First, I commend Tucker for his courage and open mindedness in having such discussions with controversial figures. Nothing I say should be interpreted as a criticism of Tucker's laudable efforts.
This conversation reinforces in my mind two priors: one is that while Russians are a great literary and musical people, they are not a philosophical people (well, no people is really is a philosophical people post WWII)
The second prior I had, reinforced by this talk is that it is very difficult, next to impossible and rarely optimal to connect "deep level" philosophical diagnoses with diagnoses of more surface level political and cultural phenomena. Let's take Dugin's example of what went wrong---the rise of "individualism." Dugin perfunctorily gestures toward various "deep level" accounts of individualism in his reference to the "subject," and to theological nominalism respectively.
This already gets into problems because the diagnosis of modernity as flowing continuously from nominalism and the diagnosis of modernity as discretely emerging from the self-grounding Cartesian subject are different and competing diagnoses. The "purpose" of nominalism was not to liberate the individual, but rather to liberate God.
The structure of the self-grounding Cartesian subject moreover analogizes much more easily to other identifiable features of modernity (Rousseau's and then Nietzsche's self grounding will)
Things get even more confused when we bring in the third, implicit and most important aspect of individualism---its implicit contrast with collectivism. This seems to be the dominant version Dugin focuses on as in his telling the key feature of "liberalism" is the liberation of the individual from collective entanglements (tradition, culture, gender, humanity).
The relation of this version to nominalism is incomplete as nominalism has to do with the liberation of God from man's cognitive categories. As to the Cartesian subject, the emergence of subjectivity exists at a deeper layer than and is presupposed by the more superficial distinction between individual and collective (at least according to Heidegger's telling)
Enough for a moment about the "deep level" diagnostic problems. Now let's turn to the political/cultural diagnostic problem.In short, the "liberation of the individual" seems to be a very poor description of the present political moment. Dugin's focus on the liberation of the individual might account for a "dystopian" society that were social darwinistic, pathologically dedicated to scientific progress and advancement and the elevation of the individual over all else (including his gendered and all biological constraints).
There are confused hints of this of course that we see in our philosophically impoverished tech elite (and what do you expect when from a society that confers such powers on glorified software engineers). But this is hardly the dominant thrust of the present moment, and if it were, notwithstanding the philosophical childishness of the tech class, would actually be a very welcome and profound improvement from what we have today.
No, what we have today in "wokeness" the political weaponization/empowerment of women and minority special interest groups, is far from the liberation of the individual. If we must use the "individualism" vs "collective" at all to account for what is going on, it can hardly be described as liberation of the individual.
Wokeness, intersectionality is all about group identity. The purpose of censoring individuals is to assuage the collective inferiority complexes of politically weaponized groups (mostly women and minorities)
The whole thing is about pandering to the emotivism, unfounded indignation and undeserved pride of resentful underachieving and independent groups. Politically the transsexual phenomenon is so much less a trans-human liberation from biology and much more an empowerment of a politically favored GROUP identity (sexual degenerates).
Thus one can much more easily buy a trajectory from liberalism to transhumanism (elevation of the individual decision maker, individual choice) than one can see between liberalism and "wokeness."
One can imagine a line from epistemological grounding of things in the self-knowing subject (Descartes), to the political grounding of things in individual choice and consent (Locke) to a kind of hyper liberated individual apotheosis in transhumanism.
Finally-- In the discussion Tucker raises the point a point about so-called "classical liberalism," mentioning that this is about individual choice, freedom from slavery, etc. This is more or less Locke. I was somewhat surprised that Dugin didn't respond that Locke (via Descartes to Hobbes) and by extension classical liberalism represent a profound step toward liberation of the individual that he decries (a politics based on choice and consent rather than heredity, tradition, etc).
Instead Dugin simply embraces the classical liberal vs bad liberal distinction, without noting that, as explained above, the bad "degraded" liberalism is not really liberalism in any sense of the word---the political dystopia we see today is in every sense post-liberal.
Perhaps I should polish this up at some point but those are some immediate thoughts. And as mentioned in the beginning, my prior sense is that it is very difficult to have a discussion that gets into deep level philosophical diagnoses and more surface level political diagnoses without impoverishing both.
