Introduction to Noomakhia (lecture 1) What is Noomakhia?
Primary tabs
View(active tab) What links here

Alexander Dugin
Dear friends: it is the final part of our geopolitical Serbian School experimental course. That is based on the previous lecture courses that are already made. I presume that you have understood well the previous courses. They are necessary to understand this final metaphysical and philosophical summary of multipolar approach to understand the very essence of modern situation concerning cultures, civilizations, societies, globalizations, and the place of identity in this context. Noology is the new philosophical discipline or approach developed by Romanian and Russian school of thought. There are two branches in noology; one Romanian and one Russian. Romanian is represented by philosopher Lucian Blaga and his kind of continuator, modern Professor Badescu. Russian noology is completely different but having the same sources of inspiration as developed in my person and my friends. I have published already 18 volumes of Noomahia, more or less 800 pages each one. So that is a kind of already made work. It is not finished yet. I’m working on the 20th book now. But it will have 21, maybe 22 volumes in all. So that is the project that is based on the special philosophical, metaphysical approach I try to explain in this course, in the ten lectures. They are very important because they are a kind of summary of everything said and done before. Excuse me for speaking English but the problem is not only that we lack the qualified translator from Russian to Serbian but there are kind of new created terms as well in Russian. For Russian to understand noomahia in Russian is difficult. For Serbia, it’s almost impossible because nobody can make a correct translation. If I would know Serbian well enough, I would prefer to make this lecture in Serbian but I doubt that there is someone besides myself that could make such philosophical translation. So excuse me for English in this course but I could stop or return to the point if you miss something. If you miss something you could ask if you don’t understand an important term, ask myself or Jovana. We will try to translate in Serbian to find the correct term because the philosophical terminology is not sufficiently developed neither in Russian nor in Serbian. We are always having in mind German or English or French words in order to transmit the concepts. I use English in the conceptual way in order to transmit the concepts, not the terms of our native languages.
We will have ten lectures during these days, up to Friday. It’s very important to be present because if you miss something you could never get what is going on in the next one. Today we will have two lectures (introduction) but they are the most important among all the others. So we need to concentrate today and to try to put other concerns aside in order to concentrate on that. If you get that, you will understand and have the keys to open any intellectual doors in this course. If not, that will be the problem. So I invite you to concentrate. Thank you for your presence.
Today’s first lecture is introduction of what is noology. Noology is a new term. The term noology consists of two roots; ‘nous' (Greek word) and ‘logy' (logic, logos, science, teaching). So noology is the teaching of ‘nous.’ What is the ‘nous’ in Greek? That is very serious word and if you try to translate it, it could be ‘ум' in Russian. It is intelligence and intellect. It is as well mind, order, thought, or a kind of consciousness. In German it is ‘Bewusstsein.' It is something that lies at the depth of the human thought. But what is human? Human is the being that is different from any other being in the world, when one thinks. It is thinking being. Every other qualities, we share with other beings but thought is the same as to be human, to be thinking. Thinking creature and thinking being is human. So the thought is the human. To think is to be human. We have bodies and we have instincts and pain, suffering, or joy. But the other creatures as well have the same. But nobody except us, in the living world, have thought. So the thought, or nous, is the essence of the man. The man is thought. All the rest is man and not only. But the thought is the only aspect of man that makes us human. To be human is to be thinking. So the nous as a kind of thought and mind is the deepest root of human being, of human-ness, of mankind. We are human because of thinking and because of nous. We are ourselves because there is the nous. Without nous, there is no human. We are human because there is the nous. So thinking about the nous and trying to explore noology is the same as to explore ourselves. It’s not the kind of alienated objected. To think about nous is the same as to think about us and about our deepest nature. It is not abstract. It is a kind of introspection. We are speaking and learning our depth. We are learning human-ness of human beings. That is the nous.
We could present human being from different point of view. Noology presents human being from one point of view, from its essential point of view. It is the study of the thought as such. That is very very important. Noology as well is philosophical basis of multipolarity. Why multipolarity? Because the idea of noology is that there is not only one kind of thinking that is universal and common for all of humanity. There are differences. So when we try to study nous, the intellect, the mind, the thought carefully, we discover how much the process of thinking depends on culture. If you are thinking in one culture, you think in one way. If you belong to the other culture, to the other ethnical group, to the other religion, to the other age, you think completely differently. But you are still human. You are still Serb, Russian, French, English, Chinese, or African. But belonging to different cultures and spaces and times, you think differently. So if we want to study nous and the thought as such, we need to take into account these differences. And without studying the differences of way of thinking, we could not arrive at the essence of thinking. For example, if we presume that everybody thinks as ourselves, we will study our thought. But it is only part. Because for example, Croatians, or Albanians, or Russians, or English, or American, or African, or Chinese, or Muslims think differently not only about secondary aspects but they think differently about the nature of human, about life, death, family, gender, history, time, space, God, matter, world, about everything. Noology is a kind of phenomenology of the mind. We don’t prescribe how the nous should be or what the thought must be. We try to explore how it is, how thought works, and presents itself in different contexts. And this recognition of the differences without any normative prescription of how the man should normally think is the special feature of noology. So we are starting from the recognition of the differences and we are trying to understand better and deeper, the differences and not trying to unite or impose something as universal but trying to discover. That is very important feature. That is why noology is dedicated to the study of the concrete cultures. In my books in the project of noology, most of them are dedicated to European culture, for French Logos, English Logos, Eastern European Logos, Russian Logos, American Logos, Chinese Logos, Iranian Logos, and so on. We are studying cultures and basing on the cultures, we are deducing from these cultures their way of thinking. In that way, we are arriving to have the complete vision of the human thought. We are not saying ‘human should be as for example, modern European, white, atheist, materialist, and liberal.’ That is a concrete result of Anglo-Saxon European civilization. It is geographically and historically limited and it is not universal. It is English way of developing their English, American, European history. And if we go to Eastern Europe, Slavic world, Russian world, Chinese world, or Muslim world, we discover that they don’t go that American or English or European way. Everybody goes its own ways.
There is the conflict of civilizations as well the key to understand what is going on now with your country or our country, how we are dealing with the west, how they treat us, why they treat us so, why we respond, why we resist, or why we submit. The essence of noology is recognition of the plurality of the minds of the cultures. Plurality means that there is not only one universal, normative way of development of mind. There are minds and not the mind. Or there are different manifestations of one mind, nous, but so differently and specially that we need to study carefully each case; Serbian case, Russian case, French case, German case. It is not to create hierarchy or to say ‘it’s more developed or it’s less developed’ but to understand how everybody thinks in different conditions. That is noology.
Noology is multilevel analysis. In noology we are using philosophy. The minimal knowledge of philosophy is necessary to understand what is going on because the philosophy is the mirror of the thought. Studying philosophy, we are saving time to study the other, politics and history, because in philosophy, everything is in contact with it. It is simultaneously presented in the philosophy. So if we are reading the history of philosophy, we are reading the history of humanity. Why? Because to think is to be human. And philosophers consecrate all their life and all their efforts to thinking. So they are more human than other. They are more clear human than other. They are making the same thing as everybody but in special way. They are concentrated on this human-ness of human. And the other as well participate. We could say that every man is philosopher. But the philosopher is complete, accomplished, and perfect man. They are dedicated to the main goal of human, to think. That is why philosophy is so important in noology. History of religions is very important because religion is the other way to think. Religion is based on the premises of the thought. So without at least some knowledge of different religions, we could not understand noology because religion is as well the mirror of the thought. There is projection of our thought on the gods, on the relations between the reason of being and the source of being, creation, god, time, and many other things in religion that reflect the structure of nous. So in noology, we need to know a little bit of religion.
What is important is that, in noology, we need to have some knowledge of geopolitics because geopolitics is concretization of civilization. So that is a kind of generalization and if we discovered geopolitical position of thinker, we could not understand what he means because we are defined by philosophical tradition and religious tradition but we are as well defined by our position in the world and our way of thinking. Our own cultural noology is defined by our geopolitical position. If you belong to the civilization of the sea (sea power) or the civilization of the earth, you think differently. That is very important difference. Position on the geopolitical map of the world is very important to interpret concretely the thought. So geopolitics is absolutely unavoidable. World history is main topic. We need to know the history of different peoples and cultures. We also need to know basic knowledge of sociology because sociology is the discipline that shows how much the way of our being is defined by society. So that is very important because society is very important way of self reflection because if we know how much society and its principles are inside us, we will discover that our individuality and originality is almost zero, is almost non-existent quantity. Everything in us is put by the society. We think ‘I’m thinking that.’ It is not ‘I’ that thinks. Society through me thinks. Sociology is very important. Anthropology and above all, the new anthropological school from Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the other tradition. And I suggest that in development of our course, we absolutely need to have a kind of anthropological course about anthropology. It is a very important part. And modern anthropology shows ethnical tradition and condition of the living and the nature and the culture and the balance between the nature and culture defines the values of the society and how different the societies are. That is very important gain of modern anthropology. Old anthropology of 19th century was based on the evolutionary theory. So everybody is developing. There are developed society and underdeveloped societies. Modern anthropology shows there are no such things as development. There are differences. And in order to study archaic society, we could discover the society more complicated and more complex than our society but they are different. They are not underdeveloped. They are not childish stage of the same culture. That is maybe mature, maybe childish, maybe old stage of different culture that we need to study carefully without projecting our own ideas on them. That is the gain of modern anthropology. That is one of the main principles of noology and noomahia.
There is ethno-sociology that puts together ethnology and sociology. You had a course already about ethno-sociology. It’s very important and key course. The theory of imagination - I would suggest strongly to read the books of Carl Gustav Jung, Gaston Bachelard, but above all Gilbert Durand (French author) about sociology of imagination. That is very important. His methods and his teachings will be used in our course as a kind of methodological basis. I will explain in short terms what is sociology of imagination of Gilbert Durand. I have made doctrine on sociology of imagination and it will be of use. Phenomenology - I would recommend you to study Heidegger and Husserl. The most important idea of phenomenology is that the thing we are thinking of exists in our mind. All the qualities of the things belong to our mind. So what the thing is beyond our mind is something we could guess. There is no evidence and no quality. It’s almost nothing. For example, existence or not existence of the thing outside of our perception changes absolutely nothing in our relations with the thing. That is the main law of phenomenology. The things are present inside of our thought and our thinking process. That is the main law of phenomenology developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and other philosophers of the same line.
The structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Paul Ricoeur is very important as well because structuralism is philosophical method that explains that everything exists in the structures. Structure is something invisible but that defines the meaning. So the language is much more important than the discourse or the things that are said in the language. The language predefines what we are going to say. So what we are saying are citations from the language and from the dictionary. So it is our speech that we are so proud of thinking that it is something original. ‘Let’s go to the cinema’ for example, we say as if let’s be the world, let’s be the light, God’s announcement from nothing, from the void but it is pure citation of what many other men and women say to each other. ‘Lets go to the cinema.’ That is citation and that is defined by the structure of the language. There is nothing, zero originality in that. And with all our judgments the same, all our words and discourses, we are repeating the things that were said many millions and millions of times before us by the other. And there is no author. There is repetition of the structure. That is the language that speaks by itself. That is the concept and philosophy of structuralism. It is very interesting and very important methodological aspect that we use in noomahia.
I suggest reading Heidegger as in Fourth Political Theory. I suggest reading traditionalist philosophers of the school of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola. They are very important. I suggest reading Bachofen about the gender and the matriarchy. It’s very important because the study of matriarchy is the essential part of noomahia. I will explain why. Bachofen has written the book that is called ‘Muterrecht’ (‘The Law of Mother’). That is classic book about how pre-Indo-European mediterranean matriarchy was. That is very important and it is basic classical work. We will mention, as well, structuralist author Georges Dumezil and Claude Levi-Strauss, as I have said, about modern structuralist anthropology and ethnology. There are more or less the kind of fields or methods of schools we are using in noology. But there are many many studies, pluri-disciplinary studies of such kind so there is nothing new or nothing concrete in everything I have just said. And what is originality of noomahia as such? That is the most important point. All the mentioned disciplines and methods and fields of studies are auxiliary. They help us to understand. They are tools. But what is the main method? The main method is the concept that this time is something partly new (and I will explain why) about existence of three Logos.
What is three Logos? My idea is that the nous as a thought or mind or intellect manifests itself in three distinguished, different forms. In three - no less and no more. That is approximation as any methodological approach. But that is what the French call 'grilles de lecture.’ That is a kind of reading. If we accept that, everything will be put in the context of this methodological approach. So one mind and three major forms with many subdivisions, many other forms included in this main global general forms of the process of the thought that I’m calling Logos. So there is one nous and three Logos. How three Logos relate to the nous, we put out of the question. That is too metaphysical and is not so important for us. The most important idea is that the nous cannot manifest itself without passing through these three Logos. There is no thought outside of these three Logos. But these three Logos, we could find in any culture. They have no destiny for one of them. There is no hierarchy between these three Logos. And we find all three Logos necessary in any kind of culture. So that is the result of my work and the result of the studies and research. I started from the hypothesis that maybe we will find them in any culture and maybe not. After studying any culture in the world, including most archaic one in Oceania, in Africa, in Indian of Southern and Northern America, I have arrived at the point where this hypothesis was confirmed. In any culture and in any society, archaic or modern or postmodern or European or not European, in any time in any form of society, we could discover these three Logos in different proportions and in different balance. They could be combined in many ways, in million ways. And that is dynamic. I will explain this balance of the Logos and how they are changing. But they are present everywhere. No culture, no people, no religion, and no region could say ‘we have this Logos and only this, or these two.’ Every culture has three Logos. That is very important. That shows that we could not reconstruct the hierarchy between the culture or people, because the three Logos combine with each other in completely special way. And the way of combination is proper to each culture. So that is kind of our history. Our deep identity of the people, of the culture, of the religion consists precisely in this combination and the changes of the balance of these three Logos. Because there are so many forms to combine them, there are unlimited possibilities of the human society and no way to create hierarchy because the archaic society can be with domination of one Logos and modern with other and vice versa. There is no general rule that could be universal.
And that is very important point because that shows that we are dealing in our science, in our methodology, in our politics, and in our culture with a kind of racist colonial approach in any culture. We are just projecting our own Logos as something universal. Careful study of the culture shows that that is illegitimate. Racism is the idea to say ‘my Logos or my special culture is universal’ without studying the other and without asking the other. And after that, after declaring that our culture is universal one, we put ourselves as example for the other. The other are either the same as ourselves or are less developed. And that is the case of modern European civilization and of us in the way we belong to it. If we accept that, we are entering into this racist attitude toward the history, toward the past, toward ourselves. And we are declaring 'that is universal, that is the only way to develop and everybody is going that way. There is only one culture and one Logos. And our Logos is universal and the measure of the things.’ That is completely wrong and is based on exaggeration of our own self. And that is something I will show that is completely illegitimate. And there is not only open biological racism. Modern liberalism, communism, and any kind of globalization are absolutely racist because they are basing on the universalism of the historic experience of the part of the humanity put as the whole of the humanity and as the goal. For example, who is in the eyes of globalists African negro? He is the man on the way to be white, modern, capitalist, liberal, European, Euro-centric man. He is a kind of underdeveloped European. He is not the representative of the culture going its own way. It’s something that is undeveloped. And modern idea of tolerance that we need to tolerate him precisely as something imperfect, something invalid, something on the way to be as ourselves is completely racist. We don’t recognize the other as complete and perfect human being different than us. We think that they are going our way and they are obliged to be and there is no other way, and we have pity on them. There is very nice film by Werner Herzog, ‘Where the Green Ants Dream.’ He shows that the people of Australia not only cannot follow Western example but they don’t want to do that. They are going their own way different from Western and that is their decision of their culture. And this clash of Anglo-Saxon racist version of the history and this aboriginal Australian vision of their own identity. They are not the Westerner of the second sort. They are Australian of the first sort for themselves.
That is ethical aspect of noology. Noology is a fight for the human dignity for any society, without hierarchy and without this projection. It is the basis of anti-colonial metaphysics. Many teachings pretended historically to be anti-colonial (Marxism and liberalism as well). But they were based on the universal version of the history. For Marxism, we need to develop African society in order to make them Socialists and they will be equal but destroying their values and their system regarding them as underdeveloped in their natural state. The same for liberalism. Liberalism and Communism are in the same way as racist as racism of Hitler. That is main basis for fourth political theory, that we need to find some other way outside of three political ideologies. Noology is the metaphysical basis of why it is so needed, because doing differently and treating the other people differently, we are projecting our racist approach and we are making equation between ours and normative and universal. But that is a violation of the truth. It’s pure colonialist struggle for power and not understanding not knowledge, not wisdom, and not the truth. It’s something completely different. So that is why noology is so important. It is the philosophical and metaphysical basis of multi-polar world. And the concept of three Logos shows the differences that could exist in combination and in different cultures.
Now what these three Logos are - here we could remind Nietzschean concept of the Greek God Apollo and the Greek God Dionysus. Apollo and Dionysus are two Greek Gods but Friedrich Nietzsche has interpreted them not as object of cult or worship. They were taken as metaphors, as kind of symbols or figures. So you should not be worshippers of Apollo to be Apollonian. You should not be worshipper of Dionysus and participate in the orgies to be Dionysian. To be Dionysian or Apollonian for Nietzsche was completely different meaning. To be Apollonian was to be hierarchical, to belong to the logical way to understand the world and to be Dionysian was to be irrational and intuitive understanding of the world. That is a kind of day way of thinking in Nietzsche (Apollonian) and night, dawn, dusk way of thinking (Dionysian). Nietzsche divided the cultures into Apollonian and Dionysian. So the cultures of Nietzsche were of two kinds. That was taken from Nietzsche and developed by many many other authors and now it is almost commonplace in the history and study of cultures. We say Dionysian style and Apollonian style following Nietzsche but going further. And I accept that and I think that we could affirm that there is the Logos of Apollo and there is the Logos of Dionysus. The nous (mind, thought) expresses itself through Apollonian or Dionysian Logos. That is very important. That sounds like Nietzschean approach and it is because I am inspired by Nietzsche in that way.
Trying to discover Dionysian Logos more, I have written a kind of prequel for Noomahia that is called ‘In Search of the Dark Logos.’ My idea was to regard history of philosophy not from Apollonian point of view that is prevailing and dominating, but from the second Logos, to construct the history of philosophy basing on Dionysian reading. We know exactly how Apollonian reading of the history of philosophy is. That coincides with the history of philosophy always. We know what Apollo thought because the history of philosophy is Apollonian thought so Apollo thought precisely as a philosopher thought during the ages. And my idea was to discover how Dionysus would think regarding the same topics, the same categories, the same opposition and relations. That was as well a kind of invitation of Nietzsche and a little bit of Heidegger and many postmodern thinkers tried to do the same, tried to apply this Dionysian approach in order to decipher the history of philosophy. It is not so unique but I tried by myself. I have called it dark Logos because it is clear for me that Apollonian Logos is light and Dionysus is night or shadow or darkness. Going into the field of this dark Logos and trying to read with the eyes of dark Logos Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, and the others (and all that is described more or less in my book 'In Search for Dark Logos’ that is prequel or 0 volume of noomahia), in the kind of field research in metaphysics and not in the idea I had before, but working with this task to imagine the alternative history of philosophy based on Dionysian approach, I have discovered in the practical way very important basis of all noomahia. There are some phenomena including in culture, in religion, in philosophy, in history of philosophy, in science, in art, in human psychology, in unconsciousness that could not enter in the field of Dionysian Logos. So something fits but there is a new field that is outside that could not fit into the Apollonian Logos clearly but could not fit as well into the Dionysian Logos. That was a kind of practical empirical discovery in the field of metaphysics because there was some conceptual field, for example the philosophy of Heraclitus or Democritus, atomic theory, or the theory of modern science, that are absolutely not Apollonian or Dionysian. Searching dark Logos, I have arrived to the point that there is something outside of this new Logos. There is the third one. Behind the Logos of Dionysus was hidden something else that was in the shadow of Dionysus. If Dionysus is the shadow of Apollo, there is the other shadow of the shadow.
That I have called in my studies the Logos of Cybele. Cybele is the name for very ancient Anatolian Goddess (the same as Greek Rhea). Cybele was the name of the mother Goddess of ancient Anatolia. It was before Hittites, there was the very special pre-indo-European people of Hattians, and Hittites Indo-European language has taken this Goddess and integrated into their own religious context and after that the Phrygian have as well and developed the cult of Cybele. And that was very interesting circle of the concept basing on the ritual castration of the man and the rule of the Great Mother. So the priests of Cybele were castrated and turned into the eunuch. So that was the emasculation of the man and that was the part of the great vision of matriarchy when the position of the man is completely different than we know. It is completely different from the Dionysian position because Dionysus in his cult is the center of interaction of the Bacchae, of the women, but as well of the men. That is the presence of the man in the center of the human existence. Dionysus is not transcendent Dionysus. He is immanent but he is man. That is immanence of the man, man-God, God as a man, man, not human. And this presence is a kind of immanent presence of transcendence. Dionysus is not the darkness, not black Logos. It is the presence of the light in the darkness. That is a kind of sun of the night. It is the man inside of the middle of the immanent, chthonic, feminine existence. So that is the male point in female reality. It is a kind of ray of the sun that goes through the darkness and that comes to the center of the darkness in order to create new dawn. That is Dionysus. And it could not be identified with darkness or with chaos. And all the orgies and all the rites and worships and all the topics linked to Dionysus were not so easy to interpret. That is not reversal of the normal Apollonian order. It was not a kind of revolution. Dionysus is the same as Apollo but coming not in the day but in the night. That was the male in the night, the light in the darkness, but ‘in’ the darkness. That is a kind of sun that comes down in the evening in order to appear anew in the morning. But when he passes, the moment of midnight, he is invisible, he is hidden, and there is no sun in the middle of the night but the sun is. If he will be absolutely absent, there will be no morning and no dawn. It is not the day but it is the sun of the night. The sun of the day is the same as Apollo or Helios. Where is the sun when there is no sun? Where is the heaven when there is no heaven? Where is the male when there is no male and only darkness, earth, immanence, matter, and female principle? He is hidden but he is. That is Dionysian Logos. It’s very special. He creates the new kind of dynamic vision, a kind of balance of the genders and metaphysics, the balance of transcendence and immanence, of heaven and the earth. It is the heaven in the earth and that is heavenly earth, earth in the heaven. So that is a combination of opposition. It is dialectics. That is Dionysian Logos.
But in order to understand correctly what is the Logos of Dionysus, we need to introduce third Logos and that is something that changes completely all the other concepts and theories that existed before and that are principles or tools of modern culture, the history of cultures, and culturology. So the third Logos is absolutely new. That is a kind of essential feature of noology that there is the third Logos, the black one, the Logos of Cybele. Why was the Logos of Cybele discovered so late? Why did everybody before not speak about three Logos? When I started to try to understand, to solve this metaphysical problem, I have discovered a very interesting thing. For the dominating Logos of Apollo, this Logos cannot exist because seeing the situation from the purely Apollonian point of view, there could not be the other Logos beyond the Apollonian one because the Apollonian concept is exclusivist and purely male and based on a kind of equivalence; the man as male is a man and man is human, so to be man and to be human is the same and everything that doesn’t fit into this concept has no right to pretend to be called Logos. So Logos is Apollo, man and human. And everything that is not male (female for example), that is not logical doesn’t belong to Logos and doesn’t belong to human. And that is a kind of beast or some object and not the subject. Subject could be only Apollonian. And the Nietzschean idea to enlarge the concept of Logos and to give the status of Logos to Dionysus was already revolution because that has shown that it could be different approach to the Logos. That is absolutely crucial. And with Dionysus we have discovered that there could be Apollonian approach and there could be other approach. But together, Apollonian approach and Dionysian approach, they could not let the third Logos be because both of them are male, open as Apollonian or hidden as Dionysian, exclusive as Apollonian or inclusive as Dionysian, but they are male Logos. And the Logos of Cybele is not male. And from the male prevailing point of view, it could not be Logos. So it pass without being remarked. It is a kind of noise. It is not words. It is not speech. For the metaphysical male’s ears, what the woman says is noise and not speech. It is something as the sound of the nature for example. It can be beautiful or less beautiful, that depends.
That is idea that Platonism is purely Apollonian philosophy. There are ideas that are above and there are images and icons that are below. There is verticality. There is the father that is eternal example and paradigm and there is the son that is a kind of phenomenological imitation of the father and nothing, khora, matter that has no quality. And the most important definition of Apollonian approach to the Logos is that beyond the Logos is nothing. Beyond father or son or matter that has no quality, so nothing, no being, darkness. Without quality, not Logos but what is important not Logos. There is the Logos of the father that is Apollonian. There is the Logos of the sun, immanent, that is the Logos of Dionysus and there is no Logos, because we are completely machist, we are patriarchal tradition, so we don’t let the other part of the reality to have Logos. So we deny that and that is why it was so hidden. And only starting to apply, to create, to describe a kind of approach to Dionysian history of philosophy, we discovered there is something below the lower border of Dionysian vision because Dionysian approach is not the castration. It is not the kind of dissolution of the great mother. It is the reach of the depth of hell in order to resurrect (Dionysian idea), to descend in order to ascend, to go down in order to go back to Heaven. It is the sacrifice and it is the death but in order to be resurrected. It is completely different. It is going from the top to the bottom in order to return to the top. Dionysus is the extreme version of Apollonian Logos that is different completely and creates different structure. So that is the other inclination of nous. Maybe the nous is the same but the form is completely different. But starting to work with Dionysian Logos seriously, I have discovered that there is something else. And that was a kind of metaphysical discovery that first of all was a kind of illumination and revelation in a philosophical sense but after thinking about that, I have arrived to the point that we could instrumentalize that. We could go beyond the Apollonian and Dionysian border and recognize this attitude as the Logos, as third form of the nous or the third Logos, the Logos of Cybele. And after that everything comes into harmony. After that we have complete explanation of all the possible versions of cultures, of philosophies, of religions, and relations between them.
So we could imagine how the nous is divided in three ways in three Logos. These three Logos, each one of them, creates a world or the worlds by itself. So we can live in many Apollonian worlds, in many Dionysian worlds, and we could live in many Cybelian worlds. There is not only one world. There are multitudes, multiplicity, plurality of Apollonian worlds, Dionysian worlds, and Cybelian worlds. And they are embedded in each other, they are merged in each other, and they represent so rich content of the cultures, of the thought, of the art, of the history that we discover immediately the spiritual treasury of the human mind. But it is not the chaos. That is a kind of inner relations between them because we could describe pure forms of these three Logos. For example, what is the universe of Apollo? It is the idea that everything is created from the top to the bottom. Everything is a kind of descending process. Platonic philosophy is so actual and was always absolutely actual because it is the most perfect form to perfect this Apollonian Logos. Platonism is the same as Apollonian Logos. So in any kind of Logos of Apollo, in any culture, having the contact with Greek Platonism or having no contact with Platonism will create the same Apollonian version. I have discovered that, for example, in the Nilo-Saharan of Africa, with no links with Greece, in the very archaic tradition, Logos of Apollo, but exactly the same idea. There is the Father God that has created everything and the people are the sons of the Father God and we are descending from the Heaven and we are returning to that. There is no earth dimension in all that. The earth is the lowest line of going down in order to get back. There is pure patriarchal attitude. Everything is based on the honor, on the fight, the fight against the death and darkness, every man is a light man. That is a kind of hierarchy inside of society based through this line. That is Platonic European feudal traditional Serbian Russian vision of the society.
By the Shilluk, by the Nuer, by the Dinka tribes of Nilo-Saharan people or for example the other African people of Western Africa in Yoruba people, we have the same purely Platonist vision. Sometimes there are kind of examples existing in the stars and all that we are dealing with are the reflections or phenomenological mirrors of what is going on above the stars. So there is Platonism that is not only in the texts or dialogues of Plato but there is Apollonian Logos. They have no contact with Plato. For example, Pharaonic tradition of Egypt was as well the sun from above, from the top that goes down and creates this kind of pyramidal version of the world. So the base is square and the top is unity. So there is purely Apollonian building in pyramid. That is why fire was presented in Plato as pyramid. It’s fire in Greek. Pyramid is a kind of fire that goes to the top. So fire is sacred and light is sacred and we are suns of the light and from this point the patriarchy and absolute domination of male principle and submission of the female principle and all Apollonian things. So the Logos of Apollo is not people who read Plato and people who have applied the texts of Plato to their society. Partly that was the case but we could not explain any Apollonian society with the reading of Plato. Plato was the part. I will explain in the future lectures what was concretely the Plato philosophy. But what is important now is that Apollonian Logos is Logos. It is not Platonic. Plato is reflection or mirror of this Logos. It is excellent form to express it. It is perfect art or revelation of this Logos in the most complete form. So it is the best introduction to the Apollonian Logos. But that is not creation of Plato. It is creation of nous. It is the way how the Apollonian Logos in nous works and how it reveals and manifests itself. That is very important. That is no artificial creation of some human mind. Human mind can be following Apollo’s line and can be Platonic. We are born with Platonism. We can be inner born Platonists if this Logos dominates in us, in our culture, in our religion, or in our system of values. And that defines our world. We regard the Heaven more than earth. So we are light. We have no weight. We worship the winged creatures and angels for example or birds. Our Gods are transparent. They live in the air or in the Heaven or in the clouds. So for our Christian Indo-European tradition, it’s Apollonic. Plato was a part of this culture. Almost all the Greek culture, before Plato, after Plato, not only Greek but Roman, Iranian, Indian, and Slavic tradition were all Apollonic.
And for us, it’s so clear that we think that the world is such and there is no other world. But we are living in the Apollonian world. Our tradition is based on the Apollonian vision. And the discovery of the Logos of Dionysus is already spiritual metaphysical revolution. It could be different. We could live in different world with different symmetry and different organization not based on the worship of the transcendence. We could see this sacredness in the immanence. Dionysian world is organized differently with different meaning of the same words, of the same figures, and of the same Gods. In this Dionysian aspect of Christian tradition (we will speak about that more) is the figure of Christ. That is the God and the man. He is transcendent and he is immanent. He is eternal as in Apollonian world where everything is eternal in essence, and he is historic, so he came into the time. If we regard in this way we don’t oppose Apollonian Christianity or Dionysian Paganism. We understand better that in the same tradition in Christianity we have both figures; transcendence of the trinity of the God and the immanence of the Christ. So we have Apollonian and Dionysian aspect in very special situation.
In other traditions, we discover the same. There are many other, in different tradition, the figure as Dionysus, not with the same name but with the same function, with some ecstatic liberation because the name of Dionysus in Roman culture was Liber (liberation, freedom). So this was liberation from the weight of the matter, from this chtonic aspect of human presence. And that is a kind of leap into the freedom of God. It is the leap from the human to divine, from the time into eternity. That is the essence of Dionysian cult. It is a kind of heresy in our Christian tradition. So we are in time and with bodies. We are coming into touch with the eternal that is God. That is a kind of metaphysical, anthropological, and ontological leap. So that is the essence of Dionysian tradition. And that is not the case that Eucharist in our church is made with the wine, with the blood of God, and with the grain, because the bread and wine were two symbols of Eleusinian Mysteries where Dionysus and Demeter were in the center of that. That is continuation of the special symbolical tradition based on Dionysus and Apollo. And when we see the world through the Logos of Dionysus, we have one world. If we see the world with the Logos of Apollo, we are dealing with different world. And there are different symmetries and different metaphysics. For example, Dionysus is the cycle. It is the kind of cycle around the point of eternity. And Apollonian Logos is eternity itself. It is eternity. So we are going from eternity and are returning to eternity. That is what is most important in the Apollonian idea. From then, in the everlasting law, the tradition, something should not be changed. The eternity of the ethic, of the cult is the belief in the eternity that pretends to be eternal itself. That is something eternal that is outside of the process of the time. And the time is not important. Only the time of the return is important. The only time that is important in the case of the Apollonian is the return to the eternity because the time itself is the reflection. As Plato says ‘it is the mirror of eternity.’ The ethics of Apollonian Logos is return, the reflection to the reflected object. That is idea that is the archetype, paradigm for eternity.
The world we are living in defined by the Logos of Apollo is precisely based on some idea for example that we are using for example the words in our speech as if the essence of them were eternal. So we don’t name any time the different but similar things with new names. We say ‘this book.’ ‘This book,’ all that are books. And books as concept exist eternally. That is eternal books. And in our religion, it is a kind of pure projection. There is the Bible as eternal book that was created and written in the eternity. Everything is eternal; everything in the book, and the book is eternal. So every name we mention is eternal in itself. It always existed in the time of Adam. So that is a kind of Apollonian world that is very famous for us. We think the world is Apollonian in our traditional education. We are educated in Apollonian culture. We are dealing with logic. But logic of Aristotle is based precisely on the laws of the eternity. He says A is A. Or if there is no A there’s a second Law, or A or not A, third law of logic. But in the world around us, there is no such things. Everything is double. Something exists and not exists, dies and is born. So in the physics, there is no logic. Logic is something that describes Apollonian world, the world that we take for granted, we are dealing with but that doesn’t exist. It is a kind of revelation. Logic is a revelation. The A is A. Only God is God. Everything is some half created by God and half nothing. So there is no point in the universe where the A is A. A=A never, nowhere. So only God is God. That was logic, something for us that is so natural, something absolutely transcendental. It is the essence of Apollonian Logos that is working inside of our brain because it is working inside of our culture forming the semantical axis, the paradigm of our way of thinking. That is Logos of Apollo.
So what is the Logos of Dionysus? That is interesting. When we are staying in Aristotle, we are coming to the other branches of his description of the sciences; we discover that for example, dealing with physics, Aristotle said every thing (he used the word ὄν, being) is double. It has form and matter. That is anti-logical concept that unity is double. Something that is united, everything that exists is double. You see one thing but in the reality, there are two things in one thing; matter and form. And if you separate them, there is nothing. That is Aristotelian physics. That is completely different Dionysian approach to the world. And that is described not by the logic but is described by the rhetoric because it is one but not exactly one, not as in the logic one, because there is double. There are two things in one thing; the form and the matter. And Dionysian way of thinking, Dionysian Logos is manifested by the capacity to think dialectically, to conceive one thing as two things at the same time, one and two, but in the logic, one or two. But in Dionysian world, no, one and two. There is not ‘here man, here woman. One and one.’ No. There is androgyne. Androgyne is something that is not a kind of sum of man and woman. It is not addition. 'We are taking man and we are adding woman and there is androgyne.’ No. There is something that precedes in Dionysian Logos to existence of male and female. The androgyne is not the result of combination. That is the source of the gender. That is not Apollonian way to think. That’s Dionysian way. Androgyne is the figure of Dionysus. There is two in one before there is two. There is in the middle, in the center before there are poles. For example, in Apollonian world, there is one pole and there is other pole and what is between is the secondary. It’s defined by limits, by poles. In Dionysian worlds is something completely different. There is what is between and its projections create poles. So we could live in the world, in the culture, in the religion of dialectical Dionysian approach; the two nature in Christ (the God and man). It is something that is irrational for the Dionysian version. Or how it could be the same and not the same, for example, in the holy trinity. So there is a kind of dialectical approach that creates a completely new symmetry in religion, in art, and in philosophy.
And this Dionysian Logos is possible but it is presented much more than in the philosophy in poetry, in sacred, in art, in language, not in the mathematical language but in the human language, in rhetoric, not in the logic. Logic is Apollonian. Rhetoric is Dionysian because the rhetoric is precisely violation of the laws of the logic. What is rhetoric when we use some rhetorical formula? We try to violate, to give the part as a whole (that is metonimia) and the other. All the figures of rhetorics are based on this Dionysian Logos. And that is why literature, art, poetry, and the other, mythology rather than philosophy is the privileged field of the Dionysian Logos. And that is not the lesser Logos. That is important. Plato has said ‘lets put all the poets out of our ideal state’ because it is Apollonian understanding of what is Dionysian. Apollo thinks that Dionysus is a kind of sub-Apollo, something that would be Apollo, something incomplete. It is a little bit of Apollonian ethnocentrism, Apollonian racism. He thinks that he himself is the whole and all the rest is part of himself or the kind of images, sometimes perverted. So Plato said ‘lets put poets and mythologists out of our purely philosophical Apollonian state because they belong to the world of Dionysus and they have no place in the Apollo republic.’ Plato’s republic is Apollo’s republic. They should be put out because they are considered to be impure because they are rhetoric. They are dealing with inclination, not with the straight line but with the curves. They are dealing with combination of the structured elements in very very fantastic way. And that is the kind of creative spirit of the art that is Dionysian. But as well we could find in art, Apollonian line, but the majority of the art and the poetry is purely Dionysian and that is the realm of the immanence and of rhetoric.
And there could be the philosophy of Dionysian style. In the modern philosophy, phenomenology is purely Dionysian. I have discovered finally, studying Heidegger for many years that Heidegger tried to create Dionysian philosophy. He tried and he succeeded in that. He developed this phenomenological aspect and his concept of dasein in purely Dionysian, is a kind of immanence. It should be regarded not as a kind of, in Apollonian way, a kind of projection of dasein, of the being. The being is Apollonian. But dasein (t/here being) is in Serbian ‘ту биће.’ But what is interesting is that in German ‘da’ is not there (ту, тамо). ‘Da’ is not here, not there, neither ту or тамо but in between. ‘Da’ is in between - not here and not there. And in Old Slavonic language there was the form that is conserved in present Serbia - овде биће (овде - neither ту or тамо - between).  So dasein is being not there, not here, but in between because there and here we could strictly define without us but between is precisely the point where the Dionysus exists. Dionysus is in between (овде). He is not there as Apollo. He is not here as something immanent. He is in between, always in between in the middle. So dasein is very Dionysian term in itself. овде биће - neither тамо биће nor ту биће. овде. In Russian we have lost this third grammatical form and maybe its a kind of luck that in Serbian you have conserved of this name in your language in order to understand better Heidegger, in order to understand better this Dionysian possibility of philosophy, to think not from the top, not from the bottom, but from the middle, nor from the two poles and after there is something that is the center. No. Thinking from the center, from between. And trying to express the idea of Heidegger in English, sometimes the philosopher translates as such - t/here being. Not there. Not here. Because they have no ‘овде’ as your rich Serbs.
So the idea is that third Logos and more fascinating is third Logos. I think that already to compare two Logos, Apollo and Dionysus, in full measure was so revealing for creation of not one history of philosophy but two versions. So you could consult not only Apollonian bookshelf but as well Dionysian. And if we apply this method, we will be not obliged to write all these volumes anew but we could make a kind of combination of existing works, of existing philosophical and religious tradition, and to reorganize our intellectual space, to reveal, to reshape our understanding of the history of the philosophy. And the history of philosophy is the history of our society and the history of humanity.
So next point of noology is that we could find the Logos of Apollo and the Logos of Dionysus in any culture as well. So every people, every culture knows these two Logos. It’s very important. So there is no people of Apollo or people of Dionysus. There are Logos of Apollo and Dionysus in any human culture. But if we remark their relations, they are not so good relations, because Apollo thinks in one way, he creates this world with verticality, with this patriarchal symmetry, and he puts out poets or Dionysian. There is a kind of fight between two Logos, one nous, two Logos. And they fight against each other. We are approaching why noomahia, because noomahia is the fight of the nous or the fight inside of the nous. But the real dramatic aspect all this obtains when we come to the third Logos because there is the third new world that creates not from the top to the bottom, not from the center, but from the bottom to the top. It is a new symmetry. And this is lost Logos lost and denied by both Logos of Apollo and in the lesser scale by the Logos of Dionysus. And what could be such a universe and such a world created on this symmetry, on this Logos of Cybele.
The world of Cybele and Logos of Cybele, it is the great mother that creates everything from herself. That is very important. That is absence of any male principle outside of the great mother. It’s absolute inclusiveness. So there is no God but the great mother. There is nobody but the great mother. There is only great mother earth that creates everything from herself and kills everything because she is at the same time the tomb and the cradle. So there is no two point of line. There is one and the same point of death and life. For example, the Goddess of death and the Goddess of life is only one mother that creates, gives life, and kills. So she creates the sun, the male principle, from herself without father, she uses it as a lover, and she emasculates, castrates, and kills it and make its revival once more. So that is Cybelian method that is explained in many forms in many cults in many worships but there is a kind of philosophy inside that is very interesting and very profound philosophy. There is no transcendence at all. There is no heaven. The heaven is the kind of mirror of the earth. So any kind of heaven is only reflection of the same of the matter. And we are coming to absolute materialistic immanence because immanence of Dionysus was not materialistic, it was spiritualist immanence, it was almost always in the middle, half spirit and half matter, and this half is before. It’s not the sum but before that exists before the matter and the spirit. And the great mother and the Logos of great mother is the idea that great mother creates and kills everything. And it is not the eternity or the cycle. It is something that is going in its way with the blind and absolute power. So there is a kind of progress that is the growth from the bottom to the top. It is also in the Apollonian way a titanic battle of the chthonian powers and forces directed against the heaven and the rule of the male Logos of Apollo. So Cybelian Logos is the third creation of the new world that is titanic, chtonic, and feminist in some way, not because there is equivalence between man and woman (that is much more Dionysian), but it is absolute domination of the mother over everything else.
So we will follow this later. In order to conclude this first lecture, what is important is that three Logos I have explained stay in the absolute fight because they create the world, the system, the society, the cultures, the religions, the cults, the relations, the values, the political systems that are based on completely different approaches. They are in conflict and that is noomahia. There is already a kind of contradiction between Apollo and Dionysus but with Cybele and Apollo, contradiction reaches its utmost highest point because there is a serious titanomachy or gigantomachy between two versions of the vision because there are two Logos fighting seriously. The titans, the autochtonic sons of Cybele try to storm the Heaven and the Apollonian Gods try to defend it. And what is in philosophical way is Democritus with his idea, is purely Cybelian philosophy. It is Epicurus. And that is our scientific modern European science of Modernity that is purely Cybelian. And that is a kind of revenge of the Logos of Cybele after the thousands of years of domination of Apollo with Dionysus. So there is a kind of Cybelian eschatology we are living in. So if we consider now, not our spiritual tradition, cultural tradition, religious tradition, ethical tradition, but our scientific vision, it is purely atomistic, materialistic, progressivist, and based on this symmetry from the bottom to the top. So the Cybele doesn’t belong to the past, to the archaic time. The Logos of Cybele is something we are dealing with. And this Cybelian world vision we could find in as well in the ancient times, in our civilization, in other civilization. There is not Cybelian civilization. In any form of civilization, we could find all three Logos and they are fighting everywhere and we are living inside of this noomahia. It is not something that is purely theoretical. We are living that. And this noomahia is going through us, through our politics, through our culture, through our science, through our identity, and through our culture. And that is a kind of the end of the first lecture and that is most important part and most important principles of what is noomahia as a basis of theory of multipolar world.