Forgotten Idealist: The Philosophy of Lev Lopatin

Dr Matthew Raphael Johnson brings us a new Orthodox Nationalist looking at Lev Lopatin (1885-1920) and the modern destruction of the self. Lopatin remains almost entirely untranslated in the west. Terrified at the invasion of western rationalism and empiricism in Russia, he sought a counterrevolution in idealism. Primarily based upon all things assuming God, or Substance, as the core of their being.

All mental life seeks truth. This means that it seeks the ground for all things. Subject and predicate have to have a third object that connects them, this organic field of meanings is what makes any sentence or thought understandable.

The human condition is that our drives interfere with both our senses and our cognition. Any addict does not see the world as it is, he sees only opportunities or challenges to gaining that which he desires. This addiction can be chemical, but it can also be economic, emotional or sexual. This fact destroys empiricism and the positivism deriving from it.

One object that shows us that we are not disconnected fragments is our consciousness. This we understand immediately, without the aid of concepts. It is just known. It is a single, unified thing and it is inherently free. It is not determined. If it were, our thoughts would always proceed to a predetermined pattern and they do not.

Time and our memory show our consciousness to be a single, spiritual object. This means that materialism and nominalism are false. It also demands its own origin. Spirit must have itself an origination point, and this is God, or substance.

This podcast brings all this epistemology together in Alexander Dugin’s three conceptions of identity, the diffusive, the extreme and the deep (or organic). The belief that substance does not exist leads to the first two. The diffusive is the vague, non-committal and symbolic sense of self so typical of alienated Americans and the rebellion against that is the “extreme” sense of self, where we construct a rigid personal identification that is equally non-correspondent with anything in the world. Only the organic, deep sense of self is real and is separate from the alienating tendencies of postmodernism.

The American mind has no identity, it has no history that is not modern and egocentric. This makes the American a highly unique creature that is also unfortunate. Apart from flailing in a sea of egocentric alienation and neurosis, the American has to dig deeper into his European roots. With a few exceptions, Americans are “diffusive” in their sense of self. Such a citizen body cannot function or even think rationally. Therefore, identity is necessary for even the most basic thought pattern.