Vladimir Putin and the Metaphysics of War

Next month, Russia will mark the first anniversary of Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, which began last year on February 22. Russia’s Special Military Operation was perceived invasion by the Western Mainstream Media and political elites by interpreting it across the strategic and geopolitical spheres. However, it is beyond that.

Since beginning of western sponsored color revolutions in the Post-Soviet Space, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been warning the west to consider the Russia’s security concerns. Despite serious warning from the Russian leadership on various occasions, the western elites ignored the grave security concerns in the post-Soviet space, which has been the Russian sphere of influence for centuries. From the post-Soviet sphere standpoint, Russia is not just a regional power but a distinctive civilizational pole on the Eurasian landmass. More precisely, in the post-soviet space Belarus and Ukraine are the important socio-cultural and metaphysical entities, which are inherent to Russian civilizational identity. Hence, turning Ukraine as scapegoat pawn on the Grand chessboard against its civilization whole (Russia) means knocking the drums for total war and destruction.

For years, Russia has been warning the Western neo-liberal elites to refrain from testing the Russia’s patience concerning the security of its naturally undefended western border. Across the cultural and metaphysical spheres, the western border of Russia represents the its ontological civilizational dawn and its hyperbolic (pole) identity. Beyond geopolitics and strategic domain, Russia is the only remaining metaphysical power on the Euro-Asian civilizational plane that represents collective tradition, and diverse ethno-cultural entities. The degeneration of the western societies that began in the late 19^th century due to modernity forced Russia to protect its realm from falling victim to western despoil. Since then, the Russian rulers whether Czars, soviet rulers or modern-day Putin always reasserted Russian civilization as the defender of lost traditional values of humanity.

The degeneration of western civilization in the wake of modernity was not speculated by Russian philosophers or historian rather by western historians themselves. The First key historian, who speculated about degeneration of western societies was Oswald Spengler, a German born philosopher of history. Oswald Spengler adopted the reductive philosophical methodology to debunk the death of tradition and classic heritage of western civilization due to modernity-driven transformations across the social, cultural and political spheres. In various contexts, Oswald Spengler’s historical approach engulfs epistemology and metaphysics because the term ‘Decline’ is a pure discourse that explains the degeneration of the European cultural identity due to the upsurge of modernity.

In this regard, Oswald Spengler compels us to re-envision our understanding of the world history by emphasizing the Modern European historical discourse. As a philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler had rejected scientific determinism of the western societies and stressed on the metaphysical interpretation of the history of the modern world and calls the whole history as world history not nature. For Spengler, the world as a nature and its scientific methods or mathematical calculations gives us the understanding of the world as ‘Space’ while Spengler’s analysis of the ‘World as history’ gives the understanding of the world as ‘becoming’—the world of time.

Today, Russia as a distinctive civilizational realm (pole) on the Great Eurasian landmass represents the Spenglerian notion of ‘world as history’ that refers to a world as “becoming”—the world of time. From the standpoint of becoming, Russia is a fighting a metaphysical battle for ontological metamorphosis—from unipolar dictatorship to a multipolar civilizational confederacy. In this process, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a metaphysical Behemoth, who picked up the fight against the tyranny of Leviathan. From the perspective of Spenglerian the world of time, Vladimir Putin is a metaphysical warrior, who is fighting a sacred battle for the realm of tradition and defending humanity against the post-modern western curse. In his magnum opus “The Metaphysics of War”, acclaimed Italian philosopher Julius Evola while highlighting the degeneracy of tradition across the west writes;

“With no significant political forces opposing the conversion of our world into a universal marketplace, the conflict of our time is the struggle to retain one’s humanity in an increasingly artificial world. That is the only battle that retains any genuine significance from a traditional perspective.”

Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin represents Evola’s notion of a significant political force, which is fighting a sacred battle for retaining humanity against the post-modern western artificial apocalypse. Vladimir Putin’s political opposition to the post-modern western civilization is what Evola calls “a spiritual realization is presumed to be the hidden soul of certain martial endeavors, which are crowned by the actual victory.” Hence, the ongoing Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) is not only geopolitical in nature as interpret by the western political circus and intelligentsia but metaphysical too, which is often being disregarded.