The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, Expanded Edition
240
The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, Expanded Edition
240eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226189352 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Lesson of Carl Schmitt
Four Chapters on the Distinction Between Political Theology and Political Philosophy
By Heinrich Meier, Marcus Brainard
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-51886-2
CHAPTER 1
MORALITY, OR ONE'S OWN QUESTION AS A FIGURE
The enemy is our own question as a figure. And he will hunt us, and we him, to the same end.
Theodor Däubler, "Sang an Palermo"
MORAL INDICNATION is no affair of political philosophy. It constitutes no part of philosophy. It does, however, belong among philosophy's objects, and it matters to philosophy as something philosophy has to be on guard against. It numbers among the objects of philosophy insofar as morality is not an unquestioned presupposition or an unquestionable given for philosophy, but rather an object to be investigated or a problem. Moreover, employed as a diagnostic probe, the question concerning the principal objective and ultimate source of moral indignation is able to unleash a disclosive power which does not fall short of the potency of that other farther-reaching question concerning the "morality it (he) aims at." Whoever deals with Carl Schmitt and his teaching does well to raise both questions and not to lose sight of either. How could one possibly turn a deaf ear to Nietzsche's maxim when faced with a theoretician who declares that "the demanding moral decision" is the "core of the political idea" and who views both, the political idea, as well as the moral, as either standing or falling with the theological? And how could one not take hold of the Ariadnean thread made accessible by the question about the cardinal objects of this political theologian's indignation if one is to succeed in the attempt to find one's way through and penetrate to the center of the labyrinth of an oeuvre rich in historical turns and political convolutions, in deliberate deceptions and involuntary obscurities?
But does Schmitt not claim to be "a theoretician of pure politics," or if not this, then at least an "observer of political phenomena" who "persistently sticks to his political thinking"? Has he not a reputation for having, as some hold, rigorously distinguished between the political and the moral or, as others say, completely torn them asunder? Is it not just this bifurcation that, in conjunction with Schmitt's critique of "humanitarian morality," with his rejection of "moralism," most persistently occupied and impressed the minds of both friend and enemy? Does not the aura of cold intrepidity and fascinating terror which in the eyes of many surround his name have its roots largely right here? And does not the same hold for the moral indignation which confronts him to a far greater extent? Whoever seeks to take his bearings by opinions about Schmitt moves in a maze that has rampantly overgrown Schmitt's own labyrinth and affords a view of little more than its outskirts. The admiration says something about the admirers; the indignation, a great deal about the indignant. However, the judgment expressed therein about the object of their admiration or indignation may well miss the point and thus bar rather than give access to what is most important. Might not the proclamation of a "pure politics" be the expression of a rhetoric, the severance of the political and the moral part of a strategy, both of which in the final analysis are based on a "demanding moral decision"? What if Schmitt's attacks on "humanitarian morality" and "moralism" were guided by moral motives? And finally: were the question concerning the morality Schmitt aims at ever able to be a meaningful question, one that elucidates the cause and furthers our knowledge, should it stop and fall silent before that to which Schmitt himself lays claim?
Let us take hold of the tail end of the thread and observe — on the authority of Schmitt, who bids us to be constantly on the lookout for the historical challenge of an oeuvre, a doctrine, a political-theological decision — first of all the moral tableau of the age, one sketched in Schmitt's earliest coherent critique. "Like everything that has a bad conscience," he writes during the First World War, "this age reveled in discussing its problematic character until the twinges of conscience ceased and it could feel better since such reasoning was at least interesting. This age has characterized itself as the capitalistic, mechanistic, relativistic age, as the age of transport, of technology, of organization. Indeed, 'business' does seem to be its trademark, business as the superbly functioning means to some pathetic or senseless end, the universal priority of the means over the end, business which annihilates the individual such that he does not even feel his nullification and who thereby does not rely on an idea but at most on a few banalities and always only asserts that everything must go smoothly and without any needless friction. The achievement of vast, material wealth, which arose from the general preoccupation with means and calculation, was strange. Men have become poor devils; 'they know everything and believe nothing.' They are interested in everything and are enthusiastic about nothing. They understand everything; their scholars register in history, in nature, in men's own souls. They are judges of character, psychologists, and sociologists, and in the end they write a sociology of sociology. Wherever something does not go completely smoothly, an astute and deft analysis or a purposive organization is able to remedy the incommodity. Even the poor of this age, the wretched multitude, which is nothing but 'a shadow that hobbles off to work,' millions who yearn for freedom, prove themselves to be children of this spirit, which reduces everything to a formula of its consciousness and admits of no mysteries and no exuberance of the soul. They wanted heaven on earth, heaven as the result of trade and industry, a heaven that is really supposed to be here on earth, in Berlin, Paris, or New York, a heaven with swimming facilities, automobiles, and club chairs, a heaven in which the holy book would be the timetable. They did not want a God of love and grace; they had 'made' so much that was astonishing; why should they not 'make' the tower of an earthly heaven? After all, the most important and last things had already been secularized. Right had become might; loyalty, calculability; truth, generally acknowledged correctness; beauty, good taste; Christianity, a pacifist organization. A general substitution and forgery of values dominated their souls. A sublimely differentiated usefulness and harmfulness took the place of the distinction between good and evil. The confounding was horrific."
This portrait, with which Schmitt in 1916 seeks to express the "moral meaning of the age," draws together nearly all the objects of importance which Schmitt encounters with indignation and abhorrence throughout his life, or they can certainly be discerned in the portrait from a distance: The world as business, an idling machine that perpetuates itself with neither purpose nor end, a cleverly staged play of comprehensive mediation, balance and finesse — all no doubt interesting, yet without greatness, without fulfillment, without meaning, a state of deadness, of industrious boredom and endless idle chatter, devoid of any intense emotion, flat, without mystery and without magic. The progressive secularization, the fall from the truth of faith, the increasing godlessness, or, as he will say decades later: incapacity for God. The hubris of men who replace Providence with the plans of their will and the calculation of their interests and who imagine themselves able to force the advent of an earthly paradise in which they would be relieved of having to decide between good and evil and from which the dire emergency would remain banned forever. From the beginning, it is the "age of security" that provokes all of Schmitt's energies against it. It is the efforts, regardless of their provenance, to pave the way for such an age, it is every attempt to erect the unlimited dominion of security. Schmitt's indignation is aimed at those who abandon themselves to the belief "that everything in the world is an entirely human affair." He is outraged at those of his contemporaries who count solely on "fabulous success," which is "irrefutable": "big cities, luxury liners, and hygiene; the prison of the soul has become a cozy summer residence." They have the audacity to make provisions for everything, to want to organize everything, to rule over everything. Ecce saeculum. In this age everything seems to have been accounted for and thought of. "Except for the only case that matters."
In the Epilogue to his last book, Schmitt in 1970 — more than half a century after the early critique of the age — once again sketches a "counterimage" with stark contours in order "to discern [his] own position more clearly." It culminates with the sentences: Homo homini res mutanda/Nemo contra hominem nisi homo ipse. In 1970 as in 1916, the belief "that everything in the world is an entirely human affair," that men place everything in the service of their power to plan and to utilize, that they subjugate everything to their wishes and desires, that they can make anything and everything, steadfastly remains at the center of Schmitt's counter sketch. He fixes his standpoint by characterizing his adversary; he marks off his position ex negativo by opposing the presumptuousness of the Prometheans. Eripuit fulmen caelo, nova fulmina mittit / Eripuit caelum deo, nova spatia struit. The hubris of the Titan, whom Schmitt ultimately considers his opponent, reaches its insuperable zenith in the Titan's refusal to grasp rebellion as rebellion, to perceive in any way the hubristic character of the anti-divine endeavor. The rebel disavows his rebellion. He denies fighting against an enemy. He believes himself able to evade the decision and the battle by concealing himself as a responsible subject in an "interminable process-progress" in order to emerge from the latter as a "New Man who produces himself." Moreover, the "process-progress," which is kept going by a mutually intensifying interplay of science, production, and consumption, is to produce "not only itself and the New Man, but also the conditions for the possibility of his own renewal of novelties"; "that means the opposite of a creation out of nothing, namely, the creation of nothing as the condition for the possibility of the self-creation of an ever New Worldliness." The madness of the Promethean delusion is as plain as day. It can be heard in every single formulation that Schmitt chooses in order to depict the "thought-chains" in which the "autism" of an immanence has to move, an immanence "that is directed polemically against a theological transcendence" without wanting to admit it. The "New, purely worldly-human Science" may pass itself off as an "incessant process-progress of an expansion and renewal of nothing-more-than-worldly-human knowledge, both of which are driven onward by incessant human curiosity." But it cannot deceive Schmitt about its being "nothing but self- authorization." In it he discerns the "New Theology" it does not want to be and the "anti-divine self-deification" it has to be if there is a God who demands obedience. The world of the New Man would be the world of a New God. There would be no room for miracles in the realm "of purely worldly-human" security. One would encounter them with "disapproval." They could not be anything more than "acts of sabotage," of events that suggest the existence of an adversary.
For Schmitt the rebellion of the Prometheans has many faces. It need not go so far as the hallucination of that "process-progress" which "no longer admits of an ovum in an old or renewable sense," but "only a novum"; and with biting sarcasm Schmitt helps give it, in its hopeless attempt to escape its theological-political opponent, a "totally" autochthonous, independent expression: "all detheologizations, depoliticizations, dejuridifications, deideologizations, dehistoricizations, and further series of un-doings directed towards a tabula rasa, fall to the side; the tabula rasa de-tabularizes itself and falls to the side along with the tabula." The "tabula rasa of techno-industrial progress," which Schmitt sees as emerging from the drawing of anything and everything into the "functionalism of a calculable, causal sequence of events," is reprehensible enough; there is no additional need for it to renounce itself in principiis. Much the same holds for the aggressiveness "of the true movers and shakers" of progress, for the aggressiveness of technology and science as the "true aggressors." The Promethean self-arrogation is expressed in the "evolutionist credo" that man, "biologically and by nature an exceedingly weak and needy being," creates a new world for himself on his own resources and on his own authority by dint of technology and science, a world "in which he is the strongest, indeed even the sole, being." Such self-arrogation manifests itself in every attempt at collective "self-salvation" and private "self-redemption." Schmitt sees self-arrogation in the self-authorization of those givers of meaning and big planners who have devoted themselves to work on the "Babylonian unity" of mankind, but also in the self-sufficiency of a life that gains its center on the path of autonomous thought. He sees it in the anarchic rejection of every authority, as well as in the bourgeois diligence to make the world "secure." The idylls of self-pleasure and the trouble-free character of the "Panians" draw near the paradises which the "religion of technicky" promises with "all the glories of an unleashed productive power and a power of consumption, which is increased to infinity." The naturalism of those who want to be true to the earth appears in the same pale light as the artificialism of those who reach for the stars. Whoever holds fast to "pure this-worldliness" or falls prey to it in his actions, turns against the transcendent God.
Revolt and turning away, unfaith and disobedience, become open enmity wherever rebellion is raised to a principle, wherever it is asserted to be the most distinctive feature of man, declared to be the origin and determinative moment of his historical ascent. Nowhere does the enmity towards the omnipotent sovereign manifest itself more visibly for Schmitt, nowhere is the rebellion more openly proclaimed, than in Bakunin's anarchism. The Russian opposes what is most precious to Schmitt; he denies that of which Schmitt is most convinced. He attacks the truth of revelation and disavows the existence of God; he wants to do away with the State and negates the universal claim of Roman Catholicism. Under the slogan Ni Dieu ni maître he revolts "with Scythian fury" against all dominion, all order, all hierarchy, against divine as well as human authority. With his appearance Schmitt sees the "true enemy of all traditional concepts of Western European culture" enter the arena. It is from him — in whom, generations ahead of the "barbarians in the Russian republic of Soviets," Schmitt believes he discerns the most persistent adversary of politics and religion, of the Pope and God, of idea and spirit — that he adopts the concept 'political theology', which has since been linked with Schmitt's name and which, like no other, deserves to be linked with his. Whereas Bakunin intends it to brand and mortally wound the opponent against whom he is waging his war, Schmitt makes the polemical concept his own so as to characterize his position by means of it and simultaneously to turn it against his opponent. He makes no mention of the original arsenal of the weapon, a weapon of which he henceforth avails himself; nor does he say a word about the battle in which he wrested it from his enemy. With it Bakunin fought against Mazzini. He forged it for a war in which two irreconcilable armies face one another, the one under the banner of Satan, the other under the sign of God. Schmitt uses the weapon in the same war. But he wants to help the latter camp to victory. What Bakunin negates in the name of Satan is asserted by Schmitt in the name of God. And what is nothing but a manmade fiction for the atheistic anarchist, is God-given reality for the political theologian.
The most outspoken rebellion need not be the most threatening, nor the most conspicuous enmity the most decisive. It is rather unlikely that Satan will display his power most prominently where he is celebrated as the eternal rebel and world-liberator in the battle against God and State or where he, as in the Satanism of a Baudelaire, is formally enthroned with the fratricide Cain. Truly satanic is — there is no doubt about it for Schmitt — the flight into invisibility. The Old Enemy prefers cunning, he is a virtuoso of disguise. He will attempt to avoid the open battle and will hardly enlist under his own flag. Instead of declaring war on someone or something, if not "on war itself," he is much more likely to promise peace and will make every effort to lull his adversary into a false sense of security. Measured by the consistency with which economic rationalism, having erected the "system of unswerving objectivity," cultivates and furthers such objectivity to the point where every government proves to be superfluous since "things govern themselves"; and compared with the disposal of theology and politics on the path of techno-industrial progress, Bakunin's battle looks like that of "a naive berserker." For the assessment of the "moral meaning of the age," the anarchist is of less importance than the bourgeois, whose ubiquitous efficacy the anarchist does not even remotely approach. Thus it is not the anarchist, but rather the born embodiment of the system of accountability and calculation that is the focus of Schmitt's attention. The bourgeois is the promoter and the ultimate fulfillment of the "age of security" all in one. Schmitt sees in his figure an existence that is thoroughly determined by the need for security. Nothing is more important to the bourgeois than his security: security for life and limb, security from divine and human encroachment upon his private existence, security for undisturbed doings and dealings, security from any interference with the increase and enjoyment of his possessions. Nothing is more important to him than himself and his property. He seeks to evade every claim that places him in question in view of the whole. This explains both his attitude towards politics, which he wants to master through commerce and communication, and towards religion, which he declares to be a "private matter." He shuts his eyes to the inevitability of the "oppositions between good and evil, God and Devil, between whom there is an Either-Or which is a matter of life and death, an Either-Or that knows no synthesis and no 'higher third,'" and he hopes that the definitive confrontation can be "eternally suspended by an eternal discussion." No one is more receptive to the promise of peace and security than he. Revelation does not reach him. He succumbs easily to the temptation to abandon himself to the faith in the "limitless possibilities for change and happiness of the natural, this-worldly existence of man." The sole miracles he tolerates are those "miracles" he himself works. For Schmitt the bourgeois epitomizes the man for whom the verse holds: "He locks himself in and locks God out."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lesson of Carl Schmitt by Heinrich Meier, Marcus Brainard. Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Translator's ForewordPreface to the American Edition
Preface to the German Edition
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts by Carl Schmitt
I: Morality, or One's Own Question as a Figure
II: Politics, or What is Truth?
III: Revelation, or He That is Not With Me is Against Me
IV: History, or the Christian Epimetheus
Translator's Notes
Index of Names