Schmitt’s Aestheticism, a Fallen Kantianism I

(For those wondering what i’ve been up to, and why I haven’t posted much recently, please take the below as an explanation — comments are greatly encouraged, since this is a piece in progress)

 

The root of history [...] is the human being, working, producing, reforming, and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone’s childhood and where no one has yet been – home.

-Ernst Bloch

The Principle of Hope, vol. 2

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.

-Franz Kafka

“On Parables” (emphasis added)

Allegory and parable are intimately related. As the etymological root for concepts like parole, a parable places the mundane and its other ‘side by side,’ it ‘casts towards’ something ‘different,’ something ‘more’ than what its rhetorical figuration seems capable of suggesting. Parables effect a transfer, a change, a metabole (a term which still resonates, however faintly, with aesthetic and political meanings). And, in its simple use, a parable is just an allegory, where allegory is understood as a ‘description’ of one subject in the guise of another.
This said, however, we must hasten to note that allegorical writing does not merely assimilate one subject to another, any more than it sublates them. Though the allegorical mode of presentation relates two potentially distinct spheres, it does not subordinate one to the other. With respect to allegory, neither the ‘profane’ allegorical form, nor its ‘otherly’ content is sovereign. Rather, they exhibit a fragile codependence. And, as Walter Benjamin points out, in his Trauerspielbuch, contrary to the symbol – “the very incarnation and embodiment of the idea” (Trauerspiel 164) – allegory does not straightforwardly identify, or otherwise dictate its content. Unlike the unity of the symbol, which “emphasizes the organic, mountain and plant-like quality” (Trauerspiel 165) of form and content, allegorical presentation labours to maintain, in all of its fragility and fragmentariness, the difference that escapes the Goethean sovereignty of the symbol.

I am referring, of course, to Goethe’s characterization of symbol and allegory. “There is a great difference,” he writes, “between a poet’s seeking the particular from the general and his seeing the general in the particular. The former gives rise to allegory, where the particular serves only as an instance or example of the general; the latter, however, is the true nature of [symbolic] poetry: the expression of the particular without any thought of, or reference to, the general. Whoever grasps the particular in all its vitality also grasps the general” (qtd. in Trauerspiel 161). Not only does the élan vital of Goethe’s symbol appear in stark opposition to the lifeless torso of Benjamin’s allegory, but Goethe considers it to be the decisive force of authentic, autonomous works of (poetic) art.

Now, if we listen attentively, we may also hear in Goethe’s remarks something prescient of Carl’s Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty, as it develops from a state of exception: “The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juristic element – the decision in its absolute purity” (Political Theology 13). And “[p]recisely a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the most extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree. [...] The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (Political Theology 15).

The striking feature of both Goethe’s understanding of the symbol’s autonomy and Schmitt’s characterization of sovereignty is their appeal to something particular – the exception, which resists subsumptive codification by a pre-established rule – and how this particular ‘generates’ (a) universal rule. When confronted with its vitality, the poet-sovereign (an identity that no longer strikes one as strange) must undertake the decisive act of fashioning a symbol – the incarnation of the idea – out of this exception, which presents the universal through its particular appearance. And, as I will show, it is precisely this act that constitutes the decision in its aesthetic or political purity, and sanctions, or otherwise legitimates Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty.
In light of this hasty sketch, I propose to read Schmitt’s political works as offering an aestheticization of the concept of sovereignty, and hence of Schmitt’s concept of the political. In other words, I will present Schmitt as providing a teleological grasp of an exception, which is unmistakably Kantian, though of a dark – or, better yet, fallen – variety.

1 Schmitt’s Fallen Kantianism

Our first task, then, is to strengthen the relationship I have intimated between Goethe’s theory of the symbol and Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. In order to clearly adduce this aesthetico-political nexus, I will focus on a trope operating in both discourses that I will subsequently trace back to its ‘originary’ source. That is to say, as a brief foreshadowing of the argument to come, in both cases the exceptional particular is grasped according to a principle of reflective judgment, in Kant’s sense of the term, and therefore the relationship between symbol and sovereignty can be understood in analogical terms. Both thinkers, in short, emphasize the teleological or reflective character of judgment. Indeed, as we have seen above, Benjamin characterizes the symbol, on Goethe’s behalf, as ‘natural’ or ‘organic,’ while Goethe and Schmitt further emphasize its vitality. Schmitt even goes so far as to disparage the dry normativism of a pluralistic liberalism, with its abstract legislation, in inverse terms, as the ‘crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.’ Put simply, then, a plausible analogical relationship of the symbol to the exception, and the poet to the sovereign, seems to obtain. We need only specify it.

Such a specification amounts to showing that, while we can take Goethe’s comments at face value, as paying tribute to Kant’s notions of artistic genius and judgments of taste, Schmitt’s anti-romanticism forces him to appropriate them critically. Under the political guise of ‘the sovereign’ – itself a kind of genius – and, in relation to the exception, Schmitt radicalizes reflective judgment and re-baptizes it as ‘decision.’ “[H]e who decides on the exception” (Political Theology 5) is thus Schmitt’s analogue of (i.e. is structurally isomorphic to) Kant’s genius.

1.1 Schmitt’s Sociology of Concepts

With this end in view, I will outline an interpretative technique which will allow us to trace the relation between aesthetics and politics back to its source in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Such a ‘conceptual transfer’ – i.e. the analogical movement from one theory or discipline to another – that unites apparently disparate spheres of investigation is not at all alien to Schmitt. With respect to his work, such transfers are evident in the movement from theology to politics, (Political Theology), and the diagnosed failure of political romanticism (Political Romanticism). Schmitt’s approach, which he calls, in Political Theology, the “sociology of concepts,” will thus provide the basis for establishing his fallen Kantianism. Only with these preparatory gestures can we begin to read Schmitt, as Benjamin might say, ‘against the grain.’

“I have for a long time,” Schmitt writes in the title chapter of Political Theology, “referred to the significance of [...] analogies” (37), for “[w]hat we immediately recognize” in these analogies is “conceptually clear and systematic” (ibid.). Analogies, for Schmitt, are methodologically significant in that they make tractable what appears, prima facie, to be intractable: they uncover or establish a conceptual identity between two apparently distinct fields, which makes a deeper, systematic understanding of both possible. Analogies offer us, in other words, principles for the intelligibility of a theoretical domain; and, as the ‘backbone’ for a ‘systematic’ understanding, they allow us to organize the chaotic mass of empiria into discrete, though nevertheless interconnected, conceptual domains.

Thus, given his avowed allergy to imprecise thinking, and his animosity towards ‘intentional’ incomprehensibility, it is no wonder that Schmitt recommends an analogical method. And his proposed ‘sociology of the concept of sovereignty’ (PT 42) profoundly exhibits this methodological tendency. Through it, he attempts to bridge the apparent divide between a theologico-metaphysical ethos, which he claims our “legal concepts presuppose,” and the politico-juridical organization of a state, which employs these concepts. He thereby hopes to elucidate the “consistent and radical [in the sense of ‘thought out to its end'] ideology” (ibid.) that grounds political theorizing. Far from being a mere heuristic tool, then, analogy is foundational for a systematic theory of the political in Schmitt’s sense of the word. “The presupposition of this kind of sociology of juristic concepts,” he writes in this vein,

is thus a radical conceptualization, a consistent thinking that is pushed into metaphysics and theology. The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. The determination of such an identity is the sociology of the concept of sovereignty. (PT 46, emphases added)

Though Schmitt’s sociology of the concept of sovereignty appears, at first blush, to be a mere diagnostic tool for systematically understanding the composition of a particular politico-juridical organization, it also illuminates a deeper theoretical problem: the relation of theory to praxis. His sociology of the concept of sovereignty, in other words, offers a substantive account of agency. As we have seen, Schmitt’s “sociology of the concept is concerned with establishing proof of two spiritual but at the same time substantial identities” (PT 43). And we have identified these two identities (of what will turn out to be a single entity) as the theologico-metaphysical and the politico-juridical. What apparently remains, then, is simply to understand how the theologico-metaphysical and the politico-juridical are interrelated – what Schmitt takes their analogical relation to be. But, upon closer inspection, to provide such a relationship is, essentially, to systematically identify a praxis for political or juridical decision.

This last claim requires elucidation, since the movement between a metaphysical image and an appropriate political form might not immediately strike one as praxeological. For Schmitt, however, the decisive feature of analogical reasoning qua praxis derives from “the old contrast between is and ought, between causal and normative considerations,” which “has been transferred to the contrast of sociology and jurisprudence” (PT 18). That is to say, so long as the normative content of political theory is divorced from its practical import, which sociology, in its traditional sense, records but in no way affects, the requisite unity of praxis remains impossible. Analogy, therefore, unites the ‘is’ of a theologico-metaphysical image with the ‘ought’ of a politico-juridical order. And in so doing the analogical relation intimates a praxis – if it does not straightforwardly amount to one. “Because the legal idea cannot realize itself,” Schmitt writes, “it needs a particular organization and form before it can be translated into reality” (PT 28). However, the “state is confined exclusively to producing law. But this does not mean that it produces the content of law. It does nothing but ascertain the legal value of interests as it springs up from the people’s feeling or sense of right” (PT 23). And, as we have seen, the politico-juridical form is derived from the metaphysical image of our world, which is itself the product of a certain historical epoch. Its translation into reality therefore demands an activity, which draws, or actualizes content – a content, moreover, that is neither theologico-metaphysical nor, as we have just seen, politico-juridical in nature – into a political form. And such an activity amounts to ascertaining the analogical relations that obtain between metaphysical image and political form, and applying them according to their conceptual identity, and in relation to the predominant interests of the people. The application, in other words, ‘dictates’ content: “That constitutive, specific element of a decision is, from the perspective of the content of the underlying norm, new and alien” (PT 31). The unifying activity of the decision, in short, amounts to praxis, the activity of a historically situated consciousness that effects change.

Moreover, if we attend to what Schmitt understands his sociology of the concept not to be, we can further strengthen this claim by eliminating any residual misunderstandings of this technique as yet another mere theoretical diagnostic. Here, his condemnation of psychological explanations of concept formation and political action is decisive. “To trace a conceptual result back to a sociological carrier,” Schmitt writes,

is psychology; it involves the determination of a certain kind of motivation for human action. [...] If this method is applied to intellectual accomplishments, it leads to explanations in terms of milieu, or even the ingenious “psychology” that is known as the sociology of specific types [...]. In its consequent manner this type of sociology is best assigned to belles-lettres; it provides a socio-psychological “portrait” produced by a method that cannot be distinguished from brilliant literary criticism. (44-45)

Praxis has little to no use for such a psychology, or what we might call, on Schmitt’s behalf, this ‘occasionalist criticism,’ which fails to grasp the inherently objective relations between the theologico-metaphysical and politico-juridical. “It is thus not a sociology of the concept of sovereignty,” Schmitt tells us, “when, for example, the monarchy of the seventeenth century is characterized as the real that is ‘mirrored’ in the Cartesian concept of God” (PT 45), for such a facile observation ignores “the general state of consciousness that was characteristic of western Europeans at that time” (ibid.), and hence is incapable of ascertaining the analogy, and of using it as a basis for politico-juridical action.

1.2 Decision as Praxis

Schmitt’s sociology of the concept of sovereignty therefore perfectly situates his conception of ‘decision.’ As we know, “[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception” (PT 5). In a less trite reading of this phrase, his sociology allows us to understand the concept of sovereignty in terms of how it identifies (to borrow a Hegelian formulation) the ‘subject of history.’ That is to say, Schmitt develops “the legal interest in the decision as such” in a manner that avoids “be[ing] mixed up with [...] calculability” (ibid.), and instead roots it “in the character of the normative,” as “derived from the necessity of judging a concrete fact concretely even though what is given as a standard for judgment is a legal principle in its general universality” (PT 31). Or, to put the matter more plainly, Schmitt’s conceptual sociology understands the decision as praxis, one which analogically draws the metaphysical image and the juridical form together – i.e. relates the is with the ought – in a concrete situation, without vacuously collapsing one into the other, in order to effect a fundamental change. “Thus a transformation takes place every time. That the legal cannot translate itself independently is evident from the fact that it says nothing about who should apply it. In every transformation there is present an auctoritatis interpositio” (ibid.). Put simply, then, Schmitt’s efforts are praxeological: they consist in first identifying the auctoritas, and, second, providing it with the appropriate ‘material’ for deciding, which ultimately transformatively reconciles the politico-juristic form with the exception.

The sociology of the concept of sovereignty thus aims for a fourfold result. Initially, it provides a conceptually clear perspective from which to systematically comprehend the politico-juridical in relation to a historically delimited theologico-metaphysical image. As we have seen, this is the methodological significance of Schmitt’s appeal to analogy. Second, by attempting to grasp a particular form of political organization by way of its contemporaneous metaphysical image, Schmitt offers an objective account of juristic form and political action, one that purports to destroy (or perhaps sublate) the ‘is/ought’ binary, which he sees as typical of the inadequate integration of sociological investigations pertaining to concrete practices of law and the normative generality of law itself, and which further results in either a form of scientism or a radical subjectivism. Schmitt, in other words, appeals to a version of Kant’s “two worlds” thesis, which tempers the observation of concrete, causal relationships, with the normative conditions for the possibility of agency; unlike Kant, however, Schmitt does maintain a mediation between causality and freedom, namely the decision. Finally, this critical mediation allows us to comprehend a specifically political form of praxis. If the content of our juridical forms is not to be found in the psychological motivations, calculability, or professional competences – to name just a few possibilities that Schmitt considers but ultimately rejects – of the auctoritas, and his, her, or its ‘ought-structure,’ then something ‘from outside,’ something other must enter into politico-juridical questions. And, according to the interpretation being put forward here, this other content is the exception, which offers us the impetus for the activities involved in decision.

1.3 From Decision to Exception, and Back

If Schmitt’s understanding of sovereignty is derived from the analogical relationship between a theologico-metaphysical image and the politico-juridical form of a state, while his theory of the decision amounts to a political practice that creates, or actualizes content and effects a transformation, then we are equally free to conduct our own analogical investigation into the basis for his understanding of the decision, without altering the thrust or details of Schmitt’s argument. Specifically, I want to undertake a limited “sociology of a concept” of my own. Here, instead of focusing on the analogical relationships between metaphysics and politics, I aim to triangulate Schmitt’s conception of the decision with his existential metaphysics by analogically relating them to Kant’s theory of reflective judgment. As we will see, Kant’s conception of genius can be analogically transferred into Schmitt’s system, which will provide a deeper understanding of the exception in terms of Kant’s account of fine art. Such an understanding of Schmitt will amount to what I have provocatively termed his ‘fallen Kantianism.’

We must, however, proceed slowly, since Schmitt himself thinks that an aesthetic basis of any sort for political theory is absolutely out of the question – indeed, Political Romanticism is an attack on such an idea, and his 1922 tract, which we have spent so much time on already, is entitled Political Theology, not Political Aesthetics. As he remarks in the latter work,

In the contrast between the subject and the content of a decision and in the proper meaning of the subject lies the problem of juristic form. It does not have the a priori emptiness of the transcendental form because it arises precisely from the juristically concrete. The juristic form is also not the form of technical precision because the latter has a goal-oriented interest that is essentially material and impersonal. Finally, it is also not the form of aesthetic production, because the latter knows no decision. (35)

Given these statements, our interpretative efforts might appear to be in vain. It would be a bad interpretative practice, however, to take a philosopher at his word. And in any event, the kind of aesthetic production Schmitt has in mind in the passage just quoted, is the kind Romanticism advocated. This realization is pivotal: though the Romantics were Kantians, Kant was not. And this point alone is enough, I believe, to give us some traction here.

What’s more, the difference between Romanticism and Kant’s philosophy promises to open up precisely the common ground between Schmitt and Kant we are interested in. That is to say, by focusing on Schmitt’s robust criticism of (political) romanticism, we may well find a point of contact between him and Kant. To this end, let us look at Schmitt’s characterization of romanticism. “[I]f anything provides a complete definition of romanticism,” he writes,

it is the lack of any relationship to a causa. Not only does it resist absolute causality – in other words, an absolutely calculable and adequate relationship of cause and effect such as the science of mechanics must presuppose [...]. In the sense of an action or a cause, the word causa also has the meaning of a teleological or normative bond and an intellectual or moral force that admits an adequate relation. On the other hand, an absolutely inadequate relationship obtains between occasio and effect. (Political Romanticism 82-83, emphasis added)

In construing the object of contemplation as an occasio – “the antithesis of causa” (Political Romanticism 82) – romanticism renders itself practically, politically and philosophically inert, since the ultimate ground for any activity resides wholly within the individual, contemplative subject, rather than in the state of affairs to be thought through. This inversion, moreover, renders the actual state of affairs to be considered arbitrary, since neither cause nor effect can be strictly determined or predicted – and thus the ultimate judgment concerning it loses, along with a criterion for evaluation, its ‘world-transforming’ decisiveness. As Schmitt explains:

romantic productivity involves the conscious renunciation of an adequate relationship to the visible, external world. Everything real is only an occasion. The object is without substance, essence, and function. It is a concrete point about which the romantic game of fantasy moves. [...] In consequence, there is no possibility of distinguishing a romantic object from the other object – the queen, the state, the beloved, the Madonna – precisely because there are no longer any objects, but merely occasiones. (Political Romanticism 84-85)

I believe this line of argument is crucial for understanding Schmitt’s ‘decisionism.’ In the first place, Schmitt’s polemic against romanticism implicitly appeals to what I called above his ‘two worlds thesis,’ which differentiates and (analogically) relates an observational perspective of the world (i.e. the theologico-metaphysical image, with its explanatory and predictive apparatuses for causal relationships) to an agent-centered perspective of the world (i.e. the politico-juridical form of agency, with its ‘ought-structure’). If we accept the idea that there are two equally intelligible worlds, then romanticism can only be seen as collapsing them – making a normative ought into a metaphysical is – in the occasio. As Schmitt argues in Political Theology, with respect to “the spiritualist explanation of material processes and the materialist explanation of spiritual phenomena [...:] they construct a contrast between two spheres, and then they dissolve this contrast into nothing by reducing one to the other” (43). This theoretical operation is the leitmotif of Schmitt’s critique of romanticism.

However, Schmitt’s theory still requires a supplement for the integrity of the two-worlds thesis, if he hopes to maintain the critical difference between these worlds. If, in other words, Schmitt wants to maintain the two senses of ‘causa’ – i.e. as meaning both a strict, ‘absolute’ causality, as well as a ‘teleological and normative bond’ with ‘intellectual or moral force’ – without reducing one to the other, then he seems obliged to come to terms with an occasio. For, as we have seen, while the two-worlds thesis allows us to comprehend the formal structures of action as analogically derived from our metaphysical image of the world, neither the analogy it depends upon, nor the form it erects produce content. Indeed, as we saw above, only the decision produces content (and hence the rule) – but such a decision is not to be understood as the mere subsumptive application of the general rule to the particular case. Therefore, if Schmitt is to avoid collapsing the normative into the factual, he must appeal to a moment where the distinct senses of causa cannot be run together, and that initially does not appear to be governed by either the ‘causal’ or ‘divine’ relations of a theologico-metaphysical world, nor by the normative principles of the politico-juridical. Put simply, he must appeal to an occasio, though one that has a specific, concrete existence, and is not subject to ‘romanticization.’ And it is in this sense that I suggest we should understand Schmitt’s concept of ‘the exception.’

Only by way of an exception, in short, can the two worlds of causa be distinguished, and maintained. And only by way of the two worlds implicit in the sense of causa, can the auctoritatis interpositio appear, and a decisionist praxis come into being. Without this matrix, neither causa nor occasio can have any political purchase: without recourse to an exception any issue concerning a ‘causa‘ is (politically) moot: it is either a rote exercise of subsumption, or undecidable, since there is literally nothing to decide. On the other hand, even though the exception cannot be absolute, it alone provides the possibility for the critical mediation of analogically related worlds, which make possible the decisionist praxis outlined above.