Abstract
This article examines the concept of existence underlying Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy—a concept is that Heidegger largely shares. Can such a conception do justice to our political life? Or is it, in fact, inimical to it? The crucial issue here is that of political identity and the role that violence plays in its formation. The article concludes by examining Jan Patočka’s account of existence as motion and applying it to our political commitments.
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Notes
Dodd (2009, p. 135).
Ibid., p. 46.
Schmitt (1996, p. 33).
See ibid., p. 19.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid.
As Löwith puts this conclusion, “What Schmitt defends is a politics of sovereign decision, but one in which content is merely a product of the accidental occasio of the political situation which happens to prevail at the moment” (Löwith 1995, p. 144).
Schmitt (1996, p. 29).
The Presocratic Philosophers (1966, p. 195).
See Heidegger (1967, pp. 218–220). All translations from this work are my own.
Ibid., pp. 90–99 [168]).
Schmitt (1996, p. 53).
Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 48–49.
Ibid., p. 49.
Heidegger (1967, p. 282).
See ibid., p. 325.
In Heidegger’s words, “‘The Dasein is occupied with its own being’ means, more precisely, it is occupied with its ability to be. As existent, the Dasein is free for specific possibilities of its own self. It is its own most peculiar able-to-be” (Heidegger 1988, p. 276).
Heidegger (1967, p. 236).
Ibid., p. 233.
Through death, then, “Dasein is essentially disclosed to itself, and disclosed, indeed, as ahead-of-itself” (ibid., p. 294).
As Heidegger puts this, “In so far as it ‘is,’ death is essentially, in every case, mine” (ibid., p. 240).
Ibid., p. 239.
See ibid., p. 263.
“… die Nichtigkeit, die das Dasein in seinem Grunde bestimmt …” (ibid., p. 308).
In Heidegger’s words, “the nothingness meant here belongs to Dasein’s being-free for its existential possibilities” (ibid., p. 285).
Ibid., p. 299.
Ibid., p. 298.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 285.
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 250.
Ibid.
Löwith (1995, pp. 149–150).
Ibid., pp. 160–161.
Strauss (1996, p. 115).
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid., p. 116.
See ibid., p. 118.
In Schmitt’s words, “The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship” (Schmitt 1996, p. 28).
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 38.
Schmitt (1985, p. 6).
Ibid., p. 12.
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (ibid., p. 5).
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid.
For the application of this principle to the National Socialist Regime, see Schmitt (1935, p. 35), where he writes, “Endlich haben die typisch liberalen Trennungen und Dualismen vom Legislative und Exekutive, in der Gemeindeorganisation von Beschuß- und Verwaltungs- oder Ausführungsorganen ihren Sinn Verloren. Die Gesetzgebungsbefugnis der Reichregierung ist ein erstes bahnbrechendes Beispiel dieser Aufhebung künstlicher Zerreißungen. Überall muß das System der Verantwortungsverteilung und Verschiebung durch die klare Verantwortlichkeit des zu seinem Befehl sich bekennenden Führers und die Wahl durch Auswahl ersetzt werden.”
Exists comes from ex (έξ), signifying “out” in Greek, and histeme (
στημι) signifying “to stand.”Schmitt (1885, p. 15).
With this, we have Kierkegaard’s definition of “that happy passion, which we call faith, the object of which is the paradox.” According to Kierkegaard, “the paradox specifically unites the contradictories” by “the eternalizing of the historical and the historicizing of the eternal” (Kierkegaard 1985, p. 61).
Ibid., p. 93.
See ibid., p. 37, where Kierkegaard claims that “the ultimate paradox of thought [is] to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”
Certain passages in Heidegger’s 1933 Rectoratsrede indicate that he embraces the view that Hitler’s ascension to power was, in fact, such a decisive moment. He writes, for example, “are we, the body of teachers and students of this ‘high’ school, truly and jointly rooted in the essence of the German university? Does this essence have genuine strength to stamp our being (Dasein)? No doubt, only if we most deeply will this essence” (Heidegger 1985, p. 470). “The self-assertion of the German university is the primordial, shared will to its essence … The will to the essence of the German university is the will to science as the will to the historical mission of the German people as a people that knows itself in its state” (Heidegger 1985, p. 471). “Out of the resoluteness of the German student body to be equal to the German fate in its most extreme distress, comes a will to the essence of the university. This will is a true will in that the German student body, through the new Student Law, places itself under the law of its own essence and in this way for the first time determines that essence” (Heidegger 1985, p. 475). Here the use of the terms “will” and “resoluteness” assumes a political cast. The determination of the students’ essence (or identity) comes from its resolute will to embrace the new situation.
Dodd (2009, p. 138).
Ibid., p. 139.
Violence, in other words, cuts short this question. In Dodd’s words, “violence is a kind of collapse of the question (where I stand, my honor, what I believe, what ‘needs to be done’ to protect my interests, and so on) into a decisive moment in which the subject seeks to extricate itself from the process of mediations that inevitably comes with the determination of selfhood” (ibid., pp. 138-9).
Ibid., p. 139.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B273.
It is interesting to note that Edmund Husserl also held this view. He writes in his early work, the Logical Investigations, “What is real is the individual … Temporality, for us, is a sufficient characteristic of individuality” (Husserl 1992, p. 129). The same position is expressed at the end of his career in the C manuscripts, “Thus, in an original sense, existent = original, concrete presence. It is persisting presence which ‘includes,’ as non-independent components in the stream of presences, both past and future” (Husserl 2006, p. 274).
Patočka (1988, p. 129).
Ibid., p. 128.
Patočka (1998, pp. 146–147).
Ibid., p. 147.
As Patočka expresses this, in a melody, “every component, tone, is part of something that transcends it; in every component something is being prepared that will form the meaning and the nature of the composition, but is not a movement of something that exists already at the start” (ibid., p. 147). For a detailed account of our motion of existence and its political implications, see Mensch (2016, pp. 115–129).
To the point that we accept Löwith’s “decisionist” interpretation of Heidegger, this critique applies to him as well. For Heidegger, of course, our existence is not limited to the now. Dasein “stands out” through its three temporal ecstasies. In its projects, it is ahead of itself. In its being in its thrown situation, it exhibits the past; in the present, it is there with the things that it discloses (see Heidegger 1967, p. 327). These three temporal modes form the “clearing”—Lichtung—through which Dasein makes the world and itself present (ibid., p. 133). The question is whether this clearing can be shaped by a moment of decision. Heidegger’s emphasis on the future argues for this. He writes, “the future has a priority in the ecstatical unity of primiordial and authentic temporality.” This means that “[p]rimordial and authentic temporality temporalizes itself in terms of the authentic future” (ibid., p. 329). The point follows from the fact “Dasein is already ahead of itself in its being. Dasein is always [in considering what it will do] ‘beyond itself’ [‘über sich hinaus’]” (ibid., p. 192). This determination by the future holds for the present as well the past. In the present, we are with the things that we disclose as we act to accomplish our goals. They are present either as means for our projects or as not being useful. A similar point is made with regard to the past. For Heidegger, “Dasein ‘is’ its past in the manner of its being, which roughly speaking, occurs from its future … Its own past—and this always implies the past of its ‘generation’—does not follow after Dasein, but rather is always in advance of it” (ibid., p. 20). Thus, we also regard the past in terms of what it offers for our projects. The possibilities it offers us are such only in relation to what we choose to accomplish. If we accept this, then we have to say with Heidegger, “Dasein can authentically be past only insofar as it is futural [zukünftig]. Pastness originates in a certain way from the future” (ibid., p. 326). Given this, the “clearing” seems to be set by our decision of what we want to accomplish.
Kierkegaard also comes to this conclusion. He writes, “Existence without motion is unthinkable” (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 308). Motion, however, demands continuity. In Kierkegaard’s words, “Inasmuch as existence is motion, it holds true that there is indeed a continuity that holds the motion together, because otherwise there is no motion” (ibid., p. 312). If we see such continuity as a style of movement, then the decision to become a Christian is a decision to take up Christ’s style of motion. We do this by imitating him in our actions.
This conception of identity recalls the opening sections of the second essay in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, where he speaks of breeding “an animal with the right to make promises” (Nietzsche 1967, p. 57). As Richard Schacht writes, “What is here at issue is not the sort of identity we each possess by virtue of the spatio-temporal continuity and discreteness of our bodily existence. Rather, it is that which is purportedly characteristic of each human being as a single person persisting as the same thinking, feeling, choosing, acting, responsible subject throughout the course of its life” (Schacht 1995, p. 111).
As Arendt writes, “The mutual contract by which people bind themselves together in order to form a community is based on reciprocity and presupposed equality; its actual content is a promise, and its result is indeed a ‘society’ or ‘consociation’ in the old Roman sense of societas, which means alliance. Such an alliance gathers together the isolated strength of the allied partners and binds them into a new power structure by virtue of ‘free and sincere promises’” (Arendt 1990, p. 170). Human plurality is implicit in this view of allies. For Arendt, it is not man, “but men that inhabit the earth” (Arendt 1958, p. 234). Individuals are, in fact, different. We are not “endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose essence or nature [is] the same for all.” Our condition is rather that of “plurality” (ibid., p. 8.) Because of this plurality, our interests do not completely overlap. Some things are more important to one group rather than another. This is the premise of political negotiation and the formation of alliances that include different groups.
Derrida (1989–1990, p. 927).
Ibid., p. 937.
Ibid., p. 943.
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099a, 11–13.
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Acknowledgements
The research for this article was funded by the program, Institutional Support for Long Term Development of Research Organizations, Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, Output of the Program PRVOUK P18 Phenomenology and Semiotics.
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Mensch, J.R. Violence and existence: an examination of Carl Schmitt’s philosophy. Cont Philos Rev 50, 249–268 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9410-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9410-4