Cologne 26-Apr-2004

-------- Original Message --------
Betreff: Re: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, et al
Datum: Sun, 04 Apr 2004 14:20:30 +0200
Von: Michael Eldred <artefact@...>
Firma: http://www.webcom.com/artefact/
An: heidegger@...
Referenzen: <406D8E8B.3070802@...>

Cologne 04-Apr-2004

henry schrieb Fri, 2 Apr 2004 11:02:19 -0500 (EST):

>
> From the Chronicle of
> Higher Education:
>
> A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics
>
> by Alan Wolfe
>
> http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i30/30b01601.htm
>

Thank you, Henry.

Kinda gethsaman ponderin'.

Alan Wolfe says that in 1932 "Strauss published a review of Schmitt's
most important book, The Concept of the Political" from 1927.
Is it a review? Is it a critical review? Is it a highly critical
engagement and deconstruction? See below.

AW:
"Schmitt's admirers on the left have been right to realize that after
the collapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable
rethinking. Yet in turning to Schmitt rather than to
liberalism, they
have clung fast to an authoritarian strain in Marxism
represented by
such 20th-century thinkers as V.I. Lenin and Antonio
Gramsci. "

Left and right meet around the corner in totalitarianism as a 'solution'
to liberalism.

AW:
"No wonder that Schmitt admired thinkers such as Machiavelli and
Hobbes, who treated politics without illusions."

Is Hobbes Schmitt's ally or is he his greatest intellectual foe? For Leo
Strauss, Hobbes is the founder of liberalism and as such the greatest
enemy of what Schmitt regards as the element of politics, namely, "the
real possibility of _physical_ killing" (Begriff des Politischen S.20
cited in 'Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen',
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Band 67, Tübingen 1932
S.732-749, reprinted in L. Strauss "Hobbes' politische Wissenschaft",
Luchterhand, Neuwied, 1965 S.161ff; here: AzCS S.165) More below.

AW:
"War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even
short of war, politics still requires that you treat
your opposition as
antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's
not personal; you
don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be
prepared to
vanquish him if necessary."

This would seem to be in line with Schmitt's (and Ernst Jünger's)
contempt for liberal politics as an art of compromise and negotiation.

AW:
"Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be
political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human
nature,
whereas 'all genuine political theories presuppose man
to be evil.' "

This is the question of human nature, of the Menschenwesen, of human
being. Schmitt would have used the word "Böse", which is either 'evil'
(Christian) or 'bad' (_kakos_, Greek). Liberals in Alan Wolfe's sense
would seem to think that people per se are good, and that only power
(the state) and money (capitalism) corrupt them. The good common people,
the Gutmenschen/nicepeople are thus confronted with the bad wielders of
power and the bad capitalists. Or the good common folk are only made bad
by society; they are the victims of society (Rousseau).

Leo Strauss conceives of liberalism quite differently. First of all,
"If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the
fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties,
of man and which identifies the function of the state with the
protection or the safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the
founder of liberalism was Hobbes." (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and
History, 1953 p. 181f)

Hobbes asserts the subjectivity of the modern subjects. The state and
political power can only proceed from the individual subjects and must
justify themselves, i.e. legitimize themselves to the individual
subjects whose rights to strive for their interests and protect their
lives have ontological priority. Hobbes’ innovation in political
philosophy is that he poses the decision as to whether individual
subjects of power could assent, through the use of reason, to set up by
social contract a superior sovereign power at all, thus asserting the
modern subjectivity of human subjects in the context of the question
concerning social power.

For Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of
Regina in Saskatchewan,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=2&debateId=95&amp;articleId=\
1542

"The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is
laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie."

Yet, she claims that "I think that the neo-conservatives are for the
most part genuine in wanting to spread the American commercial model of
liberal democracy around the globe."

So, according to Shadia Drury, there are different models of "liberal
democracy", a "commercial model", which is bad, and more preferable
models. The neo-conservatives are neo-liberal, which is bad, and true
liberals reject the ruthless laissez faire capitalist model in favour of
civil rights, a minimum of state and moderate capitalism?

As evidence for Leo Strauss being anti-liberal and advocating the
necessity of "noble lies" propagated by ruling philosophers in politics
to deceive the democratic masses, Shadia Drury cites "Natural Right and
History":

"Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an
intellectual superiority and not a moral one (Natural Right and History,
p. 151)."

But this reference provides only support for the Aristotelean
distinction between the "theoretical life" and the "practical life",
i.e. that a life devoted to philosophical speculation (the viewing of
being) is superior to the practical life of everyday affairs in the
_polis_.
What the philosopher has in view is hard for normal people to see. That
is why Plato resorts to allegory of the cave (a "noble lie"?) to try to
indicate the difficulty of learning to see the shapes of being (Politeia
Book VII) and also the resistance which everyday understanding puts up
against being liberated from its comfortable opinions as generated by
their perspectival worldviews (on the cave wall, on the screens).
This has nothing to do with consciously misleading "noble lies" but with
the difficulties of seeing and the resistances to seeing. The
distinction between esoteric insight and exoteric, rhetorical argument
that takes account of the political situation is necessary and nothing
so sinister as lying.

But back to Carl Schmitt, who proposes a totalitarian solution to the
crisis of liberalism. According to Schmitt the crisis of liberalism is a
consequence of the negation of the political (BdP S.55ff cf. AzCS
S.162). The political consists "not in Kampf itself... but in a
behaviour determined by this real possibility" (S.25 cited in AzCS
S.167), i.e. in the state being able to "demand the willingness to die
from the members of its own people" (S.34 cited in AzCS S.167). The
negation of the political initiated with the founding of liberalism by
Hobbes is the negation of the state of (human) nature achieved by men
agreeing to set up a Leviathan, i.e. a “common Power to keep them all in
awe” (Lev. p. 62), i.e. that such a superior power should exist for the
sake of men living well together in society, or “peaceable, sociable,
and comfortable living” (Lev. p. 80).

Strauss puts it thus: "for, the securing of life is the ultimate ground
of the state" (AzCS S.168). "Hobbes is... the originator of the ideal of
civilization" (AzCS S.168)

In what does this ideal of civilization consist according to Strauss?
"1. In defence against an external enemy; 2. in keeping peace in the
interior; 3. in the just and modest enrichment of the individuals which
is much more likely to be attained through work and thrift than through
victorious wars and is promoted in particular by the cultivation of
mechanics and mathematics; 4. in the enjoyment of non-detrimental
freedom" (AzCS S.168)

According to Schmitt, this ideal of civilization ends up making humanity
into a "co-operative for consumption and production" (BdP S.46 cited
AzCS S.168) "If the distinction between friend and foe were to cease,
there would be only Weltanschauung, culture, civilization, economy,
morality, law, art, _entertainment_, etc. purified of politics, but
neither politics nor state" (BdP S.42 cited AzCS.175f).

Strauss claims that Schmitt can hardly conceal his "revulsion" (Ekel
AzCS.176) at serious human issues being degraded to mere "entertainment"
in liberalism.

Strauss comments further:
"Liberalism, sheltered and caught in a world of civilization, forgets
the fundament of civilization, the state of nature, i.e. human nature in
its dangerousness and endangeredness. Schmitt goes against liberalism
back to its originator, Hobbes, in order to hit the root of liberalism
in Hobbes' express negation of the state of nature." (AzCS S.169)

But, Strauss adds at the conclusion of his remarks, Schmitt's "critique
of liberalism is carried out within the horizon of liberalism; his
illiberal tendency is stopped by the 'system of liberal thinking' that
has not yet been overcome" (AzCS S.181).

So, how is the horizon of liberal thinking itself to be overcome?
According to Strauss this horizon can only be overcome by not allowing
oneself, like Schmitt does, to become "entangled in the polemic against
liberalism" (AzCS S.181) and instead by posing the question concerning
"the order of human things" (BdP S.81 cited in AzCS S.180). This comes
down to casting the question concerning human being itself in its
"dangerousness and endangeredness" anew.

Liberalism as initiated by Hobbes aims at “peaceable, sociable, and
comfortable living” (Lev. p. 80), i.e. in pacifying the "war of nature"
that rages among human beings by virtue of their human nature.

According to Strauss' early 1934/35 study of "Hobbes' Political Science"
("Hobbes' politische Wissenschaft" HpW), Hobbes (advisedly, to deflect
the criticism of his opponents) shrinks back from openly casting human
nature as bad/evil and thus covers up his core casting of human nature,
namely, human being in its "vanity" ("Eitelkeit" HpW S.21), by putting
forward instead simply animal desires that, because they are animal
desires, are innocent, amoral, outside morality. Strauss aims to undo
this cover-up by emphasizing Hobbes' four phenomenal indiciations for
distinguishing human being from innocent, although savage, animal being,
namely,

"the striving for honour and offices of honour, for precedence over
other men and for recognition of this precedence by other men, ambition,
pride, thirst for fame" (HpW S.21)
citing
"all joy and grief of mind (consists) in a contention for precedence to
them with whom they compare themselves" (Hobbes, Elements of Law II,
VIII 3, cited in HpW S.21)

This "striving for honour" etc. is what Plato and Aristotle thought
through as _timae_, i.e. 'esteem', 'honour', 'public office', etc.

Strauss adduces further as evidence for vanity as the tacit centrepiece
for Hobbes' casting of human being the fact that Hobbes provides the
following reason for calling the necessary sovereign power to pacify the
state of nature 'Leviathan':

"Hitherto I have set forth the nature of Man, (whose PRIDE and other
passions have compelled him to submit himselfe to Government;) together
with the great Power of his Governor, whom I compared to Leviathan,
taking that comparison out of the last two verses of the one and
fortieth of Job; where God having set forth the great power of
Leviathan, called him King of the PROUD." (Lev. Ch.28 end, cited in HpW
S.22)

Is this the true source of the "dangerousness and endangeredness" of
human beings residing in human being itself -- the striving to stand in
a status with precedence over others? Is Strauss right to exclude the
other grounds for human conflict specified by Hobbes, namely, the
material goods of life? Is the human being essentially a _zoion
politikon_, i.e. a social being, because it is driven by the essential
desire for recognition in the mirror of others and to stand higher than
others in this mirroring? Does this struggle for recognition ("Kampf um
Anerkennung" Hegel, Phaenomenologie des Geistes) necessarily culminate
in the "struggle over life and death" (cf. Hegel, PhdG)? (Hegel himself
puts forward the resolution of the struggle over life and death in
relations of subjugation.)

If liberalism and its crisis has to do essentially with pacifying the
dangerousness of human being itself, in what could the overcoming of the
horizon of liberalism and its system consist? In OVERCOMING the
dangerousness of human being in a different way, in pacifying human
nature in a different way? Or in ADMITTING the dangerousness of human
being in a different way that does not involve "physical killing"? Can
the "struggle over life and death" have an ontological meaning rather
than ontic-physical killing?

Michael
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