An Observation of the Political in Husserl's Phenomenological Critique and Subjectivity: A Schmittian Investigation*21) Yusuk(Institute of Philosophy, Seoul National University) 【Main Scope】Critique of Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Theory of Subjectivity 【Key Words】Schmitt, Husserl, the political, transcendental subject, universal critique, structural character 【Abstract】The concept and the logic of the political, the most notable Schmittian ideas, based on the friend/enemy distinction and his thought on political theology have been widely and critically discussed and actively appropriated with various interpretations. On the other hand, we find that there is certain definite momentum piercing through the theoretical structure of Husserl's phenomenology in general both as a form of metaphysics and as a philosophical movement, which can also be called the political. In this circumstance, we find the Schmittian logic of the political together with his idea of political theology specifically serviceable for an effective visualization of the political characteristically structured in Husserl's system, particularly in the concepts of transcendental subjectivity and universal critique. This paper argues that Husserl's phenomenological critical subject is fundamentally a politico-theological subject and is an attempt to show to what extent and in what way Schmitt can be strategically utilized to make manifest the politicality that we discover as something that structurally inheres in Husserlian notion of subjectivity and critique. * This work is an extended and enriched reconstruction of a chapter of my dissertation. While keeping the original idea and argument, it substantially and significantly revises the content and format with an additional research and a further reflection. 󰡔철학과 현상학 연구󰡕, 제78집, 한국현상학회, 2018, 105-145 Research in Philosophy and Phenomenology, Vol. 78, 2018, 105-145 106 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 1. Introduction Carl Schmitt conceptualized "the political" on the basis of an existential distinction of friend and enemy. His famous thesis that all significant modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts, along with the friend-enemy distinction as a necessary prerequisite for the possibility of politics, provides a particular theoretical device for an analysis of the structure of political power, having been controversial as it is. Having said that, this paper is an attempt to look at Husserl through the lens of Schmitt, with a belief that the Schmittian thinking of the political offers an effective means to look at Husserl's phenomenology from a different angle. To say the conclusion first, we find a peculiarly Schmittian character of the political in and through the metaphysical logic of Husserlian phenomenological critique and subjectivity. The attempt to connect politics directly to the theoretical structure of phenomenology as such, especially to Husserl's, in distinction from a general ideological critique, may look odd to many, for Husserl's phenomenology most loudly and most resolutely speaks up for the concept of the "transcendental-ideal" as opposed to that of the "factual-real" to which belongs the concept of the political itself as well as the world of politics. Overall, Husserl's phenomenology claims itself to be the highest form of metaphysics that concerns fundamentally the most traditional themes of philosophy such as truth and being. Now we discover the political of a peculiar kind precisely through the manner in which the metaphysical truth and being is phenomenologically treated in Husserl and find a possibility that it can be clarified with the political of Schmittian kind. In other An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 107 words, the transcendental subject that plays an essential role in Husserl's phenomenological critique of reason reveals itself as a being which obtains the critical thrust from the logic of the political of Schmittian kind. In this work, we will attempt to show how and to what extent the structural character of Husserlian phenomenological subject conforms to the conceptual structure of the Schmittian kind of the political and thereupon will argue that Schmittian politico-theological aspect is a significant moment of the metaphysical essence of Husserlian subjectivity and critique. In fact, the politicality that characterizes the theoretical structure and mechanism of Husserl's phenomenology in toto has a wider and deeper semantic and thematic spectrum; hence, to demonstrate it will have to be a much larger project which exceeds the limit of this paper. For that reason, this work rather aims to brighten a Schmittian moment with the political present specifically in the conceptual structure of Husserlian subjectivity and critique, and thereby to suggest that Schmitt, as a methodological tool, is a possibility with which Husserlian notion of transcendental purity and absolute grounding can be analyzed and interpreted on the coordinate of the political. For that purpose, we will focus in particular on Husserl's text, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology1) and the writings appended to it as the main material, where the phenomenological theory of subjectivity and critique takes the most comprehensive shape, while also frequently turning to Husserl's 1) Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970 [Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962]-Crisis hereafter. 108 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 other works whenever the need is called upon. The selected lens will be two of Schmitt's most notable texts: The Concept of the Political2) and Political Theology3) 2. Schmittian Logic of the Political 1) The Friend-Enemy Antinomy as a Structural Essence of the Political In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt proposes a famous thesis that an existential distinction between friend and enemy is an absolute condition for the possibility of the work of the political. With this thesis, Schmitt repeatedly alerts readers not to be confused about the concept of enemy with the one in a moral distinction. This distinction is exclusively existential, "not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral and other conceptions."4) Enemy is not an object of mere hatred or emotional hostility; it is neither an economic competitor nor a polemical opponent, and so forth. Rather the distinction is completely independent not influenced by any other antithesis such as a moral distinction between good and evil or an aesthetic distinction between the beautiful and the ugly. It is perfectly possible that the enemy is not morally evil or aesthetically ugly or economically disadvantageous. But he is still an enemy precisely in the sense, to the extent that "he is the other, the stranger"; "it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specifically intense way, 2) Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 3) Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 4) Schmitt (1996), 27-28. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 109 existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible."5) The otherness as such, as that which is existentially irreconcilable with my own manner of being is the criterion to decide who the enemy is. The enemy precisely in that otherness is a political enemy. The whole reason that it is a political enemy is that it exists as a threat. The threat as such doesn't even have to be actual yet; only qua possibility to be a threat, the being of a political enemy is actual already; the enemy becomes concrete in that possibility to be a threat. The presence of the other whose manner of being cannot be assimilated into mine is a threat to a legitimate raison d'être of myself; just the fact that they are present qua oddity, qua stranger, impossible to be integrated to my system, threatens me; with their presence only, I feel threatened. Therefore, the enemy must be completely eradicated. All of this now consists of the logical content of jus belli. No other justification of war can exist than a political justification; there is no rational, moral, juridic legitimacy of war but a political legitimacy grounded upon an "existential threat to one's own way of life."6) A state is a decisive political entity whose legitimacy stands precisely on jus belli. The state power can be manifest and justified only on the "capacity or will" to make the distinction of friend and enemy, which corresponds precisely to the will and capacity of Sovereign to decide "who the enemy is" absolutely beforehand; without the capacity or the will to make that distinction, the state "ceases to exist politically," which leads to an annihilation of sovereign power.7) On this rule, the "protection5 ) Schmitt (1996), 27. 6) Schmitt (1996), 49. 110 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 obedience" deal between the sovereign and subjects is not determined by a defensive power a posteriori, but made a priori in a preemptive power, i.e., in the readiness to attack and die upon the threat.8) That is the political rationality of war: the only rationality for jus belli. In order to maintain the political power, Sovereign ought never to cease to live by such antinomy which proves the sovereign power to be absolute. We owe the meaning of "antinomy" here to Kant's own. The friend-enemy antagonism in Schmitt is not an expression of irrationality or absurdity which should and could be logically removed upon a series of compromising acts or contracts. To the contrary, the conflict itself is the essence of the rationality of the political; it is not to be solved, insofar as the political logos emerges and operates all and only on the presence of an enemy qua an object to be eliminated in principle. The necessity to keep the enemy and that to eliminate it are both equally rational demands. It is precisely in this sense that the friend-enemy distinction is an antinomy, i.e., a rational conflict as opposed to an irrational contradiction.9) 7) Schmitt (1996), 49. 8) Schmitt (1996) .48-53. 9) Such Schmittian political antinomy is found in Rancière's conceptualization of the meaning of politics. According to Rancière, politics arises at the moment that a part feels "discordance" about the lots that it thinks legitimately deserves due to its contribution to the good of the whole. Politics is impossible without a consciousness of the "wrong" and this wrong is not a simple injustice that is going to be logically resolved by an equal allotment of a due portion to each part. To the contrary, ever present disagreement over the justifiability of the counted is a condition for the possibility of politics. This Rancièrian interest of political logos in designating a due ontological place meets with the interest of Husserlian phenomenological logos, as we shall see below. See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 111 According to the Schmittian logic, all religious wars are to be fundamentally political wars, insofar as the being of a religion is existentially intimidated by the presence of the other who exist and live outside its belief system, not accepting its imperatives, by the very way that they are in that otherness. To be precise, however, that cannot be a general nature of any religion but a systemic essence of the religion having the slogan of a universal religion, such as Christianity. As a matter of fact, the Schmittian logic of the condition for the possibility of the political quite accurately grasps the structure of Christian jus bell, insofar as the legitimacy of Christian telos, namely, the universal kingdom of God is necessarily fed by the believer-nonbeliever distinction as an "inherent reality and a real possibility,"10) upon which the nonbeliever must be eliminated according to the Creator's rule of judgment. Particularly the modern history of Christianization outside the West, usually accompanied and protected by the European military-economic imperialism in most cases, somewhat exemplifies the Schmittian point.11) Now through Political Theology, such Schmittian perception is established into a strict formula as an inherent structural co-relation between the theological and the political. Rose, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Pr., 1999. 10) Schmitt (1996), 28 11) Quite impressively as a western intellectual, Schmitt offers an opportunity with which the history of the propagation of Christianity can be openly talked on the horizon of the political instead of the religious, for his conceptualization of the political brings out a point that the logic of Christianity is political precisely in its structural-existential essence. 112 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 2) The Exclusive Right of the Political-Theological Sovereign to Decide on Exception In Political Theology, Schmitt lays out another well-known thesis that "All significant concepts of modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts."12) The thesis claims that from counter-revolutionary theists to revolutionary deists, including bourgeois liberalists, radical anarchists as well as Marxists, the theological concept of divine sovereignty as the sole ultimate source of the emanation of power is in play behind their reflections on the state power. It has been conventionally reformulated as the thesis of "secularization" that the modern western European political theories on sovereignty prevailing up until the nineteenth century are based on medieval theological concepts.13) A key idea of this thesis is that what determines the threshold of politics where the political and the unpolitical is decided is itself a political decision of the sovereign who anchors his political power in the "exceptional" power of God who makes a miracle possible; the power of God has been secularized into the power of Prince and the power of constitutional law in modern European states. What is of premier significance in Schmitt's theorization of the political theological sovereignty is the notion of "decision." Ausnahmezustand, though translated into "exception" in English, means a "state of emergency" in the first order, incorporating the meaning of "crisis" within its semantic range; an extra-ordinary state as exceptional to a normal state represents a crisis which requires an emergent decision, i.e., a decision to make a judgment that it is a state of emergency. Exception first denotes a counter12 ) Schmitt (1985), 36. 13) See T. B. Strong's Forward in Schmitt (1985), xxiv-xxix. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 113 normal state as such, but it also means exceptionality as a formal quality of the position and power of the sovereign who decides such phenomenal content as an exception. Similarly, decision implies a claim on the right to decide and simultaneously signifies what to decide. Only the sovereign placed in the position of the exceptional power already, who cannot be more than one, can decide exception as having such and such abnormal phenomenal content: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception."14) Now, the exceptionality of sovereign power is represented by a complete "monopoly" of the right to decide. In a state of emergency, the normality of juridic normativity to manage order ceases to function; order is now given outside the rule of law, in the very exteriority of jurisdiction, on which the absolute normative juridic power is now exercised. Sovereignty is thus a complete concentration of normative power outside the territory of jurisdiction. "The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision. Therein resides the essence of the state's sovereignty which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but as the monopoly to decide." (Schmitt 1985, 13, added italics) The position of sovereign is an absolute sink hole sucking into itself all existing norms of ordering and eo ipso an absolute source of normativity as such from out of which legitimacy itself springs. Absolute power identifies itself in the making of a decision on the exception: "Exception proves everything."15) What is then the source of the monopoly right of decision? What 14) Schmitt (1985), 5. Italics are added. 15) Schmitt (1985), 15. 114 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 ultimately justifies it? Nothingness: "the decision emanates from nothingness."16) There is no such thing as a priori primordial normativity, because the decision itself is made outside legal order, and thus "proves that to produce law it need not be based on law."17) It is not that the legitimacy of decision is ascribed due to the fact that there is a norm prior; but "a point of ascription first determines what a norm is and what a normative rightness is."18) What justifies the decision is not a priori normativity, but the other way around; upon the decision, normativity itself is instituted. Therefore, there is no intrinsically metaphysical nonpolitical cause for the determination and exercise of power, whether it is the power of knowledge, or the power of Prince or the power of God. The decision of "who the enemy is" as a manifestation of "who the sovereign is" is a political state of affairs simpliciter. There is nothing other than, prior to the political―once again, this is to be a clearest Schmittian message. Now one can find a definite structural parallelism among metaphysics, theology and modern constitutional state politics in Schmittian reflection.19) The analogy between the power of Prince and the power of God is eligible between the exception in jurisprudence and the miracle in theology. Throughout the Enlightenment, metaphysical universal rationalism has reified the theological concepts into jurisprudence as such, while rejecting any theological exceptionalism in principle. In turn, the universal power of law and the state run solely by legal order has become of the exceptional "legitimatizing authority" as such,20) on which the 16) Schmitt (1985), 32. 17) Schmitt (1985), 13. 18) Schmitt (1985), 32. 19) Schmitt (1985), 36-52. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 115 omnipotent power of the first Creator is identified with the power of law-giver: the divine exceptional power that authorized the existence of the world and a miracle is imposed upon the power of jurisdiction as the sole foundation of every legitimacy. Now reason is the only common denominator that doubly binds divinity and legality, qua the exception as such that produces norm out of its own exceptionality as absolute normativity. For Schmitt, the link among metaphysics, theology and politics is found, not in a simple mirroring of a monarch in the Cartesian concept of God as the first law-giver, but in a structural concordance between the legal-theological concepts and the metaphysical concepts with which certain political-historical epoch presents itself.21) "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. It proves that...metaphysics is the most intensive and the clearest expression of an epoch."(Schmitt 1985, 46) This strikingly Foucauldian remark tells us that a tendency is discovered that an epoch justifies the political presentation of its being on the ground of a metaphysical necessity. The secularization of theological concepts corresponds as such to a metaphysical 'politicization' of them, which is a peculiarly Western European phenomenon. On the other hand, the rationalizing force that metaphysics provides overlaps with the power of modern scientific positivity. The authority of metaphysical-scientific self-evidence that seemingly extricates the question of exceptional sovereignty and generalizes it with the concept of natural objectivity, is itself a 20) Schmitt (1985), 48. 21) Schmitt (1985), 45-46. 116 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 positivistic metamorphosis of the Sovereign of all creation; with science, sovereign is internalized into the logic of a system, precisely by deistically being put aside qua only an "architect" of the system, so that "the machine runs by itself."22) Now the system itself is sovereign. In this way, sovereign is so alive, even with the modern scientific thinking.23) The theological tendency metaphysically politicized is not a characteristic merely specific to the epoch of absolute monarchy in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, through which the idea of the theological transcendence was still socially intellectually accepted. Schmitt insists that the "political metaphysics"24)) grounded on the theological concept of sovereignty is as effective and valid a picture even for the following epoch of democracy in the nineteenth century, during which the conception of immanence completely took over that of transcendence throughout the entire culture. Now the absolute power of transcendent God is immanentized into the general will of the people or the universal power of law or of the teleologically reified scientific objectivity of the world. That is what happened from Tocqueville to Hegel in the epoch of immanence.25) Now we run across here an important Schmittian insight into the inherently political function of the idea of Causa Sui. When recapitulating legal-political concepts of sovereignty in fundamental relation to theological concepts, Schmitt interprets the power of exception into the power of giving legitimacy. Whether the exception refers to the traditionally transcendent theological God or 22) Schmitt (1985), 48. 23) Schmitt (1985), 47-48. 24) Schmitt (1985), 49. 25) Schmitt (1985), 49-50. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 117 the monarch of an absolute state or the people in democratic collectivity or the normativity of reason or the systematicity of science, whatever shape it may be, it commonly represents an exceptional source point "from which everything emanates and to which everything returns," namely, "the cause and the end of all things."26) This is nothing but what Causa Sui means, an absolute being and formula, which contains the cause of its existence within itself, while itself being the cause of every other existence; it posits itself as the exceptional authority where all legitimatization begins and ends. Precisely with that conceptual-tautological potency, Causa Sui has taken up such essential place in the Western metaphysical theological tradition. Schmittian point of view depicts that such metaphysical self-positing of Causa Sui is nothing but a political decision already. Interestingly, as we will discuss from the below on, such Schmittian insight into the function of the political in the metaphysical conceptual structure of Causa Sui and self-evidence aids us deconstruct27) the structure of Husserlian phenomenological decision of the normative-ideal power of the transcendental subject as the absolute agency of philosophical critique, which counts precisely on the same kind of conceptual force. 3. Husserlian Logic of Critique: Critique, Subjectivity and Philosophy In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology known as Husserl's last publication, along with 26) Schmitt (1985), 49. 27) The meaning of the term 'deconstruct' here does not follow Derridian concept of "deconstruction." It had better be taken literally in the sense of an analytic disassembling. 118 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 "The Vienna Lecture,"28) Husserl poses his incipient question again, what it is be a science in a genuine sense.29) He recaps his whole career there, reminding that the motif and goal of phenomenology is a metaphysical rejuvenation of reason with a serious reform of Kantian critique. Throughout Husserl, the problem of science has been addressed with the consciousness of the metaphysical chasm between de facto positive sciences and de jure eidetic sciences. The de jure science represents the idea of "genuine science(echter Wissenschaft)" as the science that justifies itself by pure principles and thereby works as a norm for actual sciences,30) which thereof has a purely self-sufficient ideal being as its object of thematization, while de facto positive sciences guided by the "natural attitude(natürliche Einstellung)" explain out everything as a real object in the limit of spatiotemporal causation.31) Throughout his later period, Husserl concentrates his phenomenological effort on a clarification of the meaning of this chasm as the problem 28) E. Husserl, "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity," trans. David Carr, in Crisis, pp. 269-99 ["Die Krisis des Europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie," lecture presented before the Vienna Cultural Society in 1935]-"PCE" hereafter. 29) This is precisely the question that launched Husserl's first phenomenological project. E. Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. I, trans. J.N. Findlay, New York: Humanities Press, 1970. 30) See E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978, pp. 1-17. 31) Delimitation of positivity in the "natural attitude" is first given in Ideas I and is constantly repeated everywhere up to the Crisis. [See E. Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983, §30] A more thorough discussion of that attitude in clear contrast to the "transcendental attitude" is done in "Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy," trans. Ted E. Klein, Jr. & William E. Pohl, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5:3, Fall, 1974, pp. 9-56. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 119 of transcendental genesis of science. What is at issue is how the historical-positive objectivity of science, geometry e.g., can be ultimately validated on the ground of the transcendental origin (Ursprung) that makes it possible for the scientific meaning to be produced in the first place, passing down through history, and constituted into a legitimate positivity.32) The problem of science is now to be the problem of how to clarify the origin of positivity as such, in which itself cannot be understood in positive-scientific, empirical-historical manner. Eventually, the metaphysical chasm above mentioned is elucidated into a genetic distance between the empirical subjectivity psycho-physicalistically determined and the transcendental subjectivity ontologically self-sufficient (selbstständig), and epistemologically self-justifiable. Husserl argues that this gulf has been "concealed(verborgen)" in all previous understandings of objectivity including Kant's and calls the concealment of that distance the "enigma of subjectivity(Rätsel der Subjectivität)"33) as that which Kant's critique was unable to handle; it indicates a paradox of Kantian subject who transcendentally constitutes empirical objectivity and yet is rendered to be an object in the end, which cannot but belong to the real world of experience. The basic Husserlian rationale for this criticism of Kant is that the justification of transcendentality should never depend on spatiotemporal and causal relations which condition real objectivity as opposed to ideal objectivity. This apriori nonaffectivity from the spatiotemporal-causal limitation, precisely as the ontological essence of an ideal being guarantees a successful operation of the transcendental mechanism of 32) "The Origin of Geometry" deals with this issue of transcendental genesis with the single case of geometry. E. Husserl, "The Origin of Geometry," trans. David Carr, in Crisis, pp. 353-378 -"OG" hereafter. 33) Husserl(1970a), 5. 120 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 the justification of scientific knowing.34) To solve the enigma, the region for the transcendental subject must be absolutely spared precisely with respect to completely nonempirical, nonreal purity. That indicates nothing but a realm for the absolute origin. The absolute means clearly here pure ontological self-sufficiency and immanence. Absolute is all and only the essence of the ideal region as the "absolutely self-contained realm of purely subjective being."35) Within this region, the being of the transcendental subject is completely "closed off" and self-given rather than being given in the mode of constitution, thereby intuitively self-comprehended as a pure lived experience.36) Then the enigma of Kantian subjectivity signals nothing but a failure in the settlement of the transcendental subject in the absolute region, qua a self-sufficient, self-given, and self-justifiable being.37)The problem of subjectivity turns out to be exactly the problem of the unidentified, concealed status of the pure subject whose transcendental power has to be fixed at the place of the absolute once and for all. As long as the ontological boundary for the place of the absolute is obscure, the transcendental mission of 34) All phenomenological thoughts on the ultimate justification of science and reason are fundamentally based on the absolute distinction between the ideal and the real set out in the very first beginning; the whole discussion of Prolegomena in the Logical Investigations is dedicated to this matter. Since then, the spatiotemporality and causality as the essence of the real has been repeatedly identified into a primordial inability to validate the timeless truthfulness of ideal being. Husserl(1970b), 9-161. 35) Husserl(1974), 29. 36) Husserl(1983), §§49-50 & §55. About Husserl's formulation of "regional ontology," see Husserl(1983), §§9-10 and Ludwig Landgrebe, The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, Don Welton ed. Cornell: Ithca, 1981, chap.5: "Regions of Being and Regional Ontologies in Husserl's Phenomenology." 37) Husserl(1970a), §§ 29-32. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 121 the ultimate justification of science with no further questionability cannot be completed. Insofar as Kant leaves "unquestioned (unbefragt)" the essential necessity and possibility of the absolute distinction between the two regions of being, namely, between the ideal and the real, Kantian subject cannot be granted the transcendental position of "truly apodictic certainty" as the "ultimate ground (letzte Boden) of all scientific objectivity,"38) Precisely in this phenomenological thematic-conceptual framework, Husserlian meaning of critique comes to consist in 'being able to ground (begründen) in an absolute manner'. The absolute grounding of transcendental subjectivity in the sense of "ultimate justification (letzte Rechtfertigung)" is to be adequately fulfilled only when self-justifying capacity is confirmed on the level of apodictic certainty. In this line of thought, the phenomenological notion of critique as Besinnung39) finally arrives at Selbstbesinnung as a fulfilled form of self-justification. The "reflection on self" signifies a constant self-affirmation of the self-sufficiency of one's own transcendental ability for objective meaning formation. The reflecting I is to self-evidently affirm and confirm in and through the reflection the power of I who is capable of examining oneself precisely by virtue of that capacity.40) The phenomenological notion of epochē, originally signifying a 38) Husserl(1970a), 114-115. 39) Besinnung, meaning technically a clarification of meaning in the sense of a genetic tracing down of its constitution, is co-translated into "senseinvestigation " in many phenomenological incidences. But, as that phenomenological genesis is explicated always in terms of the transcendental capacity of ideal subjectivity, Besinnung as the critique of rationality has intended a critique of subjectivity from the outset. See Husserl(1978), 9. 40) Husserl(1970a), §15 & FTL, §103. 122 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 "putting out of an action" of any positivistic judgment about natural reality41) is reconsidered as a systematic reflective gesture to universally question the legitimacy of everything outside the pure transcendental realm of self-sufficiency in order to get rid of the cognitive fog hazing the primordial clarity of the transcendental self-power and hence "lay bare" the ideal subjective origin in full intellectual sight.42) It is supposed to conform in the end to an infinite act of "waking" to the consciousness of one's own transcendental ability, i.e., an infinite returning to the ideal source-place of one's own power of philosophizing. As such it stands for the very critical life of a philosopher. Every phenomenological critical gesture now accords to a form of returning to the subjective origin in one way or another in the sense of getting closer and closer to the ultimate first point of justification. The return to the absolute origin-self is to be a telos of critique. As such it affirms the "inborn teleology (eingeborene Teleologie)" of the European humanity and philosophy.43) The returning to oneself is to be realized with a practice of "theōria" as a teleological maxim from the idea of genuine science. The self-reflecting position of the subject is asserted with the "striving" for theōria as the ancient Greek philosophical desire to behold and bring about the "unconditioned truth" and thereby to be the unconditioned truth itself. Infinite activation of that striving is nothing but a concrete "vocational" life of a philosopher as a genuine scientist, i.e., a life professionally engrossed in such Greek theoretical attitude.44) In the end, critique for Husserl is to be a 41) Husserl(1983), §32. 42) Husserl(1970a), §71. 43) Husserl, "PCE," in Husserl(1970a), 273. 44) Husserl, "PCE," in Husserl(1970a), 277-283. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 123 philosophization as such and the transcendental subject is to be no one else than a professional philosopher never ceasing to do the work of critique; the absolute transcendental power of subjectivity expresses the utmost "legitimatizing authority" that is performed and perfected through the critique, and thereby attests the absolute institutional bearing of philosophy as a vocational discipline. 4. Schmittian Moments in the Structure of Husserlian Critique and Subjectivity 1) Critique as Husserlian Jus Belli In Husserl what motivates the phenomenological "universal epochē" is the idea of metaphysical purity and genuineness (Echtheit). The phenomenological goal is a complete purification of the transcendental power of the meaning constituting self, i.e., a complete placement of the transcendental subject in the purely ideal region ontologically distinguished from the region of real objectivity. The infinity being an essentially positive dimension of Husserlian critique with the meaning of an infinite affirmation of the absolute self-power is also necessarily a negative marking of a nonstop de-legitimatization of any attempt to naturalize the absolute reference point. In other words, the infinite theōria in Husserl takes the form of a constant arguing about and for the due place of the ideal transcendental being in more or less Rancièrian sense45) in the form of an institutional "disagreement" on the existing validity of the real state of affairs at hand. In this framework, the Schmittian logic of the political grounded on the friend-enemy distinction and jus belli is at work particularly 45) See footnote 9). 124 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 with the manner in which every otherness is universally examined during and by way of the phenomenological critique. Husserlian critical drive is drawn out to wage a permanent war against a possible threat from all types of irrationalism, skepticism, psychologism, naturalism and nihilism, etc., i.e., against any form of spiritual-cultural, intellectual resistance to even out the metaphysical power-hierarchy between the real and the ideal, between the positivistic natural objectivity and the transcendental spiritual subjectivity. The Schmittian otherness that had a patent existential shape is somehow qualitatively transformed in Husserlian system of critique into all kinds and types of the spiritual-cultural variants ontologically, axiologically and normatively distinguished from the archē of philosophical rationality represented by the transcendental ideality; accordingly, rather the threat character overwhelms the existential character in the signification of otherness in Husserl. Now, to the extent that the distinction of the genuineness of the ideal and the nongenuineness of the real as a form of otherness should be maintained and the proliferation and the running of the resistive cultural moves are taken as a threat, the Schmittian battlefield where otherness exists as a potential threat plays a theoretical milieu for Husserl, in which the transcendental subject should ever be critically awake to "disagree." When the threat character of otherness becomes acute in Husserl, critique is concretely shaped into a "struggle (Kampf)." The war metaphor of critique in the later Husserl is dominant. Particularly through the Crisis text and "The Vienna Lecture," critique as absolute grounding and ultimate justification expresses itself in the form of an infinite "spiritual struggle" for universal science, as something conceived in the idea of the infinite "striving for theōria" already. In a striking resemblance to Marxist historicism, An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 125 Husserl revaluates the whole history of humanity as the history of on-going struggle for an absolute legitimatization of the "universal critical attitude" to attain the idea of universal science, which as such is represented by the history of European humanity.46) In Husserl this historical cultural struggle as an infinite war against any philosophically degenerative move coincides with the metaphysical theoretical struggle for an absolute residentship of pure consciousness and the transcendental self in the place of ideal-normative power. The infinite awakening to self-reflectivity as a vocational task of philosophy is as such an infinite 'ultimatum' for a preemptive spiritual war toward the presumable 'invasions' into that absolute boundary for the ideal being and capacity of self. Critique for Husserl is thus a war-like project which calls for a "revolution," courageous confrontation, and uncompromising solidarity and leadership, and even a religious missionary "faith" in an 'ethical upgrading' of the whole humanity with the European spirit of universal theōria, the highest form of which is phenomenology itself.47) Philosophers as a reification of the ideal transcendental subjectivity are messianic "functionaries of mankind"48) in readiness to struggle against all modes of nonphilosophical speech and existence, precisely as a state and form of otherness with which the authenticity of transcendental selfhood is confronted as the objects, the legitimacies of which the self refuses to acknowledge in total fashion. The war-impetus now engineers and runs the whole plot of the phenomenological critique, not as an 46) Husserl, "PCE", in Husserl(1970a) , 278-289 & Husserl(1970a), §§ 6-7. 47) Husserl, "PCE", in Husserl(1970a), 299. See also E. Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965, pp. 71-147. 48) Husserl(1970a), 17. 126 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 auxiliary or accidental cause, but as a kind of Heideggerian 'existential' force, structurally engaged in every theoretical motive and move concerning the idea of critique, subjectivity and Europe in Husserl. The Schmittian political exposes itself in Husserl qua a Heideggerian 'existential' quality of the critical phenomenological subject who always already understands itself as a spiritual warrior and thereby defines and delimits otherness as a totality of all that is escaping or confronting or lacking the theoretical, the ideal, the rational, the philosophical, the Greco-European, and the phenomenological, precisely through and during the critique-war; above all, the critical transcendental subject grants itself an exclusive right to decide how the other can legitimately be. 2) Crisis as a Threat to Absolute Metaphysical Relation In Husserl, the concept of crisis works in such a way that the contemporary crisis of European culture in general is a manifestation of the crisis of the modern European philosophy and science, and that this in turn becomes immediately a crisis of the European philosophical humanity as an index of the crisis of mankind. What is responsible for such essentially globalizing cultural crisis is exactly the theoretical crisis of subjectivity in the sense of a disorientation of the empirical subject from the intentional control of the transcendental subject. Now the phenomenological crisis in all these senses means first and foremost a relationship crisis, for it brings about the "question of the relation between objective-scientific thinking and intuition in the life-world prior to theory."49) "Life-world (Lebenswelt)" is the world of originary "prescientific" experience which is soon to be 49) Husserl (1970a), 134. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 127 formally determined by a transcendental performance of the cognitive reason; it is the world self-evidently pregiven absolutely prior to any objectifying act and thereof immediately experiencible to the transcendental subject.50) As such, it refers to a totally closed-off field of the infinite transcendental capacity to intentionally will and form objective meaning. The 'right' relationship between the prescientific life-world and the objectivity of physis is such that the former exists essentially for the latter; the objective-real experience in the scientific world is genetically affixed to the original prelogical experience in the life-world by the work of the transcendental-constitutive "for." This for-structure shows a topology of power-hierarchy which as such represents the genetic relation between the two distinct regions of being in the transcendental split aforementioned. If any meaning claims an in-itself validity outside the horizon of the universal critique, refusing the transcendental care, that itself blurs the metaphysical regional boundary. It then ipso facto puts the self-evident validity of the absolute transcendental subjective capacity itself at risk, which is a threat as such. Now that is to be a crisis. Just as the mere presence of a nonbeliever does harm already to the absolute authority of the creator God, the possibility of the being of Out that is not in charge of the transcendental grounding, the possibility of registering meaning outside the philosophical nomos of critique, eo ipso breaches the rule of truth constitution, and thereby is to be an intrinsic existential threat to the noetic authority of philosophy to take charge of truth affairs. It contests the hierarchical power-relation between the legitimatizing authority and the legitimacy given. Therefore the horizon of critique 50) Husserl (1970a), 123-135. 128 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 must be infinitely expanded so that nothing can elude that juridic-hierarchical relational touch. That is what the existential logic of philosophy demands from within. What brings about critique as a total endless war in the sense of an infinite self-alarming is precisely such institutional consciousness of the crisis as a potential threat to the absolute metaphysical regional boundary between the two ontologically incommensurable beings, between the two categorically incommensurable experiences. The awareness of crisis precisely as a crisis in terms of the metaphysical power-relation is a phenomenological condition for the possibility of launching a critique at all. 3) Critique as a Revelation of Exceptional Power, Crisis as a State of Emergency In Schmitt, exception represents an instant of revelation; only in the moment of exception, with the manner in which the exception behaves, "it is clear who the sovereign is"51); through the exception, the sovereign power becomes visible as well as the politicotheological relationship between the one who gives protection and the one who must obey in return.52) In Husserl, crisis reveals itself as a state of emergency; only in the state of crisis, the absolute point-source of meaning-giving power and the phenomenon to be judged, i.e., the one that can give legitimacy and the one that needs legitimacy are to be revealed precisely through critique as the right mode to deal with the crisis. The state of crisis necessitates critique during which a decision is made of and on exception. By the universal epochē, the illegitimacy of phenomena is decided and 51) Schmitt (1985), 7. 52) See George Schwab's Introduction, in Schmitt (1985), lii. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 129 thereupon the very decisional power itself is revealed as the exception as such. What to be unconcealed with the critique is precisely that metaphysical power-relation which as such represents a political relation. To the extent that the obfuscating of the power hierarchy is an object of Besinnung, crisis means a loss of epistemic sovereignty of philosophy as an institution. The party to whom the crisis is felt as a threat is philosophy which went through already an unwanted 'dethronement' by the rising modern natural sciences. Faced with the crisis, the internal revolution, i.e., the phenomenological movement to ground the essentiality of reason from within, aims at a "rehabilitation" of the lost institutional sovereignty of philosophy in the field of the administration of truth. While the political and social revolution during the Enlightenment was a bottom-up revolution through which the governed were rising up to cut the head of the Prince or the God, the phenomenological revolution is a top-down revolution that the sovereign philosophy plans and directs to get its head back. If the Enlightenment critique aimed at a total destruction of all kinds of external moral hierarchy as irrational before the principle of universality, the phenomenological critique speaks up for the internal metaphysical power hierarchy as an absolute moral prerequisite for the realization of the Enlightenment rationalism in its "genuine sense."53) In this background, the urgent phenomenological task is now to inaugurate reason itself into the absolute exception unburdened of justification once and for all. It is worked on with the theoretical gesture to ontologically fix the exceptional power of the transcendental reason in the concept of phenomenological self-evidence (Evidenz) as the 53) Husserl, "PCE," in Husserl(1970a), 290-299. 130 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 "being-itself-there, originaliter (Selbst-da)."54) Substantially relying on the logical positivistic sense of evidence as an 'ultimatum of givenness', Husserl calls for self-evidence as an ultimately final occasion in the sense of a dead end-point other than which there is no more, no further, no deeper instant to be reached. Self-evidence is an assurance of "self-givenness" as well as an immediate "consciousness" of the pregivenness of the life-world and thereby a consciousness of self-justifiability as such, i.e., a "self-experience" of the transcendental subject of its very power to bring about meaning and distribute legitimacy.55) This way of conceptualizing self-evidence, serving both the phenomenological sense-investigation of logic and the critique of subjectivity, has a theoretical objective to cut off any positivistic or skeptic challenge to skip or doubt the self-sufficiency of reason. Dealing with the institutional-cultural threat by directly appealing to the metaphysical force of the concept of self-evidence, Husserlian phenomenological strategy reveals itself as a Schmittian political strategy. 4) The Theological Inertia of Causa Sui Throughout his career, Husserl frequently describes his phenomenological program as a "radical" philosophical movement for a renovation of spirit.56) The radicality is claimed to come from the point that phenomenological critique undoes the whole tradition of metaphysics by totally questioning the positivistic prejudice about 54) Husserl, "OG," in Husserl(1970a), 356. 55) Husserl(1978), 283-290 & E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill & K. Ameriks, Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1973, §§5-6. 56) Besides the Crisis text, particularly, the Introduction in Formal and Transcendental Logic voices clearly and in length such institutional radicalism. But the rhetoric is ubiquitous throughout all his works. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 131 the in-itself givenness of the world without reference to the deeper genetic region of the absolute ideal. Ironically, this so-called "phenomenological-transcendental radicalism"57) moors itself firm precisely to the idea of Causa Sui, the oldest of the oldest metaphysical idea that had premised the whole Western theologicoscholastic tradition, having come down even to Spinoza. What counts as the phenomenological absolute is, in the end, the same ontological essence of Causa Sui as the being of complete independence from the force of natural causality, i.e. the being of pure immanence that "nulla re indiget ad existendum."58) In the context of Husserl, the meaning of Causa Sui as 'having the cause of its being within itself' is phenomenologically customized into the sense of 'having the source of legitimacy of its being within itself' to satisfy the intent of self-justification; the ontological immanence of Causa Sui is now relegated to the immanence of justification so that the absolute can be validated by the absolute itself in the place of the absolute. By this tautological logic of immanence, the absolute relates to itself and to the other than itself, i.e., the nonabsolute as well. In the traditional theology, the concept of transcendence used to represent the relation of the absolute to the dependent, as the relation between the Creator and the created: God, the Creator, exists transcendently vis-à-vis the created. In contrast, immanence denotes self-relation of the absolute to its own being: the absolute needs no other cause than itself for its existence. On this account, it is not the existence of God which legitimatizes theological ruling; the bare existence of God per se means nothing without the existence of the created world which only, can validate the power 57) Husserl(1970a), 181. 58) Husserl(1983), 110. 132 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 of the Creator. What ultimately testifies the absolute legitimacy of creation is rather the relational order set forth between the Creator and the created. The phenomenological absolute falls under the same dual theological relation of transcendence and immanence: it exists immanently vis-à-vis itself, while being related to the Nature in such manner that the Nature exists transcendently vis-à-vis itself.59) The absolute, namely, the pure consciousness and the transcendental subject, being the sufficient reason for its own validity, relates to every nonself-sufficient reality, qua the sufficient reason for the validity of the latter, too; the self-validated absolute relates itself to the relative by bestowing legitimacy upon the latter. The phenomenological absolute, just like the theological absolute, while having to preserve its eidetic-ontologically immanent place as exceptional, exists, always already and only, in essential relation to the nonself-sufficient other, precisely in the mode of a constant speech that 'you have no other meaning than that you are merely my intentional counter-pole',60) 'you' here representing every being that is standing as an object over against myself, i.e., the totality of otherness. Therefore, the urgent phenomenological interest as well as the theological one is not simply a securing of the place of the absolute per se. Rather what should be absolutely secured is the structural relation between the two modes of givenness. Only when the power of the exception decides and manages that relation, the absolute can appear and be valid as absolute. What is of eidetic 59) About the phenomenological recapitulation of the concepts of transcendence and immanence as two distinct modes of givenness, see Husserl(1983), §44. 60) Husserl(1983), §49. Esp. 112. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 133 necessity is thus this relation of the structural hierarchy. Otherwise put, the absolute must live by this relation with otherness. Going back to Schmitt, that can explain why the exception never stops deciding "who the enemy is." In the phenomenological context, the complete non-relativity of the exception is to be affirmed with the decision of 'who is In and who is Out of the relation'. This is how the crisis as a state of emergency signifies a state of relational chaos in Husserl. The Schmittian protection-obedience political transaction followed by a successful normalization of the emergency state is to be 'transfigured' in Husserl as a metaphysical hegemony-security exchange between the genetic subjectivity and the constituted objectivity, between philosophy and positive sciences, and between the European philosophizing logos and humanity in general. It is in this sense that the relational structure of the immanence of Husserlian subject represents the structure of the theological absolute, but never in the sense that the absolute consciousness simply replaces God, which would be rather a HeideggerianDerridean critical point.61) Our point is that the manner in which the pure transcendental subject as an absolutely immanental being claims self-legitimacy with the notion of self-evidence in Husserl replays the theological mechanism of self-justification of Causa Sui, whose mode of being is sui generis political in our judgment, more or less with Schmittian reference. 61) For example, Derrida, borrowing Heidegger's term "onto-theology," directly identifies the ontological quality of phenomenological pure consciousness as the source-point of both archē and telos, with "selfpresence " or "self-perception of presence" of a transcendent being in the theological sense. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 146-7 & the Translator's Introduction, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii. 134 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 5. In the Name of the Ethical: Counter-Schmittian Logic of Inclusive Exclusion in Husserl Husserlian logic of exception radicalizes Schmittian political logic in two respects: first, with respect that it pronounces the principle of the most extreme kind of exclusion, namely, self-exclusion on which the decision of "who the other is" is derived from the decision of "who I am," second, with respect that it metaphysically permanentizes the protection-obedience rule by promising the other an eternal ontological security in return of their being an object of universal philosophical critique. But precisely for the reason that it radicalizes Schmittian logic of the political, the Husserlian subject faces an Agambenian paradox of the "inclusive exclusion" that is not a proper concern for Schmitt. Following Schmittian definition of sovereignty as the power of decision on the state of exception, Agamben modifies the friend/enemy distinction into the pair of "exclusion/inclusion" based on the distinction of "zoē/bios" as the "fundamental category" of [Western] politics.62) In doing so, he puts a particular emphasis on that the possibility of exception lies in its capacity to announce itself as a law.63) The power outside the law holds its legitimacy precisely in law, qua law. What makes exception as an exception to a rule is the logic of the rule, i.e., jurisdiction as such, on account of which exception can maintain still and always a lawful relation to exteriority. With this peculiarity, the exceptional right of sovereign is not limited to distinguish In from Out, but extended to create a new space of legitimacy in which the exception interiorizes 62) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Standford University. Press, 1998, p. 8. 63) Agamben(1998),15-29. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 135 what is excluded and therewith to reorder the rule of the whole. Exception is thus never a distinction in itself but rather an "indistinction" of exteriority from interiority.64) For Agamben, that is a "paradox" inherent to the structure of the sovereign exception, on which, however, its power completely depends. In a great deal, Husserlian rule of regional exception works for an Agambenian interiorization of the excluded. In and with critique, the totality of everything outside philosophical examination permanently regresses backward to the place of pure origin, precisely by infinitely progressing toward an ever-more spiritually homogenized world guided by the teleology of philosophy and Europe. The transcendental critical subject preemptively dismantles otherness as a totality of all that is outside the validation from the transcendental intentionality and selfhood, by being newly 'ordered' it in the space of its intentional care. Precisely in this sense and way, otherness is always already included inside the closed-off field of my intentional will and freedom. In Husserl, every objectivity, every otherness actual and possible, even humanity as such, is supposed to be 'reborn' in the form of a 'resignification' as a result of universal questioning. The goal for a clear distinction of the other is not death as an existential killing of their body, but birth as a spiritual 'revitalizing' of their mind. The uttermost goal of critique as a war is to spiritually elevate the whole humanity into a universal philosophical species. The telos of spiritual "rebirth" of humanity as something built in the idea of philosophization now makes philosophy an inherently "ethical" vocation simply by the mode in which it exists and comports. The permanent state of war as a permanent political state of eliminating 64) Agamben(1998),19. 136 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 otherness is made over into a permanent state of an "ethical edification" of the whole mankind with reference to the philosophical theōria. On an explicit level, the ethical comes into the fore in this way, instead of the political, in Husserl. A spiritually cultivated world with the [European] philosophical spirit of theōria is the world where a universal meaning-validation system operates: the world in which the ideal normativity and the absolute priority of philosophical judgment is universally juridically acknowledged.65) From Schmittian point of view, however, the world "ethically" enlightened to a universal mankind in such Husserlian manner represents a completely depoliticized world where neither politics nor state is possible due to the pure absence of an enemy.66) For Schmitt, like Hobbes, any ethical or economic universalism justified on the force of the ideal is what prevents a thinking of humanity as such, because the possibility to question what it is to be human comes about precisely due to the presence of a conflict which involves the possibility of the elimination of actual life.67) 65) The metaphysical purification of Europe into an idea based on the purely ethical teleological responsibility of European philosophical logos is the whole agenda of "The Vienna Lecture." See also Husserl(1970a), §7. On the other hand, Reinhart Koselleck's historical study of the Enlightenment crisis-discourse shows how critique works on crisis as an active motif of politicization while 'disguising' itself in a depoliticized, purely moral speech. By and large, Husserl's ethical appropriation of critique and crisis can fall in this framework. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathologies of Modern Society, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. 66) Schmitt (1996), 53-54. 67) Schmitt (1996), 65-68. This position of Schmitt makes Leo Strauss interpret him as an extreme kind of moralist. Strauss regards Schmitt's affirmation of the political as the "affirmation of the moral," thinking that he affirms a necessity to be "serious" about humanity by affirming the An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 137 On the other hand, this world operated upon such Husserlian sense of the ethical-teleological urgency of the universal inclusion is to be a necessarily politicized world now from Agambenian point of view, insofar as it works on the paradox of sovereignty. In Husserl, the teleological philosophical moralization permanently interferes in the empirical world humanity, while constantly having to exclude the ideal quality of the moralizing subject from the very empirical regionality. But to show the self-evident legitimacy of that disconnection, it should never make the world that the subject feels confronting against its authenticity actually disconnected from its own world. In the phenomenological logic, the metaphysical exclusion of the pure transcendental self-zone can be validated only at the moment, in the incidence of a total teleological inclusion of all otherness as that which is in the course of transferring from the state of illegitimacy to that of legitimacy, for which the very self-excluding subjective power is essentially involved. To this extent, Husserlian critical subject assures Agamben's definition of the sovereign exception as "what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included."68) Nonetheless, for Husserl, the inclusive exclusion works never as a paradox as in Agamben, but as an ethical telos first and political. [Leo Strauss, Notes on Carl Schmitt,The Concept of the Political, trans. J. Harvey Lomax, in Schmitt (1996), 99-122. See Paragraph 27]. But I strongly doubt that it is the case with Schmitt to whom the ethical is no end of the political. With Schmitt himself, it is hard to decide where he stands vis-à-vis moralism in general. The ethical itself is simply out of the interest and purpose of Schmitt's thinking of the political. That the political as it is can and should be an independent variable to look at the structural mechanism of war and power seems rather the clearest Schmittian point. 68) Agamben(1998), 25. 138 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 foremost. It all and only represents a purely teleological logic of critique to essentialize the play of reason for Husserl, whereas for Agamben the "inclusive exclusion," qua the paradox of sovereign politics as such, has a negative function and consequence as a source of immoral action such as violence and killing of actual human bodies, rather than being a moral ground. In this complexity out of the involvement of the ethical, the phenomenological logic of critique and subjectivity is political neither literally in Schmittian sense insofar as what it decides is not an existential extermination of a physical entity, nor paradoxically in Agambenian sense for it sublimates the paradox itself into a teleological ethical command. In consideration of all that sort of 'counter-Schmittian', 'unAgambenian' complicatedness and differentiation, we regard the Husserlian logic of the teleological with which the European-philosophical spiritual habitude is ethically purified on the ground of the idea of genuine science and critique, still and precisely, as a political reality for the following reasons: in that Husserlian structure, every other cannot but be caught in the critical radar of philosophy according to the internal cultural-disciplinary demand; the suspended other, whatever its form may be, during the universal epochē can never stay outside legitimately; even when the other never want to be included and never ask for it, simply being outside showing no interest in and desire for being reborn in the European philosophical signification, the teleologically ethical responsibility internally demanded by the idea of philosophy decides that such mode of existence and living is not legitimate and such state of affairs is not right; the decision of 'who I am' implements the impossibility for the other to be present as a definite other which expresses an original meaning of their own outside the reach of my rational power; in the end, the Husserlian inclusive exclusion occasions a diastrophism of the whole meaning An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 139 system itself, i.e., a rearrangement or reconfiguration of the space of legitimacy for all beings, in which the normative relation between the exclusive mineness and the included otherness is constantly reordered. Eventually the decision of how, in what way, the other as a teleological object of philosophical critique can and must exist, marks up the highest political moment of the purely metaphysical-ethical exception. Then, doesn't the political shine through the ethical in Husserl precisely back in the Schmittian sense? For Schmitt the ethical is neither a means to nor an end of the political, but something that already belongs to the political as a structural part of its mechanism. This implies that the decision of what the good is itself can be already a political decision. Thus one has no reason to interpret the Schmittian view that the political is prerequisite in order to talk about humanity as if the political itself were an ethical tenet as Leo Strauss does.69) The good is merely an interest and an object of ethics as a discipline. A relentless appealing to the ethical, as we have seen through Husserl's phenomenology, has nothing to do with anything good as such. Rather we need to see through more urgently, first and foremost, the structure and mechanism in which the phenomenological speech of the ethical subjectivity and critique justifies itself and operates its institutional right to speak. Given that the interest of the political is not the good as such, but how and on what condition, as what the good itself is decided, the phenomenological structure of the speaking of the ethical with a presupposition of what the good already is rather verifies the mechanism of the political. The Husserlian ethical bespeaks the political in each step of its utterance, precisely in regard that 69) See footnote 67). 140 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 whenever the ethical is said in the phenomenological context of idealization, it always already finalizes the good itself; what is to be the state that can be legitimatized as good is constantly decided with and during the phenomenological purification. 6. Conclusion In the move of the phenomenological subject and critique in Husserl, the logic of the political comes out in both Schmittian and counterSchmittian fashions in a quite intermingled and indistinguishable manner as we have seen thus far; while the phenomenological decision on the ground of which the exceptional power of the ideal origin and the European philosophical spirituality is affirmed and reaffirmed follows the Schmittian logic of the political, the phenomenological mechanism of critique exhibits once a definite counter-Schmittian moment when it mutates the logic of an exclusive politics into the logic of an inclusive ethics as the condition for the possibility of thinking 'what it is to be human.' In this situation, we now conclude that, in one way or another, the Husserlian critical philosophical subject is a politico-theological subject who makes a Schmittian decision of who the other is in the form of a phenomenological decision of what is a spiritual decadence to be exterminated; this political decision is made with the operation of the very counter-Schmittian depoliticizing apparatus of the ethical. As such it bears out a possibility of a conflict caused from an unallowed suspending or an unasked inclusion, which can turn to a crisis when it is to be shaped into a concrete mode of resistance to philosophical reason. Precisely to that extent, the phenomenological critique nourished from the metaphysicaltheological power of Causa Sui and the teleology of reason An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 141 manifests itself as a bare political phenomenon, insofar as it never breaks out the strict legitimacy-illegitimacy distinction boundary and the decision on the exception that has a double denotation as the exception of ideal-transcendental subjectivity as the force of critique and the exception of the state of emergency as the crisis in the relational power-hierarchy. One reason that the Schmittian and the counter-Schmittian moments are crisscrossed in Husserl is that Schmitt takes body- whether it is a body of bios or zoē- as a categorical threshold for the work of the political, whereas in Husserl the political plays on nous. Thus it may well be questionable how much, how directly the Schmittian logic of the political is applicable, albeit strategically, when the existential threshold moves from body to spirit, if one insists that the actual possibility of physical removal itself should be the most substantial Schmittian theoretical element. Indeed, the flesh of otherness and its physical elimination are central Schmittian elements concerning the possibility of the political. Thus if our purpose were to statically juxtapose Husserl by Schmitt in a mechanical semantic comparison of some of their separate concepts and terms dogmatically guided by the Schmittian idea and definition of the political and political theology, our whole task itself would become an absurdity. Quite distanced from it, our motif was rather to look into the political structured in the system of Husserl's phenomenology. For that purpose, we focused on the structural mechanism in which the political appears and functions precisely in the mode and entanglement of hierarchical power-relation and commanding decision. Schmitt was utilized as a strategic instrument to envisage the political in such Husserlian particularity. The utility of Schmitt can be acknowledged to the extent that it helps to clarify the phenomenologically thematized metaphysical power precisely 142 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 with respect to the political. In that respect, the lens of Schmitt did a useful service for us to situate Husserl around the axis of the political. An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 143 References Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Standford University Press, 1998. Derrida, J., Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. 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Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978 [Formale und Transzendentale Logik: Versuch enier Kritik der logischen Vernunft, Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974]. , "Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy," 144 ║ 철학과 현상학 연구 trans. Ted E. Klein, Jr. & William E. Pohl, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5:3, Fall, 1974. , Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983 [Ideen zu einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die Reine Phänomenologie, Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950]. Koselleck, R., Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathologies of Modern Society, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Landgrebe, L., The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, Don Welton ed. Cornell: Ithaca, 1981. Rancière, J., Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999. Schmitt, C., Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. , The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Strauss, L., Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. J. Harvey Lomax, in The Concept of the Poitical. 접수일: 2018년 8월 27일 심사일: 2018년 8월 27일 ~ 9월 19일 수정일: 2018년 9월 26일 게재확정일: 2018년 9월 26일 An Observation of the Political in Husserl's .../ Yusuk ║ 145 <국문초록> 후썰 현상학적 비판과 주체성에 내재한 정치성 관찰: 슈미트식 규명 이유숙(서울대 철학사상연구소 객원연구원) "정치적인 것" 또는 "정치적임"(the political)은 칼 슈미트 정치이론에 서 핵심적 역할을 하는 개념이다. 친구와 적을 실존적으로 구분하는 것 을 이 개념논리의 핵심으로 간주하고, 모든 서구 근대 국가정치이론의 권력개념의 근간을 서구신학에서 찾고 있는 슈미트의 정치신학적 사유는 많은 논란과 함께 오랫동안 널리 논의되고 다양하게 해석되어 왔다. 한 편, 우리는 자칭 최고형태의 형이상학이자 철학운동의 한 형태인 후썰현 상학 체계 전반을 관통하는 일종의 "구조적 정치성"이 있음을 발견한다. 특히 후썰식 현상학적 주체와 비판 개념의 형이상학적 이론구조는 "정치 적"이라는 개념으로 표상되고 파악되는 특성을 분명히 보이고 있다. 이러 할 때, 우리는 슈미트식 정치 개념과 논리가 우리가 후썰현상학의 형이 상학적 움직임을 구조적으로 동기적으로 추동하고 있는 것으로 보고 있 는 그 정치성을 드러내게 하는데 유용한 관찰과 분석의 도구적 틀을 제 공할 수 있음을 본다. 이 논문은 후썰이론 전반에 걸쳐 중심적인 이론적 역할을 담당하는 현상학적 주체-원험(原驗)적 초월자 주체(transcendental ideal subject) -에 존재론적 .구조적으로 내재하고 있는 일종의 분명한 정치적성(politicality)을 가시화하고자 하며, 그 작업에서 슈미트를 어떻게 전략적으로 유용할 수 있는지 보여주고자 한다. 주제분류: 현상학 비판, 비판이론, 주체성 이론 주제어: 슈미트, 후썰, 정치적임(the political), 초월원험주체, 보편비판, 구조적특질