Carl Schmitt's Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of "the Outermost Sphere"
- Carl Schmitt’s Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of “the Outermost Sphere”
Heinrich Meier has argued at length that Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy is in fact a theological politics, one driven by a pre- or even anti-philosophical submission to what Schmitt allegedly perceived to be divine authority. This essay contests this reading of Schmitt, and argues that his famous secularization thesis should be understood not simply as an assertion of the diachronic relationship between a now-dead theological form of life and our current secular culture, but rather as an assertion of the synchronic structure of political authority. Political authority, on Schmitt’s account, is located in the political decision, and his work on secularization can be properly understood only in the context of his disturbing account of the decision. When that is done we can see that politics for Schmitt is a matter of borders and the authority that creates them—authority that by definition acts and moves in excess of those very borders. Politics in other words is metaphysical, in much the same way that Kant’s discussion of Grenzen and Schranken in the conclusion of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics is. But with one crucial difference: in Schmitt’s case, the paradoxes of the border and of “the Outermost Sphere” are applied to the living human body.
Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstance, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.
William James
What is secularization? The word “secular” comes to us from the Latin saeculum (breed or generation) which is itself akin to serere (to sow). The Late Latin saecularis denotes those things that come “once in an age.” There are good and familiar reasons to define our own age in terms of the rise of the secular: In response to the development of modern science and to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new and distinctive mode of political life arose, one devoted to the skepticism, tolerance, and privacy that regularly goes by the shorthand “Liberalism.” In considering liberalism as a mode of secularization it is instructive to recall the central lesson of Locke’s Letter on Tolerance (1689): in order to secure a limited religious tolerance, Locke makes religion a private affair.[1] Though the distinction is an unstable one, he strives to locate religion “within” men and women, and to limit political authority to “outward” externals.[2] “The Church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. [The two are] infinitely different from each other” (184). Though Locke describes churches as houses of “public” worship (175), this is a public that lacks all means of enforcing internal discipline. “The arms by which the members of the society are to kept within their duty are exhortations, admonitions, and advises.” Should these fail, the church’s only recourse is excommunication, without, however, any accompanying “rough usage of word or action” (179). It can offer and deny membership, but it cannot give this membership a political form. Significantly, the justification for this limitation is that churches remain, vis-a-vis one another and the state, private persons: “particular churches . . . stand, as it were, in the same relation to one another as private persons among themselves” (180). Indeed, Locke argues that the authority of the various churches is delineated by the authority of the private person—an authority that, of course, is trumped by that of the state. His example is significantly that of sacrifice: a private person can, under normal circumstances (but not under abnormal ones) kill a calf. Hence a church can, under normal circumstances, sacrifice a calf. But no private person, and hence no church, can ever be allowed to “sacrifice infants” (198). Only the denatured laws of nature are of political significance, as they are required to guarantee the performance of promises, etc. that are in turn...
