Motus Mentis

In a pair of posts at Substack and his own website, Bill Vallicella revisits a conversation he and I had a couple of years ago about the shrinkage of circles of moral inclusion in periods of deep political strife.

I had commented on this passage of his:

…haven’t the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all?

This question touches on the deepest moral issues. It asks us to choose between the universal moral inclusion that we, as modern citizens of a (residually, at least) Christian civilization are drawn to see as axiomatic, and the practical realities of survival and conflict in a fallen world. Are we right to extend moral inclusion to those who would not extend it to us? Should we “turn the other cheek” if it means not only our personal destruction, but the destruction of all that we cherish, and perhaps even the triumph of objective evil? (And yes, before you ask: I do believe that objective evil exists.)

Thus framed, the answer would seem to be “no” — but choosing that answer brings with it the responsibility for determining where that line is to be drawn: when to give up on the power of love and the hope of redemption and reconciliation, and irreversibly to harden our hearts and “hoist the black flag“. To choose wrongly would be the profoundest of moral errors, and so we, as decent people, will naturally err on the side of caution — even when that error might well be fatal.

These questions confront us with clamant urgency in our current political climate. In the comment-thread at his website, Bill mentions Carl Schmitt’s observation that the essence of the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, Schmitt first presented this analysis in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political:

A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories. In contrast to the various relatively independent endeavors of human thought and action, particularly the moral, aesthetic, and economic, the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way. The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced. Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself.

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

– Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (pp. 25-26).

Bill and I have had some conversations about Schmitt over the past year or so, but I think he has been somewhat reluctant really to “grasp the nettle” that Schmitt offers. His recent comment, though, makes me think that we have somewhat different understandings of what Schmitt is saying, which I hope to clear up.

Bill’s comment was this:

Carl Schmitt maintained that the Freund-Feind, friend-foe, distinction is the essence of the political.

I don’t go that far. My position is that, at the present time, in the USA, we are locked in a existential battle with our political enemies, the cadre Dems. So it is Us versus Them, here and now as a contingent matter of fact.

We differ with our politcal enemies on values and on facts. For example, truth is not leftist value for the Left. For us it is. For the Left, math is racist, which is worse than false: it doesn’t even make sense.

And so on down the line.

To this I replied:

I understand Schmitt’s position to be that the essence of the political is that it always holds the potential for becoming actual friend-enemy combat. It is not not that it will come to that at all times, but rather that it is the essence of the political to create sides that will fight and die if, by contingency, they must.

That we soon may find ourselves fighting with “our political enemies, the cadre Dems” is, I think, perfectly consistent with Schmitt’s analysis.

Bill expertly clarified:

You may well be right about that. Do you have some references for me? Or better yet, a quotation (with a reference)? The difference is between:

A) Necessarily, in every political arrangement there is the potential for existential conflict, friend-enemy combat, a potential that may or may not become actual

and

B) Necessarily, in every political arrangement there will be existential conflict, friend-enemy combat.

(A) is much more plausible than (B), and more charitable an interpretation of Schmitt. On the other hand, it is a much weaker claim, bordering as it does on the obvious.

That we soon may find ourselves fighting with our political enemies, not just verbally and politically (in the usual sense of the term) but also extra-politically (which includes such horrors as regular assasinations, sabotage, concentration camps, etc.) is consistent with both (A) and (B).

This is exactly right — although I think Schmitt’s is neither a weak claim, nor one that borders on the obvious (in our era, at least), because we have lived so long in a well-functioning republic built on such deep commonality that the essential characteristic of the political — namely its intrinsic and unalienable potential for genuinely existential violence — is all but forgotten.

Bill asked me for a passage in support of my interpretation of Schmitt (the one that he marks as option A just above). I’ll offer this one (my emphasis):

The antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on. In any event it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these. If the antithesis of good and evil is not simply identical with that of beautiful and ugly, profitable and unprofitable, and cannot be directly reduced to the others, then the antithesis of friend and enemy must even less be confused with or mistaken for the others. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party. Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.

Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support.

– Ibid, (pp. 26-27).

What sets this characteristic of the political apart from the other distinctions Schmitt compares it to is its capacity for promotion to the genuinely (and practically) existential. Although it resembles, for example, the competitive opposition we see in business or sport, those rivalries are circumscribed by formal rules — rules of the game, or of law. But in modern, secular societies, with transcendent law entirely out of the picture, politics is prior to rules — it is the exclusive source and foundation of the rules themselves — and so, when comity and commonality break down, as they are doing today, the political can present a truly existential threat. In good times, we imagine — as Schmitt also described at length in his 1929 lecture The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (PDF here) — that we have, in modern societies, eliminated the most dangerous aspects of the political by a process of legalistic proceduralization. This is mistaken, however, because no formalized political procedure can survive the stresses of unforseen and exceptional crises, or of a breakdown of commonality that erodes shared faith in the axioms that usable political theorems must rest upon.

To sum up: my reading of Schmitt’s points here is that his purpose is to make us aware that the chief feature of the political is not only its necessary division into friends and enemies, but also its ineradicable potential, because of its access to the very foundations of our societies (and therefore our lives), to amplify that distinction into sanguinary, or even mortal, conflict. That this potential may lie unrealized for long years diminishes its importance not at all.

This leaves us, still, with the question that Bill started with: how do we know, in darkening times, where we stand, morally, with regard to the political enemy? Schmitt explains that “in the extreme case, conflicts are possible”, and that “Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.”

Are we there yet?