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Secularization and Political Myth

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Secularization and Political Myth Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Secularization and political myth Lessons from the Schmitt-Blumenberg debate Promoter: (Prof.) dr. Andre Cloots A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy (MA) By Jonathan Sozek Leuven, May 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1. Aim of the paper 2 2. Why is this debate so little known in English? 3 Chapter One: Groundwork of the Schmitt-Blumenberg debate 1. Introduction 6 2. Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) 6 3. Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) 17 Chapter Two: Reconstruction of the debate 1. Introduction 26 2. Schmitt’s postscript to Political Theology II (1969) 26 3. Blumenberg’s new chapter on Schmitt (1973) 31 4. The Schmitt-Blumenberg correspondence (1971-78) 41 5. Blumenberg on Goethe’s ‘extraordinary saying’ (1979) 51 6. Conclusion: ‘the logic of their difference’ 60 Chapter Three: Myth and political myth 1. Introduction 65 2. Schmitt: myth as irrational theory 65 3. Blumenberg: myth as nonconceptual material 72 4. Conclusion: from myth to political myth 81 Conclusion 1. Reassessing ‘the logic of their difference’ 86 Appendix: The Schmitt-Blumenberg correspondence (1971-1978) 88 Bibliography 110 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Aim of this paper These pages examine a debate between two German scholars of the last century, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Hans Blumenberg. The most explicit point at issue between them concerns the status of the category of ‘secularization’ as a way of describing the relation between certain kinds of concepts – namely between Christian theological or metaphysical concepts on the one hand, and modern legal and political ones on the other. In broad outline their difference on this issue can be stated briefly: According to Schmitt, we need to develop a ‘sociology of concepts’ – he calls it ‘political theology’ – in order to uncover this conceptual relation of ‘derivation’ (i.e., their status as ‘secularized’ concepts) and thereby reveal the dependency and ‘illegitimacy’ of certain concepts in the modern theory of the state, especially sovereignty. Blumenberg, against this, argues that the very notion that some concepts are ‘secularized versions’ of other concepts rests on a misunderstanding about the nature of conceptual change; in his view there is nothing for such a political theology to do since in fact modern concepts are not derivative from earlier, Christian ones but rather are, for other reasons, ‘legitimate’. Such, in any case, are the highly abstract terms in which their debate was conducted. As we shall see however, the lessons one can take away from the Schmitt-Blumenberg debate are more concrete and extend beyond this rather technical arena. For several reasons this debate has so far received little attention in English-language scholarship. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct and assess it more thoroughly than has yet been done in English and, by defending a new and enlarged reading of ‘the logic of their difference’ (as Blumenberg puts it in a letter to Schmitt), to show its contemporary relevance. Accordingly I begin, in chapter one, by outlining the ‘groundwork’ of their debate through an examination of two texts in which their own positions on these issues are most clearly elaborated: Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) and Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966). Then, in chapter two, I reconstruct their debate itself through a close reading of the three published texts and series of letters in which it was conducted. (As no English translation of these letters has yet been published I have included my own translation as an appendix to this paper.) I conclude with an effort to state clearly ‘the logic of their difference’ insofar as this can be determined from these texts. My contention shall be, however, that the full implications and relevance of this ‘logic’ can be appreciated only once 2 one broadens one’s horizon of inquiry to include a consideration of Schmitt’s and Blumenberg’s writings on myth and the political implications of these. To this end, in chapter three, I examine these writings in the context of Schmitt’s and Blumenberg’s political thought to show how they serve to clarify and extend the conclusions reached in chapters one and two. Specifically, and more than this, I draw attention to a new and surprising conclusion apparent on this now-broader horizon: namely, that despite their debate’s explicit concern with the logic and status of the category of secularization, a close examination of that concern in all its dimensions reveals that the difference between them is finally rooted elsewhere, i.e. in their possession of basically different political intuitions about the desirability (and indeed the possibility) of establishing a division of powers, and about the role of ‘myth’ and other non-conceptual ‘materials’ (e.g., metaphor, symbol, etc.) in either preventing or preserving such a division. For Schmitt, we need always to consolidate power, and rely crucially on such ‘materials’ in our efforts to do so; for Blumenberg, we need always to break it up, and do so precisely through an ongoing and broadly rational process he calls ‘work on myth’. In a word, I suggest that Schmitt and Blumenberg differ most fundamentally in their conceptions of the nature and function of political myth. In conclusion, I reassess the logic of their difference in light of this new dimension. 2. Why is this debate so little known in English? I’ve suggested that several factors have kept this debate from the attention of scholars working in English, and something should be said about these before proceeding. Indeed, this lack of attention is not surprising. Schmitt published just one text addressing Blumenberg’s work, and this became available in translation only in 2008. The series of letters they exchanged between 1971 and 1978 was published in German only in 2007 and has not been translated. Though certainly this lack of textual availability has been the greatest factor inhibiting the debate’s English reception, this has been coupled with other factors: in Schmitt’s case, mostly ad hominem worries; in Blumenberg’s, mostly difficulties of style. Carl Schmitt’s active entanglement with the Nazi regime, though brief (1933-36), was in many ways more damning even than Martin Heidegger’s1. Still today he is known widely as a ‘dangerous’ thinker and, by some, as ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’2. As many have argued, Schmitt’s publications during the 1920s may be regarded as having sped the demise 1 Schmitt and Heidegger joined the Nazi party in the same month, May 1933. 2 Cf. Muller 1999, a study of Schmitt’s thought which takes as its title ‘A Dangerous Mind’. For an especially critical engagement with Schmitt see Stephen Holmes chapter entitled ‘Schmitt: The debility of liberalism’ (Holmes1993). 3 of the Weimar Republic and directly paved the way for Hitler’s seizure of power. There is certainly truth in this, though also there are reasons for regarding Schmitt’s Nazi adventure more as a consequence of personal ambition, opportunism, and fear than as a logical outgrowth of his legal theory3. In fact since the 1980s Schmitt, a stalwart of the right, has ironically won the attention of many on the political left (e.g., Chantal Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek) who discern in his writings on the allegedly self-contradictory logic of liberal democracy a critique avant la lettre of currently dominant Rawlsian4 and Habermasian ways of thinking about the state and political community5. His work has also been important for those on the political right, for example Heinrich Meier6, and likewise among those who find in his ‘political theology’ a way of understanding the motivations underlying recent expressions of Islamist violence. And so Schmitt’s work, though still generally regarded as dangerous, has enjoyed a kind of renaissance in recent years. The reception of Hans Blumenberg’s work has been less dramatic. Only several of his dozens of essays have been translated, though three of his longest and most important books are available due to the Herculean efforts of one man, Robert M. Wallace, who during the 1980s rendered their combined two thousand pages of uncommonly dense German academic prose lucidly into English. Blumenberg’s allusive and even tangential style, thick with anecdotes and seemingly minor historical details, is not immediately attractive to an English philosophical readership more likely to harbor a taste for desert landscapes in its prose7. Yet one may expect that Blumenberg, like Schmitt, is in for something of a revival. His important early essay ‘Paradigms of a Metaphorology’ (1962), which presents the ‘logic’ of his own philosophical project more clearly and succinctly than anything currently available in 3 Ellen Kennedy makes a strong case for this point in her study of Schmitt’s work during the Weimar period (Kennedy 2004) 4 See Dyzenhaus (1996) for a comparative reading of Schmitt and Rawls. 5 See for example Agamben’s The State of Exception (Agamben 2005) of the collection edited by Mouffe entitled ‘The Challenge of Carl Schmitt’, to which both Mouffe and Žižek have contributed articles (Mouffe 2005) 6 I have not treated Meier’s work in this paper, though my own conclusions do in the end have some points of commonality with his. His argument, worked out primarily in his study of the so-called ‘hidden dialogue’ between Schmitt and Leo Strauss (Meier 1995) and his follow-up study of Schmitt (Meier and Brainard 1998), draws a sharp distinction between political theology and political philosophy. Although I would question the viability of this distinction applied generally, Meier does seem to get very right, at least, the nature of Schmitt’s political theology as he himself understood it.
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