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IMMANUEL KANT and the THEORY of RADICAL DEMOCRACY By IMMANUEL KANT AND THE THEORY OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY By Nathanael W. Vaprin Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in PHILOSOPHY August, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Gregg Horowitz Ph.D. Idit Dobbs-Weinstein Ph.D. W. James Booth Ph.D. Copyright © 2013 by Nathanael W. Vaprin All Rights Reserved To Jennifer, always. To my parents. For their patience and their love. To Gregg and Idit, for showing me the way. To my graduate school friends and colleagues. To John, Rachel, and Tonya, without whose support this project could not have been completed. TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION.........................................................................................iii Chapter I. THE SHOALS OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY..........................1 II. KANT, REVOLUTION, AND THE STATE............................42 III. CIVIC CULTURE AND TASTE...........................................98 IV. LOVE, WAR, AND THE PANTHEISMUSSTREIT: A LESSON FOR THE THEORY OF (RADICAL) DEMOCRACY.................................................................137 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................171 CHAPTER I THE SHOALS OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories. In contrast to the various relatively independent endeavours 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 the 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.1 Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the German theorist Carl Schmitt; Schmitt has become a kind of homo sacer to the theorists of the political left, in that his position is anathema - he is excluded from the scene of political debate tout court - yet his work contains challenges that, ostensibly, must be met by any theorist of democracy, be it radical, participatory, or other. He cannot simply be 1 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans., George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). pp. 25-6 1 condemned or elided, but must be considered by proponents of any democratic theory - before he is ultimately reviled and rejected. This is an ironic fate, to say the least, for a thinker who until recently was simply seen as an appendage of totalitarian barbarism: a fascist, pure and simple. He therefore has been a kind of shadow-figure of that other famous dallier with the Nazis, Martin Heidegger, whose thinking has always been too intimately embedded within the broader project of philosophy, and too much the subtle philosophical integral on its own account, to suffer precisely the same fate: where Heidegger has been the unexpellable irritant, never settled nor removed, Schmitt has been much easier to dismember in the name of fruitful dialog. He has been made to fit all too easily on a philosophical Procrustean bed: the vitality of his challenge to democracy is excised, preserved, taken up so as to test and strengthen the theory of radical democracy, while the fascist heart is left to serve as a horrific warning to liberalism's complacency. Chantal Mouffe, who, along with Ernesto Laclau, is probably most responsible for the recovery of Schmitt by theorists of radical democracy, says that "I am convinced that a confrontation with his thought will allow us to acknowledge - and therefore, be in a better position to try to negotiate - an important paradox inscribed in the very nature of liberal democracy."2 Mouffe thereby performs a theoretical amputation of 2 Chantal Mouffe, "Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy," in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe(London: Verso, 1999). p. 38. 2 Schmitt: his political metaphysic is separated from his fascist normative politics, in the hopes that each can survive on its own and so reveal the connection between them to have been inessential, rather than bearing the internal relation that Schmitt thought them to have. The Schmittian political metaphysic is in turn transplanted into Mouffe and Laclau's radical democratic theory as its own proper heart; the same maneuver shows the truth of Schmitt's original critique, that liberalism is chimerical, holding within itself an irresolvable aporia which always threatens to overtake it and transform it in practice into barbarism. I thoroughly disagree; it's my contention that when Schmitt would not have thought his criticisms any less applicable to radical vs. liberal democracy, and I think Mouffe and Laclau are wrong to to attempt to graft his political metaphysic onto any democratic theory whatsoever, for it is anti-democratic to its core. As the progenitors of radical democratic theory, they have thereby produced a construct which cannot bear its philosophical burden, and which cannot offer normative prescriptions for a more democratic polity. Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, attends to the specificity of the political in a metaphysical register, discovering what he believes is the constitutive distinction that is special to its substance: that between friend and enemy.3 For a enemy to be an enemy it is necessary only that the enemy be recognized as what is alien or different: the enemy is the 3 Schmitt. p. 26. 3 stranger. The enemy is not constituted by an disinterested normative judgment; it is "sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially different and alien".4 This is a judgment that can be made only internally, within and by the political grouping, and it is made on the basis of the enemy's appearing, in its difference, as a threat to what the group itself is. This constitutes the "intensity" of the conflict between friend and enemy, that the enemy is always a potential destroyer. For Schmitt, the life-and-death confrontation is politics, and it is at the moment at which the threat is faced as a threat to existence, to life, that the situation reaches its "most political".5 "To the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat,"6 of what Schmitt calls, curiously, "physical killing"7 Because it defines the enemy on a principle of ultimately threatening difference, a political group must define its internal bonds of friendship by this shared, peaceable sameness, the sameness of the unit of defense. My friend is she or he with whom I stand against the threat posed by the dangerously different enemy, against whose difference the person with whom I am standing comes to appear to me as the same. The group defines itself according to qualities that come into relief as fundamental similarities precisely because they are the qualities against 4 Ibid. p. 27. 5 Ibid. p. 29 6 Ibid. p. 32 7 Ibid. p. 33. 4 which the enemy is seen to differ8 the collectivity of friends has no concrete being without the collectivity of enemies against which it stands. This sense of the political, because primordial and constitutive, is ineliminable. It is both the lie and tragedy of liberal democracy that it cannot realize this, that what liberalism aims at is to erase its own identity as collectivity of friends of an enemy, instead seeing itself as a neutral space, a container, defined by the values of egalitarian tolerance and general respect for the law. Schmitt notes that this is essentially a will to peaceful co-existence among competing subject-positions. But the liberal state is simultaneously a political ideal that defines a relationship of friends and enemies, and therefore cannot avoid constituting itself on a principle of homogeneity over and against threatening outsiders. A political group that holds as a value the will to peace and tolerance is a contradiction, and, worse, it is in a state of contradiction that it cannot recognize. The will to peaceful co-existence, the ending of intergroup violence, is, in fact, the will to depoliticization of the world - but such a will is doomed. Liberal democracy discloses its own political character by revealing a covered-over will to destroy the warlike: "if the will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has become a political motive".9The war to end war, however, must be an inhuman war, 8 Ibid. p. 30 9 Ibid. p. 36. 5 the most intense, because putatively final, conflict, and thereby the most destructive imaginable moment of political engagement:the most hideous and base possible form of conflict. To Schmitt, then, the liberal, cosmopolitan will to peace hides within itself an impetus to the worst, most barbaric violence. Liberalism is a will to total war. Chantal Mouffe, in enunciating her critique of liberalism, invokes Schmitt on this point: in covering over the ways in which liberalism still requires modes of terrible, even genocidal,
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