The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas

Gavin Rae

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137591685
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

In this book, Gavin Rae analyses the foundationsof political life by undertaking a critical comparative analysis of thepolitical theologies of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. In so doing, Raecontributes to key debates in contemporary political philosophy, specifically thoserelating to the nature of, and the relationship between, the theological, thepolitical, and the ethical, as well as those questioning the existence ofahistoric metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological foundations. While thetheological is often associated with belief in a fixed foundation such as Godor the truth of a religion, Rae identifies another sense rooted inepistemology. On this understanding, the ontological limitations of humancognition mean that, ultimately, human truth is based in faith and so can neverbe certain. The argument developed suggests that Levinas' conception of thepolitical is grounded in theology in the sense of religion, particularly therevelations of Judaism. For this reason, Levinas claims that the politicaldecision is based on how to implement a prior religiously-inspired norm: justice. Schmitt, in contrast, develops a conception of the political rooted inepistemic faith to claim that the political decision is normless. Whilesympathetic to Schmitt's conception of theology and its relationship to thepolitical, Rae concludes by arguing that the emphasis Levinas places onresponsibility is crucial to understanding the implications of this. Thecontinuing relevance of Schmitt's and Levinas' political theologies is thatthey teach us that, while the political decision is ultimately normless, webear an infinite responsibility for the consequences of this normless decision.

© The Author(s) 2016

Gavin RaeThe Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas10.1057/978-1-137-59168-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Gavin Rae¹

(1)

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

End Abstract

This book examines the problem of political foundations by comparing and contrasting the role that political theology plays in the thought of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). Historically, the dominant conception of the political was rooted in and gained inspiration from theology, whereby God was understood to be the foundation of being and knowledge. Contemporary philosophy has, however, been marked by a radical questioning of the notion and nature of God specifically and foundations more generally. As such, the certainties that legitimized the notion of the political historically have been questioned and delegitimized giving rise to a renewed questioning of political and social issues that, for so long, were simply taken for granted. Rather than simply assume a fixed foundation that delineates and legitimizes one conception of the political, the questioning of foundations inherent to contemporary thinking has brought to the fore the need to re-think the political in a way that does not depend on or re-affirm the foundations that previously grounded thought. On the one hand, this has been disconcerting as it has meant that the certainties and epistemological framework(s) that structured social understandings have been undermined. This has called into question deeply held and cherished ideas and ideals and has, therefore, been upsetting for some. Others, however, have found the possibility of creating alternative ‘certainties’ and ways of doing things inherently liberating. Working out how to engage with these alternatives requires that we think about questions including ‘if the notion of fixed foundations is challenged and found to be wanting, what grounds conceptions of the political?’, ‘how can we act if there is no foundation to legitimize a particular truth as the truth?’, and ‘what can and should we do politically when claims to absolute status have been foregone?’

There are a myriad of ways to engage with these questions, but ultimately they go back to the normative question relating to the type of society we want to live in and the epistemological question of how we are to justify that normative conception. By engaging with the thought of Schmitt and Levinas, this book charts two ways in which the normative and epistemological questions posed can and have been answered. By arguing that Schmitt offers a conception of the political rooted in epistemic faith in contrast to Levinas’s conception of the political rooted in a religiously derived norm (justice), the argument developed offers holistic interpretations of both thinkers that, at times, offers readings of their work that are opposed to, what might be called, the dominant understanding of their thinking. This also feeds into a historical debate regarding the relationship between faith and reason or theology and philosophy, which will return us to the contemporary debate regarding the nature and possibility of political foundations. It may, therefore, be helpful to say something about the historical relationship between faith and reason or theology and philosophy.

At the risk of oversimplification, the traditional narrative of Western philosophical history holds that it is with the ancient Greeks that reason enters the world. There is, of course, some truth to this, but, as Eric Dodds (1951) and, before him, Friedrich Nietzsche (1999) point out, Apollo also had Dionysus. The reason of the Greeks was not total, nor was it meant to be. Indeed, reason was not even privileged, but was always subservient to the Gods. Religion and philosophy had their place, but many things were simply left to the Gods. As Western history proceeded, a number of subtle alterations took place in terms of the religion/philosophy relationship. The initial Greek division between philosophy and the Gods, which might be characterized as separate and unequal insofar as while philosophy could question, it had to leave the Gods alone, gradually morphed into a relationship, exemplified by Medieval Scholasticism, wherein philosophy became the handmaiden of theology. While Scholasticism aimed to use rational means to discuss a God who was simply presumed to exist, this rational attempt gradually led to modernity’s privileging of reason. God’s existence, which had previously been taken for granted, not only was now openly questioned but also had to be rationally justified. Reason was prized over the belief that previously sanctioned and legitimated God’s existence specifically and the truth generally. In the eighteenth century, this was expressed in a variety of ways, the two most prominent being the French Encyclopaedists’ affirmation of naturalist reason as that which provides access to the truth and, somewhat differently, Kant’s attempt to limit reason’s exercise in knowledge to the phenomenal world. The means were different, but the underlying point was the same: cognition must be naturalist and rational. This continued in the nineteenth century and, indeed, reached its zenith with a range of thinkers, including Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and, ultimately, Nietzsche, subsuming God under reason to claim that God is an expression of human cognition. For these thinkers, as for the tradition of Western modernity, religion and theology are associated with superstition, authority, and other-worldly concerns which belong to a premodern mentality and time overcome by the liberating (or for Nietzsche ‘stultifying’) progress of Enlightenment rationality. Reason was perceived to have gradually overcome the superstition, ambiguity, and slavery inherent to religion and replaced it with a focus on individuality, critical thinking, and creativity. To this end, metaphysical speculation gave way to naturalism sanctified by the certainties of scientific thinking. Authority was usurped by a critical stance no longer content to simply obey the Gods, let alone the mere mortals of the established religious authorities. Governments were no longer ordained by God as the doctrine of the Divine Rights of Kings would have us believe, but, in Abraham Lincoln’s memorable phrase, were made ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ (2012: 192). This is not, of course, to say that this movement was total; plenty of examples reveal the extent to which religious beliefs and structures continued to influence our understanding, ways of thinking, not to mention our practical activities, but, for the narrative of Western modernity, these remnants were decreasing in importance and increasingly confined to ‘backward’, primitive, and immature individuals and populaces. However, rather than be content with the ‘progress’ made by reason, those remnants of pre-modernist understanding had to be sought out and overcome.

There were two general reactions to this death of God thesis. The first was from traditional theists who simply rejected it to affirm God’s existence. While proponents tended to endlessly repeat scripture and so did not tend to engage in philosophical disputes, if we try to think with them, they may have defended their position philosophically by pointing out that Nietzsche proclaims the death of God through a madman (2001, book 3, §125). Rather than the image of a madman proclaiming God’s death being a statement about how a traditional society would judge someone making such a statement, the traditionalist’s position would be to read it as an indictment of those who make the statement. Put simply, only the mad think that God is dead. Rather than take the death of God seriously as so many had, the traditionalists advocated a return to onto-theology, a return that, politically speaking, led to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s, the growth of Hindu and Buddhist Nationalism and the Iranian Revolution in the 1950s–1970s, the Christian Right in the 1980s, and the Islamic Fundamentalism of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Islamic State in the 1990s and 2000s. While no doubt different, each is underpinned by the same basic idea: God must be affirmed more strongly than ever. Anything else is folly at best, blasphemy at worse.Whereas this response aimed to re-affirm onto-theology, another response, manifested in twentieth century Western continental philosophy, took Nietzsche’s proclamation seriously, but reminded us that the title of Nietzsche’s last book, Twilight of the Idols, warns us that while the Gods are in their twilight years and so are dying, they are not quite dead. The job must be finished meaning that the God of onto-theology, whether thought in terms of God as traditionally understood, identity, and/or fixed foundations, must be killed to free thinking from the constraints and false illusions it has been suffering from. Onto-theology is underpinned by two different, but complementary, notions: first, the idea that thinking is rooted in a unitary foundation that determines the parameters and methodology of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, and, second, the notion that there is a transcendent principle or being that thought must strive to attain to complete the inquiry. Attempts to overcome onto-theology tended to question the underlying unitary logic that supports it, reject the metaphysical association between essence and presence upon which onto-theology is based, and inquire into whether thinking has a unitary form, purpose, and end. The questioning of onto-theology was, therefore, part of a larger project that aimed to think without foundations. Ironically, the attempt to overcome foundations lies at the foundation of Heidegger’s overcoming of onto-theology through his privileging of the question of the meaning of being, Sartre’s affirmation of freedom, Foucault’s genealogical method, and Deleuze’s and Derrida’s affirmation of difference over identity. For these thinkers, any trace of onto-theology must be rooted out.

The Return of the Theological

While their approaches to the death of God thesis were very different, these two sides agree that there has been a historical process of secularization whereby God’s traditional foundational role in society has been increasingly downgraded. They do, however, disagree on the correct response to it; that is, whether to reject or affirm it. A number of contemporary philosophers, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Hent de Vries, John Caputo, Charles Taylor, Simon Critchley, and Clayton Crockett, have, however, questioned the binary logic upon which these options are based to try to navigate an alternative. While they hold that the critique proposed by Western Enlightenment means that a straightforward return to onto-theology is, philosophically speaking, untenable, these thinkers also shun the temptation to simply reject onto-theology because, it is argued, doing so all too easily continues to implicitly depend on certain theological motifs and/or be grounded in the foundational logic underpinning onto-theology. If those explicitly seeking to turn away from theology are invariably turned to another form of theology, the conclusion reached is that it is not a matter of simply affirming or rejecting onto-theology. It is time to re-examine the theological in light of past approaches to recognize the continuing relevance of theological motifs and concepts for thought without ‘falling’ into an explicit or implicit affirmation of the foundational logic constitutive of onto-theology. One way of understanding what this approach is trying to get at is to return to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols to recognize its double meaning: on the one hand, those twentieth-century thinkers mentioned above are correct to highlight that ‘twilight’ points to a coming end, as in the coming end of the Gods. But, on the other hand, ‘twilight’ also means the fuzzy moment where the darkness starts to give way to the light prior to a new awakening. Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols does not simply mean the coming end of the Gods but the moment prior to the awakening of new ones. It is exactly this ambiguous position that the return to theology has played up. This is not to simply re-affirm the past certainties of onto-theology, but entails a diagnosis about the creation of new idols either intentionally proposed—one thinks of being, freedom, difference, reason, human rights, the nation state—or unintentionally depended upon.

The theological return has, therefore, sought to explore this by challenging the presumptions of the secularization thesis on three counts: first, it challenges the reduction of Western philosophical history to a linear trajectory that forgets or ignores those thinkers—Pascal, Spinoza, de Maistre, Cortes, Levinas—who continue to think in theological terms. Second, by reducing this history to a singular, linear movement, the secularization thesis is also charged with being based in a teleological movement to a fixed truth, a reduction that shares more than a passing resemblance to traditional onto-theology’s historical narrative and insistence on a singular truth. And, third, those who simply reject onto-theology are criticized conceptually for ignoring the ways in which their so-called secular theories continue to depend upon theological motifs, structures, or ideas. Heidegger’s being, for example, appears to have almost theological significance and, indeed, in his later writings, the link with a ‘new’ religion is made explicit. In Sartre, ‘freedom’, or rather authenticity, seems to take on the significance previously occupied by God, a position that, for Deleuze and Derrida, is taken by difference. The conclusion drawn is that the theological framework, defined by a logic that relies on a fixed foundation, which has supposedly been overcome, continues to support and give meaning to so-called secular theories. If the onto-theology of the past cannot be returned to and the turn away from theology returned us to theology, we need a subtler, more nuanced understanding of the theological. Guided by the contention that the turn away from theology was too abrupt and blunt, contemporary thought has sought to re-evaluate theological sources and concepts to determine whether it can continue to offer insights that have been overlooked or dismissed.

By engaging with the notion of political theology, this book takes seriously and, indeed, mirrors the so-called theological turn that has garnered so much attention in contemporary philosophy (de Vries 1999, 2002; Taylor 2007; Critchley 2012; Crockett 2013). Having supposedly been overcome by the rational empiricism, naturalism, and secularization of Enlightenment modernity, contemporary philosophy has once again discovered the important role that theology plays in humanity’s attempts to understand itself and its world. Rather than simply reject or re-use the language, semantic content, and metaphysical structures of past theology, the aim is, as Hent de Vries explains, to

show that citations from religious traditions are more fundamental to the structure of language and experience than the genealogies, critiques, and transcendental reflections of the modern discourse that have deemed such citations obsolete [but which] have been unable to settle the debate and to silence the religious once and for all. (1999: 2–3).

This is particularly so in political philosophy, where the relationship between the political and the theological has been used to understand a raft of socio-political issues and themes and, indeed, the political itself.

The turn to the theological has also, therefore, entailed a (re)turn to the political, which, not surprisingly, has led to renewed interest in the notion of political theology. This notion is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it depends on the meaning of both aspects comprising it, both of which have been subject to much contention. Generally speaking, however, it refers to the idea that there is an intimate connection between the political and the theological whereby the political is thought to be rooted in religious doctrine, structured around the metaphysics of onto-theology, or dependent upon ‘sacred narratives, motifs, and liturgical forms to establish, legitimate, and reflect upon the sovereignty of monarchs, corporations, and parliaments’ (Hammill and Lupton 2012: 1). Put differently, political theology refers to the idea that the political, even in its supposed secular forms, is rooted in narratives and structures derived from traditional theology or unintentionally dependent upon certain privilegings that are, ultimately, rooted in theological belief or authority.

There are, of course, a number of metaphysical and epistemological aspects underpinning political theology. In terms of metaphysics, the assumption is that there is more to existence than that which is presented to the senses or human cognition. The epistemological aspect is a correlative of this in that it relates to the idea that human cognition is limited and so cannot discern the absolute truth about the remainder, but must at a point defer to faith that the world is structured in a particular way or base itself on an authority, usually religiously inspired. Put together, we find that the world is not rationally grounded meaning that political thought, and indeed thought in general, relies upon and must rely upon theological underpinnings, whether this is faith based or religiously inspired, for its judgements and knowledge. The overall aim of this theological turn in political theory is to bring to the fore the theological nature of the structures and conceptual apparatus that inform our thinking on the political, as a precursor to providing ‘new’ ways through which to think about the problems thrown up by this revealing.

Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas

The questioning of political foundations through an engagement with the notion of political theology is, therefore, a pertinent one. While this shows the contemporary relevance of the theme of this study, it does bring us to the question of the relationship between Schmitt and Levinas. After all, neither discusses the other, meaning that there is no clear entwinement of the two. While they do not discuss each other, however, there are conceptual and historical reasons as to why Schmitt and Levinas should be brought together. Conceptually, the political plays a key role in both Schmitt’s and Levinas’s thinking. While this has always been obvious with Schmitt, contemporary Levinasian scholarship has gradually orientated itself from his ethics to his conception of the political. The political is, therefore, a key aspect of both Schmitt’s and Levinas’s thinking. But this does not mean that they think about the nature of the political in isolation. Both Schmitt and Levinas think about the political in relation to the non-political, specifically the theological. While they are not theologians in the classic sense of the word, they are thinkers of the theological, meaning that both recognize and value the role that theology plays in human existence. Theological concerns are at the heart of their respective endeavours meaning that looking at their respective theories through this lens will allow us to understand their respective thinking on the political, the theological, and the relationship between the two. It will also touch on and bring to the fore a range of other issues to highlight how both thinkers understand concepts including sovereignty, law, and the other. While this will help us to understand their respective thinking on political theology, including the way it impacts on and shapes the range of issues identified above, this study complements this by employing a comparative focus to compare and contrast their respective thinking on these issues and, by extension, the nature of political theology. This will bring to the fore the similarities and differences between these two thinkers, thereby sharpening our understanding of their respective thinking and the nature of political theology itself.

The conceptual justification for why these two thinkers are focused on is complemented by a historical one, albeit one that may not be immediately apparent. There is, after all, much in thei...