|
March 17, 2004
The argument so far is that Schmitt, along with a host of others--eg., the Georg Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness,-- found Weber's ethical responsibility standing in resolute opposition to an abstract reason untenable. Both make a Hegelian turn to concrete being against Weber's neo-Kantian duality of value-free reason and value.
In making this turn Schmitt does not see the concrete and the qualitative as something that is pre-modern and counterposed to a formal and quantitative instrumental reason. Or as needing to be willed into the modern present. He holds that modernity produces its own form of the concrete and qualitiative.
So Schmitt understands modernity in dualistic terms that are interrelated. Thus an unrestrained, irrational subjectivity is interrelated with a hyper objectivity of abstract reason.
What then is the modern form the concrete and the qualititative? Schmitt identifies the modern form of subjectivity as romanticism---by which is meant subjective expression that aesthetizices objects. Romantics seek out objects and situations as occassions for the expression of their subjective feelings. This romanticism has a latent irrationality. Romanticism both celebrates the concrete and particularity and infuses the technologically disenchanted world of modernity with meaning and value.
This is not a historical argument. It has relevance today in two ways.
We find the dichotomy of abstract reason and a private romantic subjectivity within the contmporary liberalism; whether this be the economic or political variety. I have mentioned the duality of economic instrument reason and irrationality before. But political liberalism also works in terms of public reason's formally public bounds of liberal politics that are maintained against expressly individual romantic sensibilities.
Secondly, aestheticism is alive and well. Aestheticism has come to be the:
'....spiritual link between the individuals of the industrialized world, the shape of our ethical life. We now equate a meaningful life to the pursuit of unique experiences. We speak of an ideal life that is rich in encounters with the world: one should travel, one should develop one's tastes in art and music and food, one should have variety, one should be open to new experiences, one should "experience" love, one should even "experience" God. '
These individual experiences are all given an aesthetic twist by which is meant beautiful.
In Political Romanticism Schmitt tackles romanticism. He analysis and criticizes the romantic movement for performing a dangerous form of poetization and aesthetization. He argues that there is nothing wrong with aesthetics qua aesthetics, provided it remains within its own sphere. What romanticism does is to aestheticize everything.
What then is political romanticism? It is left wing revolutionary action that views history as the univeralsing of Enlightenment values. It is intervention into, and control over history, through revolution, It is also the counter-revolutionary notion of history as the organic development of a people to block a leftist revolution.
|
