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April 3, 2004
My month to six weeks contract work to do philosophy inside the machinery of federal Parliament is drawing to a close.
My very intense experience over the last month of dealing with the conflicts within the political machinery of the state reaffirmed Carl Schmitt's thesis that the essential political distinction is the one between friend and enemy.
That distinction is fundamental and elemental.
Without it the strife, chaos and passion of politics makes little sense. Politics in Parliament is a case of armed autonomous armed groups (political parties) confronting one another across a shifting political battlefield. It is a kind of ongoing civil war.
Within that battle field fear is the key emotion. The fear of being destroyed by one's enemy.
Outside the media prism the conflict within political life looks like mud slinging. But inside the political institutions the conflict has a different existential quality. In the Concept of the Political Carl Schmitt describes it this way:
"Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme cases 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." (p. 27)
A federal democracy means that there are institutional boundaries to the conflict that constrain the ever threatening potentiality of war and uncertainity arising from the radical subjectivity of Schmitt's statement----that every person is the judge of good and evil. The institutions place limits on the likelihood of perosns being allowed to resort to violence to defend their judgements.
However, the threat of danger is ever present. As Thomas Hobbes indicates the essence of war iconsists not in the actual fighting but the known disposition to do so. Within Schmitt's enemy concept is the ever present possibility of conflict.
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