To a conception of the human

simultaneously, its humanity. It remains within the realm of the humanly-spiritual without exhibiting the dark irrationalism of the human soul”²⁶⁰. The capacity to perceive this middle ground, irreducible to a formula and yet still a system of its own is the meaning of the healthy human understanding.

human being, namely, to a way of thinking.

The characteristic, that is, the non-substantive nature of this concept of the human becomes clear when we consider the striking rhetorical difference between the terms

“humanité” or “Menschheit” which Schmitt critiques in The Concept of the Political and his positive employment of terms like “Humanität”, “Menschlichkeit” and “the humane” (das Humane) in Roman Catholicism²⁶⁶. Without wanting to enter too deeply into the ultimately irresolvable question of these semantic fields' connotations, it can be said that Schmitt's argument in Roman Catholicism differentiates itself from his critique of humanity in that it is not a definition of humanity as the collective of human beings but rather the attempt to describe the characteristic sense of what it means for something to remain within the realm of the human, for which reason he, with both “Menschlichkeit” as well as “das Humane”, employs substantivized adjectives, that is qualities. Recently, Jürgen Habermas has described Schmitt's attitude towards a concept of “humanity” in the context of its resonance among American neo-conservatives: Schmitt “lumps humanity (Humanität) together with beastiality”²⁶⁷. While it is indeed true that Schmitt waged an intellectual war against the idea of a civilizing “humanité”, it is also ironic that Habermas should emphasize Schmitt's distaste for Humanität because it is precisely in a concept of Humanität that a part of Schmitt's deepest anthropological thought is to be found. We will return to examine Schmitt’s critique of the terms “humanité” and “Menschheit” and, in particular, to look at a logical problem which it causes in Schmitt’s thought at the end of this chapter.

The human, as Schmitt wants to employ it in Roman Catholicism is rooted in a sense of proportion, in understanding the parameters between which the human being moves. It is interested in grasping the human, in a way similar to the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, in difference to the merely biological which ultimately amounts to a technical machine (Betrieb), regulated only by materially immanent needs, and yet, at the same time, to insist upon the inability of a purely technical thought to grasp the humanity of the human being. The focus of the present chapter lies in describing the general way in which Schmitt's thought can be seen as an attempt to overcome the problem of modernity's dualistic thought. By examining his concept of representative thought we have tried to show that Schmitt is not only interested in finding a solution to dualistic thought, but also that he conceives of this higher, non-dualistic form of rationality in the explicit terms of

266 Here I generally provide the German terms, because the differences between the terms he uses are lost in translation into English. For, with the exception of “das Humane” which could be translated as “the humane”, all other terms translate as “humanity”.

267 Habermas, Jürgen. Der gespaltene Westen, p. 31.

the human. This employment of the human as a descriptor is, however, also more than one adjective among others. The specific conceptual meaning of the human is the two-fold designation of, firstly, an existence located between an overly occasionalist, agonistic Romanticism and a pretentiously objective dogmatic pseudo rationality of economic thought and, secondly, a rationality which accounts for this neither purely material nor purely spiritual mode of existence; inhabitant and observer of the particularly human sphere of existence it is the only thought capable of overcoming the radical dualisms of modernity and revealing the world in its “real presence” (Realpräsenz).

What significance such a concept of the human carries for the interpretation of Schmitt’s thought can be seen if we recall the exclusively pessimistic-decisionistic anthropology so often attributed to Schmitt's thought. Thus, while not intended to negate the presence of authoritarian, dualistic-decisionistic elements in Schmitt’s thought, it should also be clear by now that no reading of Schmitt’s thought is complete unless it accounts for the pathos of holistic mediation beyond that of mere decisionism, articulated with particular clarity in Roman Catholicism. This holism has been picked up on by Ruth Groh: “Schmitt understands this regression, the ‘true ritornar al principio' as a ‘return to the undistorted, uncorrupted nature’. […] Where is there space in his thought, a place in his discourse, for the concept of a ‘undistorted, uncorrupted nature’, which has within it an upright knowledge which we might ascertain?”²⁶⁸. Why, in other words, did the presumably so pessimistic thinker of the political also once write in The Visibility of the Church that: “Whoever still recognizes the sin of men so deeply is forced by the incarnation of God to return to the belief that the human being and the world are ‘by nature good’”²⁶⁹? Is this not more than an aberration, ascribable to a certainly unimportant and eccentrically 'early', 'catholic' text of the ultimately Manichean misanthropic political thinker²⁷⁰? Nicolaus Sombart's 1991 study The German Men and their Enemies (Die Deutsche Männer und ihre Feinde) also approaches this question, though formulated differently. Reading Schmitt psychoanalytically, Sombart has argued that Schmitt, the product of Willhelmine Germany who knew no revolt against the mother²⁷¹, dreamt, with so many of his contemporaries, of a revolt against the father, against the suffocatingly authoritarian and militaristic organization of prussianized Germany, possessed by the oedipal desire, with which Schmitt describes Kleist in the essay Two Graves,

268 Groh, Ruth. Heillosigkeit der Welt, p. 293. The phrases “ritornar al principio” and “return to the undistorted, uncorrupted nature” can be found in: ZNE, p. 86.

269 Schmitt, Carl. The Visibility of the Church, pp. 45-59 in: RC, trans. Ulmen, G.L.; German: Die Sichtbarkeit der Kirche, pp. 100-116 in: Der Fürst dieser Welt.

270 Galli, Carlo. Genealogia, p. 230.

271 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 8: “Has there ever been a revolt against the mother?”.

to find “the empress’ bed”²⁷². Not only Schmitt, but an entire generation of German thinkers put forth the strongest arguments for an authoritarian, partriarchical world view and society while secretly dreaming of a freedom from all authority²⁷³. Thus, Sombart argues, Schmitts work Land and Sea (Land und Meer) is, in reality, a return to the sea, “le retour à la mer” –

“Oh oracle-like nature of language” – to the French “mère”, a return to the mother²⁷⁴. Sombart's interpretation is certainly unique and diverges from both the mainstream juristic-political reading as well as Groh's mythical theological reading. Yet, what Groh's question as well as Sombart’s study attempts to reveal is the presence of what we might call an 'anthropological negative'. This anthropological negative is, like the negative of a photograph, an inversion. The anthropological negative is not therefore the negative anthropology, but rather the negative of the negative anthropology, in short, a positive anthropology. Parallel to, in almost perfect opposition to everything that he argued in his writings, Schmitt's most secret and deepest desire was not the patriarchal authoritarianism of Political Theology, not the Victory of the Soldier over the Bourgeoisie²⁷⁵, but the ecstatic release, the absolute dissolution of all authority: “the true 'ritornar al principio'”, “retour a la mère”, not the radically decisionistic sovereign, but the holistic vision of the human in all its presence.

Without depicting Schmitt as a secret anti-authoritarian, the concept of the human which we are investigating necessarily contradicts an overly authoritarian and, regarding the Concept of the Political’s anthropological confession, therefore anthropologically pessimistic reading of Schmitt’s thought. What emerges from an anthropological reading of Roman Catholicism is a conception of the human beyond the dualistic thought of modernity, not that of an isolated individual but rather a human existence embedded in its corresponding “civitas humana”, a picture of the human at once anti-technological and opposed to the

“Präzisionsmechanismus” and yet in possession of the deeply rational capacity for distinctions. It is this middle position to which Schmitt refers with the “specific rationality” of the Catholic Church, its “healthy human understanding”. The principle of the healthy human understanding is a non systematic and yet coherent sense or feel, not so much for the 'rational'

272 Schmitt, Carl. Zwei Gräber, pp. 35-53 in: ECS, p. 43. Sombart, Nicolaus. Die deutschte Männer und ihre Feinde. Carl Schmitt – ein deutsches Schicksal zwischen Männerbund und Matriarchatsmythos, München:

Hanser 1991, p. 360.

273 Whether or not Sombart’s all too often disparagingly received interpretation of Schmitt goes too far in its psychoanalytic reading of Schmitt’s thought need not be resolved here. Important is that Sombart’s study represents the most extensive analysis in the tradition of Adorno (The Authoritarian Personality, New York:

Harper 1950), Fromm (Escape from Freedom, New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart 1941) and Reich (Massenpsychologie des Faschismus), of a clearly present ‘authoritarian character’s’ presence in Schmitt’s thought.

274 Sombart, Nicolaus. Die deutschte Männer und ihre Feinde, p. 304.

275 Sombart, Nicolaus. Die deutschte Männer und ihre Feinde, pp. 22-30; Schmitt, Carl. Der Sieg des Bürgers über den Soldat.

but for the 'reasonable' and the plausible²⁷⁶. Opposed to the distortion of the golden middle, Schmitt's concept of a “healthy human understanding” is the basis upon which “the antithesis of man ‘by nature evil’ and ‘by nature good’ – this decisive question for political theory – is in no sense answered by a simple yes or no in the Tridentine Creed”²⁷⁷.

Thus far we have focused on investigating and bringing to light the structure of this specifically human rationality, focusing on Schmitt’s explicit interaction with this discourse on rationality in its Catholic form. In order to see that and how this concept of a human middle is anything but a footnote in Schmitt’s thought it is instructive for us consider two other ways in which the conception of the human makes itself visible in Schmitt's thought.