Human rationality

Proceeding from our investigation of representative thought and keeping in mind its fundamental character of partial correspondence and full presence, we now turn to look at the way in which Schmitt describes the Catholic Church in its relationship to the human and, in particular, the way in which he wants to describe the Church’s representative rationality as particularly human. What we want to show is that, in confirming Schmitt's description of this representative thought in its humanity, we can also see that Schmitt conceives of the human as a particular form of rationality, that is, a particular mode of thought and access to the world, characterized not only by the idea of partial correspondence, but also by that of a middle position between the two irrationalities of an overly subjective Romantic fantasy and an overly objective technicity. In order, therefore, to understand the distinctly rational and human nature of the Catholic Church's representative thought, we begin briefly returning to look at how Schmitt describes the particular irrationality of economic thought.

This irrationality of economic thought becomes clearly visible when Schmitt writes, as we have seen, that “In the modern economy, a completely irrational consumption conforms to a totally rationalized production. A marvelously rational mechanism serves one or another demand, always with the same earnestness and precision, be it for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whatsoever”²³⁷. This ultimate irrationalism of economic thought “is so far removed from Catholic rationalism that it can arouse a specific Catholic anxiety”²³⁸. Turning to Political Theology's third chapter we read a formulation almost identical to that of Roman Catholicism when Schmitt writes: “The materialist explanation renders an isolate observation of ideological consistency impossible because it sees everywhere only ‘reflexes’, ‘reflections’

and ‘disguises’ of economic relationships. […] Precisely because of its massive rationalism economic thought can, however, easily turn into an irrational understanding of history”²³⁹. For the time being we need not concern ourselves with Schmitt's historico-philosophical argument in this passage. Important is Schmitt’s argument for the possibility of economic thought’s irrationality precisely “because of its massive rationalism”.

236 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 19; RK, p. 32: modified – N.H.. The original German reads: “Sie repräsentiert die civitas humana, sie stellt in jedem Augenblick den geschichtlichen Zusammenhang mit der Menschwerdung und dem Kreuzesopfer Christi dar, sie repräsentiert Christus selbst, persönlich, den in geschichtlicher Wirklichkeit Mensch gewordenen Gott” .

237 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 14.

238 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 14.

239 Schmitt, Carl. PT, p. 48.

That economic thought is ultimately irrational is one point. More important, however, is that “this system of unwavering objectivity” calls forth the “specifc Catholic anxiety” and horrifies the devout Catholic “precisely in its rationality”²⁴⁰. Representative of Schmitt's numerous descriptions of Catholicism in its deeply rational nature is the sentence: “The Church has its particular rationality”²⁴¹; it is “rational to the highest degree”²⁴². Rationalism and, more specifically, the “rationalist”²⁴³ are characteristics of the scientific-technical world view, not to be confused with human rationality. And of the Church's distinction between the office and person of the priest Schmitt writes that “In such distinctions lie Catholicism’s rational power of creation and, simultaneously, its humanity”²⁴⁴. Thus, the opposition between this humanity of Catholicism and a “mechanistic precisionism”²⁴⁵ should not lead us to believe that Schmitt's thought can be understood as mere anti-technological irrationalism.

Instead he assigns a specifically Catholic, Roman rational character to this humanity.

With his description of the Catholic Church Schmitt wants to make plausible the Church’s claim to a not only alternative but even superior form of reason. Thus, despite what might seem to be an opposition between Catholicism and rationalism, the opposition of technology and religion is not a matter of the irrational and the rational, but of two forms of rationality. Indeed, a dichotomy between technical, economic rationality and religious irrationality is in fact precisely the kind of dualism proper to the modern age, a sign not of its superior technical rationality, but of its tremendous deficit. It “misses the essential point, because it identifies rationalism with the thinking of the natural sciences and overlooks the fact that Catholic argumentation is based on a particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a specific juridical logic and whose focus of interest is the normative guidance of human social life”²⁴⁶.

Thus, after it becomes clear that Schmitt is interested in challenging the monopoly on reason to which modern scientifistic thought lays claim and in revealing Catholicism’s profound rationality, it also becomes clear that this alternative rationality of the Catholic Church is, for Schmitt, incomprehensible without its rootedness in the humanity of the Church and its logic. A brief overview of the variations on the human which Schmitt employs to describe this specifically Catholic rationality illustrates well just how anthropomorphic

240 Schmitt, Carl. RC, pp. 14-15; RK, pp. 24-25: modified and emphasis – N.H..

241 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 13; RK, p. 23: modified – N.H..

242 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 8; RK, p. 14: modified – N.H..

243 Cf. Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 23. Ulmen translates “Rationalistische” as “rational” rather than “rationalist, cf. RK, p. 39ff.

244 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 14; RK, p. 24: modified – N.H..

245 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 11.

246 Schmitt, Carl. RC p. 12.

Schmitt's understanding of the Catholic rationality is: “The rationalism of the Roman Church morally encompasses the psychological and sociological nature of the human being”²⁴⁷;

“[Catholic cities] have a humanity”²⁴⁸; “In such distinctions lie Catholicism’s rational power of creation [rationale Schöpferkraft] and, simultaneously, its humanity. It remains within the realm of the humanly-spiritual [bleibt im Menschlich-Geistigen]”²⁴⁹; “It represents the civitas humana”²⁵⁰; “This world has its own hierarchy of values and its own humanity”²⁵¹; “rhetoric in its grand sense is is a sign of human life”²⁵²; “It [the eternal opposition of justice and beauty] lies in the general sphere of the human [im allgemein Menschlichen]”²⁵³; “the personalism inherent in the idea of representation is human in the deepest sense”²⁵⁴.

Here, one of the terms which Schmitt employs can be emphasized in particular: “In struggles with sectarian fanaticism, the Church was always on the side of the healthy human understanding [gesunden Menschenverstand]”²⁵⁵. The term of importance in this passage, which Ulmen translates as “common sense”, is the “gesunde[r] Menschenverstand”. Now, in a certain sense Ulmen’s translation is more accurate than the literal translation I would like to employ, because it captures the idiomatic and itself generally understood meaning of this figure of speech. Nonetheless, I choose to employ the translation “healthy human understanding” because it uncovers the literal meaning of this phrase which its idiomatic nature has a tendency to cover up, namely, its connection to the human. By considering the

“healthy human understanding” as something more than just a commonplace phrase we can also become aware of the argumentative position of this term almost a terminus technicus in Schmitts vocabulary²⁵⁶.

This passage in Roman Catholicism is not the first time Schmitt has used the term

“healthy human understanding”. At the end of Political Theology’s second chapter, Schmitt employs the term to describe the way that Hobbes addresses sovereignty:

That one speaks of super and subordinations and at the same time tries to remain abstract is incomprehensible to him […] He illustrates this with one of those comparisons which he, in the unwavering sobriety of his healthy human

247 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 13.

248 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 11.

249 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 14; RK, p. 24: modified – N.H..

250 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 19; RK, p. 32: modified – N.H..

251 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 20.

252 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 23; RK, p. 39: modified – N.H..

253 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 31; RK, p. 53: modified – N.H..

254 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 33.

255 Schmitt, Carl. RC, pp. 13-14.

256 Regarding the terminological nature of the ‘healthy human understanding’ see: Alexander von Maydell and Reiner Wiehl’s entry to Gemeinsinn in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 3, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 6, Basel: Schwabe 1984, pp. 243-247.

understanding, knows how to apply so powerfully: a power or order can be subjugated to another one in the same way as the art of the saddler is subjugated to that of the knight; but the essential thing is that, in spite of this abstract ladder of orders, no one thinks to therefore subjugate every individual saddler and obligate him to obedience to every individual knight²⁵⁷.

The decisive point for our study is not the way that this explanation illustrates Hobbes' justification of the state's subjection to spiritual powers, but the way that this explanation illustrates what Schmitt means by the “unwavering sobriety of his healthy human understanding”. The point is that Hobbes' understanding of “Subjection, Command, Right and Power” can neither be reduced to an abstract formula nor does it, however, result in a loss of structure. The healthy human understanding is that capacity to remain in the middle, neither without system nor over systematized, neither anarchic nor technical-economic and therefore beyond the dualistic view of the world in which both of these absurd alternatives participate.

It is in this sense that Schmitt's statement regarding the Tridentine dogma’s permitting of “the use of some gradations and adaptations”²⁵⁸ can be understood in its relationship to the

“hierarchy” of this Catholically understood world. This “healthy human understanding” is adopted by Schmitt as an expression for the capacity to differentiate, a differentiation which cannot remain merely horizontal but must also encompass the verticality of this world and which must therefore account for the question of authority because as much as Schmitt is at tremendous pains in this text to reveal the diversity and flowering of the Church as complexio oppositorum, so too the very thought of the complexio oppositorum must also itself house the opposition of authority and anarchy²⁵⁹. This is “Catholicism’s rational power of creation and,

257 Schmitt, Carl. PT, p. 39.

258 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 8.

259 This study’s reading of Roman Catholicism is focused primarily on revealing the centrality of a concept of the human and its rationality for Roman Catholicism’s argument. In doing so the question of the Church’s authoritarian structure is, one could criticize, somewhat neglected: “Consequently, [the Church] represents

“from above” (RC, p. 26.); “there is no politics without authority” (RC, p. 17). This critique is not completely misplaced. The following study does not, however, have the intention of covering up this authoritarianism nor of portraying Schmitt as an anti-authoritarian proponent of the complexio oppositorum. Instead, our focus on Repräsentation should also make clear that authority is part of a “dialectic of representation” (see: Kaiser, Joseph H. Die Dialektik der Representation, pp. 71-81 in: Festschrift für Carl Schmitt zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Barion, Ernst Forsthoff, Werner Weber. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1959) as well as, in English:

Kelly, Duncan. Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Representation, pp. 113-134 in: Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.

65, no. 1 (Jan., 2004)) in which “the simple meaning of the principle of representation is that the members of parliament are representatives of the whole people and thus have an independent authority vis-à-vis the voters. Instead of deriving their authority from the individual voter, they continue to derive it from the people” (RC, p. 26), which is to say they derive it from an idea, a hypostatized entity. The relationship between representation and authority finds a classic expression in chapter 16 of Hobbes’ Leviathan, entitled Of Person, Autors and Things Personated of the Leviathan: “A person is he whose words and actions are considered either as his own or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing, to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction” (Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, p. 101); see thereto:

Pitkin, Hannah. The Concept of Representation, Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1967, pp. 14-37.

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.