The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

A terrifying world without an exterior 209
Meier’s view, Schmitt rejects Hegel’s philosophy because it does not recognize
the ‘commandment that is given him from outside’, that is, by God (Meier 1998:
16). To my mind, Schmitt rejects Hegel, because the unending process of the
Hegelian world spirit absorbs all interruptions into itself as immanent negations.
In Schmitt’s view, such absorption makes all interruptions counterfeit. In
Hegel’s philosophy, there is no genuine interruption, and therefore, no space for
the event of the political, which also means no space for freedom of action: ‘The
essential point is that an exception’ signifying the event of the political ‘never
comes from outside into the immanence of development’ (Schmitt 1994: 56).
However, Schmitt’s primary target in his critique of immanence is not Hegel,
but the epoch of late modernity as a whole. According to Schmitt, an outstanding
characteristic of late modernity is precisely the dominance of the metaphysics
of immanence: ‘Everything is increasingly governed by conceptions of
immanence’ (Schmitt 1985: 49). In Schmitt’s view, this tendency began with
Baruch Spinoza 4 and found its culmination in Hegel, but the concrete deployment
of the metaphysics of immanence did not take place until the triumph of
natural-scientific dogma during the nineteenth century. With the triumph of this
dogma, Spinoza’s and Hegel’s philosophies of immanence were secularized,
materialized and diffused, which in Schmitt’s view paved the way to the possibility
of absolute rationalization and neutralization of human existence. With
this triumph, society – even the world as a whole – became increasingly conceived
as an ethically neutral and absolutely rational self-enclosed system in
which everything ‘functions automatically’ and things ‘administer themselves’
(Schmitt 1996a: 57). With the triumph of this dogma, man could be conceptualized
as a bee and society as a totally managed beehive.
According to Schmitt, however, man is not – at least not yet – a bee. In
human life, there is something that transcends the condition of an animal, which
is subordinated to the immanence of its life-world. Only a bee lives in a selfpropelling
machine. Only an animal is ‘entirely programmed’, but not man:
Man can choose, and at certain moments in his history, he may even go so
far, through a gesture peculiar to him, as to change himself into a new form
of his historical existence, in virtue of which he readjusts and reorganizes
himself.
(Schmitt 1997: 5)
In other words, man has the capacity to transcend his condition and thereby
to reach the level of meaning in life. Traditionally, such transcendent moments
and simultaneously substantial foundations of meaningful order of human life
have been such things as God, Nature, Reason or Tradition. According to
Renato Cristi, Schmitt too sought such substantial foundations, calling his philosophy
a ‘metaphysics of substance’ (Cristi 1998: 144–145). To my mind,
however, Schmitt fully realized that the epoch of late modernity is marked by a
fundamental loss of such substantial foundations. Late modernity is characterized
by the absence of gods, meaning that we are living in an epoch in which all