Mechanism, Organism, or Decisionism

§16. From Political Theology to Political Epistemology

Retrospectively, one may say that Hegel’s state, as an organic unity, did not turn the Prussian state into an organic whole, nor did it produce an organic and holistic economy—something that might only appear as a slogan at the dawn of the Second World War when holism became the science of National Socialism. The First World War was probably only a preparation for the Second World War. In 1914, when Henri Bergson gave his inaugural speech as the newly elected president of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Bergson addressed the outbreak of the First World War by accusing Germany of being machinist and mechanist.2 After several centuries of achievement in poetry, art, and metaphysics, by the end of the nineteenth century, Germany turned itself into a mechanical machine in industry, administration, and military. Bergson saw a fundamental mechanism in Germany’s mentality, one that not only was metaphorical but also reflected itself in the machines then produced in Germany: “diabolical artifice,” which, instead of producing “a spiritualization of matter,” ended in a “mechanization of the spirit.”3 We will return to this statement in chapter 6 by investigating Bergson’s organology of war. In this short speech of 1914, terms such as mechanism, mechanic, and mechanization appear nineteen times. One could associate this accusation with Bergson’s critique of mechanism and his own vitalist position or a quasi-organicism. Indeed, almost a century had passed between Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (1821) and Bergson’s speech on the First World War (1914), and Prussia had turned Germany into a “scientific barbary” or a “systematic barbary” through mechanization.

Did Hegel then fail? His theory of the state was supposed to guarantee planetary freedom without inciting wars of diverse nature and scale. Furthermore, not only did the individuality and the substance of the state not make “the nullity of these finite things [life, property, and their rights] as an accomplished fact,”4 but also the organism of the state became unachievable—just as the young Marx criticized, that the organic state remains ultimately a myth.5 We know that after Hegel’s death, his name gradually faded from view, but Germany itself, more than ever, continued “Hegelianizing from top to bottom.”6 In the previous chapters, we attempted to show how Hegel, in his doctrine of the state, identifies the spirit with philosophy and the state with freedom. This identification is also an identification of philosophy with the necessity of organicity. The question might be asked again about the requirement of understanding the state through the two images of the machine and organism. What does it contribute to political philosophy today?

Indeed, one might answer such a question by recognizing that the machine and organism are not just metaphors but rather function as aspirations to ideal models of human society; they are, therefore, also fundamental to the perception and imagination of all domains of human existence. The art of governance, which, in general, we now call politics, is nothing accidental, nor is it simply the collection of wisdom passed down from previous generations. It is a science that presupposes a certain epistemology as its way of investigating the organization within a particular human society and the latter’s relation with other societies, an epistemology without which it would be completely doomed. By giving validity to rules, the legal system can legitimate certain norms that are shared and respected by all the members of society—be that via the school of natural law or that of positive law. Natural law seeks its foundation in human nature, especially rationality and morality, while an authoritative communal will constitutes positive law.7 In Hans Kelsen’s positivism, a Grundnorm is presupposed in a legal community as validifying other norms. By their efficiency, norms also affirm or discredit the validity of rules. In international relations, norms are described as protocols and international laws, establish order between nations that do not share the same values and beliefs, and presuppose a basic norm, sovereignty, the common will that possesses the greatest power of legislation.8 We will look more closely at the ontological question of sovereignty in the next chapter, reserving this chapter for discussing Schmitt’s political epistemology.

Any political science presupposes a specific political epistemology that departs from a presupposed foundation. Indeed, this is precisely what Karl Deutsch shows in his seminal work on cybernetics and governance, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. Deutsch surveyed the images of political thought, ranging from the wheel and the scale to the modern models of mechanism and organism.9 Deutsch did not exhaust all images of political thought, and we should not reproach him for this; instead, we would like to point out that what Deutsch demonstrated is that epistemological frameworks coincide with modes of legitimation. For example, since the pre-Socratics embraced an epistemology of elements, the formation of their societies was based on the complexification of elements, be that water, fire, or more abstract entities like the apeiron (the unbounded and infinite from which the universe arose), while in Plato, we find an epistemology based on Form, according to which, each individual, be it a human being or social institute, participates in an ideal Form, eidos, with neither tyranny nor democracy being able to access the eidos since this is only possible through a philosopher-king, once the ruler of the polis.10 In the modern age, we see a parallel process of secularization and the emergence of modern science, which had significant implications for political thought. The question of legitimacy underlines the relation between epistemology and politics, for epistemological models do not alter from one to another without being given the legitimacy to do so. The question of legitimacy also highlights the contrast between political theology and political epistemology. Indeed, do political epistemology and political theology converge in the process of secularization? Epistemology as a category of science is opposed to theology. To understand this opposition, we must first go through Schmitt’s concept of political theology.

In Political Theology (1922), Schmitt claims that

all significant concepts of modern theory of the state are resulted from the secularization of theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state . . . but also because of their systematic structure. . . . The state of exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical idea of the state developed over the last few centuries.11

In other words, there is a “systematic structural kinship” between theological and juridical concepts.12 How can we judge Schmitt’s assertion? Hans Blumenberg mocked and reproached the credibility of this notion of secularization in the first edition of his Legitimacy of the Modern Age,13 and the theologist Erik Peterson denied the possibility of any political theology in Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem (1935). Going into depth on Peterson’s debate with Schmitt about church history is beyond the scope of this work; Blumenberg’s criticism, however, is more relevant since it reveals the problematic of historicization. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg’s main target was not Schmitt but Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949).14 Löwith contends that several important modern concepts, such as progress, are secularized Christian concepts. The concept of infinite progress, and its underlying philosophy of history, is the secularization of a linear time established by Christianity by turning away from the cyclic time found in the antique pagan cosmos. Once associated with biblical times, progress is seen as the secularization of the eschatological model, which anticipates an ultimate event like the Last Judgment as the fulfilment of history.15 According to this view, Hegel’s philosophy of history is no exception from this paradigm: “For Löwith, Hegel’s theory of the ‘suspension and carrying forward’ (Aufhebung) of the Christian and Reformation phase of history in the underlying structure of the modern spiritual and political world, especially in its constitutive consciousness of subjective freedom, degraded ‘sacred history to the level of secular history and exalt[ed] the latter to the level of the first.’”16

Schmitt’s review of Löwith’s book affirms Löwith’s claim that paganism (Heidentum) is incapable of historical thinking because it is cyclic.17 Blumenberg defends the concept of progress for various reasons, most notably because Löwith’s view is taken to be questionable, if not unhistorical.18 According to Blumenberg, Löwith’s interpretation of the philosophy of history was already shaped in his earlier work on Nietzsche, where he set up the eternal return as the renaissance of cyclic time.19 For Blumenberg, modernity should not be seen as the continuation and transposition of a set of concepts A from the past to the set of concepts B found in the present, since this view undermines the legitimacy of the modern. In such a transposition, the legitimacy of the modern depends completely on the past. Modernity, for Blumenberg, stands as a self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung), similar to Hannah Arendt’s argument, which he quoted: “Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world.”20 Modernity could be seen as a discontinuity, where both the becoming worldlessness (Entweltlichung) and detheolization (Enttheologisierung) take place.21 Unlike the eschatological view of history, the modern concept of progress does not necessarily await a transcendent intervention, like a revolution. Instead, it consists of an immanent process of self-justification. Science and technology behind the idea of infinite progress constitute neither the negativity nor the residue of religion. In the same vein, despite largely agreeing with Schmitt, Blumenberg rejects Schmitt’s claim that “all significant concepts of modern theory of the state are resulted from the secularization of theological concepts.” This does not mean that Blumenberg refuses to recognize that there is a historical relation between theology and the modern state (indeed, for him, the modern age is “unthinkable without” Christianity, as he intended to show in the second part of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age); but rather he rejects secularization as a transfer of concepts from one realm to another. As a method, it is not legitimate but merely romantic,22 because analogy does not imply transformation. In this sense, Schmitt’s political theology could be reduced to a set of metaphorical relations: “Is ‘Political Theology’ only the sum of a set of metaphors, whose selection reveals more about the character of the situations in which use is made of them than about the origin of the ideas and concepts that are employed in dealing with such situations?”23

The essential difference between Schmitt and Blumenberg, which Blumenberg also recognized after Schmitt’s publication of Political Theology II, is that secularization is a category of legitimacy for Schmitt; while for Blumenberg, it belongs to the category of historical justice.24 Schmitt wants to identify the systemic structural kinship between the modern doctrine of the state and theology. In contrast, Blumenberg wants to show that the modern is irreducible to theological categories, even if they are closely related. Jean-Claude Monod distinguishes two meanings (sens, or more precisely, two phases) of secularization: secularization-transfer and secularization-liquidation. These two senses seem to respectively characterize Schmitt and Blumenberg’s positions. According to Monod, secularization-transfer sees secularization as a transfer of concepts from theology to the state, which characterizes Schmitt’s political theology; secularization-liquidation is a second phase that leads to the emancipation, not only from Christian theology but also from all substitutions of theology.25 Schmitt focuses on transfer but fears liquidation, which he considered neutralization; Blumenberg is critical of secularization-transfer but is not completely in favor of liquidation either.

We do not intend to prolong the debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt here. The confrontation between Blumenberg, Schmitt, and Löwith that we staged above highlights the problem of political theology. Furthermore, it serves as an invitation to pursue a different line of inquiry: political epistemology. Even if we step back and follow Löwith’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history as a form of eschatology, it remains insufficient to understand Hegel’s organic state. This is also why political epistemology is essential to understanding modern political thought. We do not mean to reject political theology and its importance in the history of the Occident. Indeed, it is not possible to understand the West without understanding Christianity. However, from the perspective of planetary politics, it makes little sense today to claim that Xi Jinping is the secular transfer of the Christian God or that the Covid-19 vaccines are a Christian miracle. This is because modernization is secularization as both Sekularisierung and Verweltlichung, that is, in the process of mondialization, certain senses of secularization are no longer recognizable, while at the same time a set of more universal categories have to be adopted. For example, Marxism, which according to Löwith and Jacob Taubes is an instance of the eschatological model, nevertheless took a nontheological and quasi-scientific meaning in the Eastern communist countries.

Suppose political theology is based on divine revelation emphasizing the transposition of theological concepts to political concepts. In that case, political epistemology has its source in science, understanding the implication of scientific categories in forming political organizations. When we look at history from the perspective of political epistemology, it might then be possible to identify a more sophisticated and open future than that of an eschatology; it also returns political agency to the human and value to knowledge. For example, if we follow Gilbert Simondon, the concept of progress is characteristic of the eighteenth century in which technical and scientific improvement was conceived without limit, this techno-scientific optimism being the belief of the epoch of mechanism.26 We could then also see how mechanist epistemology ended following industrialization and mechanization, and why an organismic epistemology is conceived as a rescuing force.

Political epistemology is not a replacement for political theology. Modern epistemology is too constrained to replace theology because it is only limited to what is knowable. In Schmitt’s political theology, the secularization of Christian concepts produces new forms of legitimacy that cannot be reduced to science—and indeed, science has legality as the form of the “laws of nature” but not yet an absolute legitimacy, therefore any scientific inquiry into the emergence of life or the birth of the cosmos is always haunted by the necessity of the divine power. Our interest in political epistemology hopes, however, to expose, at the same time, the metaphysical-cum-scientific sources of political thought as well as their limits—which we have already performed in our reading of Hegel. With Blumenberg’s criticism in mind, we would like to read Schmitt’s theory of the state, not from the perspective of political theology but rather from political epistemology. Schmitt’s remark in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes is, therefore, significant since, first, it is an invitation to evaluate the two images of the state and to reflect on this historical debate given our situation, and second, it is also key to identifying a new concept, or a new image of the state that Schmitt himself wants to sketch.

§17. Machine and Organism in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes

Schmitt is, however, not satisfied with the shift from mechanism to organism. This displacement of mechanism and the replacement with organism is not only unsatisfactory, but also it brutally slashes something even more important in political theory, leading to the consequence that “the image generated by Hobbes began to be perceived as downright grotesque.”27 Does Schmitt want to defend and return to the Hobbesian mechanization of the state? He was very critical and skeptical of a certain “organismic” concept of politics, which he named “political romanticism,” in which he included various political structures such as liberal democracy and parliamentary democracy. The Romantics see the organic in everything, even a stone. Schmitt sometimes caricatures Romanticism as a certain form of animism, which is a mere abstraction and aestheticization of reality, failing to historicize and seize the concreteness of history.28 The emphasis on spontaneity and organicity of politics implies, first of all, endless discussions without arriving at the right political decision, as he argues at the opening of chapter 4 of Political Theology, “On the Counter Revolutionary Philosophy of the State (de Maistre, Bonald, Donosco Cortés”: “German romantics possess an odd trait: everlasting conversation. Novalis and Adam Müller feel at home with it; to them, it constitutes the true realization of their spirits.”29 Donosco Cortés, during the crisis of 1848, undermined discussion and prioritized the decision; he called the bourgeoisie a clasa discutidora—Schmitt later carried this criticism against parliamentarians.30 Schmitt’s attraction to the Hobbesian theory of the state is not a return to a mechanist or a rigidly rational and linear model. Schmitt also understands the problem of the lifeless and repetitive mechanism, which he identifies in liberalism, especially the “mechanical formalism” of Kelsenian liberalism.31 He also associated this formalism with what Montesquieu claimed of the judge being “la bouche qui pronounce les paroles de la loi” (the mouth that pronounces the speech of the law), as well as with what Rousseau said about executive power being no more than a radical mechanical application of legislative norms.32 As a historical fact, the difference between organism and mechanism had not yet been clearly made in Hobbes’s time; Hobbes, like his contemporary Descartes, was a thinker of mechanism. Hobbes’s mechanism remains mystical,33 rendering the classification of whether the Hobbesian state is mechanism or organism, animal or machine, superfluous.34 Retrospectively, we would like to claim—and this constitutes the major difference between our reading of Schmitt and most others—that what Schmitt was looking for is a theory of the state beyond mechanism and organism.35

We will start where Schmitt ended, in the appendix to his book on Hobbes entitled “The State as Mechanism in Descartes and Hobbes,” an article published in 1936 in the journal Archivfür Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, two years before the publication of his monograph on Hobbes. Regarding mechanical philosophy, Hobbes’s philosophical project was a step further than, or even a leap beyond, that of Descartes. Descartes, the great thinker of mechanism, was able to sketch a mechanization of the anthropological image of man, best demonstrated in his shorter treatises such as “Description of the Human Body” (1648), posthumously published together with “Treatise on Man” in 1664, in which Descartes compares different parts of the human body with various components of the church organ, the animal spirit being passed by the blood, and a soul dwelling in the pineal gland:

The air which comes from the bellows

The spirits which come from the heart

The pipes which make sound

The pores of the brain through which they pass

The distribution of the air in the pipes

The way in which the spirits are distributed in these pores

Hobbes furthered Descartes’s project of mechanization, transporting it from the image of man to the image of the state, with the sovereign dwelling in the brain of the leviathan, itself composed of individuals. In Schmitt’s own words, Hobbes’s philosophy was an advancement of Descartes’s: “The mechanization of the concept of a state thus completed the mechanization of the anthropological image of man.”36 In the first paragraph of his introduction to the Leviathan, Hobbes starts with a mechanical metaphor of the human being with the human heart as the spring, nerves as strings, and joints as wheels. Hobbes extends this mechanical metaphor to the commonwealth by claiming that more than this image of the automata, “art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a commonwealth.”37 Just as with Descartes’s comparison of automata and human beings, Hobbes gave a long list of equivalent features:

Sovereignty

Artificial soul

Magistrates/officers

Artificial joints

Reward/punishment

Nerves

Wealth/riches

Strength

Salus populi

Business

Counsellors

Memory

Equity/law

Reason/will

Concord

Health

Sedition

Sickness

Civil war

Death

Pacts/covenants

Fiat

Hobbes’s mechanization of the state is not only a metaphor: it also explores in detail the structure and operation of the state from the perspective of mechanism. Hobbes valued mechanism as a superior form of thinking that reveals the organization of the body politic and the functioning of the commonwealth.38 In addition to the mechanical body, the sovereign representative to the state is understood as the soul dwelling in the body, or, as in Schmitt’s 1919 lecture on Jean Bodin’s concept of sovereignty, Schmitt also compared this soul to the keel of a ship.39 In his Six Livres de la République, Bodin developed the sovereign as a legal concept defined as the state’s representative in opposition to “feudal, patrimonial, corporate and confessional pluralism.”40 Bodin’s definition of the sovereign has been understood since the seventeenth century as an absolutist and indivisible power, not conditioned by any other power except God.41 To offer a contemporary description, we might compare this image of the soul with mecha, those robots from Japanese animations, where a human being sits inside the heart or the brain of the robot, driving it with a control panel; indeed, this is not far from how Schmitt describes Hobbes’s state theory: “Hobbes transfers—and that seems to me to be the gist of his philosophy of state—the Cartesian conception of man as a mechanism with a soul onto the ‘human man,’ the state, made by him into a machine animated by the sovereign-representative person.”42

The mechanization of the state is unlikely to be found in Bodin, mostly since he lived and wrote at a period when mechanism was not yet a dominant epistemology. Indeed, Schmitt thinks that Bodin could not grasp the modern Leviathan as Hobbes did, that is, understand its fourfold combination of God, animal, person, and machine.43 What, then, is the problem of mechanism in Hobbes’s theory, and to what extent did it fail—as the subtitle of Schmitt’s book Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbolsuggests? Furthermore, how is “mechanism”—a term immediately associated with machines—related to Schmitt’s take on technology, which plays a decisive role in his distinction between his political project and that of the communists and the liberals? The answers to these questions are not self-evident, not only because the text is open to different readings but also because Schmitt’s political involvement with National Socialism invites readings that identify his philosophy with the ideology of Nazism. It is beyond our intention to repeat what has been plausibly analyzed regarding Schmitt’s theory and his involvement with National Socialism, but rather we would like to situate our readings in the antithesis of mechanism and organism—an antithesis we have been using to read the history of modern European philosophy. To understand Schmitt’s reading, we must go back to Hobbes’s political epistemology of the Leviathan.

§18. Political Epistemology in Hobbes’s Leviathan

For historians of science, Hobbes’s mechanism is not entirely the same as that of Descartes. As we know, Hobbes entered into a critical correspondence with Descartes during the former’s self-exile in Paris during the 1640s, just after the publication of The Elements of Law. The debates were around the interpretation of optics and Descartes’s meditation, and Hobbes’s objections were also listed as an appendix in Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy.44 We will have to leave the details of this debate to historians of science; here, we only want to highlight one observation. We might say that dualism, which is at the same time a cause but also a result of Descartes’s mechanism, is not treated in the same manner in the philosophy of Hobbes. As a reminder: mechanism is characterized by a linear causality: one cause leads to an effect, as is demonstrated by a mechanical machine. If observers chose to trace the cause of a machine’s movement, they might well arrive at what they think is the single mechanical cause, such as a coiled spring inside the machine. However, the spring was itself coiled by a human being external to the machine, and the coiling action would also have to have a cause. Through such reasoning, one continues ad infinitum until, in the end, one is very likely to arrive at God as the first cause. This is not yet a logical conclusion since it is still a postulate. For Descartes, the proof of the existence of God must be mediated via the res cogitans because the res cogitans is that which thinks and wills, while insofar that the res cogitans is limited in both representation and reasoning, namely, it is always far away from perfection, a higher form of existence or a perfect being must exist that makes such a perfection possible. This, as we know, is Descartes’s proof of the existence of God.45 Hobbes, like Descartes, assumes God as the first cause. However, he does not mediate it through the res cogitans; instead, Hobbes considers being from the perspective of local motion. Whether that is the imagination or passions of the human being or the movement of an object, both could be interpreted as motion. In other words, there is a conflation of the physical and the sensual, an ontological homogeneity governing both physical beings and living beings46—in this sense, we may be able to say that Hobbes pushes mechanism further than Descartes. This is also the foundation of Hobbes’s body politics, as we can see in De Motu, where Hobbes compares the river with the commonwealth:

Since the motion and the flow are one and the same, the river will also be one and the same. Likewise if one asks: “Is a man, when old and young, the same being, ens, or matter, in number?” it is clear that, because of the continual casting of [existing] body-tissue and the acquisition of new, it is not the same material [that endures], and hence not the same body; yet because of the unbroken nature of the flux by which matter decays and is replaced, he is always the same man. The same must be said of the commonwealth. When any citizen dies, the material of the state is not the same, i.e. the state is not the same ens. Yet the uninterrupted degree [ordo] and motion of government that signalise a state ensure, while they remain as one, that the state is the same in number.47

The commonwealth is not simply an assembly of bodies; rather, it has a vitality, which Hobbes borrows from the metaphor of the flow or man’s ageing. That which goes away is replaced by something new; nothing remains the same. One observes it in an inorganic matter, such as the river, or organic matter, such as the human being. Likewise, when the commonwealth is well regulated, it is maintained by flows of matter and energy as the river is by the flow of water. This means the mechanical or civil laws must supplement the moral laws (what Hobbes calls laws of nature) and enforce the latter. The civil laws are constitutive of a body politics that defines the obligations and interdictions of the subjects of the commonwealth:

The making of union consisteth in this, that every man by covenant oblige himself to some one and the same man, or to some one and the same council, by them all named and determined, to do those actions, which the said man or council shall command them to do; and to do no action which he or they shall forbid, or command them not to do. . . . This union so made, is that which men call now-a-days a BODY POLITIC or civil society; and the Greeks call it πόλισ; that is to say, a city; which may be defined to be a multitude of men, united as one person by a common power, for their common peace, defence, and benefit.48

Civil laws are thus like the laws of mechanics that govern the movements of the bodies in a common space, such as the civil society or polis. The multitude as an assembly of bodies is devoid of organization. Like the rabbles in Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, they have to be organized. However, as we can see, Hegel’s organic unity of the state greatly contrasts with Hobbes’s mechanical unity of the commonwealth, which interests us here. But if Schmitt is well aware of this opposition and the organic advancements of Hegel’s political philosophy, why did he still long for Hobbes’s mechanism? In doing so, does he not risk returning to an obsolete political epistemology? The answer to such a question can be found in Schmitt’s nuanced reading of the Leviathan as not purely a mechanical being but rather a mythical one; this mythical origin of the Leviathan has to be firstly approached from Hobbes’s anthropology.

Toward the end of the Introduction of Leviathan, Hobbes tells us that wisdom is acquired not through reading books but through studying human beings.49 That is to say, one must start with anthropology, the study of the human and its tendencies. In chapter XIII, titled “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery,” Hobbes suggests three principal causes of conflict between humans: competition, diffidence, and glory, each corresponding to invasion for gain, safety, and reputation.50 The war of all against all is a natural tendency in human beings. It is nothing sinful, provided that each person preserves themselves until a law forbids them. However, Hobbes clarifies that such a situation never really existed: “It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world.”51

What, then would be the use of giving such an imaginary scenario? It is due to the fact that he must demonstrate the genesis of politics and that his formulation of the political order is nothing more than the necessary result of such a genesis. As we know, Hobbes’s fictional state of nature contrasts with that of both Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Book I of his Spirit of the Laws,52 Montesquieu claimed that the state of nature is harmonious rather than being a war of all against all; conflicts arose due to the growth of intelligence, and laws were enacted to ensure harmonious interactions between people. It became clearer in Rousseau’s Second Discourse (Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind) that Hobbes’s state of nature is no longer the “first state of nature.” For simplicity, we might call Hobbes’s a second state of nature. The first state of nature is characterized by the natural state of men’s idleness and self-satisfaction with natural resources. The second state of nature is already one where artificiality introduces itself into the nature of man, and inequality is said to emerge due to competition—“some improved or impaired their condition or acquired good or bad qualities not inherent in their nature, the rest continued a longer time in their primitive state.”53 This artificiality is subject to perfection in the sense of the constant improvement of tools; Rousseau therefore often used the word perfectibilité to characterize the fall qua departure of the original man toward sociability. Instead of competition and war, Rousseau points out that Hobbes ignored pity, which is fundamental to self-love and self-preservation.

Both Rousseau and Hobbes provide us with two imaginary stories, which compete with each other to be anthropological qua ontological because both submit the human to a genesis that is always conditioned by the ontological postulate of human nature. Though Hobbes could not illustrate such a story according to European history, he claimed it might have happened elsewhere. The contact with the New World invokes strong interest in anthropology, but it also provides anthropology with the “other” understood as the “primitive self.” This encounter reconstructs the genesis of human society, or political anthropology, by starting with the lawless primitive, bestial, barbarous savages,54 whom Hobbes gives the example of those “in many places of America”: “But there are many places where they live so now. For the savage people in many places in America (except the government of small families, the concord where of dependeth on natural lust) have no government at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner as I said before.”55 Contemporary anthropologists have criticized Hobbes’s evidence, but we find no better with Rousseau, who identified the supporting evidence with the Caribbeans. Throughout the Second Discourse, we can find three places where the Caribbeans are used as an example to demonstrate the nature of the original man.56 Rousseau’s discourse is not fundamentally different from that of Hobbes. However, each takes himself to be the authority on the discourse of the “original man”—which remains imaginary if not purely fictional.57 Both Hobbes and Rousseau, as Leo Strauss points out, rejected the assumption of traditional political philosophy that man is by nature a political and social animal and produced a genesis of right departing from man as an apolitical and asocial animal.58 The state of nature (status naturalis) is a tabula rasa, yet to be filled with culture (status civilis). Hobbes constructs a historical transition from nature to culture as the necessity of the commonwealth for these wolf-like animals, called human beings. Human nature implies a tendency, be that vanity, evil, or sympathy, and politics manages such a tendency. The anthropological explanation also becomes here the science of the moral.59 The logical inference from the nature of man to the nature of the state is very “natural” for Hobbes, since man is dangerous, like a wild animal, driven by desire and passion; men are therefore always in conflict, whether that be through rivalry, distrust, or vanity. If such passions are not regulated, it will lead to war, like a cluster of moving bodies that may collide by chance.

At first glance, one may consider Rousseau’s anthropology in The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality as being opposed to that of Hobbes, but the truth is that even though they have different beginnings, they both end with the same need for law and the state; this is also the same with Montesquieu, who, in the Spirit of the Laws describes how the development of intelligence led to conflict, thus instigating the need of law for security. Anthropologies of law thus presuppose a chaotic and conflictual state that demands an impersonal force to intervene. They have varied ways to describe the function of social institutions as means to resolve conflicts and construct a community. In contrast to Rousseau’s organic tendency, Hobbes provides a mechanist solution. Indeed, we might say that in addition to anthropology, Hobbes’s mechanist philosophy allows him to legitimate the state as an antidote to the state of nature and avoid the war of all against all. This new morality targets vanity and fear. Vanity necessitates an acknowledgement of one’s wealth and possessions. Possession, desire, and vanity are thus related and all can be prolonged indefinitely. One is scared of dying violently, as when animals fight over their dead prey because every neighbor could be a potential competitor or the wolf behind your back. Humans are more complicated because they can anticipate and calculate, and a violent death can be skillfully planned and handled. Vanity is unjust because it is the shadow of human desire; fear of violent death is just because it is unjust to cause violent death to anyone; and, most importantly, everyone should have the liberty to pursue his or her interests and preserve himself or herself, and everyone in this regard is equal because they all have the same capacity to kill each other, like an “arrant wolf.” Self-preservation thus underlies and defines rights, hence why Strauss (by way of Dilthey) argues that Hobbes was greatly influenced by the Stoics:60

Not the naturalistic antithesis of morally indifferent animal appetite (or of morally indifferent human striving after power) on the one hand, and morally different striving after self-preservation on the other, but the moral and humanist antithesis of fundamentally unjust vanity and fundamentally just fear of violent death is the basis of Hobbes’ political philosophy.61

In the state of nature, namely, in the absence of law, under the condition of self-preservation, killing another human being is not unjust; as Hobbes writes, “By the right of nature, we destroy, without being unjust, all that is noxious, including beasts and men.”62 In the state of nature, there is the right of nature (jus naturale), which is the liberty of each human being to preserve itself, and the law of nature (lex naturalis), which forbids the human being from doing that which is destructive to his life or that which may take away its means of preservation. To preserve oneself, one has to enter into contract with each other—a mutual transference of rights. However, wars are still unavoidable because either a community or commonwealth is still absent. Laws, enforced by the commonwealth, function as the mechanical rules that coordinate the people’s desires and fear. Laws and covenants of the commonwealth are not merely laws of nature, since the latter are moral laws, words, while the former are swords.63 Here we may want to ask why other animals do not need a government like humans. Aristotle also named two other political animals, bees and ants. Hobbes in the Leviathan answers this question. His answer could also be read as the triumph of the mechanical over the biological—for the biological or the organic is not on the same level of rationality as the mechanical. Hobbes gave five reasons, which we paraphrase here:

1. Men are continually in competition for honor and dignity (which ants and bees are not).
2. Among these creatures (bees and ants) the common good does not differ from private good.
3. These creatures, deprived of the same reason that humans have, do not see, nor think they see, any fault in the administration of their common business, whereas among men there are very many that think themselves wiser and abler to govern the public than others; and they strive to reform and innovate, one this way, another that way; and thereby bring society into distraction and civil war.
4. These creatures, though they have some use of voice, yet they want that art of words by which some men can represent to others that which is good in the likeness of evil, and evil in the likeness of good.
5. Irrational creatures cannot distinguish between injury and damage, and therefore, as long as they be at ease, they are not offended with their fellows, whereas man is then most troublesome, when he is most at ease, for then it is that he loves to show his wisdom and control the actions of them that govern the commonwealth.
6. The agreement of these creatures is natural, that of men is by covenant only, which is artificial; and therefore, it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required (besides covenant) to make their agreement constant and lasting.64

Later in the Leviathan, we see that point two is not entirely valid because the common good of the monarchy has to become the good of every subject. If we boil down the other points to two features that distinguish humans from other political creatures, they are reason (or what Hobbes refers to as that which makes natural laws conceivable) and artificiality (more precisely, writing and printing technologies). Of course, this understanding of reason is also a form of artificiality that could only come into being through other forms of artificiality such as writing and tools. The leap from the natural state to the artificial state is the formation of civilization. It also gradually leads to the formation of the modern state from family to clans and large institutions. However, living as small families does not resolve the problem of security and the possibility of violent death. Therefore, there is still a tendency that incites war. The sovereign is the third party that resolves the situation of infinite war. The sovereign exchanges its protection of the individuals with obedience from its subjects; this interrelation between protection and obedience is what makes the state a state.65 This is Hobbes’s concept of the social contract; it is not so much based on the desire of a community but on the preservation of individual liberty and the suppression of infinite vanity: “Men—the individuals, not the fathers—at the founding of the artificial state delegate the highest power to a man or an assembly from mutual fear, the feat of violent death, and fear, in itself compulsive, is consistent with freedom. . . . In other words, they voluntarily replace compulsive mutual fear by the again compulsive fear of a neutral third power, the government.”66

The “body politics” that Hobbes proposes is a “unity,” without which the community is dissolved into a multitude, like the savages in America that he read or imagined. Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes focuses on Hobbes as both a philosopher of mechanism and philosopher of sovereignty,67 while Strauss has Hobbes as an anthropologist and a philosopher of liberalism. This difference, which has its root in their readings of Hobbes, also underlies the difference of their politics, demonstrable in Strauss’s “Note on the Concept of the Political.”68 Whereas Schmitt opposes Spinoza and Hobbes by claiming that Spinoza inverted Hobbes69 since the former imposes liberalism against the domination of the public as was advocated by the latter, Strauss, on the contrary, shows that Hobbes is the founder of liberalism in an unliberal world while Schmitt’s use of Hobbes to attack liberalism in a liberal world is dramatic.70 The anthropological foundation of Hobbes’s morality and the maintenance of such morality through the mechanistic state is clear. In humanity’s leap from the natural state to the artificial state, its order is maintained by social contracts and laws, and the monarchy is the best governing body. This status civilis, or what Strauss calls culture, is primarily mechanism in Hobbes, which demands a soul to guarantee the balance of the body politics. Both mechanism and the soul are indispensable for the reading of Schmitt, which we can generalize as machine and sovereignty in retrospect, not only because technology in the time of Hobbes is mechanical but also because the history of the state is also a history of the megamachine.

§19. Catholicism and the Logic of Complexio Oppositorum

If, for Schmitt, Hobbes’s theory of the state was the completion of the mechanization of the anthropological image of man, then what happens to the theory of the state when mechanism ceased to be the dominant philosophical thought, as occurred already in the eighteenth century? The rise of Romantic and organismic thinking naturally presented an enormous challenge to the Hobbesian theory of the state. Schmitt is aware of the criticism from the Romantics, who regard the state as a plant, an animal, whereas Hobbes’s mechanical state “began to be perceived as downright grotesque.”71

Schmitt is familiar with the classical opposition between mechanism and organism that began in the eighteenth century and the importance of Otto von Gierke’s organic state theory that dates from the second half of the nineteenth century.72 Indeed, for him, it would only be possible to understand the nineteenth-century German state and constitutional history by referring to the opposition between organism and mechanism.73 How, then did Schmitt deal with this oppositional logic? As we have seen, Romantic organicism is caricatured as “discussion,” and “dictatorship is the opposite of discussion.”74 Schematically, we are tempted to say that organism is discussion and mechanism is dictatorship. Gemeinschaft is organic, and Gesellschaft is mechanic, just as one finds in the classical sociological work of Ferdinand Tönnies. Or is this opposition itself too simplistic? Hobbes and Descartes did not make such a distinction; otherwise, there would be no mechanist philosophy, and modernity would be rewritten. Mechanism was not presented as mere analogy or reduction; it was the founding principle of all existence. For Hobbes and for his time (we also see the use of the term human machine in Rousseau’s Second Discourse75), machines have “thoroughly mythical meaning.”76 The Leviathan is a mixture of God, man, animal, and machine. It is like a machine endowed with the soul, but the soul is not situated in the pineal gland but rather in the sovereign power or the monarch.

Critiques against Schmitt’s concept of the political and the sovereign suffer from the fact that even though they correctly see Schmitt’s political theory as a justification of dictatorship and a rejection of liberalism, they undermine the epistemological question present in Schmitt’s thought. One exception is the work of William Rasch, who identifies in Schmitt’s earlier work Law and Judgment (Gesetz und Urteil) an antimechanist tendency.77Schmitt’s 1912 book addresses the question: When is a legal judgment correct? He considers the practicing judge who makes judgments based on the subsumption of the particular rules as merely Subsumtionsmaschine and Gesetzesautomat. Schmitt does not deny the possibility of subsumption, but he understands that the act of subsumption cannot be simply a consequence of another subsumption. That is to say, legality (Gesetzmässigkeit) does not imply legitimacy, and the decision of legitimacy is something other than subsumption. Rasch identifies subsumption with what Kant calls “determinative judgment” and Schmitt’s nonsubsumptive approach with Kant’s “reflective judgment.”78 In the previous chapters, we have already endeavored to show that Kant’s Critique of Judgment grounds the organic condition of philosophizing. Rasch’s thesis is interesting and demonstrates a sensitivity toward epistemology; however, this thesis also bypasses Schmitt’s consistent criticism against the opposition between mechanism and organism, and indeed, it unconsciously, via the reference to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, places Schmitt on the side of organism, which he would refuse, as he wrote in The Concept of the Political:

It may be left open what the state is in its essence—a machine or an organism, a person or an institution, a society or a community, an enterprise or a beehive, or perhaps even a basic procedural order. These definitions and images anticipate too much meaning, interpretation, illustration, and construction, and therefore cannot constitute any appropriate point of departure for a simple and elementary statement.79

Note that Schmitt was looking for a “simple and elementary statement,” which both mechanism and organism, with their overloaded historical and philosophical meaning, failed to elucidate.80 The failure of the symbol in Hobbes’s Leviathan is partly because the strong connotation with mechanism failed to reveal the true meaning of the Hobbesian theory of the state. Instead, when mechanism is reproached for its insufficiency as a true epistemology and when organism stands as a new condition of philosophizing, then Hobbes’s doctrine of the state appears obsolete, if not “grotesque.” Retrieval of the concept of the political has to bypass and surpass the opposition between the mechanic and organic. Schmitt wants to circumscribe this opposition between mechanism and organism in favor of a simple statement: decisionism. This conflict between mechanism and organism is clearly spelled out in Schmitt’s earlier essays. For example, in Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), we can find criticisms against the post-Kantian idealists and the Romantics who characterize Catholicism as either mechanism or organism. In this text, Schmitt expounds on the particular political form of Catholicism, which he argues is neither mechanism nor organism but rather what he calls complexio oppositorum, or the complex of opposites. This complexio oppositorum is not a synthesis that results from an opposition between thesis and antithesis; instead, it is a logic that contains and nurtures oppositions (one might want to associate it with Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum). The complexio Schmitt identifies in Catholicism is the logic that lasts throughout his work and justifies his “entire intellectual and journalistic existence.”81 How exactly is it different from the organic form? In Roman Catholicism, Schmitt reproaches the Hegelian and Romantic misinterpretation of the Church:

Out of a spiritual promiscuity which seeks a Romantic or Hegelian brotherhood with Catholicism, as with so many other ideas and individuals, a person could make the Catholic complexio into one of many syntheses and rashly conclude that he had thereby construed the essence of Catholicism. The metaphysician of speculative post-Kantian philosophy conceives organic and historical life as eternal process of antitheses and synthesis, assigning the respective role at will.82

For Schmitt, taking the church as either organism or mechanism is a misunderstanding, consequently undermining the significance of Catholic rationalism. It is not sure if this criticism of Hegel stays in Schmitt’s latter writing, because there are occasions when the “great Hegel” is mentioned and whose logic was considered superior to the complexio or coincidentia oppositorum.83 But in this 1923 text, the Hegelian brotherhood is at least contested. The constructs of the Hegelian and Romantic brotherhood are “more than fantasies out of the blue” because they nevertheless correspond to the reality of the modern industrial world, namely, the opposition between a “rationalistic–mechanistic world of human labour” and a “romantic–virginal state of nature.” However, according to Schmitt, this dichotomy is “totally foreign to the Roman Catholic concept of nature.”84 The Catholics are not immigrants, as are the Protestants. The latter are businesspeople who establish their enterprises everywhere without necessarily settling down to live. In contrast, the former are agricultural workers with a different relation or attachment to the soil. Nature for the Catholics is not the antithesis of spirit, intellect, art, or machine as the moderns see it today.85 The idealists and the Romantics have diagnosed the crisis of modernity and therefore search for a point of “indifference” between the two polarities as a synthesis of the opposing antitheses. To Schmitt, such indifference implies equally a “profound indecision.” In contrast, the Catholic Church, claims Schmitt, is “categorically something other than the (in any case, always absent) ‘higher third’ of the German philosophy of nature and history.”86 This is because instead of seeking an indifferent point between the two poles, it embraces all antitheses; it can do so because it is the absolute realization of authority.87 Michael Marder has a concise summary of this activity: “Instead of neutralizing the antagonisms it houses, the complex of opposites nurtures and accentuates them; instead of totalizing or inserting the particulars under the umbrella of a single concept, it permits them to clash and derives its political energy from this enduring standoff.”88 The pope, as Schmitt tells us, exemplifies the “most astounding complexio oppositorum” because the pope is the Vicar of Christ, elected by an aristocracy of cardinals. But unlike the modern official, he is not impersonal: the pope is the culmination of the most precise dogmatism and the will to decide.89

The complexio oppositorum is a nondialectical polar logic, but it is also an existential strategy. It does not resolve contradictions, and it does not allow any self-destruction. Therefore, the logic of the complexio oppositorum also holds both friend and enemy—the essential political criteria for Schmitt. The key to the complexio oppositorum is the question of authority, the authority to hold the contradictions and to decide. The decisions are oriented according to Catholic rationalism. Economic and technological rationality is not recognizable in it; on the contrary, they produce a “Catholic anxiety.” Economic and technological rationality is based on a calculation and mechanization that neutralizes the antagonism by satisfying all kinds of needs without questioning the rationality and the purpose of technical and economic activities.90 Commenting on Schmitt’s interpretation of the complexio oppositorum, Marder suggests that there is a “living form” at play which “internalizes the antinomy of form and content . . . [that] sheds its identity as pure living, and, thus, paves the way for the vent of politics.”91 However, it would seem as though Marder’s notion of life to comprehend Schmitt’s complexio is precisely the organic form that Schmitt criticizes.

The notion of life or living form may appear to be too general here. It is more precisely a vitalism. Vitalism is a term charged with various meanings in the history of science; here, we can follow Georges Canguilhem and understand it as a practical attitude, an orientation of biological thought, and a cautious positivist way of understanding life without reducing it to mechanism.92 In Schmitt’s case, it is a refusal to reduce legal thought to positivism and politics to economic calculation and technological manipulation.93 A vitalism is often distinguished from an organicism, for the latter reproaches the former for relying on mystical forces. Vitalism, however, does not necessarily have to rely on an unexplainable force. We can understand Marder’s characterization because in “The Age of Neutralizations and Depolitizations (1929)” we find again a criticism of the antithesis between the organic and the mechanic without this time referring to Catholicism and Hegel, but to the “romantic lament”:

The comfortable antithesis of the organic and the mechanistic is itself something crudely mechanistic. A grouping which sees on the one side only spirit and life and on the other only death and mechanism signifies nothing more than a renunciation of the struggle and amounts to nothing more than a romantic lament. For life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the order of human things. Ab integro nascitur ordo.94

Schmitt notes here that the antithesis between machine and organism is “comfortable.” Comfortable suggests that it is too easy to choose sides. Schmitt strives to break away from binary logic, such as life against death or spirit versus spiritlessness. However, Schmitt’s tautological logic, life over life and spirit with spirit, is closer to the organic than the mechanic because he emphasizes the whole (integro): Ab integro nascitur ordo (Order is born from the whole). The notion of the whole is central to the teachings of organicism and holism. This reference to the whole does not mean that he is now on the side of the Hegelians or the Romantics; instead, it constitutes only one component of his vitalism. Schmitt’s vitalism suspends any dialectical movement, refusing synthesis; on the contrary, it contains and nurtures contradictions, that is, until the moment (e.g., the real possibility of war) arrives where it has to look at its situation and decide who are friend and enemy.95 It is clearer now that Schmitt’s state is not the lifeless mechanical state in the sense we understand it today, but rather mythical as per Hobbes’s conception. The interpretation of Catholicism (1923) and the interpretation of Hobbes (1938) are not without relations; instead, they show the continuity and consistency of Schmitt’s thinking. Both allow Schmitt to abandon the reference to the organic and conceptually overcome the opposition between mechanism and organism in favor of decisionism. Decisionism is a political vitalism in its essence, neither based on the strict implementation of laws as in the mechanical machine, in which when one part is broken, the whole machine collapses, nor based on an organic image, in which everyone must participate and a decision is always at risk of being postponed, i.e., a “metaphysics of indecision.”96 This rediscovery in Hobbes’s doctrine of the state is the notion of the sovereign—a God, a fictitious persona, a soul in the machine, which can break the mechanical and the organic image of the state.

The impulse to move beyond mechanism is fundamental to Schmitt’s critique of the formalism of positive law and the neutralization of politics. State administration is the most fundamental part for Schmitt, according to whom “the starting point of all state activity is administration.”97 However, modern state administration functions as a machine and has been increasingly replaced by machines. This is increasingly the case in our time, with the digitalization of administrative processes—for example, when artificial intelligence is used in the place of judges to deal with the so-called logical cases.98 This neutralization is, at the same time, a depoliticization, and it has to be interrupted and vitalized; otherwise, it remains lifeless. However, one must not misunderstand that Schmitt is criticizing technology in general as neutralization, because no one can deny that machines have become the central political question of today. It is often remarked that Schmitt made a distinction between Technik and Technizität, the former being “dead” and the latter being spiritual (geistig) and “alive,” resembling or at least resonating with Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of modern technology as enframing or Gestell. Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology (1949/1953), claims that the essence of modern technology is nothing technical. This claim is comparable to when Schmitt (albeit twenty years earlier than Heidegger) asserts that the spirit of technology is “not itself technical and mechanical”:99

The spirit of technicity that has led to the mass belief of an antireligious this-worldly activism, is nevertheless spirit, perhaps a more evil and demonic spirit, but not to be dismissed as mechanistic and not to be attributed to technology as such. It is perhaps something terrifying, but is not itself technical or machinelike. It is the belief of an activist metaphysics, the belief in a limitless power and domination of man over nature, even over human nature.100

Technology is not regarded as purely mechanical and machinic but rather as an active metaphysical force that is more harmful than the dead mechanical parts moving alone on the planet’s surface. It is a metaphysical force, which, having become autonomous, seizes the total control of the planet Earth and beyond. Heidegger’s Gestell means that every being could be treated and mobilized as a resource. In contrast to Prometheanism, symbolizing progress, Schmitt calls himself a Christian Epimetheus.101 Unlike Prometheus, the Titan of foresight, Epimetheus means hindsight, who knows only once the mistake is committed. For example, he forgets to give skills to the human, opens Pandora’s box, and so on. Epimetheus is he who withholds, like the Katechon.102

Schmitt’s resonance with Heidegger’s analysis is not superficial. If, in the early twentieth century, the call for organicism, which we find in thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Lewis Mumford, was intended as resistance against mechanism qua industrialism, then this organicism no longer poses itself as a solution for both Heidegger and Schmitt. Heidegger views organism and the opposition between organism and mechanism as a product of modernity. He clearly stated it in the Black Notebooks written during the 1930s: “It might very well still take a considerable time to recognize that the ‘organism’ and the ‘organic’ present themselves as the mechanistic-technological ‘triumph’ of modernity over the domain of growth, ‘nature.’”103 Even once technology begins to increasingly resemble organic beings (as Simondon rightly pointed out in his 1958 On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects concerning his interpretation of cybernetics, which we have also discussed in chapter 3), this will not resolve the devastation caused by industrialism; it might well only found the basis of a different form of domination, though one that might perhaps give the appearance of being less threatening. The organic as an antidote to mechanization was considered a communitarian political model. Max Weber, once Schmitt’s mentor, already refused the biological metaphor of the state by saying that “All analogies with the ‘organism’ and similar biological concepts are doomed to remain sterile.”104 Today we may see that the organic critique of the mechanical is already surpassed by cybernetics, not the least that all machines are in the process of becoming “organic.”

Schmitt was aware of cybernetics; indeed, a copy of Wiener’s cybernetics could be found in his library’s stock list.105 However, Schmitt made no explicit comment on cybernetics as Heidegger did. It is difficult to say whether he perceived the mechanism in the organism, but he does see the binary logic between mechanism and organism as nothing more than mechanical. Formalism, both in the form of liberal democracy and parliamentary democracy, is highly inefficient in addressing political urgencies; often, the solution endorsed by the majority may not appear to be the best political decision. The separation between judicial, executive, and legislative power and the mechanization of each part only leads to the indecisiveness of the state. It therefore renders the state vulnerable in the time of crisis. Schmitt’s reproach against Hobbes for his attempt to absorb private freedom into the state follows a similar logic: “[Hobbes underscores] the importance of absorbing this right of private freedom of thought and belief into the political system. This contained the seed of death that destroyed the mighty leviathan from within and brought about the end of the mortal god.”106 Hobbes’s liberalism107 destroys the Leviathan from within since it spreads the seeds of destruction—privately held belief is separated from, and therefore resists against, the public confession of faith submitted to the sovereign’s authority.108 This symptom of modern democracy in its popular or parliamentarian form contributes to the ineffectiveness and indecision of the state. Strauss criticized Schmitt’s presupposition of liberalism as homogeneity because “The heterogeneity of . . . interests is as crucial as a certain kind of homogeneity.”109 However, it is unlikely that Schmitt would make such a foolish assumption; his attack against liberalism targets both its homogeneity and its incapability to overcome civil war. Its mechanical formalism (in terms of procedure) and organic aspiration (in terms of consensus) render a concrete decision impossible. Schmitt finds brotherhood with Bodin and Hobbes here, both thinkers of the concept of the sovereign as a response and solution to civil wars they experienced; but it might be the case, as Koselleck diagnosed, that for Hobbes, who experienced history as the history of civil war, sacrificed reason to political morality without realizing that reason has a “gravitation of its own.”110 Given the triumph of Hitler, Schmitt claims, “In the one-party state of National Socialist Germany, the danger of a pluralistic dismemberment of Germany . . . has been vanquished.”111

A dynamic that goes beyond mechanism and organism is required as a new model of politicization, or more precisely, vitalization. The question of the soul, here presented as sovereignty, distinguishes Schmitt’s Hobbesian state from the later technocratic state, which for him, is a form of neutralization and depoliticization. What Schmitt means by neutralization and depoliticization is the move from the conflictual status to a neutral zone where the political defined by the friend-foe distinction disappears. The neutral zone is historical in that in different historical epochs different central scientific domains are established to resolve problems that do not belong to that domain.112 In the article “The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticizations,” Schmitt outlines different central domains of neutralization that were established during different periods throughout Western history, these being theology in the sixteenth century, metaphysics in the seventeenth century, moralism and humanitarianism in the eighteenth century, economics in the nineteenth century and technology in the twentieth century. Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes should be also contextualized according to both history of thought and the history of technology. The domination of mechanist philosophy in Hobbes’s time was accompanied by the triumph of mechanism: maritime power superseded land power; in other words, the Leviathan dominated the Behemoth. Indeed, it was maritime technology that allowed Britain to develop its marine power and conquer the world, as is clearly shown in Schmitt’s Land and Sea, but even more explicitly said in his Dialogues on Power and Space:

Already the modern, thoroughly well-organised, European state of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a technological and artistic product, a Super-Human [Über-Mensch] created by humans out of humans set together with one another, which in the image of the Leviathan as the large human, the μάκρος ἅνθρωπος, and the little humans producing it, the isolated individual, the μίκρος ἅνθρωπος, confronted with a Super-Power [Über-Macht]. In this sense the well-functioning European state of early modern period was the first modern machine and simultaneously the concrete presupposition of all further technological machines. It was the machine of machines, the machina machinarum, a Super-Human [Über-Mensch] compiled of humans gathered together, which comes into existence via human consensus and yet, in the moment that it is present, exceeds all human consensus. It is precisely because this issue concerns a power organised by humans that Burckhardt feels that this power is evil in itself.113

This could be understood as one of the significances of Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes, for Hobbes’s contribution is not only metaphysical, according to Schmitt, but rather his image of the state corresponds to the technological development of his time. The European state at this time was a “technological and artistic product,” the machine of machines or a vital machine. The Hobbesian state is, therefore, the first modern megamachine. Maybe we can also read Schmitt’s vitalism as an attempt to take advantage of the Technizität that he described as a metaphysical force; the soul is that which can actively direct the metaphysical force of machines and gives it life through politics. Technology in Hobbes’s time was not the central domain if we follow Schmitt’s periodization here. Instead, metaphysics functioned as the central domain or the neutral zone for resolving conflict. However, what truly became politicized was the subsequent technological development, which converted the state into a machine while equipping it with the mechanical power and warships necessary for appropriating territories. Metaphysics always forgets the question of technology because technology seems to appear as only one instance of the metaphysical idea or a mere question of logic. The Leviathan is neither a natural state nor a metaphysical state, but an artificial state, as Leo Strauss also emphasized; the former is characterized by fear and monarchy, the latter by hope and democracy.114 The mechanical state is animated by the soul, the sovereign, symbolized by a person or an assembly:

Men—the individuals, not the fathers—at the founding of the artificial state delegate the highest power to a man or an assembly from mutual fear, the fear of violent death, and fear, in itself compulsive, is consistent with freedom. . . . In other words, they voluntarily replace compulsive mutual fear by the again compulsive fear of a neutral third power, the government.115

The sovereign is the soul that dwells in the mechanical body of the state. The soul is the authority: Autoritas non veritas facit legem (Authority, not truth, makes law). The soul is that which can determine the body instead of being that which is imprisoned by the body. The mechanization of the state, though it completed the Cartesian project, also led to the possibility of the neutralization of politics in the twentieth century, when mechanism, the symbol of order and progress, is generalized as a technical state-administrative (staatsverwaltungstechnische) rationalization.116 Schmitt hinted at a temporal gap between the epoch when mechanism was a philosophy and when mechanism was realized in material terms and pervaded the world through industrialization and colonization. The occidental rationalism Schmitt criticized thus belongs to the development of the industrial society.117 However, in the same article, we are told that technology as neutralization is only something transitory, temporary. It was only a “religious belief in technology,” and such belief is an effect of the shift of the neutral zone from economy to technology.118 In reality, we have not yet really understood the question of technology. Furthermore, technology in the twentieth century is no longer neutral, but rather “every strong politics will make use of it . . . the present century can only be understood provisionally as the century of technology.”119 This remark of Schmitt’s brings Hobbes’s word “mechanization” to a concrete historical situation, which Hobbes himself did not anticipate. The state ceases to be an imaginary megamachine of mechanics, but it is a machine realized before us. If Schmitt could say that the twentieth century was the century of technology, this is even more true in the twenty-first century: 5G, microchips, and AI are no longer neutral, as we read in the newspaper every day.

However, such a techno-utopian dream of better governing states through full automation (with artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning) will not be endorsed by Schmitt. This is because, in the case of full automation, the state would already be dead. This appears as a paradox because it may lead to two consequences. First, it may lead to a neutralization in Schmitt’s sense, that all decisions will be based on facts and formal procedures (as in legal positivism). Second, the battlefield will become the competition of realizing a technological singularity, as Putin said in 2017 to the Russian schoolchildren, “Whoever leads in AI will dominate the world.”120 Indeed, such technological competition will lead to a total domination of one state over the rest, a techno-imperialism. The competition for techno-imperialism means the empowerment of the metaphysical force that nurtures modern technology and its capacity to bring about more catastrophes. Therefore, technology serves both as a neutral zone and a battlefield.

§20. The Death of Hegel and the Triumph of Political Vitalism

Considering the discussions in the previous chapters, it is possible to conclude that the debate between mechanism and organism no longer determines the state’s imagination. This does not mean that Schmitt provides us with a satisfactory solution, though he saw the limit of such an opposition and the need for a different political epistemology. Retrospectively, Mumford’s “New Organum”—the antimechanistic imagination—must be put in question, not to discredit him but to think together with and beyond him. The mechanical and the organic were presented as two ideals of political governance, two forms of automatization par excellence. But all forms of automation tend to neutralize the sovereign power and depoliticize it into routine machinic operations. This lies at the center of Schmitt’s decisionism, for “the decision alone is capable of bridging the gap between the abstractness of law and the fullness of life.”121 And for decisionism to function, it will need the absoluteness of the sovereign, which is constantly conscious of its vulnerability. Both vulnerability and immunity repose on the ontological categories of friend and enemy, but more significantly, in terms of political theology, an identification of the satanic force and the katechon. Enemies signal vulnerabilities, and friends reinforce the capacity for war and immunity against external attacks. Therefore, the question of the state as mechanism or organism is left open insofar as the sovereign decides. The sovereign decides internally by suspending any legal norm and invoking the state of emergency or externally by waging war against another state. Schmitt’s political vitalism is, therefore, also an existentialism:122 “The exception is more interesting than the rule . . . The rule proves nothing, the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”123 A political vitalism was, for Schmitt, a way out of the two paradigms that characterize modern European philosophy. Schmitt’s real politics is, first of all, geopolitics that sees the state as the final realization of Western philosophy, as Hegel did. Therefore, Schmitt is not in tension or disagreement with Hegel on what concerns the role of the state in the history of the spirit but rather on the ideality of the organic unity of the state. The state is only an incarnated form of the political in history.

The figure of the sovereign in Hegel remains symbolic because Hegel aims for the organic unity (unlike Louis XIV, who said “L’état c’est moi,” Frederick the Great said that the prince is the first servant of the state),124 but in Schmitt, it is realized as the soul in the machine. The state of exception is the soul’s vitality because the soul can suspend rules, namely deciding the state of emergency. Even if certain courts declare exceptions regularly, unlike sovereignty, it does not reveal itself as an absolute or unconditional power.125 This is also probably why the opening line of “The Concept of the Political” starts with the claim that “the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”126 This may remind us of Sartre’s infamous statement, “Existence precedes essence.”127 The political is grounded in decisions and exceptions. Decisionism is the dynamic of the sovereign as the soul of a living being, as Schmitt writes in “Reich, Staat, Bund” (1933) that “politics means intensive life [intensives Leben].”128 This intensity is opposed to homogeneity in the same way Hans Kelsen describes democracy.129 In this sense, Schmitt is on the side of the Hobbesian mechanism. Ironically, Schmitt’s doctrine of the state is also a vitalism, and Schmitt is a political vitalist. Maybe this is how we should interpret what Schmitt, in Staat, Bewegung, Volk, claims: that on the day Hitler seized power, “Hegel died.”130

The relation between the death of Hegel and Hitler’s seizing of power contains several meanings. First, if we follow Schmitt’s statement closely, then it was only on January 30, 1933, with the appointment of Hitler as chancellor, that “the Hegelian state of civil servants of the nineteenth century, characterized by the identity of the civil service and the stratum in charge of the State, was replaced by another State construction.”131 This new state construction allows the Reich to recover a political leadership, namely, the capacity to identify and annihilate its enemy, communism. Let us remind ourselves that the election on July 31, 1932, put the National Socialist Party (37.3%) and the German Communist Party (14.4%) as the majority of the Reichstag.132 In this sense, we can understand why only on this day “Hegel died.” Second, Schmitt also finds the germ of the Reich in Hegel’s state theory, which is not a “neutral concept of the state” but that of the “political-historical concrete Prussian state of the first half of the nineteenth century.”133 That is to say, January 30 is, in fact, the culmination of Hegel’s state theory instead of a judgment on its failure; Schmitt’s comment on the death of Hegel is, in this sense, not a farewell, a Grabrede, but rather a comment that marks the completion and continuation of Hegel’s state theory, as Schmitt himself admitted.134 Last, we could also interpret it as the end of the organismic ideal of the state and the triumph of a political vitalism that led to the emergence of fascist states and total war. The political unity (politische Einheit) of the state is still based on the constitution; however, it is no longer an organicity of the state as Hegel aspired to as the desirable model; the organicity of the state stands opposed to the mechanical operation of the civil service that Schmitt discredited, because instead of blindly applying norms, reason “itself requires us to recognize that contingency, contradiction, and semblance have a sphere and a right of their own”;135 law, as Hegel argues, only indicates the maximum and minimum to the judge, but it does not determine the case a priori. Schmitt not only sought his alliance with Hegel,136 but rather he completed Hegel, as he thought that Hobbes had done after Descartes. The state as a persona is no longer a mechanical being but rather that which has the vitality (or, more precisely, in Schmitt’s own words, “intensity”) to render the heterogenous political opinions ineffective and to decide on exceptions.137

The ontological categories of friend and enemy are the condition of the political vitality of the state. Without danger, the state will sink into oblivion and depoliticize itself as an administrative machine. The struggle between the spirit with spirit, life with life, is the self-assertion of the state as a vital being. This vital being does not lie so much in the democratic form of society but rather in the capacity of the sovereign to act in response to an emergency. Schmitt opened a new path that moves away from mechanism and organism, and his fundamental move is a return to vitalism. We say “return” here because, during this time (when writing his book on Hobbes), biologists were trying to undermine vitalism, which relies on a mystic force (be that Bergson’s élan vital or Driesch’s entelechy) to explain life, and to overcome the historical opposition between vitalism and mechanism by providing a third path: organicism. In this sense, Schmitt takes a rather different turn by taking recourse to political vitalism. It remains circular to ask if this political vitalism is the source of the political or if the political is the source of such a political vitalism.

This political vitalism is present in dictators and “partisans.” In his later writing, Theory of the Partisan (1963), which bears the subtitle IntermediateCommentary on the Concept of the Political, a sequel to his 1929 essay, Schmitt granted a historical role to the partisans. Partisans are characterized by their irregularity in contrast to the regularity of state armies, but also by their increasing mobility of combat and increasing intensity of political engagement.138 The partisan, exemplified in General Salan’s example, is beyond legality or illegality. The partisan instead seeks legitimacy, which is higher than legality. In the case of revolution or resistance, legitimacy is identified with the nation instead of the state. In other words, the partisan as a historical figure, like the dictator, is a commander of the state of exception. The partisan is political, whereas a figure such as Michael Kohlhaas, who administers personal justice to robbers and murderers, is not partisan since he is not politically motivated and “did not fight against a foreign invader or for a revolutionary cause, but rather for his offended private right.”139 The partisan is political precisely because he identifies a real enemy, and war would not exist without an enemy. The negativity of the enemy, and its death-threatening presence, like the master to the slave, is fundamental to the war of survival. The key question now is how to identify the enemy. In this reading, the biopolitical foundation of the Homo sacer qua the most elementary form of exception, namely, that neither belongs to zoe or bio, shares the same logic as the partisan, though the former is passive and the latter active. The partisan transcends the categories of legality and illegality, such as the state transcends the opposition between mechanism and organism. The partisan is, in this way, the one who risks their own life because they will have to fight, but also the one whom the binary logic of legality could not contain: “The partisan has an enemy and risks something completely different from blockade runners and contraband leaders. He risks not only his life, as does every regular combatant; he knows and accepts that he is an enemy outside of right, law, and honor.”140 Schmitt traces the theory of the partisan to the early nineteenth-century Prussian state but focuses more on twentieth-century Spain, Algeria, China, and Vietnam. In Schmitt’s reading of Clausewitz’s analysis of irregular warfare, he describes Clausewitz as having unleased “a new, formerly unrecognized figure of the world-spirit [Figur des Weltgeistes].”141 On this question, Schmitt showed his respect to Mao Zedong, the most sophisticated and radical theorist of guerrilla warfare and the most accomplished practitioner.142 Mao’s victory over the Japanese invader, the national opponent (the Kuomintang), and the colonial West define a new nomos:

The question is only whether enmity can be bracketed and regulated, i.e., whether it is relative or absolute. That can be decided only by the belligerents at their own risk. For Mao, who thinks as a partisan, peace today is only a manifestation of real enmity. Enmity also does not cease in so-called Cold War, which is not half war and half peace, but rather a situation of enmity with other than open violent means.143

We could follow Clausewitz by saying peace is the continuation of war by other means. The state and the partisan confront the same question, namely, its existence in relation to technology.144 Could the partisan sustain itself “in the age of atomic weapons of mass destruction?” The Cold War was maintained largely by threat of atomic bombs, meaning total annihilation. Technology ceased to be a neutral zone; on the contrary, technology became the means of politicization. We might say that Schmitt was tempted to read political philosophy according to the history of technology. In this case, the political vitalism Schmitt outlines is inseparable from technology since technology allows life to struggle with life. The nomos of the Earth, defined in the Jus Publicum Europaeum, is inseparable from technology since it is the laws of space appropriation and division that could not do without technological advancement. Thus, the progressive appropriation of the three spatial elements, land, sea, and air, is determined by improving marine technology and, later, air technology. In the same book, we find a footnote: “I would like to develop fully and hermeneutically sections 247–48 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a historico-intellectual nucleus [geistesgeschichtliche Keimzelle] for understanding the contemporary techno-industrial world, just as the Marxist interpretation developed the preceding sections 243–46 for an understanding of bourgeois society.”145

As a reminder, in the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §247 discusses the emergence of sea power in modern industrial society; §248 discusses the distinction between the sporadic and systematic mode of colonization. Schmitt not only further elaborated on Hegel’s discussion on sea power but also extended beyond sea power to the concern of air power. Today, we know that the nomos extends beyond the earth toward outer space, as Schmitt had already anticipated, where “these immeasurable spaces also become potential battlefields.”146 However, he was not able to anticipate the emergence of cyberspace. As Peter Thiel has pointed out, after the three spatial elements of land, sea, and air, the future appropriation of space will be outer space, the deep ocean, and cyberspace.147 New technologies will challenge the sovereign and enforce it to respond to the ambiguities and hiatus made visible by technological changes. It is the same with the partisan, who might disappear in the technological world by being dissolved into technological apparatus and platforms (a consequence of technological neutralization). In reaction to these changes, the state of exception could become a regularity, similar to what Agamben has been warning. The state becomes a vital megamachine, vital in that it has to actively interrupt its own routine and suspend its protocols to preserve itself recursively. Simultaneously, we can expect that, a new nomos of the Earth will emerge in the planetary condition driven by the exigency of “real politics.”