Dualism and Its Discontents in Schmitt, Freud, and Nietzsche - Essay Example

Dualism and Its Discontents in Schmitt, Freud, and Nietzsche Carl Schmitt had come to conclude that the bourgeois politics of post-WWI Germany was a system of constant compromising making the world to be such that there were never any solutions to anything. No one within politics could provide answers, only ever changing points of view. Additionally, he found that nothing within such an arrangement can ever satisfy the total egalitarianism that is demanded by our modern democracies. The liberalism contained within modern politics negates the universal egalitarian position by way of its emphasis on ever-shifting foundations and keepers of power. Liberalism undermines the very ideal and purpose of politics—resolution—because of its love of substituting procedure for real struggling. Necessarily, this means that legitimacy and legalism must always be at odds and perpetually never-meeting. “Liberals are horrified at Schmitt because he offends against one of the deepest premises of liberalism: politics is necessary but should not become serious…Most important, liberal politics takes the form of claiming that politics should never be about identity and that to the degree that policy decisions affect what it means to be a person those decisions are decisive and dangerous. For liberals, rights are rights no matter how gained: they have little truck with the claim of what one might call Schmitt-leaning democrats that rights are not rights unless they are fought for and won, such that they become our rights” (Schmitt xxvi). Schmitt conceptualizes politics as delineating the whole of human thought and action. He returns to the primordial and seminal dualism between “friend” and “enemy” when he seeks to explain the essence of being. Dualism posits that the essential truth about the world of mankind is always defined by a conflict or divide between two defined distinctions. In morals it is between good and evil, in aesthetics between the beautiful and the ugly, in economics between profitable and unprofitable. Schmitt transposed dualism, which is embedded deeply as a meme in German culture, onto politics, for him the essential philosophical expression of mankind. For Schmitt, the significantly political distinction is between “friend” and “foe”. He asserted that the political is primordial; it comes before the State and transcends its mundane and routine policies. It reveals itself, historically, at the foundational moment of the polity, and conceptually, in the unwritten metaphysics of the constitution. Indeed, the political in the conceptualization of Schmitt incarnates existential totality and determines a choice between being and nothingness. Schmitt found his enemy in liberalism, which by the postulation of a false universalism, according to him, obscures the existentially paramount nature of politics and replaces it with the struggle for purely formal notions of rights. Schmitt is at pains to underscore that, within the scope of his theory, friend and foe are not to be taken merely as metaphors or symbols, for they are “neither normative not pure spiritual antitheses.” He furthermore asserts that “The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist, theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transaction. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are always possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined norm nor by the judgement of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party” (Schmitt 37). Freud had found himself involved in a type of political struggle at one time. “When the International Psychoanalytical Association was founded in March of 1910, in Nurnberg”, Carl Jung “was Freud’s logical, inevitable choice for president”. Freud’s Viennese adherents were very put off by the center of their precious movement being displaced from their city to Jung’s Zurich. Although a peace was hammered out, it did not last long. Alfred Adler, along with Jung one of Freud’s two most promising and capable “apprentices”, “was developing distinctive psychological ideas, which featured aggressiveness over sexuality…A split was inevitable”, and in 1911 Adler and some of his own adherents left the movement. “Like Adler, Jung increasingly diverged from Freud’s ideas. He had never been easy with the prominence Freud” gave to the “libido. By early 1912, these reservations took a personal turn” (Freud, xix). Freud himself would later expand his concepts into the realm of the dualistic with his Eros and Thanatos. However, unlike with the overt politics of Schmitt, with its literal friend and foe, it us reading symbols and understanding stories that is the guidepost to healing for Freud. Psychoanalysis is an intellectual discourse which turns on interpreting that which is presented in symbolic format. Freud had come to believe that mythology reflected human history and therefore human psychology. He kept on his desk a collection of statues, heads, busts, and figurines that had been dug up and brought back into the light by archaeology. Freud imagined himself as the archaeologist of the soul. Indeed, one of the things that he comes to conceptualize is that of the psyche having levels, analogous to the levels that the archaeologist digs through. He also understood that those levels found in the earth represented different civilizations, or different stages of the development of civilization. Freud saw all religion as an illusion and as something that has to do with the archaic past of human beings. The objects of beauty and art that he kept on his desk were also objects to be used in rituals. At all times, Freud was an unrepentant nonbeliever. In one of his letters he said, “Neither in my private life nor in my writings have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.” In 1873 he wrote to a friend that “For God's dark ways, no one has yet invented a lantern.” This echoes with Nietzsche's madman wandering the streets with lantern in hand, searching for God and never finding him. For Freud, it was never atheism which required an explanation, but instead religion. Freud's mentors were from the new world of science. In the early 1870s, scientists were trespassing on the traditional domain of religion. This rebellion against the established order—something with overtones of German romantic idealism and its dualistic politics—appealed to the young Freud. But, while Freud's passion was science, the material world didn't replace his old love of the humanities. He was a pioneer of neuroscience. He wanted to understand the true essence of a human being, of a person’s inner workings. But he wanted this to be grasped in earthy terms. The dualistic divide between body and soul was anathema to Freud. He identified in the language of religion and mythology terms that can be appropriated for scientific use. He reinterpreted pre-Christian Greek myths and saw within them oracles about the inner workings of humankind; then he arranged a scientific approach to understanding that phenomena within the structures of rationality. Freud said, “Religions owe their compulsive power to reawakened memories of very ancient, forgotten, highly emotional episodes of human history....Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.” Freud said in essence that people have got to face themselves. He believed that primal events had left “ineradicable traces in the history of humanity.” Freud saw the inner divided from the outer. Reconciliation of the inner to the outer, the bridging of that gap, manifested itself in the healthy capacities to love and to work. “Nietzche’s interest in ethics is an anthropological one, and terms such as ‘morality’ and ‘morals’ are used more or less neutrally to designate historically relative sets of values and beliefs rather than absolute moral truths.” Traveling down the dimly-lit road into pre-Christian Greek story, and arguably setting the stage for Freud’s own later journey along there, Nietzsche sought “to locate the origin of Greek tragedy in a compromise between what he called the Apollonian and the Dionysian poles of Greek culture. While Apollo represented the desire for containment and form, Dionysus symbolized excess and loss of identity.” Greek tragedy sought to reconcile the two dualistic opposites (Nietzsche viii). Nietzsche’s “friend vs. foe” conflict can be seen in his declaration that the Few—the “Hyperboreans”, the men of great intellectual—are at war against the weak masses with their herdlike mentalities. Like Freud, he saw religion as a phenomenal illusion. But he arguably saw politics as delusional as well. And that religion—and politics—which he most despised was Christianity, which he saw as having infiltrated and permeated the whole of German and Western culture and causing it to rot from within. Nietzsche wanted to see a society of “Overmen”. The Overman—the “man above men”—is someone who has reached a state of being where he is no longer affected by the core things that most Christians and Western moral philosophers preach or practice. Overman is constantly changing and in a state of rebirth and growth. He determines what is good and what is evil, not allowing religion or society to determine these things for him. The Overman finds his joy and his raison d’etre by being beyond good and evil. He uses a reason that is independent of the modern values of society or religion. He determines his own values. This creation of his own values gives him joy, and in order for the Overman to cope with a changing world, the Overman must constantly change. This constant state of change is a constant source of joy, leaving little or no room for suffering. The Overman does not believe in an afterlife or the power of the soul over the body because he does not have any religious faith and has no proof of an afterlife or a God. Therefore, he makes the most out of this life, not depending on a reward in Heaven or a punishment in Hell for what he has done on Earth. The Overman does not pity or tolerate the weak. But who are the “weak”? They are all those who fear strength and individuality and who furthermore, in their fear, seek to hold back mankind’s progress by beating down the keepers of wisdom and creativity. They are in fact most people—the herd following the political shepherd, the masses needing the opium of religion. Those who will not face themselves. Those who will not fight to forge “rights”. Nietzsche had absorbed the German romanticist view that non-rational forces reside at the foundation of all creativity and of reality itself—something later to appear in a different form in Freud’s core of libidinous energy and in Schmitt’s sharp distinction between friend and enemy. He felt that the strongly instinctual, wild, lusting, Dionysian energy that he believed to be the epitome of pre-Socratic Greek culture was an essentially creative and healthy force. Looking on Western culture, Nietzsche lamented over how the Dionysian creative energy had been submerged and weakened as it became overshadowed by the Apollonian forces of logical order and stiff sobriety. As a means towards cultural rebirth, and thus the healing of individuals, Nietzsche advocated the resurrection and fuller release of Dionysian artistic energies—those which he associated with primordial creativity, joy in existence, and ultimate truth. If man is by destiny a political animal, then that “animal” portion of his nature is still emphasized with that definition itself. Schmitt’s political reality exists only to make real for the most people the strident individualism of Nietzsche or the man who lives for erotic love and creative work whom Freud defined as hale and whole. Individuals in turn are creating that body politic out of which so many conflicts arise. Perhaps it is dualism itself that needs to be brought to its bitter end. Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Introduction by Peter Gray). WW Norton & Co.: New York, NY: 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals (Introduction and Notes by Douglas Smith). Oxford University Press: NY: 1996. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political (Introduction by George Schwab and Forward by Tracy B. Strong).University of Chicago Press: Chicago, Ill.: 1996. Read More