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Title: The Tyranny of Values by Carl Schmitt, Simona Draghici ISBN: 0-943045-11-8 Publisher: Plutarch Press Pub. Date: December, 1996 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $3.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Schmitt fights tyranny to the death!
Comment: This book reprints two similar short works by Schmitt on the philosophy of values. It's great reading, especially for those unacquainted with Schmitt's lesser known works, because it gives the lie to the usual rather unfair picture that he was a mere Nazi and authoritarian, when in fact his career and intellectual corpus is much more variegated than this.
Schmitt finds that the problem with values is that their logic is merely one dimensional, better and worse, and a higher value has absolute right to supplant and even destroy a lower value. This actually gives way to terrific destructiveness, especially in war. (Presumably in contrast, old fashioned thinking about ethics, morality, is many-dimensional, vast in its logic and rich in its complexity. It is more human; it makes finer distinctions, presumably in both the subject and the object of ethical thought.) Schmitt writes relatively little about the pre-value conception of morality; maybe it is supposed to be so obvious to us all as to need little exposition. Values logic has replaced or tried to take the place of the older conception, that these are problems of "convictions and interests" (25).
The theory of values is basically derivative of neo-Kantian subjectivism. Philosophy of values and natural law were twin attempts to redress the nihilism of legal positivism (9). The philosophy of values seems neutral and tolerant, but is in fact aggressive (11). Value and the logic of extra-economic values prove to be the engines of utopia (8) in cutting down the barrier between scientific and moral thinking.
The only way out of such an aggressive social struggle, Hobbesian in ferocity, would be to find objective values. But these are no where to be found. "They have not and could not. To claim an objective character for values which we set up means only to create a new occasion for rekindling the aggressiveness in the struggle of valuations, to introduce a new instrument of self-righteousness..." (23).
Is it that values philosophy is worse than moralism or traditional ethics? Presumably not in itself. But the old fashioned version has several things going for it. First, it did not claim to have a scientific character, but a religious one, so in the modern world it was less able to arrogantly claim correctness. And that religious character is tied to another advantage of the old model: it is mediated by political institutions. Values exhibit the same problem as pure heavenly Platonic ideas: they require legal (i.e. political) mediation; if they appear unmediated - directly - terror ensues, a la French Revolution. In contrast to traditional legal mediation, value philosophy, by its extremist logic, cuts through all traditional distinctions and restrictions, from personal ethics to international relations: there is one great big hierarchy of values, and any value can be found on its way up to the top. "All thinking about values only foments and intensifies the age old struggle between convictions and interests" (25).
According to Heidegger (quoted on 19), "Value and valuation act as a positivistic substitute for the metaphysical." Schmitt writes that value philosophy is "an attempt to assert the human being as a free, responsible creature."
"Virtues are practiced, norms are applied, orders are executed, but values are set up and enacted. Whoever asserts a value, must bring its influence to bear. Whoever maintains that it has value regardless of the influence brought to bear by any individual human being who endorses it, is simply cheating" (21). I think that by "bring to bear" Schmitt must mean valuate and disvalue, in other words act upon other things, other lower values. The valuator, if not simply cheating, must aggress and seek power.
Schmitt quotes Nicolai Hartmann: "There is a fanaticism of justice (fiat justitia pereat mundus), which is opposed not only to love, to say nothing of charity, but essentially to all the superior values" (25). Witness "making the world safe for democracy" or "bringing democracy to Bosnia-Herzogovina."
According to value logic, the highest price is not too much to realize the highest value (25-26). On similar grounds Hayek criticizes central planning - it requires to assume a unanimity of values for the society, which certainly do not exist. In addition, if say dignity or freedom are the single highest value, then can enormous power not be set up to secure these things? The logic of values shreds and destroys the amazing richness and complexity of older moral and political thinking.
"Formerly, when value was substantially some thing else than worth, the end could not justify the means... On the other hand, in the hierarchy of values, there are other relationships that count and justify it, namely that the value cancels the disvalue, and the higher value treats the lower value as inferior to it" (26). The logic of this modern eradication of ethics will "transform our planet into a hell that turns into a paradise for value" (26).
The theory of values really gets out of control in the theory of the just war (26), in which all restraints are thrown out; this in contrast to the old European international civil law, the jus publicum Europeum. In the 20th century, the values of the national community, as embodied in the citizen-emperor, are universal and not to be resisted, whether legal or illegal...
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Title: The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt by Gopal Balakrishnan ISBN: 185984359X Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues by Alasdair MacIntyre ISBN: 081269452X Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: 09 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Alain Badiou, Ray Brassier ISBN: 0804744718 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Four Articles: 1931-1938 by Carl Schmitt, Simona Draghici ISBN: 0943045169 Publisher: Plutarch Press Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Land and Sea by Carl Schmitt ISBN: 0943045126 Publisher: Plutarch Press Pub. Date: August, 1997 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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