Hegel in Carl Schmitt’s ‘Glossarium’
Since the ‘Glossarium’ , Carl Schmitt’s private notebook covering the years 1947–1958, has never been translated in full, I collected &…
Since the ‘Glossarium’ , Carl Schmitt’s private notebook covering the years 1947–1958, has never been translated in full, I collected & translated some of his thoughts on Hegel (in honor of the latter’s birthday).
One must have a memory for long-term effects. For example, the Inquisition in Spain was an answer given after 600 years to the authors and instigators of the Saracen invasion of the 8th century. Here the great Hegel fails; he thought that what was long ago was therefore no longer true. “So Christ has died for our sins so long ago that it will soon be no longer true” (Rosenkranz). Understand Otto Weininger’s fear of such a saying. This is the unjust comb maker Hegel, who unfortunately also exists and who is now to become the crown witness of Lukács.
There is nothing in the whole history of the world that is so free from every need of salvation, so completely immune to every impulse of such a need as Hegel’s philosophy of the identity of being and not-being to a connection, which is not only connection, complexio or coincidentia oppositorum, but connection of connection and non-connection, identity of identity and non-identity, eternal process, eternal restlessness; he who understands this needs no more salvation.
Deeply frightened of the real irony that lies in the fact that a thick book about the concept of irony is lying in my room. Irony is something so destructively effective that its mere mention determines the atmosphere. Perhaps it is the same with every term and every word. That is concept-realism. Deeply frightened; deeply affected. Victim of the irony of world history, of fate, that is unbearable, not even as a hypothetical possibility, not even as a danger or risk. God is easy to deceive, but he cannot deceive. Nor can he become ironic. The Hegelian spirit can do that, and it always is, actually. Were you a deception, you blessed silver-blue day? Or even irony? Because the irony that the strong man imposes on the weak is the most horrible cruelty, devilry, hellspawn, madness. There is indeed something animal-like, this self-evident quality with which Hegel knows himself to be identical with the subject of “irony of history”; that he shows no fear when he speaks of such things. So, was Hegel also one of those who don’t fear the devil? Descartes’ deepest motive and final driving force was the fear of the spiritus malignus, the abysmal possibilities of an ironic deception.
As to natural law: during every discussion of natural law, no matter how fleeting and casual, but even more so during every detailed and in-depth debate, I consider whether the author knows Hegel’s essay on “The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law” (1802/03) or not. If he does not know it, then I recommend that he read it, unless the discussion makes the author recognizable as incapable of Hegel. In this unfortunately most frequent case I turn off. Why is this young Hegel of 1802 so overwhelmingly great? And why is the old Hegel (e. g., the essay on Hamann’s writings of 1828) so narrow and unjust in his dogmatism? The parallel to Goethe is obvious here; of course old Goethe played his role as a cult image more tastefully, with more effective cult means and therefore more successfully than old Hegel.
Hegel’s ingenuity can be seen in the fact that he saw the connection between the sea and industrial technology. But Hobbes’ ingenuity is even greater; it shows itself in the fact that he symbolizes all this in his Leviathan.
My rejection of positivism came with age. Would it have made more sense in youth? Compare with this the rejection of “positivity” by the young Hegel. Positivity = legality = Judaism = despotism = cramp of the “ought” and the norm. Hegel polemically opposes positive Christianity with a non-positive religiosity. Georg Lukács states this, without mentioning that this positive Christianity in the case of the young Hegel expressly means law religion and Judaism; the young Hegel seeks the subjective and yet public religion. Here he already shows his famous Janus face. Hegel’s contradiction as the deepest principle of all things and their movements; everything, life, the absolute is connection of connection and non-connection. “Not the one or the other has truth, but their movement”. Not the identity of opposites, but identity and non-identity. Not the abolition, but the continual abolition of opposites is infinity. These are the sentences that pleased Lenin. Thus: Hegel said “The great teacher of constitutional law sits in Paris”. Where is he sitting today? Today the great teacher of international law sits in Moscow. From there he instructed the Nuremberg Trials.
Reading “Young Hegel” by Georg Lukács presents a great task: to make the Christian Epimetheus visible, as from whom the Heraclitic Epimetheus Hegel is only waste. Admittedly, this waste is still a thousand times greater than the UN-Toynbee and the positivists of the West. Of course, to say that the world was created out of nothing is no explanation of its creation. Nothing, that is to say: Nothing, and if it is to mean something else, it is no longer nothing, and the whole thing becomes a puzzle of deceptive words. “Creation out of nothing,” that has no other meaning than to make the origin of the world from God incomprehensible and to leave it incomprehensible. Infinite superiority of nihilism over positivism. Hegel is a nihilist, and not a positivist. The Nothing is stronger than the Something.
The two-facedness of Hegel is the authentically German face; his double sense the German sense.
No departure to the true Hegel, who is the same as Hölderlin, of the same spirit, corresponded to the great departure to Hölderlin. The philosophical power was extinguished, now they become poets. But is that not much more? Germany missed something important in Hegel at that time. Hegel was only historically present in Leninism and Mussolinism; the Germans knew nothing more about him and had opted for Schopenhauer in the 19th century. Today, Hegel is a holy cat in the idolatrous temple of strangers, and who would dare to wrest him from the power of these malicious priests like Georg Lukács? And where to put him, even if the holy robbery should succeed? The German professors will snatch the rescued painting from your hands to make it harmless in their storage room. So let it stay a holy cat among the idolaters, who make it work, and don’t just let it rot in a scheming boredom.
Today the Germans complain about the art theft that the Russians and other victors are committing against Germany, and yet these Germans have no idea what spiritual abandonment they have carried out for 100 years when they abandoned Hegel to the Russians, and whom they are now leaving even to the French. Today the Germans complain about the theft of art which the Russians and other victors commit against Germany, and do not suspect that by abandoning Hegel they have authorized in advance this effect of their abandonment.
Hegel has been the only Christian theologian for 400 years; not Kierkegaard; because in Kierkegaard there is no theology of the Trinity. But Hegel is the theologian of the Trinity.
Hegel in Carl Schmitt’s ‘Glossarium’
Thanks you for these translations, which give valuable insight into Schmitt's view of Hegel.