Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians

Sun May 18 06:48:54 CDT 2014

The linked essay may be of use.

Responsibility of Making Decisions without Decisionism: From Carl
Schmitt to Jacques Derrida  by Yusuke Miyazaki

http://www.academia.edu/1066606/Responsibility_of_Making_Decisions_without_Decisionism_From_Carl_Schmitt_to_Jacques_Derrida

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 4:10 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> On 17.05.2014 16:31, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>> "The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It's what happened to the
>> Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on
>> itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills
>> and false emotion."
>>
>> Hannah, in Stoppard's "Acadia"I
>>
>> On May 17, 2014 5:26 AM, "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com
>> <mailto:against.the.dave at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians
>>
>>
>> http://www.openculture.com/2014/05/the-british-library-puts-online-1200-romantic-and-victorian-literary-treasures.html
>>
>>
>
>
> "One of the theses advanced by Carl Schmitt in his *Political Romanticism
> <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=6760&ttype=2>* (MIT
> Press, 1986, tr. Guy Oakes; German original first appeared in 1919 as
> *Politische Romantik*, 2nd ed. 1925) is that romanticism is a form of
> occasionalism. As Schmitt puts it, “Romanticism is subjectified
> occasionalism.” (PR 17) In this set of notes I attempt to interpret and
> develop this thought. I will take the ball and run with it, but I won’t quit
> the field of Schmitt’s text. Before proceeding, a preliminary point about
> metaphysics needs to be made.
>
> 1. Metaphysical commitment is unavoidable. (PR 17) Every person assumes some
> metaphysical stance or other, tacitly or expressly, whether or not he is
> conscious of assuming it. That is to say: he takes something or other to be
> ultimate or absolute or foundational or finally authoritative. For some this
> is God, but for others it is “humanity, the nation, the individual,
> historical development, or even life as life for its own sake, in its
> complete emptiness and mere dynamic.” (PR 17) Secularization is the process
> whereby God is replaced by some such mundane ersatz. But the replacement of
> God by the individual, say, or by the revolution, does not alter the fact
> that something is being taken as absolute, as an ultimate focus and locus of
> meaning. The only question is whether this is something transcendent or
> something immanent (worldly).
>
> Someone who attempts to reject every absolute soon finds himself affirming
> one willy-nilly. To say, “I accept nothing whatsoever as absolute!” is to
> accept as absolute the rejection all absolutes. After all, a relativized
> rejection of all absolutes would be one that countenances circumstances in
> which absolutes would be affirmed. To claim that all is a matter of
> perception or perspective, that there are no absolute truths or absolute
> moral standards, is to posit some principle of perspectivism or relativism
> as an absolute principle. A relativized or perspectivized perspectivism
> undercuts itself.
>
> 2. Romanticism is a metaphysical attitude that places the individual subject
> at the center. The romantic does not free himself from divine control in
> order to submit to some temporal power such as the state; his attempt is to
> free himself from every external power. Romanticism puts the individual
> human being in the place of God.
>
> 3. God stands to the world as creator to creature. Divine creating is
> causing in a preeminent sense, a causing to exist, a bringing into being /ex
> nihilo/. But the human individual is in no position to create the world out
> of nothing. At best, he can operate upon the world and change it in minor
> ways. He can bring about changes in what exists, but cannot bring about what
> exists. But even this is hard work and so does not interest the romantic.
> You see, this fellow is a bit of a slacker. To operate upon the world
> effectively, to cause real changes in it, one must understand its causal
> structure, its nomological order and intrinsic intelligibility. One must
> study hard science. I cannot manipulate worldly realities for my use and
> benefit unless I understand their intrinsic properties. To work upon the
> world, I must understand it workings (/Wirkungen/ = effects) and these have
> causes.
>
> The romantic, however, substitutes /occasio/ for /causa/. (PR 16-17). He
> does not want to work upon the world. That would require submitting to the
> world and its laws. The romantic would rather play God and create something
> /ex nihilo/. That’s easier, more fun, and more ‘creative.’ He must be
> creative at all costs, and original to boot! Originality is a high value
> among the romantically inclined just so long as it is understood that he is
> the /fons et origo/. The source that interests him is not rooted in reality
> but rooted in him. He takes originality to be connected with novelty. What
> he wants is the new, not the true. Truth implies correspondence to a
> pre-given reality possessing an intrinsic intelligibility demanding his
> intellectual submission. The romantic, however, prefers dominance over
> submission. But he would dominate the world, not by working on it – which is
> hard work and requires an understanding of the world’s intrinsic workings –
> but by telling stories, painting pictures, and the like, with the world as
> the mere occasion of the telling and the painting, etc.
>
> So the romantic subject treats the world as an occasion, an opportunity, for
> his romantic productivity. For the romantic, things cease to be what they
> are, substantial mind-independent unities, acting and being acted upon in a
> world governed by causal laws; they become instead starting points for
> endless novels. (PR 20)
>
> It helps to recall that ‘romantic’ refers us back to /Roman/, novel. The
> romantic, then, takes worldly data as mere occasions for his fictionalizing
> and poeticizing. Incapable of making the world, he makes up stories about it
> and enjoys the experiences he conjures up by so doing. Fabricating and
> fictionalizing, the romantic finds an ersatz for /creatio ex nihilo/.
>
> 4. Schmitt’s idea, then, is that to understand romanticism one must
> understand it as a species of occasionalism. But what exactly is
> occasionalism? Classically, occasionalism is a theory of causation in which
> secondary causes – causes in the natural world – are mere occasions of
> divine activity. It is a theory according to which God is the only genuine
> or productive cause and every thing else that looks like a cause is but an
> ‘occasional cause,’ a mere condition of the exercise of divine activity.
> Suppose a bolt of lightning hits a tree and the tree explodes into flame. If
> you believe in the efficacy of natural events, then you say that the bolt of
> lightning *caused* the tree to burn. But if you are an occasionalist like
> the Muslim al-Ghazali
> <http://www.epistemelinks.com/Main/Philosophers.aspx?PhilCode=Algh>or the
> Christian Malebranche <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/malebranche/>, you
> interpret the same appearances in a different way: you say that there are
> two spatiotemporally contiguous events with one occuring before the other,
> but that there is no worldly connection between the two other than
> spatiotemporal contiguity and temporal successiveness. Thus there is no
> causing on the world’s ‘horizontal plane’ that links the two events. The
> exploding into flame is not brought about by the bolt of lightning
> contacting the tree; the former is brought about by God ‘vertically’ on the
> occasion of the lightning strike.
>
> Classically, then, occasionalism is at once both a theory of causation and a
> theory of how God is related to the world: God commands all the power and
> the world commands none. Theologically, this fits nicely with Islam’s
> emphasis on the radical transcendence, unity, and omnipotence of Allah.
> Omnipotence here means not only that God can do everything that is
> (metaphysically) possible to do; but also that God actually does everything
> that gets done. All doing is divine doing, appearances notwithstanding.
>
> Schmitt’s idea can be understood in part as follows. The romantic adopts a
> metaphysical stance in which the individual human subject is the center, the
> final authority, the ultimate arbiter of the good, the true, and the
> beautiful. The individual subject takes over the role of God. The romantic
> subject must be creative and original at all costs. Since he cannot create
> the world /ex nihilo/, he creates fictions /ex nihilo/. He withdraws
> aesthetically from the world and its demands and enters a private world in
> which he is the “master builder in the cathedral of his own personality.”
> (PR 20) Worldly realities are thus demoted to the status of mere occasions
> of his romantic productivity."
>
>
> http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/12/carl-schmitt-on-romanticism-as-a-form-of-occasionalism.html
>
>
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