Carl Schmitt on Romanticism as a Form of Occasionalism

One of the theses advanced by Carl Schmitt in his Political Romanticism (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 or the Christian 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.