The Enmity Potential of Thought and Philosophy as Blood Sport

Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, hrsg. v. Medem (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1991), S. 213 (14. I. 49):

     Das Feindschaftpotential des Denkens ist unendlich. Denn man kann
     nicht anders als in Gegensätzen denken. Le combat spirituel est
     plus brutal que la bataille des hommes.

     The enmity potential of thought is infinite. For one cannot think
     otherwise than in oppositions. Spiritual combat is more brutal than
     a battle of men. (tr. MavPhil)

There is something to this unrepentant Nazi's onesided observation.  Philosophy in particular sometimes bears the aspect of a blood sport. But thinking is just as much about the reconciliation of oppositions as it is about their  sharpening. A good thinker is rigorous, precise, clear, disciplined. These are virtues martial and manly. But there are also the womanly virtues, in particular, those of the midwife. Socratic maieutic is as  important as ramming a precisely formulated thesis down someone's throat or impaling him on the horns of a dilemma. The Cusanean coincidentia oppositorum belongs as much to thought as the oppositio  oppositorum.

There is more to philosophy than the Butlerian "A thing is what it is and not some  other thing." There is also the Heraclitean "The way up and the way down are the same."  To take either as one's motto would be to philosophize onesidedly.  Sometimes a thing is what it is in virtue of not being what it is not, its not being its Other being constitutive of what it is.  That is indeed the case with the way up and the way down. Each is what it is by not being what it is not as non-independent moments of a whole which is their unity.

There is no philosophy without analysis and distinction, but there is also no philosophy without a concern for unity and wholeness. Discursive reason is diremptive but is also somehow aware of this fact and so seeks its Other, the reason that reconciles and harmonizes.

Every judgment, after all, is both an analysis and a synthesis.  To judge that a is F is to separate a subject and a predicate while combining them.  This holds for both what we in the trade call analytic and synthetic judgments.  There is a clear sense in which the analytic Every cygnet is a swan is synthetic and the synthetic  Some cygnets have broken wings is analytic.  

The ability to listen and lay oneself open are as important in a philosopher as the ability to probe, penetrate, and dissect. When the manly and martial squeezes out the feminine and receptive, then philosophy can degenerate into a blood sport.