AN ARGUMENT AGAINST LEVITY: PRODUCTIONAL VALUE BY WAY OF POLITICAL TRUTH
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A calling for a return to the original principles of liberalism and private enterprise to address the consequences of consumerism's overproduction and manipulation.
“The specific political distinction to which actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”¹ For Schmitt, many distinctions exist, such as between beauty and ugliness in the aesthetic realm or between good and evil in the moral sphere, but the ultimate antithesis is between friend and enemy as that is the only polarity to exist independently of “other antitheses.”² In other words, the political is the fundamental characteristic of humankind just as Aristotle had summed up millennia ago by positing that “man is by nature political”. This fundamental facet of human nature manifests itself when peoples form groups which coalesce around some shared belief and draw meaning in opposition to some other group of peoples. Group formation is dynamic, always changing, guided by some kind of Hegelian spirit, the belief that history is moving in some kind of rational manner to some end. This process evinces progress through the consistent renewal of some development that leads to some thesis which then engenders an antithesis that then creates space for a synthesis, so on and so forth. Perhaps, this ultimate direction of history ends with the foundations of “Liberalism”, the belief in the irrevocable and fundamental nature of rights and freedoms inherent to man.
Liberties which must be protected from governments and secured in constitutions through theorems of federalism, separation of powers, etc.
These liberties are typically enshrined in certain regime types such as democracies as they permit the universal codification of these beliefs. But what happens when this spirit becomes corrupted and runs rampant in synchronicity with the potential weaknesses of such regimes like democracies to economic principles such as capitalism which espouse a tacit materialism? Our current scenario can be deduced from the movement of goods which seems to outstrip human needs but never too far out of sync with demand. The seemingly innumerable production of cheap and fragile goods, the manipulation of peoples with advertising, and the obsession with false idols has all led to a skewing of sorts, a distortion of human will equating consumption with need. Quantity replaces quality, the ugly challenges the beautiful, and the evil presents as the good. This spirit must be challenged. I argue that the founding merits of liberalism have been corrupted just as the core essence of private enterprise has been corrupted, and a return to original principles is needed. This is neither impossible nor improbable as thoughts, intentions, and actions aggregate creating a force majeure powerful enough to cut through proverbial mountains and introduce a new reality.
The current political and philosophical thought prevalent today, enshrined in our holiest of institutions, owes much of its existence to the fissuring of Christianity in the sixteenth century. Disagreements regarding leadership questions and religious doctrine created a maelstrom of discontent which not only led to new alliances but a new way of viewing the world. For it was in the aftereffects of this new world order, that famous thinkers such as Suarez, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, Newton, and Leibniz realized that Christianity no longer held a monopoly on the truth. They turned to the natural environment around them for answers to age-old questions regarding human nature and the physical world. It is with this schismatic leap that the modern world we know today exists. In it, these thinkers discovered new truths and founded a philosophical and scientific approach that believed in a constant forward march of progress. It is in this environment that Schmitt remarks that “I consider the strongest and most consequential of all intellectual shifts of European history to be the one in the seventeenth century from the traditional Christian theology to natural science. Until now this shift has determined the direction of all further development.”³ It is with this backdrop that liberalism was established and its founder, Thomas Hobbes, unveiled a new political doctrine.
Deeply affected by the deadly and chaotic times of the English Civil War, Hobbes became convinced of the dangerousness of man. He theorized that life in the theoretical state of nature is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”⁴ due to the right of nature, man’s absolute freedom to protect his own life by any means necessary. The only way to avoid this unseemly reality for Hobbes is to enter into a contract where man renounces his right of nature in favor of a reduced freedom guaranteeing certain rights and liberties to one another and vesting all political control to the leviathan, the state.
It is with this narrative that liberalism was established, a doctrine which recognizes the seriousness of political life, the choice between peace and violence, and thus the need for the primacy of rights and a rights-based order. Subsequent political thought maintained the sanctity of the new rights-based order known as liberalism.
The development of this new political philosophy, however, introduced new shades to the color of liberalism with the passage of time: “In the past four centuries of European history, intellectual life has had four different centers and the thinking of the active elite which constituted the respective vanguards moved in the changing centuries around changing centers.”⁵
For Schmitt, the original understanding of liberalism became lost and ultimately corrupted as seventeenth century thought gave way to the moralism of the eighteenth century, the obsession with economics in the nineteenth century, and the attachment to technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Though liberalism has its seeds in the most consequential and intellectually significant century for Schmitt – the seventeenth century – its current form coupled with its previous wayward development pose significant problems in understanding reality. This misconception of reality reveals itself when analyzing the lens through which descendants of liberalist thought have mistakenly attributed human progress to some quixotic ideal. For example, the spirit of thought from the eighteenth-century equated progress with the state’s securitization of rights that seeks to affirm man’s utopic moral demands. The spirit of thought from the nineteenth century equated progress with the state’s protection of man’s economic right to profit. Lastly, the spirit of thought from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries equated progress with the state’s obligation to protect man’s inexorable claim to technology as a means to human perfection. According to Schmitt, all of the aforementioned examples regarding the development of thought within liberalism misunderstand the fundamental notion of liberalism. The state exists not to be limited by some other human pursuit but rather it exists to protect the way of life of its citizens.
In fact, the state’s obligation to the protection of its citizens must be unshackled from any restraint and exercisable to the fullest degree. This return to original principles is made clear with Schmitt’s reaffirmation of the state of nature, albeit a slightly amended one: “the state of nature is defined by Schmitt in a fundamentally different fashion than it is by Hobbes. For Hobbes, it is the state of war of individuals; for Schmitt, it is the state of war of groups (especially of nations). For Hobbes, in the state of nature everyone is the enemy of everyone else; for Schmitt, all political behavior is oriented towards friend and enemy."⁶
This friend-enemy distinction is observed at the international level, state vs. state. An enemy is not defined in a private sense but rather in a public sense.
Any state which presents an existential threat to the way of life of another state is an enemy. The mere possibility of war is an acknowledgement of this fact. This reformulation of the state of nature is a reminder of the realities of political life; the raison d’être for any state is to protect the lives and way of life of its citizens. A state should not be limited in this regard by any other interest, no matter how strong or convincing. This reformulation of the state of nature though is not a rejection of it as such but rather a type of rebirth, one that places it on the other end of the kind of liberalism that exists today:
“Whereas the liberal respects and tolerates all ‘honest’ convictions so long as they merely acknowledge the legal order, peace, as sacrosanct, he who affirms the political as such respects and tolerates all ‘serious’ convictions, that is, all decisions oriented to the real possibility of war. Thus, the affirmation of the political as such proves to be a liberalism with the opposite polarity.”
Seriousness must be restored to political life through the acknowledgement that war is an existential possibility. The threat of ruin is so strong that the state concentrates all its efforts and energies in securing peace with other states and seeks only in return obedience from its citizens. The kind of obedience that allows human flourishing to occur, respect for laws and the establishment of norms. So that within this system all other kinds of human activities can exist and thrive. This is the return to original principles, the true nature of liberalism, the acknowledgment of the seriousness of human life.
Louis-Phillipe Opening the Galerie des Batailles by Francois-Joseph Heim (1837)
Up until now, I have introduced Schmitt’s framework of the political and his use of such to critique the current state of liberalism and his call to return to original principles. Now, I would like to take the liberty to use Schmitt’s thought as scaffolding to understand another topic, the nature of private enterprise. Though businesses are not states, they hold many similarities, especially in today’s day and age. Businesses now, more than ever, are international. Look at Apple as an example with headquarters in the USA, production in Asia, and operations throughout the rest of the world. These businesses do not exist only at the top but at almost every other rung of the ladder. Businesses like states compete and trade with one another. Some businesses in industries like personal computers compete against one another. Dell competes against Lenovo for market share. But within this same industry, certain companies work together with one another such as Dell and Intel where Intel produces the processing chips needed to operate the computers Dell produces. Lastly, businesses are like states in that they have a contingent of people whom they are ultimately answerable to –consumers/clients/fans – those who form the fundamental base of any business. Unlike states, however, businesses face their existential threat not from war but rather from desertion. Consumers, unlike citizens, are free to switch their allegiances as they please.
Thus, businesses find themselves in a position in which they must remain ever vigilant, always serious. This seriousness, however, does not signify that businesses fulfill first principles as such.
Instead, the majority of these businesses are corrupted. For most of these businesses find themselves in a world that emphasizes the supremacy of the economic and of technology. This fixation as such has engendered an obsession with the material as a way to either display wealth/status or to improve/augment man. Thus, the incentive for many of these businesses is to produce goods that subscribe to this obsession with materialism for that is what will please their consumers. Products are manufactured in far away places, with no spiritual or human connection, lacking in providing any real quality as margins are squeezed out of every turn with an eye to producing an economic profit. These items sell because they offer idealized versions of what they purport to be or simply because they fulfill a transient need. Products no longer subscribe to the higher ideals of enterprise visible in artisanal practices: to infuse an object with culture, love, and a sense of place. The idea of creating a quality product has been lost in so many places as the true connection between enterprise and consumer has been lost. A return to original principles is merited, the idea that the connection between business and client is sacred and the idea that products are not simply vacuous material objects, but rather objects of appreciation, joy, and meaning that share some indelible link between producer and consumer.
To properly restore the connection between producer and consumer, one must reaffirm the value of quality. A quality good is one with a mission, an intent that it can fully satisfy. For example, a door frame that can properly sustain the weight of its intended door. This functional satiation, however, is not enough to determine a quality good. The quality good must also possess the capability to communicate effectively between the producer and the consumer. One might immediately think of an instruction manual or a guide and while this is good, it is not all. The communication I intend to indicate is oftentimes tacit, the shared understanding of a good’s function and its meaning. Though function and meaning may ostensibly appear as synonyms, they are not the same thing. Meaning means something more than simply function, it is the ascription of a higher quality to a good. For just as in a Platonic world of forms one does not simply talk of this good, for example this chair, but rather refers to the ideal of that chair, the symbol of its perfection. In a Platonic world, however, the manifestation of an ideal is always a shadow of the ideal, an inferior clone to the original. Here, however, I intend to share that the manifestation of an ideal need not be inferior if it was made in keeping with the beliefs, values, and culture surrounding the producer’s atmosphere of production, the same atmosphere which lured the consumer to the producer’s way of being. Thus, no matter the type of good, the full embrace of quality – both to function and to the communication of self to the other – is paramount to restoring the sanctity of business and client.
A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery by Joseph Wright of Derby (1766)
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in returning to original principles is understanding oneself. The original conception of self is difficult to affirm because as beings and as groups of beings we are constantly changing. To demand, however, a return to such a static point in time is not the aim. Instead, it is to recognize the authenticity of self and the factors which make one authentic. It is not enough to simply hint towards these factors. For example, a brand such as Gucci, with over a hundred years of history should not flippantly refer to its past, its original conception of self, to sell more products and bolster profits. This would be a mistake, a misunderstanding of quality. At that point, Gucci would simply be profiting from its name, image, and likeness. Sure, they would be producing goods and perhaps even goods that functionally fulfill their purpose quite nicely. Nevertheless, such a strategy would be an omission of a higher aim, of a purposefulness that extends beyond the material and into the immaterial – into the realm of true meaning. For a product to achieve such an end, to be infused with meaning, creates an approximation with the transcendentals of beauty, truth, and goodness – ends which are sought for their own sake and nothing else. In the case of retail, especially in apparel, most businesses ought to be concerned with beauty. Such an aim recognizes the belief in something more than simply the material, it is an affirmation of man’s longing for order, purpose, and structure.
It is through this pursuit of something more that businesses can achieve a return to original principles fighting back materialism and reestablishing the sacred connection between producer and consumer.
A philosophy which in the long run, even in our corrupt capitalistic world, is rewarded with recognition and praise. Schmitt reaffirms the importance of the political by arguing for a return to original principles, an understanding of the true nature and obligations of the state, a return to seriousness. Existentially, the reality of seriousness revolves around the potential for war. Liberalist philosophies that demand the securitization of rights to any other purpose engender non-serious states. It is within this Schmittian framework that I proposed a parallel to his work on states by offering to examine private enterprises. Here, I argued that the existential threat to businesses is a misconception of purpose. Quality is an important first step to creating serious businesses but not a great enough step to move beyond the throws of materialism. To succeed in this endeavor, a business must reaffirm its communication of self to the other by reaffirming its authenticity and striving for a purposefulness beyond oneself. That is true meaning, that should be the labor of every business; but one must not stop there: “To know the actual condition of things is all well and good, but our knowledge of it must be for the sake of action. Yes, let us know the world in the best possible manner, but in order to change it: tempus cognoscendi, tempus destruendi, tempus renovandi.”⁷
¹ Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26
² Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27
³ Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 89
⁴ Hobbes, Leviathan, 89
⁵ Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 82
⁶ Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 106
⁷ Croce, Guide to Aesthetics, 120
