Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Carl Schmitt was a Catholic, but his existentialist "decisionism" has more in common with Averroes and Kierkegaard than it does with Aquinas. (Mini Thread)

For Aquinas, reason and faith are cooperative. For Schmitt, the point is that the sovereign decision is not reasoned or reasonable, it's a kind of leap of faith. 2/x

No program or procedure can determine what the sovereign decides. The sovereign has maximal latitude. For Aquinas, reason is a guardrail. The sovereign is subservient to reason. 3/x

This is one way to understand Leo Strauss's claim that Schmitt is a liberal, despite himself. He enshrines the sovereign decision as the highest good without any ability to say what the content of the good is or why the sovereign should choose this over that. 4/x

This leads me to two possible ways of understanding Schmitt:

1) He's just an existentialist who just happens be Catholic or happens to use Catholicism for the purposes of being trad and counter-cultural. But he's not a philosophical Catholic.

Or...

5/x

2) He really is a Catholic fundamentally. And the existentialism is just a means to an end. He cares about the highest good in the Aquinas sense, but instrumentalizes the state of exception as his way of getting there.

6/6

For Schmitt appreciators, especially of a religious bent, it's worth asking whether they are really existentialists LARPing as defenders of the common good. Or whether they are really trads who are pragmatic in their adoption of existentialism.