Notes on Carl Schmitt's Concept of Time as a Cosmic Event

Here I explain an important and difficult passage from Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism. This is essential to understand his relation to the reactionaries and decisionists.

"Only in duration does time approach the irrational abyss that brings forth the cosmic event out of itself."

"The appeal to duration is the received conservative and traditionalist argument. It is only the condition of continuous duration that justifies every state of affairs."

Schmitt sees in the reactionaries a sense of time opposed to the shock and unique violence of decision.

"De Maistre found grandiose words for the grandeur of the process in which a new family makes its appearance in world history and comes to power. He even uses the phrase legitimate usurpation (in other words, a usurpation that is historically durable), which is intelligible only on the basis of the new historical sensibility and threatens his entire doctrine of legitimacy as a system and a principle."

This is rather harsh criticism of one of the great minds of reactionary thought, and essential to understand the violence of decision, which is an arcane wisdom and relation to time.

Schmitt looks to the history of romanticism, and the real political nerve in which it develops.

"The bearer of the romantic movement is the new bourgeoisie."

The basic question, what in the reaction becomes romanticism, and in what way is it susceptible to bourgeois politics? Further, in what way is the reaction, in itself, merely an occasion of history?

"The romantics felt strong enough to play the role of the creator of the world themselves, and to bring forth reality out of themselves."

Here we see the conflict and unity of the reaction, what Schmitt sees as a false individualism.

It is in this relation to history that the conservative turns away from decision, and in contradiction of the principles of Left and Right takes on both poles of the modern concept of time.

As counterparts to anarchism and absolutism we see the irrational abyss of modern politics. The two great enemies, often unknown to each other, can turn towards reality or duration as cosmic acts of creation.

In this is duality rather than polarity, what appears separate is an absolute and potentially world ending unity.