131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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follow this speculation any further. The rationalism that also incorporated world history into
its construction certainly has its great dramatic moments; but its intensity ends in a fever, and
it no longers sees the idyllic paradise before its eyes which the naive optimism of the
Enlightenment saw and which Condorcet saw in his sketch of the development of the human
race, in the "Apocalypse of the Enlightenment." 15 The new rationalism destroys itself
dialectically, and before it stands a terrible negation. The kind of force to which it must resort
cannot any longer be Fichte's naive schoolmasterly "educational dictatorship." The bourgeois
is not to be educated, but eliminated. The struggle, a real and bloody struggle that arises here,
requires a different chain of thought and a different intellectual constitution from the
Hegelian construction, whose core always remained contemplative. The Hegelian
construction remains the most important intellectual factor here, and almost every work by
Lenin or Trotsky demonstrates how much, energy and tension it can still generate. But it has
become only an intellectual instrument for what is really no longer a rationalist impulse. The
parties to the struggle that has broken out between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had to
assume a concrete shape, just as an actual struggle demands. A philosophy of material life
offered an intellectual weapon for this purpose, a theory that saw every intellectual discovery
as secondary compared to a deeper—more vital, emotional, or voluntary—course of events
and that corresponded to a frame of mind in which the categories of received morals—the
governance of the unconscious by the conscious, of instinct by reason—had been shaken to
their very core. A new theory of the direct use of force arose in opposition to the absolute
rationalsm of an educational dictatorship and to the relative rationalism of the division of
powers. Against the belief in discussion there appeared a theory of direct action. Not only
were the foundations of parliamentarism attacked, but so too the democracy that always
remained, at least in theory, part of rationalist dictatorship. As Trotsky justly reminded the
democrat Kautsky, the awareness of relative truths never gives one the courage to use force
and to spill blood. 16
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