The Schmitt Explainer You Should Read

A recent look into the biography and writing of Carl Schmitt by N.S. Lyons.

N.S. Lyons’ piece on Carl Schmitt is well worth the time to read. He weaves the development of his life and his writing to make the case that Schmitt’s struggle is one of trying and failing to cling to faith in a post Nietzschian world of technics, eventually by succumbing to the post-modern will to power. Better would that Schmitt had repented and returned to the Catholic faith and the belief in the transcendent as did his friend Ernst Jünger. My recent forays into the writings of Augusto Del Noce have also underscored this for me in new ways. There is tremendous value in reading Schmitt to understand the contradictions and vulnerabilities of our current system, and while much can be learned from him, the “answers” lie elsewhere. The way out of our current materialist prison to technique is to rediscover the transcendent and the supernatural, not in some bland notion of “re-enchantment” but of a robust embrace of the traditions of the still living (although deeply wounded) Christian …