Who I am now is not who I will be. The future is unlike the past, but progess often appears as regress. Who am I now is not who I will be. But who I will be is not radically different from now. Lessons are learned and re-learned...and eventually forgotten. Tragedy weighs heavy on the spirit of the thinker. But we return to tragedy again and again. Some overcome it. Others are ensnared in its irrational logic. In the face of unspeakable evil, moral reflexes demand purification, by any means necessary. But the pure exists only in the Platonic world of forms.
In life, purity is a dangerous illusion. Evil and good - we cannot go beyond, nor choose either or. 'Evil' and 'Good' are invariably linked in the life of humanity. The task of man is not to grow intoxicated by the 'good' and absolutely reject 'evil'. This brings humanity only to grief, contributing to a wholesale rejection of the ephemeral as impure and pointing man towards the world of purity, of good in its supposedly absolute perfection. Salvation and redemption, for those who accept this, comes from above. Humanity's task, hence, is simply to obey and to surrender to the divine intellect, conceding that the particular intellect will succumb to imperfection. They wait passively for perfection. However, those who attempt to bring the order of heavens to earth - those who actively pursue perfection - are far more dangerous. They hold the particular intellect as being akin to the divine. The desire for pure uniformity on this earth unleashes the most destructive impulses. Schmitt's desire for homogeneity in the body politic lead him to accept - tacitly or not - repugant means in order to achieve an impossible end. The friend-enemy distinction is built upon a radical antagonism between good and evil. Is such a division possible, when we are confronted with the contingencies of life? Schmitt's thought, hence, did not seek to confront a situation in a sober manner. It seeks to return to a purity that never existed.
Progess oddly resembles regress and return. But it isn't progress. What I am now is not what I will be. What I will be cannot be what I am now. But the differences are never so obvious. I cannot cleanly reject and renounce my past selves. I change and understand that the circumstances that confront me do change as well. Heraclitus was right to say that the world, for those awake, is in flux. But we must not let flux overwhelm us, forcing us to succumb to our own illusions. Accept the unforeseen as flux, and soon you will see that it is not repressive. The unpredictable will appear, for those in the world of the waking, very much like the impulse of freedom.
