EXPLAINING THE SPATIAL MIND

PART TWO: SCHMITT’S SPATIAL REVOLUTION

This is the second in what’s anticipated to be a short series on Carl Schmitt’s analysis of what he coined as “the spatial revolution.” For an index to the series, see the first installment, here.

In the first part to this series on Carl Schmitt’s conception of the spatial revolution we saw that for Schmitt as important as was the occupation, we might even say conquest, of geometric-global space, through transportation and communication media – very much in keeping with Innis’ conception of space biased society – at least as important to the spatial revolution for Schmitt was the mental revolution occasioning such spatial expansion. And indeed Schmitt shared with Innis the belief that somehow it was the spatial expansion into that geometric, free, fluid, open, vacant space (see here¹) – manifest in the means to generate such expansion – which gave rise to what we might call the spatial mind.² I of course, for reasons previously cited, and that will be briefly repeated below, reject those vectors of causation.

The previous post addressed the kind of spatial revolution mind, what we might describe as subject to the expansive horizons of a sea-based imperial mindset, that could take disperse scientific discoveries and exercise the industrious and innovative engineering that turned them into the media of the industrial revolution. Again, this is clearly consistent with Innis’ interpretation of space biased society – particularly the mid-20th century one in which both Innis and Schmitt were theorizing. And, like Innis, Schmitt wouldn’t have stopped there. For him this spatial mind, product of the spatial revolution, manifests across a vast canvass of increasing spatialization, associated with the initial emergence of the spatial revolution occasioning the sea-turning Age of Discovery.

So, while I will at the end of this post remind readers why I reject their techno-geographic determinism, for now let’s allow Schmitt to share his assessment of this mental dimension of the spatial revolution. All the quotations below are from Land and Sea.³

There are a half-dozen concepts of space.

The human receives a particular historical consciousness from his “space,” which is subjected to great historical transformations. The variegated forms of life correspond to equally differentiated spaces. Even within the same time period, the environment of individual humans for the practice of daily life is already defined differently by their different life occupations. An urbanite thinks the world otherwise than does a peasant farmer, a whale-fish hunter has another living space [Lebensraum] than an opera singer, and to a pilot the world and life appear otherwise not only in other lights but also in other quantities, depths, and horizons. The differences between spatial conceptions are still deeper and greater when it is a matter of different peoples and different periods of human history.

...historical forces and powers do not wait for science, they wait as little as Christopher Columbus waited for Copernicus. Every time when new lands and seas enter the field of vision of human collective consciousness by a new thrust of historical forces, by an unleashing of new energies, the spaces of historical existence also change. Then there emerge new measures and directions of political-historical activity, new sciences, new orders, new life for new or reborn peoples. The expansion can be so deep and so surprising that not only quantities and measurements, not only the outermost human horizon, but even the structure of the concept of space itself is altered. Then one may speak of a spatial revolution.

From there Schmitt illustrates his point with reflection on the history of prior spatial revolutions – what I’d call previous cycles of the phenotype wars.

In Alexander the Great’s maneuvers of conquest, a powerful, new spatial horizon opened to the Greeks. The culture and art of Hellenism is its consequence. Aristotle, the great philosopher, a contemporary of this spatial transformation, already saw that the human-inhabited world drew itself ever more together, from the East and from the West.

Aristarchus of Samos, who lived slightly later (310–230), already conjectured that the sun is a fixed star, standing in the center of the earth’s orbit. The city of Alexandria on the Nile, founded by Alexander, became a center of astonishing discoveries and inventions in the technical, mathematical, and physical domains. Here, Euclid, the founder of Euclidian geometry, taught; here Hero made astonishing technological inventions. Archimedes of Syracuse, an inventor of great war machines and discoverer of natural scientific laws, studied here, and the director of the Library of Alexandria, Eratosthenes (275–195), had already correctly calculated the equator and the spherical shape of the earth. Thus, the doctrine of Copernicus was anticipated in advance. Nonetheless, the Hellenic world was not comprehensive enough for a planetary spatial revolution. Its knowledge remained the concern of the learned, because it had not drawn a world ocean into its existential reality.

In the first century of the Roman imperial period, most strongly indeed at the time of Nero, the consciousness of a deep transformation became so powerful and expansive that one can almost speak of spatial revolutionary transformations, at least with the leading intellects. This historical moment coincides with the first century of our era and thus merits particular attention. The field of vision expanded to the East and to the West, to the North and to the South. Wars of conquest and civil wars enveloped space from Spain to Persia, from England to Egypt. Widely distant regions and peoples came into contact with each other and experienced the unity of a common political destiny. From all parts of the Empire, from Germany as from Syria, from Africa or Illyria, a general could be elevated to emperor in Rome by his soldiers. The Isthmus of Corinth was penetrated; Arabia was circumnavigated from the south. Nero sent an expedition to the sources of the Nile. Agrippa’s world map and Strabo’s Geography are documents of this spatial expansion. That the earth has the shape of a sphere was known not only to individual astronomers and mathematicians.

The fall of the Roman Empire, the expansion of Islam, the invasions of the Arabs and of the Turks brought about a centuries-long spatial darkening and land confinement in Europe.

From, in my nomenclature, this concluding arc of the prior cycle of the phenotypes wars, Schmitt considers the gradual emergence of the next cycle.

Being pushed from the sea, the lack of a fleet, [and] the complete confinement to land are markers of the early Middle Ages and its feudal system.

As a result of the Crusades, however, French, English, and German knights and merchants became acquainted with the Near East. In the North, the expansion of the German Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights opened a new horizon; here a system of traffic and trade emerged, which came to be called the “World economy of the Middle Ages.”

...this spatial expansion was simultaneously a cultural transformation of a thoroughgoing kind. Everywhere in Europe new forms of political life emerged. In France, England, and Sicily centralized administrations were created that in many ways anticipate the modern state. In northern and central Italy, a new city culture grew. Universities developed with a new theological science and a heretofore unknown juristic science, and the rebirth of Roman law created a new educated class, the jurists, which broke the educational monopoly of the Church clerisy, which was typical for the medieval feudal period.

And, following Schmitt’s reasoning about the spatial mind, he points to a variety of psychological and cultural developments, in both the sciences and the arts, that reflect the changing perceptions of the world occasioned by those living through that spatial revolution. Referring to what he calls “the deepest and most consequential alteration in the whole of world history known to us,” he explains that this change “falls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the epoch of the discovery of America and of the first circumnavigation of the earth.”

...the whole of human collective consciousness is transformed from the ground up. This is the first authentic spatial revolution in the full, earth- and world-encompassing sense of the term.

This is clearly an exaggeration by Schmitt. As my several series on pluralism posted to this Substack last year reveals, and will be likewise illustrated in my forthcoming book on the pluralist constitution, clearly lots of humanity’s consciousness remained deeply temporalist right through the Age of Discovery. Indeed, in some areas, even into the 19th century. Such a change in consciousness is in reality a shift in the institutional and cultural prominence and impact of spatialism. One only experienced that impact of the spatial revolution though if caught up in its demographic and political net.

Again, nonetheless, he does provide an intriguing description of that consciousness change as revealed in the mind of the spatial revolution:

There is more to a spatial revolution than landing in a heretofore unknown place. A spatial revolution involves a change in the concepts of space encompassing all the levels and domains of human existence.

[The spatial revolution] was not somehow only a particularly comprehensive quantitative spatial expansion of the geographic horizon, which entered of its own accord as a result of the discovery of new parts of the earth and new seas. Rather, for human collective consciousness the whole picture of our planet and, beyond this, the whole astronomical conception of the entire universe were changed, with the complete abandonment of received ancient and medieval conceptions. For the first time in its history, the human held the whole terrestrial orb like a ball in its hand.

That the earth should be a sphere appeared to a medieval human, but also still appeared to Martin Luther, as a ridiculous fantasy, not to be taken seriously. Now, the spherical shape of the earth became a comprehensible fact, an irrefutable experience, and an indisputable scientific truth.

Copernicus was the first to show scientifically that the earth revolves around the sun. His work on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, appeared in 1543.

Copernicus changed our star system, however, he still held fast to the notion that the universe in its entirety, the cosmos, is a bounded space. The world in the grand cosmic sense and, with it, the concept of space itself had thus not yet been altered. A few decades later the boundaries fell. In the philosophic system of Giordano Bruno, the star system, in which the earth moves around the sun as a planet, is only one of many star systems in the infinite celestial firmament. As a consequence of Galileo’s scientific experiments, such philosophic speculations became a mathematically demonstrable truth. Kepler calculated the orbits of the planets, although it made even him shudder when he conceived the infinity of such spaces, in which the systems of planets moved without conceivable boundaries and without a center. With Newton’s theory, the new conception of space was established for the whole of enlightened Europe. Planets, masses, and matter moved, with forces of attraction and repulsion balancing each other according to the laws of gravity in an infinite, empty space.

Humans could thus now conceive of an empty space, which they could not have previously done, even if some philosophers might have wished to speak of “emptiness.” Previously, humans feared emptiness; they had the so-called horror vacui. Now they forget their fear and are not at all worried by the fact that they and their world exist in a vacuum.

It’s worth taking a moment to emphasis what seems to me to be Schmitt’s key point here regarding spatial consciousness. What he’s referencing is not merely a new spatial mode of conception, but even more fundamentally a new comfort with such a conception of space. Only when the fear of the vacuum has been overcome can such space be explored. And of course, I would emphasize that it is precisely with the increasing cultural and institutional dominance of spatials – and the foisting of their phenotypic dispositional equanimity with the transcending of boundaries upon such culture and institutions – that this comfort with empty, geometric space becomes increasingly ubiquitous. This new spatial comfort with empty space is central to the practical manifestation of the spatial revolution. (And, though I won’t go into here, this development has to be read in the context of Schmitt’s argument for Großraum: see here.)

And as already anticipated, Schmitt’s perceptions of the manifestation of the spatial mind, this consciousness of the spatial revolution, is revealed as much in the arts as it is in sciences, such as astronomy.

Art is a historical index of spatial consciousness, and the real painter is a human, who sees humans and things better and more correctly than other humans, more correctly in the sense of the historical reality of his own time.

In the new, Gothic art, in architecture, in sculpture, and in painting, a powerful rhythm of movement overcomes the static space in the Romanesque art, which preceded it, and puts in its place a dynamic force field, a space of movement.

...humanity simultaneously imposed upon all the domains of its creative spirit a new concept of space. The painting of the Renaissance laid aside the space of medieval Gothic painting; the painters now painted humans and things placed in a space, which perspectivally generates an empty depth.

...the sculpture of the Renaissance poses the statues of human figures free in space, while medieval figures are “angled” upon pillars and walls.

Music extracts its melodies and harmonies out of the old keys and places them in the auditory space of our so-called tonal system.

All these intellectual currents from both of these centuries, the Renaissance, Humanism, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and Baroque, thus contributed to the totality of this spatial revolution.

And just in case my position should be unclear, I would not dispute Schmitt’s claim here. I concede that there are cultural and institutional, scientific and artistic, feedback loops. Though, my argument would be that the effect of these are a kind of mop-up operation, in which those other phenotypes who are neither temporals or high resonance spatials – i.e., high openness, low conscientiousness; disposed to novelty and risk seeking, adverse to rule and boundary constraints – can still be absorbed into the hegemonic proclivities of space biased society. There are plenty of other personality structure phenotypes aside of temporals and spatials. Most of them, particularly those strong in agreeableness, extroversion, and neuroticism, I’d expect to follow the lead of the politically dominant phenotypes, whether the phenotype wars cycle is in an arc of temporal or spatial hegemony.

In any event, the emergence of this spatial revolution, for Schmitt, created a new nomos of the earth: a globalization of European jurisprudence, determining the contours of international law.

The great changes in the geographic picture of the earth are now only a foregrounded aspect of the deep transformation, which is implied in a term as consequential as “spatial revolution.”

...that which has been termed the European spirit and “Occidental rationalism,” now advances irresistibly. It develops in the western and central European peoples, destroys the medieval forms of human community, builds new states, fleets, and armies, invents new machines, subjugates the non-European peoples, and places them before the dilemma of either adopting European civilization or of descending to the status of a mere colonial people.

And of course while we have here been taking passages from Land and Sea, it was in Schmitt’s other major study dedicated to the spatial revolution, Nomos of the Earth⁴, that he acknowledges the end of this “international law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum.” In the next installment, we will venture into that territory.

Before concluding this post, though, as promised I need to say a few words about how I see Schmitt’s version of the spatial revolution consciousness in relation to my own phenotype wars model. His focus on the manifestations of the spatial revolution within the arts and sciences is certainly compelling. I would precisely expect such cultural and institutional manifestations of space bias and spatialism. And its fruitful of Schmitt to have drawn our attention to these developments. Where of course I cannot follow him, or Innis, is in the assumption that those manifestations of the spatial mind can or should be explained as symptoms of the geographical or technological dimensions of the spatial revolution.

I’ve addressed these objections at greater length elsewhere so here will only repeat them in summary (but, see here and here). As I’ve said to Innis, if it is the media of communication that generate space (or time) biased society, why is it that it took the ancient Egyptians centuries to figure out that papyrus could be a beneficial communications media in the administration of their expanding empire? The chronology simply doesn’t support this technological determinist argument. And likewise I’ve posed to Schmitt, why is that suddenly by the 16^th century England becomes a sea-oriented spatialist global empire. It had been an island for centuries before; the sea was always there. And of course he cannot claim that a spatial consciousness produced that revolution, as he attributes the origins of the spatial consciousness to the impact of the revolution. That would reduce his argument to a tautology.

And of course to claim that the turn-to-the-sea had to wait for the development of appropriate technology simply turns the problem into an infinite regress: wouldn’t a sea-minded people have been disposed to invent such technology during those earlier centuries? (And likewise for whatever predicate one would otherwise attribute to facilitating conditions for innovating such technology?) Indeed, as we saw in the last post, Schmitt attributes the innovation that generated the industrial revolution to the spatial mind unleashed by the sea-oriented open horizons thinking of the English. But that sea-oriented mind, for Schmitt, was a product of the revolution that supposedly required the aforementioned technological innovation to unleash the sea-oriented spatial revolution. Again, down this explanatory path lies tautology.

Rather, something else has to be responsible for the change of what Schmitt calls consciousness that gave rise to the multifactored overdetermination – e.g., geographic, technological, scientific, cultural, and psychological — of the spatial revolution. And of course, those who have been long time readers of this Substack, or have read my most recent book, will know, my assertion is that those societies experienced a demographic level shift in the dominance of personality structure phenotypes: from temporals to spatials. But of course that is a long, elaborate argument that I couldn’t possibly rehearse here. Those interested are encouraged to read A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.

Meanwhile, in this series, we’ll move ahead with our next post into unpacking Schmitt’s understanding of the nature and consequences of the Jus Publicum Europaeum that constituted the nomos of the first globalized spatial revolution. And that discussion will be followed up with an examination of Schmitt’s conclusions on our options, writing in the mid-20th century, in light of the collapse of that nomos — and indeed of how the findings of those conclusions stand up to scrutiny today. So, if you don’t want to miss that, and haven’t yet, please do…

And if you know anyone else who’d be interested in joining this little intellectual journey of ours, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. I now kind of regret getting ahead of myself and publishing that piece on Schmittian space. I had thought at the time that it was only going to be ancillary to the main thrust of Schmitt’s spatial revolution argument. I now appreciate though that the ideas explored there wound up playing a far more central role in the larger picture of that argument. So, there will be occasion to revisit that post in the future, perhaps at length.

2. For those interested, I unpack Innis on all this in my book, Michael McConkey, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2023).

3. Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, ed. Russell A. Berman, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2015).

4. According to Gary Ulmen’s translator’s introduction, a book that Schmitt already was working on at the time that Land and Sea was published.