Conscience and Hugo Ball
[ES: But can’t the jurist become a revolutionary, against his will, or …?]
“He is, after all … He becomes it of his own accord and he also catches himself. Now I wanted to add a sentence here … the word of the profession of a lawyer.
I actually first became aware of this through a man who was not a lawyer but who, because of his Catholic background, had a great deal of formal understanding of forms and processes in the sense of a regulated procedure. The regulated procedure … a minimum of regulated procedure remains into the most bitter … into the most bitter dispute. And enemy is not a term that is inhuman, but on the contrary: humanity stops when enemy and friend are sorted and replaced by any, that is utopias or illusions of humanity. So this word that I just wanted to quote … Only the man who spoke it and formulated it and thereby impressed me deeply and also <…?> was Hugo Ball the Dadaist. An amazing, enigmatic man who is simply muzzled, so to speak, by the brand, the pointed brand of Dadaism … one of the deepest and most significant people I have met in my life. This Hugo Ball has coined a sentence which is important to me here in this context, not true, it concerned me but it applies to what I understand under lawyers 〈〉 <?>. He, this Carl Schmitt, Hugo Ball said, not true, Carl Schmitt is a man who experiences his time in the conscience form of his talent. I repeat: He experiences his time in the knowledge form of his talent, the conscience form not knowledge form. The form of knowledge that belongs to the legal talent has a relation to the conscience. This is so specific, as with hardly anyone else … I would still take theologians, as far as they are not lawyers, aside. So the sentence from which I start, if I want to speak of myself at all and answer a serious question seriously is this sentence: in the conscience form of his endowment he experiences his time. Every talent has its specific form of conscience. Also the artist, the painter, as soon as he has a profession <?>, the doctor of course, also the craftsmen … there is no abstract human conscience. This word form of conscience is one of the most beautiful and most fruitful coinages that I have encountered in my life. And I apply it to my profession as a lawyer.”