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Copyright © 2007 by Lexington Books

First paperback edition 2007

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

Von Vacano, Diego A., 1970—

The art of power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the making of aesthetic political theory /Diego A. von Vacano.

p. cm.

9780739152096

1. Aesthetics—Political aspects. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469—1527—Aesthetics. 4. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844—1900—Aesthetics. I. Title.

BH301.P64V66 2006

320.1092’2—dc22

2006025575

Printed in the United States of America

Riderà bene chi riderà ultimo

This book is dedicated to Kazuko Suzuki

Abbreviations

Works by Machiavelli:

P | The Prince, Mansfield, trans. and ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Chapter is cited first, then page number.
D | The Discourses on Livy, Mansfield and Tarcov, trans. and ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Book number is cited first, then paragraph and page number.
FH | Florentine Histories, Mansfield, ed. and Banfield, trans.
(Princeton University Press, 1988). Book number is cited first, then chapter and page number.
CW | Chief Works, Gilbert, ed. (Duke University Press, 1989). Page number is cited.
LL | Lust and Liberty: The Poems of Machiavelli, Tusiani, Joseph, trans. and ed., (Ivan Obolensky). Page is cited first, then the poem’s line number.

Works by Nietzsche:

Chapter, section, and page number are cited.

If there is only one number, it refers to the page (except for WP see below).

A | The Antichrist, Kaufmann, trans. and ed., The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin, 1982)
BGE | Beyond Good and Evil, Kaufmann, trans. and ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche(Modern Library, 1968)
BT | The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Geuss, R., (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
EH | Ecce Homo, Kaufmann, trans. and ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library, 1968)
GM | Genealogy of Morals, Kaufmann, trans. and ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library, 1968)
GS | Gay Science, Kaufmann, trans. and ed. (Vintage, 1974)
HH | Human, all too Human, Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
TI | Twilight of the Idols, Kaufmann, trans., The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin, 1982)
WP | The Will to Power, Kaufmann, trans. and ed. (Vintage, 1968). Section is cited.
Z | Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Kaufmann, trans. and ed., The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin, 1982)

Acknowledgements

Many people supported my work in this project. First and foremost are my family and friends. My parents Arturo and Marcela and my sisters Marcela and Claudia inspired me to pursue the academic path. Without their life-long encouragement, and that of Maria Antonieta Cámara, Mario Dorado and Alejandra Dorado, as well as Pepe and Maria Luisa Cámara, I would not have been able to pursue this objective. My friends and colleagues also provided intellectual stimulation and personal engagement. Among them are Ari Adut, Jorge Coronado, Christian Inchauste, Arang Keshavarzian, Saahir Lone, Samir Lone, Oliver Lu, Morgann Paraskevas, Tamas Peterfalvy, Ashok Parameswaran, Rouzbeh Pirouz, Séverine Boumati, Sven Vahsen, and Adam Webb.

Princeton University’s political theory community was the fertile ground for my initial work on this book. Without the guidance and support from George Kateb, Maurizio Viroli, and Stephen Macedo, the task would not have been completed. I owe them immeasurable thanks for academic and personal encouragement in climbing the mountain and seeing the peaks and valleys of graduate school. Patrick Deneen, Amy Gutmann, Alexander Nehamas, Tamsin Shaw, Paul Sigmund, and Peter Singer were also vital in my progress in the writing of the manuscript out of the basis of a dissertation. I also wish to thank all my former teammates of the Princeton United FC soccer club, without whom Princeton would have been a much less interesting place.

Outside of Princeton, my experience at the University of Chicago and the courses I took at Harvard University formed my interest in Machiavelli and Nietzsche. I owe this to Nathan Tarcov and Harvey Mansfield. Last but not least, Don Moon at Wesleyan University was the person who most inspired me to pursue the paths of political theory as a naive (or idealistic?) undergraduate.

Several sections of the book were significantly affected by my experiences teaching gifted undergraduates at Williams, Vassar, and Hunter colleges. I also owe great thanks to my colleagues at Texas A&M University where this book was completed in the Winter of 2006. In particular, Cary Nederman, Lisa Ellis, and Ed Portis showed critical yet warm and instructive support. Christie Maloyed, Sofya Treskova, and Mary Beth Sullivan provided excellent research assistance. All errors are my responsibility.

Introduction

Art, Power and Knowledge

To those who saw the harrowing image of a clear summer sky broken by plumes of dark smoke on September 11, 2001, a new kind of politics emerged. The revolution was not televised in the 1960s, but terror was at the dawn of the new century. One of the principal characteristics of the Twenty-first century, it seems, will be the magnified potency of information conveyed through images. It is now a commonplace that we live in a visual culture. We live in an information age, where much of the information that we get comes in the form of images. The impressions that we get, the data that we process, more often appear to us through visual perception. During the US-Iraq war of 2004, for instance, the appearance of disturbing photographs of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib shook entire political structures and made people rethink their moral points of view.

People read less, and watch more. We watch television, movies, and increasingly, images that emerge on the Internet. Is there a politico-theoretic dimension to this phenomenon? What are its philosophical foundations and implications? How can political theory explain the persistent political power of images and other forms of sensory perception on the imagination of people? What is the relationship between aesthetic or sensory cognition and the fields of morality and politics?

These questions, I seek to argue in this work, can best be explained by our going back to two particular thinkers in the history of political philosophy. The origin of this study is in a comparative study of the central ideas of the thinkers Niccolò Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche. While I argue that these two theorists have similar aims and perspectives, I also want to uncover the implications of their common way of looking at the human condition and political practice to elucidate the phenomenon of the persistence of aesthetic, sensory cognition as fundamental to the human experience, particularly in political life.

What might be the benefit of viewing politics through the aesthetic? What Machiavelli and Nietzsche point to is a manner of looking at the way politics is, rather than how it ought to be. Ethics as the “philosophy of desirability,” as Nietzsche called it,¹ hides the fact that sometimes what is cannot be overcome. This realism, which is not scientistic, gives us an alternative mode to see things that appear to us in political life.

Images are just one form that sensory cognition can take. Our sense of touch, hearing, smell, and taste also inform our experience as human beings. Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche saw the human being as one that gets its information about the world through his or her sensory capabilities. Rather than imagining beings whose determinations about the nature of the world come from pure reason abstracted from the senses, these thinkers pointed to the worldly, corporeal basis of our understanding of our surroundings and our lot. This perspective can be called “aesthetic,” for when Alexander Baumgarten coined the term in 1735, he intended it to describe that which is perceived through the senses, or in other words, through sensory cognition.

This understanding of the term “aesthetic” is something that both Machiavelli and Nietzsche share. Both thinkers are concerned with the dimension of human experience that allow for purchase on the world through the senses, and how this relates to both political and moral evaluations. For the Florentine the political is more central, while for the German the moral is more problematic. Yet they both understand that aesthetic experience is part of a larger membership in a community, which can be described as political because the polis or city is the locus of aesthetico-moral judgment and because power (the language of politics) is inherent in their conception of the political.

At the same time, some understand “aesthetics” as the study of beauty and/or art. However if we prefer the core of Baumgarten’s definition, we must push beauty out of the center of “the aesthetic,” since his conception is one that emphasizes our sensory perception of all things, whether they are beautiful or not. Baumgarten’s Enlightenment definition of the term is modern: it does not make a necessary link between beauty and morality, and it simply affirms the importance of the sensory for man in the process of understanding the world and art. Similarly, Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s modern view of aesthetic phenomena does not place beauty at its center.² In their larger separation of conventional ethics from the essence of human being, they do, however, retain the meaning of the aesthetic as what pertains to the artistic. So for these thinkers the aesthetic refers to what is artistic and to the human capacity for cognition through the senses. How is this meaning related to the tension between power, knowledge, and morality?

To answer this question we must go back to the origin of the study of these relationships, and this is in Plato’s seminal Republic. From there we can begin to locate the views of art and politics that are present in Machiavelli, and in the work of Nietzsche. Then we can embark on an analysis of the affinities between these thinkers. Finally, we can see in what sense the contributions of these two critics of conventional morality can allow us an alternative lens to examine the way that politics really works (not how it ought to work) and how it makes use of sensory phenomena and artistic qualities.

Let it be our apology that it was then fitting for us to send [poetry] away from the city on account of its character... Let us further say to it, lest it convict us for a certain harshness and rusticity, that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. For that ‘yelping bitch shrieking at her master’ and ‘great in the empty eloquence of fools’ ... are signs of this old opposition³

The author of the Republic, that quintessential paragon of rationality, ends his best-known work with a myth. The tale of Er closes Book X of Plato’s work, a chapter that execrates poetry and art in general, banishing most forms of poetry from the ideal city. Yet Plato himself is a master of words, a thinker whose surviving writings possess a certain “artistic” style that often betrays an ambiguity about his message of the superiority of logical rationalism over knowledge acquired on the basis of aesthetic, sensuous perception. There is, at certain points, a profound tension between the form and content of Plato’s works, as we can see in his poetic use of the myth of Er.

In the history of political thought, Niccolò Machiavelli gives us—albeit implicitly—the view of the relationship of art and poetry to wisdom that is antipodal to Plato’s. For him art, far from being deluding as Plato seeks to prove, actually tells us much about reality. The reality Machiavelli is most concerned with is the worldly; more specifically, the political. And through his writings he tells us that poetry, as well as other forms of art, provides us with insights into the nature of politics. In fact, as I seek to argue in this work, he tells us that politics is itself aesthetic in nature.⁴ Form and content thus are synchronized in the work of the Florentine. Instead of an old quarrel, there is a happy marriage between poetry and philosophy.

Reading the poetry, comedy, and “tragic” letters of Machiavelli before reading his better-known political works (The Prince and The Discourses on Livy) offers us a different light on his overall project. In place of the cynical self interest that his name has become associated with, the aims of his enterprise show a desire to proffer his own knowledge about not only the true nature of political life, but of life in general. It shows us that Machiavelli possesses a philosophy of life, something that is not only of use for our understanding of the place of man or woman in the modern world, but also of the depth and complexity of this much maligned figure.

The philosophy of life that comes from our reading of Machiavelli’s works in light of his aesthetic perspective is of importance in our efforts to get to what Machiavelli was up to. It is also important when we recognize that this philosophy of life leads to a political theory that is a radical (if implicit) critique of the deontological, normative political theory model established by Plato for posterity. And we must note that such a model for normative political theory has, over the years, become the dominant paradigm in the academic study of the discipline.

In observing the critique of conventional, largely Christian ethics that Machiavelli carries out, we discover that his is not a normative political theory, if we understand the term as ethics-based as it is with the deontological approach. In spite of many defenses in the recent past of a benign Machiavelli that emphasize his recovery of republicanism and seem to push for a morally good Machiavelli, a more comprehensive view of his works shows us that instead of being fundamentally a lover of freedom, he is concerned with drawing a picture of his own perspective on (political) power for the world to admire as superior to others. This aesthetic ambition explains why he is able to follow up the first part of the Discourses (often considered proto-democratic in its sense of liberty) with the second part, which is an unflinching admiration of Rome’s expansion, which—like any empire—took the freedom of many.

It is precisely this attitude that Nietzsche found so appealing in the Florentine. It is a propensity to become fascinated by the dazzling spectacle of (political) life in all its extremes, of peace and even gore. Doubtless, Machiavelli’s own desire was to see peace, stability, and tranquility in his Florentine homeland, yet the political theory behind this desire is neither a normative nor a scientific one. As we will see in this work, Nietzsche considered Machiavelli’s work a relief from what he believed was Plato’s illusion of an ethical and rational essence in reality. The German philosopher could imagine Machiavelli galloping briskly through the harsh political landscape with a wry smile on his face, passing no moral judgment as he surveyed the causes of war and peace in his times.

This admiration felt by Nietzsche for Machiavelli is rooted in the fact that they were thinkers who shared some important similarities in their approach to thinking about life. Both were radical critics of Christian values. In the place of Christian virtue they proposed a quasi-pagan heroic conception of the task of the great man, rooted in a naturalistic understanding of the human being. And in their understanding of virtue, one is often required to act immorally, transgressing codes of ethical action, for the sake of a higher end. At the same time they were also alive to the ubiquity of a phenomenon in life that has often been best understood by aesthetic thought: the tragic.⁵ Nietzsche valued it, inter alia, in his understanding of Homeric Greece, while Machiavelli saw that the lot of most political men—if not of all men in general—is that of failure. More importantly, both see modern man as a being alone and lost in a wilderness of competing, discordant ways of living.

To give some order to this chaotic sense of the world, Machiavelli and Nietzsche choose to pen their ideas on paper. In this personal decision to write, they choose a style that is not at all one of cold, methodical logic, but rather one peppered with figures of speech, colored with awful scenes, and rife with emotion. Not that they abandon reason; but the reason that is employed is aesthetic, for it is grounded in their firm belief that perception through the senses is what underlies the human condition. Such is their poetic stance, so distant from the approach urged by Plato.

More than simply being a matter of a similar ethos in their writing, the aesthetic approach is thus established on a philosophy of the human condition that posits concrete, sensuous, bodily existence as the primary locus of reality. It also presents material reality as the true one, eluding idealistic metaphysics. In this, they reject a priori truths, or truths that they consider to be imaginary constructs in the minds of philosophers. Perspective is what must be accepted as the ground of reason. It is that perspective which originates in the man seeking a job from the Medici or of a man agonizing in his sickbed in Turin. Machiavelli and Nietzsche give us their own accounts of the world, but this does not mean that they are irrelevant to other people, for they seek to persuade their readers to accept their perspectival accounts as more accurate and useful than others.

Their aestheticism is built on this perspectivism, yet it extends far deeper. It is such that their prescriptions are thought out in terms of currency in the history of aesthetic theory, such as imitation, representation, expression, emotion, and form. They urge for certain kinds of imitation, such as Machiavelli’s wish to emulate the Romans and Nietzsche’s efforts to learn from Attic tragedy. They represent ideas through metaphor, and they seek to understand humans through the emotions, such as love and fear, or ressentiment and joy. But above all, they seek to impose form. Machiavelli’s chief concern is the state, while that of Nietzsche is the soul. Yet neither of them is unaware of the other’s focus of attention. It is in the synthesis of their intentions that we can think about how they lay the foundations of what we may call aesthetic political theory.

Theoria, in ancient Greek, means vision. Seeing, as a matter of one of the senses (and perhaps the most important one in distinguishing man as a being perceiving an outside physical world distinct from an inner, thought-based one) is thus a proper way to conceive of phenomena as amenable to aesthetico-theoretic speculation. In opposition to a normative political theory that is grounded on claims about the universality of (logical) reason in ascertaining the nature of the world and of man, and subsequently ordering society in such a way as to diminish the dangers of unreasonable behavior, aesthetic political theory begins from the perspectivism of particular experiences. It takes sense perception as its field, and it borrows from aesthetic theory and art criticism not only the ideas of imitation, representation, emotion, and form, but also of imagination, creativity, and originality to explain political phenomena and practices. From the analysis of the work of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, one of the aims of this book is to construct an aesthetic political theory that can have wider applicability.

What relevance will this theory have for us moderns (and those who are post-modems)? In the closing of this work I argue that this aesthetic political theory drawn from the views of Machiavelli and Nietzsche is very much a modern one, where not only is reason still the ordering principle, but also where accounting for human freedom is part of the project’s aim. Yet this aesthetic political theory is modern also in the sense that beauty is no longer central to the artistic enterprise. The reason employed is aesthetic, for it is based on sense perception and utilizes categories borrowed from artistic life; yet a classical conception of beauty as part of a higher good is not part of its core. Significantly, I will also argue that having witnessed the “end of art” in late-modern aesthetic theory, we still have with us the artistic as such (the characteristics related to creativity), which can be applicable to fields outside of the artworld. The discussion of aesthetic political theory in relation to some related ideas in other key thinkers will serve to close the present work, in order to think about its relevance to pressing contemporary problems such as dogmatism and moralism in politics.

This book is about Machiavellian aesthetic politics. In the first part, I examine them in Machiavelli’s works proper. In the second, in the writings of Nietzsche. And in the third in what I call “aesthetic political theory,” an account of how politics works that is built on the foundations established by Machiavelli and reinforced, as well as deepened, by Nietzsche.

In Part I, the entry point into the book’s vision is located in Machiavelli’s poetic oeuvre. The chapter explains how Machiavelli represents political life in artistic terms. The focus is on the Florentine’s most significant poem, The Ass. It is a poem written a few years after the writing of his better-known political works. In examining the poem, the chapter makes salient the philosophic themes that make up his worldview. The vision of the human condition that emerges from this poem is not consistent with the traditional image of Machiavelli as a cynical power-monger. It is one that is in touch with aesthetic experience, a tragic sense of life, and a heroic conception of the human task on earth. Far from being an advocacy of bold action at all costs for the sake of a simple imposition of authority, his philosophy of life urges a thoughtful reassessment of the nature of being human. This reassessment, as experienced by the protagonist of The Ass represented through Machiavelli’s artistic contribution—and informed by some of his other poems—gives us Machiavelli’s implicit philosophical anthropology and the values that he proposes for political, and human, existence.

One of the central values Machiavelli proposes is that of heroic action. The second chapter reads The Prince in light of Machiavelli’s poetic works. Following the idea that what guides Machiavelli’s effort to understand politics is aesthetic in nature, this chapter examines The Prince as an attempt to interpret the nature of political power and leadership in aesthetic terms. It examines Machiavelli’s main work as aesthetic on three levels: in relation to his whole opus, in its style, and its substantive political ideas, which I argue center on the myth of Cesare Borgia as an exemplar of the pursuit of power.

This myth, I seek to show, is Machiavelli’s making of a heroic model of political action. The hero, significantly, is neither wholly Italian nor republican (Cesare was of Spanish and religious origin and detested republics). Thus, we see that a centerpiece of the main work of the Florentine is far from humanist, civic republican patriotism, something that is dear to some historicist interpreters of Machiavelli. Borgia’s greatness, for Machiavelli, lies in his character, which allowed him to act immorally when necessary. Still, Borgia ultimately failed; hence this chapter also builds on the idea of the tragic found in chapter one. The tragic is something that a leader must recognize as he seeks to acquire, maintain, and expand power and to subsequently give form to a state, using human emotions and imitating great men of the past. Moreover his failure is glossed over by Machiavelli in order to construct the mythical image of duke Valentino. This is the moment where Machiavelli’s creativity comes into play for political-moral purposes.

Part II begins with a discussion of the ways in which there are conceptual affinities between Machiavelli and another admirer of great individuals, Friedrich Nietzsche. In chapter three I argue that in the history of political thought, the affinities between Machiavelli and Nietzsche are important. Both are ruthless critics of Christianity for similar reasons. Alternatively, both admire the ancients with a view to create something new. The chapter follows the thread of the idea of the tragic in the preceding chapters to argue that both thinkers hold this theme as central to their philosophy of life or Lebensphilosophie. It also examines their common valuation of heroism and artistry.

I argue that, while significant differences do exist between them, especially in what pertains to their views of the soul, their common attempt to break the Manichean mold of morality in their respective cultures is what makes them kindred spirits. Plato and Christianity are the explicit targets in Nietzsche, while they are implicit adversaries of Machiavelli. I also argue that to understand Nietzsche as a thinker of political power we can do well by examining his work in relation to Machiavelli. In this chapter, I also examine the ideas of virtù and Will to Power as notions related to each other on the aesthetic plane. Further, I assay Nietzsche’s explicit admiration of and references to the Florentine, one of the few figures for whom the German philosopher reserves unqualified respect.

In chapter four, I delve more deeply into the Machiavellian themes of Nietzsche’s oeuvre. I focus on what is perhaps Nietzsche’s most artistic or literary work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Especially in Book Four, we see concepts with close connection to those of Machiavelli. The chapter searches for more precise textual evidence linking the two thinkers to show that they are both engaged in an attempt to transform cultural values, an attempt that can be termed aesthetico-political: because culture largely depends on aesthetic phenomena and because they believe that its transformation requires the use of will and power. I argue that the theme of Book Four is parallel to that of Machiavelli’s Ass; and I seek to show that both works are ultimately based on the ancient Roman writer Apuleius’ classical novel The Golden Ass. This is a political reading of Nietzsche’s text, which is sometimes considered his most important. I argue that the bringing of new “tablets” by Nietzsche is akin to the “new modes and orders” in the foundational politics of Machiavelli’s idea of the “new prince.”

Thus Parts I and II engage the theme of the exemplary man of politics, understood aesthetically. In chapter one the great man is the protagonist of The Ass, viewed through a poem. In the second, Cesare Borgia is the focus, and The Prince is seen as a mythological image created by Machiavelli. In chapter three the man of politics is Machiavelli himself, viewed through a Nietzschean perspective. Lastly, in chapter four, the man is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, as viewed through a Machiavellian lens.

In Part III, I turn to the construction of what I call “aesthetic political theory” and to its relation to themes discussed by other thinkers concerned with problems in the aesthetics of politics. In chapter five, I distill ideas from the previous chapters to show that politics itself can be understood as an aesthetic practice. Having analyzed the works of Machiavelli and Nietzsche as well as their affinity, I propose that they lead to us to a model of viewing politics with aesthetic categories. The central ideas of this new model are those of imitation, representation, emotion, expression, and form, but I also relate these to perspectivism, creativity, imagination, originality, flexibility, audience, and rhetoric. I argue that in this model, politics is about making, fashioning, shaping, and imposing form according to particular designs (by imitating great paragons of political virtue, utilizing the emotions, and representing ideas rhetorically, inter alia) rather than seeking to realize, on earth, an ideal vision of justice (which is the traditional view of deontological-normative political theory).

In chapter six I locate my view of aesthetic political theory in the context of modern political thought. I do so in two ways. First, I contrast the aesthetic political thought grounded on Machiavelli and Nietzsche to discussions of related themes by some prominent thinkers in the history of political thought. I discuss some ideas in the thought of Plato, Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss on the relationship between the aesthetic and the political within the task of philosophy. I contrast their views with the conclusions drawn from my aesthetic political theory based on my reading of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Second, I discuss the implications of this aesthetic political theory to the current crisis of modernity, viz., whether modernity is universal or particular, and if its association with liberal political thought is necessary. This chapter seeks to engage aesthetic political theory in a critical dialogue with the currently preponderant political philosophy associated with modernity, that of Rawlsian liberalism. I argue that the critique of universal rationality and deontological morality by aesthetic political theory is a solid counterpoint to the problems that arise from the clash of the universalistic ethical basis of neo-Kantian Rawlsian liberalism with contexts of cultural disagreement. I propose that aesthetic political theory, while fundamentally amoral, can become engaged with forms of consequentialist ethics in a manner that leads to a skepticism that is of value in a time of cultural clashes, fundamentalism, and fanaticism on both sides of the debate about the value of modernity.

In the Conclusion, I discuss how aesthetic political theory is visible in actual political life. I seek to show how aesthetic notions such as imitation, representation, deception, emotion, expression, and form recur in political regimes of various stripes. I argue that politics is becoming increasingly aestheticized through the growing power of mass media and the influence, especially, of visual communication in politics. This is particularly salient in times of war, when images carry a weight that mere words often do not possess.

The aesthetic political theory that emerges from these pages is the product of an attempt to provide a four-fold contribution in political theory. The first is to propose an original reading of Machiavelli’s overall aims, one that starts from his artistic works to show how he understands political power aesthetically. The second is to relate this reading to ideas central to the philosophy of Nietzsche, thereby claiming that the relationship between the two authors is significant to intellectual history. The third is to argue for the importance of reading Nietzsche as a political thinker particularly as influenced by Machiavelli. Finally, to construct a model of an “aesthetic political theory,” one based on ideas of the two thinkers in question, in order to approach political phenomena and practice from a new angle.⁶ In this manner, an alternative perspective on political theory becomes visible, one that can have wider applicability and can provide a constructive critique of deontological-normative theory. Thus one of the central aims of this book is to bridge aesthetic theory and political theory. I seek to do this by showing how political practice is itself aesthetic in nature, and by arguing that this is uncovered when we transpose aesthetic categories onto the political plane without recourse to the use of moral/ethical language.

At the present time, there is a global questioning of values whose genealogy can be traced back to the birth of European modernity. From skepticism to radical fundamentalism, reactions to modern Western understandings of notions such as rationality, freedom, equality, and commerce—notions often laden with normative implications—have become more common and severe. Can the West provide an alternative form of modernity (that is, of thinking about these principles) that is less moralizing, less sure of itself and hence less threatening to other cultural traditions? Perhaps if logical rationalism is removed from the basis of political theorizing in the West and in its place a different form of reason is established, this might be possible. Aesthetic political theory is one alternative modern Western construct that—being grounded on perspectivism—avoids the West’s “empire of reason” that has come to be resented in many parts of the world. In Machiavelli and Nietzsche we find the roots of the aesthetic approach to political theory and it is to them that we need to return.

Notes

1

WP 333.

2

Obviously Machiavelli does not use the term “aesthetic,” since it appears after his death.

3

Republic, Grube, trans., p. 278 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).

4

The term “aesthetic” is multifarious, yet for our purposes it refers to what is related to cognition through the senses (following Alexander Baumgarten’s definition of 1735 in Reflections on Poetry) acquired and expressed mostly through artistic representation, emotion, and form—and their related concepts.

5

Unamuno’s account of the tragic is instructive in this respect. See The Tragic Sense of Life (Dover).

6

I seek to contribute to the nascent literature in political theory and the aesthetic, which includes the work of Kateb (2000), Schoolman (2001), Strong (1975; 1988), Ankersmit (1996), and Villa (1992).

Chapter 1

Machiavelli’s Ass and the Poetics of Political Life

Introduction

For almost five centuries Niccolò Machiavelli has been generally seen in the popular mind as a cold-blooded cynic, or a hardheaded pragmatist at best. More acute readings emphasize his republicanism, yet those perspectives have a difficult time in explaining the more complex (sometimes disturbing) but eventually unavoidable, chambers of his mind. A close reading of Machiavelli’s whole oeuvre, taking as a starting point his often-neglected poetry, provides us with the insight to more accurately assess his legacy. We must not forget that it is not only because of his political theory that Machiavelli comes down to us as one of the major figures of the Italian Renaissance, but also for the style and content of his literary works. Machiavelli was indeed an artist of words.

What is the significance of the relationship of Machiavelli’s literary writings to his political and philosophical thought?¹ This question is important because he is one of the few political theorists to also have written artistic, literary works of prominence. In this fact we first encounter political theory’s favorable approach to art, the first major case where a political philosopher engages in artistic endeavors in a way that integrally links art and politics. Far from being a side project, literature for Machiavelli was a cardinal part of his overall aims, those of capturing the essence or truth about the way the world really works. Hence it is the beginning of a merging of political and aesthetic concerns,² a line of thought that is the birth of what we will ultimately call aesthetic political theory. ³

The question of the significance of the relationship between Machiavelli’s political and literary works should also be seen as equally important as the one that has dominated Machiavelli studies for as long as we can remember, namely the relationship between the apparently despotic Prince and the putatively republican Discourses. The reason the former question is important is that Machiavelli was—historically—as much a literary artist as a political thinker.⁴ Yet, in political theory, we do not often examine the form and literary content of major works, unless we specifically focus on the rhetorical aspects of a piece.⁵ In this opening chapter we shall explore a key component of what makes Machiavelli original among the West’s principal political thinkers: his use of artistic representation to capture the essence of political power.⁶

We can do this by examining his most important poetic contributions to see what it is that his poetry gives us that is different from his writings in proses ⁷ This approach, which takes its initial step within Machiavelli’s aesthetic project near end of his life, then gives us a window through which we can see his opus as an integrated whole unified by the concepts of the aesthetic,⁸ the tragic, and the heroic, as we shall see in the following chapters.

Machiavelli’s l’Asino (The Ass), written in 1517, is his most impressive and important work in verse.⁹ It is his most introspective account of the life and suf ferings of a man seized by the passion for politics, a work at once fantastical and seemingly autobiographical. It is similar to Lucius Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, written circa 160 AD, also known as The Golden Ass. ¹⁰ Machiavelli’s poem is a variation on a recurring theme in Western thought, that of a person who journeys into a netherworld where he encounters a variety of figures and events.¹¹ Through the telling of a man’s entrance into a mysterious world, Machiavelli gives us a view of some of his most cardinal philosophical tenets. ¹² Aesthetic political theory thus emerges when a vision of politics is presented, and represented, through artistic means, in a simultaneous engagement of politics and literature.

The poem shows us Machiavelli’s aesthetic concerns as well. His use of representation through imagery and metaphor, his emphasis on form (the form of an animal taken by a man), and his expression of emotions (the desire to articulate pain caused by injustice) are evident throughout the poem. Moreover, it is central in perceiving Machiavelli’s sense of the tragic in life, particularly in political life.¹³ As Maurizio Viroli tells us, “Perhaps the key to understanding the significance of Niccolò’s smile,” which is a metaphor for his attitude towards life, “is in the conception of life he set forth in The Ass.”¹⁴

Apuleius’s work tells the story of a man who is changed by magic into an ass. He draws on a similar story by Lucius of Patrae¹⁵ and unfolds a tale that moves from the dignified to the lascivious, from the absurd to the voluptuous, and from the innocent to the ghastly. He refers to magic and the occult throughout, and makes comments that show his interest in contemporary religious initiation rites and ceremonies associated with the Egyptian goddess Isis.

Machiavelli’s Ass also draws on Dante’s oeuvre, particularly The Divine Comedy. Of this work, the Inferno, as a tale of a man who enters a netherworld in a journey of Christian discovery and redemption, is important in informing Machiavelli’s work. Machiavelli recasts the story of a man’s entrance to the depths from a non-Christian perspective.¹⁶ Thus, by returning to Apuleius’s work, Machiavelli makes a critical—even satirical—comment on Dante’s Christian tale by preferring to follow the lines drawn by an ancient pagan author. Well-regarded as a philosopher and rhetorician, Apuleius is of interest to Machiavelli because he is a leading exponent of Roman poetry.

Following Hannah Pitkin and Wendy Brown, I believe The Ass is a rich, superabundant text.¹⁷ Pitkin is correct to point to the poem as one of Machiavelli’s principal works on “manhood.” ¹⁸ Yet, while she recognizes that Machiavelli’s notion of manhood¹⁹ (defined as the anxious search for male identity) is determined by a variety of oppositions, she chooses to place undue weight on a single one, that of the male-female. Moreover, the general conclusion she reaches, namely that Machiavelli espouses a condescending, disempowering view of women simply does not accord with the textual evidence. ²⁰ Precisely this poem shows us how unequivocally powerful the female can be in Machiavelli’s cosmos. Moreover, it shows us the way to Machiavelli’s use of other three key antinomies in his implicit philosophical anthropology, viz., the man-boy, man-animal, and man-divinity antinomies that are equally central in defining the anxiety about what it is to be a man. Pitkin’s focus on the anxiety of being existentially a man is apropos, yet is it important not to unduly privilege any one of the various oppositions that make up Machiavelli’s understanding of the agonism that takes place inside man’s psyche. ²¹

The Freedom to Follow One’s Own Nature

In order to carry out an exegesis of The Ass, we must recount the story. Machiavelli’s narrative is a twisting, turning tale of a surreal experience endured by a man who is transformed into an ass.²² This happens after meeting one of Circe’s young maidens, who shepherds other men transformed into animals. What is the significance of this poem to Machiavelli’s politics and philosophy of life?

Machiavelli opens the narrative with a direct statement of what he considers the aim of this poem: to “sing about pain.”²³ Thus the poem is tragic in natures.²⁴ The pain is owed to the fact that the narrator believes he has lived a life of naïveté and stupidity, believing in justice, when in fact the world he lived in was one of ingratitude for the just and rewards for the unjust. It is a poem not about that classical concern of political philosophy, justice, but rather its opposite, injustice, which seems to be at the core of the political.

Before he is turned into the ass, the narrator identifies in thought with this animal, which he believes most closely exemplifies his own attitude. He represents himself as thick-skinned and with little volition, for Fate determines whether he can or cannot sing about his sufferings (51, 13). ²⁵ Neither does he claim originality, for he does not consider his poetic contribution to be worth much. He asserts this because he believes that in his time the capacity for truly original art is no longer in evidence (51, 1 7). In this manner Machiavelli expresses not only that the art of the moderns is imitative,²⁶ but also that original art is always difficult to achieve. And, his own voice, while needing a poetic form to express its pain, is undeserving of lofty artistic accouterments. He is now in an emotionally abject state. Physical or spiritual pain, for him, no longer matters much because he has become inured.

Still, there is something left in him that urges his story to come out. There seems to be anger, resentment, and a sense of “nothing left to lose” that motivate his narration.²⁷ He wants the world and those above to hear him:

And yet, if heaven overbrims with sneers
Against me, my loud bray will sound all over,
And just too bad for those who have to hear

(52, II 4-6)

It appears that no matter how lowly his form, the narrator still feels a deep dignity that requires him to repeat his story to all who can hear, including those in heaven.²⁸ Machiavelli wants to express emotions aesthetically. As we shall see later, the theme of a man’s rise from a low position to political power is an important one in Machiavelli’s political theory. The narrator seems to believe that those above, be they deities or those high up in a worldly hierarchy, take part in the injustices of the universe and are unable to grasp what he feels. They must listen to his complaints. In the depths of abjection, Machiavelli believes, a violent assertion is necessary.

A sudden change in the narrative begins when the speaker starts his tale. This is where Machiavelli introduces us to the man-boy antinomy that is cardinal to his representation of the male anxiety about being a man. He tells of a young boy who lived in Florence some time ago who suffered from a strange affliction: he ran whenever and wherever he could. It is possible, but not certain, that this young boy is the narrator himself. The narrator refers to his home city and ironically places the events “to be exact, a long, long time ago” (52, 112). In this manner Machiavelli may be referring to himself in this poem and also trying to minimize the importance of historical time. It does not matter exactly when this occurred, as it is something that may occur at any time throughout the ages. Machiavelli thus hints that he will tell of eternal human passions. In particular, the passion for freedom.

The speaker tells how the lad would, upon seeing an open street, take to running wildly regardless of others’ admonitions. In this peculiar tale we see intimations of Machiavelli’s description of what he may consider a form of the underlying human desire to achieve timelessness and enjoyment, a sort of freedom available almost always only to the young. It is also a tale of boundless energy joined to no particular purpose—but tied to the delight of being in motion. The boy’s old father, however, is concerned and none too pleased. For him, this is an illness and hence he looks for a cure wherever he can. Experts of all kinds were sought, including doctors as well as priests, but to no avail. It seems neither science nor religion could remove this poor lad’s longing for open spaces for his running. Neither “absurd” medicines nor exorcisms had any effect.

If ever there was a possibility for a cure, a dubious “medicaster” (53, 1 1) seemed to offer it. Machiavelli, through the narrator, describes the father’s faith in the medicine man as quasi-religious (likening the sort of faith to that of a “sect”) and as trapped by human weaknesses even when the offer of health is not realizable. In the description of the father’s despondent acceptance of the medicine, we can see Machiavelli’s recurring theme of gullibility and his skeptical outlook on supposedly scientific theories and practices:

The poor, sad father without thinking twice,
Put that hard case into the doctor’s hands,
For blindly he believed his new advice.

(53, 11 10-12, emphasis added)

All forms of cure were tried, including drawing blood from the lad’s head.²⁹ After which the doctor returns the boy, apparently cured, to his father with the condition that he be guarded for four months. In this time, the doctor insists, the boy must not be left alone.³⁰

For a month this cure appeared to be working. The boy was never alone, and seemed respectful at all times to his brother-keepers. Yet, one fine day near Martelli Road, the lad was overcome with the desire to run on his own. A vast open avenue beckoned and he could not repress his desire for his old predilection. Upon seeing the road, first his “mind” then his body began to flee. The instinct was irrepressible. For the narrator, this urge for independent activity unbounded by time or place was no match for the efforts of medicine, a metaphor widely used, since Plato, for political rule.³¹ Machiavelli seems to express a belief that the deep, organic human urge is stronger than science, political rule, or even religion, for he claims that the boy utters “Not even Christ can stop me now” (54, 114).

Does this mean that Machiavelli espouses a radical, absolute freedom from science, religion, and politics because the human being is inherently desirous of fulfilling certain biological, natural needs? Is The Ass “the most antipolitical”³² of Machiavelli’s works? Indeed, Machiavelli is highly critical and even derisive of the medical science, which we can interpret as a technical or mechanical understanding of political rule that is hierarchical, or in more pedestrian terms, “top-down.”³³ He is certainly dismissive of religiosity, for he mocks the father’s myopic faith and puts aside the power of Christ in curbing the boy’s appetite. Neither authoritarian politics nor religion can address or manage the vital impulses running through the veins of this young man. He is not a typical boy, but one who cannot control his need for liberation.

However, there is no question that somehow this vitality must be controlled at least for the sake of the boy. For, as Machiavelli puts it, “that one thought” (54, 111), or the obsession with one singular desire for expression, can prevent his becoming anything other than a mere vehicle for his impulse. The boy is atypical, yet his actions appear to be something that Machiavelli claims is reflective of an important longing for freedom that is essential at least in some of us. ³⁴ This freedom, a product (according to Machiavelli) of the youthful, nearly infantile need to do as one wishes, is a central human passion. No matter how much political rules seek to control it, it must be refined and channeled properly if man is to retain a close link to this one preternatural desire. Here Machiavelli understands freedom in its purest sense, detached from the notion of dependence, which is more evident when we examine the male-female antinomy that is also part of Machiavelli’s representation of the internal agon in man.

Political Life and One’s Nature

Nonetheless, some form of politics is necessary for the sake of the individual’s full capacities. Each human being has a dominant “natural goal” (54, 119) deep within spirit or mind, which the body must “tend forever to.” Education or habit is fruitless in the face of this goal. And while there is no real, ultimate defense against the dangers that this goal might entail, running its course requires a sort of politics that is cognizant of this drive. It is neither a rationalistic, authoritarian, nor precisely democratic politics; it is a conception of politics that accepts some forms of radical individual freedom as intractable and not prone to molding by authoritative power. It is in a sense an emancipatory politics as expressed in the metaphor of an unusual domestic or paternal-filial relationship.

Why does Machiavelli speak of a boy? Because politics, at least an emancipatory politics, is for the “young.” Only the young (literally and figuratively) possess the drive to pursue their own natural ends at any cost. It is the young who see an endless “Martelli road” before them and run forward. Is this reckless? In some sense it is; in another it is the essence of emancipatory politics, or the system that a reformer seeks to put in place, as Machiavelli describes it in The Prince. It is for this reason that Fortune is a friend of the young, and she is more likely to be seduced by the young, as we will see below in the section on Fortune.

At the core, the tale expresses a fundamental theme in Machiavelli’s conception of life: the importance and necessity to be free to follow one’s own nature. Machiavelli believes that everyone is free to make his or her own way in life, to the extent that others are not harmed. Repression of one’s own nature is harmful; to act upon natural inclinations, so long as they do not injure others, is vital. In this manner, Machiavelli posits a kind of radical individualism that asserts that each person has a distinct and unique mode of expression and appreciation of freedom in action.

The narrator moves his tale from that of the energetic boy to his own (which may or may not be of the same person).³⁵ Here Machiavelli recounts a story of a man who looks back at his own life and career in politics, one that began with earnest devotion to duty and gradually became eroded by injustices suffered. The narrator is now contemplating his life and “our present time” (55, 19) and finds that a life of quiet duty and service ultimately lead to disgrace, abuse, and stultification. Like the boy, the man that the narrator now describes had his own natural “aim” (54,122) or passion. It was to “bite now this, now that” (54,123): to aggressively taste life’s experiences. Like a donkey, he kept that aim muted, “silent... humane . . . tame” in the course of his career. It is a life described as filled with sacrifice for a purpose other than one’s own. It is not a life met with rewards, but rather by injustice.

Machiavelli describes this person’s life as quiet in its humanness, but that of the beast he is about to describe, as wild. With a puzzling change of direction that is characteristic of the entire poem, he now begins to describe how the man remembers his past. He complains that he tried to start a new life after his fall from grace and was simply unable to shake off the lingering memories of profound suffering after his years of living according to duty. It seems Machiavelli describes his own life after official politics in the Chancery, yet he intimates that it is a fate similarly experienced by men in politics in general. More particularly, it is the narrator who expresses how his own times, fraught with mistrust and vulgar ambition, prevented him from forgetting his pains. It is a time for him to release anger, but it is an anger resulting from the pains inherent in politics.

The Trials of Politics

By juxtaposing man and beast, Machiavelli delineates a representation of his philosophical anthropology. He makes use of animals not only for the vivid imagery they provide his poetry, but also because he finds that the relationship between human and animal traits is cardinal in exploring the nature of man. This is the third of Machiavelli’s four key antinomies: man as defined by the internal agon between his self-understanding as a human and his more primordial animal instincts.³⁶

The story he is about to tell does not owe much to Aristotle’s understanding of man as zoon politikon. Neither does it raise man to the pedestal which secular humanism intends to build. In spite of Machiavelli’s deep-seated education in the umanesimo of Renaissance Florence, what Machiavelli does is to highlight the limits and weaknesses of man through a comparison of his traits to those of his cousins (animals, which are closer to nature). Further, Machiavelli points to ways in which man can improve himself by expressing traits that we normally consider animal. That is, he points to the transvaluation of features of life that are commonly deemed lofty (because spiritual) or, alternatively, base (because bodily) owing to their supposed connection with natural processes.³⁷ In this manner he seeks to elevate the merely natural or animal, and he does so through exaggeration that is typical of the rule of rhetoric of amplification, which employs exaggerated language to persuade the audience to accept a point of view.

The ass the protagonist identifies with is in a sense powerful not because it is the exterior form of a man who had traveled the globe and the world of wisdom, but because it cannot help but to express its urges. This tendency shared by animals is empowering in a sense because it allows a direct connection with instinct, whereas man often represses his own. Usually it is through its brays, jarring and loud, which, like the young boy’s running, “[N]ot even God could stop” (55, 1 15). To be sure, being turned into an ass is a sort of condemnation in our eyes, for the man of our tale is reduced to those traits that characterized him as a man, stoicism and suffering, and loses every other human capacity.

These elements are coalesced and compressed into a sort of caricature of his former self. Still, a warning is necessary, for this new beast is “rough and stubborn.” It is an intractable beast that can resist being held by crude, harsh means (55, 121). Machiavelli values this being because it is the only channel for expressing the narrator’s own feelings to those who would otherwise never pay attention. For Machiavelli certain fundamental injustices, which those in power are reluctant to listen to, can best be vented by coarse, violent means. The cry of resentment contains in it a spark of emancipation, for it entails a growing realization that an injustice has been committed. Redress may or may not be forthcoming, but for Machiavelli the fact that the injustice is uttered loudly and ineluctably is rewarding in itself:

How the world is rotten, all of you
Shall hear, for this my Ass will tell a story
Before on reins and yoke he started to chew:
And if you are offended—I’m not sorry.

(56,11 1-4)

Having painted the picture of the narrator’s lot in life, Machiavelli then moves his brush to tell of his awakening to a new reality. He suddenly tells us it is “Spring,” a new day that breaks an icy winter and brings with it a world that far from appearing “rotten,” seems fertile and ripe. A female, Diana, draws her bow and the day is “clear and beautiful” (57, 1 7). Among the animals that roam peacefully are small donkeys whose laughter and braying appear concerted.³⁸

In the midst of this idyllic imagination, there is a rapid turn towards a glum description of dusk. The narrator finds himself losing his “soul’s freedom” not knowing how or why. It appears that in this sudden shift of the poem’s mood the narrator turns into an ass. Machiavelli alters the placid sensation of the opening of Chapter Two by imposing a heavy sense of fear that tells us that Fortune can change most drastically and suddenly. The narrator thinks he sees Death itself surrounded by mist. That is to say, he does not die, but feels as if he does. His “descent” is not to Hell, but to an inward sphere. No matter how promising spring appears, Machiavelli tells us, for a variety of reasons (which may be unknown to us) circumstances can easily turn against anyone. The joys of spring are not delusory, but they are ephemeral.

Paradoxically, in this mercurial setting there is something that appears perennial and immutable. The image of an appealing young maiden emerges: a beautiful lady “full of sweet youth and tempting carefreeness” (59, 1 5). Here Machiavelli introduces the antinomy that Pitkin prefers: that of male-female in the male psyche. But the maiden the protagonist finds is not a pretty thing; there is something strong, stolid, and eternal about her manner of holding a lantern and horn. She leads other beings:

Around her, through the lonely plainland, came
Innumerable beasts of every kind,
All of them following, resigned and tame

(59,11 10-12)

What does this young maiden signify? To be sure, one idea that cannot be eluded is that Machiavelli posits a fundamental distinction, or inequality, between men and women. His world is not one where gender is a mere accident or external form of beings that are essentially equal human persons. Yet this inequality is the opposite of that found in the world of machismo; here the female stands towering above men who have been reduced to animals, that is, to their most lowly characteristics. The maiden is a beacon illuminating a dark and forbidding nether land. The horn, used to call wandering beasts, recalls that of a lighthouse used for drawing in lost ships. At the same time, the sense of men’s inferiority is highlighted if we liken the maiden to a shepherdess surrounded by sheep. This is an image not unlike that of Christ leading his flock. Thus Machiavelli interestingly blends two antinomies, that of the male-female and the man-divine.

Hanna Pitkin’s comment that for Machiavelli “dependence is characteristic of women, children, and animals”³⁹ is thus off the mark. She rightly points out that Machiavelli’s chief concern is with autonomy,⁴⁰ yet ignores that this autonomy is tenuous for man as well as for any other sentient being. If we read The Ass carefully we can see that not only can women and animals not be grouped together as equals in dependence, but in fact the animals, which are in Machiavelli’s vision men (or, alternatively, men who are essentially animals), depend on a woman. If there is a vision of autonomy in this work, it is clearly one where woman has more of it than man. Man needs, quite desperately, the guidance and succor of woman.

Wendy Brown rightly tells us that we can find Machiavelli’s sense of manhood in his Ass. For him, Brown tells us, man is simply one of many animals. He is no higher than any of them and in fact is inferior to them in many ways. Concerning the relationship of man to animals, Brown correctly asserts, “Machiavelli’s literary endeavors are more revealing than his political writings. Particularly interesting in this regard is his allegorical poem, The Ass.”⁴¹ The poem is also a key to how Machiavelli sees the relationship between man and woman. While it is true that Machiavelli sees it as a struggle and one where man often falls owing to his enchantment with woman, we can see in the Ass that the role of the maiden is one of a leader, not a pleasure object. The narrator, now an ass, feels ashamed, foolish, and numb as he confronts the maiden in the dark recesses. Exploitation or subordination of woman by man is nowhere to be seen.

In this world where a woman stands above apparently devalued men, there is clearly a transvaluation of dominant gender roles in Machiavelli’s time or even ours.⁴² This woman, a maiden of Circe, symbolizes actualized strength that can guide men’s self-emancipation. It is achieved through the transvaluation of predominant beliefs. Is this something that Machiavelli sees as desirable, abhorrent, funny, or simply fantastical? What kind of world are we in now? Is it a part of this world that we do not know? Is it a dream? Is it hell? Are we to think that Machiavelli is drawing a parallel between hell and this nether world?

The vision that Machiavelli provides us in The Ass is a representation of a central aspect of our world that we cannot see: humans’ internal being.⁴³ Yes, it is specifically the male psyche; but it is not entirely limited to it, since it appears the female figures in the poem are symbols of strength, beacons of liberty. Machiavelli employs the allegory of this apparent fable to examine and explore subjectivity. Hence his poem is not really a mocking of the Christian view of hell, as de Grazia tells US.⁴⁴ Machiavelli is not primarily concerned with deriding the Catholic doctrine of hell; rather, he is finding the adequate way to represent how he sees human nature; how it is lived and experienced both at the physical and the consciousness level. ⁴⁵

His vision is an act of artistic creativity intent on reproducing the key elements of the human essence. It is no mere imagination or dream of something desirable or abhorrent. Furthermore, it is not an eschatology or doctrine of the afterlife, which the author does not possess. Machiavelli believed in the idea of hell, quite simply as tradition described it, but did not believe this notion merited a doctrine. The use of the notion of “hell” is descriptive of a subjective human experience, expressed by means of an allegory.

In this light the protagonist’s descent into another world is in reality an entrance into a level of self-consciousness hitherto inaccessible. It is neither a literal death nor a view of what hell is like. Neither is it simply an entrance into dialogue with great figures long dead. Sebastian de Grazia is aware that Machiavelli’s writing is in some way related to the idea of an entrance into a netherworld. However, he does not discuss The Ass in this context.⁴⁶ De Grazia emphasizes Machiavelli’s intellectual dialogue with figures of the past, yet does not refer to his greatest poem as the place where Machiavelli enters an underworld of extramoral self-understanding.

The poem is thus critical in Machiavelli’s corpus because it is the most profound access route to this particular man’s psyche and, Machiavelli claims, to that of most men. Its darkness entails an entrance into a realm of forbidding moralities, rather than the purely intellectual exercise Machiavelli performs when he retires to his house and study as he recounts in the famous letter to Vettori of December 10, 1513. In the case of the poem, the hero is tempted and accepts the lead of a seductive woman. Following the lead of the young maiden opens this entrance to a world where the consequences of particular moral choices are palpable. ⁴⁷ By listening to a representative of Circe, the man is able to see himself as he really is, not as he imagines himself nor as how he is told he is. He is able to achieve a degree of self-consciousness that shows a frightening reality that at the same time will offer, at the end of the poem, a promising prospect.

The entrance to this level of consciousness occurs when Circe’s maiden’s gaze is met.⁴⁸ Machiavelli portrays Circe’s maiden as someone in a sense divine, receiving abilities from above:

This power which she has comes from the skies
She into various disguises turns
Whomever she has looked into the eyes

(63, 11 22-24)

But the “power” is in fact virtù come down from the heavens.⁴⁹ Not moral virtue, but the capacity to foresee change and adapt to it with a defiant, transgressive attitude. For the maiden, her power is her ability to effect a change on various men by actually taking their own virtù away by looking at them in the eyes. Their capacity to adapt as men do is taken from them: in a sense their virility is removed, they are emasculated. The maiden is a woman who stands above those on earth by her command of others’ virtù, which also involves the capacity to create stability and to subdue unexpected change. For Machiavelli, the maiden’s gaze turns men to animals, which are simultaneously full of life yet also considered inferior to men. The adaptability of animals, which allows persistence, is what Machiavelli seeks to teach men; but it is only possible if man becomes something considered lower than himself. Man must learn to overcome the way he normally sees himself.

In Circe’s maiden, the traditional trait of mature femininity, constancy, and the traditional masculine trait of courage in the face of the unexpected are combined. ⁵⁰ The maiden is distant, and appears as almost a supernatural phenomenon of which we are aware even if we do not see it, yet we are told that she can turn any man that looks at her into a lowly, desperate animal. Machiavelli is telling us that this combination of female constancy and male courage and adaptability, a potential in all persons, can be the window through which we can see the true nature of men. Not that this nature is pleasant, but it is human nature nonetheless.

The maiden tells the ass that he must hide among her beasts. He follows her lead into the deep woods. Gripped by trepidation, the protagonist follows his guide into a luxurious palace. It is in this place that the maiden seduces him in one of her bedrooms. He gives himself to her, reversing traditional gender roles, as the young lady takes his “life” (66, 1 14). He is eager to find out what kind of existence he will now have. The woman knows him well, for she states that no one has suffered from ingratitude and ill luck as much as he has. She describes his tragic lot as that of one whose good intentions and deeds had the reverse response from others around him.

Ingratitude in Human Life

Why does the maiden concentrate on ingratitude? Ingratitude is a cardinal human sentiment in Machiavelli’s worldview. Though a Florentine citizen, he does not believe life’s deeds are rewarded according to just deserts. “On Ingratitude,” the first poem of Machiavelli’s four Capitoli or “chapters” in verse, is a pithy explication of Machiavelli’s understanding of this component of human nature. For him, this passion or feeling is so strong that it undermines the entire edifice of political construction. Machiavelli’s view of this sentiment is complex, because it covers not only the personal, inward side of it but the political, public side as well.

How does ingratitude fit in Machiavelli’s philosophy of life? In general terms, it is part and parcel of the author’s hostile vision of the world. Machiavelli deems it important enough to warrant careful treatment in one of his “chapters” on life. This hostility is not born in the physical world, but rather comes from social relationships. It is born of others’ unwillingness to grant peace and recognition to someone’s achievements.⁵¹ As Machiavelli states, it is the progeny of greed and suspicion, and thrives on others’ envy. The force of the sentiment of ingratitude is so strong that the entire poem seems to ultimately warn against, and even decry, a political path for one’s way in life.

As with The Ass, Machiavelli begins the poem on ingratitude by underscoring that his project arises out of grief. With song, he states, he wants the waning of “sorrow and despair” (LL 103). This song is like that of the hero of the Ass: it is inspired by the sufferings of a life devoted to being a good citizen but not met with rewards or a modicum of grace. No congratulations, no thanks are given to a man who has devoted his life to the common good of his city.

It is a somber, agonizing picture, and Machiavelli wants to use it as emblematic of the life of one who engages in politics with a grand vision. One should not expect thanks or justice, but rather a sort of anonymity. Of all human achievements, the political is the grandest, for man’s political glory, as Machiavelli says, is envied by “the stars and God” (LL 104).⁵² Yet, echoing the Ass, these achievements are generally evanescent, for man sows on “sand and sea.” To know that most political actions will not be perennial or rewarded is part of political wisdom, and the best attitude, at the end of the day, is “humility” (LL 103). With such an attitude one can climb up the “long and steep mountain” (LL 103) of politics, aware that one’s Sisyphean rock will fall once one reaches the apex.

Like acquisitiveness, ingratitude is for Machiavelli an innate part of the human condition but originates—or is activated by—in “great men.” Machiavelli sees that ingratitude emerges, essentially, from political struggles. It then goes on to exist in a variety of human practices, but it truly is born and begins in political competition. It takes form, embryo-like, in the souls of great men, of “rulers” (LL 104) and “potentates” (LL 105). Slowly “the people” or “the crowd” perceives the contention for power between great men. Soon enough ingratitude moves from being a localized, elite-centered part of political competition to a universal emotion: in every place, and in every part of the human race, it can be found (LL 103). The reason for this spread is that all people possess this trait, yet it is more effective in the great, who may sometimes be able to mobilize it in the many.

How is ingratitude manifested? It has three modes of infectious spread, or three “arrows” with which it stings men. One is the absence of rewards for good deeds. The second is the human tendency to forget favors. The third, and most painful one, is the tendency of men and women to aim to hurt others even when they have done them good. This, Machiavelli states, is “the evil that never dies” (LL 105). With such a view of the human condition, rife with internecine attitudes, we can hardly aver that Machiavelli lacks a personal morality: he speaks with revulsion and contempt for those who live in such a manner. His tone is one of despondency, not of praise for a self-oriented human trait. Machiavelli has a conception of human dignity; he is disgusted by the lack of respect most men show for it, but aims to show that politics and ethics are, at the fundamental level, divorced. One may indeed be displeased or hurt by unethical treatment, yet, Machiavelli affirms politics cannot be tamed by morality.

It is because of this divorce that the good citizen is forced to accept repayment that is not commensurate with his or her contribution to the common good. In Machiavelli’s words, he “must reap fruit contrary to the seeds grown in the field” (LL 106). Good deeds performed on the grounds of public life may be received with rotten responses: men do not follow instincts of justice, either based on natural law or on reasonable institutions. Men in fact care not for another’s good intentions. Neither do they really care for good results: even in cases when a man clearly performs deeds good for the entire community, ingratitude will emerge like a plague, like “a horrid Pest” (LL 104).⁵³ This is sometimes owed to neglect, yet in most cases is something perniciously active.

In this idea, it is clear that Machiavelli does not espouse a simplistic notion that “the ends justify the means.” He thinks that most men do not care for the grand achievements of even their own great leaders; when they see their leaders’ character flaws they are likely to carp about them. Neither will men’s responses pay much regard to the means, but rather to the passions awakened by a great man’s deeds.

Machiavelli brings up the example of Scipio to make this point. In The Ass Machiavelli praises Scipio for his character and actions, which benefited his motherland, Rome. He finds him a paragon of virtue, courage, and love of country. In his description of Scipio’s deeds at Cannae, Spain, Africa, and Asia, Machiavelli wants to underscore this man’s contributions to the common good of Rome. This pursuit of the common good, not military might per se, is what Machiavelli describes when he states that Scipio showed us “the only way that leads to the most lofty limit of man’s glory” (LL 107). Yet, he finds that men’s envy led them to be entirely ungrateful to him. That is to say, they cared little for the common good achieved through great deeds, for they were more swayed by the self-regarding sentiment of wishing to have his glory and were unconcerned with either his good ends or the means he used to attain them. Ingratitude touches even the highest among men.

One would expect that if one’s contributions to the common good of the city are immense, as those of Scipio, one would be spared the people’s ill will. But Machiavelli does not think this will happen. In Rome and in Athens, from the ancients to the “modern” Florentines, ingratitude will touch all. Clearly if ingratitude was pervasive among the ancients, it is bound to be even more intense in badly-ordered republics of modern times such as Florence or on the part of “modern princes” (LL 109). Great Athenian men such as Aristides suffered from the ingratitude of the people, for “among the people, the least failure found erases the memory of conquered castles” (LL 109). The common man will overlook a great man’s contribution to the common good when a failing, of character or political conduct, is perceived. Not even liberators are spared: those who free a state are often “rewarded” with exile or death (LL 110).

It is a mistake, Machiavelli believes, to see politics as a path to eternal glory, or a substitute to spiritual afterlife. Politics for the citizen of Florence is indeed the practice that allows the creation of great things: good laws, reform, emancipation, good conquest, or transformation. Yet more often than not, the man who actually performed the vital republican deeds is either forgotten or reviled and the achievement is not felt to be its own reward. Eternal glory or life after death, in the people’s memory, is far from the reward gained by such a man. “Ingratitude made Caesar seize the reign” (LL 109) and thus end liberty in Rome. Caesar, the terminator of Roman freedom, is remembered; yet few emancipators and contributors to republican freedom are. Theirs is generally a political life with achievements either soon forgotten or brought down. The disjuncture between a good citizen’s contributions and the way that these are remembered prompts Machiavelli to aver, in the closing lines of “On Ingratitude,”

Let everyone abhor both court and state:
For there’s no shorter way to make men hate
The things he wanted most, once he has had them

(LL 110)

This apparently anti-political statement is intended to show a piece of wisdom Machiavelli has discovered: republican politics is not a glorious road to the attainment of one’s private wishes. The affairs of state are abhorrent, at least in the sense that they instill in political men disdain for politics because one’s deeds are not well received. And this creates grave moral or mental malaise. Rather than the shortest path to rewards, politics in the service of the common good, a republican politics, is bound to be the path that leads to being forgotten, to suf fering, and to see one’s achievements as evanescent. Spiritual redemption is to be found in politics but only after a long and tortuous process in which one is denied gratitude. This redemption is of a different sort: it must be found through other parts of life, and only after one has reconceptualized one’s place in the cosmos.

Human Beings in the Cosmos

If political achievements of the republican kind are evanescent, what is longer-lasting? Part of the story of The Ass is that the cosmos and its movement are shown to the hero. They are eternal, not what is human. He must realize, the young maiden implies, that no human achievement, however great, can be permanent. The cosmos is a material system whose movement affects humans’ internal fluid “humors”⁵⁴ and consequently affairs of state, the history of nations, as well as matters of the social world. For Machiavelli, the physics of the cosmos is the sole perpetual reality; man is made up of humors whose balance may shift although individuals tend to remain of one nature throughout their lives because the proportions of the humors remain more or less the same. This relationship between the movement of celestial bodies and humans upon earth is something Machiavelli took quite seriously, as Anthony Parel has shown. ⁵⁵

What is the significance of this relationship? For Parel, it means that Machiavelli was not truly the first modern political philosopher as Leo Strauss has asserted. The Florentine’s adherence to an antiquated doctrine of astrological forces proves the existence of an irrational pre-modern strain in Machiavelli.⁵⁶ It also means, for Parel, that the conception that cosmic dynamics affects humans sheds a new light on Machiavelli’s political philosophy: political regimes can be judged according to the collective humors in them. ⁵⁷

While there is no doubt that Machiavelli refers to cosmology in many passages of The Ass as well as his entire corpus, the meaning of this fact is different from what Parel asserts. Machiavelli does not by any means undertake a systematic exploration of the cosmic-human relationship. Had he truly believed that the underlying causes of changes in humors and history were most importantly located up in the heavens he would have tried to undertake such an exploration. He does not, in my view, for the simple reason that Machiavelli, while accepting the prevailing orthodoxy of astrology as scientific in Renaissance times, understands this relationship as metaphorical for his philosophical purposes. He finds in it a means to express, through artistic representation, the aldilà⁵⁸ of human capabilities: that is, the limitations of human action and reason.

As Parel ably demonstrates, Machiavelli believed in cosmic influence. Machiavelli did not “satirize astrologers.”⁵⁹ Yet the implication of this fact for his political work has not been explored fully. More importantly, Machiavelli’s understanding of cosmic notions helps him construct a philosophy of man where man is neither the master of all things nor subject to divine Providence, but rather bounded and constrained by nature. It is an attempt by Machiavelli to distance himself from the Christian religion, which posits the supremacy of Providence over the cosmos. But it is also an attempt to deny that man is the measure of all things, for forces within and without his body affect him. Machiavelli wants to show how humans are first corporeal matter, then (perhaps) soul.⁶⁰ In this project he finds that cosmology supports his naturalistic conception of existence that sharply stresses the imperfection of men without necessitating a conception of divinity.

Machiavelli’s use of the term “providence” is not rooted in Christian theism. It is not an attempt to assert the existence of that entity which maintains the human species. The notion that celestial and astral dynamics affect human humors and history is an attempt to point to physical processes as the underlying roots of social motion and their independence from human will. Machiavelli’s is a rudimentary, quasi-scientific project (from our vantage point), but not a matter of superstition, as astrology was an accepted science in the Renaissance. Hence, the interpretation of cosmology in Machiavelli can be understood in contradistinction to Christian doctrine and to boundless humanism. Within the larger scheme Machiavelli has in mind, which is to delineate his philosophical anthropology of man as a severely limited being, political action is not a matter of man acting upon the world as will acting upon inert matter. A virile, virtuous man does not tame nature as Pitkin asserts; rather, nature contains man.

This philosophical anthropology is best understood as tragic, for it shows man’s lot to be by necessity bounded by nature. The severe limitations of human action and reason, for Machiavelli, can be represented aesthetically, i.e., metaphorically, in terms of cosmic, natural influences. Machiavelli has no concern for discovering scientifically the actual processes of this influence; nor is he simply a believer, in a superstitious manner, in astrological forces. He is taken by them because in his aesthetico-theoretic attempt to explain to others his naturalistic, existential⁶¹ philosophy of human being, the cosmic analogy is useful and is supported by the science of his time, astrology. The implication of this understanding for modern political theory is that humans are natural, material beings with delimited reason, action, and morality. For our understanding of this notion, the cosmos’ dictates over men are a useful metaphor for human limitations and the intractability of the world.

Fearing Fortune

Within this pessimistic view of human capacities found in The Ass as in the entire corpus of Machiavelli, peace is something elusive. It is something possible, but fragile. A certain hope does exist, for the “happy hour will come” (68, 1 15), the young maiden foresees, perhaps alluding to the possibility of an individual’s adaptability to circumstances. The transformation the young maiden has in mind for the protagonist takes place: he must adapt, but by becoming an ass, not a lion nor a fox (as Machiavelli will propose in The Prince). Paradoxically, the maiden describes this transformation as necessary for his “salvation.” This is another instance of the transvaluation of values: man is now to be ranked under the animal, at least in one sense. Now the narrator takes a new form, that of an ass.

Machiavelli appears to be rejecting the mundane social world. For him the hardships that one must endure in the course of dealing with others, especially in the function of civic activity that is meant to contribute to the city, are too much to bear. The result of good deeds (deeds done for the common political good) tends to be, not always but generally, ill luck for oneself. The protagonist does not choose his new form; yet he is promised that in it he will be saved from a brutish fate. Is this true? It can be true insofar as we accept that his identification with a lowly, crude beast is in any way an amelioration of his lot. Machiavelli goes on to explain why this is the case in Chapter Four of The Ass.

At the inception of this chapter it is evident that the protagonist values happiness more than anything. It is something he has not felt much in his life. Machiavelli’s belief that “man’s condition in this world remains disconsolate”⁶² is evident in him. However, he is willing to endure more pain, which he knows well, in order to reach some happiness. In his condition, he reverses the traditional understanding of the virtuous man’s confrontation with female Fortuna found in Chapter XXV of The Prince: in The Ass, the protagonist is willing and wants to submit to whatever “tricks” Fortune has in store for him if they lead him to salvation. He states that Fortune “was forever deaf” (70, 1 12) to his pleas and in his submission to her he is in a sense surrendering. In The Ass, Fortune is not Circe nor the maiden alone, but the metaphorical “queen” that rules these two female figures which in turn draw the paths on which the narrator must tread.

How are we to understand Machiavelli’s conception of Fortune? Fortune is a representation of contingency in Machiavelli’s vision of the cosmos, which also includes the heavens/stars and God. The Capitolo “On Fortune” is an appropriate complement to our analysis of Fortuna in The Ass. In this poem Machiavelli ponders the changing nature of circumstances. It is dedicated to Giovanni Soderini, a conspirator against the Medici and an ally of Machiavelli’s in setting up the militia in the Casentino Valley. Hence it appears to be written to someone Machiavelli trusts and has an affinity with, someone with whom he is comfortable in telling his real opinion of things. In this work the Secretary wonders why it is that a prosperous lot can easily turn dire. He emphasizes not the happy turns, but the hapless circumstances that can emerge suddenly. He personifies and also deifies the changing nature of circumstances as a being, “Fortuna.”

In reading this notion, should we think that Machiavelli believes there is—literally—a goddess who actually rules human matters? Machiavelli’s analysis of changing circumstances is poetic in a wider sense: he employs the metaphorical concept of Fortune to denominate what he considers beyond humans, what is contingent and unforeseen. He seeks to express, through metaphor, what is arbitrary and beyond men’s intellectual grasp and practical will. Taken together, the overdetermination of earthly events is given a name, Fortune, which, being overwhelming to any one individual, is understood pessimistically, for no one single man can always foretell or control it. Importantly, these changing circumstances are in constant revolution, that is to say, there is a cyclical pattern that repeats itself, like Machiavelli’s belief in cyclical, rather than progressive, eternally-recurrent history.⁶³ No definitive resolution to the turning of Fortune’s “wheels” (112, viii) exists; repetition is bound to occur owing to both the nature of men and the nature of history.⁶⁴ The Carmina Burana similarly tells us,

Fortuna rota volvitur,
Descendo minoratus,
Alter in altum tollitur
Nimis exaltatus⁶⁵

Both the nature of men and the nature of history depend on “Nature” itself: hence Machiavelli’s deep-seated naturalism. And this explains why death is a great concern to Machiavelli; he treats it with dread because there is no afterlife beyond it.

Machiavelli considers the idea of changing circumstances as a cohesive system, which has interconnectedness but no purpose or teleology. “Fortune” is the metaphorical name of this holistic system; it is not an actually existing being or entity. Machiavelli personifies Fortune and it is like a woman who is both a “goddess” (112, 1 1) and a “queen” (111, 12). By telling his friend Soderini that he must only fear Fortune (111,17), Machiavelli disparages the Christian view of Providence and asserts that no political order, no state, has as much oppressive weight on the individual’s consciousness as changing circumstances. Machiavelli’s acceptance of astrological concepts leads him to see a complex world that is determined by the natural, material forces that hold the universe together. In this worldview, fate is a product of the stars’ movements, which are not easily knowable or predictable by men. Machiavelli thus assails the notion of a benevolent Providence, a fundamental Christian tenet. His assumed use of Apuleius’s Golden Ass is important here, for the African-born rhetorician sought to construct a vision of men emancipated from the power of the stars. Machiavelli, par contre, seeks to construct a vision of men emancipated from the power of a Christian God although still under the yoke of astral forces.

In Apuleius’s work, the narrator is converted to the religion of the goddess Isis and hence escapes the arbitrary hand of Fortune. But for Machiavelli no such escape from the contingent and arbitrary is possible; what he does think is possible is a withdrawal from the belief in a benign, Providential God. Thus when Apuleius remarks that the protagonist’s ill luck is over because “blind Fortune, after tossing you maliciously about from peril to peril has somehow, without thinking what she was doing, landed you here in religious felicity”⁶⁶ Machiavelli responds with a different view. For Machiavelli, Fortune is not blind and is indeed malicious, for ill luck tends to occur more often than good luck, and an escape to religious contentment or joy is not possible. A nonarbitrary god cannot overwhelm Fortune. For Machiavelli Fortune is lawless; hence she is arbitrary, unlike the will of the Christian God, which cannot be arbitrary. Yet Machiavelli finds that the “natural” force of Fortune is stronger than the Christian God that many believe in.

Why is it stronger? Because the “fickleness” (111, 1 10) that characterizes Fortune points to the absence of a telos in the aggregate combination of changing circumstances that an individual man must face in life. Unlike the Christian God, whose will is guided to a divine Providence and underlying reason, Fortune has no telos; it is forever in motion, it has no goal. Machiavelli seeks to locate this entity in the real world, in the world of “nature” (111, 1 15). It is not an idea expressing a metaphysical reality, a religious vision, or a moral order. It is undeniable that Machiavelli refers to Fortune as a person or goddess in many instances; he does so because he lived in a period where, in popular culture (and this is Machiavelli’s milieu, as opposed to academic circles) the idea had representational purchase. Yet he does not attempt to invest the notion with actual personhood. The fundamental meaning, and chief implication of the term for our reconstruction of his implicit philosophy of life, is that it is a metaphorical description of an important component in human experience: the fact that many things are (or at least appear to humans as) contingent and arbitrary. In other words it is an aesthetic (because representational) notion used to convey the mystery of contingency.

Why does Machiavelli not underscore the positive, happy turns of Fortune? Certainly he seems to think that Fortune is made of two opposite tendencies: those that benefit and those that harm. Machiavelli terms these the “meek” and the “harsh” faces of Fortune (113, v). Fortune appears to be understandable only as an inter-relationship between the felicitous and the hapless, what may seem to be the good and the evil. Yet there is no doubt that Machiavelli is concerned more in expressing the negative, pain-fraught side of Fortuna. This is because his philosophy of life is guided largely by the idea that absurdity and suffering affect the individual more than happy turnouts. In his understanding of history, growth and decay, rise and fall are equally important. But in his philosophy of consciousness and of man, the negative is preponderant.

Here is where Machiavelli’s individualistic conception of the human condition is evident. The reason that he underscores pain and suffering in life’s turns is that in his contrasting of the influence of the individual to that of Fortune’s changing circumstances he finds the former in the shadow of the latter. In general, man is not able to control or guide his destiny. It is possible to do so, through virtù, yet this capacity is difficult to achieve. Fortune’s “kingdom [is] violent,” unless resisted by extreme virtue (111, 1 14-15).

Political matters are affected similarly by the turns of Fortune. Justice is not a lofty idea that exists independent of history. It is also used and abused by the turns of Fortune: “Beneath her feet she often keeps the just and raises the unjust” (112, 1 10). Rather than a kingdom of truth, the moral sphere is swayed by this factor of Fortune’s turns, for “promises” are forgotten and injustices done at her “whim.” Political rule is not infrequently devolved to those who do not deserve it. Political power, generally, does not follow any established rules of reason or laws of nature ( 112, 1 21 ). That is to say, Fortune is arbitrary with regard to who acquires political power. Unlike St. Paul, who believes the secular sovereignty of rulers is rooted in God’s will and providence, Machiavelli finds no justification other than arbitrary fortune in most rulers’ reigns. Mighty and rich men, especially, do not recognize the hand of Fortune in their happy lot: they believe they themselves are to be lauded. And Machiavelli thinks they are utterly mistaken: no invisible, rational hands distribute money and power according to merit. It falls upon men without reason.

In this sort of world, Machiavelli believes, an emancipatory politics is necessary. What does this entail? It needs the actions of the audacious and the figuratively “young” (114, iii). They are the ones who are most likely to fare well facing Fortune. Why? The young are by nature audacious and impetuous. They are predisposed to risking life in order to achieve some envisioned end. No rational calculation, not even a “willingness” to risk is predominant in them. When external circumstances are against them, they are nevertheless bound to struggle for liberation, for independence. And this is Machiavelli’s definition of freedom.

Independence means a relative autonomy from Fortune. The young’s wide horizon does not easily accept any form of constraint; when it appears they are more prone to try a variety of stances in order to overcome it. Like adolescents, the politically “youthful,” are able to try different personae for different purposes. Yet, like the young boy in the opening of The Ass, they can still see reason to follow politics with a passion, not rational calculation. Hence the form of politics Machiavelli is chiefly concerned with is emancipatory and foundational. It is a search for freedom that is adaptable and passionate. And this must be founded on an élan. Not cold rationality nor crude idealism, but a passionate, quasi-erotic love for the political goal.

Dependence on others is the end result if Fortune has her way. Her wheels are greased by “necessity” and “sloth” in men (114, v). That is, so long as will power and vigor are strong, as represented in the young, Fortune will be kept at bay, at least for a while. Necessity leads man to “break the earth,” (114, vii) for the natural life cycle requires initiative. Sloth “recreates the earth,” for men who are sedentary in a metaphorical way will aid the recuperation of the ground. When necessity and sloth predominate, Fortune will continue revolving. Human will is of utmost importance if the pace of the revolving is to slow. As Machiavelli states,

Of all the people gathered in that place
He is the wisest and the luckiest
Whose will adjusts itself to the wheels’ pace

(115,110-12)

Human will thus acts as a countervening force, going in the opposite direction as Fortune’s wheel. Hence will—which is the core of adaptability—must be cultivated.

Machiavelli appears to believe in Fortune, human nature, will, and also God, for he states

And since you cannot change either yourself
Or the order that God endowed you with,
In the midst of the road alone you’re left

(115, 11 22-24)

Alone is how Machiavelli finds man in this world. He is on a “road,” with some unknown direction that man can embark on or not, depending on his will. Yet the stage is already set for him by his own predisposition and character, which is part of the nature of which Fortune and the stars are also members. God’s hand in this situation is not influential except at the original point of endowment. Yet Machiavelli is not an atheist, for he does not seek to deny the existence of God. More important is the fact that each man is alone as a newborn left on an open road.

How does Machiavelli understand this experience? He sees it ultimately as not allowing real happiness to man. To be happy one would have to be able to joyfully and “deftly jump from wheel to wheel” (116, 13) in Fortune’s aimless grand structure, something that Machiavelli finds inscrutably impossible. This would require a power “denied to us” (116, 14) which we can infer to be that of complete prescience and repeated transformation of one’s nature. Hence Machiavelli urges this lonely man not to acquiesce, not to fundamentally alter his nature or character, but to try to adapt to changing circumstances. To attempt to change in order to face changing circumstances inexorably leads to the abrading of one’s sense of self and an ultimate psychic disorder, for “In this world nothing can eternal be” (116, 17). We should only try to “adjust to her whims and signs” (116, 12) which is something that may appear merely reactive and somewhat passive yet in fact requires effort, will, and strength.

This virtù that may allow individuals a significant degree of independence and order is the same that provides to political orders a similar autonomy. Machiavelli again moves his pen from describing a man’s virtue in the face of Fortune to describing the vicissitudes of particular nations. He states that in Fortune’s palace one can see a series of paintings of the various nations that enjoyed their moment in the sun before falling. Egypt’s reign and its “beautiful works on nature that still please” (116,1 21) are extolled, thus assigning human value to its aesthetic achievements as much as to its political durability. Yet it is an apparent durability, for the Assyrians, the Persians, Athens, Sparta, and Rome then replace the previous reign. All republics, kingdoms, principalities or empires collapse soon enough.

Rome’s aesthetic achievements and other creative works crumbled as well, as if a “rapid stream” (117, 13) had flooded its city walls. Here Machiavelli likens Fortune to a river, a force of nature, which overpowers the works of mere men.⁶⁷ He also compares it to another natural entity, an eagle that “swoops down” (117, 120) to the earth to take “turtles” (men) to great heights only to then drop them to see carapace and flesh crushed upon rocks. Although Machiavelli praises a few men such as Caesar and Alexander for their ability to confront Fortune and impress upon her their virtù by creating and leading perdurable empires, he also includes them in the group of “turtles” because both fell dramatically as well. In fact, Machiavelli asserts at the close of the Capitolo, that only death provides a path out of the tragic fall of men and cities (119,1 7).

The Beauty of Eros

Of the various naturalistic metaphors that Machiavelli employs to describe the changing essence of Fortune (rivers, eagles, etc.), the human female form is the most common. The comparison of changing circumstances to a goddess of antiquity, Fortune, is the first manifestation of this poetic technique. The reason why Machiavelli chooses to compare the power of changing circumstances in life (as moved by nature) to a woman is that he believes men’s relationships with women have a Janus-faced nature: they can be most felicitous but also most abject. This alternation makes for a whole that is characterized by extremes: momentous hope and joy at one end, and severe suffering at the other.⁶⁸ This characteristic of a change in the real world affecting men’s emotions is, for Machiavelli, the most adequate metaphor for the nature of changing circumstances in nature and history.

The sort of suffering felt by men facing changing circumstances in life is similar in intensity to their facing the challenges of love and eros.⁶⁹ It is a literary device used by Machiavelli to express the depth of the sentiment. There is no other underlying, metaphysical reason; the parallel between nature and woman is a poetic construct to express the sort of harrowing experience the world’s vicissitudes can generate in a man’s spirit. Yet while there is no metaphysical reason as link, Machiavelli’s use of the female metaphor for Fortune does provide us a statement about his philosophical anthropology. For Machiavelli, as we stated earlier, an essential difference between man and woman exists, yet it is not hierarchical.

Besides his treatment of Fortune as a woman for the reasons just described, Machiavelli also pursues the theme of the distinctions between men and women in their earthly lives. This theme is elaborated through the use of extremes as well, in order to make the point clearly and convince the reader through rhetorical amplification. As Machiavelli’s oeuvre follows the rules of classical rhetoric, ⁷⁰ his poetry also seeks the amplified images of joy and deep despair that characterize relations between the sexes as perceived by man. To be sure, Machiavelli’s is not an impartial account of love and eros. It is not objective, since for Machiavelli truth has many sides and must be approached from one’s angle. Hence Machiavelli writes about eros from the male’s point of view (more specifically, his own) without claiming to know the phenomenon objectively. From this angle, and in his poetry, Machiavelli tends to place emphasis on the grave turns rather than the happy, for the same reason that we point to with reference to Fortune’s changes above: most of one man’s actions cannot control most of the world’s phenomena.

In his prototypical love poems, Machiavelli sings of the pangs of love. His poems are emotive: they long for unattainable love and lament the anguish that this entails. Machiavelli does this because he believes that the need for woman that man has is profound, natural, and necessary, and hence its frustration is felt deeply.⁷¹ In his love “Sonnet,” Machiavelli states,

If but one hour I could not think of you,
I would call happy that whole year indeed;
If I could prove to you my present rue,
I would not mind this grief that makes me bleed.

(LL 40, ll 1-4)

The burning desire that Machiavelli describes in “At the Request of Barbera” (a poem referring to a woman Machiavelli loved) is rife with words such as “smart” and “torment” (LL 41). The theme of missed opportunities that occur when will is not synchronized with action (or mind with nature) is echoed in Machiavelli’s words in the poem “To Barbera:”

But since desire and strength
Do not go well together,
Suffer I must the length
Of all my woes, my lord.

(LL 42, 11 4-7)

Machiavelli urges our acceptance of certain flaws, such as the attributes that nature provides us with. He also underscores how time can seem hostile to man’s desires and plans when he describes how in his old age the woman he loves no longer wants him and prefers younger men:

Great beauty finds its bliss—
I see and I confess—
In a much greener age.

(LL 42,11 10-12)

In this manner Machiavelli iterates the notion that time runs against one’s wishes and thus the proper alignment of opportunity and action is rare indeed. Thus the frustrations of love are more likely to occur than the felicitous turns. This fact causes the emotions of fear of suffering, a theme expressed in Machiavelli’s “Serenade” (LL 21-31), where Venus and her son Love possess an ire that “should make us wan” (LL 21, 1 14). In this world, failure and fear go hand in hand.

The Aesthetic Redemption of Life

If fear and failure surround us, can anything provide us with hope or even redemption? Does the protagonist in The Ass possess any ability to avoid failure and fear? It seems, rather, that this story tells us that virtù does have a costly side. Virtù is the capacity to see an opportunity and to act on it with the requisite adaptability of disposition, sometimes involving transgressions. But in The Ass we see that the narrator’s virtù is not permanent, for it is ultimately mired in failure. It is the story of an anti-hero, a tragic man who nevertheless deserves praise because of his contribution to the common good of the state. He also deserves to be lauded for his unrelenting willingness to face struggles with others (as with himself) in the course of this contribution. As the young maiden declares in The Ass, the narrator, a man who was involved in politics in his lifetime suffers deeply:

O prudent soul,
To sing your journey and your present woe
It takes a poet’s or a historian’s role

(70, ll 16-18)

For Machiavelli, a poet’s role is to capture the emotions and feelings of universal humanity found in particular experiences in the most accurate representational manner and with the most mellifluous sound. These tend to be tragic, for it appears the feelings of despair are much more difficult to grasp and express. A historian, on the other hand, must be able to ascertain what the causes of events truly are. For the tale of the protagonist in The Ass, only a poet can tell of the despair.

If the lot of this man is as dire as Machiavelli portrays it, what is the point of telling his story? Machiavelli wants to iterate the idea that political glory, because it is the summum bonum of human life on this earth, makes the efforts made towards it valuable even if they ultimately fail. If they are not reached for various reasons (such as the protagonist’s ill-fate) there is nonetheless value in pursuing glory through the agon, or struggle, with oneself, others, nature, and Fortune. Stubborn persistence, like the ass’s, is indeed valuable for the character of a man who will engage in politics.

This agon, it must be underscored, is marked by many ills and pains. Yet Machiavelli believes man can find redemption after the ugliness of the agon in his grasping of beauty. Redemption, not merely consolation: because the entire species, of which he is a member, is shown to have a capability that in a sense overrides all negative, destructive ones. This capability is that of perceiving beauty in others (as exemplified by women) and in works of art (as exemplified by written works). It is also manifest in the aesthetic aspect of politics, which is not to say that there is a beauty about it, but that there is a process of form-giving (as in art) to peoples, states, and oneself through the activity of politics.

The narrative of The Ass turns to how the protagonist forgets his pain through his immersion in the beauty of the young maiden. He describes the beauty of this woman, who is able to turn the man’s attention from his inward self-depreciation to an appreciation of beauty in another human being.⁷² This beauty diverts the man’s view from the injustice of his past to an immediate beauty that provides an alternative world. In the company of the young maiden the protagonist recovers the sense of aesthetic appreciation, which allows him to untangle himself from the torment of his failures and to return to the sensual world. He discovers in mundane, intimate interaction a process that allows the return of basic abilities of perception to human beings. In Machiavelli’s portrayal of the man’s encounter with the young lady, he describes the experience as reinvigorating, a rebirth of both mind and body. With the implicit metaphor of intercourse, Machiavelli points to the return to the sensuous world (from the domain of anaesthetized inwardness) through intimate human interaction by a man previously on the verge of hopelessness.

The man in this story is in a sense a hero; yet he is a failure even by his own account. However, his story is worth repeating because in the experience that is told, a redeeming process occurs. A quasi-religious experience takes place, which serves to remind the protagonist of the value of his worldly existence. The enjoyment of beauty or aesthetic appreciation takes the place of religion in finding redemption at the end of the day.

As the night nears its end, the protagonist abruptly begins to ponder something entirely different and seemingly unrelated: the fate of states. Machiavelli’s turn from a moment of ecstasy to a moment of meditation on politics is absurdly comic. But the underlying reason is that the protagonist discovers in his meditation that fate is mercurial not just for men, but for states as well, and that giving form to states is a valuable task. The same universal fact of achievement followed by failure applies to unknown men as well as to great nations. The story’s protagonist did work for the common good, yet was met with ingratitude. In the course of the history of cities, ascendancy is soon met by decline. In both cases, ambition is the reason for the fall. Greed feeds strife, and this appetite ruins states. Athens and Sparta fell, “the day they seized and tamed the states around” (78, 1 13-15). Ambitious imperialism or conquest is hence the cause of massive collapse. Only good laws, the essence of statecraft, can resist the tendency of a state to fall.

The Choice to be Made: Political Agon or Contentment

We can return to the narrative of The Ass to see the message or moral of Machiavelli’s poem as well as his philosophy of life in general. After having discussed the art of the state, the narrator now begins to describe the menagerie that now surrounds the tale’s hero. A variety of animals, including lions, bears, oxen, wolves, and others live in separate rooms. Each was previously a man in earthly life; each became a beast that most embodied his character. And over the entrance to this place, a huge statue of a man stood. It was that of the poet Gaetano Baraballo, who was made poet laureate in jest by Pope Leo X, and sent through the streets of Rome in 1515 riding an elephant. It is thus clear who the men that populate this place are: the fools and failures of the human world that once held some esteemed position. Machiavelli proceeds to describe each animal, usually as a beast that instinctively does something simultaneously pleasurable and brutish (89-93). Among them, a fat pig wallows in mud.

Nauseous owing to the pig’s appearance, the protagonist reacts with familiarity to the pig because he senses he knew him in the human world.⁷³ He tells the animal that it is able to return him to his human form if he wishes to.⁷⁴ To his surprise, the pig reacts vehemently against the idea: it declares proudly that it refuses to live in the error of man’s ways. For the pig, man is deceived by his self-love, which is the root of his anthropocentrism. It is the beast that is superior, the pig goes on to argue.

Instinct, the pig states, teaches the beast what is good and bad for it. No study is necessary, no long hours of calculation. Beasts are also able to move about life without nostalgia and are able to ultimately adapt to different environments. Nature is immediate and provides the beast with what it needs. But man is forever moved by dishonest greed. The pursuit of wealth provides no respite to man. Man is weak, whereas beasts are by nature bold and courageous, yet without the need to claim glory for their valor as the Romans did. Amour propre is a deleterious human trait. ⁷⁵ The beastly soul, the pig states, is hence superior to that of man. Memory is something fleeting for a beast; deeds are forgotten almost as soon as they are performed. Further, the impulse to freedom is in the very essence of the animal. Rare is the beast that is not intractable in captivity, unless it has been domesticated and housebound. As far as sexual gratification is concerned, the pig mockingly declares, animals are more temperate than men, for they do not need it year-round. Men are guilty of the deadly sin of lust. In all, men are less happy, and more beastly, than beasts.

The protagonist thus learns that humans are thus all-too-human. The root of their weakness, ultimately, is ambition. Neither the gift of speech (i.e., reason) nor manual dexterity (i.e., labor) are able to overcome the failings of greed (99, 1 15). As de Grazia asserts, “ambition and greed cancel the goodness in hands and speech.”⁷⁶ Machiavelli hence does not find much to rescue from the ideas of man qua rational being or qua homo jaber. No other being, the pig instructs, is more fragile and confused with “terror and with rancor” (99, 1 24) than man. Thus, dread, weakness, and resentment ⁷⁷ permeate the existence of human beings. It is from these three characteristics of the essence of man that he is driven to destroy and murder others. In the pig’s eyes, such an existence is true misery, not the wallowing in the natural elements of earth and water that the pig experiences. Machiavelli concludes his diatribe against the harrowing side of man by having the pig declare that divinity is a lie. Apparently referring to Jesus, the pig states that no mortal that seems godly and content can elicit true faith, for true happiness is in being something other, and lower, than man.

By pushing the reader to see the world from a perspective opposite from that usually taken, new wisdom is gained. Machiavelli does this through the rhetorical use of irony: the use of words to convey the opposite meaning of what is expressed. The transvaluation of a dominant conception of life, of man as rational and endowed with the capacity for rational labor, leads to a new understanding of the virtues of living in accordance with one’s nature. By reversing the common way of looking at things, new insights are achieved. Irony serves as the device with which Machiavelli tells us to heed not literal meaning, not appearances, not empirical immediacy, but rather the real meaning behind things, which can be derived from our analysis of overturned concepts of nature, religion, and social life.

In this moment we can see the meaning of Machiavelli’s last Capitolo, “Chance.” In this short poem the Florentine essentially exhorts to action. An opportunity, or a chance to act, is the meaning of Machiavelli’s original title, dell’occasione. Through the reading of The Ass, the reader is meant to realize, at the end of the poem, that opportunities for political action are always present beneath the comforts of a contented life like that of the wise pig’s.⁷⁸ It is the choice to be made between a life of political action and one of primordial satiation. This is the chance or opportunity that Machiavelli shows us by pointing to what is natural for man.

Yet the opportunity to act according to our nature in a propitious time is fleeting. It is so because each moment has its own particular character, which is adequate for a precise sort of political actor and action. Hence Machiavelli compares Chance to a “young girl,” a sort of daughter of Fortune. She has grace and speed, she is disheveled so as to be unrecognizable, and she is difficult to catch. Her companion? Penance, because “who loses me,” Chance says, “gets her—and he is through” (128, 17-18). The opportunity to act in the manner of the political reformer and emancipator is ephemeral; if it is lost, one can only repent. Chance’s last words could also be seen as an admonition given by the wise pig. These words instruct a man to act after having learned from the pig’s wisdom that one must act according to one’s nature since the words of the pig are wise as a description of life, but life for a pig. The exhortation is this:

“You fool! who do not seem to understand
That, while you talk to me, you waste your time
In empty thoughts, and do not realize
“I am no longer within reach of hand.”

(129,11 1-4)

For Machiavelli, man cannot simply impose his will upon the world.⁷⁹ He does not urge this because he knows Fortune, the heavens, the humors, God, and other men will not always be situated in such a manner as to allow free, purposive action to be effectual. Yet Machiavelli does believe the effort can be made to perceive the opportunity that will allow one to act, with the requisite adaptability, to have an impact on political life. This is virtù.

Conclusion

Far from being a text with a clear, logical meaning, Machiavelli’s Ass is an example of aesthetic political reasoning: it is a work of art (a poem) that has significant insights into both the nature of political life and of the human condition. Through exegesis we can seek its message and find that it is a central text in Machiavelli’s oeuvre. By approaching the text with the view that it carries an important contribution to the analysis of the human condition and the justification for a political life, we see a different Machiavelli, one that is not a hardheaded realist or cynic, but rather one that is aware of the limits of human action and is eager to find an aesthetic justification for the political life, since moral reasons no longer satisfy.

While Apuleius’s Golden Ass is a text that has a profound philosophical merit, even if it is written in a picaresque, Milesian style, Machiavelli’s Ass is emblematic of his own philosophy of life. It is a text that is laden with representational imagery, focused on the form a man takes, and pregnant with emotional expressiveness. As such, it is an aesthetic endeavor that tells us about Machiavelli’s larger worldview, which is tragic, heroic, and agonistic. It is a narrative, poetic in form, of Machiavelli’s understanding of the relationship between human being and politics, and how it inevitably leads to deep despair and agony. It also shows us Machiavelli’s view of the world: one that is not generally amenable to human mastery and that presents man with endless, nearly insurmountable suffering and challenges. It is not a proto-scientific vision at all. Much like Apuleius can be seen as an original philosopher in his work,⁸⁰ Machiavelli emerges as a philosopher of the human condition in his own version of the tale.⁸¹

The poem both casts invective on the absurdity of human inhumanity and also attempts to describe dispassionately the fact that human capacities such as reason and labor are not enough to tame a more destructive aspect of man, greed. It presents a picture, discovered through a series of transvaluations, of the human self and of human history that is cyclical, driven by the antinomies inside man’s psyche: the antinomies of male-female, man-boy, man-divinity, and man-animal. None is dominant over the others. However, in the conclusion of the poem one is left asking how the protagonist will react to what the wise pig has told him. In this manner Machiavelli seems to be asking the reader a rhetorical question, so that he may respond to himself how man should act, after having read how Machiavelli portrays the human condition.⁸²

In this sense the poem is an exhortation to learn from the base tale just told. For Machiavelli, virtù is not simply the adaptation of a human being to changing circumstances in the context of grand political schemes. It is also the adaptation to changing circumstances in contexts of despair. The recognition that humans must lose their hubris through the immersion in concrete, sensuous life (with the occasional moment of laughter) helps sustain this virtù. As the symbol of the ass suggests, men must be willing to suffer much, stubbornly and with determination, in the course of political life. The reason is that this political life is nonetheless still worthier than a contented philistinism, for it is the nature of men to seek order through political action. This overturning of prevailing values is learned, Machiavelli tells, us through the ironic words of a voluble pig.

What is the lesson we gather from the pig’s wisdom? It is that a choice has to be made. A choice between contentment in the private sphere and the travails of public life. It is a choice that each man comes upon at one point or another. To live a tranquil life as the pig does; or to embark on the new seas of politics’ uncertainties. As much as Machiavelli admires the qualities of the former life, he opts for the latter in spite of the high costs because he believes that is the nature of man.

This nature lends a meaning that comes from the shaping of one’s world on a grand, beautiful scale. The choice to engage in such a difficult project is nothing less than heroic. As Isaiah Berlin tells us, Machiavelli believes that there is no mediating system of values between the realms of ethics and politics. “[S]etting ... them side by side, with the implicit motivation of men to choose either a good, virtuous, private life, or a good, successful social existence” Machiavelli tells we can have one, but “not both.”⁸³ Hence the choice between realms of existence is a tragic one, laden with finality. This tragedy is an added dimension to the agonism that is central to Machiavelli’s view of the human condition. The aesthetic appreciation that Machiavelli has for the heroic and the tragic essence of political power in The Ass is also present—in a different form—in his most infamous work, The Prince, as we shall see in the following chapter.

Notes

1

While Machiavelli was not a “philosopher” in the strict sense of the word proper to his times, his ideas do have philosophical import, as I shall seek to show in this work.

2

Machiavelli does not use the term “aesthetic,” yet we may use this word to stand for his artistic intentions.

3

1 use “aesthetic” to characterize the political theory of Machiavelli and Nietzsche as a way to describe their essential approach, even if they do not refer to their own work with this term.

4

Martha Nussbaum provides the most adequate explanation of the importance of literature to philosophy in “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” in Love’s Knowledge, p. 3-53, passim.

5

In works on political theory, parts of Machiavelli’s poetry are usually used only as emblematic of ideas drawn principally from his other, “political” works.

6

Among the canonical Western political philosophers, few tried their hand at explicitly literary endeavors such as poetry, dramas or comedies as Machiavelli did.

7

Here we focus on Machiavelli’s main poem rather than his plays because it has tended to be neglected in political theory and, as I seek to show, goes to the heart of his philosophy of life in a way that his plays Mandragola and Clizia do not.

8

This is a concept that has rich and diverse meanings, yet at this point we can recall that it stands for sensuous perception and/or artistic qualities (which may involve imitation, emotion, and form inter alia).

9

The Decennali, an important set of poems, is of interest primarily for historical purposes, whereas The Ass contains more philosophical themes.

10

Machiavelli’s work was originally entitled simply The Ass, but its similarity to Apuleius’s tale led some commentators to use the same title as the original. I will refer to it simply as The Ass to distinguish it from Apuleius’s work, which I refer to as The Golden Ass.

11

Apuleius was a Platonic thinker, hence Machiavelli’s version of the tale is an implicit riposte to Plato.

12

In his treatment of poetics, Machiavelli is not too far from Aristotle, who thinks the poet creates particular types and situations that, while imitating nature, are nonetheless akin to universals. That is, the poet describes what is possible as though it were both likely and necessary.

13

Tragedy is a branch of drama that treats in a serious style the sorrowful events encountered by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary works, such as the novel or the poem. Although the word tragedy is often used loosely to describe any sort misfortune, it more precisely refers to a work of art that probes with high seriousness questions concerning the role of man in the universe (see the recent work by Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence).

14

Viroli 2000, p. 180.

15

Lucian, or the Ass. Perhaps Machiavelli’s interest in the circular, non-teleological view of the universe is evident in his reworking of a Latin version of a Greek version of a mythical story of uncertain origin. It seems that indeed “men have been the same throughout time.”

16

A similar tale can be found in the story I mention at the beginning of this work. The “Myth of Er,” recounted by Plato at the end of Book X of the Republic, is where a man encounters a series of humans turned to animals after his death.

17

See Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, p. 122, 124 and Brown, Manhood and Politics, p. 74.

18

Even if we grant that Machiavelli wrote “all that he knew” about politics in The Prince, what he knew about the human condition may be more evident in what he wrote in this poem.

19

Pitkin, p. 8.

20

Pitkin is not content to see a “dominant” (Ibid., p. 123) woman in the poem; nothing less than a flat “equality” between man and woman would seem to please her. Brown also sees Machiavelli’s view of female power as purely “vengeful, surreptitious, and elusive” (Brown, p. 90).

21

Machiavelli does indeed use gender-specific language, sometimes to refer to men alone, sometimes to refer to humanity in general. His philosophy of the human condition is grounded on a male-centered view, yet this view is not necessarily misogynistic.

22

Here the terminology is of some importance. An ass is a wild, free animal. (A donkey is a domesticated jackass. A “mule” is a hybrid animal that is created out of the pairing of a mare and a jack. A “burro” is a small donkey often used as a pack animal owing to its being sure-footed.)

23

“la pena e la doglia ... canterò io” (in Capata, p. 831). For this chapter I use the translation by Joseph Tusiani, Of Lust and Liberty: The Poems of Machiavelli, p. 51ff and Alessandro Capata, Machiavelli: Tutte le opere, p. 831.

24

The prolonged period between tragedy’s heyday in Greek antiquity and its reemergence in Elizabethan England did not evince many great works of tragedy. Machiavelli’s Ass is one of the Renaissance works that seeks to raise the idea of the tragic to the surface of consciousness. With the Renaissance, the visual arts came to increasingly represent the afflictive aspects of life, and the word tragedy again came into currency, but more in England than in Italy. Chaucer (1340-1400) used the word in Troilus and Criseyde, and in The Canterbury Tales it is applied to a series of stories in the medieval style of de casibus virorum illustrium, meaning “the downfall” (more or less inevitable) “of princes.” Chaucer used the word to signify little more than the turn of the wheel of fortune, against whose force no meaningful effort of man is possible.

25

All page and line references to The Ass are from Tusiani, Lust and Liberty: The Poems of Machiavelli.

26

Imitation, Plato’s essential and denigrated definition of art, was a recognized and valued artform in the Renaissance.

27

The narration gives shape and form to his life, even if it was chaotic as a series of events.

28

The narrator wants to express his emotions to anyone within hearing (or reading) distance.

29

This is a reference to the theory of humors, which Parel ably demonstrates forms the context of Machiavelli’s naturalistic view of the cosmos and humans (See Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos, p. 101).

30

The tale is that of a hyperactive boy, a sort of child talked much of in contemporary times.

31

See, for instance, The Laws 684.

32

de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, p. 83.

33

Machiavelli may also be using a pun of the name of the Medici, which means “doctors.” Again he deprecates authoritarian politics.

34

It is far from “inescapable” that the tale of the boy refers only to Machiavelli’s own life (contra Pitkin, p. 125). Pitkin sees a hint of the notion of freedom when she links the boy’s running to the people’s street riots in Florence (Ibid., p. 1126).

35

Machiavelli may be deliberately establishing some uncertainty as to the identity of the boy and the narrator. It would appear, however, that they are one and the same because the youthful episode provides a possible background to the psychological motivations behind the grown man’s involvement in reform politics.

36

Pitkin is not correct in saying that Machiavelli does not personify nature. Nature is “personified” by the figures of the animal-men (vide Pitkin, p. 128).

37

This is an indirect opposition to Platonic theory.

38

The figure of the huntress Diana, a strong female character, shows how much Machiavelli appreciates the power of the female in human life, particularly as contrasted to the animalized form the male takes.

39

Pitkin, p. 21.

40

As we see in the next chapter.

41

Brown, p. 74.

42

According to de Grazia, the protagonist feels “like a blushing young bride” (de Grazia, p. 319).

43

To say that Machiavelli shows us, in The Ass, man’s “alienation” (Brown, p. 77) is to employ a notion more at home with other forms of modernism (Hegelian or Marxist) that does not easily fit with Machiavelli’s simple aim of entering man’s psyche and discovering its central tensions.

44

de Grazia states that Machiavelli is “poking fun at hell” (de Grazia, p. 318).

45

The poem appears to some commentators to be a parody of Dante’s Inferno, yet its interpretation of human being is original (See Tusiani, p. xxii). Parody is a low form of artistic creativity; it offers no true insight, unlike Machiavelli’s transformation of the tales of Apuleius and Dante for philosophical purposes.

46

See de Grazia, “Crossing to Another World: Machiavelli and Others,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 45 Issue 1, 145-151.

47

As Machiavelli affirms in Mandragola, “there are many good men down there,” thereby declaring that a man is good not if considered from a moral perspective, but rather from political or artistic viewpoints.

48

This recalls Homeric poetry (Plato’s target in Republic X), where Ulysses’s men are turned to hogs by Circe’s gaze.

49

“Questa propria virtù dal ciel gli e data.” (in Capata, p. 836).

50

The stereotypical, traditional trait of young women, however, is fickleness.

51

See D 1.30.

52

To say this is to place it at the highest echelon of Machiavelli’s view of the cosmos, which is comprised of the stars, god, Fortune, and man (See Parel, p. 7).

53

This is a foreshadowing of Camus’ use of the term.

54

The fluids that humans possess and determine their character, as was believed in premodem times.

55

See Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos.

56

The question of Machiavelli’s modernity is not central in this work. However, Strauss seems correct in presenting him as the first modern political theorist. In Machiavelli we can see both “modern” and “pre-modem” elements (see Nederman, p. 364). An antiquated cosmology is an example of the latter, while his naturalist opposition to Christianity is an example of the former. The fact that he employed “pre-modern” notions does not disprove his being the first modern political theorist as Parel believes. Machiavelli did not live in a vacuum or arrive with entirely new ideas ex nihilo, and hence we can see an “antiquated cosmology” (Parel) as well as Christian and humanist ideas in his work. His work is modern, certainly not because of scientific intentions (which are not there), but because Machiavelli undertakes a radical, humanist philosophical critique of Christianity, not ahead to science like Bacon for instance.

57

For instance, Parel states, the principality’s humors are out of balance; the republic is in good equilibrium; and the case of Florence in the Florentine Histories is one of dire instability of humors.

58

“What is beyond” human capacities.

59

de Grazia, p. 65.

60

The term anima is not a central preoccupation of Machiavelli.

61

As Walter Kaufmann defines it, an existential attitude is one that is a ‘“timeless sensibility” to the difficulties of human life in a world considered largely hostile or indif ferent (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 12).

62

Viroli 1998, p. 16.

63

Mansfield’s assertion that Machiavelli possesses a conception of how to overcome cycles in favor of a progressive view of history does not address the problem of Fortune as “permanent revolution” and is therefore inefficacious (See Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, pp. 119-122).

64

This idea has an affinity with Nietzsche’s notions of eternal return and amor fati.

65

The wheel of Fortune turns/I go down to humiliation/And beyond all reason and measure/Another is extolled.

66

Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Providence.”

67

Similarly to The Prince chapter XXV, where Fortune is compared to a river.

68

This archaic, outmoded, and quasi-sexist understanding is nonetheless the way Machiavelli sees gender relations.

69

See Harvey, Michael, “Lost in the Wilderness: Love and Longing in L’Asino” in The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli.

70

See Viroli 1998, pp. 73-113.

71

It must be pointed out that Machiavelli does not suffer from heterosexism. Besides evidence to the effect that Machiavelli finds homosexuality natural (see Viroli 2000, p. 163-164), his poem “The Snake Charmers” points out that it is in the nature of male sexuality to be satisfied by male sexual objects (16, 115-8).

72

It is an “exaltation of women” as de Grazia puts it (de Grazia, p. 133).

73

It is not clear from the text who the pig (or the other animals) had been in human form.

74

It is not clear why the protagonist has this power.

75

Ibid., p. 131.

76

Ibid., p. 75.

77

Ressentiment, Nietzsche would call it.

78

The “moral” of this story recalls (in the history of political thought) John Stuart Mill’s declaration, in Chapter Two of Utilitarianism, that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The choice for Mill is one of rationality over the unexamined life, whereas for Machiavelli it is a choice between political and non-political life.

79

For Najemy, as well as for Pitkin, Machiavelli is the first to urge as possible the imposition of man’s will on nature and the world of politics. This is only partly true, for Machiavelli saw man as severely limited by natural, physical, and psychological forces (as well as political, social, and historical ones) which might be attributed in part to the skepticism transmitted through the letters of his friend Vettori (See Najemy, Ch. 5 passim ).

80

See “Introduction,” The Golden Ass, by P.G. Walsh. p. xv, xxiii.

81

Although Machiavelli did not write conventional philosophical works, as Pitkin points out, I disagree with her statement that Machiavelli “is not a philosopher” (Pitkin, p. 288), since his ideas do have important contributions to understanding the human condition and ethics.

82

The question is doubly rhetorical because the poem is unfinished, it has no telos.

83

Berlin, p. 71.

Chapter 2

Tragic Machiavelli: The Agon of the Heroic Prince

Introduction

Of the many vivid images we find in Machiavelli’s best-known work, The Prince, one of the most lingering ones is that drawn in the passage where Re-mirro de Orco’s death is described.¹ Through it, Machiavelli describes how Cesare Borgia, Duke Valentino, disposed of his feared lieutenant and then displayed his body, torn into two bloody pieces, on a piazza. As he declares, this sight left the denizens of Cesena “at once satisfied and stupefied” (The Prince, VII 29-30).

This spectacle, Machiavelli believes, is worthy of imitation. The reason is that it is emblematic of the sort of gruesome, theatrical performance that Machiavelli believes is necessary of a man who may rightly be called a prince.² It is also, I believe, representative of the type of man Machiavelli believes is necessary if politics is to have real autonomy from other spheres of life.³ More specifically, the depiction represents a complete transcendence of conventional morality because it lauds the brutal killing of one man by another.⁴ In this, it shows how politics is not to be restrained by any other sphere of life: it is a matter of radical measures, not of middle courses.⁵ The act is one whose performance is not aimless even if it is arbitrary and terrifying. It serves a larger political purpose whose effect is felt throughout a social community. In fact, a sort of collective moral result occurs.⁶ It is carried out, in a sense, in the name of a larger social group. The act can be characterized as tragic because it implies that political life as such cannot avoid immorality.⁷ The act has a beneficence that makes it stand for Machiavelli’s novel conception of a paragon of human being: his peculiar understanding of the political hero. ⁸

Can we find Machiavelli’s philosophy of life in his most infamous text?⁹ Although his poetry is the most promising starting point for such an inquiry because it shows us Machiavelli at his most inward and looking straight into the psyche of man, The Prince is where Machiavelli thinks about how an exemplary man orders his state. This statement has a double meaning, for not only does it refer to how a prince should rule his political state, but also how a best or first man (the principe)¹⁰ views his state from a humanistic perspective. In other words how a “great,” or outstanding, man must understand his human state, understood this time as “condition.” This tells us that The Prince, ostensibly written about principalities, is also a representation of the ethic of the great man in terms of the human condition.¹¹Contrasted to the anti-hero of The Ass, the heroic image created in The Prince is intended to be a (theoretical) model for success.

The Prince is rife with ideas and images that help us get to that ethic. The book is no mere manual for political leaders, rulers, or Mafiosi. It is an analysis of the moral psychology necessary of a great man or strong leader.¹² It is the imaginary portrayal of the psychology of the quintessentially political man, who, in Machiavelli’s estimation, is a hero because he possesses the courage and daring that is required in the tasks that benefit a larger whole.¹³ He is capable of undergoing an internal moral revolution. Indeed, for Machiavelli, he is the most admirable man by human standards. Having witnessed the violence characteristic of social and political life in Florence, even from his times of youth, Machiavelli admires those who can achieve unity among persons who see each other fundamentally as antagonists. ¹⁴ But this achievement requires a transcendence of conventional moral norms, and this Machiavelli describes in his magnum opus through the “mythologized” figure of Duke Valentino.

For Machiavelli, politics is an art. In his world, no figure exemplifies the virtuosity of being a political artist as much as Borgia. Partly in admiration and partly in puzzlement, Machiavelli constructed a mythical view of Duke Valentino in his most famous work, The Prince. In it, he shows us the way he sees what the great leader should be like and how he imagined the Duke to be. In Machiavelli’s amoral and immoral political world,¹⁵ the effective use of consequences, appearances, representations, emotions, and forms is what makes for a “good” (i.e. effective) political leader. In a word, it is where aesthetic ability is applied to the realm of political power. In The Prince Machiavelli goes to the core of political power and shows us an image of the great leader (largely founded on Borgia) possessing a heroic, agonistic, and tragic character.¹⁶ This is a paradoxical attempt by Machiavelli, for he prides himself on being a realist, yet in delineating his ideal hero, he carries out an imaginary drawing of the character of the ideal political hero as he images Borgia to be. He does not use a realistic lens, but rather a creative one.

The Nature of The Prince

The Prince was written by Machiavelli to show his political wisdom to both noble and popular men. It is a short piece that happens to be dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici yet is simultaneously a public work containing what would normally be held secretly: the ways of political power. In this, Machiavelli is shown to be anything but “Machiavellian” in the vulgar sense, for he exposes (instead of hiding) how men of politics think. In this light, it is a book about a type of human being. It is a text that describes the form of self-education that a truly political man must undertake if he takes politics seriously. And, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, this education is of a nature best described as aesthetic.

Machiavelli’s chief work is a book that, if read as a tacit response to the writings of Cicero,¹⁷ describes the sort of self that a political man must shape for himself. Unlike Cicero’s quasi-Stoic view where reason and morality can and should order the world, Machiavelli’s project of education is carried out in a world characterized by perpetual conflict, hostility, and indifference to human aims. This produces an existential ethos that understands life as consisting primarily of physical existence and only subsequently of essence, or human character. ¹⁸ It entails a pathos that maintains that the individual is the locus of experience and is metaphorically without a home. Such a man is “thrown upon the world” without any reassurance of ultimate success. He remains in perpetual defiance, something that translates into an agonism vis-a-vis others and the world. And this generates a constant condition of pain that characterizes life. In the background, God’s absence is felt. This is because such a view posits the inexistence or irrelevance of God in some central spheres of individual life, especially that of free choice.¹⁹ This view leads to a sense of incoherence in life’s experience. This is the character of Machiavelli’s contribution to the Renaissance’s radical focus on the individual. ²⁰

This contribution by the Florentine Secretary has to do with existence and its tragic difficulties; it is thus an existential worldview. His understanding of the travails of the individual is located in a fundamentally atheistic context where human interaction is characterized by conflict and human experience is largely shaped by pain. While he is generally a collectivist historical thinker (he tends to see things in terms of groups rather than individuals), in The Prince he displays a fine acumen in penetrating the inner life of the individual man of politics. Thus he is a thinker who understands the complicated problematique of the relationship of the individual to the collectivity.²¹

As in The Ass, for him the art of politics is the practice that is the path that may (a word that needs to be underscored) provide humans with a sense of real achievement and permanence that is lacking in existence.²² Political practice is the act of fashioning for oneself, as well as for others, an order that allow for meaning in a meaningless and hostile world. This is the aesthetic aspect of Machiavelli’s teaching. Machiavelli describes in his chief work his idea of a hero, the rare man who is largely successful in answering the existential and aesthetic challenges of life and politics.

Machiavelli’s assay of politics is empirical and realistic, yet this does not amount to a scientific method. “Machiavelli adumbrates the modern scientific understanding of nature that, with Bacon, abandons natural beings and begins the search for natural laws, but he does no more than adumbrate.”²³ The foreshadowing is vague, for Machiavelli merely provides general guidelines based on own his philosophy of life. Strauss’s statement that The Prince is a “scientific book because it conveys a general teaching that is based on reasoning from experience and that sets forth that reasoning”²⁴ seems too strong a claim about the text’s status as an scientific treatise. Aesthetic analysis, for instance, is based on empirical experience but cannot be necessarily termed “scientific” for this reason.

Strauss is correct, however, to point out that The Prince is Machiavelli’s radical, or “revolutionary teaching.”²⁵ This is because it is a piece of rhetorical art that is intended to persuade the reader that what is contained in its pages is the most apposite moral wisdom for a man intent on entering the dark portals of politics.²⁶ By examining politics through an existential philosophy of life, Machiavelli goes to the core of politics. This is my recasting of what Strauss is telling us when he declares that beneath the text’s “traditional exterior” there is a “revolutionary center.”²⁷ By doing so, Machiavelli shows the way politics is to be properly understood. He thereby rejects other alternatives and makes us think critically of views on politics that are founded on different views of the human condition.²⁸ Against Strauss, The Prince is not an objective work of political science that seeks to classify the category “Principality” and its attendant elements. This, in spite of Machiavelli’s own original title, De Principatibus. It is in effect a text for the political and existential education of a man who entertains the idea of politics seriously.²⁹ And, as Strauss tells us, this education involves the ways of political “evil.”³⁰

The work is for a single man, not a group of men, who will carefully read and ruminate on the analyses found therein. Just as prayer is fundamentally one man’s direct relationship with the One above him, in isolation from all others, The Prince is a book that contains a philosophy of life that is to be read in deep meditation by one man who takes politics seriously and wants to learn its key precepts. It is to be read in mental isolation because it describes a new, if quite harsh, morality (or, more precisely, anti-morality) that, in Machiavelli’s opinion, is required of the political man and that must be carefully thought about and evaluated. If such a man reads the text seriously and willfully, this new morality will shape him into becoming a person who is willing to accept the cruel tenets of politics. At many points in the text its violation of conventional morality is so powerful that most readers are bound to turn away in moral opprobrium. Nonetheless, for the few who do not turn away, its existential and aesthetic philosophy of the political life will appear neatly (yet harshly) drawn on its pages. For them the book’s new morality is intended. In a sense, the book is for a man like the protagonist of The Ass: but as something to read before engaging in politics.

As we saw in Chapter 1, Machiavelli’s poetry displays a view of the human condition that is best characterized as existential because it shows man’s agony in a hostile world where resistance to his imprint is all around. In this chapter we will examine Machiavelli’s political works to see that this existential philosophy of life is also present in works outside his poetry. His Weltanschauung is also aesthetic in The Prince because it seeks to replace ethical systems of value premised on norms of moral good and evil with an attitude to life that is con cerned with form-giving to oneself and to others (and to states) with a view to effects achieved through representation and the use of emotions.³¹

Is the view of life presented in The Prince only for princes? If this were true, we could no longer speak of Machiavelli’s philosophy of life or view of the human condition, for we would be confronted with a view reserved for the few men who are willing to engage in the cold world of politics. However, in Machiavelli’s thought, politics, seen as the conflict among individuals and groups, is a fundamental and universal part of life.³² All humans, in their relations with each other, are in a perpetual act of exercising power in order to achieve their own particular purposes. For Machiavelli, “all human relationships are political.” ³³ This fact may or may not devolve into violence but is essentially characterized by unequal status, preferences, and power. Hence even in quotidian life agonistic interaction is the norm. This is the meaning of Machiavelli’s idea of the inherent wickedness, or tristizia,³⁴ of men. This idea makes the political omnipresent. It leads Machiavelli to posit the life of the successful political man as the highest form of human achievement because he is able to bring order in a world of discord and chaos.³⁵ Thus what makes the best prince or political man is also something that is of benefit for the human species as a whole. Machiavelli’s hero suffers and toils in the name of others. This is the foundation of the universality of Machiavelli’s Prince.

The cardinal tenets of Machiavelli’s understanding of the hero’s agonistic experience as found in The Prince can be reduced to three principles: the notions of independence, acquisition, and appearance. If these three principles, which are constitutive of the domains in which Machiavelli’s idea of virtù is exercised, are heeded, the prince can then direct his power to the generation of autonomy, or the making of one’s own laws.³⁶ These three concepts seek to respond to the crisis of value and action that exists in a world rife with agonistic social rela tions. That is, in a world characterized by agonism such as ours, value and actions tend to be impermanent and ineffective. In expounding these notions, Machiavelli promulgates his teaching on the project of the political hero’s self-education.

The Princely Hero

The Prince is a book that tells of a new sort of hero.³⁷ It is Machiavelli’s own radically innovative understanding of the idea. It extirpates the notion from conventional definitions that he inherits from the past, both in classical and biblical definitions. Most readers will see it rather as a type of anti-hero, for evil is easily associated with the actions described in the work. Yet, in fact, what makes this work “anti-heroic” is that it contains the notion that ultimate decline and failure are attendant in almost all political endeavors. Unlike the conventional hero, ultimate success is actually a rare feat.

For Machiavelli, Fortuna is the rhetorical name he gives to historical contingency. It is changeful and incomprehensible (hence the stereotypical meta phor of woman) and a strong force to reckon with in the nature of the world (hence the metaphor of a river). It tends to overshadow other phenomena and this entails the likelihood that events may turn out to be unfavorable in spite of one’s best efforts. This is the foundation of Machiavelli’s rejection or willful neglect of the idea of justice in political theory, for he believes it is the nature of the world and of life that what one may truly deserve may not (and most generally will not) come about, often simply because unfortunate events and contingencies may preclude it. The notion of “just deserts” is fine for imaginary politics, but not for Machiavelli’s political world where Fortune disregards it. If Fortune is so overpowering, men tend to be largely ineffectual. However, once in a while a man of superior strength will appear that can show how far human power can discharge itself on the world.³⁸ One such man, in Machiavelli’s estimation, was Cesare Borgia. Duke Valentino is the figure most applauded in The Prince. One cannot understand the Prince if one does not understand the man behind the title duke of Valentinois. Machiavelli states “I shall never hesitate to cite Cesare Borgia and his actions” (P XIII 55).³⁹

Why is this ruthless Spanish politico Machiavelli’s hero? Principally because of the implications of his actions on the moral dimension. It is not because of the actual power that he had, since although Borgia was ruthlessly pragmatic, he failed to successfully establish a durable state after the pacification of the Romagna. In addition, his father, Pope Alexander VI, aided him to power. Moreover, it is not because of who he was in the context of Italian politics of the time. If one wants to reduce Machiavelli’s originality to an anti-Papist, Italian, or Florentine patriotic republicanism, what can he or she do with the admiration Machiavelli had for the historical figure of Borgia? Borgia was no Italian republican patriot. If one believes Machiavelli’s originality is merely in the revival of classical humanism and patriotic republicanism, the question of Machiavelli’s profound, almost unmatched admiration for Cesare is baffling.

The historical facts are telling. Cesare was of the Borja family, originally from Valencia, Spain. Cesare’s family and cultural background was almost entirely Spanish.⁴⁰ The family was deeply involved in Christian life. Cesare himself was a man of the cloth until he saw it politically convenient to abandon his calling. His father was Rodrigo Borja, the future Pope Alexander VI. Moreover, another great enemy of Italian unification, the French, aided him in his entry to Italian politics. Louis XII, the French king, bestowed on him the title of “duc de Valentinois,” from which he derived his nickname il Valentino.

Machiavelli’s admiration for Cesare in The Prince is thus not strictly political. It is moral, or to be more precise, anti-moral. Borgia lived a life above and beyond the grasp of conventional morality in an almost entirely consistent manner. From the style used by Machiavelli in his “On the Method Used by Duke Valentino in Killing Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and Others,” we can infer that this is a correct estimation: Machiavelli describes, matter-of factly and without moralism, the careful elimination of enemies by the “skillful dissembler.”⁴¹ Machiavelli sees that Borgia understood the power of fear, which is the presentment of pain. He understood well the power of human suffering. He used this knowledge, and it is for this reason that he achieved rapid, yet short-lived political success.⁴² This is what makes The Prince an important text of moral psychology and character, not merely a political manifesto.⁴³

This claim can be made if we look at the facts of Machiavelli’s meeting with Cesare Borgia in 1502.⁴⁴ Machiavelli was thirty-three when he met the younger Borgia, who was then a mere twenty-seven. What struck Machiavelli most about the Duke was his personality. This personality was characterized by four qualities that Machiavelli found appealing. In the first place, Borgia was quick: he acted rapidly and did not demur. Secondly, he was an excellent military captain. He also excelled at secrecy and conspiracies. But the fourth and final quality, which allowed him to truly succeed, was his capacity to not be tied down by Christian morality or ethics. This crucial trait is what enabled him to carry out some of the most horrific acts of his time. Yet, for Machiavelli this sort of man was precisely what a republic like Florence lacked: the city lacked a resolute leader, it lacked a military, failed miserably in conspiracies, and was deeply rooted in the Christian tradition of ethics in politics.

The image painted by the encounter of the Secretary and the Duke is one of a great thinker having difficulty grasping the complex personality of the captain. The psyche of the Duke seems to be close to paranoid—but with reason. Clearly he felt assailed by other political powers, and indeed he was. But his elimination of the anarchy in Romagna was carried out not just by radical means, but even by a possible fratricide, with the killing of his own brother, the duke of Gandía.

Borgia’s life was one of wholehearted acceptance and practice of the amoral and immoral acts of political life. For the purpose of achieving political power, he was willing to do anything necessary. Aut Caesar, aut nihil (“Either Caesar or Nothing”) was the motto he adopted to assert the single-mindedness of his aim. This is especially salient in contradistinction to the prevalent Catholic Christian view of life that was the norm in sixteenth-century Italy (if not necessarily in practice). Contrary to the Christian idea that terrestrial power should be employed for the glory of the celestial, Borgia understood that politics is a realm onto itself. It involves practices amoral (such as the crafting of institutions) and those immoral (such as the killing of others). Borgia’s example is laudable, in Machiavelli’s eyes, because it is representative of a life-attitude that disregarded others’ norms and held fast to its own.

For Machiavelli Borgia was a man of great virtù, in spite of the fact that he rose to power through others’ fortune, especially that of his father. Can we use the term hero for this sanguinary figure? A hero is someone who undergoes a variety of difficult experiences that test his mettle and resolve in order to achieve something of benefit to many. That is, a man of courage, daring, and strength. For Machiavelli, Borgia’s political values were not ideal, for he was not a republican. Indeed, he was to say, “I don’t in the least like this republican government of yours” to Machiavelli regarding Florence.⁴⁵ Yet what made him heroic nonetheless was his virtù coupled with a political aim: the willingness and desire to go through obstacles and travails in order to shape himself as above common morality and to thereby pursue political goals, the unification and control of the Romagna, on his own terms.⁴⁶

The reason Machiavelli uses the term “new” to characterize the prince that he writes about is that not only is he a recently-emerged contender for power, but he also employs methods whose immoralism (including that of appearing moral) exemplifies the autonomy of politics from ethics, insubordinate to anything else. Unrestrained violence at the right moment is a radical, new paradigm for effectiveness in political life. Borgia’s was an example for others to witness, for political success went hand in hand with acts normally held to be immoral. What brought benefit to many in Borgia’s actions was the idea of independent action unfettered by a Christian morality Machiavelli held to be debilitating.⁴⁷ The hardships, tests, and new humanist “immoralism” in politics is what made a new sort of hero of Borgia in Machiavelli’s eyes.

Machiavelli seemed to have in mind something like the Homeric hero when he described the man he met at Urbino. The report sent by Machiavelli and Francesco Soderini is palpably laudatory. The words used are striking:

This lord is most splendid and magnificent and is so vigorous in military matters that there is no undertaking so great that does not seem a minor thing to him, and he never ceases from seeking glory or enlarging his state, and he fears no effort or danger . . . his soldiers love him⁴⁸

If one adds to this the fact that Machiavelli and Soderini considered Borgia “perpetually lucky” (Ibid.) we see that Borgia is indeed a heroic figure for Machiavelli. Fortunato is the term for “lucky,” and this means loved by Fortune. If Fortune is a woman, Borgia is one of her most admired—and feared—lovers. Previous princes may have acted similarly, yet they did either under the motivation or unrecognized guise of otherworldly moral doctrines. What Machiavelli seems to be claiming is that “old” princes, as opposed to those “new,” act under a sort of “false consciousness” that requires them to justify political actions in moral terms. The “new” prince disabuses himself of this false consciousness and heeds the precepts of politics alone.⁴⁹ As a result, for him the term “evil” loses moral weight and simply denotes that which is considered a new harm by those who are fearful of an act’s moral consequences.

In The Prince no figure is admired as much as Duke Valentino. Borgia’s example is “the highest” (P VII 27). It is ironic that Machiavelli, often characterized primarily as a republican patriot, ⁵⁰ praises a foreign hater of republics (who, in addition, was the son of a pope) above all other political men.⁵¹ This is because of his capacity to live and act without the illusions of morality. Nonetheless, the Spaniard achieved his success not entirely through his own virtù, which was considerable, but rather also “with others’ arms and virtue” (P VII 25). In this, Borgia was shown to be partly deficient. His virtù, or ability to anticipate obstacles and to respond to them with flexibility, was not crucial, according to Machiavelli, in his coming to power. He may be Machiavelli’s favored political actor because of the virtù displayed in his moral courage to defy conventional ethical practices consistently.⁵² Yet he lacked what Machiavelli also considered important: the use of one’s own virtù and own arms in coming to power. This is one defect that makes Borgia less than perfect; he is not fully the paragon of political life.

In spite of this flaw, Machiavelli makes Borgia out to be the highest moral, or rather anti-moral example. Yet it is for this same reason, the capacity to obviate conventional ethics, that Agathocles the Sicilian is also praised (P VIII 34). Agathocles was successful in achieving power essentially through a life of crime, which is the systematic and willful transgressing of norms and laws. Machiavelli praises his violence, calling it virtuous and “spirited” (P VIII 35). Agathocles’s ability or virtù is thus similar to Borgia’s but is in a more raw form, for it is the direct breaking of established laws.⁵³ While Machiavelli is awed by Agathocles’s cruel savagery and calls it virtù, he ultimately claims that it was really not virtù as such: “one cannot attribute to fortune or to virtue what he achieved without either” (Ibid.). Agathocles came to power through disregard for previous authorities, through what Machiavelli calls “crime.”⁵⁴ Borgia relied on others’ arms and virtù and on his father’s fortune. In both cases, their virtue lay in the their great capacity to understand the causing of pain and its consequences as such, as well as its political uses. It is for this reason that Machiavelli believes a thorough knowledge of pain can allow one to master the art of “cruelties well-used” (P VIII 37).⁵⁵ However Machiavelli chooses to ignore the fact that Agathocles did not rely on Fortune and therefore was more virtuous than Borgia, and decides to fabricate a mythical figure of il Valentino. Machiavelli is not clear on why he places Borgia above Agathocles who would seem more deserving of praise from him owing to his virtù. Machiavelli prefers to make Borgia the larger-than life model.

Using a cruel method well—as Borgia did—is one of the most perverse notions in Machiavelli’s thought. However, it is of utmost significance in delineating the character of the princely hero.⁵⁶ This is because it entails a knowledge or wisdom regarding pain and injury that goes to the heart of both the human condition and to that of politics. For Machiavelli the knowledge of cruelty, on in other words the expertise in the suffering of humans, is what allows a prince to become effective and consequently to achieve his political aims. Machiavelli understands that deep in human consciousness, suffering and pain are central factors. Death, the most extreme negation of one’s being and which causes great psychic suffering, is a concern of Machiavelli’s: “Machiavelli speaks of death as a dreadful event.”⁵⁷

Machiavelli does not write about happiness, satisfaction, or providing pleasure to citizens as processes in themselves; he always contrasts them to the causing of pain. “Injuries must be done all together, so that, being tasted less, they offend less, and benefits should be done little by little so that they may be taster better,” he declares (P VIII 38). He pays attention to pain because, he implies, it is the core of human existence. It is the guiding criterion for belief and action. Knowledge of this is what makes the prince superior to other humans. And his ability to utilize it for political purposes is what makes him wise. If the knowledge is put to good, effective use (in creating stable order) then the prince is heroic.

The other path to power Machiavelli describes, which neither Borgia nor Agathocles followed, is that of using fully one’s own virtù. He does, however, provide examples of heroes who relied on their own virtù and own arms. These are the “founders” that he names in Chapter VI: Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus (P VI 21). These are men whose acts of bravery and immorality allowed the founding of states. Machiavelli, however much he praises them, is not as effusive about them as he is about Borgia because Machiavelli primarily sees them as founders, not life-long political men. They are heroes, but they lack the strikingly consistent ruthlessness of Borgia.⁵⁸ Just as Borgia is (ironically) exemplary in the moral plane, through his contravening of conventional morality,⁵⁹ so the founders are of import owing to their roles in the beginning of the undermining of common codes of morality in order to establish new social norms. They are important not only for their founding the states of the Israelites, the Persians, the Romans, and the Athenians. They are emblematic of the valuation of the political community above and beyond moral precepts.⁶⁰ It is for this reason that Moses killed “countless men,” and Romulus let his brother Remus die. The choice made by these men favored the political community over the principles of morality, religion, or even their own conscience. They managed to teach themselves to act immorally even unconsciously. In this free choice, Machiavelli shows how man can be arbiter of half his world, the other half being the domain of Fortune (P XXV 98). Fortune can be of great help too, as she placed the Israelites in captivity, the Persians under the Medes, and the Athenians dispersed. It is up to the virtuous man to recognize such opportunities.⁶¹

Order, peace, and unity are the achievements Machiavelli finds praiseworthy in a man’s political actions.⁶² Borgia showed he was able to bring these, for he eliminated many tyrants in order to make of himself the only ruler and thereby bring unity to the Romagna.⁶³ If a leader is able to build an edifice that has the three elements, he is considered a hero. They are difficult achievements, to be sure. This is what makes Machiavelli consider such princes heroic, even if he does not use the term. Since for Machiavelli there is no spiritual heaven or hell (except as objects of derision)⁶⁴ moral conduct is of no other import except insofar as it generates these three elements. And these elements are the product of an aesthetic predisposition: “the State can only be founded upon a specific personage . . . for it has to be conditioned first and foremost by the virtue of an individual, and the inert material awaits the imprint of an excessive excellence.” ⁶⁵ The Machiavellian hero is the man who realizes that heaven is no consideration and who devotes his life to the pursuit of these three political aims. They are not self-serving; they are for the common good. In the case of the principality they are the most salient political fact, whereas for the republic they are merely the foundation on which the rule of law and a mixed regime are established.

Like all of Machiavelli’s heroes, Borgia’s life ended in a political collapse, in “ultimate ruin” (P VII 33). Such is the tragic finality that marks the demise of Machiavelli’s heroic figures, even that of Borgia, a man he considered “most splendid and magnificent and ... vigorous.”⁶⁶ This ultimate decline is not something unnatural. Most political men are bound to find themselves eventually face to face with it. Yet politics is a matter of resisting its advent.

For Machiavelli, a figure that can be posed against Borgia’s individual heroism is that of Fra Girolamo Savonarola. In spite of good intentions and moral rectitude, or rather because of them, the Dominican friar was not a man of politics properly understood. Certainly he opposed tyranny, yet being torn on one hand by his love of Florence and on the other by his love of God, he was not successful in shaping himself as a leader. A great orator, that he was, but he could not carry through particular stances, such as his unwillingness to defend the five eminent citizens accused of conspiracy against the Republic in 1497. This made him appear ambitious and not impartial. If there is a figure that can be contrasted to Borgia, it is Savonarola. He knew some of the ways of politics, such as rhetoric, yet he failed to grasp others, such as a complete involvement in the transcendence of moral precepts. His gaze was directed too much towards heaven.

Like we saw in The Ass, ruin cannot be ultimately avoided, then. If this is the case, the only consolation is to be able to avoid it for as long as possible. How can this ultimate ruin be kept at bay? For Machiavelli, independence, acquisition, and appearances are the methods through which the prince can exercise his virtù. And, this exercise expands or protects his dominion of freedom, which is the sphere of his security. These three factors of human life are present in individual existence and are replicated in a larger scale, that of history. Machiavelli’s genius thus lies in his ability to grasp this important connection between existential and historical phenomena.

While The Prince does not deal directly with Machiavelli’s preferred form of government, the republic (as he states in the first chapter), it does, however, deal with his preferred political attitude for the individual engaged in any type of politics. And Borgia is he who comes closest to it. His spirit of transgression is prototypical of the idea of vitalism that is central to Machiavelli’s new notion of virtù. For Machiavelli virtù is the human capacity comprised of three qualities: 1) the ability to foresee events, 2) to be flexible, and 3) to be able to take on a transgressive attitude. This character is expressed in the world in three realms or domains: 1) independence, 2) acquisition, and 3) appearances.

To Have “One’s Own Arms:” The Value of Independence

Acquisition, as we shall see, is the central practice that Machiavelli sees in the political domain.⁶⁷ However, it is crucially related to another key notion, which is the idea of independence. In order to acquire things successfully, one must initially have independence from others. If acquisition is successful, one’s degree of freedom is expanded, for then one can set to institutionalize freedom through the creation of one’s own laws. This is the ultimate of Machiavelli’s political aims, autonomy as the formation of one’s laws.

The independence that is needed to embark on projects of acquisition rests on the idea that one must have own resources, primarily arms. It is through this prerequisite that a prince may begin to engage in the expansion of the space in which a man feels secure enough to undertake his own, self-determined, activities. This long process of emancipation, however, is very difficult to achieve. Acquisition is logically subsequent to the idea of having one’s own arms.⁶⁸ It is for this reason that Machiavelli begins The Prince by explaining how acquisition can take place once a prince has his own arms (P I 5).

With proper arms, acquisition can occur, which may eventually lead to autonomy understood as the making of one’s laws. This is a lesson Machiavelli learned as Secretary of the Second Chancery. In Florence’s attempt to recapture Pisa, French troops were used. They only showed to be rapacious and unconcerned with Florence. Moreover, Machiavelli’s attempt to call attention to the need to raise funds for an army initially was not effective. One probable reason why Florentine aristocrats did not easily heed Machiavelli’s call for a militia is that they emulated the Venetian republic: by relying on commercial and financial enterprises, these republics were in a sense dependent on other states owing to their economic ties. Thus their not favoring reliance on their own arms was in part due to their excessive concentration on banking and trade.

From such a lesson, “[t]he principal foundations that states have,” Machiavelli writes, “are good laws and good arms” (P XII 48). This is one manner, besides his reinterpretation of acquisition, that Machiavelli posits a radically new vision in which the economic sphere, in this case the commercial and financial sectors, is not given priority. The base on which he believes a state is to be built is not economic success, but rather a political bulwark. Yet this foundation requires first and foremost arms, so that eventually laws can be established over a secure domain.

The example of Moses is crucial in making one of Machiavelli’s cardinal points regarding the foundational relationship of heroism and freedom. He is a man who emancipated the people of Israel from the bondage of the Egyptians, and Machiavelli praises his virtù. Moses succeeded through his own virtù. Machiavelli goes so far as to say that Moses’ success in maintaining the people’s fidelity to the constitution was owed to his being armed (P VI 24). In Machiavelli’s eyes, however, Moses in not merely the bringer of mosaic law and an envoy of God (even though at points he seems to say so): his importance really lies in his being a prophet (a messenger of God) who recognized the importance of physical weapons in order to maintain order. At the start of the emancipation and after it, Moses was a founder on his own: an independent, armed, and wary leader. He was not, according to Machiavelli, merely the spiritual voice of God.

Machiavelli wants to underscore the importance of being “uno solo,” one man alone. This is especially necessary at the founding of a state, as in the case of Moses, yet it is also fundamental throughout the life of the political leader. ⁶⁹ If one has no arms, he is bound to fail, as did the King of Naples and the Duke of Milan (P XXIV 96). The many are best to rule once the regime has been founded, yet the need for a strong hero may always arise. The leader must of necessity trust no one and have his own arms.⁷⁰ Borgia again is the best example, a man who “was alone”⁷¹ and trusted no one. Yet Machiavelli’s point is that, especially in political life (but in general as well), men are wicked⁷² and are not to be trusted fully. One’s demise may be found in another person’s presence. Hence Machiavelli’s “pessimistic” view of human nature.

This view, which posits the inherent wickedness of men, possesses at its core the seed of distrust that further makes Machiavelli’s view of the human condition existential, for others can be one’s damnation. And in such a world, one’s best (and possibly only) friend is oneself. It is for this reason that The Prince calls for the self-education and self-protection of the individual without the idea that one may gain real security from others. This view is existential because it posits intersubjective hostility as a feature of human life and the consequence is a sense of insecurity in the individual. In this perspective, arms or weapons of different sorts are necessary to make others bend to one’s wishes. In a misnomer that Machiavelli employs with irony, arms help to “persuade” (P VI 24) others to follow what one wants. Arms are a force that enables independence by preventing the encroachment of others on one’s domain. It is a force that also has a psychological aspect, for through its engendering of fear it makes “unbelievers believe” (Ibid.) in one’s power.

This does not mean that Machiavelli does not see the benefits of cooperation or of a community. His republican thought evinces them. However, in The Prince Machiavelli is concerned with explicating the internal life of the individual engaged in political life. At its center, this internal life is not pleasant to behold. It is a man’s consciousness that is gripped by mistrust and feels encroached by the expansion of others’ dominion. This political psychology found in The Prince is how Machiavelli thinks political man must of necessity be if politics is to be autonomous and political action to succeed. It has great costs, such as the tension and near paranoia⁷³ that accompany the man of politics, as we saw in Chapter 1. The prince suffers from such insecurity to a large extent in the name of others, for it is through his decisions and choices that the “little borders” of a republic or principality are safe or endangered.⁷⁴

The political mind of Machiavelli’s hero thus also reflects the political community of which he is a part (or head, to be more precise). In The Prince, Machiavelli writes about the man with power, not necessarily the tyrant. The Prince is not necessarily an oppressor who seeks his own good through raw ambition. He may become so, yet in The Prince he is simply the man who seeks power; we are not told that this is at the expense of the common good. This is what makes the work not a manifesto for the power of a single man in order to oppress the people. As Machiavelli states in Chapter IX, the principality emerges when “the great” or nobles are the dominant political class, not when a self-regarding tyrant rules. Civil principalities, in addition, may learn from republican regimes the importance of the support of fellow citizens (P IX 38).

Tyranny may emerge when ambition grips the thoughts of the great. Ambition, Machiavelli avers, is a crucial ill that describes the pursuit of personal as opposed to public goods, and it tends to be among the grandi. However, in The Prince Machiavelli does not discourse at great length on this idea. In one instance, however, he refers to the ambition of the Cardinals in an Ecclesiastical Principality (P XXI 45). In this critique of the deleterious power of Rome, which hindered Italy’s unification, Machiavelli assails the noxious effects of the Christian religion. This is another reason for the centrality of the idea of independence, or “one’s own arms” in Machiavelli’s thought. In this passage Machiavelli hints at the tension that exists in a political order whose values rest on an otherworldly principle. As he avers, ecclesiastical principalities “subsist by superior causes to which the human mind does not reach” (P XI 45). He then declares that he will not comment on them and nonetheless goes on to comment on them from a purely temporal, political perspective. In this manner Machiavelli expresses his belief that the Cardinals’ ambition emerges on the mundane plane, in spite or the Church’s teachings.

The philosophy propounded by the Catholic Church, thus, is a weak and corrupting one. The Cardinals’ ambition, Machiavelli claims, shows the preponderance of political sentiments over Christian tenets, such as humility and poverty, even within church institutions. Christian values are too weak in the face of political needs. The Vatican is an ecclesiastical principality, and not the purely spiritual Holy See that Christianity purports it to be. As such, it is a weak yet problematic state in the heart of the peninsula. Moreover, Christian ideas are corrupting, because their weakness make men easily fall prey to their own ambitions and to their self-regarding wants. Self-deprivation breeds a resentful attitude that internally foments corrupt acquisition for personal gain. Hence it is a threat to public freedom.⁷⁵ Both as a political entity and as a philosophy of life, Christianity is ultimately ineffectual.⁷⁶ From the political inefficacy of the Church, Machiavelli draws out Christianity’s weaknesses as a philosophy to live by: he declared that “[w]e Italians are irreligious and corrupt above all other . . . because the church and its representatives set us the worst example.”⁷⁷

In a world where man is “homeless” and hostility is seen all around, this vision of the importance of man’s independence from other entities gains relevance. Machiavelli in no way accepts Christianity’s values and rather presents his own alternatives. These necessitate an attitude towards life that takes existence to be a matter of impermanence, godlessness, and general agonism among individuals and collectivities. It is also an alternative to the Church’s universalism, for Machiavelli believes in the primacy of individual and of particular experience (either of individuals or of specific peoples). Borgia’s opposition to the Church is one reason for Machiavelli’s admiration of Valentine.⁷⁸ Self-reliance is necessary; and the opposite, contributing to another’s greatness, is what must be avoided at all cost.⁷⁹ It is the one “general rule” that Machiavelli provides (P III 14).⁸⁰

Not being subject to another’s will and power is the principal value that Machiavelli holds when a leader begins to enter political life. This necessitates the very real instruments of agonism, weapons. To rely on auxiliary or mercenary arms is a fatal error that Machiavelli uses to underscore the need for a prince to rely on his own resources. It is through such independence that he can begin to affirm himself as arbiter of half of his actions (P XXVI 98). The key type of action that is thus carried out is, for Machiavelli, acquisition. And when acquisition is not effective enough, deception is needed as an aid. It is in this light that Machiavelli sees religion as important, yet only as a way to congeal power and the community, even if it is done through deception (P XVIII 70-71).

Acquisition: To Make Things Your Own

To be independent from others is a value that rests on the idea that trust is basically not possible. This notion of distrust is part and parcel of Machiavelli’s existential ethos, which posits a barrier between individuals as agents of power, since harm is always a danger. Does the existential ethos of feeling without a home and distrusting others necessitate the trampling of others and ignoring of the idea of moral obligation in order to subsist and thrive in an uncertain world? In political life, Machiavelli believes this is true.⁸¹

For Machiavelli the world as such is perilous because stability is hard to find. Change is all around, for nature itself is changeful. It is for this reason that Machiavelli praises the man who can change as much as nature changes, as he tells Francesco Vettori in a letter of January 31, 1515:

Anybody who saw our letters, honored friend, and saw their diversity, would wonder greatly, because he would suppose now that we were grave men, wholly concerned with important matters, and that into our breasts no thought could fall that did not have in itself honor and greatness. But then, turning the page, he would judge that we, the very same persons, were light-minded, inconstant, lascivious, concerned with empty things. And this way of proceeding, if to some it may appear censurable, to me seems praiseworthy, because we are imitating Nature, who is variable; and he who imitates her cannot be rebuked.⁸²

If nature herself is so fickle, Machiavelli believes, man must imitate her and adapt himself to all sorts of vicissitudes. Inflexibility is no part of virtue.⁸³

Fortune, as much as “Nature,” is capricious, and this Machiavelli avers when he declares that “Fortune is a woman” (P XXV 101). More precisely, “Fortune is woman,”⁸⁴ and as such is not like a single woman, but rather possesses the stereotypical “natural feminine characteristic” of fickleness. Fortune is thus the semantic representation of the phenomenon of impermanence and contingency that is found in the natural world, which includes humans qua organisms. The other aspect of humans, humans as crafters of their social world, is what keeps Fortune restrained. It is the artificial facet of man, his capacity to create or assemble things from the world as a product of virtù. When the creation of artificial constraints is not possible, Machiavelli recommends artifice as craftiness and dissembling in order to slow the turn of Fortune (as we shall see in the following section on the art of appearances).

What is artificial in the world is that which is created by man to counter nature’s processes.⁸⁵ In order to engage in the project of creating artificial things, man must first possess the predisposition as well as the implements and raw materials. The predisposition is what Machiavelli calls virtù, the ability to foresee change and be flexible in order to act to confront changing events. It also calls for an attitude of transgression or defiance. With this approach moral laws can be transcended. The implements or raw materials are the political methods and elements that can be shaped so as to create some sort of order.

For Machiavelli the raw materials are principally the two social “humors” that exist in all polities, the grandi and the popolari (P IX 38).⁸⁶ The political leader manages them, successfully or not, by playing on their hopes (speranza). It is from this process that institutions (ordine) may be shaped. This task is largely dependent on the particular ability of the political leader, the prince. The natural tendency of the great is to oppress, and the tendency of the people is to avoid oppression. These are the natural forces that the prince must artificially control.

The process of control is not uncomplicated. It entails not only a positive, constructive aspect, but also a negative one of dealing with opponents. There are always other men who will seek to establish order and gain glory for themselves. It is for this reason that the prince must always be ready for struggle. This perennial agonism is what necessitates a transgressive attitude, one that disobeys moral considerations. It is from this that Machiavelli finds the idea of making other things your own, or acquisition, a central rule for the prince. Since nature and Fortune are fickle, and man must confront both, he must be flexible. In fact, humans are in a sense fickle as well, for the “nature of peoples” as a whole, Machiavelli believes is “variable” (P VI 24).⁸⁷ In this context we can understand why Machiavelli believes “it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire” (P III 14).⁸⁸ What Machiavelli finds opprobrious is not the desire to acquire, but the inaptitude of those who cannot do it properly.

Acquisition is a term Machiavelli appropriates from the economic realm to transform and extend it to other spheres of life. It is not synonymous with a possessive attitude, for it is not defined as property ownership or that which is appropriated definitively in legal terms. The gaining of something is of necessity for Machiavelli a loss for someone else. In Machiavelli there is no state of nature where fallow land may be harmlessly appropriated. Since man is born without a home, and with a sense of being left on an open road, there is both a physical and psychological need to make the things of the world one’s own in order to feel more secure and protected. If man is born homeless, he is bound to seek refuge. This is the meaning of acquisition that is used by Machiavelli to describe the ways in which a man makes things in the world part of himself in order to confront obstacles.⁸⁹

As Machiavelli does not conceive of the world in terms of discrete individuals coming into contact with each other, collectivities are of primary importance. This is especially the case in his republicanism, yet it is also evident in The Prince, for the prince is a political man, a man whose actions are of relevance not for the worth they give him, but for the value they have to political communities. This is the core of Machiavelli’s concern with the stability of Florence or the unity of Italy. In a world where a people is fundamentally homeless, ⁹⁰ the role of the prince is to gather enough power so as to secure the basic political goods, order, unity, and security. And, since this world is occupied by a variety of peoples whose desire for order and security are as intense as one’s own, a political agonism is bound to exist.

Nonetheless, the carrying out of actions that may be considered immoral by some is in fact not entirely devoid of what may be understood as a moral aspect, since the achieving of order, unity, and security benefit a wide range of members of a community. No political act, however apparently immoral or ethically despicable, is entirely empty of moral worth, since it benefits people who would otherwise live in misery and fear.⁹¹ Such is the case with a people’s emancipation, such as Moses’s Exodus. It is also the case with expansionist policies, which, however harmful they may be for the occupied people, also benefits the humble popular sectors of the expanding state. As Machiavelli put it, it was vital for the Florentines to acquire Pisa, in order to preserve the liberty of Florence. It is for this reason that acquisition, understood in territorial terms, is important to Machiavelli.

Acquisition is important in the more philosophical sense as well. It is here that making (others’) things your own is relevant. When one does not have own resources and is surrounded by others who do, it is a matter of necessity to appropriate things in the world. In this manner the emptiness that comes with the birth of man is temporarily filled. In this way man begins to make something of himself by acquiring things that will allow him to constitute himself. This does not mean that everything is within one’s reach or that once one acquires something it can be utilized as a failure-proof instrument. Rather, it means that man should not feel timid in seeking to make the world his own. The courage to take something and employ it for one’s needs is necessary, yet it is not guaranteed success. Acquisition by no means represents a permanent condition that makes something part of oneself. It means things in the world can be used as instruments for one’s benefit and can be taken from others. One borrows or steals from Nature things that may be useful, but they may be stolen back.

This view is especially relevant in contradistinction with the Christian ethics that Machiavelli wants to undermine. For Machiavelli, Christianity’s call for humility and poverty is debilitating. In the first place it posits a single being who is superior to all earthly forms of life even if there is no evidence of his existence. Moreover, the Christian God’s calls for humility are inadequate in facing the fact, Machiavelli believes, that men are in constant opposition to each other in their pursuit of their various aims.⁹² What is necessary is not necessarily pride and wealth-seeking, but rather the appropriation of things that will be useful in the political world that orders the community. And in the place of faith, the glory one receives if one is politically successful goes a long distance in securing some form of lasting prestige that outlasts physical existence. It is also for this reason that he writes The Prince: to acquire favor and honor for himself (see P Dedicatory Letter 3).

The first chapters of The Prince are written from the perspective of acquiring something that will provide order and security. The first eight chapters have to do with the acquisition of principalities qua domains of power. Here is where Machiavelli’s though is shown to be at once philosophy and political philosophy. The subject is not merely acquisition of principalities, but also the prince’s acquisition of power as such, in order to create a political order for those under him. Power in this sense is a sort of energy, a primal, vital capacity that fuels human activities. It is the self-manifestation of a person upon the world by his impressing himself on it. This is an essential part of Machiavelli’s redefinition of virtue. For Machiavelli, “philosophy” must be political because life itself is political, as he understands politics to be the agon that exists between man and the world, man and Fortune, and man and other men.

In this light we can understand the centrality of the term “acquisition” in The Prince. It is a term that describes the existential project that the prince must undertake in his participation in politics. For Machiavelli everything can be acquired, yet he understands this term not in the economic sense in which it is generally understood, but rather as the process through which the prince’s virtù is expressed in the world; it is his imprint on the world.⁹³ The expansion of his virtuous domain means the expansion of sovereignty that allows the subsequent creative projects of order, unity, and security. For Machiavelli politics is not a matter of bargaining, transactions or exchange. Usurpation and conquest are the real underpinnings of political life. For him acquisition is not a gain received for any sort of payment. Once one acquires something, it does not mean one has a permanent property right over it or until one decides to exchange it again. It is the gain that one is able to get by, essentially, making another person concede something (through either force or fraud).

If acquisition is not based on any principle of exchange, then it is, in Machiavelli’s view, the term that describes usurpation and transgression. Being more concerned with the manner in which a state is acquired, and not heeding traditional regime typology as his chief concern, Machiavelli wants to focus on the idea of making another person’s “goods” one’s own. The goods in question are those that increase political power and sovereignty, such as arms or land. And, importantly, he classifies this process according to principles in his philosophy of life and the world, (as we saw in Chapter 1) not according to any scientific or objective criterion. He uses the ideas of virtù, Fortune, and one’s own arms as the guiding notions.

These principles are reflective of Machiavelli’s philosophy of the life and the world because they are the concepts he develops to make sense of the existence of man in the world. They are not derived from a scientific or technical study of political regimes. He understands existence as being a struggle between a man’s virtù and the world’s (and nature’s) contingencies and changes, which he embodies in the idea of “Fortuna.” Further, the key manner in which virtù is best expressed is the idea of “one’s own arms,” which is the principle of independence that Machiavelli believes is necessary for the later achievement of true freedom as the autonomous making of laws.

Machiavelli then takes these philosophical terms and employs them to understand political and historical situations. It is for this reason that a republic, if independent and autonomous, is free; and a prince, ruler, or political man is free if he is able to acquire for himself the resources, arms, and instruments to engage in combat (bellicose or diplomatic) with others. The key point, again, is that Machiavelli does not employ any typological or objective criteria to describe modes of acquisition, but rather, principles derived from his conception of the world (the power and presence of Fortuna in the cosmos) and human life (the capacity he understands to be virtù). He takes from his analysis of individual existential experience ideas that he then transposes to his philosophy of history.

In examining the notion of acquisition that Machiavelli uses, we see that it not only refers to a political strategy but also to part of Machiavelli’s own philosophy of life. To acquire things of this world without asking the permission of God or a higher authority is critical to human success. And here is where the myth of Borgia as a paradigm of the hero recurs. Borgia did not acquire his power through his own virtue (P VI 27). He acquired it by being loved by Fortune. Rather than criticize Borgia’s dependence on his father, Machiavelli sets him up to be a role model in spite of what would appear to be a flaw. Thus Machiavelli aggrandizes and idealizes the man Borgia in order to create the Valentino myth.⁹⁴

In this conception of life, the notion of truth plays a cardinal role. It does so in a sort of negative manner, for Machiavelli does not see it as a value that inheres in human existence. Because life is characterized so deeply by agonism, Machiavelli believes all sorts of arms are necessary in order to impose oneself on the world and on others. One of these is the disregard for the commitment to truth, since often being untruthful helps one acquire certain things. Moreover, since Machiavelli conceives of human life as a struggle between man’s virtù and nature, God’s punishments for untruthfulness are not part of his considerations. It is here that the importance of deception appears.

Appearance and Artfulness: When You Do Not Have, Seem to Have

Cesare Borgia was an expert deceiver. Perhaps this man was in Machiavelli’s mind when he considered the importance of appearance and artfulness. The Duke was “supremely skilled in the use of both weapons and words.”⁹⁵ And Machiavelli, keen observer of men, was intrigued by this art.

Persuasion is not purely a verbal art. It is a central component of the political value of having arms. By declaring that arms make unbelievers believe, Machiavelli underscores the significance of being able to persuade others by various means. Why is persuasion so important? Because for Machiavelli all men are different and see each other as such. Mutual incomprehension is a characteristic of the world: inter-penetrability or transparency among humans is not really possible.⁹⁶

In such a context, not only is there a plurality of ways of life, Machiavelli believes, but also achieving unity or solidarity is one of the most difficult tasks in political life. Mutual incomprehension is not limited to individuals facing each other. It is also present in the relation between the great and the many. This mutual incomprehension, however, leads to a paradoxical result. Machiavelli believes that the fact remains that humans do not really understand each other in a deep sense (as he expresses it in describing the near-inscrutability of Borgia when he met him); however since the internal essence of each individual cannot be accessed by the other, the only aspect of the other that is apprehended in some limited way is how that person appears to others. Since one can never really see how one appears to others, only others know about this crucial part of one’s existence. It is for this reason that Machiavelli believes one must be of the people to “understand” the princely, and one must be princely to understand the people (in his dedicatory letter to Lorenzo). This understanding or comprehend-sion only refers to the external appearance; yet this sphere, in politics, is more important than the inner life of men.

For Machiavelli, if one is wise enough to realize that this is the state of things among humans, then clearly one loses faith even in one’s own power of judgment. To be aware that only others perceive how one is to the world is disarming; one may be very cocksure, but how one is seen from the outside remains a mystery. While not really a crisis of conscience or identity, this state of things can engender a sort of psychic uneasiness in oneself. As F.R. Ankersmit rightly asserts, this tension, for Machiavelli, makes political agents unsure of themselves: “neither prince nor citizen is completely ‘at home’ with himself” for “alienation is where all politics begins.”⁹⁷

Ankersmit also understands Machiavelli as a political aesthete. He rightly begins his analysis of the tradition of “aesthetic politics,” in contrast to the politics based on ethics, with Machiavelli’s dedicatory letter to Lorenzo. He points out that for Machiavelli looking at politics is like gazing at a landscape either from the valleys (the people) to understand mountains (the princes), or from mountains to understand valleys. Machiavelli thus posits an incommensurability of worlds between the rulers and the ruled. Politics is fragmented, and its formation is based on two separate existences. It is best understood in the manner of the aesthetic perspective, in which there is no one single necessary point of view from which “truth” is ascertained, but rather the truth of politics depends on the point of view taken. If this is the case, there is a conflict between the people and the great that cannot be resolved except through the manipulation of appearances, since their antagonism cannot find a common ground.

In this sort of world, unity among humans is—to borrow a religious term—nearly a miracle.⁹⁸ However, some techniques exist to bring it about. Oratory and rhetoric, arts Machiavelli was a master of, can bring some unification.⁹⁹ Another is the threat of the use of arms in order to make men believe things that will help the prince. For Machiavelli, speech is a human capability that is used for communication but not necessarily for coming to a mutual understanding. “Not being rational in nature,” the two humors “cannot be reconciled by speech or argument. These are two human types who do not understand each other.”¹⁰⁰

The ideal of a deliberative community in which individuals share and express transparent reasons to each other with the aim of comprehension or concord is for the Florentine just that, an ideal. Humans may use the same language, but in effect what they mean may be incompatible among individuals in a group. It is for this reason that Machiavelli almost entirely omits the ideas of deliberation or agreement in his principal work.¹⁰¹ He understands speech under the rubric of rhetoric, which he sees to mean an ability to persuade, or move, others. If this is the case, persuasion must of necessity contain an element of deception in it, for there is an ulterior motive behind the force of argument. This is why he conceives of law as an aesthetic product, rather than a deliberative one founded on moral reason-giving. Laws are constructed to provide order and an artificial restraint of individual passions; they are not the distilled reason that emanates from reasonable ethical discussion.

How is this notion of rhetoric tied to that of deception in Machiavelli’s view of life? Machiavelli’s view of man as essentially empty posits a sense of action that calls for the appropriation of things in the world. Political man seeks to fill that internal chasm with something of substance, and that is the process of acquisition that we describe above. When acquisition is not successful or only partly so, Machiavelli declares that appearing to possess something is almost equally satisfactory. ¹⁰² In this, persuasion and dissembling are two forms in which individuals may further their strategies in acquiring some object.

Moreover, Machiavelli is so deeply marked by the phenomenon of social violence and agonism that he sees men as fundamentally not connected to each other by any metaphysical entity that may unite all of humanity. Machiavelli rejects the Christian tradition of a belief in communion in a higher realm of being, and further refuses to employ any alternative notion of a substance that may coalesce all individual consciousnesses. Here is Machiavelli’s deep secularism (or even materialism), for he rejects the idea of the soul and its attendant notion that individual souls are somehow united in a larger-than-life spirit. If such a spirit of communion is absent, what remains are individuated beings whose existence negates any inherent, spiritual essence. In such a conception, there is no thing-in-itself beneath the appearance of things. Beneath the appearance of existing things is really nothing. Hence, appearance, in a sense, is all there is.¹⁰³

Machiavelli makes no attempt, thus, to penetrate some other reality besides that of historico-empirical experience. Although Machiavelli’s concept of tristizia is often used as evidence of his view that there is an inherent human nature, in fact a more complex process is at play. There is no singular human essence; there is human existence, which then is followed by humans creating values, but there is no specific, inherent human character. ¹⁰⁴ What characterizes humans in this view (and what explains “wickedness”) is that they perceive others as alien or distinct beings, not as fellows. This is what explains their antagonistic, chary attitude towards each other.¹⁰⁵ And this untrusting attitude is not without justification, since history, Machiavelli believes, shows how easily antagonism and violence come about.¹⁰⁶ Fear of danger and harm makes individuals distrust one another and see each other as competitors. As there is no underlying human unity beneath worldly phenomena, and since a primary concern of individuals is subsistence, the art of manipulating appearances is vital.¹⁰⁷

Deception is an instance of the necessity of doing something normally considered immoral in order to impose one’s view over another’s in an agonistic world. Where others threaten one’s very existence, sense of self, and imprint on things, Machiavelli implies, morality is a weak persuader. Not only is self-preservation at risk, but also the meaning and values that one derives from one’s place in the political whole. This set of circumstances calls for a disregard for basic conventional morality, especially Christian morality. Religion, Machiavelli asserts, is something that the prince must be able to appear to respect (P XVIII 70). It is not the only element that must be feigned, although it is of supreme importance for it is the belief in God that makes a community remain together. In this manner deception becomes crucial, for the belief in a superior being allows for the cohesion of the community, which for Machiavelli is fundamental good.¹⁰⁸

Not telling falsehoods is a basic Christian tenet that is in direct opposition to deception. Machiavelli prefers to avoid a moral discussion of this opposition and presents deception in an aesthetic light, as the art of appearances. It is an art for it shares with other arts the key component of representation. Something is a work of art if it is purposely made to represent something else.¹⁰⁹ In deception, including the practice of managing political appearances, things are made to represent things that they are not. In this manner artfulness becomes a central component of Machiavelli’s politics.

Being able to engage in the art of appearances follows directly from Machiavelli’s existential view of life. This is because the hostility that he finds pervasive in life is in large part a social, human phenomenon. Agonism between individuals and groups is the foundational truth that Machiavelli employs, and this is not a claim about the nature of the cosmos but rather about the nature of human interaction. And, this fact regarding interaction is replicated in historical phenomena. Cesare Borgia is again Machiavelli’s paragon, for he recognized this fact of antagonism and resorted to deception as a way to manage it. ¹¹⁰ Hence for Machiavelli all meaning and human achievement must be generated only after having taken into account this fact of agonism. Since order and autonomy are the political objectives and arms are not always effective in attaining them, Machiavelli posits that the apparent arm of deception must be used to confront others.

Throughout The Prince Machiavelli shows how deception is both necessary and vital in the political sphere. When one does not have something, Machiavelli tells us, it is important to be able to feign having it. Moreover, even in one does have something, it is useful to know how to make others believe something different. The case of Fra Girolamo Savonarola is one in which the first instance is evident. The friar did not have arms, yet his power of persuasion was heightened by his ability to appear to have divine inspiration that allowed him to understand omens. The friar was able to master the art of appearances and that of rhetoric. He did not aim to have independence from God or others, possess his own arms, or to acquire power based on such independence. Hence his abilities as a master of appearances and persuasion were ineffectual.

Conclusion

Machiavelli thinks of himself as an educator. He thinks he can educate Lorenzo (and whoever else would read his book) in the lessons of power. Of course there is ambition behind this apparent façade of academic imparting of knowledge. When he describes how to beware of all sycophants, Machiavelli makes an exemption and says that the prince, even if he is not too bright, may trust one man who is educated in the ways of the art of politics. There are three kinds of brains, he says: one that perceives by itself, another that perceives through others, and the third (the useless sort) that does neither (P XXII 92). Machiavelli is perhaps seeking to acquire power for himself as the prince’s “tutor” when he claims that there is a “general rule”: “that a prince who is not wise by himself cannot be counseled well, unless indeed by chance he should submit himself to one alone to govern him in everything, who is a very prudent man” (P XXIII 95; emphasis added). Machiavelli is of the first kind of brain, a most excellent man who also desires power for himself. This desire for power is at the heart of the man of politics, for it is a deep-seated urge or craving. And it is an urge that Machiavelli saw in the person of Borgia. Seeking to instruct his wise students properly, Machiavelli uses the Borgia myth as a teaching tool, choosing to ignore or minimize the kinks in the actual person: “for I do not know what better teaching I could give to a new prince than the example of his actions” (P VII 27).

The mastery of the three human domains mentioned above (independence, acquisition, and appearance) is what provides the mettle that may make a hero. While The Prince is a comprehensive guide to politics that encapsulates Machiavelli’s wisdom, it is largely an account of how an individual prince can shape himself into an effective leader if he heeds the advice given with regard to the three domains. Cesare Borgia was not in actuality the perfect model for Machiavelli, yet he is the one figure that the Florentine repeatedly admires. This admiration is the basis of Machiavelli’s making of the “Borgia myth.” This myth is the rhetorical device useful to Machiavelli in his attempt to both personify the ideal character of the political leader and to express key aspects of his philosophy of life. At the core of this character is the ability to be able to act against the precepts of common morality in order to bring about something of greater purpose to oneself and to one’s community.¹¹¹ By creating a myth, Machiavelli is acting as an artist, not a realist. The fact that Borgia ultimately failed is not an objection to Machiavelli: what he wants to do is underscore the kind of moral or anti-moral character that he imagines Borgia to possess, for it is the ideal character for the ideal political actor, someone who can separate his personal from his political ethics by engaging in moral transgressions. This myth-making is creative, and it requires an artistic mind as well as the desire to re-found Western values on a different set of principles: to move away from ethics as the grounds of politics and towards aesthetic, creative, sensory, and perspectival bases.

This notion of urging the transgression of moral codes in order to raise the status of human being is not a common one in Western political philosophy, but we see it again in a thinker removed from Machiavelli by almost four hundred years, Friedrich Nietzsche. In what follows we shall explore the affinities and connections between these critics and see where they lead us in terms of understanding the application of aesthetic principles to political life.

Notes

1

Also known as Ramiro de Orca or de Lorqua. It is ironic that one of the most vivid descriptions in the text is that of a death.

2

Viroli calls Borgia a “great political showman” and his acts those of “stagecraft” (Viroli 2000, p. 62). See also de Grazia, p. 326.

3

See Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance, p. 184 on Machiavelli’s contribution to the Renaissance idea of the autonomy of social spheres.

4

Machiavelli’s theoretical defense of exemplary executions is grounded on historical reality. He himself favored the summary decapitation of Paolo Vitelli in 1499 for failing to advance the interests of Florence in the conquest of Pisa.

5

Machiavelli thus implicitly rejects the Aristotelian conception of justice as finding the mean, a founding concept in classical political philosophy. See also Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, p. 251.

6

Merleau-Ponty, in Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of an Existentialist Politics, p. 116. The French existentialist philosopher drew on Machiavelli (as much as on Hegel and Marx) in his effort to determine the foundations of an existential philosophy of politics (see Whiteside, p. 231 ).

7

See Ansell-Pearson 1991, p. 43 for a hint of the tragic dimension in Machiavelli.

8

See Hulliung, p. 226 for an assertion of Machiavelli’s emphasis on “heroic values.”

9

I understand this term in the sense of Lebensphilosophie or Weltanschauung. Viroli (1998, p. 11-12) rightly explains that Machiavelli’s thought is not circumscribed by politics alone.

10

Let us remember that the term goes back to the primus, first, and the principium, or the beginning of things.

11

Leo Strauss does not believe The Prince was written with any intention other than to convey knowledge about “how to acquire and preserve princely power” (Strauss, p. 54). This, however, does not mean that the meaning of the text is free from conceptions of human nature and the human condition that allow Machiavelli to explain power. Further, the text itself is in an important sense autonomous from the “intention” of the author, and this allows for interpretive tasks.

12

The greatness that so concerns Machiavelli makes him an “aristocrat” in the sense that he believes that few men are able to achieve the formation of a psyche that is admirable because it can yield great individual and collective acts. For a similar argument about the psychology of virtue in Machiavelli, see Nederman, C.J., “Machiavelli and Moral Character,” History of Political Thought, XXI, Issue 3, Autumn 2000, page 349, passim; and Coleman, Janet, “Machiavelli’s Via Moderna: Medieval and Renaissance Attitudes to History,” in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. M. Coyle, Manchester, 1995, passim.

13

This is what Machiavelli means when he criticizes those who do “not dare” act in a manner “altogether wicked or altogether good” (D 1.27).

14

See Viroli 2000, p. 28 for a description of the violent sights Machiavelli witnessed throughout his life in Florence. This is one likely reason for Machiavelli’s focus, in political philosophy, on the problem of violence in human affairs.

15

At times it is a world only concerned with consequences and effectiveness; at others, it is one that requires harming others.

16

It is worth pointing out that literary perspectives such as dramas have often grasped the heroic, agonistic, and tragic most adequately.

17

See, for instance, J.J. Barlow, “The Fox and the Lion: Machiavelli replies to Cicero,” History of Political Thought, 1999, 20 (4); also Hulliung, p. x; p. 253.

18

In the sense expressed by Walter Kaufmann as we explain in Chapter 1.

19

While there is a tradition of Christian existentialism, it seems reasonable to assume that atheistic existential thought places a more difficult burden on human beings owing to the lack of a higher reality.

20

See Chabod, p. 184; Burckhardt, pp. 99-119, passim.

21

Machiavelli cannot be fitted neatly into either box of the “individualist” or “communitarian” thinker. His work shows deep understanding of the basic political tension between self and membership in a community.

22

This is another way of explaining politics as an a response to man’s “fragility and mortality” (Viroli 1998, p. 41). It also expresses Machiavelli’s understanding that politics offers no universal, scientific account of the world, but only a general approach to it (Ibid., p. 83).

23

Mansfield 1966, p. 21.

24

Strauss, p. 55.

25

Ibid., p. 62, 67.

26

Strauss misinterprets Machiavelli’s historical project for a scientific method; in fact his historiography is laden with rhetorical flourish that is often manipulative of actual facts (vide Ibid., p. 59).

27

Ibid., p. 69.

28

The claim is that politics rightly understood, then, is existential at its center. It is misunderstood when other approaches are taken (e.g., rational, Christian, moral, scientific, liberal, or deontological).

29

This “education” follows the pagan Roman notion that posits that killing for the glory of the republic is laudable (see Hulliung, p. 246).

30

Machiavelli posits a radical, “malevolent” understanding of life in his work. The contribution of the great Florentine is not one of a benevolent republican seeking to expose the evils of politics. He promulgates and teaches the idea that politics properly understood necessitates new immoral or a-moral acts; in other words, “evil.” Leo Strauss was correct in claiming Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, yet for Machiavelli the term evil is not as sinister as we understand it: it is simply the term that is characterized by soft souls to the new acts of cruelty that must be and are commonly performed by men of politics for the benefit of many.

31

By aesthetic I mean being characterized by cognition through the senses in a manner involving representation, emotion, and form in a process of artistic creativity (as I mention earlier).

32

It is the only universal fact of human being. Its consequences are, in history, particular to specific areas and peoples. However, because political dynamics between individuals and between groups are the same across time, there can be a “learning” from history that is applicable to other periods, such as Machiavelli’s reading of the ancients to understand his contemporary times. It is a universalism grounded on organic, material bases, not on moral or ethical ones. It is thus a very thin conception of shared human commonalities.

33

Mansfield 1966, p. 20.

34

This is the wickedness of men (see P XVII 66-7). This wickedness is more evident in the interaction of men rather than in their essence.

35

This, however, does not mean Machiavelli believes in a notion of perfectibility. There is no set of rules that can be followed by all men at all times in order to become more “perfect” as human beings or men of politics. Machiavelli, rather, believes that in the sphere of politics a certain life attitude must be taken that is radically different from that in other parts of life and which in a sense creates a “new man.” See also the letter of 31 January 1514 (CW 962) where Machiavelli here praises Borgia as a new prince.

36

Here is where the link between individual virtù and civic virtue are linked. Machiavelli sometimes sees virtù as the ability and desire to love one’s country and its laws, but this requires a concomitant understanding of his notion from the perspective of individual moral psychology, which is what I seek to address in this chapter.

37

Although Machiavelli does not use the term in his short work, we can interpret the text as such an attempt.

38

This effulgent discharge of power is rare; here we see that Fortune tends to win in its agon with man, and hence Machiavelli does not espouse a view that man is the supreme being in control of the world. If “modernity” hinges on the idea of human supremacy over the world, then Machiavelli is not its first proponent.

39

Perhaps Leo Strauss was correct to believe that the essence of an argument lies at its midpoint; Chapter XIII is halfway through The Prince and in its center is the name “Cesare Borgia.” If this is correct, the work is not principally about the practical politics of the principality or its exposition for republicans, but rather about the type of moral character of a man engaged in foundational politics.

40

Burckhardt tells us Cesare spoke in Spanish in public with Alexander and killed bulls in the Iberian fashion (Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 86).

41

CW 165.

42

Borgia’s life can be interpreted as an instance of the tragic casibus virorum illustrium, or inevitable fall of princes, which Machiavelli seems to believe is an ineluctable truth.

43

Although there is something to that as well, as Gramsci pointed out. However, that quality of a manifesto is based on the radical moral claims advanced therein. (See also Althusser, passim).

44

See Viroli 2000, p. 53-54.

45

Viroli 2000, p. 54.

46

Moreover, Machiavelli makes violence part and parcel of his idea of heroism (See Hulliung, p. 223).

47

See Ibid., p. 253.

48

in Viroli 2000, p. 54.

49

“Old” princes may still exist; it is not a temporal category, but a typology based on the logic of power.

50

E.g. Burckhardt, p. 72.

51

“The dingier the hero, the sharper the irony” declares N. Frye (op. Cit. Di Maria, “Machiavelli’s Ironic View of History”, Renaissance Quarterly, Summer 1992, p. 261).

52

Here again we see how “un-Machiavellian” Machiavelli was, for he was not himself a master of deceit and violence as Borgia was. He was the philosopher who thought about and explained the deeds of the man of action, the Valentino. See also Whiteside, p. 305 for the relationship between theory and action.

53

The manner, not the intentions, behind the cruel acts is what distinguishes Borgia and Agathocles (contra de Grazia, p. 154-5). This is what explains that Agathocles could only achieve fame, not glory.

54

His shortcoming was his cruel reputation, which prevented him from achieving “glory” (P VIII 35).

55

“crudeltà male usate o bene usate” (in Capata, p. 22). All Italian original text is from the Capata edition.

56

Machiavelli understands virtù largely as “a matter of one’s personality” (Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 168).

57

Viroli 1998, p. 24. Death, and the dread of it, is one element that makes an existential philosophy of life, for it establishes the limit to human existence and delineates the anguish and preoccupation that it entails.

58

In his discussion of Machiavelli’s heroes, de Grazia does not explicate the meaning behind the figures the Secretary admired (see de Grazia, p. 357-9). I think it is proper to consider these founders to be salient in the domain of Sittlichkeit in the sense given by Hegel. They established social norms throug their founding

59

In this, Borgia is a figure of import in the realm of reshaping Moralitat.

60

See P XXVI where Machiavelli considers it fortunate for Moses to have found the people of Israel enslaved, and for Cyrus to find the Persians oppressed by the Medes.

61

Opportunity, or chance, is a sister of Fortune, as we saw in Chapter 1’s analysis of the poem dell’ occasione.

62

Bringing order “to the horizontal relationship within the civitas terrena” (Ankersmit, p. 168).

63

Borgia’s murder of the conspirators Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto da Fermo at Senigaglia among others was in effect the elimination of tyrants in order to consolidate power in one single figure, thereby creating more stability and order. He also rid the area of thieves and predatory lords (de Grazia, p. 329).

64

The joke Machiavelli is purported to have made at his deathbed is the gist of this mocking idea of heaven. Moreover, Belfagor is, for instance, another text where Machiavelli makes fun of hell. The “Exhortation to Penitence” was written for a friar, not for himself. Parel makes it clear that when Machiavelli uses the term cielo or cieli, he understands them to mean the physical entities (See Parel, p. 1-2).

65

Chabod, p. 70.

66

Viroli 2000, p. 53; see p. 72. Machiavelli’s heroes are “quixotic,” as Terence Ball rightly declares (‘The Picaresque Prince,’ Political Theory, November 1984, p. 524-5; see also Unamuno’s discussion of Don Quixote in Tragic Sense of Life).

67

Whereas virtù is the central value in life generally.

68

See P VI 21.

69

See D 1.9.2.

70

Against Hulliung, Mansfield’s emphasis on “necessity” in Machiavelli’s thought is largely correct because Machiavelli understands political action as part of a struggle for survival and expression of power that is necessitated by the organic, agonistic nature of man (See Hulliung, p. 224).

71

Viroli 2000, p. 60.

72

“per essere gl’uomini triisti” (in Capata, p. 36).

73

See Berlin, p. 104-109.

74

The suffering of the political leader is thus a consequence of the feeling of being encroached that he has, not of the idea that he feels the bite of conscience owing to “dirty hands” (see Hulliung, p. ix).

75

See Burckhardt, p. 349.

76

It is true that Machiavelli sees the ancients as stronger than the moderns, but Machiavelli propounds a “modern” view of life by assailing the ancient (Platonic) roots of Christianity, which are those of the idea that a metaphysical reality exists beyond human life. Machiavelli’s aim, in part, is to advance an idea of independence, or “one’s own arms,” that is detached from the Christian idea of submissiveness to God, the Church, and the principle of humility. While Christianity showed itself able to use the political tools of propaganda and papal succession well, it did not manage to establish a code of life consonant with what Machiavelli saw as the reality of human affairs, agonism.

77

Hulliung, p. 272. Moreover, Machiavelli’s attack on the Church is further motivated by its being emblematic of centralized and hierarchical authority. For Machiavelli these should be values only for the organization of institutions such as armies or states, not societies as a whole, because he believes in the fundamental plurality and diversity of human ways of life (See Ibid., p. 192).

78

Both in the political as well as the moral planes (See Ibid., p. 88).

79

It is reasonable to assume that Machiavelli also assails those who seek the “greatness” of God over that of oneself as well.

80

“una regula generale, la quale mai o raro falla, che chi e cagione che uno diventi potente, ruina” (in Capata, p. 12).

81

In the personal sphere, as we shall see in the discussion of Machiavelli’s plays in Chapter V, things are more complicated.

82

In CW 961.

83

See Mansfield 1966, p. 37-38.

84

Emphasis added. “Fortuna è donna” (in Capata, p. 53).

85

“Man is not at all the master of the universe but the victim of nature first and of Fortune afterwards” (Viroli 1998, p. 16).

86

“dua umori” (in Capata, p. 230). In The Prince, Machiavelli implies that the Roman Empire had three humors, which included soldiers in addition to the people and the great (P XIX 76).

87

“la natura de’ populi e varia” (in Ibid., p. 16).

88

“È cosa veramente molto naturale e ordinaria desirare di acquistare” (in Ibid., p. 11).

89

This interpretation is not entirely different from that given by Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, pp. 13-16 in that it is also rooted in the idea that it is a necessity to engage in acquisition in the face of competition.

90

Machiavelli does not posit that a people is necessarily entitled or rooted in a geographical territory. See for instance the discussion of Germanic peoples all over Europe, including Italy, at the beginning of Book I of the FH (vide pp. 9-13).

91

This is the question Merleau-Ponty also wants to answer: in a world where violence is pervasive, and political theories that claim universality in fact are shackled by particularistic and violent commitments, can there be a universalist politics that humanizes social life? (see Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, p. 7-8). He found the answer in Marxism’s proletariat and faults Machiavelli for not being able to “systematize” political action. However, it is precisely the self-conscious rejection of universalism, eschatology, and systematization that makes Machiavelli radical, and which leaves him with the restrained, limited hope of improving the lot of humans. As Kaufmann defines it, existentialism is an approach to life that, principally, eludes systematization. This reading of Machiavelli is also related to that of Burckhardt, who was motivated to examine Machiavelli because of Burckhardt’s proposition of “the subjectivity of historical writing and... cultural relativism” (Burke, “Introduction,” p. 15).

92

This is why “war” should be on the prince’s mind at all times.

93

This goes against Wolin’s understanding of Machiavelli’s work as one in “the economy of violence” (See Hulliung, p. 223). Machiavelli does not see things quantitatively ; he understands power and virtù as exercised at the right temporal period or moment. It is more a matter of prudence that of economy.

94

Machiavelli blames Valentino for not creating a Spanish pope; yet he nonetheless does not lower his admiration for this captain because he wants to underscore the fact that he learned from his mistakes as he proceeded to acquire power. “I shall never hesitate to cite Cesare Borgia and his actions” Machiavelli says, and then describes how the captain learned from his actions in acquiring his own arms (P XIII 55).

95

Viroli 2000, p. 57.

96

Merleau-Ponty, deeply influenced by Machiavelli’s analysis of violence, also shares in this concept of humans not being able to truly understand each other (see Witheside, p. 115). Another interpreter of Machiavelli, this one more to the north, Jacob Burckhardt, is also motivated in his study of the Renaissance by his fascination of the seemingly incomprehensible violence of southern Europeans: a sense of “the northemer’s perception of the hot-blooded south as the Other” shared by Nietzsche as well (Burke, “Introduction,” p. 10, emphasis added).

97

Ankersmit, p. 120.

98

See D III.27.

99

Machiavelli, Viroli rightly asserts, was “a master of rhetoric” (Viroli 2000, p. 70).

100

Mansfield 1966, p. 24.

101

This is one important difference with the thought of Rousseau, whose idea of the General Will rests on an implicit conception of the commensurability of individuals’ values when coalesced into a group.

102

This is the idea nicely captured by de Grazia’s notion of “to be or to seem to be” (de Grazia, p. 293).

103

“Virtue as a whole must be impressive,” Mansfield asserts (p. 17). He is correct because politics is the theatre of appearances, where one’s power is enhanced by the awe it elicits when displayed, even if not necessarily exercised.

104

Machiavelli sees humans as classed into two separate groups; hence there is no one single human nature. But the passions of each group, for Machiavelli, are transhistorical (he believes the two classes always exist).

105

Along with the fact that humans are tied to animal behavior as well, as we shall see in the next chapter.

106

“Primordial violence is the background condition of political order” (Whiteside, p. 192).

107

This is what Machiavelli recognized in his examination of Borgia: the impenetrability and inscrutability of others is evident in his remarks that “this Lord is very secretive, and I do not believe that what he is going to do is known to anybody but himself’ (in Viroli 1998, p. 66).

108

See Ibid., p. 132.

109

This aesthetic conception will be developed further in the following chapters, especially Chapter 5.

110

Machiavelli praises Borgia’s deception of Liverotto (P VIII 37). Machiavelli’s ”Borgia myth” is also useful in Machiavelli’s effort to “educate” republicans in, for instance, possessing resolve (D 1.38.2).

111

Mansfield recognizes that Machiavelli “urges us to share in ... evil” (P Introduction ix).

Chapter 3

Nietzsche’s Machiavellism

Machiavellianism pur, sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute sa force, dans toute son âpreté, is superhuman, divine, transcendental, it will never be achieved by man, at most approximated.

-Nietzsche WP 304

Introduction

Late in his life, Machiavelli described himself as “historico, comico et tragico”¹ in a letter to Francesco Guicciardini written in 1525. Against the common perception of Machiavelli as the founder of modern “political science,” the totality of his works in fact shows that he was not an unqualified champion of the idea of a progressive human mastery of the world. He was one of the founders of a new realism that entailed serious doubts about the effective power of human knowledge and action. He saw human control as a desirable and admirable yet generally elusive aim. His writings, most of which are of a historical or tragic-comic nature, in effect dispel the longing for a unification of politics and ethics while avoiding the pretense that scientific knowledge is his aim.

As Isaiah Berlin affirms, the enduring legacy of the Florentine for Western thought is the philosophical, rather than scientific, idea that different spheres of value may not, in the final analysis, be compatible.² In particular, Machiavelli focuses on politics and morality as two practices whose values, he claims, are indeed separable and in fact are separate. This “revolution” in moral and political philosophy is, I believe, strikingly similar to that enacted by another thinker who is generally not seen as a political philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet if we are to understand Nietzsche’s important contribution to political thought, we must examine the way he understands, following Machiavelli, the close link between immorality and the idea of human betterment. By this I mean that both thinkers believe the human condition, taken as the life of the collectivity, often requires acts that are considered “bad” according to conventional morality if it is to improve. This is the primary foundation of the intellectual kinship between the two thinkers who are often considered the demarcations of modernity.

The affinities between Machiavelli and Nietzsche have hitherto not been explored fully but merit close attention. In reading Machiavelli’s account of the tragedy of life in The Ass and his profound amoralism in his admiration of Cesare Borgia, especially in The Prince, one is reminded of similar themes in the thought of Nietzsche. The German thinker’s analysis of the demise of tragedy and his critique of conventional morality—especially Christian—resonate with the tragic and anti-Christian ideas of Machiavelli. Moreover, Nietzsche often cites Borgia as an examplar of a strong human life.³ These are signs of their deep affinity. By looking beneath their surface, however, one finds that these examples of commonality hide fundamental philosophical similarities in ways of thinking about life, being human, the world, and political power.

There are two major strands that connect the two thinkers’ ideas and explain their espousal of wrongdoing as a means to improve the lot of the human condition: the themes of the tragic and of the aesthetic. The two thinkers share a distinctively tragic or existential⁴ view of life that serves as a foundation of a particularly skeptical attitude towards modernity. Moreover, as a consequence of their critical assay of morality in human life, they are led to an “aesthetic” conception of action—as I will elaborate in the Part III—which seeks to satisfy the human craving for order.⁵ From these two elements, we can discern a unique perspective on life that stands in sharp contrast to other dominant views of modernity.⁶ In the case of each thinker, the tragic and the aesthetic generate a view that connects intimately with the thinker’s conception of politics. Their political recommendations are indeed quite divergent but the founts from which they spring are similar.

Why is the term “tragic” apt in describing the two authors’ worldview? Because they both portray man as engaged in a significant ethical struggle generally ending in ruin or profound disappointment. They do not espouse a conventional moral lens defined by the antinomy good/bad, but they do propose a way of living (an ethics) that is intended to better the human condition. However, they see this proposal as rife with difficulties, making life as such a trial of suffering and pain. Neither of them sees an ultimate, inevitable redemption for man, but rather ultimate failure is more common.⁷ This fate is owed to the way the see the individual as severely limited in capacities, and the world as “broken,” or possessing no clear, simple, and unified order.

Nietzsche’s work bears the recurring imprint of “Machiavellian” concerns. Undoubtedly, Socrates and Schopenhauer are his chief interlocutors.⁸ Nonetheless, the Florentine Secretary is one his most admired figures. Stanley Rosen goes so far as to affirm that the author of The Prince was one of Nietzsche’s two favorite authors.⁹ In this project I will concentrate on Nietzsche’s affinities with Machiavelli and, on a secondary level, to “Nietzsche’s Machiavelli,” that is, the way that Machiavelli can be understood from a Nietzschean perspective. In this it is also important to examine the direct influence that Machiavelli had on Nietzsche’s thoughts on moral psychology and philosophical anthropology as evidenced by direct references to the Florentine.

From Socrates and Plato to Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer as well as Rousseau and the English utilitarians, Nietzsche was in constant implicit dialogue with many figures in philosophy. It is true that even in his youth Nietzsche saw in Schopenhauer and the German Romantics the idea that nature as such is “without ethics.”¹⁰ Yet of all his influences, it is from Machiavelli that Nietzsche acquires the idea of a radical separation of morals from politics (and thereafter from human life in toto). This influence is visible in the context of their common critique of Christianity and the idea that committing harms is often necessary to propose something new and better for man. The concept of value-incongruity follows as a consequence of this innovation.

However, it is important to point out that Nietzsche does go beyond Machiavelli’s initial separation of ethics from politics. He posits a ranking in which a new sort of ethical transformation stands higher than political change; that is to say, he presents a new brand of ethics to replace the old. This concern with the new is a key commonality between the two thinkers—hence their modernity. Nietzsche also casts a more critical glance at what I believe is a new theme, the distance of politics from the aesthetic. This is a task that Machiavelli does not perform. In fact, for Machiavelli politics is itself a practice that can be understood in aesthetic terms; while for Nietzsche the aesthetic has a more fundamental link to the underlying nature of life than does politics.¹¹

The Florentine introduces a wall between sets of values for two reasons. One is a positive reason, the other a normative one. In Machiavelli’s opinion, politics and morality are, in real life, separate realms with distinct values. From our analysis of his literary works in Chapter 1 and of his study the princely hero in Chapter 2, we can affirm that Machiavelli sees life in politics and art (mainly literature) as characterized by non-moral factors. Fundamentally, he sees force and fraud as the twin pillars of all foundations of political order; and form-giving and redemptive beauty as the guiding criteria of the aesthetic. The normative reason rests on Machiavelli’s view of the soul. For Machiavelli, the critique of the “soul” for which he is well known through his jokes is actually quite serious. For him human life is not centered on the soul.¹² In fact, it is arguable whether he truly believes there is in effect such a thing. He was “a man unconcerned with questions of soul, afterlife, or sin.”¹³ It is for this reason that he does not in any of his writings promote a vision of the politics of soul-cultivation. ¹⁴ He promotes a view of the improvement of human capacities, but this is not the same as spiritual improvement. Thus his notion of human development or strength is not moral, if this term is understood as one of the faculties of the soul.

Unlike Nietzsche and Arendt, who do believe in the idea of the cultivation of the soul, Machiavelli is concerned with a more minimalist conception of man; one in which existence is fragile and politics is urgently necessary to safeguard it.¹⁵ Politics is born not from man’s superior qualities, but rather from his weaknesses. Beauty (in art, daily life, or even in politics) is valuable for Machiavelli in a redemptive sense, as a justification for existence in the face of its horrors. It is not, as for Nietzsche, a faculty for the cultivation of the soul that enables a moral regeneration. Machiavelli sees man as a lost being: as a newborn left on an open road, as he tells us in The Ass, or as “a man alone,” uno solo, in The Prince. He does not see a path for human achievement except insofar as it comes from answering the challenges of the fragility of life.¹⁶

This uncertainty about the ultimate unity of human experience and meaning leads to the tragic or existential ethos of his work. His radical critique of Christianity leads us to see that he rejects its eschatological view. For him, there is no telos. Politics is for him the practice that best orders the world; it is an urgent endeavor, it can engender great deeds, yet it is not always a glorious or progressive path. His disregard for the idea of the soul then makes him espouse values that are useful for the sort of man who is in a precarious and uncertain situation. Machiavelli’s own life is the model of such a conception. In this personal-cum-universal view, the values he espouses are: order, stability, durability, development, strength, freedom, independence, and lastly (somewhat out of place) beauty. These values do not necessitate morality and thus make Machiavelli see the positive and normative reasons to reject the need for an ethical perspective in affairs of politics and art.¹⁷

Nietzsche fundamentally shares the same values because he sees them as most conducive to his own idea of man as a physio-psychological “plant.”¹⁸ For him, in an age of nihilism,¹⁹ Platonic-Christian morality has run its course and is no longer cogent (in large part due to the Enlightenment). Man must overcome himself by seeing himself as he originally is: as a physiological and psychological being who must therefore choose values that will make him stronger in those two realms.²⁰

How does Nietzsche understand Machiavelli? We can start by pointing out (without claiming that this is the essence of their relationship) that he makes direct reference to him in eight passages of his published work and in nineteen of his unpublished notes.²¹ In all of these, he is portrayed as among Nietzsche’s most important influences.

Isaiah Berlin’s correct assessment of Machiavelli is that the Florentine believed that the ultimate harmony of different sets of values (such as those of ethics and politics) is uncertain. In this notion there is a beginning of a bridge between the man of the Renaissance and Friedrich Nietzsche. For the latter also shares in this sentiment although in a more forceful manner.

It is interesting to note in what terms Berlin expresses his valuation of Machiavelli, for he also sees a parallel with Nietzsche:

What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too), but that when they assume that the two ideals [of politics and ethics] are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula), which their actual behaviour exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality ... but of one of the foundations of the central western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all values²²

Nietzsche raises the wager that Machiavelli places. He follows Machiavelli by calling into question the incompatibility of values and goes beyond this: he asserts their actual regular conflict in historical practice and establishes his own ethics of the soul. For Berlin, Machiavelli’s work negates the idea that there is a single proper way to live, a single morality that binds all of life into an ordered whole.²³ Hence the value pluralism that Berlin underscores is rooted in the Florentine. But this pluralism is not important so much for a defense of toleration; rather, it undermines the notion of progress towards an eventual perfection of human society. Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche does not break with tradition altogether²⁴ but looks for “the new”²⁵ as a way to release the existential tension that is felt by man after he recognizes the incongruity of life.²⁶ Value pluralism is not unproblematic: it can be experienced as an onus or a tension. This is the root of Machiavelli’s existentialist outlook.²⁷

This existential tension is the adjustment of man, accustomed to living under the desire for value-compatibility, to the new world where such compatibility is shown to be nonexistent or impossible.²⁸ Thus, it is a world deprived of the illusion or deception of its coherence or ultimate perfection. The suffering that occurs in this adjustment is not owed to the bite of conscience (or one’s “dirty hands”²⁹) but simply to the fact that a life lived in a world without an all-encompassing compatibility of various spheres of value is by its very nature onerous and disconcerting. This is another way to describe the problem that Nietzsche calls nihilism.³⁰ This realization and the actual adjustment to it is the project undertaken by both Machiavelli and Nietzsche in the same spirit though in different contexts.³¹ Through their artistic sensibility and their teachings they seek to make this realization and this adjustment easier for man. Otherwise, they believe, a cold, matter-of-fact statement of truths would be neither believable nor bearable.

Machiavelli and Nietzsche hold similar views about man and the world. To be sure, they are not identical; yet because they are averse to follow in the footsteps of the Platonic tradition, they are drawn closer to a moral psychology immersed in aesthetic reasoning rather than logic and rationality. In what follows I will discuss the structural parallels that exist between their views of human nature and the nature of the world. It is important to note that there is no rigid boundary between the two views; for both see man as a creature of his milieu, not separate from it.³²

“Macchiavell ... [ist einer der] . . . Grossen Moral-Philosophen”

Nietzsche, Nachlass 1888³³

Man in a Broken World

Niccolò Machiavelli was not a philosopher in the strict sense of the term. His own works and life do not fit the mold of the typical philosopher of the Cinque-cento . He did not write scholastic treatises, did not rigorously assay natural law, did not concern himself with learning the traditional bases of his contemporary philosophical world. Yet this does not mean that his writings do not possess philosophical import—and an import with historical reverberations. If we read him from the perspective Nietzsche had on him—as one of “the great moral philosophers” as he avers in one his notes of 1888—we see that his ideas in fact construct a philosophy of life, one that has relevance not only to politics alone but to life in general. This is what Nietzsche saw in the Florentine, particularly as the founder of modern moral thought.

Part of what Nietzsche admired in Machiavelli was his style of writing. This style reflects how he sees the world: as composed of contradictory, contrasting elements. For Machiavelli things are the effect of apparent opposites or antinomies. ³⁴ This notion of the interplay of antinomies goes back to one of the primary theoretical innovations expressed by Machiavelli in The Prince: “the effectual truth of the thing [la verità effetuale della cosa]” (P XV 61).³⁵

In this notion, Machiavelli wants to convey that things in the world exist not by virtue of some singular essence. Their truth is in their effect, not their essence. There is no one single central criterion to define things in the world in relation to it.³⁶ No form inherent in them can be grasped through reflection, but rather things are the effect of their internal dynamics that at the same time have an impact on the world. They are also related antagonistically to other things that are similarly divided internally. This means that things are not what they merely appear to be in a rough empirical sense. Machiavelli is no crude realist. Things may have a name and a determinate form, but their actual effect on the world may contravene both. The true identity or being of things or entities (including men) is in the way in which their internal tendencies or components affect the world and are affected by it.

This view implicitly constructs a sort of metaphysics for Machiavelli.³⁷ And this rudimentary metaphysics is important to understand his moral philosophy as we shall see in later sections. It expresses both a notion of what the world is like (a cosmology) and also of what humans are (a philosophical anthropology).³⁸ It is a base on which Machiavelli’s philosophical edifice is built. From it we can understand why Machiavelli conceives of man and the world in an existential manner: there is no necessary way in which man is to act or to be. Moreover, there is no clear unity to what a person is, for in fact whatever identity he or she has is dependent on the net effect that internal antinomies have and which may not be necessarily under the control of the self at a particular moment. This is what we may call Machiavelli’s ontological dualism, since he considers man to be the result of the conflict of two tendencies. In this view of the world, conflict—not only internal but also external—is crucial.

The relation between internal and external antagonism is here of interest for our analysis. Internal elements of one person’s personality may conflict and may push the individual to different types of action, and this occurs according to how much force they have at a particular point in time. This is in effect Machiavelli’s understanding of the idea of the humors that make up a person’s character. They are internal fluids that make the person as a whole fluid; that is, changing and temperamental. A person may not always react in the same manner in similar circumstances. His or her attitude to things in the world will depend on the particular conformation of his or her humors at that moment in time. If this is the case (and we know that Machiavelli believed in the quasi-scientific doctrine of the humors as we saw in Chapter 1), then there is no necessary constancy in a person’s actions. He or she may thus be in harmony or in conflict with other things in the world. This sort of inconstancy leads to a situation where internal antagonism (between humors) prepares the way for antagonism with the external world. Each person does, however, have a temperament, which is general makeup of the humors in her.

As we know from the work of Parel, Machiavelli understands that a person’s bodily humors are affected and interrelated with the geo- and cosmological forces that exist in the physical heavens and terrestrial bodies. Internal division, much like what Plato says, weakens the ability to present a unified force against the world. This is the foundation of Machiavelli’s understanding of antinomies.

There are many examples given by Machiavelli of the idea found in Chapter XV of The Prince that a thing is the effect created by the antagonism of its internal elements. Throughout subsequent chapters of The Prince we can discern many: Machiavelli discusses how generosity is the result of the conflict between liberality and parsimony (Chapter XVI). The discussion of cruelty and mercy as defining magnanimity, and love and fear as defining affect are further examples (Chapter XVII).³⁹ The effect is the resultant of the amount or force of one type of cause in contrast to the amount or force of the other. For instance, a prince may make himself loved by the people if he is kind only in small amounts relative to his harshness, so that when he does carry out a very generous act, the people will feel it better and more intimately. The effect thus depends on the marginal, relative amounts of energy spent on each of the causes that make up an antagonism.

Importantly, for Machiavelli most antinomies are made of one harm-causing element and one pain-causing element. It is the former that is more critical because people tend to feel pain more deeply than they do pleasure. The pain and pleasure calculus is thus biased by nature towards the former element, and this is part of the wisdom that Machiavelli wants to convey.⁴⁰

The most important example of the idea of the antinomy for us is his discussion of man in Chapter XVIII. Here is where we see Machiavelli’s discussion of man proper. We also see that the subject of the work The Prince is not only the apparent one, the politics of the principality, but also man himself, for Machiavelli discusses man’s human and animal nature in implicit response to the context of Cicero’s ideas on the proper role and conduct of man, not that of the state.

In this chapter of The Prince Machiavelli avers that man is not one single thing. Man is not reducible to one fundamental essence, as many philosophers have claimed. Man is not essentially rational, essentially ethical, or essentially social. These are some philosophers’ views of some kind of perfection, but Machiavelli does not believe in the idea of perfectibility. Man creates his essence by attempting to control the antinomies inherent in him, which produce an effect that depends on the relative strength of each element. Machiavelli does not merely say that men can imitate animals or that only political man should try to be a composite creature (of man and animal); he claims that humans in general are such composites, though in different degrees of temperament, self-control or management.⁴¹ It is precisely because it is in men’s nature that the beastly is found that political man can have recourse to it for acting.

Political man is not acting in “artifice” by fabricating a beastly nature in himself. Hence within the antinomy of “man-beast,” (P 69) there is yet another antinomy within the category “beast,” which is that of “fox-lion” (Ibid.).⁴² The human will, which for Machiavelli is a separate faculty for the controlling agency in the human mind, is only partially capable of controlling which tendency will override the other, but much of the outcome really hinges on the “physics” that is at play between the antinomies.⁴³ And this is only partly under a person’s control.

This ontological dualism found in the work of Machiavelli is akin, but not identical, to what Nietzsche would later claim; namely that “a thing is the sum of its effects” (WP 551).⁴⁴ Nietzsche similarly sees a lack of unity in what we normally understand as the individual. The notion of competing drives and a will that attempts to bring them into line is a variation of Machiavelli’s conception, though for Nietzsche it is not a matter of duality, but of multiplicity.⁴⁵ Nietzsche sometimes writes describing the will as a separate faculty that tries to bring order to competing drives. However, early in BGE (I 19) he deconstructs this idea in favor of the notion that the will is the strongest drive in each person. Nietzsche’s conception of the will is influenced by Schopenhauer’s, which is defined as something both within and beyond individuals. For Nietzsche will is similarly present in all activity and is not confined to the individual as if it were a capacity to be put to use by each person whenever he desires. For Nietzsche “will to power” is the underlying quality in life and it is different from Schopenhauer’s Will in that it is defined as the more potent of the drives in each being. As such, it overpowers others drives while retaining from them (Aufheben) their effective energy.⁴⁶ Thus Nietzsche claims that a thing is the “sum” (aggregation) of its multiple effects (‘ranked,’ in a sense, by order of power).⁴⁷ Nietzsche declares “l’effet c’est moi” (BGE I 19) and thus shares with Machiavelli the idea that the self is an effect caused by internal processes, which—to repeat—for Machiavelli are usually made of two elements while for Nietzsche they are manifold.⁴⁸

There is another crucial distinction: Nietzsche’s idea of multiplicity negates the notion of the free will,’ something Machiavelli does not want to do. Machiavelli’s definition of Fortuna states that she (the rhetorical metaphor for contingency in the world) is ruler of one-half of man’s actions in order to allow man to have volition (P XXV 98). It is not the name of an independent entity with a will of its own. Machiavelli finds the argument that man’s life is ruled by Fortune and God interesting, yet does not wholly agree with the elimination of free volition: “in order that our free will not be eliminated,” he declares, “I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of one-half of our actions, but she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern” (Ibid.).

The cautious language (“might,” “close to it”) clearly shows that Machiavelli is uncertain about the scope of man’s free will. Still, he sides with the idea that man has the faculty of will and that it is to a significant extent free to try to govern himself, others, and the world. For Machiavelli this free will is endowed with a creative potency, which is not the same as undetermined will, which is the usual meaning of free will. In contrast to free will, Fortune and God are different phenomena in Machiavelli’s mind. Machiavelli understands the former as the complex of contingencies in the world and the latter as the being that is considered by Christians to rule the cosmos. He thus understands the notion of God in the Christian manner, yet does not share a belief that such a being truly rules over the lives of men. Machiavelli tends to refer to God in a rhetorical manner, merely as a figure of speech and not as a central factor in the existence and processes of the world.⁴⁹ Fortune’s power is greater, for it is located in the concrete world that Machiavelli considers.

From Machiavelli’s ontological dualism, branches of his philosophical tree arise. The fact that no single essential quality distinguishes a thing from others, and in reality a thing is the effect it creates, points away from any form of essentialism or idealism, including a doctrine of a single supreme, omnipotent being. Things can be distinguished, but this is because of their unique composition of antagonisms, not because of an ideal form. This duality also characterizes Machiavelli’s conception of the cosmos. Given the dependence on effects that are determined by relative strengths of existing antinomies, ordered to some extent by human will, there is no necessity that a particular path will be taken in history.⁵⁰

Hence while Machiavelli advises men to take certain actions and favor particular dispositions, he provides a limited (rather than systematic) set of general rules or universal maxims to be used in similar circumstances. In this we see the reason for Machiavelli’s opposition to determinism and to the absence of a dialectical theory in his work. There is no guarantee or tendency towards any particular outcome in worldly affairs.

‘Machiavellism of power’ [as a] love of humanity Nietzsche WP 776

Agonism and Moral Philosophy

The internal competition between tendencies or natures that Machiavelli recognizes in individuals and groups and that Nietzsche sees as multiple drives is a form of “agonism.”⁵¹ Agonism is the idea that conflict and struggle are the natural basis of life and that this is replicated in social, political, and cultural life. Human artifice can in many ways transform nature, but it does not eliminate the presence and preeminence of conflict in individual human consciousness and in social groups. For Nietzsche, what makes a man great in political terms is his ability to go above the constant antagonisms of life and to see that a higher purpose can be achieved if one abandons the desire to oppress. This is what Nietzsche refers to as the “love of humanity” that a great leader comes to possess by acting for the common good of a people or of humanity. For Nietzsche, Machiavelli’s notion of power is not for a mere power-monger seeking to tyrannize others.

Agonism, as a concept, has two influences that are useful for our description of Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s view of life. The obvious one is the classical Hellenic meaning: the agon is the contest, and the agonistes is the contestant. More specifically I wish to draw attention to its origin in Attic comedy, where the agon is the debate or contest between two characters. The Old Comedy of Greece was added to Dionysian festivals in 487 BC and was extant in the writings of Aristophanes. Hence the term agonism involves a contest between two persons in the context of comedy. Further, the most likely origin of the agon is the mimetic ritual from which comedy evolved: that is, the fertility rituals in which humans imitated the cycles of regeneration in nature.⁵² This is one key aspect of Machiavelli’s thought that indirectly owes much to Greek, rather than Roman, antiquity.

This points to the second source of meaning in the term agonism that I want to underscore. The relationship between man and nature is evident from the idea of the imitation of nature.⁵³ More specifically, the study of animal behavior understands agonism in this sense: as a struggle for survival involving aggression, defense, and avoidance.⁵⁴ This datum from animal behavior is also present in human, social psychology. In human societies, where verbal expression exists, agonistic behavior can generate constructive activity or bring about destructive acts. Hence the term agonism is also tied to the notion of conflict in both animal and human settings.

For our use of the term agonism, then, the first influence points to the human acts of contest, struggle, and debate between individuals and groups. The underlying meaning is that human relations are characterized fundamentally and originally by confrontation. In Greek comedy cooperation is possible, but only after a process of debate and contest that enriches the participants and ends in a harangue where the audience is criticized in the name of some social or political principle. In society as a whole, struggle is part of the foundation of human life and from it achievements can be reached but only once deep-seated conflict is acknowledged and confronted. The second influence points to the animal nature of conflict, which carries over to human behavior. This links the human to the natural and specifically animal world. What this does is to introduce an element of irrationality and impulse from animal nature to human nature. And this presents us with the possibility that reason, argument, debate, and deliberation may not in some, or possibly most, cases allow for the cooperation and learning that the Attic comedy intends to ultimately bring about. Hence agonism is at its root animal, and therefore not grounded in reason.

This agonism is what describes the view of human life that Machiavelli and Nietzsche share. Machiavelli is one of the first post-classical political theorists to emphasize the struggle between groups as the core of social activity.⁵⁵ For him, reason, deliberation, and ethical principles are relevant to political life but are not sufficient in bringing about order, duration, and flourishing in a society. Agonism is part of both individual and social life. Violence is thus a permanent and recurring feature of human society even when highly organized and developed (as was the case in Florence in Machiavelli’s time). At the same time, conflict can actually be the root of the highest achievements, such as political order, if managed properly (as in the case of the early Roman republic’s management of tumults).

For Nietzsche agonism is a theme that suffuses his oeuvre. From his early writings on “Homer’s Contest” to the miscellaneous notes that make up the Will to Power, the notion of the contest recurs. In the former, Nietzsche argues the value of contests and confrontation, as a form of “wrestling” that enables the individual to improve himself through a challenge. Nietzsche thinks primarily of intellectual and moral (soul-related) improvement. It is a challenge that involves the fundamental continuity of the human and the natural. To be sure, Nietzsche has an interest in the individual psychology of men; yet his concern is in a sense class-based, for he understands men as divided into two classes, those whom he considers noble, and those he calls slavish. Hence while his understanding of agonism may be considered more focused on the individual as compared to Machiavelli’s, in fact he shares with the Florentine a class-based prism through which he sees the world. In both his understanding of the self and of groups, the agon is key. For instance, in the verse “Heraclitean” of the Prelude to GS Nietzsche writes,

Only fighting yields
Happiness on earth,
And on battlefields
Friendship has its birth,
One in three are friends:
Brothers in distress,
Equals, facing foe,
Free, when facing death!

Heraclitus was a philosopher who understood the cosmos as being originated in fire and struggle. “War is father of all,” he believed. In Nietzsche’s view, equality is a quality gained or achieved by individuals through the facing of a common enemy.⁵⁶ It is not an inherent quality; rather, it must be won. There is sort of equality both among enemies and among brothers-in-arms. The agon allows for the development of happiness and friendship with profound meaning, to a large extent because they are earned in the process.

In addition to the Greek influences on his understanding of agonism, Nietzsche found much to agree with Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of human conflict. Schopenhauer had a proto-Darwinian view of nature in which vast groups of various species are ultimately useful as nourishment for other groups. The competition and destruction that was prevalent in nature was also present in the human condition, Schopenhauer believed. It is from this notion that his pessimism concerning the inevitability of suffering and pain emerged.⁵⁷

Nietzsche never fully rejected this Schopenhauerian influence, even after bouts of self-criticism.⁵⁸ Yet it is important to note that Nietzsche does not see this struggle as merely one among individuals. There are many instances where the idea of struggle between and among individuals and groups is a fundamental element of Nietzsche’s world-view. In his account of slave and master morality, first introduced in Beyond Good and Evil (section 260 of chapter nine) and later developed in the Genealogy of Morals, for instance, the idea of a recurring contest is present: it is a contest between moralities that actually benefits the noble as well as the whole of society, and indeed development is only possible through protracted struggle.⁵⁹ It is true that noble morality is nearly eliminated and prevented from dominating, but it is precisely this struggle that is required for the noble morality to be called thus, and for it to merit its dominance. It is a dominance that is achieved, or won, in competition with the powerful slave morality. Noble morality needs its competitor, slave morality, if it is going to deserve any praise. Just as Machiavelli’s virtù requires Fortune to be called virtuous (it merits value only insofar as it overcomes Fortune, not if Fortune is too weak or inexistent), noble morality needs the challenge of different forms of slavish ethics.

Additionally, the idea of the agon between nobles and non-nobles shows Nietzsche understands the noble as mindful of, and even dependent on, the non-noble. In GS Nietzsche tells us that he understands the noble spirit as infused with a self-sacrificial attitude for the sake of the whole (GS Preface 3 77). The Nietzschean agon is not a matter of “all against all” or of the “survival of the fittest.”⁶⁰ Contrary to a simple Darwinian view or Schopenhauer’s pessimistic regard towards survival, the human species tends to general advancement if there is a proper relationship between the “strong” and the “weak.”⁶¹ The noble man is in an antagonistic relationship with the non-nobles, yet he must face the potentially deadly insights that come with the task of philosophy: and this he does so that the totality of life is protected from dangerous discoveries even if it culminates in a hierarchical society. For instance, Christianity’s proper focus on pain and suffering is dangerous to man because it posits an afterlife that in effect negates actual life. The slavish is bound to be attached to this philosophy while the noble must defend against it.

For Nietzsche there are some truths that are hard to bear and which should not be accessible to all humans. In a sense the nobles’ role is to bear the onus of knowing certain truths and still live with them while the slavish live in illusion. Nietzsche is indeed worried about slave morality triumphing over the noble, for if this occurs certain truths, such as the centrality and inevitability of pain in life, would not be known to man. Nonetheless, the noble needs the slavish to be challenged continually and thus hone his philosophical “knife.” As he avers in HH,

degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to be effected. Every progress of the whole has to be. preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures preserve the type, the weaker help it to evolve.

HH I.224 107

Unlike other perspectives that see cooperation, reciprocity, or reasonable agreement (or disagreement) as possible durable equilibria in social life, such as certain brands of socialism or liberalism, the Machiavellian and Nietzschean philosophy of life makes a case for avoiding such delusions because the reality is that man is agonistic by nature. Communal feeling exists, yet it is not one essentially based on reasonable deliberation but rather constant antagonism. Rather than encasing the sword in a cross-shaped sheath, they opt to expose its metal. Reasonable agreement is in a sense irrelevant, for in the final instance it is conflict and the will to impose one’s view on others that reigns.

[As Machiavelli says] the ‘form of government is of very little importance; although the half-educated think otherwise. The great goal of statesmanship should be duration, which outweighs everything else because it is far more valuable than freedom.’

Nietzsche HH V. 224 108

In Search of Permanence: Time and Durability

While Machiavelli and Nietzsche see that man can in some sense impose his will on others and on nature, what is more salient in their thought, as compared to that of scientific thinkers such as Bacon or Descartes, is their cognizance of the limits to this. Nature may be amenable to human action from a scientific, technical perspective. Yet this human power over nature has its boundaries and, moreover, cannot alter man’s own nature. “Nature is there to be transcended,” Nietzsche affirms in BGE, yet he understands man as deeply rooted in nature and only able to transcend it in the future, once his world-view is put in place. Man is not entirely contained and limited by nature, but he is firmly rooted in it. This explains Nietzsche’s understanding of man as “beast” but also as potentially higher than beasts.⁶²

Although for Nietzsche man has shown himself to be able to have great power over nature, this mastery is not entirely beneficent, for it may lack a noble purpose. Hence man is in a sense not truly sovereign. One force that conspires against this sovereignty is that of time.

The course of time is a natural force that erodes, through the abrasive concatenation of events, human creations. Time proceeds headlong without consideration for the needs of man; and given the antagonistic nature of social existence, one’s actions must be hurried if one is to avoid being overrun by others’ plans. This is a factor in life that for Nietzsche is part of the configuration of things. However, it lacks a malicious form, since it is simply part of life, part of life’s animal innocence.

Machiavelli, too, shares this concern for the impermanence and evanescence of human achievements that is fomented by time.⁶³ Frequently, Machiavelli reminds the reader that failing to take action only aggravates one’s situation in the face of the passing of time. The concern with the perdurability of human creations is a common one to both thinkers. This is evident if we look at Nietzsche’s effort to understand the “weak” and the “strong” as a tacit response to Darwin’s notion of the struggle for existence in Human, All-too-Human (section 224). Nietzsche does find truth in the notion of struggle between weak and strong, but unlike Darwin, he does not think that it is a matter of the survival of the strongest over the weakest. For Nietzsche, in this early text, a community is made of both types, and the weak are as important as the strong. The weak allow wounds to be opened in the community, which eventually must be healed by the strong in order to reconstitute cohesion and then allow development. It is not merely a matter of the overcoming of the weak by the strong. Complete victories or defeats are really not possible, for time brings new antagonisms.⁶⁴

In an important reference to political life, Nietzsche calls on Machiavelli to explain the nature of durability. As we see in the passage cited above, Nietzsche finds it convenient to use Machiavelli’s example of the state as a durable thing, and is eager to quote the words of Machiavelli. Nietzsche goes on to expound that only where “the greatest duration is securely established and guaranteed is continual development and ennobling inoculation at all possible” (Ibid.).⁶⁵

In this key passage Nietzsche wholeheartedly accepts Machiavelli’s judgment that duration, permanence, persistence, and lasting form are the foundation on which all else is built. Machiavelli brings up the model of the state, which Nietzsche admits as an example of the need for perdurability in a world where agonism and time’s corrosive quality are central. Nietzsche is not dismissive or critical of the political example, which for Machiavelli is the most evident one. The duration of a regime, not its type, is the primary concern, for only from this can any sort of development or growth occur. Nietzsche only adds a coda that authority, the ruling power, will usually try to oppose such growth for its people, since its interests are not those of the individual. Nietzsche, however, ignores Machiavelli’s belief that order requires a mixed regime. Nietzsche tends to write as if he aims to see a complete triumph of the strong or noble, yet in fact, as we pointed out above, the weak or slavish have a cardinal place in the “dynamics” of power that comprise a Nietzschean “constitution” of the soul.

The importance of this passage is in the two thinkers’ common concern for the need to impose lasting form upon a fractious entity. This task is aesthetic in the sense that lasting form and permanence are also aesthetic concerns. For Machiavelli the state is the foremost example of imposing order upon an agonistic people; Nietzsche accepts this example and uses it to support the notion that the same applies to individuals in relation to each other in all sorts of communities, as well as to each noble individual in relation to himself. Machiavelli shares this idea in his conception of the republic, for in his view both the grandi and the popolari must be included in the constitution; and only through their interrelation can the republic flourish. The difference is that while Nietzsche sees time as an innocent part of the world, for Machiavelli time appears to have a malice about it, for he thinks it diminishes everyone’s achievements including those of the highest type of men, such as Scipio as described in The Ass.

Only through the unusual coexistence or symbiosis of the many and the few, of the people and the great, can perdurability emerge. This is the explicit meaning of Machiavelli’s civic republicanism. Power, the capacity to establish perdurable order, is thus understood by Machiavelli through this form of unconscious cooperation. And the great men are those who understand the need for such coexistence without seeking to appropriate all of the state: hence Machiavelli’s endorsement of the mixed republic, where both plebs and nobles partake in rule. It is for this reason that Nietzsche describes the “Machiavellism of power” as that which manifests itself among the very strongest (the founders) as a “love of humanity” (WP 776) rather than a mere will to conquer and oppress.⁶⁶

From the ideas of agonism and the corrosive character of time, we see that the human individual is not in a position of domination over his world. Conflict is something that is largely irrational and often occurs at the level of groups, where no “head” may actually exist to lead a movement. Moreover, time itself is a conspiratorial force in human affair, which thus prevents full agency in man. Facing this reality about the nature of our world, Nietzsche’s Machiavelli helps us seek to see in human achievements the notion that some kind of permanence may redeem our time on earth. We must be cognizant that all eventually goes back to a primordial sand, yet we can try to sculpt a form with some sense of permanence—much like an artist seeking to find aesthetic value in durability—to give sense to our lives.

But how could the German language, even in the prose of a Lessing, imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his Principe lets us breathe the dry, refined air of Florence and cannot help presenting the most serious matters in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he risks—long, difficult, hard, dangerous thoughts and the tempo of the gallop and the very best, most capricious humor?

Nietzsche, Part II, ‘The Free Spirits’, BGE, section 28

The Absurd Comedy of an Unstable Self

Machiavelli recognizes contingency as a fundamental characteristic of the cosmos.⁶⁷ It is this that is the root of Machiavelli’s conception of Fortuna. Contrary to Aristotle, in his view there is no telos to which humanity or a particular man is directed either by nature or social relations.⁶⁸ Human agency is bounded by the uncertain outcome of the ontological dualism: it is not possible to ascertain a priori what the effect of the agonism of antinomies (either internal or external) in human behavior will be. This, in spite of Machiavelli’s realization that certain attitudes of the will can be recommended; but they are devoid of a guarantee of success. For Machiavelli politics is no science; indeed, since political action depends on the largely uncontrollable interplay between apparently opposite elements in a single entity and subsequently on the antagonism of distinct entities (such as states and classes) no exact political science can be derived.

The connection between elements in a single entity and the antagonism of distinct entities rests on Machiavelli’s notion of the humors (Latin for fluids or liquids).⁶⁹ As we saw in Chapter 1, Machiavelli understands the human being as composed of fluids whose volume and power in relation to each other determine in large part the actions and behavior of a person. Moreover, celestial and terrestrial physical forces affect these humors.⁷⁰ The movement of planetary natural entities affects the dispositions of individuals. It is through this that Machiavelli understands group formation or solidarity, not through an idea of deliberation or reason. Machiavelli believes that this interplay between personal humors and planetary movement tends to create, generally, two social groups, a popular one that seeks not to be oppressed and a noble one that seeks to oppress (P IX).⁷¹

The attempt to impose form and order on this interplay is worthy, necessary, and possible but far from predictable or always efficacious. In a world where the human being is affected deeply by natural forces and is made up of largely inscrutable fluids, prediction of behavior is not easy. This realization is what makes Machiavelli’s philosophy of life acquire a tragic tone. Machiavelli is not the theorist of deliberate action or demiurgic agency. He is even less a theorist of male domination as Pitkin claimed.⁷² In fact Machiavelli’s exhortation to action is not rooted in the will to impose or, in other words, for the pleasure of imposition, but simply in the desperate need to create some order and some meaning in an otherwise overwhelmingly chaotic universe. This happens through imposition, which may require brute force. A partial view of Machiavelli may lead one to see him as concerned primarily with male autonomy; but a fuller view of his works shows us that, while cognizant of distinctions between the genders, he does not posit a hegemonic superiority of the male over the female in every realm.

An interesting, though unconventional, example of Machiavelli’s writing that paradoxically undermines Pitkin’s feminist critique can be seen in Machiavelli’s letter to Luigi Guicciardini of December 9, 1509. It is paradoxical because although the letter’s salacious language appears to betray a sort of misogyny, the text actuality shows Machiavelli’s belief in the inherent weakness and impotence of man. In this letter Machiavelli recounts a humorous⁷³ episode to his good friend:

To Signor Luigi Guicciardini
as his dearest brother, in Mantua

Damn it all, Luigi! You see how fortune can bring about in men different results in similar matters. You, when you have . . . her once, you still get the urge . . . again—you still want another go . . . But I, having been here several days, going blind crazy without my wife, came across an old woman who washed my shirts; she lives in a house that is practically underground, and the only light that comes in is from the door. I was passing by there one day, and she recognized me and made a big fuss over me; she said that if I wished, she would show me some beautiful shirts that I might want to buy. I believed her—innocent . . . that I am! And when I was inside I dimly saw a woman hiding in a corner, pretending to be bashful with a towel over her head and face. The old hag took me by the hand and led me to the woman, saying: “This is the shirt that I want to sell, but I want you to try it on first and pay later.” Timid as I am, I was now completely terrified; nevertheless, since I was alone with her and in the dark (the old lady left the house immediately and shut the door), I gave her a good hump. Even though I found her thighs flabby and . . . her breath stinking a bit, my lust was so desperate that I went ahead and gave it to her anyway! And once I had her, I had the urge to see my merchandise and I took a brand from the fireplace near me and lit a lamp that was above it; and hardly was it lit when the light almost dropped from my hand. My God! The woman was so ugly that I almost dropped dead. The first thing I noticed was a tuft of hair, half white and half black, and although the top of her head was bald, which allowed you to observe a number of lice taking a stroll, nevertheless a few hairs mingled with the whiskers that grew around her face; and on top of her small, wrinkled head there was a scar-burn which made her look as if she had been branded at the market; her eyebrows were full of nits; one eye looked down, the other up, and one was larger than the other. Her tear ducts were full of mucus and her eyelashes plucked; her nose was twisted into a funny shape, the nostrils were full of snot, and one of them was half cut off, her mouth looked like Lorenzo de’ Medici’s, but it was twisted on one side and drooled a bit since she had no teeth to keep the saliva in her mouth; her upper lip was covered with a thin but rather long moustache; her chin was long and sharp, pointed up, and from it hung a bit of skin that dangled to her Adam’s apple. As I stood there, amazed at this monster, she noticed my surprise and tried to say: “What is the trouble, sir?”; but she could not, since she was a stutterer; and as she opened her mouth there came from it such a stinking breath that my eyes and my nose, the two gateways of the two most outraged senses, found themselves offended by this pestilence; this was such a shock to my stomach that, not being able to bear it, it heaved so much that I vomited all over her. And so, having paid her in the way she deserved, I left. And I swear to God, I don’t believe that my lust will return as long as I am in Lombardy. So you can praise God in the hope of enjoying your pleasures again, while I shall be thankful because I have lost the fear of ever again having such an unfortunate experience.

I think that I will have some money left from this trip, and I would like to put it into some small investment when I am back in Florence. I thought about setting up a poultry yard; I need some employee to run it for me. I hear that Piero di Martino is interested; I would like to hear from him if he is able and to have you reply to me. Because if he doesn’t want to, I have to find someone else. Giovanni will give you the news from here. Give Jacopo my regards and remember me to him and don’t forget Marco.

In Verona on December 9, 1509.

Niccolò Machiavelli

[P.S.] I am awaiting the reply of Gualtieri about my poem.

Besides the fact that this missive is intended to make fun of himself and of man generally, there is an underlying meaning that sheds light on Machiavelli’s vision of life. Machiavelli did not intend to express it directly in this letter, but his implicit conception of ontological dualism is evident if we analyze it. This is especially salient given that Renaissance epistolary was not always intended only for private reading. Machiavelli evidently enjoys the act of writing this letter, for he has fun with the idea and the language to express it. In part what he does is impose some form, through words, on an action and event that are characterized by dissolution.

In spite of the crude diction and apparent sexism, paradoxically, the letter in fact shows that Machiavelli does not endorse a view of male domination or misogyny. Rather, the meaning of this letter is that human (in this case male) psychology and action are produced by the tension of apparently opposite but inseparable tendencies. In this tale, which is probably based on some truth but is largely fantastical (or lavishly embroidered), the key is not that Machiavelli was tempted by natural impulses to go beyond social mores and conventions, but rather that his will is weaker than the libidinous drive. “He” does not dictate his agency⁷⁴ but rather it is dictated by internal, competing drives. Moreover, the effect of his internal drives’ competition are affected and provoked by his encounter with two entities over whom he has no power, the laundry woman and the woman in the dark room. In this case the culmination of the letter, the realization that the woman was utterly unattractive (to say the least) when Machiavelli utters “My God!,” is representative of Machiavelli’s psychological reaction to his own act. The woman may in fact not have been repulsive at all, but in Machiavelli’s mind the fact that his action, driven and blinded by lust (witness the dreamlike darkness of the room), was unaccompanied by beauty or love⁷⁵ instills in him a sense of absurdity which nauseates him, quite literally in this case. Psychology and physiology are the loci of the antagonistic drives. Paradoxically the tale shows man’s impotence vis-à-vis his own drives.⁷⁶

The acts described in this letter are symbolic of the loss of willful agency that characterizes man in many instances. The lust-love antinomy is possibly what eventually generates an effect of nausea in Machiavelli himself.⁷⁷ It is not one of simple hedonic experience; disgust and sickness are also involved. The act cannot be reduced to one single essence or motivation, and the comic aspect of the letter is an effect produced by the tension between Machiavelli’s awareness that the act, for a human being, should be motivated by appreciation of beauty or of love, and a more bestial impulse which indeed is also what defines him as a man. Two apparently competing and opposite drives, lust and love, in truth are united in the phenomenon of desire, which in this particular case creates an effect of nausea because their relation is not, or cannot be, properly managed by human volition.⁷⁸ In this letter Machiavelli thus hints at his view of how things really are.⁷⁹

Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche also finds man to inhabit a world where he is not truly sovereign. From his early works, such as Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche praises the uniqueness and beauty of man but finds that his capacity to alter the world is severely limited. As Machiavelli posited contingency in human life, Nietzsche finds that not only is man subject to the effect of his own competing drives,⁸⁰ but the forces of nature also circumscribe him. According to Nietzsche, meaning can be derived from one’s small contribution to create some order in the world, from “the power to help nature and to correct a little its follies and blunders” (SE 125; emphasis added). These words recall the more pessimistic statement by Machiavelli that he would “laugh at the errors of humanity, since it impossible to correct them.”⁸¹

The uncertain boundaries of the self, for Nietzsche, exist ultimately because there is no unifying, fixed entity that one could ascertain to always order the person. The process of self-development and change is never-ending. From birth to death the drives that make up the person are in flux and do not necessarily produce a unified whole. It is the task of the great man to provide such an order through moral thinking and literary writing, which provides a certain cosmos⁸² to the self. If Nietzsche is understood as thinker who never fully rejected Schopenhauer, then his individualism is not as radical as we often believe. While Nietzsche stated many times that his own optimism is what replaced Schopenhauer’s pessimism, it is not clear how much he rejected his idea of the Will as fundamental and the principium individuationis as epiphenomenal. If Nietzsche never fully rejected Schopenhauer’s Will, he was therefore more of a “communitarian” than he is normally considered, since he would accept that the unity of all individuals is the underlying and painless state of (all) things. Nevertheless for Nietzsche the self, as with Machiavelli, is not a clearly defined, fixed entity.⁸³

Behind Nietzsche’s attempt to replace Schopenhauer’s pessimism with his own optimistic outlook is an attitude to life that can be seen to be derived in part from Machiavelli. The allegrissimo that characterizes rambunctious laughter emerges from deep in the appreciation of the comic in human existence. This is part of the way that Machiavelli saw his own life and the absurdity of being human; it is also something that Nietzsche envied in the Italian writer. To abandon dour seriousness, to laugh in the face of terror, and to thereby acquire a platform for optimism, is something Nietzsche found of value in the Florentine.

Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli’s Principe are most closely related to me by the unconditional will not to gull oneself and to see reason in reality—not in “reason,” still less in “morality.”⁸⁴

Nietzsche, TI 558

Subjectivity and Perspective

The humanist idea that man is the measure of all things is one way to define subjectivity: the eminent power of the self over his world. Yet Machiavelli and Nietzsche give subjectivity in another sense a high value. And this is the sense opposed to the idea of objectivity in knowledge. In Machiavelli, the subjective perspective on knowledge runs throughout his oeuvre. Implicitly, this trust in the idea that humans exist as beings always located in particular contexts is a riposte to the Platonic (in the colloquial sense) notion that there is an underlying universal rationality to the way the cosmos works. This is the sense in which Nietzsche sees Machiavelli as a “cure for Platonism.”

Despite the claim by some commentators that he is a founder of an objective political science, Machiavelli actually writes from a very partisan and personal, or subjective, perspective.⁸⁵ Two examples can be given for this fact: his own republican political beliefs as they permeate his works; and the fact that his own life is the source of particular theoretical stances that he takes. In Nietzsche, the principal related idea is his perspectivism, which includes the critique of philosophers’ claims that they are motivated only by the will to truth, when in fact this will is underlain by a will to power. Further, it can be claimed that Nietzsche’s own life is the artistic creation that is representative of his philosophy, as Nehamas has deftly argued.⁸⁶

Throughout the past five centuries, the fact that Machiavelli wrote the republican Discourses and also the apparently despotic Prince has been considered perhaps the central problem in Machiavelli studies. The work of Skinner and Viroli et al. has gone a long way to prove the republican beliefs dear to Machiavelli’s heart.⁸⁷ Still, the question of why Machiavelli wrote a sort of handbook for tyrants is asked again and again. We may trust Rousseau in believing that The Prince is a book for republicans that attempts to show the way despots think and act (On the Social Contract, Book III Chapter vi: 88). However, the most convincing piece of evidence as to the presentation of Machiavelli’s republican beliefs can be found in the text of The Prince itself.

Machiavelli presents his own personal belief, his partisan stance, not in a surreptitious manner, but founded on theoretical reasons, in Chapters V and IX. In these chapters of The Prince he explains the superiority of the republican mode of government over the principality, thereby providing support for his own partisan preference.⁸⁸ He avoids spurious reasoning but still provides an indirect defense of his own republican ideas in Chapter V, where he claims that in a confrontation between a republic and a principality the latter can only defeat the former through sheer violence and destruction, not by improving its own internal order. In a republic more life and passion are found (P 21) than in principalities and the latter can defeat the former only by force, not by any self-improvement. In chapter IX, discussing civil principalities, Machiavelli erodes the distinction between the republic and the principality by expressing the idea that principalities can acquire from republics certain techniques; for instance, the support of fellow citizens, a bulwark of republican government, can be useful to principalities.

In this manner Machiavelli proffers reasons for the superiority of the republican form, which can in some way be borrowed by principalities which lack virtue or fortune (or power through crime) by relying on citizens’ support. The people are more “decent” (P 39)⁸⁹ than the great; and they also have more power to threaten the authority of the prince if they are not kept friendly to him. In these two instances Machiavelli presents his subjective opinion couched in a manner so as to be read by a prince without him reacting negatively. Machiavelli is no objective, aloof analyst. We especially see this in the last words of his work, where he quotes, with rhetorical flourish, Plutarch’s Italia Mia to urge Lorenzo to act in a patriotic manner Machiavelli personally deems necessary (P 101).

A second example of the way in which Machiavelli does not claim or believe in objectivity but in fact integrates his subjective experience into his theoretical assertions is visible in the way that his own life informs his works. This process is evident in his poetry, as we saw in Chapter 1, for in many instances he refers to situations that are uncannily familiar to those who know about his own life. His attempt to struggle for the restoration of the republic, his subsequent imprisonment, and banishment from political life after 1513 are all reflected in his poem The Ass. Personal difficulties made him feel “useless” and having a “sad fate” as he says in a letter to Vemacci in 1515 (CW 964) and this may have influenced his conception of ingratitude in his poem On Ingratitude. We can also add the character of Nicomaco, in Clizia, as a stand-in for Machiavelli himself in a self-derisive work.⁹⁰

The perspicacious biography of Machiavelli by Viroli, Niccolo’s Smile, points to many instances where Machiavelli’s own life informed his insights into politics as well as into life in general. Viroli asserts that much of Machiavelli’s own life led to his statements regarding the human condition in general. What he learned from reading the ancients was supplemented by what he “learned in the streets . . . of Florence”⁹¹ and produced his works from this. We could say the same thing about any author, but in fact many authors, thinkers, and philosophers claim a personal detachment or objectivity from their thoughts that Machiavelli would reject.⁹²

Similarly, Nietzsche exalts subjective experience. He sees the ideas and writings of a man as synonymous with the person. In an early letter to his friend Carl von Gersdorff, he shows that creating one’s own brand of writing is imperative, for it shows one’s uniqueness. He writes that “no man has a good style by nature, that one must at the uphill job of acquiring one.”⁹³ From The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche moved to the conception that the search for truth is a particular expression of the will to power, that is the release and expenditure of one’s energy (see for instance BGE I 1-2). He also saw believers in the supremacy of truth as fanatical to the extent that they derived this drive from outside oneself: hence Nietzsche finds authenticity when a drive is rooted inside oneself, that is, subjectively, or when writers admit to the existence of the drives in themselves. Nietzsche tells us that there is a point in every philosopher’s work where his own views are evident and this taints their claim to objectivity:

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (and immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

BGE 2 6 203, emphasis added

In this manner Nietzsche shares with Machiavelli the belief that man cannot know the world as if it were a purely external thing; rather, man must of necessity make certain claims about things that are rooted in his own personal perspective and can only make guided guesses about things in the world.⁹⁴ Man is part of the world; he does not stand above it. Science as a rational optimism (which is how Nietzsche believed Socrates understood it) is a delusion—for truth often hurts, rather than helps humans (BT 75; BGE 2 39). In his “diagnosis” of contemporary European culture, Nietzsche finds that the objectivity purported by scientists and other purists actually hides a weakness, indeed a sickness of the will, which is in fact a weak skepticism. Nietzsche finds in the subjective sense of the real philosopher a strength to affirm life; the skeptic, for him, fears either the Yes or the No and remains in a sort of limbo (BGE 6 208). Nietzsche’s sort of continuous inquiry requires an intrepid attitude. The skeptic is sick with a “paralysis of the will,” a sclerosis born from being much too at home with one’s scientific convictions.

However, Nietzsche sees another sort of skepticism that is superior and possible. The fearlessness that Nietzsche favors goes to the root of seeking to inquire about oneself, but with the belief that there is something unique deep in one’s constitution that has to be expressed critically in real life.⁹⁵ This skepticism is rooted in a sense of oneself. Early in his philosophical career, Nietzsche provides an account of his valuation of subjectivity in his rich and limpid text Schopenhauer as Educator. “Be yourself!”⁹⁶ is his exhortation. It is the call that comes out of an incisive reading of Schopenhauer. In this work Nietzsche tells us that every great philosophy has a challenge before it and that is to create an image of life and from it to develop the meaning of a particular life. Hence, he calls on the reader to “read only your life, and from this understand the hieroglyphs of universal life!”⁹⁷ One must begin from one’s own experience, but interestingly enough Nietzsche believes that this is something to be done not only for oneself, but also for all persons that exist: “to begin with yourself; but eventually through oneself, for all.”⁹⁸

There is a sense in which universality is thus present in Nietzsche. Yet this desire to show to others why one’s perspective is more cogent that others is not bound to the notion that reason, morality, and the world possess an inherent order that can be found through human rationality, as the Platonic aim seeks to show. For Nietzsche, to make universal claims one must be grounded in one’s personal, partial experience. And this is something that he saw in Machiavelli’s Prince as a cure for the disease of Platonism. Reality as such holds no immanent internal order that can be discovered through abstract thought. Nietzsche believes Machiavelli is one of the two thinkers who most adequately counter the Platonic idea that specific terms—such as “reason” or “morality” have a stable, fixed meaning that is tied to some eternal essence. There is no reason to reason, i.e., there is no inherent structure or pattern the way human thought works and ascertains what is. Machiavelli also helps Nietzsche see that this is also the case in morality, as there is no fixed, universal order to the moral concepts that we use.

[W]hen reformers indulge in politics, as Luther did, one sees that they are just as much followers of Machiavelli as any immoralist or tyrant.

Nietzsche WP 211

Of Virtù and Will to Power

Nietzsche’s embracing of Machiavelli is also owed to the fact that he sees him as a radical critic of Christian values, at least those understood conventionally. Not only does he see in him a vision of a broken, tragicomic world that he himself discerns, but he also finds that the Florentine undermines the potency of Christianity by arguing that it cannot reform politics by making it ethical. Machiavelli never directly assails Christianity in the ruthless manner that Nietzsche does as in The Antichrist; yet he argues that Christianity is effete, emasculating, and distracting, for it proffers values like humility, suffering, and otherworldly contemplation rather than civic action and a quest for glory. For Machiavelli Christianity is inherently tied to making the people, those under the Divine King (God) feel guilty. This is what makes them effeminate, according to Machiavelli. For Nietzsche, Christ’s teaching was not originally intended to focus on guilt, but the Church established this as a ruling principle of the religion.

In one his entries of his unpublished notes Nietzsche makes a statement similar to the above quotation found in WP. “In the end the Christian prince, too, practises the politics of Machiavelli: assuming, that is, he doesn’t practise bad politics.”⁹⁹ Here Nietzsche is even more explicit in wholeheartedly embracing Machiavellian politics as the true, accurate, and proper way to engage in the practice of politics. Nietzsche agrees with the Machiavellian estimation that to be effective in political life one must disengage from everyday morality. It is particularly Christian morality that is the antipodal view of the Machiavellian insight, for it claims to possess a clear-cut definition of right and wrong, a doctrine of sin, and a theory of punishment to be meted out not by a worldly magistrate but a divine ruler. For Nietzsche, as for Machiavelli, authority and its concomitants standards of right and wrong, good and bad, are born from earthly processes of power.

Rulers and politicians who claim to act out of Christian motivations, Nietzsche tell us, in reality simply follow Machiavelli’s tenets for acquiring, maintaining and utilizing power. That is, if they are effective rulers and politicians. For Nietzsche a political man who does not understand and act on such tenets is an inept one. Christian morality is merely a façade that belies the desire for power. But what is the theory of power that explains what really motivates the ruler? This is what Machiavelli and Nietzsche posit as an alternative to the ethical, Christian view that politics should be about achieving justice. What they argue is that there is an aesthetic motivation in the political man. For Machiavelli the notion of virtù is the key concept, while for Nietzsche it is will to power. These notions are related to each other through their sense of aesthetic practice.

Virtù as Aesthetic Action

As I define it in previous chapters, Machiavelli’s understanding of virtù has a meaning more complex than selfless civic action in the service of one’s country. The notion refers to Machiavelli’s philosophical anthropology. It represents a rare ability found in the character of some men. This ability rests on innate talent, but also requires cultivation through practice. There are three qualities that it comprises: foresight, flexibility, and defiance. When these appear in concert, they can be expressed in three areas: independence, acquisition, and appearance. The effective result of this exercise of abilities in these fields allows for autonomy and freedom through the construction of order, unity and peace. This is the logic that Machiavelli seems to be employing when understanding the notion of virtù as a human capacity.¹⁰⁰

Clearly what strikes us at first, and what is known to be one his central innovations, is his disregard for moral concepts in his understanding of virtù. Virtue as understood by Christianity entails following the rules set down by its religious tenets. In its place Machiavelli wants to promote the idea that one reaches certain rules through experience. The quality of foresight, to be able to see in advance what will come, entails a mastery of the notion of new-ness. Imagination is at work when one needs to anticipate the future. And this ability requires the mental movement from the present to the future, from one “now I” to another “now II.” This is the essence of modernism, for the term refers to the present, to the “now” of a particular moment, even before it refers to the “new-ness” of something.

Machiavelli also tells us that it is important, though difficult, to be flexible according to the times. Most men’s natures are fixed, yet there is something in some of us that allows us to alter them a little to suit the circumstances. This relative “transformation” of one’s character is indeed a movement from one form to another. The movement from one form or shape to another requires knowledge about various forms if one is to do it successfully. For this, understanding of action as form-giving is necessary, for a unity to one’s new “character” or persona can only succeed if the elements of the new form are well grasped. If one is unwilling to be flexible, one lacks this quality.

The final quality that makes up virtù is that of defiance. What this stands for is a transgressive attitude that urges critical questioning of received ideas and values. In part this seems to be present in Machiavelli through the “expression” of the quality of courage that is tied to defiance. Through virtù, Machiavelli seems to assert, a man can allow the manifestation or expression of his innate capacity to have courage. However, it also seems to be linked to the idea that something new can only come about by crossing the boundaries of present norms or rules. This transgression thus allows for the development of new forms of living.

Freedom, for most readers of Machiavelli, means the capacity of a group of citizens to establish their own laws, to not be subject to another city’s rule. But perhaps the essence of Machiavelli’s notion of freedom can best be grasped if we recall his tale of the running boy in his poem The Ass (see Chapter 1). There, Machiavelli contrasts the freedom of the young, defiant child to the rigid rules of the “medicaster” or doctor that tries to control him. In this image, we can see a sense of “play” that is not unlike the disinterested pleasure and free enjoyment that is linked to the aesthetic attitude. A return to such a feeling of independence through action may be what Machiavelli has in mind, especially after his disillusionment that comes from the his own tragic separation from civic life.

Will to Power as Virtuoso Action

Perhaps no concept is at the same time more central and more nebulous in Nietzsche’s thinking than “will to power.” As is well known, Walter Kaufmann considered it the kernel of Nietzsche’s teaching.¹⁰¹ Martin Heidegger saw the notes that make up the text Will to Power (arranged by Nietzsche’s sister) as Nietzsche’s principal work for its propounding of what he saw as Nietzsche’s metaphysics. Yet it cannot be denied that there is no extensive exposition of the notion anywhere in Nietzsche’s texts, and that the notes that make up that publication were not intended by Nietzsche to be a cohesive, final work. Nonetheless, the same can be said for any of the key Nietzschean concepts, such as the Eternal Return and the Overman. Moreover the works that preceded WP were not entirely paragons of expository writing.¹⁰²

Still, the concept is indeed cardinal in Nietzsche’s opus. Nietzsche was indeed confusing about it, for he appears to have various meanings at different times for this notion. One way to come to terms with what will to power means is to understand it from the vantagepoint of Machiavelli’s concept of virtù. With this approach, we can approximate at least one of the meanings that Nietzsche seemed to be trying to provide for the term.¹⁰³

Nietzsche’s ambiguous term appears infrequently in his writings. The confusion around it centers on the fact that Nietzsche at points seems to claim that Wille zur Macht is a human quality; at others, that it is a quality of all life; and yet in other instances he appears to declare that it is the fundamental quality of the world. Hence it is not clear if he understands the term as ontological, cosmological, or metaphysical. Perhaps he meant it to be all three, but this adds to the confusion.

Will to power depends largely on Nietzsche’s understanding of Will in Schopenhauer, as I stated before.¹⁰⁴ Because Nietzsche is nowhere explicit about what part of his once-admired “idol” he wants to reject and what part he wants to retain, what we have is tenuous, yet pivotal concept. Schopenhauer’s philosophy saw the world as Will; Nietzsche appears at times to follow him: “This world . . . a monster of energy, without beginning, without end . . . this world is the will to power—and nothing besides!” (WP 1067). But it is Schopenhauer’s awareness of English utilitarianism that tells us what Nietzsche seems to want to do: to reject a simple hedonistic perspective that claims humans basically seek pleasure and abhor pain. Exploitation, for instance, is part of the essence of what lives; it is a consequence of will to power.¹⁰⁵ Hence for Nietzsche pain and pleasure are not antinomies that represent the guiding lights of human motivation or action.

At this point we can introduce Machiavelli’s notion of virtù to shed light on Nietzsche’s concept of will to power. The critique of a simple avoidance of pain that Nietzsche carries out has a parallel in Machiavelli, for Machiavelli does not want to give credence to the notion that avoiding pain is the key human trait. For Machiavelli the term virtù, rooted in the Latin word vir, which means man, implies an archetype of male toughness and courage that actually seeks out danger and pain in order to prove itself. Let us hear Nietzsche’s words: “I judge the power of a will according to how much resistance, pain, torture it can endure and; given this yardstick, far be it from me to reproach the evil and painful side of man.”¹⁰⁶ Here is where the transgressive quality is manifested, as “lust for adventure.”¹⁰⁷ This is the root of the term and it is the basis on which Machiavelli posits the “maleness” of his ethics, however machista, misogynistic, or simple it may appear to modern minds.¹⁰⁸

In lieu of a simple hedonistic calculus, Nietzsche wants to underscore the idea that “drive” (Trieb) is what will seems to be connected to. Taking another cue from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche finds that drives inhere in humans qua biological beings. Against a Heideggerian interpretation of will to power as metaphysical, in effect what Nietzsche does is to locate the will in relation to drives which are themselves part of the somatic, animal, and physio-psychological aspects of man:

Suppose all organic functions were traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of procreation and nourishment . . . then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power

BGE 36

Flesh and blood envelop the will, and it is not, we can argue, a substance in the sense that Aristotle would propose. Again the link with Machiavelli’s virtù is clear: for Machiavelli the daring that a man must show is principally in risking his body. This would require a “discharging of strength” (BGE 13). Death and pain are the currency of Machiavelli’s trade. But more specifically, the quality of flexibility that I describe above requires a somatic self-control that is related to the body’s humors, sensations, and dispositions. For Machiavelli the trans formation of a man from the “manly” to the “beastly” is not purely mental or moral; it also requires a change in one’s actions in the world and towards others.

This is one point of tension between the two thinkers. For Nietzsche, even if will appears to be located in the midst of such a corporeal locus, this does not mean that it is fundamentally expressed physically.¹⁰⁹ For him, it would seem, “will” becomes “will to power” in the mind. It may be true that will exists, and it exists as linked to basic, inchoate drives. Yet for it to be called “a will that makes” (as the German term seems to imply) it requires a particular orientation that can only be given in the mind, not in physicality. Nietzsche does appear to reject free will, but will to power seems to have at least a moment of freedom in the mind, when a particular drive is chosen by a person, mentally, as the ordering principle of his or her word.¹¹⁰ This is why Nietzsche calls philosophy, the love of wisdom, “the tyrannical urge itself, the most spiritual will to power” (BGE 9).

If the drive that one chooses to become dominant (in one’s mind) is allowed to supersede others most of the time, it will have an affirmative, explanatory value for the person vis-à-vis the world.¹¹¹ This dominant drive is really not one towards mastery of the world. It is one towards ordering and justifying, in the sense that one may use it as the reason behind the fact of one’s existence. This is what explains why Nietzsche tends to favor artists and authors over men of politics as his paragons: he finds them more emblematic of the mental process that he is interested in, viz. the moment of choice in which a drive is chosen as a world-ordering principle.

The ordering of the world allows a simultaneous process of self-mastery because subordinate drives or values are kept in check by the dominant drive. Thus, while the choice of drive may not necessarily be done for the purpose of self-mastery, this may in effect be one of its results. Thus the process of world-ordering is intimately tied to self-mastery as if in a mirror play. But for this, the element of time is crucial.

Because the world-ordering process allows for a self-mastery, the desire to have a mastery of the self or soul requires keen knowledge and understanding of the times in which one lives. For Nietzsche, will to power is effective only to the extent that it faces things in the world and persons in the world aptly, that is, fitting the temporal context. This involves both a timing of actions and the exercise of actions in accordance to the times in which one lives, that is to say the social and cultural conditions.

This is what brings into play what we might call the art of time. Nietzsche does not favor reckless, anarchic action. The model of the artist, and more specifically the musician, is important. Rhythm is of the essence; timing of notes, of actions, allows for a style that is cohesive, even if not uniform. The music that emerges comes out over time, it becomes and develops slowly into a whole that is effective if timed well. Again Nietzsche sees that artists, especially musicians and poets, have such a talent. And to the extent that a writer writes poetically, he also shares in this talent.

How is this related to Machiavelli’s sense of virtù? We must recall that the third element or quality that I suggest makes up virtù is foresight. Machiavelli tells us that knowing one’s times and how to act at the right moment is part of what makes for a good man of politics. A man of politics who is able to discern current and future conditions in order to gauge his actions, informed by things past (history), is engaging in virtuoso action. Knowledge of the past, present, and future, both from a wide perspective as well as from a momentary one, is essential for a man to engage his flexibility and transgressive qualities at the appropriate instance.

If we see the will to power as virtù, we recognize that Nietzsche has something in mind similar to what Machiavelli does when he conceives of the “fields” in which virtù is expressed. As I said above, for Machiavelli the attributes of foresight, flexibility, and defiance can manifest themselves on three different fields, independence, acquisition, and appearance. The second is the most important, and here is where we can elucidate further Nietzsche’s notion of will to power.

If we understand will to power as the desire or ability to “make things your own,” we approach a notion like acquisition in Machiavelli, as I explained in Chapter 2.¹¹² This attitude of appropriation allows an ordering of the world that makes it more intelligible and therefore makes one (at least feel) stronger. Looking out into the world and being able to explain it is one example of this. This is why Nietzsche reduces the will to truth to will to power (Z II 12).¹¹³ But the intellectual sphere is not the only one where this occurs; will to power is omnipresent. Just as Machiavelli was concerned in explaining how to make the world your own or appearing to do so, Nietzsche understands will to power as appropriation. This is what he means when he explains the morality of loving our fellows: “Our love of neighbor—is it not a lust for new possessions?” (GS 14). Of course Nietzsche does not mean to say that will to power is only (or even primarily) the acquisition of material possessions. What he means is the acquisition of a grasp, a comprehension of the world in one’s own terms. This is a parallel to Machiavelli’s study of acquisition in the prince and in the republic.

Having said all this, Nietzsche does seem to have in mind a meaning wider in breadth than Machiavelli’s virtù. This is because the remarks that he makes about will to power sometimes include all of life, not just human beings, and not just some great human beings. To understand the concept from a metaphysical perspective, however, seems to fly in the face of the naturalist, and explicitly anti-metaphysical perspective that Nietzsche posits as his own.

To make the notion of will to power clearer and more cogent, a perspective grounded on the human being is most appropriate. For this reason the ties to Machiavelli’s concept of virtù are useful. Because Nietzsche seems ambivalent about free will, however, we must treat will to power as a nascent potentiality in all, whereas virtù is a rare capacity in some. What this means is that will to power may not easily be called to action and may not be manifested in the world as easily as virtù is. Virtù itself is rare, but it seems will to power, properly understood as that which develops from an inchoate potential to something that allows self-mastery, is even more rare.

The way that Nietzsche understands will to power, however, is ineluctably tied to virtù. In a passage in The Antichrist he tell us,

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself . . . . Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtù), virtue that is moraline-free ¹¹⁴

Much like the Machiavellian prince’s need to acquire power, the Nietzschean Overman must express his unique approach to life in a way that is courageous and transgressive (‘war’). He must be agonistic, and not have the contentedness of a being like the pig in Machiavelli’s Ass. And he must have the flexibility that comes with Machiavelli’s understanding of virtue. For fitness flexibility is needed; and fitness allows strength and a longer life. Like an athlete who must avoid nicotine and caffeine, the new man should avoid “moraline,” i.e., thinking in terms of a Manichean ethics. Specifically, it cannot be the ethics of Christianity. For as Machiavelli tells us,

Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative more than active men. It has then placed the highest good in humility, abjectness, and contempt of things human; the [pagan] placed it in greatness of spirit, strength of body, and all other things capable of making men very strong.

D II 2.2

Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche wants to undermine Christianity and remove it from the base of Western civilization. For this, both find inspiration in the ancients: the Italian primarily in his “ancestors” the Romans of antiquity, and the German in pre-Socratic Greece. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and both seek to establish new bases for the West from their study of the strengths and weaknesses of the ancients.

Conclusion

Few thinkers receive the kind of approval—and even praise—that Nietzsche bequeaths on Machiavelli. There are some important distinctions between the aims of the two, yet the overall intention that Nietzsche sees in Machiavelli is found to be on target. True, Nietzsche finds Machiavelli’s critique of conventional Christianity somewhat superficial, for it does not psychoanalyze the notion of guilt, for instance. Yet on the whole the Machiavellian perspective on the world is what Nietzsche believes is necessary in order to achieve things, to create lasting, admirable, life-redeeming events.

Much like the ideal that Machiavelli creates in the mythologized image of Borgia, a prototype of (im)moral perfection that never quite existed in reality (as we saw in Chapter 2), for Nietzsche “Machiavellianism” is the theoretically perfect separation of a desire to create great things and the personal cost that it might entail. This is what Nietzsche means when he says that virtù (the capacity to act with force, foresight, flexibility, and creativity in order to produce something grand) can be made to dominate only when one is willing to renounce being virtuous in a conventional sense.¹¹⁵ This explains the statement by Nietzsche from Will to Power with which we open the present chapter: pure, untarnished, raw, green, strong, pungent virtue is that which is human, natural, perceived through the senses, worldly, and not one that is abstract, clean, rational, and moral—in a word, Platonic-Christian. For Nietzsche Machiavellian virtù is an organic human capability possessed by the few, the ability to remain untouched by moral pangs when acting for the sake of a great purpose, for the “grand politics of virtue” (WP 304). Of course, few humans can really remain unharmed by such immorality or amorality, hence the theoretical perfection of Machiavellianism as a principle. It is anti-Platonism, the opposite number of the Platonic ideal, something so rare as to be almost just an ideal. Thus Nietzsche describes it as “superhuman” and only approximated in reality. For Nietzsche virtù is the real-world manifestation of Will to Power when put to use adequately, correctly. This occurs in the foundation of new states, new morals, and new ways of life that transcend the simplistic, unreal, and harmful denigration of this world by worldviews such as Platonism and Pauline Christianity.

From vastly different historical and political contexts yet from similar philosophical perspectives, Machiavelli and Nietzsche seek a rejuvenation of the West. This process involves a radical critique of Christian values and the establishing of a new way of looking at the world beyond conventional moral codes. Despite almost four hundred years between them, Machiavelli and Nietzsche possess a similar structure to their philosophical approaches. It is from this that we can affirm that there is an underlying bond between the two. This bond is born from a similar predisposition to approach moral-philosophic problems not from an abstract deontological-normative position but from one that is rooted in the actual, lived experience of human beings. This position is one that depends on cognition through the senses to acquire knowledge; thus, it is aesthetic.

While not fitting the traditional mold, Machiavelli was a philosopher who wrote historical, comic, and tragic works. He was a political historian, but not a political scientist, as we moderns understand the term.¹¹⁶ Contrary to the common belief that Machiavelli was one of the founders of the kind of modern view of man as the potentially unbounded shaper of the world, we see from the above account that he in fact is the founder of a modern view of life that sees man as severely limited and constrained by the nature of the world, time, and his own nature.

Machiavelli and Nietzsche share these philosophical points about the nature of the world: The significant presence of unintelligibility in certain respects is what comes about from the multiple causation of events in the world;¹¹⁷ the lack of self-control is what emerges from the competing antinomies in human being; the deterioration of human achievements is what comes from the frenzied run of time; and the incapacity to ascertain a universal, scientific account of the world is what makes man by necessity draw inwardly to his own subjective experience.

This view is tragic/existential, and not proto-scientific or an adumbration of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche shares with him the same ethos; and this subjective perspective in which harm and agonism are pervasive leads to their conception of the world as fundamentally amoral. As a consequence, they believe the justification for human existence lies in the idea of man as shaper or artist in the world. But because they see a variety of oppositions to a truly free imposition of human will upon the world, they possess a view of action that is closer to an aesthetic one that struggles to achieve some degree of order rather that complete, masterly control as a scientistic, or techne-based view would have it. This view is much more skeptical than that given by the demiurgic view of man in other writers in the humanist tradition with whom Machiavelli and Nietzsche have sometimes been confused.

If the philosophic grounds on which the two authors stand are similar, what do they propose as an alternative to conventional political theorizing? What they provide is a way to understand value-creation through aesthetic means and categories. The means are artistic, and the categories are drawn from aesthetic theory. Rather than to seek logical proofs of what the best way to live is, they rely on metaphor and story-telling to persuade us to embrace particular values that they espouse.

For Nietzsche, “Machiavellianism” is “perfection in politics” (WP 304). What he means is that one must recognize Machiavelli’s basic insight: that any new founder of constitutions or ways of life (ethics)—if he or she is to be effective—has to be able to separate conventional morality from the doing of great deeds. These are political acts even if they are not formally matters of state, because they entail power and sets of values that are to affect communities of people. Value-creation is inherently political because it is grounded on an assertion of particular power, and on a separation of simple morality from the acts of a founder. We explore the aesthetic nature of value creation in their work in the next chapter, as we follow Nietzschean themes in Machiavelli’s plays and in the Machiavellianism of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. By “Zarathustra” we mean Nietzsche’s idea of the man who brings new and radical values, to the text by the same name, and to Nietzsche himself, who sometimes wrote his words under this self-styled pseudonym in his belief that he was the prophet of a radical break with the Western tradition.

Notes

1

Letter to Francesco Guicciardini written circa 21 October 1525 (in Capata p. 962). See CW 987.

2

Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” p. 70-71.

3

See, e.g., BGE 4 197, where Nietzsche describes him as a healthy, “tropical” (intemperate) man. Also, EH III 1. Safranski recognizes that Borgia is indeed one of Nietzsche’s central paragons yet does not elaborate on the idea that Nietzsche tends to find nobility “primarily in the Italian Renaissance,” something that could have led him to see the import of Machiavelli for Nietzsche (See Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, p. 264-5). Kaufmann does not believe Nietzsche endorses the example of Cesare Borgia (See Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 224-225). The reason this may appear correct is that Borgia’s life does not evince a philosophical self-consciousness that Nietzsche would endorse; his life was pure action. However, for Nietzsche this in itself is one of the many forms a higher spirit may take in the world of man (see also Conway, p. 22, fn. 11).

4

In the sense defined in Chapter 1, following Walter Kaufmann.

5

As George Kateb points out, the “aesthetic” is tied to a human craving.

6

I take it that this notion, claiming Nietzsche provides an alternative form of modernism, is what Gooding-Williams seeks to put forward (See Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism).

7

The world or cosmos has no telos for either thinker. For Nietzsche, individuals can have a telos in the sense of possessing a goal or objective for personal improvement (“My idea of happiness? A goal!”). “Self-perfection,” in my view, is too strong a term to use for Nietzsche’s view of potential individual betterment.

8

Socrates is his life-long companion and adversary in an otherwise solitary life; Schopenhauer is a main inspiration while in his youth, but also a life-long influence.

9

See Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment, p. 26.

10

Middleton, p. 12.

11

One important difference, moreover, is that Nietzsche believes (not entirely justifiably) that his brand of philosophy is a new form of “science” of man (as a genealogy of moral notions), whereas Machiavelli does not.

12

Leo Strauss reminds us that Machiavelli does not mention the word in his two main works (See Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 200).

13

Viroli 2000, p. 4.

14

See Mansfield 1966, p. 41.

15

While Machiavelli is motivated by the idea of political glory, this is much less a “moral” notion than Nietzsche’s ambitious desire to cultivate the soul. In this manner Hulliung errs in claiming that Machiavelli is not a “prophet of life ‘beyond good and evil’” (Hulliung, p. 6). Glory can be understood in aesthetic, rather than ethical terms, as something that inspires awe and resplendent admiration, not moral value.

16

This is one idea that militates against seeing Machiavelli as the first “modem” thinker, if modernity is understood (in the manner that Mansfield does) as having the objective of having unhindered human control over the world.

17

And, arguably, in personal affairs, if we consider his plays as descriptive of private life deprived of the codes of ethics.

18

See BGE I 15 23.

19

Which means the absence, or collapse, of credible moral authorities and the ensuing desire to find meaning even in things that are counter to human life itself (such as Christian ideas). See BGE I 10.

20

See Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction, p. 126.

21

Once in HH, BGE, TI, GS and four times in WP, even though Nietzsche did not publish this last text. The Intelex© database of the Nietzsche Werke Kritische Gesamtaugabe was also used for review of the notes. The terms Machiavelli, Machiavellianism, and The Prince were the foci.

22

Berlin, p. 71 (emphasis added).

23

This is the underlying assumption behind the notion that politics itself is irreconcilably divided or “broken” into two realms, one for the prince and one for the people (Ankersmit, p. 119).

24

Machiavelli goes back to his study to glean the wisdom of the ancients; Nietzsche is grounded in classical philology.

25

Machiavelli’s “new modes and orders” and Nietzsche’s “new seas.”

26

Machiavelli does so through republican politics and art’s beauty; Nietzsche through life-affirmation.

27

Ankersmit recognizes Machiavelli’s existential ethos (Ankersmit, p. 133). For Berlin, as well as for Ankersmit, Machiavelli’s “existential” or “broken” world leads to the fragmentation that validates the liberal perspective on pluralism. They do not recognize that Machiavelli’s point of view is also fraught with violence in a manner not amenable to (deontological) liberal purposes.

28

Wendy Brown’s use of the term “alienat[ion]” (Brown, p. 77) to describe the way Machiavelli sees man to be on earth is apt for our understanding of Machiavelli’s existential view. She rightly sees this as a result of the tension between man’s animal and rational tendencies, but it is also a result of man’s inability to ascertain his role and path in life. (I use gendered language consciously, as I believe Machiavelli speaks of the male when he uses the word man).

29

The tension or stress felt by man is not a moral one. It is not a problem of “dirty hands,” as Mark Hulliung rightly points out (Hulliung, p. 54). The tension arises from the recognition of fundamental uncertainty about the world, not from one’s conscience.

30

See Ansell-Pearson, p. 38.

31

The context for Machiavelli is the “lack of coherence and symmetry in the Renaissance conception of the world,” as Chabod writes (Chabod, p. 185-186).

32

One is reminded of Ortega y Gasset’s expression, “I am myself and my circumstances.”

33

Aphorism n=11344 of KGA. One influence on Nietzsche that seems to have urged for a valuation of Machiavelli is his Swiss friend Jacob Burckhardt. The Renaissance historian admired Machiavelli’s aestheticization of politics where the state is a work of art. (See The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Penguin).

34

This idea is similar to Strauss’ underlining of Machiavelli’s “pairs of opposites” (Strauss, p. 61).

35

As we saw in Chapter 2’s discussion of The Prince.

36

This “decentralized” conception of the world is similar to what Vattimo finds in Nietzsche (see Vattimo, p. 124).

37

Metaphysics understood as the investigation of the structure and nature of reality. Machiavelli’s is a realist metaphysics (if we seek to reconstitute it from his writings).

38

Here we see the underlying reason why Machiavelli’s Ass tells not one but many stories, all related to the one protagonist. The tensions male-female, boy-man, and man-animal in the poem are examples of the author’s view of the complexity of the human character.

39

See D III. 19, where Machiavelli explains how cruelty (‘punishment’) and humanity (‘compliance’) are most effective when intimately related to each other, rather than in opposition.

40

Hence Machiavelli posits a sort of “anti-utilitarian” view in which the degree of pain experienced or felt is much more important, in the lives of people and in the political effects of actions, than the degree of pleasure. Machiavelli does share with the utilitarian the idea that pain and pleasure are key components of the human character, yet he rejects the idea that pleasure-seeking is natural. What is natural is the recognition that pain is the most powerful human sentiment and that its manipulation is the most effective form of acting on others.

41

This is particularly evident in The Ass.

42

The category of “man” may be further broken into possibly boy-male or male-female.

43

Machiavelli and Nietzsche have different conceptions of the will. For Machiavelli, human volition is a distinct faculty that can guide, to some extent, drives. For Nietzsche, the will is the strongest drive in each person.

44

See Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p.78.

45

The original source for Nietzsche may be Plato, as in many things; yet Nietzsche shares with Machiavelli the idea that the competing drives are not naturally controlled by reason. In BGE, Nietzsche refers to immorality (“deception, selfishness, and lust”) as part of the fundamental value of life and as in unity with “seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence” (BGE I 2).

46

See BGE II 36 where he claims all efficient (hence net, or actually prevailing) force is will to power. I examine this notion at greater length in Chapter 5.

47

This points to Nietzsche’s dualist metaphysics. It is neither purely realist or idealist.

48

See BGE I 19, where Nietzsche refers to the will as “manifold,” and hence not unitary. It is more like the effect of a relationship between factors than a free capacity. Moreover, he does not see antinomies, but rather “degrees of apparentness” in the world, which is reflected in his epistemological perspectivism (BGE II 34).

49

Machiavelli’s understanding of God is an important and as of yet uncertain question. It is, regrettably, beyond the scope of this work because Machiavelli does not address it at length.

50

The doctrine that cycles exist in history (as expressed in the Discourses) cannot determine future occurrences. It is merely based on Machiavelli’s idea that, while human beings are fickle, human nature itself is limited in its possibilities and hence is constant throughout history; therefore similar events will recur in diverse locations. The human being is, for Machiavelli, made up of a set number of humors that inhere in him or her, but which are in constant flux. Thus there is some general constancy (in the sense that the same humors are always present and always in the same number) yet they change in relative power (hence the unpredictability of human behavior).

51

David Owen has a useful discussion of the concept (see Owen, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity, pp. 132-154).

52

While not explicitly described as such, the cycle of regeneration is expressive of the agonism between the male and the female, a theme that is recurring in Machiavelli’s thought and writings. The agonism virtù-Fortuna is the paradigmatic case.

53

Parel, with the idea of the relationship the humors to planetary motion, supports the idea that Machiavelli’s theory of life and politics is characterized by a “naturalism” (Parel, p. 101).

54

See Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, p. 314.

55

Medieval political thinkers also saw struggle as the process of life: a struggle between good and evil as understood by Christian ideas. It was not a fully earthly, human struggle, for it tended to reject the body and exalt the spiritual domain. It also did not view social groups as the chief entities of this underlying struggle, but rather it was the conscience and soul of individual man.

56

The “war” and facing of enemies are principally in the realms of critique or philosophy, but they extend beyond these (see BGE 4 76 for a view of Nietzsche’s “self-critique”).

57

See Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art, Chapter I, passim.

58

Nietzsche’s philosophy of life-affirmation may appear to be “optimistic” at one level, yet is rests on a “pessimistic” view of existence and of man in its acceptance of the tragic and of evil.

59

Another form of the class struggle nature of life is the agonism between males and females, as Nietzsche sees it. He expresses this tension between the genders in such notions as “Buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone” (‘good women and bad women want the stick’), BGE 4 147.

60

This term is Herbert Spencer’s, the English sociologist and philosopher whose ideas on evolution predate those of Darwin and Wallace. See his Principles of Biology [1864], vol. 1, p. 444). Spencer’s proposition that science and the individual have preeminence over religion and society are often mistakenly attributed to Nietzsche’s writings as well. Nietzsche does not advocate a simple preeminence of the individual, but rather of a particular sort of heroic individual within a societal, cultural context.

61

See BGE I 13.

62

See Schacht, p. 268-269.

63

Herodotus opens his Histories by declaring that he writes them “to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time” (p. 3). Perhaps this is the reason for Machiavelli’s choice to engage in historiography, reflecting his existential concern with perdurability.

64

Machiavelli’s cyclical sense of history is in a sense parallel to Nietzsche’s “eternal return.” For Nietzsche this is a conceptual, not cosmological, stance towards the self. It encourages living one life as if its conditions were always to be repeated. Similarly, Machiavelli urges the individual to live as if he were facing the same, recurring patterns. Both see time as “endless,” against which only a kind of attitude can help “overcome” it.

65

It is not clear how this statement squares with Nietzsche’s prediction that modern democracy will lead to the decay and dissolution of the state (HH 8 472). Nietzsche writes, in that section, that modern democracy erodes the boundary between private and public, after religion has lost its grip in a non-tutelary state. He then predicts that a privatization of the state will occur. This has both positive and negative consequences. Nietzsche seems to say that there are some things to be rescued from this process, such as the refinement of the instincts of prudence and self-interest. He also states that chaos will not ensue. However, the passage has a general tone of critique, as it ends with a hope that the state be preserved. Nietzsche shares with Machiavelli the preoccupation with preservation and durability, but does not think the state is the non plus ultra form.

66

Whereas the will to power, the desire for self-realization, is evident as the desire for freedom among the oppressed and as the desire to overcome among a stronger type, Nietzsche tells us in this passage. This understanding matches that of Machiavelli, who considers the wish to be free, not to be oppressed, the desire of the people, and the desire to oppress the key desire of the few (cf. D I.5.2). Hence the implication is that at least for Nietzsche there really are three types of men: the weak, the strong, and the strongest. It is a struggle for eminence within the ruling class, the highest men.

67

Nonetheless, since he gives room to free will, virtù can master the world to an appreciable degree.

68

Aristotle is always aware that human beings can fail to reach their telos and that failure is the norm. Nonetheless he believes that human excellence as a possible realization exists, whereas for Machiavelli this conception of potential perfection is not present.

69

In early Western physiological theory, the humors were fluids of the body that were thought to determine a person’s temperament and features. In the ancient physiological theory still current in the European Middle Ages and later, the four cardinal humors were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). The ideal person had a proportioned mixture of the four; a predominance of one produced a person who was sanguine (Latin sanguis, “blood”), phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. Each complexion had specific characteristics, and the words carried much weight that they have since lost: e.g., the choleric man was not only quick to anger but also yellow-faced, lean, hairy, proud, ambitious, revengeful, and shrewd. By extension, “humor” in the sixteenth century came to denote an unbalanced mental condition, a mood or unreasonable caprice, or a fixed folly or vice. (From Encyclopedia Britannica, “Humour”).

70

See Parel, Chapter I, passim.

71

This may be due to the fact that the people posses more phlegm while the great possess more yellow bile, but Machiavelli does not expound on this.

72

See Pitkin, “Introduction,” passim. Against the idea, see Mansfield 1966, 37-38.

73

When the humors are out of balance, a situation is thus “humorous.”

74

Here we see how porous the term “himself” is, since it is not clear what part of him is the true self or center of agency.

75

The claim that Machiavelli possessed a “romantic” disposition is not far-fetched in spite of his being also driven impulsively by eros, i.e., lust. Many of his poems are about romantic love and Viroli has shown that his passionate affection for Barbera Salutati Raffacani was romantic in character (Viroli 2000, p. 224-5).

76

He cannot master his drives; and it is not clear that he is proud or ashamed of their strength.

77

This idea of nausea adumbrates that used by Nietzsche and Sartre.

78

Lust and love may sometimes grow out of each other. In certain cases, Machiavelli seems to say, they are in a sort of opposition that, unlike a dialectical relationship, is not resolved or synthesized. Hence the mental and emotional imbalance that occurs. The humors most likely play an important role in this respect as well.

79

Camus tells us that Don Juan is a paradigm of a certain type of absurd existential attitude. Don Juan plunges headlong into an ethic of quantity rather than quality. Machiavelli may be similarly possessed with such an absurd attitude, if we read the many accounts of his love affairs in his letters to Vettori. The saint, on the other hand, embraces an ethic of quality that seeks to transform his life-experience. Perhaps this contrast is a sign that Machiavelli was indeed a paragon of an ethics of the absurd more so than a believer in spiritual cultivation such as Nietzsche (see Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, pp. 49-57).

80

This is not to be understood in a rough or vulgar “Freudian” sense, for not all is rooted in desire and moreover there are a multiplicity of drives, according to Nietzsche, that compete for man’s actions.

81

Viroli 2000, p. 240.

82

Ornament, or ordering.

83

Machiavelli nowhere proposes a view of a fundamental unity of the species or of the things in the world. In this sense there is something “pessimistic” in it, as it accepts a basic antagonism among individuals that cannot be superseded, not even in anything like Schopenhauer’s “Will.”

84

Nietzsche refers to Thucydides and Machiavelli as his own “cure” for Platonism. Yet he is not unambiguous about Plato; his admiration is evident in other passages.

85

See for instance Jacob Burckhardt’s characterization of Machiavelli’s descriptions of conspiracies as having a “cold-blooded indifference” (Burckhardt, p. 54) about them. The Swiss historian misses the fact that Machiavelli relishes in the sanguinary descriptions of these conspiracies, rather than ignoring their passionate aspects.

86

See especially Nehamas, Chapter 7, p. 233.

87

See Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism, Cambridge, 1990.

88

The claim that Machiavelli was “scientific” is advanced by many authors, for example by Roger Masters in his Machiavelli, Leonardo and the Science of Power (See “Introduction,” p. 2). In such accounts of Machiavelli’s purported scientism, the authors tend to go beyond the idea that Machiavelli was calculating, cold-blooded and amoral and hence “objective.” They claim that he sought, first and foremost, universal rules to be applicable to any political situation. They ignore the subjectivist and tragic ethos of the Florentine and his lack of precision in forecasting events.

89

“onesto” (in Capata, p. 39).

90

Cf. Clizia, Act Two, Scene One (p. 15).

91

Viroli 2000, p. 10.

92

Machiavelli largely acknowledges how “personal” his political theory is through his statement that he loves his country, the Florentine republic, more than his soul. His project is not one of detailing different forms of government merely to show his knowledge of politics; it is to advance republican principles. Confusion has led some commentators to ignore the latter and to claim that he was an objective political scientist.

93

In Middleton, p. 22.

94

See also BGE 6 207.

95

See BGE 6 209.

96

In Kaufmann 1975, p. 123.

97

Ibid.: 125.

98

Ibid. Here Emerson’s influence is evident.

99

Notebook 10 Autumn 1887, in Writings from the Late Notebooks, Cambridge University Press, p. 197.

100

See Chapter 2, where I discuss virtù in the context of Machiavelli’s understanding of the tragic hero.

101

Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. xvi.

102

It is clear that WP, if we can speak of it as a text, is much looser than any of Nietzsche’s major works.

103

Nietzsche admired the Italian Renaissance notion of virtù understood in this sense (See A, p. 570).

104

Supra Chapter IV.

105

See BGE 259.

106

In Vattimo (p. 127). The notion is expressed as “rebellion” by this commentator.

107

Ibid.

108

This does not mean that it is an ethic only applicable to men. But the male-centric ethos is there; there is no way around it.

109

Nietzsche does not want to reduce consciousness to the somatic (See Vattimo, p. 133; Schacht, p. 270).

110

Vattimo has in mind a similar notion in the idea of the “selectivity” or decision principle in will to power (See Vattimo, p. 125).

111

I believe this is the origin of the notion of perspectivism. Hence will to power is crucial for perspectivism.

112

See supra Chapter II, Section two.

113

Think of the example of a young dogmatic Marxist: in her self-certainty about the way the social world works, she is able to establish a conceptual (and even moral) hierarchical structure and teleology in her approach to phenomena. This produces a sense or sensation of power, and may lead to actual worldly power.

114

Antichrist I.2.

115

This involves being able to be even untouched by a feeling of “dirty hands.”

116

He did not employ rigorous scientific, mathematical, or logical methods to determine causes or predict outcomes with precision.

117

Machiavelli does not believe total unintelligibility exists; he sought o make things intelligible and succeeded to a great extent. Yet he does believe that unintelligibility permeates human existence.

Chapter 4

A Machiavellian Zarathustra: The Aesthetic Politics of Value Creation

The pain and the vicissitudes and wrongs/Which in an ass’s skin I had to bear, /
Now if my fate permits, shall be my song.

Machiavelli, The Ass¹

Can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? The case of the philosopher.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols²

Introduction

One approach in philosophy is to seek—and try to demonstrate—universal truths. This was the aim of Plato, for he sought to get to the essence or Form of things. This is what Nietzsche also saw in Christianity, as Platonism for the masses, in its belief in an eternal metaphysical reality above and beyond the temporal world. Another approach sees the world as comprised of contradictions whose temporary stability is tenuous. This is the view with which Nietzsche carried out his philosophical task; and it shares with Machiavelli’s worldview the notion that the world’s contradictions are there to be managed for our sake as human beings, rather than for that of a higher purpose. In this light we see the paradox of how Machiavelli wishes to sing about pain and Nietzsche feels a burden he can neither bear nor throw off.

For the two authors, truth is to be approached from an artistic perspective, that is, not from a scientific point of view that aims to ascertain with precision the way things are, but rather by describing the way things really are with a view to their effect on us, as a human audience. Both authors seek to move away from traditional ways of thinking, and both do so by two central means: utilizing aesthetic reason rather than abstract logical rationality, and by seeking to undermine the Christian ethical system in which they lived. In its place they aim to construct new values that are set on human characteristics (such as the emotions that go with pain and laughter) and that move away from a simple Manichean morality. In this chapter we shall see how this is evident through analysis of Machiavellian themes in one of Nietzsche’s central works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Because neither thinker relies fundamentally on abstract logical reasoning, the persuasiveness of their arguments depends to a significant extent on the way the “truth” of the world is made attractive, appealing, or convincing to us. The rhetorical nature of their writing is artistic both in the strict sense that rhetoric is a form of art and in the sense that it is self-consciously partisan: its purpose is to gain support for itself from others (and sometimes this requires less than full fidelity to the facts). This task is eminently political, if we understand politics as the organization of human power for a social aim. In the approach taken by these authors, then, politics and the aesthetic are inextricably intertwined.

How are we to find Nietzsche’s “artistic sense of truth” in relation to Machiavelli’s? We can do so by analyzing the comparative development of his political aesthetics from one text, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), to another, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885). Why? Because in Nietzsche’s first work the place of the aesthetic in life is the central theme; and his own critique of it and eventual move away from the idea of music and towards the poetry of Zarathustra is what explains how he ultimately understood the relationship of the aesthetic to the formation of new values. As Richard Schacht tells us, Nietzsche “never abandoned the whole of his initial concern understanding and estimation” of art in Birth of Tragedy.³

Moreover, Zarathustra is, arguably, the key text in Nietzsche’s career.⁴ This is a contentious claim, to be sure, but a good case can be made for it.⁵ The work contains all his major philosophical tenets. Also, it is written in a manner emblematic of his idea that style itself can have both form and substance, even more so than his other works.⁶ The literary style in which Zarathustra is written is representative of Nietzsche’s central idea that style provides order to the world and to oneself. It is a poem about a subject who confronts the idea that life entails pain; that reason and certain knowledge are illusory; and the consequence that if life is non-moral (owing to its inevitable harms) and that reason is misleading, only an aesthetic appreciation of life justifies one’s existence and that this can potentially allow a man to create his own values, with the help of others. As such, Zarathustra stands for Nietzsche’s idea that style is action (writing, as practical action, requires controlled craftsmanship). It also contains the central Nietzschean ideas of the Overman, eternal recurrence, the death of God, and will to power.⁷ Moreover, it claims a Machiavellian point: that founding new ways of life for a collectivity presupposes immorality. At the same time, superior men can forge radical new values if they learn from their life experience and from others who are also in some sense “higher” persons.

Zarathustra is also of interest to us because of an uncanny coincidence. In the concluding Book Four, we clearly see how Nietzsche’s thinking unconsciously imitates that of Machiavelli, as it deals with themes that draw heavily on Apuleius’s Golden Ass, just as Machiavelli poem L’Asino does in his own version of the ancient tale. As Kathleen Higgins rightly elaborates in her excellent work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Zarathustra is a central text in Nietzsche’s thought: Nietzsche himself said it was his “most profound book” and Book Four was its “sublime finale.”⁸

Moreover, Book Four in particular has special importance, as it reaches the conclusions of Nietzsche’s thought in this long work.⁹ Higgins shows that Nietzsche relied on Apuleius’s Golden Ass for ideas found in this book. She contends that Book Four “is a satire constructed on the model of Apuleius’s Golden Ass.”¹⁰More precisely, in fact we know that Nietzsche was cognizant of both Lucian’s and Apuleius’s versions of the story. Beyond the fact that he was a classical philologist and we can surmise that he most likely knew the tales, in one of his letters to his friend Erwin Rhode he refers to Rhode’s manuscript of a study of the two works. In an early letter written in Leipzig on November 9, 1868, Nietzsche urges his friend to “publish the οηος” [onos, or ass].¹¹

In this fact that the ass tale served as an inspiration to both Machiavelli and Nietzsche, we see an affinity between the two writers. They were both admirers of the Menippean philosophical farce, the spoudegeloion. This makes them philosophers-artists who prized the media of comedy and tragedy.

Excursus: Writing Tragedy, Writing Comedy

As is well known, the essence of Birth of Tragedy is the idea that tragedy allowed the Greeks to accept the misery of life as palatable; and that Attic tragedy was composed of a relationship between two artistic drives, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Nietzsche himself states in the preface that the work is concerned with the “problem of science” that emerges with Socrates. Socrates’ optimistic rationalism is what brought about the demise of the tragic view of life.¹² Nietzsche thought that Wagner would be able to restore tragedy to its original power in Germany through his opera, for (being especially influenced by Schopenhauer during that time) he believed music to be “a direct copy of Will itself” (BT 77).

We know that there were factual errors in Nietzsche’s account; we also know that eventually Nietzsche repudiated much of this work and Wagner himself (largely attributing Wagner’s failure to his Christian ideals). Yet the ideas presented in Birth of Tragedy make an original model through which we can assess Nietzsche’s early aesthetics and his relationship to Machiavelli. Moreover, as Justin Young shows, Nietzsche’s aesthetic views return to his first work, forming a “circle.”¹³ Basing himself on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche appropriates Machiavelli’s removal of morality from art and thereby seeks to move away from Schopenhauer’s brand of pessimism.

The central thesis of the relationship between the Dionysian and the Apollonian drives is what animates the work, especially as it later becomes a critique of Socratic rational optimism. For Nietzsche, the Dionysiac has a certain preponderance in the partnership of the two deities. Yet he describes their relationship sometimes as a fraternal one, sometimes as a conjugal one, whose offspring is tragedy. The Dionysiac is emblematic of excess, transgression, the dissolution of boundaries, and (importantly) the dissolution of individuation. The Apollonian describes drives to distinction, individuality, discreteness, order, boundaries, and moderation. Both are present in art; where they are best related is in Attic tragedy, for there is a complementarity present where the formless Dionysian drives are ordered and expressed by Apollonian drives. In this way the cathartic experience of pure Dionysiac force, which is exemplified in music as a direct copy of Will (the fundamental metaphysical entity in the world, a notion basically drawn from Schopenhauer), is shored up by words and action which, according to Nietzsche, prevent a critical collapse of the audience upon experiencing exposure to pure Will.

Is this account cogent? The criticism of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy by his contemporaries shows that much of it was factually erroneous in its analysis of Greek tragedy. Nonetheless, through the exposition of the two drives, Nietzsche creates a view of art that makes the tragic the best expression of “pessimism and despair” as “the natural existential lot of humans,”¹⁴ but which is overcome by an affirmation of life. Thus Nietzsche expresses a philosophical view through his account of tragic art. Tragedy exposes, with some veils still remaining, the abject nature of human existence as Nietzsche sees it. In this way the philosophical view comes first, the particular way it is expressed is a secondary consequence. Thus the problem is no longer “getting Greek tragedy right” from a scholarly historico-philological point of view (although Nietzsche apparently originally intended it to be that) but finding coherence between a philosophical view and its artistic representation.¹⁵

This instance of Nietzsche’s creative interpretation of the genealogy of Greek tragedy points to an important aspect of his own aesthetic activity: the making of myths. Nietzsche is a thinker deeply concerned with the replacing of religious moralism by values that he deems conducive to a stronger culture and human type. It is in this spirit that he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, whether consciously or not. In understanding the nature of tragedy as the coupling of Dionysiac and Apollonian forces, Nietzsche constructed an argument that in essence was mythical. Historical analyses of the origins of Greek tragedy by his own contemporaries in classical philology undermined his notion. Yet he himself wanted to get at a truth of human being in a manner that would hold steady over time much as a myth does. Like a myth, his explanation is grounded on some empirical truth. But like a myth it is also rife with fictionalization and exaggeration, which are used to underscore particular values or principles that eventually become the moral of the story for its readers. Nietzsche eludes historical truth to get to a philosophical truth about the nature of human suffering. For this, he falsifies and exaggerates and thus creates a new myth.

In this light we can better understand the crucial comment made by Nietzsche that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified.”¹⁶ In the first place, because Nietzsche’s humanism is a naturalism,¹⁷ the world and existence can only be perceived through the senses. That is, the foundation for our understanding of the world is not to be found in ideas, but rather in empirical, lived experience. Hence the importance of the sensuous plasticity of the aesthetic. As he declares in BGE, “all credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses” (BGE 4 134).¹⁸

Moreover, Nietzsche posits that an unquenchable will to life inheres in the Dionysian passion that is felt by man, despite all suffering. The Dionysian is the underlying element in human life. However, the world’s meaninglessness and chaos, which bring despair to man, is only made conscious and tolerable to man by art, especially by tragedy of the Attic sort. No other activity or practice makes life tolerable in a full sense. One may be misled to other activities that appear to offer a respite from life’s burdens and opacity, such as the politics of nationalism or Realpolitik, but they provide illusions that are far from the real content of life. Tragedy presents a final affirmation in spite of undesirable knowledge—the knowledge, as I mention above, that is presented beautifully to make it more telling, more pleasing, and more palatable.

How are the two thinkers’ interpretations of the artistic representation of this philosophical perspective related? Machiavelli and Nietzsche share the philosophical view that sees life as tragic yet also as having a potential for action that justifies existence. This view can be termed virtuous pessimism. The virtue of the great man is the ability to have vision and flexibility. It is in essence Machiavelli’s virtù: the ability to foresee opportunities presented by fortune and to adapt accordingly to circumstances in order to establish something great and of duration. And this sort of virtù is aesthetic, for it requires imagination, creativity, flexibility, and plasticity. It is neither driven by moral rectitude nor by political ideals, but simply by the desire to create order out of either nothing or something intractable. This challenge requires artistic creativity.

The view is also pessimistic because tragic, since the outcome is negative: political action generally ends in failure. Rome, Sparta, and Venice had a good long run, yet they, too, ultimately collapsed. For Nietzsche the ultimate absurdity and despair of life are so overwhelming that some deception is necessary, and the Apollonian character of drama and tragedy, which provides action and words as a buffer between the audience and the despairing message, is effective in enabling man to continue living. Delusion is vital; artfulness is necessary. Yet delusion does not drive truth out—truth remains and is accepted. That is the aesthetic triumph.

To see how Machiavelli creates values through artistic means (in this case comedy), we must make a careful reading of his literary works to see his tragic view of life. As we saw in Chapter 1, The Ass, in particular, is a re-telling of Lucius Apuleius’s Milesian tale (which is itself based on a Greek original). Machiavelli’s version wholly lacks the humor of the Latin original. Moreover, surprisingly it also lacks the humor of his plays, the works for which Machiavelli is known as a literary genius. The Ass is infused with a darkness that nowhere finds the lightheartedness of laughter.¹⁹ It is worth recalling that Machiavelli’s own life tells us of a man deeply marked by the tragic: as we have said, he considered himself a writer of history and comedy as well as a tragic-comic figure: “Machiavelli—historico, comico et tragico.”²⁰The Ass is Machiavelli’s tragedy.

At the same time, Machiavelli’s comedies Mandragola and Clizia were written to entertain and arouse boisterous laughter in the audience. Some of Machiavelli’s other works, such as Belfagor and the carnival songs, too, are comic. However, the comic element is not entirely preponderant in his literary works as a whole (many of the poems are sincere, plaintive pieces on failed love). The tragic-comic nature of his literary oeuvre is thus an example of what Nietzsche would later describe as the need to find in laughter a medium to accept suffering. As Ansell-Pearson rightly underscores, Nietzsche also argues that to overcome the tragic nature of the human condition, it is vital to learn to laugh “out of the whole truth.”²¹

The Germans, alas, are not known for their humor, and this may explain Nietzsche’s often staid brand of comic writing.²² What irony and satire is present in his work (and it is sizable) is but a shadow of Machiavelli’s malevolent Mediterranean spirit.²³ Yet this does not efface the fact that Nietzsche sees, at least in theory, what Machiavelli saw in reality: the need for laughter as a way of forgetting. Forgetting what? The limits, absurdities, pains, and meaninglessness of human experience (BT 40).

For Nietzsche, the absurdity is that the history of civilization makes the species everything, the individual nothing.²⁴ Part of the critique Nietzsche makes of Hegel’s historicism is that to view life in terms of historical conditioning deprives individual man of the greatness associated with the timelessness of inner existence and self-shaping. Nietzsche wants to exalt the right kind of individual: he feels contempt for most individuals, many of whom, he thinks, allow themselves to be mere stones in the historical mosaic rather than seeking to feel the “pathos of distance,” or the drive to uniqueness and superiority.

The history of modern civilization thus presents a weakening ethos of historicism that emasculates the “titanically striving individual.” This false and debilitating spirit of the modern age is one of its chief defects. And Nietzsche’s critique of the modern age requires, he thinks, a joyful spirit in order to accept this bitter truth with a smile on one’s face. This is because we cannot turn clocks back. This idea is well expressed in GS, where Nietzsche attempts to promote a view of knowledge that incorporates the idea of laughter as a medium of alleviating the pain and suffering of life and of making new discoveries easier to bear. The wisest lover of man will say “[n]ot only laughter and gay wisdom but the tragic, too with all its sublime unreason, belongs among the means and necessities for the preservation of the species” (GS 1.1 76).

For Machiavelli, laughter is similarly expressive of the way that civilization’s morality and religion force individuals to go to the most absurd lengths to experience their drives for both dissolution and individuation; in short, for living out what Nietzsche would call natural “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” tendencies. These tendencies are so suppressed and stultified by modern civilization that when a man does seek to reach the depths of the Dionysian truth, he appears comic and foolish in the eyes of others. He invokes a picture of a man whose humors are out of balance: and thus produces humorous effects.

This acceptance of the body’s “humors” and its intimate relation to the mind is, according to Nietzsche, a characteristic mark of Mediterranean or “southern” culture.²⁵ Whereas “northern” (Germanic or Anglo-Saxon) culture seeks to sever the mind from the body and denigrate the latter’s processes, Nietzsche believes southern culture sees life more holistically and in fact places the mind inside the body. This entails an acceptance and valuation of sensations and emotions, understood as products of the interaction of mind and body, in the larger sphere of human existence.

This “southern” synthesis is present in both authors. The two thinkers’ view of life involves a movement from tragic views to comic ones, and eventually seeks to synthesize the two into poetic tragi-comedy.²⁶ An example of this is found in Machiavelli’s Clizia. This play is not merely a comedy, for it masks quasi-tragic elements of ultimate failure, as Martinez rightly shows.²⁷ Thus it is a good example of Machiavelli’s brand of tragic-comic art. In that play there are intimations that Machiavelli understood life, in this case private life, as a strategic game built on the twin foundations of the desire for dissolution (of boundaries, not of life) and the need for order and durability. Throughout much of Machiavelli’s work there is a Milesian quality that is met again and again.²⁸ As we saw in Chapter 1, the carnival songs have a Dionysiac element to them that we also see repeated in the plays.

Nicomaco, the old man in love with Clizia, wills dissolution. His individual achievement of having established a proper and respectable household goes overboard once he cannot control his erotic impulses. Machiavelli makes it quite clear that Nicomaco suddenly cares not for his reputation, for chief in his mind is the desire for Clizia. This is all the more scandalous since he is a sort of surrogate father to her; yet convention and restraint are replaced by the desire for transgression and excess.

Coupled to Nicomaco’s Dionysiac drive is Sofronia’s desire to reestablish order in their household.²⁹ Sofronia understands Nicomaco’s lust well, for she maintains a sort of equanimity in the face of her husband’s unexpected changes. She possesses enough virtù to adapt to the new circumstances in order to restore tranquility and harmony not only to her household but also to Florence, for the events that transpire affect diverse people. In this case Sofronia is the character whose Apollonian wish for boundaries and moderation is ultimately effective in accepting the sudden, absurdly comic (not to say repulsive) change in Nicomaco. Sofronia’s scheme works by accepting that there is an agonistic relationship between the father and son and also between the two parents. Adapting to changing circumstances, Sofronia manages to teach Nicomaco a lesson and to make him accept her “art of ruling” the household for the sake of peace. The price, of course, is making Nicomaco an emasculated failure and the household a farce. Machiavelli shows that he believes women can possess virtù at least as well as men: the action of distaff can indeed establish order.³⁰ Machiavelli’s work is an example of writing where, as Nietzsche would declare (not without humor) in Birth of Tragedy,

the continuous evolution of art is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in much the same way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes which coexist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconciliation.

BT 14

Zarathustra’s Machiavellian Turn

What does the above excursus on comedy tell us about Zarathustra? It tells us how to approach this important text by Nietzsche: from a comedic perspective.³¹ One must read the work with the humor and allegrissimo that Machiavelli writes. Far from the staid, cryptic passages of the Bible, which Zarathustra mocks, those of Nietzsche’s work are meant to be read as derisive. To mock is to demean, to debase, and to undermine. The laughter behind it empowers the one who laughs, disempowers the object of derision. And, as we shall see, the aim of Zarathustra is to undermine Christian values by mocking them (especially in Book IV) and affirming Machiavellian values in its stead.

If Birth of Tragedy has—as we saw above—conceptual categories that can be applied to the aims of the comedic works of Machiavelli, Zarathustra is a “Machiavellian” poem. As Laurence Lampert intimates, the spirit of the poem seems to be inspired by the great Florentine.³² The project of Zarathustra is to write a poem based on the classical Roman style that can also have philosophical content.³³ It is not a treatise, a Tractatus, as Spinoza wrote. Spinoza is a good contrast since in Nietzsche’s own view, he was one of his chief precursors. Yet the manner in which Spinoza sought to transcend the prevailing morality of his time was undesirable for Nietzsche: a scientific, logical treatise would be for him inadequate. Nietzsche admires Spinoza because he confronts Judeo-Christian morality (to present, however, a pantheistic view expressing that nature is God that is not Nietzsche’s). Yet Nietzsche believes taking the pill that makes one go beyond one’s conception of God requires enough water that one should be immersed in it. Unlike his aphorisms, which are like buckets of cold water, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a long swim in his new sea, where one is more likely to understand his meaning than with rapid dips in various aphorisms.³⁴

Zarathustra may thus be Nietzsche’s chief artistic achievement; it is also a “discovery of a new sea” in the manner that Columbus sailed on new seas to the New World.³⁵ As a work of art, it is not merely a series of original notes bound together, like his aphorisms, but it is a sustained, (largely) successful harmony.³⁶ Although Zarathustra is mostly prose, it is poetic prose that resembles an epic poem’s tale of one man’s journey.

In Nietzsche’s choice of a poetic medium for expressing his central philosophical ideas, we see why there is a clear link to Machiavelli, who also wrote poetry with philosophical intent. Moreover, the motif of new-ness (of discovery and breaking of new ground) is like the founding of new modes and the reform of orders that Machiavelli urges. In this they are both progressive, as they look forward to a “New World” that does not conserve any of the effete religiosity of Christian ethics. In this sense they are both moderns. In its form, it is a serious text that aims to replace Christian scriptures and contains elements of a parody of Christian teaching. Thus it engages in a comedic enterprise as described in GS: to seek to express both the tragic and comic aspects of life (“the comedy of existence”) beyond ethics and religion (GS 1.1 74).

What is the meaning and purpose of Zarathustra? Similarly to Machiavelli’s Ass, it is the story of a journey. It is a voyage taken by a character not from the Western tradition, but by the originator of Zoroastrianism, a Persian cult.³⁷ Few commentators ask why Nietzsche chooses this personage. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche explains that he chose a dualist in order to show the abandonment of dualism and hence the acceptance of everything.³⁸ In this the indirect influence of Machiavelli is striking. Machiavelli’s rejection of the “good/evil” dualism of medieval Christian political thought replaces it with a man who could synthesize the two, as Borgia did.

As Nietzsche had “mythologized” the story of the birth and decay of tragedy through the figures of the Dionysiac and the Apollonian, Machiavelli also became the maker of a myth in the figure of Cesare Borgia. Valentino was a man raised in the Church, and if one is to be entirely realistic, one cannot easily accept Machiavelli’s image of him as a completely ruthless, “inhuman” human being. Yet for the purpose of underscoring the importance and need to have immorality inside political action, Machiavelli created the myth of the wholly hardened Borgia. The myth was started by Machiavelli and has become a metaphor for the ability of the political leader to act ruthlessly but without pangs of conscience, thereby erasing the hard and fast distinction between good and evil.³⁹

Likewise, Nietzsche’s myth of Zarathustra shows how he abandons the dualist view of life. He is important because he represents Nietzsche’s model Overman, the sort of person whom Nietzsche wants to see exist in the world that he envisions.⁴⁰ He is a man who takes the place of Jesus Christ, the “first and only Christian,” and thereby helps Nietzsche reject the two-millennia-old Western Judeo-Christian tradition and its Greek antecedents.⁴¹ More specifically, it is the Christian ideas of guilt and pity that Nietzsche wants to assail through Zarathustra. Zoroaster is the first to admit the idea of sin; and in Nietzsche’s work is thus the perfect person to reject it fully. As a result of the disquieting process of rejection of common morality, Zarathustra is a man whose wisdom is self-acquired and which is reached in the depths of loneliness. Even when in the company of others, Zarathustra longs for his solitude. Like the protagonist of Machiavelli’s Ass, Zarathustra is a solitary person.

The literary form of the first person singular noun enables the author to beguile the reader into becoming, to some extent, the protagonist of the story. In this manner the impact of what is read is of necessity stronger than merely reading a factual account, because one’s faculties become engaged in the process of identification and commiseration. This leads to an immersion that leaves a deeper mark on the reader.⁴² Furthermore, in spite of the effects felt in the process of reading, there are many others that linger and are carried with the reader for a longer time at a subconscious level. The subconscious involves the idea of commonly held myths, which Nietzsche believes is necessary for effective and socially meaningful art (that is, affecting a wide human sphere). Myths tie people together, as Nietzsche asserted in BT.⁴³ The impact on the reader and the shaping of the audience is sustained over a longer period because the elements of myth, sentiment, affect, pathos, and wonderment are present. This is part of the process involved in Nietzsche’s “cultivation of the soul.”

Thus, Zarathustra is the story of a character who encounters a variety of new situations and in each one expresses and represents his groundbreaking philosophical ideas, to be gathered and mulled over by the reader. It is the reader’s own work that is necessitated: Nietzsche does not tell him or her what he intends to mean specifically. That would go against his anti-dogmatic nature. The reader must on her own determine the meaning out of the text. In this manner Nietzsche rejects a positivist, scientific, or didactic account of life that would say that one’s simple expression of an idea is enough to be grasped by others. This is one thought in Nietzsche’s oeuvre that appears to be “egalitarian:” Zarathustra does not want to be merely followed; he urges all his listeners to look for meaning by themselves.⁴⁴

In this process of going through new experiences and carrying out parabolic teaching, Zarathustra is a founder in the Machiavellian sense.⁴⁵ Just as Machiavelli’s teaching makes him a founder of a new world-view through his writings. Zarathustra is paradigmatic of the same sort of man who creates values and whose original ideas are disseminated through words received by an audience.⁴⁶ Yet of course not all writers are founders, for not all contain in their words new categories that make one see the world in an entirely different manner. And, founders must reject and destroy previous sets of beliefs in order to install their own world-views.

But this new world-view is not scientific, either for Machiavelli or for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.⁴⁷ Much has been made of Machiavelli as the founder of modernity, the seminal figure in the development of “objective” and dispassionate analysis of history and politics. But this is not an accurate depiction of what the Florentine did. Machiavelli is a rhetorician in the classical sense through and through .⁴⁸ He wants to persuade us of his own worldview, not merely to examine things.

However, this worldview is not confined to republicanism. Moreover, it is not a harmless republicanism. It is a republicanism that has a moral and psychological intent: it requires certain individuals (those in great politics, which are those of foundings and reforms) to forcefully reject what he considers the false, misleading, and emasculating bonds of common morality. And often this transcendence requires actions that are not merely non-moral; Machiavelli urges us to recognize that what we normally consider immoral sometimes must be performed. There is indeed wickedness in Machiavelli’s teaching; we must be careful not to expunge it. This very view is carried forth by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. As Hulliung rightly claims, Machiavelli and Nietzsche “subvert our genealogy by showing that those who stood at the beginnings were as noble, strong, and terrible as we are ignoble, weak, and domesticated.”⁴⁹

Nietzsche rejects the purported neutrality and harmlessness of thoughts, words, and actions. He rejects the idea of neutrality and links this to Machiavelli in a passage in one of unpublished writings: “Think of Livius’s aim, of Tacitus, of Machiavelli—flight from the present and consolation—sometimes it suffices merely to recognize that at one time things were different, sometimes that it happened just that way, sometimes that it was better.”⁵⁰ Through this, Nietzsche wants to reject the idea that “objective” historiography is possible; and to proclaim that the wish for it is debilitating. And the fact that he points to Machiavelli as a historian to support this idea underscores Machiavelli’s own rejection of the positivist, scientistic view of history.⁵¹

In “On Self-Overcoming” (II), Nietzsche states that

whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.⁵²

Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche believes constructive deeds require immoral acts. The construction of new, durable orders must be built on immoral foundations because they must first break the ground, which has become sterile. For Machiavelli and Nietzsche reform of decaying life-forms can only be performed through a radical, thorough re-evaluation of all its values and bases; this includes the most deeply held ones. This message is quite harmful if held universally, and so both express it in an esoteric, metaphorical form so that only the wisest will comprehend it. This mental task leads to an embrace of antimoralism that is necessary for both of their perspectives.

In the “Adder’s Bite” (1.19), Nietzsche shows that Zarathustra rejects the value of harmlessness, both of words and of actions. It is a passage that is a critique of Christian teaching, Zarathustra shows his disciples that words may appear innocent, but they are as potent as a poison or a dagger. The killing of the hermit that he proposes to his disciples is as radical a rejection of the idea that words are harmless as there is.⁵³ Further, it goes against traditional teaching by rejecting the idea that moral goodness can eliminate evil; and that one can make oneself less “sinful” through good deeds.⁵⁴ The power of words is as puissant as Machiavelli’s own view of rhetorical practice. As Rosen believes, Zarathustra’s philosophy has a “tincture of Machiavellianism”⁵⁵ because the overcoming of sin necessitates evil-doing.⁵⁶ Lampert concurs, calling this killing a “Machiavellian teaching.”⁵⁷

In the notes that make up Will to Power Nietzsche endorses Machiavelli’s Prince as carrying the right wisdom regarding the necessity of committing harms. In a passage where he assails what he considers the simplistic views of English utilitarianism he declares:

what if someone holding the Principe in his hand were to say: ‘It is precisely such [harmful] actions that one must perform, to prevent others from performing them first—to deprive others of the chance to perform them on us?’⁵⁸

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Machiavelli’s notorious work of rhetoric contains the idea that causing harm is of necessity part of the human character. Wrongdoing means trespassing established boundaries and expanding the range of human activity. Moreover, immorality is necessary to break the yoke of complacency and acquired values.⁵⁹ This idea goes back to Nietzsche’s first work, in the notion of the myth of Prometheus: “wrongdoing is of necessity imposed on the titanically striving individual” (BT 51).⁶⁰ The subversiveness and transgressive ethos of Nietzsche’s thought reaches its apex in the work dearest to him, Zarathustra. Zarathustra’s “adventures in becoming” culminate in a parody of Christian morality through indirect references to Apuleius’s tale of the golden ass.

Zarathustra’s “Golden Ass”: Book Four and Its Meaning

If it is true that Machiavelli and Nietzsche share at base a sensibility towards the value of understanding truth and value-creation in aesthetic terms, then we begin to address the problematique of why they write literary works even though they are primarily a political theorist and a philosopher, respectively.⁶¹

Neither thinker is committed to truth for its own sake. Machiavelli’s chief intellectual aim is to understand power,⁶² not “truth.” While he asserts a variety of general rules for political action, there is no universal truth to them. Similar acts can lead to different consequences, depending on the times. Or, different people (such as Hannibal and Scipio) can lead to similar results. This is an idea central to understanding Machiavelli. It is especially valuable for grasping his notion that rather than truth, what is more important in achieving stable power is being able to adapt oneself with plasticity, flexibility, and creativity to one’s particular times and places. This is a particular truth that Machiavelli’s work discovers about human beings.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, expresses throughout his oeuvre a belief that what must be safeguarded and propounded above all is an affirmation of life in toto, especially in terms of the soul’s health. It is not what philosophy has tended to do since Socrates, which is to aim its arrow of reason to truth’s target. It could be said that he thinks that the philosophers have hitherto only attempted to understand the world; the point, however, is to affirm life.⁶³

For both thinkers, reality, as experienced by the human being, is not best grasped primarily through logical reasoning. Reality is manifold, and human experience itself is manifold. The individual subject cannot easily unify his perception and grasp of reality through a rational sense of a bounded, controlling self or ego.⁶⁴ It is no easy task; but the attempt to find some degree of order in one’s consciousness or soul or self is a project common to the thought of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. The former tends to apply the same sort of criterion to a larger political whole, but nonetheless also proposes the same notion for the self, as we saw in his treatment of the Ass. The latter focuses on the individual self or soul⁶⁵ but still refers to the larger social and political reality as well.

Why do Machiavelli and Nietzsche find value in Lucius Apuleius’s tale? There is much disagreement over this point in the literature that deals separately with each thinker. In my view they are inspired by Apuleius’s work because they find that it is paradigmatic of a way of looking at the world that is almost correct but which they believe can improved upon.⁶⁶ Moreover it is a way of looking at the world written in a literary, artistic (as contrasted to an expository) style. Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche want to present a view of human existence where the individual life is a loosely controlled narrative in which the human person confronts and, importantly, accepts irrationality and the tragic as part of the world, life, and the human being as such. This makes the person wiser, stronger, and hence possess greatness vis-à-vis others.

Lucius Apuleius’s Golden Ass is one of the first novels of the Western literary tradition. It is, thus, a founding text. It is a work written by a Platonic philosopher who was born in Roman Algeria and was personally drawn to magical cults and the religion of Isis at the time of Christianity’s ascendancy in northern Africa. It is a “counterblast to ... Christianity”⁶⁷, something that would seem to appeal to Machiavelli and Nietzsche. For many modern readers, the Golden Ass, with its tales of adventure and ribald events, was merely intended for entertainment. However, for others, among whom are Machiavelli and Nietzsche, it is a philosophical text written in the form of a literary piece. More precisely, it is a work that merges both genres and is thus both at the same time, without privileging either side.

This work is often also called the Metamorphoses. This is because it tells of a man who changes into the shape of an animal, an ass. But beyond that, it is also because it tells of the internal development and changes that the protagonist undergoes while in the ass’ skin. Lucius, the protagonist, is treated badly and humiliated yet also finds himself in situations beneficial. Thus, in the form of a mule, the hero (or anti-hero, since the tale is mostly about enduring life when one lacks free will) has the opportunity to see and think about human nature from his lowly position. The idea that one goes through life suffering and without real volition is what makes this tale quasi-tragic, although it is a Milesian tale that also mixes ribaldry and the comic as well. As Higgins asserts rightly, Zarathustra also follows the Menippean tradition of Apuleius’s Golden Ass.⁶⁸ The tragicomic ethos is what, I believe, both Machiavelli and Nietzsche find valuable in Apuleius’s seminal work.

Apuleius does not write a logical treatise to express his view of life; he chooses a literary medium because he believes that a narrative is the most efficacious style to convey the subjective experiences of a man who is paradigmatic of the human condition. Readers will more easily be convinced of the authenticity of the ideas presented through this particular rhetorical style. This idea of the importance of a particular style is dear to Machiavelli’s espousal of classical rhetoric. For Nietzsche, Zarathustra plays a similar role. An interesting coincidence, which points in the direction of a philosophical affinity (albeit unintended), is the fact that Machiavelli’s Ass was never finished and that Nietzsche’s Book Four was not intended to be the ending of Zarathustra.⁶⁹ Hence, both works have an indeterminate conclusion, they have no ending, no telos.

There is a central difference between Apuleius’s philosophy of life as shown in the Golden Ass and that of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Apuleius’s tale concludes with the return of the protagonist to human shape and to an idealized world in which reason can order reality. In this interpretation of the ending of Apuleius’s novel, the hero sought to satisfy his curiosity through a “wrong” kind of reason, which is that of magic and the occult. When he comes back to human shape he begins to become involved in the cult of Isis and the tale ends with a serious tone in which the picaresque, comic elements of the preceding chapters are abandoned. A grave tone is used to convey the idea that, while enlightening, the kind of life the hero led as an ass was a result of a misguided curiosity. This curiosity led to a false sense of reality through magic and the irrational (as represented by the dull ass-man and his being overpowered by women’s blinding erotic appeal). While Isis is an Egyptian goddess contrapuntal to the Christ figure, and may thus appear to represent a radical departure from Western religion, she is also seen as a goddess of order. Lucius’s experiences as an animal make him then embrace not the earthly and irrational (the animal that he was) but rather the otherworldly and orderly (the power of Isis).

Such an embrace of the otherworldly and the rational is nowhere to be seen in either Machiavelli’s Ass or book four of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. For the two interpreters of Apuleius, Lucius’s tale is valuable not for its rejection of the animal, irrational, and earthly facets of human nature, bur precisely because it points to them as sources of valuable insight. Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche follow the thread of analyzing what this value is. As we saw in Chapter 1, for Machiavelli the conclusion to be drawn is that looking into man’s nature tells us that he is a being not too distant from animal nature. The need to follow certain basic instinctual drives must not be rejected. It must be embraced as part of life, especially as the instincts are valuable in contrast to the tragic outcomes that often occur in life. And, from this perspective, more can be learned about being human.

However, as we saw in Chapter 1, Machiavelli’s work also points out that while man must not reject or mortify his natural instinct, he is faced with a choice to remain like the beasts (e.g., the wallowing pig) or find his own, superior way to order the world. This second alternative involves the need to accept that life tends towards the tragic and that it allows us a certain appreciation of beauty when we lose our desire to control everything (in the tale, the female character leads the hero). However, it also affords us the possibility to choose to find some way to establish a degree of order through political action.

This Machiavellian conclusion is different only in form, not substance, from Nietzsche’s contentions. For Nietzsche the practical focus is not politics, but the collectivity of types of higher men who inhabit the earth. In Book Four, Zarathustra is finally seen as fallible, as being able to learn from his mistakes and from others. What he learns is that a new sort of “religion”⁷⁰ is possible in which the natural, amoral world (as represented by the ass) is central, in lieu of a religion where transcendental values are posited. It also stands in contrast to a religion, such as Christianity, where one’s free will is cardinal.⁷¹ With this, Zarathustra’s valuation of one’s will is displaced as well. Moreover, we can see that Nietzsche seeks to present Zarathustra as a Machiavellian founder who presents a new “religion” that may unify higher men.

This new (human) “religion” that both Machiavelli and Nietzsche present in their own way involves a critical reconsideration of one’s values by looking at the depths and base naturalism of one’s existence. This leads to the question, as posed by the pig at the conclusion of Machiavelli’s version, of whether it is better to live in wallowing comfort or to engage in risky, generally tragic political action. Zarathustra poses a similar question when he contrasts the Overman to the Last Man who prefers to remain idle in philistine comfort. The self questioning process of becoming and overcoming oneself is described in Zarathustra and culminates in Book Four, the part Nietzsche calls “a sublime finale.”⁷²

Book Four is comprised of twenty sections. It is characterized by Zarathustra’s encounter, in each section, with a different person or being. After each encounter with the entity with which Zarathustra enters into dialogue, there is an implicit invitation to a supper in Zarathustra’s cave. After this supper, a festival takes place in which an ass, while largely inarticulate, has a central position. Zarathustra then ponders the meaning of this ass-festival.⁷³

Part of the book’s importance lies in the idea that Zarathustra meets “higher men” that are similar in strength of soul as Zarathustra himself. While he meets men who appear inferior to him, in reality his dialogues with them evince a kind of equality of status.⁷⁴ Zarathustra is not wholly alone. The solitude of the previous books is transcended. Zarathustra is interested in listening to and and arguing with his interlocutors.⁷⁵ The crux of this tale is the common worship of the ass. Hence the quadruped plays a central role in the story. The interlocutors are independent entities who nonetheless appear to stand for various kinds of human values. However, Zarathustra is the protagonist and his judgment is most crucial; thus he is the hero and founder of this fraternal order. He is indeed primus inter pares.

At the same time the important theme of animals as metaphors must be underscored. It is a theme that runs not only throughout the book, but also through the entire work. Moreover, it is a theme that also covers the entirety of Nietzsche’s opus. Essentially, the use of animal metaphors is intended to convey the notion that Nietzsche’s brand of humanism is grounded on naturalism.⁷⁶ This means that it is a non-moral humanism. The animal figures, from the serpent to the eagle to the lion, represent particular organic, natural instincts in man as elements of value-creation.⁷⁷ They represent certain values that are lacking in men, because men are often inferior to animals.⁷⁸ They are counterpoints to ideas derived from systems of belief predicated on the higher status of transcendental, non-material sources such as that of Christianity.⁷⁹ Part of their value is the idea that life without the commands of rigid moral or logical reason is still very much life; in fact it is a more authentic and fuller part of the human being qua natural being.⁸⁰

At the inception of Book Four, Zarathustra finds himself surrounded by his own animals. He is a solitary man who nonetheless finds solace and comfort in their company. Nietzsche wants to stress the idea that man, on the deepest level, is an animal, a natural being that should be classified alongside other animals that are traditionally seen, especially by the Christian view, as inferior to man.⁸¹ For Zarathustra, these animals are his companions, even if they are unable to engage in dialogue. They are representations of his manifold drives and instincts.

Zarathustra’s journey at the onset of Book Four begins with a “honey sacrifice.” As his animals surround him, he suspects that the sweetness of life can be found in what the natural life can produce. The sacrifice is not to any deity, but rather it is a sacrifice of one’s own sense of certainty about what it is to be human.⁸² This sacrifice entails evaluating competing views on life and assessing their value. This is the journey that Zarathustra undertakes as he takes his lead from the floating bees.

There are nine human characters that Zarathustra meets in his journey.⁸³ They are all men, some of whom had authority (political or ecclesiastical), and others whose ideas and values are meant to be authoritative. As Zarathustra meets each one, he uncovers the truth and falsehood of the views they present. This truth is not one based on an idea of verifying a claim against empirical facts, but rather assessing claims and values against what Zarathustra considers to be an authentic and strong human life. Thus there is no claim to a universal truth; in effect the journey represents Zarathustra’s subjective evaluation of ideas, which nonetheless is an argument for a particular way of looking at life.

The ass makes its appearance when it comes alongside two kings. It accompanies these regal travelers as they seem to be fleeing the trappings of power.⁸⁴ Nietzsche’s portrayal of the two kings appears intended to unmask the false power of politics. It seems the kings have become disenchanted with the idea of ruling, as people can no longer be convinced to believe in an authoritative set of values through the imposition of political rule. In this, Nietzsche is in a sense thoroughly un-Machiavellian, for he rejects the basic proposition that political rule can establish a unity founded on a common sense of stable values. However, while it is true that Nietzsche does not see in the actual practice of political rule a means to attach individuals to a particular authoritative belief, he does share with Machiavelli the idea that there is something tragic to the political enterprise. Perhaps Nietzsche refers to two kings rather than one because he sees the political life as fundamentally duplicitous and therefore incapable of being unified.

The sight of two kings moving like nomads alongside a mule makes for a pathetic picture of an abysmal fall from power. Since nomadic movement stands for Nietzsche as a positive philosophical attitude that seeks restless inquiry rather than fixed certainties, we know that this image means that Nietzsche thinks political wisdom is ultimately futile and a better stance is to embark on a wandering, solitary quest for meaning that never rests.⁸⁵ Nonetheless, it also suggests that political rule is valuable, at least if it is eventually criticized from within, and may somehow lead to a philosophical life.

This is not unlike the view of politics that Machiavelli presents in his Ass, since the story tells of a man whose life in politics was ultimately futile and leads him to inquire about the meaning of life as such. In any event, Nietzsche seems to accept that politics is one particular way of achieving meaning, even if he considers it ultimately futile. Nietzsche’s use of the ass is a means to equate the three characters as they travel; all three appear stupefied. The ass carries the burden of the kings’ erroneous belief in the magnificence of political rule. This sentiment echoes that of Machiavelli in his own version of the ass story and can therefore be termed Machiavellian, if by now I have provided another level to this term beyond its common understanding.

The critique of Christian values, not predominant in Machiavelli’s Ass but pervasive in many of his other works, is present in Nietzsche’s analysis of other characters in Book Four of Zarathustra. Machiavelli was not only concerned with the institutional weakness of the Catholic Church in political affairs and its role in preventing a unified state in central Italy, but also with the particular values that it ostensibly espoused. Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche finds that some central values of Christianity are not in accord with what it means to live a full and authentic human life. Through this, Nietzsche is seen to be a thoroughly anti-Christian thinker, as opposed to merely being a critic of a perverted Christianity (and hence as possibly a neo-Lutheran).⁸⁶

Nietzsche offers a ruthless critique of Christian values, and not merely of institutions, in his response to many of the arguments he hears throughout Zarathustra’s life-journey. Chief among these critiques, it can be argued, is his response to the Leech Man and the Voluntary Beggar. The former, a person whose hand is permanently immersed in a turbid bog and is covered with bloodsucking leeches, finds a strange sort of comfort in the bite of conscience. For Zarathustra, he is a man who must justify his acts through a ritual of suffering produced by his having recourse to the pangs of conscience as a matter of self-justification or punishment. This is not unlike the ascetic principle that provides a reason to suffering and gives it a kind of therapeutic.⁸⁷ For Zarathustra, this behavior is anathema, for he equates the conscience with a life-sapping suffering. The comportment of the ascetic priest, a kind of prototype in Christianity, is not too distant from this kind of behavior.

A similar critique of Christian values appears in Zarathustra’s response to the Voluntary Beggar. The Christian doctrine of humility and pauperism seems to be the target here. Zarathustra finds the beggar among cows, Nietzsche’s oft-cited metaphor for the men of herd morality.⁸⁸ For Nietzsche greatness is having faith in oneself, while mediocrity is relying on others, either for values or for one’s self-valuation. The beggar is a symbol of this dependence. The beggar lives off the scraps of others. He is not free because he must be a mendicant of material as well as normative content. His poverty is “admirable,” and thus its value depends on the admiration of others. The beggar is voluntary because he is not driven to such a condition by necessity, but rather by his own careful evaluation of life that concludes that rejecting the material world is the most adequate response to its temptations. It is not difficult to see here a barb directed at Christianity, its monkish obsession with poverty, and the figure of Christ himself.

Nietzsche mocks Christian institutions in Book Four as well. The institution of the Last Supper, central to the liturgy, is derided in Zarathustra’s assembly of his own higher men, who are a motley crew of comic yet somehow philosophical figures. Nietzsche rejects Christianity’s denial of the flesh and sensuality by making the last supper seem closer to a delectation of wine and foods. He even goes so far as to state that the guests eagerly eat lamb! In this manner he assails the figure of Christ by positing his own brand of ritual, one in which the Dionysiac affirmation of life is represented by the drinking of wine and eating of lamb’s flesh, without characterizing it in an orgiastic fashion.

Perhaps the apex of Zarathustra’s critique of Christian values is that he replaces the lamb of Christ with the ass.⁸⁹ When Zarathustra returns to his cave he finds his guests worshipping the ass. Initially surprised, disappointed, and angry, Zarathustra witnesses a bizarre “liturgy” where the donkey is placed at the center, much like a crucifix would take the central role in a Christian ceremony. The image is painted in “The Awakening” (Z 422) and is continued in “The Ass Festival” (Z 425).

The cave, instead of being solemnly silent, roars with laughter and noise.⁹⁰ The ass portentously breaks his silence, but it is only to say “Yeah-Yuh.” This braying sounds like an affirmation, and Nietzsche writes that it was not at all discordant in the midst of the higher men’s utterances: it was “strangely blended with the jubilating noise of these higher men” (Z 422). Zarathustra is initially unsure of the meaning of this blend. However he recognizes that these men stand before him as men who are slowly curing themselves of ill thoughts. And Zarathustra believes that he stands before them as teacher and physician of persons who want to be strong and virile. Zarathustra is not the teacher of children or women.⁹¹

As teacher and physician of men, Zarathustra also stands as head of a new kind of “army.” The men lose their “nausea” (or sense of being in the wrong place) and accept their world as is. It is only in Zarathustra’s realm, under his guidance, that the higher men achieve health and vigor. Zarathustra is the founder of a new mode of living. Shame, pity, guilt, and other bites of conscience leave the men, as Zarathustra’s morality of life-affirmation replaces Christian doctrine. This founding of a new “realm” (Z 425) where Zarathustra is king, is a Machiavellian founding where conventional morality is assailed and replaced by an ethics of “war,” where strength is necessary to persevere and laughter is necessary to accept life.⁹² Zarathustra as ruler is seen in the concluding pages of the work, where his faithful companion, the lion, frightens the higher men. In this image, Nietzsche wants to declare that Zarathustra is the predominant figure whose courage and strength enable the other higher men to live together in the cave, surrounded by the doves of peace. But this peace is only possible if protected by the lion, which stands for courage and violence. This martial, virile spirit is not unlike Machiavelli’s, which also takes conflict or war as the basis of life, and where peace is only possible through some force.⁹³ As I state above, the animals stand for natural instincts in man. The lion and the dove, courage and peacefulness, form a hybrid that is parallel to Machiavelli’s combination of the lion and the fox, aggressiveness and cunning.⁹⁴

In this new realm “governed” by Zarathustra, rule is in a sense lax, for there are no general, universal laws to be heeded. Zarathustra’s teachings are, as the subtitle of Nietzsche’s work goes, “for all and none.” Perhaps the only thing close to a law is the dictum to be authentic. Yet, Nietzsche clearly wants nothing like a command that would apply equally to all. Zarathustra’s rule is one as a model, an exemplar of a kind of life that may take many forms. Moreover, he is no infallible exemplar; this we see in his reaction to the ass liturgy he encounters.

Zarathustra is initially dismayed at the sight of his companions kneeling before the ass. They “adore” the ass and proceed to carry out a ceremony reminiscent of (and mocking) the Christian mass. The ass is called “our god” (Z 424) and praised for his many virtues. Here we are reminded of Machiavelli’s poem, where the reader is told of the superior qualities of the ass over those of men. The ass carries the higher men’s burdens; hence it cares for all humanity. It does not speak but always affirms; hence it prefers a joyful affirmation to a logician’s carping attitude. It is plain, quiet, gray, and listens well; thus it is modest, of a color that avoids extremes (not all is “black or white”), and has perceptive philosophical ears. It never says no; thus it affirms all of life’s events. It cares not for the moral rectitude of its life; and thus is amoral. It loves the female of its species and eats figs; and thus possesses a taste for sensuality. Lastly, it embraces all, it pushes none away; hence it adheres to a truly authentic, deep egalitarianism different from a superficial democratic one.

This last idea stands out in the vastness of Nietzsche’s thought, for it connotes a certain universalistic and catholic openness, contrary to the understanding of Nietzsche’s view as the result of crude aristocratic thinking. But it explains the subtitle of the work that we mention above: “A book for all and none.” What Nietzsche wants to convey is that the ideas he expresses through Zarathustra are difficult to grasp and put in practice in real life; yet at the same time all persons, given enough motivation, talent, and will, can achieve the sort of authentic, genuine life that Zarathustra achieves through his journey. In this sense it is a potentially “democratic” book: everyone can undergo an arduous transformation.⁹⁵

But we are still not sure whether Nietzsche agrees with this judgment of the ass or not. In “The Ass Festival” we get our response. Zarathustra joins his guests: “At this point of the litany Zarathustra could no longer control himself and himself shouted Yea-Yuh” (Z 428).⁹⁶ Zarathustra sees that his initial aversion at the sight of the adoration of the ass was an improper response. He stands corrected. He realizes that he is an “old gay fool” who has actually learned something from his “friends” (Z 428), a word not to be taken lightly.⁹⁷ Much like the protagonist of Machiavelli’s Ass, Zarathustra becomes even more aware that he must continually develop, change, and become something other than what he is in the present. Yet Zarathustra is not solipsistic or adamantly concerned only with his own development in isolation from others. He realizes that the adoration of the ass is an adoration of life, this life. As Nietzsche tells us elsewhere:

Adventavit asinus,
Pulcher et fortissimus!⁹⁸

BGE 18

Zarathustra’s admiration for the thick-skinned, stubborn ass is profound: the ass is beautiful.⁹⁹ He concurs with the Old Pope, who claims that whoever came up with the idea that God was a spirit was a fool for having taken such an absurd leap of faith.¹⁰⁰ Zarathustra realizes he is a changing being whose process of becoming in this final instance is colored with the lesson of accepting nature as part and parcel of his own being. It is a realization that takes place at (what seems to be) the end of a long, circuitous journey. For Nietzsche this journey tells us that man is in constant flux and becoming, in constant metamorphosis, rather than being a fixed entity.

The figure of the ass is thus central to the culmination of Zarathustra. The ass stands for two ideas that Nietzsche wants to convey.¹⁰¹ One is the coarse, dust-covered roughness of this life. Sooner or later, the ass affirms any situation it is in, without giving it great thought, for it realizes that that situation is part of its life.¹⁰² Like Machiavelli’s protagonist, who witnesses a variety of beings and episodes while in the form of a will-less ass, Zarathustra gains an acceptance of life’s variegated vignettes. This acceptance is not a quiet Stoicism, which necessitates cool reason and quieted passions; it is a direct, non-rational natural openness to all of life’s possibilities. And, this includes the fact that life inevitably requires pain, suffering, harm, and harm-doing. This is the wisdom of the ass.¹⁰³

The ass’s ready suffering also shows the philosophical stance Nietzsche wants to express. The ass has thick skin: it can endure pain. It also has long ears, and can thus hear well. For Nietzsche hearing represents a higher sense perception than seeing, for it requires greater concentration but also has greater range.¹⁰⁴ It is an example of how one “philosophizes with a hammer” (a tuning fork, as Nietzsche states in TI) by listening well to the faintest sounds in life. It is an attitude that stubbornly accepts life’s roughness and steep hills or challenges. Like the camel, the ass is a beast of burden, but it has more qualities than the desert animal. The ass can climb mountains; it sees no other alternative than to proceed and climb them. Like the tightrope walker, the ass manages to maneuver in steep, difficult climbs by shifting his gaze from the far off (the goal) to the nearby (the moment). Only with a proper balance between these two foci of the horizon and the “present” can the ass succeed in reaching its objective. In the same manner that Machiavelli’s protagonist is told that man is born naked and without protection while animals have natural strengths, Zarathustra comes to admire the ass’ animal nature.

In spite of the heavy burdens this challenge imposes, they are simply on life’s paths. And the ass, even if stubborn at times, is a beast of burden. It faces an ultimately painful existence; it is a tragic animal. As Nietzsche asks in TI: “can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? The case of the philosopher” (TI 468). The tragic philosopher is he who accepts the pain of life, takes it upon himself to understand what it means to human life, and proceeds from this inquiry to push its boundaries. And, hopefully, to produce a new, original insight to convey to others.¹⁰⁵ This is the ideal case of the “genius” (BGE 6: 206).¹⁰⁶ Because it is concerned with pain and not virtue, the ass is a symbol of a particular way of life as understood by the tragic type of philosopher. “Beyond good and evil is [its] kingdom” (Z 425). Nietzsche also seems to imply that if the ass can escape the yoke of good and evil, it is emancipated, freed from its long-heavy burden.¹⁰⁷

Zarathustra’s acceptance of the ass worship is now clearly Nietzsche’s acceptance of it as a representation of the extramoral life and its inquiry in the context of a tragic philosophy of life.¹⁰⁸ It is not that punishment, justice, and other moral tenets do not exist; they clearly do. Yet for Nietzsche their purpose is to instill a sense of guilt, rather than to achieve rectification of evils.¹⁰⁹ Like Machiavelli, who sees the preeminence of the rule of law in the creation of stable, ordered societies over the pursuit and achievement of justice as such, Nietzsche sees that systems of “justice” belie psychological conditions that can be altered with various ways of life and thought. The ass’s embrace of all, including kings and beggars tells us that this extramoral stance is potentially accessible to all humans, no matter how different they may be.

Zarathustra as a whole and the closing mass in Book Four are generally understood as satirical statements. A satire is a literary and dramatic artistic form in which human vices are ridiculed, sometimes in order to bring about some improvement. Human shortcomings are censured through derision, burlesque and irony. However, this is not Nietzsche’s intention. He certainly uses irony and derision; but it is not to censure humans for their acts or natures. Rather, he does so to posit that what humans are (even if comical because sometimes base or crude) must be affirmed as what life has given to them. He ridicules the postures and contortions that some men engage in to justify their existence through some otherworldly or moral claim. But what he wants to declare in Zarathustra is that the many apparently contradictory aspects of human nature must be consciously embraced, and instead of feeling guilt for their outcomes, one must learn to laugh at them, to not take them too seriously. The pedantic philosopher, the philosophus gloriosus,¹¹⁰ is Zarathustra’s target of ridicule.¹¹¹ Such a philosopher is recalcitrant to change, and his stubborn clinging to old beliefs is more asinine than the quiet ass that breaks its silence only to loudly affirm its lot in life. The philosopher who identifies with this sort of ass is more clear-sighted than the pedantic philosopher.

Conclusion

Nietzsche imitates Machiavelli’s founding of a new secular, humanist set of values that affirm this world through the words of Zarathustra. The Florentine secretary, as we saw in Chapter 2 on The Prince, was not merely a republican, civic humanist Florentine patriot. He founded a new perspective on moral psychology that did not elude evil; rather, he presented it for all to see it as a natural and inevitable (and sometimes vital) part of humanity. He then proceeded to try to construct something beyond it. The necessity to confront and even commit harms is an idea that Machiavelli expressed in his belief that there are “cruelties well used” (P VIII) if greatness is their aim.¹¹² Zarathustra follows this notion through his own claims, such as those about the “Adder’s Bite.”

This Machiavellian anti-morality is particularly aimed at Christian ethics. Machiavelli was not opposed to the Catholic Church only for its role in preventing the unity and strength of the Italian peninsula; he also opposed its putative values of humility, weakness, poverty, and the afterlife. Similarly, Zarathustra assails Christianity’s values systematically, as we saw in the derision of the Ass Festival, for instance.

Following from this radical critique of conventional (Christian) morality undertaken by both thinkers, a new way of looking at one’s life emerges. This is evident through the apparently coincidental use of Apuleius’ Golden Ass by both authors. The coincidence is merely apparent because in reality both authors think alike. Machiavelli and Nietzsche share the belief that history tends to bring great suffering (‘ingratitude,’ for Machiavelli, and “pain” for Nietzsche) to the individual. They thus come to believe that man himself must fabricate some justification for existence outside of any religious ground.

This creativity in developing a conception of oneself is, quite literally, vital. According to the ethics the two thinkers espouse, it should be marked by authenticity with regard to one’s unique instincts. Moreover, it can only be performed through a long and arduous journey where moral and logical reason are not always present. In this journey, a comic ethos is necessary. The subjective and aesthetic experience of life, through a self-critical analysis of one’s moral views, can be lived if one accepts life as an ever-unfolding process.

“Art as the redemption of the sufferer:”¹¹³ this is Apuleius’s great insight, which Machiavelli and Nietzsche take up to underscore the potentially creative and redemptive power of the aesthetic in the face of a world where evil, even wrong-doing, is ineluctable in the establishing of great things. Zarathustra is a work of art that is at the same time a philosophical text, one that is largely shaped by Machiavellian insights. From what Machiavelli and Nietzsche have taught us, we can now seek to develop a more general theory of how to understand politics aesthetically.

Notes

1

In Tusiani, p. 51.

2

Maxims and Arrows 11, p. 468.

3

Schacht, Nietzsche, p. 476. See also Young, “Introduction,” passim. I recognize the importance of Gay Science in understanding the totality of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of art;” however, the move from one explicitly “artistic” text to another is of interest in this study.

4

Nietzsche calls it a “non plus ultra” (Letter to von Seydlitz, in Middleton, p. 284). See EH Zarathustra: 6. Nietzsche writes to Overbeck that Zarathustra seems to be his “last will and testament” and “it contains an image of myself in the sharpest focus” (Middleton, p. 207). See also letter to Overbeck, March 31 1885 (Ibid., p. 239). It must be noted that the claim that there is a single “key text” is contestable. Perhaps the totality of Nietzsche’s work is most important; perhaps only a segment of it. Nonetheless, going on the textual evidence of what Nietzsche said about it and what it contains and its style, a case can be made for Zarathustra‘s centrality.

5

See Pippin, in Gillespie and Strong, Nietzsche’s New Seas, p. 45.

6

Kaufmann believed that Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s key text. He believed all his central ideas are to be found in Zarathustra. More importantly, for us the style in which it is written (a literary form) is of importance because it is parallel to Machiavelli’s literary enterprise as well. Few political thinkers combined the literary and political as Machiavelli and Nietzsche did. To be sure, most of Nietzsche’s works are of a literary rather than expository quality; yet Zarathustra stands as its apex.

7

Gooding-Williams explains why a literary text can have philosophical explanatory value: if it addresses questions that are in the purview of philosophy (See Gooding-Williams, p. 14).

8

In Higgins, p. 206.

9

The book’s philosophical importance, as shall be shown below, transcends the interpretation that it was merely a parody of Nietzsche’s contemporaries.

10

Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, p. 206. Apuleius, moreover, relied on Lucian’s Story of the Ass. Ovid’s Metamorphosis may also have influenced Apuleius.

11

Middleton, p. 40.

12

Nietzsche disapproves of Socrates’ notion of knowledge as the closest thing to an exit from the human labyrinth (see BT 74).

13

See Justin Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art, “The Birth of Tragedy,” passim.

14

Raymond Geuss, Introduction, Birth of Tragedy, p. xi.

15

Here we see that Nietzsche’s original desire to be an academic and good scholar was overridden by his desire to be “truthful,” even if this later entailed a massive personal onus (see letter to Burckhardt, January 6, 1889, in Middleton, p. 346).

16

BT, “An attempt at self-criticism,” section 5, p. 8.

17

Safranski recognizes this, in noting Nietzsche’s use of “biologistic overtones” (Safranski, p. 260). It is meant to provide an anti-metaphysical philosophy.

18

Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche’s view of man is corporeal, based on the body.

19

There are glimmers of a sly smile in some of his lines (such as in the conclusion, when the pig speaks), yet it on the whole it is not a comic writing.

20

In Capata (p. 962). In a Letter to Francesco Guicciardini circa 21 October 1525. See CW 987. Gilbert’s claim that the tragic part refers to Italy’s woes is partly correct (See letter to Alamanni November 8, 1504, in Tusiani, p. 151) but ignores the tragic elements in Machiavelli’s writing itself and also in his own life.

21

GS I.1 74.

22

Although the Gay Science is Nietzsche’s effort at incorporating a comic attitude in some extended sense. See K. Higgins, Comic Relief, passim.

23

It is interesting to note that Nietzsche jokes about the lack of interesting characters in heaven in the same manner as Machiavelli (WP 871). It is not clear if he got this from the Florentine.

24

Ansell-Pearson, p. 53.

25

See Nietzsche’s admiration for Bizet’s Carmen as an “extremely southern work!” (Letter to Gast, December 5, 1881, in Middleton, p. 180). Also see letter to Gast, January 21, 1887 (Middleton, p. 259).

26

Justin Young is correct in telling us that Nietzsche’s view of art eventually returns to its tragic origins but only after having discovered the qualities of comedy and poetry (See Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art, epilogue, passim).

27

Martinez, “Benefit of Absence,” in Kahn, Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, 1993: 117ff

28

In the sense of a Milesian tale (in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, a brief erotic or picaresque tale of romantic adventure).

29

The names are reminiscent of Niccolò Machiavelli himself (and of the Nicomachean Ethics, which Machiavelli may be seeking to target) and of the Greek idea of phronesis or temperance. This gives us an intimation that Machiavelli saw himself as (in Nietzschean terms) “Dionysiac” in nature.

30

Contra Brown, Clizia shows fundamentally a self-ironic stance in the part of Nicomaco as a stand-in for Machiavelli in his old age, when he was gripped by a ludicrous attraction to a younger woman (See Brown, p. 88-89).

31

Kathleen Higgins recognizes this when she cleverly claims Zarathustra is a “comic book.”

32

See Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching, p. 52, 62, 263.

33

Here is where we begin to see the reason for Nietzsche’s use of Apuleius’s Golden Ass.

34

Nietzsche tells Overbeck that Zarathustra is “poetry, and not a collection of aphorisms” (Middleton, p. 207).

35

See Harries, “The Philosopher at Sea,” in Gillespie and Strong, p. 21. Machiavelli also discovers “new seas” in his political realism, at the same time that the Genoan reached America. Nietzsche seems to be speaking for Machiavelli and himself when he states, “we both sail right over morality, we crush, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by daring to make the voyage there” (BGE I 23).

36

We could say the same thing of BT and GM, which are also anti-Christian. They are, however, prose works that do not have the epic-poem quality of Zarathustra.

37

Apuleius’s original Golden Ass is largely inspired also by non-western tradition, in this case by Egyptian magic cults.

38

See Lampert, p. 2.

39

Gramsci also sees Machiavelli’s enterprise in The Prince as that of the making of a “dramatic form of a myth,” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, in Forgacs, p. 238-9); yet for him the myth is more directly political (the fusion of political ideology and political science) than moral. Gramsci calls it a Sorelian myth that arouses a collectivity’s will. The link to Nietzsche’s own account of arousing will is not too distant.

40

Nietzsche knows he mythologizes, for, as he tells von Gersdorff, he knows “quite well that there is nobody alive who would do anything the way this Zarathustra is” (Middleton, p. 213).

41

As Hulliung affirms, “for both Machiavelli and Nietzsche the crux of history is the struggle of Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome” (Hulliung, p. 248).

42

If it is done skillfully. Many readers of Zarathustra do not believe it is carefully constructed or edited.

43

This may also be a reason why Machiavelli believes that religion is always important to a political community, that is, in order to secure ties among people through common myths.

44

See Ansell-Pearson, p. 21. Also “Vademecum-Vadetecum,” GS Prelude 7, p. 43.

45

See Lampert, p. 263.

46

See EH Zarathustra 6; BGE 6 211, where Nietzsche says “genuine philosophers are legislators.”

47

Nietzsche’s own understanding of his philosophical enterprise as “scientific” is based on his genealogical method, which is more historicist and interpretive than “scientific” in the sense we now understand.

48

See Viroli 1998, p. 73-75.

49

Hulliung, p. 256.

50

In Gray, p. 233.

51

Tacitus’s accounts of Caligula’s acts play a similar, non-moralistic role.

52

Zarathustra, “On Self Overcoming”, p. 228. See also EH 4 2.

53

See GS 1.4 79 on Nietzsche’s idea that evil is necessary as a way to transgress old boundaries and set new paths for innovative thinking and action.

54

See Lampert, p. 70.

55

Rosen, p. 234.

56

BGE is likewise infused with the Machiavellian acceptance of evil and its concomitant rejection of standard Christian morality. In “Our Virtues,” Nietzsche avers that the good European will reject pity, love, and moral judgments (see sections 219-222). For Nietzsche, true love is not a moral sentiment (see BGE 4 153).

57

Lampert, p. 70.

58

The psychological assumption here is relevant to utilitarianism. Nietzsche holds the view that basically all humans fundamentally think in such terms, i.e., each individual is prepared to commit harm because he or she expects that otherwise similar harms will be committed against them. If this is the case, the utilitarian notion that it is possible to have in mind the consequences of one’s actions for everyone, not for “us,” is undermined.

59

Nietzsche criticizes Sophocles and Euripides for their embracing of the moral and the truth-seeking as foundations of action, in contradistinction to Aeschylus (BT 65).

60

Further, “there are no moral phenomena” as such, “but only a moral interpretation of phenomena” (BGE 4 108).

61

In fact this distinction is false, for both write works that are simultaneously artistic and philosophical. However, for analytical clarity, it helps to make the distinction.

62

Understood as the capacity to acquire dominion, maintain it, and expand it. It is not a tyrannical urge.

63

Marx would clearly disagree; yet these two German atheists have many parallel ideas. See Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.

64

This idea opposes notions such as the transcendental unity of apperception in Kant.

65

For Nehamas there is no distinction between the self and the soul. However, is it not possible to conceive of a person in whom the soul (understood in this case as the spiritual side of man) has a marginal role as compared to the corporeal? Machiavelli seems to have such a notion (see Nehamas, pp. 155-169, passim).

66

One foundation is Apuleius’s depiction of a “hostile, hateful world” (see Walsh, Introduction, Golden Ass, p. xxxvi).

67

Ibid, p. xxxiv.

68

Mennipus of Gadara, the Cynic philosopher, wrote allegories in verse and prose. Apuleius’s and Machiavelli’s work underscore the Milesian or picaresque element more than Nietzsche in Book Four because they place philosophical importance on the symbolism of gender relations in a manner different from Nietzsche. For them it is represents an affirmation of life; for Nietzsche woman stands for opposition to man’s projects.

69

See Lampert, p. 288.

70

By this he means a way of uniting people of the same ilk (from the Latin legare, to tie together).

71

Such as the volition needed in the acceptance of the faith.

72

Letter to von Gersdorff, February 12, 1885 (Middleton, p. 235). Against Lampert’s dismissive view of Book Four (see Lampert, p. 289), we can point out that Nietzsche at one point said he wanted to recall all editions with Book Four; but this is not because he disapproves of that section, rather he thinks it may be too complex and harsh for a readership too inept and too soft (Letter to Peter Gast, December 9, 1888, in Middleton, p. 332). Nietzsche implied that only after the consolidation of “his” philosophy could readers comprehend and tolerate the final part. Until then it would remain a “private party,” an esoteric teaching. This is similar to the claim that the “moral” of the story of Apuleius’s work is in the final book (See Walsh, p. xxxiii).

73

The “Festival of Laughter,” where Lucius becomes an ass, is Apuleius’s chapter three.

74

He calls them “friends” in a few instances. Friendship, as Machiavelli believed, requires equality.

75

As Pippin says, Zarathustra’s achievement depends on a collective accomplishment (Pippin, in Gillespie and Strong, p. 64)

76

This idea is encapsulated by “the abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god” (BGE IV 141). Nietzsche here declares that the bodily hungers and needs of the human being are evidence of his lower-than-divinity status.

77

Stanley Rosen remarks that the animals represent Becoming, which is Nietzsche’s version of nature. This idea is not far from my interpretation, for I understand the animals as representing certain values or qualities that Zarathustra may or may not learn from. Perhaps my conception does not take for granted the notion that Becoming is possible (See Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment, p. 208). For Rosen the human and the animals seem to be separated (in Nietzsche) by a rigid line, something that I reject (see Ibid., p. 209).

78

Man is the “most bungled of all animals” (A 14). This recalls the pig’s lecture at the end of Machiavelli’s Ass.

79

See Rosen p. 26.

80

In this manner this perspective opposes Heidegger’s metaphysical reading.

81

Nietzsche’s use of animal imagery is the use of metaphors to underscore particular values. However, since his own philosophy is a brand of naturalism, the animal metaphor also underscores man’s animal nature. I take the animal metaphor as a sign of what Lampert means when he states that the central matter of Zarathustra, like some of Machiavelli’s work, may be about the relationship of man to nature (See Lampert, p. 68).

82

Rosen makes the enlightening comment that honey, being associated with bees, leads to the notion of work as distinctively human as opposed to animal (because animals are merely interested in sweetness). I believe that this is correct but valuation of work only occurs through the acceptance of the animal enjoyment in the production of sweetness or happiness. Hence there really is not a strict boundary between the animal and the human (See Rosen, p. 209).

83

The nine human characters plus the three animals make for twelve beings, which points to the work as a satire of Christ’s disciples.

84

See Higgins, p. 211.

85

The fact that there is a king on the right and on the left would seem to imply that both right-wing and left-wing politics are deluded.

86

John McCormick has suggested that this may be the case. However, I believe Nietzsche shows himself to be radically anti-Christian, even as he posits some form of an alternative “religion.”

87

Rosen associates it with science; I believe the voluntary immersion of the arm into the bog seems to lead to a sense of guilt that the man tries to wash out through pain (it is an erroneous belief, just as doctors’ belief in the use of leeches a long time ago).

88

Cows are also positive symbols for Nietzsche, since they represent philosophical rumination.

89

Higgins believes the ass represents Zarathustra himself. However, this cannot be possible, since the ass is an independent entity in the story, which at one point is in antagonism with Zarathustra, when it is adored and Zarathustra finds this repulsive. The ass surely represents an instinctive affirmation of life, which is also a possible potentiality in all humans, including Zarathustra himself. The ass does not stand for Zarathustra but for a particular instinctive, non-rationalistic affirmation of life (see Higgins p. 227). Higgins is right to say that “there is spiritual value in being an ass” (Ibid., p. 228).

90

This image is clearly an attack on Plato’s metaphor of the cave. In Plato’s view, the cave dwellers merely see shadows, or falsehoods. But in Nietzsche, the dwellers revel in enjoyment of life’s discoveries without seeking to escape the caverns.

91

Nietzsche’s misogyny is an important aspect of his conception of the strong life: he abhors, or hates, traditional female values or images such as passivity.

92

Like Heraclitus, Zarathustra believes war is the father of all there is.

93

Machiavelli’s misogyny is infinitely more tempered than Nietzsche’s.

94

Or force and fraud. It can be argued that Machiavelli is ultimately no machista since, beyond the strong role of women in The Ass, Clizia, Mandragola and other works, he sees that man can be an amalgam of a distinctively (although stereotypical) male quality as force (the lion) and a distinctively female (albeit stereotypical) quality of deception or guile (the fox). Schopenhauer, in his notes on the sexes, tells us women are more rational and artful than men.

95

Or, at least Nietzsche seems to want to make us believe that this is possible because this may lead us to try to reach that goal.

96

The German original states Zarathustra shouts “I-A”, which also has a ring of af firmation, as it is onomatopoeic of the German “Ja.”: “An dieser Stelle der Litanei aber konnte Zarathustra sich nicht länger bemeistern, schrie selber I-A, lauter noch als der Esel.” Nietzsches Werke, KGW=‘VI-1.387’ KSA=’4.391’.

97

“Und noch einmal hob Zarathustra an zu reden. Oh meine neuen Freunde, sprach er, ihr Wunderlichen, ihr höheren Menschen, wie gut gefallt ihr mir nun,—seit ihr wieder fröhlich wurdet! Ihr seid wahrlich Alle aufgeblüht: mich dünkt, solchen Blumen, wie ihr seid, thun neue Feste noth, ein kleiner tapferer Unsinn, irgend ein Gottesdienst nd sels-fest, irgend ein alter fröhlicher Zarathustra-Narr, ein rausewind, der euch die Seelen hell bläst” KGW=‘VI-1.390’ KSA=’4.394’ (Intelex search).

98

“The ass has arrived, beautiful and most strong/brave.” Zarathustra’s admiration is echoed here in BGE: Nietzsche finds beauty in the ass.

99

The ass also symbolizes stupidity. Here Nietzsche seems to want to make Zarathustra mock himself for having been too certain about his own perspective.

100

Here we can see one idea that shows that Nietzsche is no “Protestant,” not even in the manner of Kierkegaard.

101

Rosen does not provide much insight into the figure and meaning of the ass (See Rosen, p. 241-242). Lampert’s treatment is equivocal and perfunctory and its association with mass man is disconcerting (See Lampert, p. 306). Berkowitz does not discuss it at length (see Berkowitz, pp. 223-227).

102

The ass stands in contraposition to the Ugliest Man, a stand-in for the life-wrenching anxiety of Socrates’ hyper-rationalism (which eventually murders God).

103

Contrary to what Rosen believes, animal figures in Nietzsche’s work do have wisdom. See Rosen, p. 26.

104

See Solomon and Higgins, What Nietzsche Really Said, on Nietzsche’s understanding of “ears,” p. 237.

105

As Rosen tells us, Nietzsche can be seen as primarily a political theorist (and not as an ontologist or metaphysician) because he wants to shape the views held by the human collectivity.

106

For Nietzsche a genius produces something new, he is not sterile. Hence the metaphor of pregnancy and motherly nature as figuring a genius who originates new vistas and values, such as Machiavelli and Nietzsche himself

107

This may reflect also Nietzsche’s own identification with the process of expressing what the ass means to his philosophy and to himself: as he tells Overbeck, Zarathustra is an image of himself “once I have thrown off my whole burden” (Middleton, p. 207-208).

108

As Higgins declares, “the central ‘tragic’ message of Zarathustra is that the meaning in life is to be found in simply loving life for its own sake” (Higgins, p. 241) because its recurring pains and ultimate futility can only be made sense of by enjoying its minor climaxes in quotidian existence.

109

In any case, complete rectification is impossible; we cannot go back in time. Amor fati is entailed by this fact.

110

See Ibid., p. 207. It seems that Zarathustra seems himself as being flawed like this kind of philosopher.

111

This is also the intent of the section “We Scholars” of BGE, where Nietzsche mocks the “self-glorification and self-exaltation” (BGE 6 204) of professional thinkers’ sclerotic dogmatism.

112

D III.19 also refers to the use of punishment as a necessary cruelty well used. D III.21 explains how Scipio and Hannibal’s cruelty served them well.

113

WP 853, emphasis in the original. Nietzsche believes art is the redemption of the men of probing, radical questioning, or “of tragic knowledge.” It is also the redemption of the man of action and of suffering. These words seem apt to describe Machiavelli’s keen inquiry into the lived reality of men in the midst of pain.

Chapter 5

The Form of Aesthetic Political Theory

Introduction

In the Dedicatory Letter of The Prince, Machiavelli paints a political vista on our minds:

For just as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down on the plain to consider the nature of mountains and high places and to consider the nature of low places place themselves atop high mountains, similarly, to know the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people.

The Prince, DL 4

To be sure, this use of imagery is an attractive flight of rhetoric. Yet it is not merely that. Machiavelli wants to express, to Lorenzo de Medici (and perhaps to anyone else who might read this), his notion that two “humors”—the people and the great—are the constants that must be taken into account in political life. Yet both cannot be understood simultaneously: the totality of politics is so complex that only partial understanding can be achieved at any given time. In order to reach this kind of understanding, one’s perspective, be it from the plain or the mountain, is critical. In this manner Machiavelli shows us that he understands politics aesthetically, that is, he sees the political landscape through a category normally reserved to artists.

While perspectivism is one of the distinguishing features of Renaissance painting in relation to Medieval art, Machiavelli’s perspectivism is one that reflects his unconscious drawing on a range of artistic or aesthetic principles in his effort to comprehend the nature of political power. Behind his rhetorical mastery, Machiavelli intimates that we can grasp politics as such through a perspective acquired from an aesthetic attitude. Radically remolding the traditional categories of classical political thought, especially those inherited from Plato and Cicero, Machiavelli tells us we can understand politics aesthetically. What can we make of this implicit directive?

Art and politics, for some, do not mix well. How can something grounded on law, rule-driven, systematic and systematized, such as politics, be coupled to the concept of the aesthetic, most often associated with subjective boundlessness and creativity? This question, or one of its variants, often emerges in the minds of skeptics when they hear of attempts to find an aesthetic element in political life. In these minds the political is something related to governance, rules, laws, and regulations. The arts, par contre, are by their nature about the free expression of ineffable individual character.

The coupling of the aesthetic and the political is something that is rare in contemporary political science. The trend within this discipline has moved in arguably the opposite direction: the effort to underscore the science term in the phrase by employing methods borrowed from economics and statistics has become dominant in some areas. In this manner, political studies have gained somewhat of an air of systematicity and “hard science” seriousness about them. As much as this development can be seen as an advance in the effort to analytically grasp what is the inner logic and nature of political phenomena, it is a welcome step. Yet two things stand in the way of its claiming unchallenged dominance. One is the fact simple observation that to explore varieties of doing “political science” or political theory rather than one single approach can yield innovation. And, this innovation may lead to useful, important discoveries. The other is that some major developments in political life, were not adequately predicted by “scientific” views of political events.¹ “Scientific” approaches to political processes have proven to be less than exact.

At the same time, we must recall that the roots of the term “theory” refer to something that is essentially aesthetic, not scientific. As we mention at the inception of this work, the word theoria in Greek refers to vision, to observation, and to spectatorship. It does not first mean an intellectual construction of a general concept based on abstract principles derived from observation of empirical facts. Theoria for the ancient Greeks meant spectacle, much like that observed by an audience that then engages in its “contemplation.” In turn it referred back to the term theoros, which meant to observe. Thus to understand the term theory abstractly is to deracinate it from its origin as something related to participation in an act of observation and spectacle. To generalize one must first observe particular events and cases much like a member of an audience during a play. To contemplate, one must first view objects outside oneself

If this is the case, we must always be open to the possibility of new forms of theory, including those that emphasize the role of sensory perception. Innovation as an effort to find new perspectives on politics is not merely acceptable but necessary. We live in an age of information sciences, where computers are the lifeline of both society and culture, and this has led many academic endeavors to try to imitate the accuracy of scientific fields or to borrow the not-so-accurate efforts at systematicity of the “dismal science,” economics. At the same time we live in an era of mass media and communication, where a sensory datum can be magnified by the sheer power of new communications technology.

It is in this moment of self-reflection within the discipline that emerges what I call “aesthetic political theory.” The basis of this analytical approach to politics is aesthetic. That is to say, this perspective on politics is analytical because it seeks to understand political life and phenomena for what they are, rather than for what they should be. And, it is aesthetic because the methods that it adopts depend on categories borrowed from aesthetic theory. Grounded on the notion that the traditional (deontological) ethical basis of political theory can become too removed from reality and the possible, this new approach urges for a creative way of thinking about how to analyze politics. Like much rational choice political science, aesthetic political theory borrows from another field many of its key terms. The former finds them in economics and decision theory, while the latter finds them in philosophical aesthetics.

Philosophical aesthetics is the tradition of thinking about the terms “aesthetic” and “art.” As one of the main branches of philosophical inquiry alongside epistemology, ontology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics, aesthetics is often simply defined as the effort to define what art is, or as what beauty and taste are. Even in its status as one of the least developed branches, it does provide us with an appealing set of ideas for our recasting of political theory onto new grounds.

Plato’s Apparent Assault on Art

Any attempt to define aesthetics must confront the question of its own purpose and intent. At the heart of this attempt is the need—or ambition—to try to determine what “art” is. In a work of this scope, dealing with the dual legacy of Machiavelli and Nietzsche and its implications, we do not have space to trace the history of aesthetics. However, what we must do in order to proceed with our inquiry is to summarize some of the key problems and issues of this tradition as they are relevant to our purposes. Moreover, we must posit what the current state of philosophical aesthetics is in order to explain our justification for using aesthetic categories for politics.

For political theory, any discussion of what art is must begin with Plato’s Republic. More specifically, it should begin with the last book. In Book X Plato’s Socrates declares that “imitative” art should be banished from the ideal city. Some patriotic hymns and poems are acceptable, but any art that is deemed imitative (that is characterized by mimesis) is unacceptable. Why? Fundamentally because it is deceptive. This sort of art, such as a painting of a chair, is three steps removed from reality and therefore gives us a false impression of what is real. The painting is merely a reflection or imitation of the object (a chair) manufactured by a carpenter, and the carpenter’s work is in turn merely an imitation of the ideal form of a chair as it exists in the true world, the domain of Eidos or the Forms in Platonic metaphysics. Thus by definition the work of art does not have innate reality about it; if we think it does, we are being deluded.

At the same time, the work of art is dangerous because it pulls on the emotions of humans rather than on their faculty of reason. Homer is the example that Plato finds useful. Most people admire his verses, yet, who really can know why Homer is manipulating our emotions in this way? His tales are exciting, moving, and dazzling, and because of this we become emotional and passionate when listening to them or reading them. But then this is dangerous: it leads us away from using our rational faculties to control ourselves and our world.

Finally, art of the Homeric kind is dangerous because it gives us a false vision of the form of virtue. Yes, there are images of great heroes in his works, and we come to think of their courage, leadership, fortitude, temperance, and other qualities as virtues. Yet no one, Plato says, can confirm whether Homer himself knew anything at all about how an ideal city should be formed. He had no real view of the form the perfect city should take, for he gave us no indication of this. Moreover, his own character is suspect, Plato goes on to add, according to his contemporaries.

Thus, the inception of the analysis of the relationship between politics and art (understood as what artists create as such) is one of suspicion. Plato banishes art from the ideal city. Not all art, but it is difficult to think of any other art besides patriotic art that might be acceptable in his dream city. It is true that in The Laws he gives us a more ample vision of how the arts can play a role, yet they remain subservient to the good functioning of the city as a whole. This is the idea of justice for Plato, after all: each element must be located in its proper place. Creative individual expression does not have autonomous value.

This image of Plato’s distrust of art in the polis becomes more complex, to be sure. We shall review this in the next chapter where we will see how Plato’s own account of political theory is in some ways inherently aesthetic and as we examine the relation to the notion of techne. Yet for our present purposes of introducing the basic foundation of the way political theory has understood that which is related to the arts (the aesthetic) this is the proper image. It is an image where art is merely imitative in general (one could argue that even patriotic art is imitative of martial arts, such as those in marches or hymns), that it is deceptive because it leads us to false views of the reality of the world, it is dangerous because it works at the level of emotions and not reason, and that it is politically disastrous for it gives us a false view of the ideal form of a city or state and the political virtues of a leader.

Has this distrustful view of the arts remained constant? This is not the case. It is precisely through the erosion of this Platonic denigration of the arts that modern aesthetic political theory is possible. This is also largely due to the fact that the very notion of art has been placed under rigorous scrutiny by philosophical aesthetics. In tracing the transformations of the artistic, we can see why we are able to apply aesthetic categories to politics in modernity.

What is “Art”?

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art, the character of our experience of it and of our experience of the natural environment. Most modern aesthetic theory centers on artworks rather than the environment.² The term aesthetics is thus different from art proper and is born in 1700s Enlightenment Europe, when Alexander Baumgarten coins the term in his Reflections on Poetry (1735). He understands this term to mean the study of sensory experience coupled with feeling, and it stands in distinction to logic. As he put it, is “sensitive knowing” (Aesthetica section I). It is the direct sensuous apprehension of actual things.

In Greek, aisthesthai means to perceive as a part of sensory, physical experience. Aesthetics is not the same as the philosophy of art, which focuses on the question of beauty, taste, and art itself. However, it does encompass it. The concerns it seeks to answer are what art is, how to interpret art, and what are the proper criteria of evaluation of art.

We must rehearse some basic notions in aesthetic theory to see later how they are connected to the aesthetic political theory that is built on an implicit critique by Machiavelli and Nietzsche of Plato’s views of imitative or Homeric art (in distinction to techne). If the above is an accurate description of Plato’s treatment of art in relation to politics, it is important to note that it hinges on Plato’s effort to define art. Thus the Platonic distrust of the aesthetic (defined here as simply that which is related to art) is a consequence of his pejorative definition of the art works or objects of art. Given his conception of the Forms, it could not be otherwise, for in his metaphysical system, tactile, sensuous things must of necessity be lower in status vis-à-vis ideal conceptions.³

The ball of aesthetic analysis thus starts to roll: Plato sets it in motion by founding the “imitative” definition of art. This definition asserts that art merely reflects, like a mirror, things in the world. But from this definition we come to the related notion of “representation,” which does not have the pejorative connotation that Plato gives mimesis. Aesthetic theorists, in the effort to define what is art, moved to the idea that representation was central to the concept. An artist represents his view of a tree when he paints it on a canvas; or a sculptor gives wings to a man to represent freedom. Shakespeare’s Othello represents jealousy in an effective way, and we should not deem it deficient for being merely “imitative” of human jealousy. Imitation, for thinkers as diverse as Dewey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Gombrich, does not exhaust the productive, clarifying power that artistic representation has.⁴

However, we encounter the problem that some art forms do not seem to represent anything at all. Here, music is an important example. There is no actual, physical thing that a musical score represents in any straightforward sense of the term. Wagner’s music may represent some ideas, but they also seem to elicit in the audience a series of emotions that do not easily attach themselves to concepts for representation. In What is Art? Tolstoy argues that art is about contagion of feeling. Moreover, in some cases the artist may be only seeking to express his or her own emotions, rather than to shape those of the audience. Here is where the expressive or emotive definition of art emerges. Related to this is the expression theory of art, which argues that the expression of feelings or ideas is at the center of art. Croce and Collingwood’s “idealist” theories of art that argue that the essence of art is in the imagination of the artist are examples of the expression theory of art.⁵ For Collingwood “imagination proper” is the essence of art, which may be expressed in the artist’s creations but does not necessarily have to be realized.⁶

Just as not all art appears to be imitative or representational, we come to see that not all art is centrally about emotions. This is perhaps best illustrated in much contemporary abstract art. Certainly there may be overlap between representation and emotion in some cases (such as a painting like F-111 by James Rosenquist) but in others, there is no clear representational objective nor emotional purpose. We can see that some kinds of art are valuable for the significant form that they possess, as Clive Bell and Roger Fry argued. The minimalism of color lines and shapes in a mobile by Calder may not be easily categorized according to what it may represent or what emotions it may elicit, yet we are drawn to it by its purity of form and harmonic constellation of connected shapes. Here we find that art can be given a form-related definition.

What is the current status of aesthetic theory after this rough sketch of the problems in defining “art”? What is important for our purposes in seeing whether we can apply categories drawn from aesthetics to the political is that in the last three decades the very attempt to “define art” has largely fallen to the wayside. Some art critics and philosophers of art have even argued against the very project of trying to define art. Frustrated by the inability of any one-term definition of art to cover all forms of it, art critics and historians have moved away, as Noel Carroll tells us, from the very basic attempt to try to define what art is.⁷

What has taken its place? The institutional theory of art, built on the twin pillars of the work of Arthur Danto and George Dickie basically tells us that art is whatever those involved in it say it is.⁸ In Dickie’s seminal work The Art Circle published in 1984 he provides a definition of art: a work of art is an artifact of a kind to be presented to the artworld public. By 1994 this definition did not go through major changes but was modified to assert that an institution, not society as a whole, confers the title of art to an artifact. This non-essentialist, non-functionalist approach to art has the virtue of being open-ended and inclusive, for no object, act, or performance can be excluded a priori. The artworld public determines, through a multi-layered process, what constitutes as art, good and bad, according to its own standards. And, this process is self-defining: pushing the boundaries of “art” can be itself the art in question. The paradigmatic example in contemporary art is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which is an upside-down urinal placed as a museum piece. It does not fit squarely into the representation /imitation, emotion/expression or significant form matrices, yet it was hailed as a revolutionary work by the art establishment. In a sense “the artistic” remains while the art object as such is demoted. Thus is the quasi-sociological approach of the institutional theory of art, which, as Bourdieu believes, largely leaves the realm of philosophy.

If this is the case, and there is no one definition or true definition of “art,” then we must be open to the possibility that anything could conceivably be art. Dickie does not specify which social institution has the prerogative or authority to determine what art is. This does not mean that all things can be or could become art; yet it means that we can no longer approach the notions of the artistic or the aesthetic with preconceptions that rest on our reification of art objects, on particular ways of doing art, or on views of the exclusivity of doing art in the hands of professional artists. The ball continues rolling and the game no longer is one of defining what art is but what you can do with the ball, that is, the purpose to which “the artistic” is put to use.⁹ Without a specific arena in which “art” must be located, we now have an opening where things from other spheres, such as the political, can enter the realm of the aesthetic and vice versa, to see in what sense their overlap manifests artistic qualities. It is especially useful to us as a way to see how Machiavelli and Nietzsche enter the picture.

For our purposes, the three traditional categories of aesthetic theory, representation, expression/emotion and form, can be translated into political language if we heed Machiavelli’s lead. Representation can be reconstituted as a matter of combined imitation, (mis)representation, and deception. Emotion can be tied to expression. And form can be linked to the idea of order and constitution. Nietzsche shares with Machiavelli the idea that human activity can be most creative and productive and valuable when it shows to be both amoral and immoral. Taken by admiration of great achievements, Machiavelli and Nietzsche share the delight in spectacle detached from moral judgment. This aesthetic appreciation is not morally neutral, however, for both thinkers sometimes urge that great achievements require immoral acts, such as cruelty well used and the exploitation of others. Nietzsche’s main contribution to the aesthetic basis of politics as founded by Machiavelli is in his focus on the individual man who engages in cultural/political transformation. In other words, Nietzsche adds depth to Machiavelli’s general view that politics can be understood aesthetically. In what follows we provide a provisional theory of the various elements that hold together an aesthetic theory or politics; that is, the ideas borrowed (and to some extent transformed) from art theory into the field of political life.

From Mimesis to Imitation

Against the denigrated Platonic idea of mimesis, Machiavelli explicitly posits the value of imitation. While Plato assails imitation, Machiavelli in his most important book, The Prince, makes “imitation” one of the central themes. Of course Machiavelli does not mention Plato by name, yet when he tells us that he is concerned with the “effectual truth” (TP XV 61) of things, he seems to have in mind an implicit critique of ancient philosophers who “imagined” ideal conditions (such as Plato and Cicero). Like an artist concerned with the impact his work will have on an audience, Machiavelli is preoccupied with the effects of actions and not their ideal or intended motives.

The Florentine urges two sorts of imitation. One is the imitation of great men of the past. The other is the imitation of great constitutions. For Machiavelli—following Renaissance convention—the imitation of the ancients and of things considered excellent is a form of art worthy of admiration. The replication of something is not inferior per se. Rather, like the imitation of the sculpture of antiquity by Florentine Renaissance artists, political theorists and men of state should imitate the durable, resilient constitutions of the past, as Machiavelli tells us in the Preface to the Discourses.¹⁰

Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times—letting pass infinite other examples—a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at a high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to be able to have it imitated by those who delight in that art, and how the latter then strive with all industry to represent in all their works; and seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous works the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms and republics, by kings, captains, citizens legislators, and others who have labored for their fatherland, are rather admired than imitated ... I can do no other than marvel and grieve.¹¹

For Machiavelli, to follow the model of previous successes in no way diminishes one’s status in the cosmos. The Florentine shows us his alternative approach to art, one that focuses on politics rather than art objects such as statues. Machiavelli wants both admiration and imitation of great political art products (states) and artists (Romulus, etc).¹² As we saw in Chapter 2, the imitation of Borgia is principally one of his character, rather than of the specific policies he undertook.¹³ Here Machiavelli is asking us to see beneath the surface of things, by getting to the antimoral character of Duke Valentino to see that it is worthy of imitation in foundational moments. It is also emblematic of the separation of ethics and politics in a key sense: it helps to underscore the dangers to oneself and one’s state when the leader acts in a moral or moralistic manner. This way of acting detracts from efficiency and effectiveness, and makes the statesman more inept and dangerous. Thus the imitation of great men has to do with the imitation of their character insofar as it is distant from moralism.

The imitation of great cities, which is what Machiavelli seeks to pursue in the Discourses and to show by negative contrast in the Florentine Histories is the second kind of imitation that Machiavelli urges. What sort of cities must be emulated? Those that are republics. This is because they are more resilient and flexible owing to their self-developed laws. They also allow their own citizens to move to higher positions of power and thus provide room for innovation and motivation. Machiavelli does not urge the imitation of all powerful states; not all empires are worthy of admiration. Rome, which abraded the distinction between empire and republic, is the highest example because it maintained its independence and did so with perdurable means while maintaining the rule of law. Thus for Machiavelli durability is a key criterion for judging whether to imitate a state’s methods or not.

What does this tell us about the role of imitation in politics in a general sense? Principally that in order to be successful in the art of politics, a statesman must be well versed in lessons of the past, of history. To be unaware of how things happened in critical cases, to be ignorant of the models of great men and perdurable states is to invite disaster. It is also a vice, not a virtue of governance, for such kind of ignorance on the part of a leader, especially of an important state, can lead to disastrous consequences. What this tells us is that the lesson to learn is to be able to distance oneself from moralism, to act in ways that are not rooted in ethical precepts, and to aim at the construction of republican, militarily strong regimes, not of antirepublican, lawless machines of war.

If not the moral idea of justice, what lies at the heart of the aesthetic political theory grounded on Machiavelli and Nietzsche? The concepts of deception, (mis)representation, emotion, and form are the central categories in this approach to political phenomena.

Deception

Throughout the annals of political and military events that Machiavelli describes, we can encounter countless cases where he praises duplicity.¹⁴ Valentino is again the most salient example, a man whose killing of Vitellozzo Vitelli is lauded even as it baffles the observer.¹⁵ Whether one likes it or not, deception is part and parcel of the political. One may wish it to go away, one may want to sweep it under the rug with moralism and all manner of pretext, but for Machiavelli all politics that is effective must delude. The imagery of the fox in his composite beast of lion-fox refers to the ability to deceive, to be cunning and stealthy when necessity requires it. Republican regimes lack this ability in comparison with principalities, yet their leaders must learn to behave according to the principle that if one does not deceive first, one will be deceived.¹⁶

How does Nietzsche, who provides depth to Machiavelli’s ideas, see deception? We must recall that for him the idea that reality lies in morality and/or reason is a form of deception. The Platonic notion that reality is metaphysical, from which Nietzsche believes we can be disabused through the work of Thucydides and Machiavelli, is anathema. Because we are organic, sentient, perspectival beings, as he tells us in On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense we are always engaged with the world as “artistically creative subjects].”¹⁷ We can never gain a “view from nowhere.” When we recognize that God is dead, we are further pushed to seek some kind of perspective that will justify our existence. It is through art, Nietzsche believes, that we can acquire this “eternal” justification.¹⁸

For Nietzsche this embrace of art is itself deluding, for it does not allow us to see the full nature of life with all its horrors. Yet it is precisely for this reason that it is healthy: tragic art gives us a hint of the wickedness of life but without allowing it to destroy us. As Nietzsche puts it, “To say: The good and the beautiful are one, is a disgrace for a philosopher: If he adds ”the true as well,” one ought to thrash him. The truth is ugly: we have art so we don’t perish of the truth” (WP 822). The appealing sheen and veneer distract our attention from the cold, bleak realization that life is about pain, isolation, suffering, and the tragic outcome of most events. Yet we exist nevertheless, and this existence can be made fruitful and salutary if we embrace the deceptiveness of (tragic) art.

Nietzsche replicates this notion of delusion in his positive and strikingly Machiavellian assessment that a statesman should dazzle the public by pretending to act in the service of a prince:

In the service of the prince. To be able to act with complete ruthlessness, a statesman will do best to perform his work not on his own behalf but on behalf of a prince. The glitter of this general disinterestedness will dazzle the eye of the beholder, so that he will fail to see the knavery and harshness involved in the work of the statesman.

HH 1.224

Here he tells us that the political world itself has something of an artful deceit about it. Further, he tells us that to be effective a statesman should behave in a deceitful manner. To those that think Nietzsche is apolitical or antipolitical, this statement about the way politics should be performed is an apropos reply. Moreover, it is an aesthetic or artistic form of politics, where spectacle and appearances are central to the effectiveness of the political actor on the stage of the state.

Deception, both for Machiavelli and Nietzsche, is thus at the core of the art of power. Analytically, they tell us, politics to be effective must follow the precept of deception at the right time and place. Sometimes the deception must be of the opponent; here we can recall Borgia’s stratagems. At other times the deception even includes oneself, such as in Nietzsche’s urging to accept tragic art as a valid way of continue living. There is a price, for as Machiavelli tells us one’s identity can itself be eroded by lies. Yet this is, again, part and parcel of politics no matter how much one may wish to eradicate it or reform it. Perhaps a greater danger lies in the very belief that ethical behavior can eliminate deception from the realm of politics; no greater self-delusion can be found in the theater of war and diplomacy.

Representation and Misrepresentation

A notion related to deception is that of (mis)representation. Unconnected to the liberal democratic idea of political representation in a national assembly, the understanding of representation in Machiavelli and Nietzsche is grounded on the field of appearances.

The term “representation,” in common parlance within political theory, evokes the liberal democratic effort to have a miniature version of society assembled in a parliament or congress so as to be “representative” of the whole nature of the state in question. As F.R. Ankersmit tells us, however, nothing could be more dangerous than this idea that society can be mirrored in the assembly.

For Ankersmit political representation as a concept grounded on imitation is argued most strongly in John Adams’s effort to build a replication of society’s composition in Congress. What is the danger of this “mimetic representation in Ankersmit’s view? It is that this approach is really no representation at all. There is no distance between the represented and the representatives, and if this is the case, there can be a tyrannical urge coming from civil society that may take hold of the state based on the fact that identity is demanded.¹⁹ For there to be a true (democratic) representation, Ankersmit believes there must be a gap between the two groups (the people and its representatives). This is what he calls aesthetic representation.²⁰

In an aesthetic understanding of politics, how does “representation” become a visible concept in political theory? Following Ankersmit, I believe it is not a matter of a moral obligation to “stand in” for someone who is outside of the scope of a political arena. Whereas normative (democratic) political theory in a territorially large state seeks to execute the dictum that everyone should have a voice in the political forum or assembly through “representatives” who express their constituents’ views, in an aesthetic approach to political representation appearance is the central concept. Just as a dramatic actor appears upon a stage to perform something that is public, the political actor—in this schema—shows up on the political theater not with a moral motive but with a objective to make visible something that was previously invisible. In this notion borrowed from the Arendtian model (as we shall see in the next chapter), the political and the aesthetic /artistic have in common the idea of publicity. Unlike Arendt’s model however, the approach urged by Machiavelli and Nietzsche does not understand representation as a matter of revealing, but rather as a matter of concealing or only uncovering portions of one’s political agenda. This is why misrepresentation, in the aesthetic political theory model, is as important a concept as that of representation. It is the realm of appearances that contains the political actor. Again, this strikes us as abhorrent, but this is the analytical claim that aesthetic political theory makes about the nature of political action.

To represent means to present again. In other words, it is to provide certain data for observation by others as a secondary source. Thus, it is different from “presentation” tout court, since this term means the displaying of objective, indisputable facts for anyone to see. To re-present is to present ideas, facts, or objects in a particular kind of light or in a manner specific to the agent doing the representing. In aesthetic political theory, to represent means to present certain facts in a particular way, not as scientific data. Politicians, policy-makers and other people involved in politics all possess an “agenda,” which colors the way they present the facts as they see them.²¹ While a political agent can present facts, he or she can also have recourse to represent them in a given way or to misrepresent them, that is, cast them on false or misleading bases. This may not be ethical, but it may be effective as a way to play with the impact of appearances on other agents.

Emotion and Expression

We know from the history of aesthetic theory that efforts to define art have at times come across the idea that something is artistic when it seeks to express emotion or elicit a sentiment in an audience. Following this model, we can see that Machiavellian aesthetic political theory is one where a similar process occurs: emotions are the psychological matter upon which a great prince can exert his virtuosity.

In what is perhaps one of the best-known maxims of Machiavellianism, the emotions of love and fear are made salient: it is better to be feared than loved by others, if the best alternative of being loved and feared is not possible.²² For Machiavelli the art of power rests largely on the psychological reactions of people to one’s use of authority. The great prince is he who recognizes this fact, manipulates it to his advantage, and then uses it to benefit his state. The emotion of love is the glue that holds a people to its leader, and the emotion of fear is the incentive that presses them to his authority. Politics without emotion, one that relies on morality or moralism or perhaps a technocratic sense of order, is bound to be ineffective. This is not merely for cases of authoritarianism,²³ for even the politics of democratic life require the rhetorical mastery of words that will move and convince the people to vote for one or another candidate. Machiavelli certainly recognized the power of oratory in a republican, proto-democratic setting.

Nietzsche complicates the relationship of the emotions to self-fashioning, which is itself a political task if we understand politics as being centrally concerned with the negotiation of intersubjective human (as opposed to physical) power for some end. In the physio-psychological understanding of man that Nietzsche has, the emotions play a central role. Less interested in the state-centered concern with the emotions than Machiavelli, and more attuned to the way that the emotions must be controlled and refashioned for an individual’s sake, Nietzsche gives us a picture of the sort of psychology of emotions that a great man—such as Machiavelli’s new prince—must have if he is to be successful. Whereas Machiavelli gives us the instructions for the constitution of great states, Nietzsche gives us the (rough) instructions for the constitution of the great man who can make such great states.

Three emotional inclinations are central, to our concerns, in Nietzsche’s schema of how the great man should think. Ressentiment, as the wish for revenge by the weak, is one of them. Another is the equanimity of courage: the ability to “live dangerously” by forsaking comforting moral parapets. The third is the “comic,” understood as the ability to not take anything too seriously.

We know that Nietzsche in a sense fears the great power of ressentiment, a feeling of anguish mixed with vengefulness, for the weak can begin to impress their sense of being exploited upon the general culture when conscious of their growing numbers. From this process the emasculating sentiment of pity can then take hold of an entire people. It is the task of the great, those who can withstand difficult truths about the absence of certainty in life, to combat those who are imbued with pity. This in itself requires courage, for in Nietzsche’s view it en-swimming against the strong current of Judeo-Christianity that has ruled Western culture for what amounts to millennia.

Doubtless the uncertainty will bring fear, yet this is precisely why courage is needed to leave harmful illusions aside and to live with healthy ones. Recognizing the absence of certainty would be devastating were it not for one further emotional ability: the capacity to laugh in the face of terror. This allows one to recognize the fragility of existence while defeating it by minimizing its importance. For Nietzsche the comic is thus an attempt to combat the horror of meaninglessness by placing a mirror in front of it: the gaping meaninglessness is temporarily rendered meaningless through humor.

The management of emotions is thus vital to both the constitution of the right state and the right self. There is congruity in Machiavelli’s and Nietzsche’s views, since neither is guided by normative ideals, but rather are in a sense consequentialist: both are concerned with developing the most effective (durable for Machiavelli, healthy for Nietzsche) constitutions that will stand the test of time.²⁴ In both thinkers there is a suspicion of time: its passing destroys human achievements for Machiavelli, and it innocently erodes things human for Nietzsche. When confronting time, anything that makes human achievements perdurable and quasi-immortal is admirable. Thus the admiration that they possess for lasting form is aesthetic in nature. Like a worn but still awe-inspiring sculpture, lasting form elicits admiration in the observer.

Form

The third of the principal criteria for aesthetic political theory is that of form. Perhaps “the artistic” is not centrally about representation or expression /emotion. If this is the case, the idea of lasting form that Machiavelli and Nietzsche point to may well be a crucial candidate for our analytical efforts. From aesthetic theory the phrase of “significant form” is used to describe the lines, shapes, and figures in a work of art that make it distinctive and valuable in contrast to other like objects. The value may rest in its originality, simplicity, or adequacy. Or, it may rest on the way that the object’s parts hang together effectively as a whole. There is no normative moment here, and the test of value may rest on an aesthetic appreciation of its overall effect.

What stands against the idea of significant form in a Machiavellian cosmos is the notion that the world is chaotic. From his own accounts of personal life to his stories of the bloody wars of Florence, Machiavelli gives us a view of the world as one that is on the brink of anarchy and disorder. Like Hobbes’s state of nature, the absence of law for Machiavelli is what permits the continuation of a human way of life that is deeply animalistic: violence and ignorance permeate it, self-regard corrupts it. Only the imposition of some sort of order, shape or form to a collectivity of human beings can provide a qualitative transformation of their way of living. It is for this reason that Machiavelli finds Borgia’s ill-fated attempt to pacify the Romagna worthy: while it failed, it was a valiant effort to bring ordered form to a chaotic region of Italy. This explains Machiavelli’s recurring use of the metaphor of architecture to express the need for lasting form and laying the foundations of durable peace.²⁵

The concurrent concept in Nietzsche is that of style. In his own effort to give the great individual’s self a significant form that will be admirable and valuable, writing with proper and unique style is the way that he envisions a qualitative change. To be sure the art of writing is not the only way that a person of character can life with style. Actions are what define the self, not intentions. Thus Napoleon and Caesar were admired by Nietzsche because of the fact that their actions, in making great transformations of human life and simultaneously shaping their own selves, were direct expressions of their will to power, i.e., their affirmation of their unique capacity for living fully. But for those whose main concern is thought—such as the philosopher or the historian or the political theorist (as was Machiavelli in all three forms)—writing is what takes the place of heroic actions in battlefields.

Writing is an action, and it is self-defining as well as other-defining if it is read and cared about. But to be read and cared about depends on how attractive, satisfying, and unique (that, is how stylish) the writing is. For this reason Nietzsche did care about how many books he sold: not for the money he would make, but rather for the desire to have his ideas shape and give form to some future free spirits who might be attracted to, or admire, his writing style. In a world without God and characterized by the moral anarchy of nihilism, it is through style that Nietzsche seeks to give significant form to his own self and to the culture of his times. This, he hopes to achieve through those of his readers that he hopes will someday be of the right spirit.

The Politics of Taste

If the above three criteria (representation, expression/emotion and form) are the central notions in a schema that tries to understand politics aesthetically, there are three further problems that must be addressed in this discussion. They cannot be avoided, for they are part and parcel of aesthetic theory and we must examine whether there is any role for them at all in our aesthetic political theory model.

The first is an idea that we encountered earlier, that of perspective. As we know from modern aesthetic theory beginning with Kant, the ambition to have a universal account of things beautiful rooted in subjective disinterested experience has been a major force in theorizing the value of artworks. A work of art is valuable insofar as it expresses universal, generalizable sentiments or ideas that are appreciated as more than merely particularistic. To claim that something is art and not be able to show that it has universal appeal is, in this view, an inconsistency. Without finding a generalizable argument, no objective method for evaluating art can be established.

How does the aesthetic political theory of Machiavelli and Nietzsche respond to this challenge? The response is rooted in the affirmation that “aesthetic” fundamentally means “perception through the senses.” This definition, close to that of Baumgarten, helps us ground our notion of the aesthetic not on idealistic metaphysics but rather a materialism that is tied to humanism.²⁶ If perception through the senses informs our ideas of what is pleasing and attractive, the corporeality of human existence comes to the fore in the aesthetic political theory as understood through our analysis of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. It is through the eyes, the skin, the ears, the tongue, and the nose that we encounter our external world and find things either beautiful or abhorrent. It is not through the mind or the soul that our first window on the world is established.

As Mary Dietz has shown, Machiavelli’s political theory is born during a time of artistic effulgence in sixteenth century Florence.²⁷ She points out that Machiavelli’s work fits well—conceptually—with particularly one form of Renaissance painting. This form is perspectival painting, which presents images of events and things from a single point in a three-dimensional model in a way that is partial. That is, the image in the painting does not reflect the totality of what is conveyed (it is difficult to think of an image that fully reflects an object in reality; for it would then be a mirror rather than a work of human art or artifice).

Thus we have a painting like Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt (1470) in which the artist depicts a hunting party. The dogs look at a point in the middle of the painting, and the pieces of wood on the ground also point to the particular perspectival focus of the image. The perspective from which we see the scene is a specific vantage point in the middle of the party. The angles of the lines that are drawn show us that we are seeing the party from our particular and partial point of view. We do not have (and may not wish to have) the full view of all the objects in the image. To have all of the objects drawn in their full detail would be both superabundant and disconcerting. Partiality is necessary to make sense of the image and to allow us to appreciate its composition.

Dietz tells us that Machiavelli’s Prince is an attempt by Machiavelli to approach the ear of the Medici and to give the prince his own, partial view of events in order to influence, trap, or “capture,” him. Politics is, like Renaissance perspectival painting, the art of providing partial accounts, accounts from particular points of view.²⁸ Impartiality is either not possible or dangerous to the person giving the account. Political men and women must of necessity engage in the politics of the partial, of showing or revealing only parts of the whole. Even if they wished to be able to reveal the totality, that in itself is an impossibility. Just as we could not possibly see all of the trees and horses in the hunting party as depicted by Uccello from all available perspectives, the realm of politics cannot be visible to any one single actor because it is too complex, or to use another term, overdetermined. The existence of multiple actors, institutions, processes, unforeseen events, incomplete information, and the quick step of time does not allow for any sort of capturing of the whole view of a political situation by any one spectator. There cannot be a view from nowhere that grasps all of the relevant information and images at play.

It is this very partiality that allows us to appreciate the qualities of Uccello’s painting or the peculiar attributes of a political act. A view of all connected facts would prevent us from having any kind of significant judgment of a work or a policy choice. It is in the very partiality of our vision that we can begin to make judgments about the worthiness of a political act. Is this worthiness akin to the beauty that is central to much aesthetic theory? How does beauty play a role in aesthetic political theory? This is the second problem to be addressed.

The “aesthetic” has sometimes been defined as “that which relates to beauty.” If this definition were the sole one, we would have to think about the place of beauty in politics as a crucial problem. However, it is not the sole definition, as I have pointed out. The definition that most adapts to the schema built on the grounds of Machiavelli and Nietzsche is Baumgarten’s notion of perception or cognition through the senses. Why can we reject the beauty-centered definition as the most cardinal?

The reason is that we are dealing with modern political theory. Beauty, as Elaine Scarry has shown (and as we will discuss in the next chapter) has been increasingly pushed out of the center of both aesthetics and of Western culture at least as far back as Kant and Burke.²⁹ With their distinction with the sublime, beauty was demoted from philosophical aesthetics and from cultural practices from the late 1700s on. In its place, other concepts, beside the sublime, took over. It is here that we see that representation, emotion, and form, inter alia, emerge as criteria of analysis. Moreover, the term “aesthetics” itself, having been born during the Enlightenment, is inherently modern. Thus the project to develop an “aesthetic political theory” is eminently modern as well. To focus on beauty as a political concept would perhaps lead us to models of antiquity that are outside the purview of this study.

Machiavelli, as Leo Strauss tells us, is the father of modern political theory. By severing ethics and political theory, he carried out a separation akin to what future “art theorists” would similarly do: to sever aesthetics from ethics and to study l’art pour l’art.³⁰ The modernist attempt to utilize reason to comprehend human and worldly phenomena by separating “science” (in a broad sense) from ethics is the quintessentially modern ethos. Coupled to it is the desire to trace the path of freedom, and in both the case of Machiavelli and that of aesthetic theory we find similar projects. The former seeks to develop republican freedom while the latter finds freedom in the acts of individual human artistic creativity, a notion not present in Greek antiquity or Platonic thought (where the artist is immanently intertwined with social-ethical purposes for a collectivity rather than wedded to self-expression).

If beauty is not central to the foundations of aesthetic political theory, in a manner that emulates modern aesthetic theory, is there then anything that might serve as a final arbiter or judgment about particular political forms?

The answer, I wish to posit, is in the idea of taste. Taste is a term that, according to common sense, most immediately denotes the gustatory.³¹ Flavors that can be sensed through the tongue are what we first come to think about the term if we approach it from our perspective of perception through the senses. From this approach, taste is not a matter of sophistication—of finding La Gioconda more admirable than a velvet painting of Elvis.³² It is the basic sensation of experiencing something that comes in contact with our corporeality. If it is a form of “perception through the senses,” then it is grounded in both sensory and aesthetic judgment.

Taste as a matter of politico-aesthetic judgment allows us to determine if we approve of a regime based on the way that we experience it in terms of our immediate existence in it. Whether it gives us pleasure to live in the conditions afforded by a political regime, whether we find enjoyment in the daily life that is created within the boundaries of the laws existing in a given regime or political order, are the questions that we can answer to find if it suits our taste. Here we obviously find a political criterion that is nowhere near a normative, deontological model. Yes, there are ethical implications, for if a form of government can be judged according to whether it satisfies the people who live in it by their immediate, quotidian experiences afforded to them, then we can develop arguments for and against the kinds of regimes that are worthy of ethical value for given peoples or societies. Yet at the root the basic justification is not moral, it is one pleasure and enjoyment. Here we can understand why Machiavelli believes republics are characterized by la dolcezza del vivere civile: the sweetness of the free way of life. Like honey, freedom is sweet and pleases us. The subjective appreciation, based on taste, of a republican, free constitution is one of its greatest attributes. And because taste is subjective or acquired, there cannot be one single, superior object for it. Diversity of tastes for different ways of living according to different political constitutions is thus a fact of human life.

Aesthetic Political Theory and Ethics?

If there cannot be one single kind of taste for a way of life that is protected by a political regime, then multiplicity and diversity are inherent in the very nature of political life. This is the basis on which we can examine the ethical implications of grounding our analysis on aesthetic political theory. Contrary to a Kantian effort to find one objective, universal, and generalizable account of what makes for proper judgment (even if mediated by subjective experience), the approach aesthetic political theory takes is to claim that taste or judgment should be comprehended organically or corporally, and we should return to the metaphor of the body for politics—yet in a different form.

The body politic here no longer refers to the idea that an ideal regime should be a form of corporatism with each part playing its role within a hierarchy of elements. It means that human bodily experience is the point of contact between the world and the individual and that the state or constitution should respond to this idea by seeking to satisfy its needs. Rather than positing an ideal, deontological model to which bodies should then adjust, the reverse should occur. Starting from the observation that different areas of the world have different cultural forms many of which are grounded on arbitrary tastes rather than reasoned, justified argumentation, the idea of taste allows for a plurality of notions of the “pleasurable.” The “reasonable,” the criterion used by normative political theory cannot easily be translated across different cultural traditions, and hence we need a different construct to analyze why different societies develop alternative modes of political organization. Moreover, we need to see whether these alternatives are morally defensible.

If we take the notion of taste as discussed above, we see that it can be seen as a fundamental human attribute which nonetheless has no single, unique form. Taste depends on the person doing the tasting, and it also depends on the society or historical period in which it exists.³³ There cannot be a science of taste; neither can there be a moral argument for the imposition of one form of taste over another. If taste is as basic a human faculty as sleeping or walking, then to argue that one form of appreciation of a way of life is inferior to another as a whole is nonsensical. To be sure, there can be arguments over how to improve certain aspects of a way of life that exists under a given regime, yet any wholesale denunciation of ways of life that do not accord to a dominant criterion is both discordant with an ethics of mutual respect and the multiplicity of tastes.

Thus, it is possible to find connections between aesthetic political theory and ethics. If we understand ethics to mean thinking about “how I (we) should live” then clearly an approach to politics that is rooted in aesthetic categories and uses the notion of taste as a criterion for analysis does have ethical implications. If we move away from a Kantian universalism in both judgment and political ethics, we find that diversity, plurality, multiplicity, and gustatorial variety in quotidian life characterize the human faculty of taste. Going back to the notion of perspectivism, it is really a matter of one’s partial location—both as discrete individuals and as particular members of a given community—that determines one’s taste or preference for one way of life over another. It is impossible to remove subjectivism from the judgment of ways of life. And we must remember that ways of life do not exist ex nihilo, they are protected by particular political regimes. In the next chapter we shall see how the notions of political philosophy and aesthetic theory have overlapped in some major modern thinkers, and how their views, contrasted to the aesthetic political theory founded on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, can inform our judgment of recent events in the world political arena.

Notes

1

Such as the important historical case of the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s or the events of September 11, 2001.

2

Significant exceptions include Allen Carlson and some of the work by Marcia Mulder Eaton.

3

We shall treat techne in Plato in Chapter VI.

4

Dewey asserts that through imitation or representation “meanings of objects that are otherwise dumb, inchoate ... are clarified” (Dewey, Art as Experience: 1934, p. 131-132).

5

A political manifestation of the “imagination” theory of art, albeit unintended and indirect, can be found in Benedict Anderson’s influential Imagined Communities. See also Redfield, Marc, The Politics of Aesthetics (Stanford University Press, 2003).

6

See Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford University Press), p. 135- 136.

7

“Introduction,” Theories of Art Today (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).

8

Danto’s initial critical contribution is Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press, 1986).

9

The claim that “the end of art” has arrived, first propounded by Hegel, then taken up by Danto, is elaborated in the recent work by Donald Kuspit, The End of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

10

In language that seems to deride an “artworld” as defined by Danto. It is important to note that both The Prince and The Discourses open with references to aesthetic practices (in the DL and the Preface respectively).

11

Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Mansfield and Tarcov trans., p. 5.

12

“Above all,” Machiavelli says, a prince “should do as some excellent man has done in the past who found someone to imitate who had been praised and glorified before him” (P XIV 60; emphasis added). See also P VI 22; VII 29; XIX 78; XIX 82.

13

Borgia should be “imitated by all those who have risen to empire by fortune” (P VII 32; emphasis added).

14

See P XVIII 70 where Machiavelli urges it is better to be deceitful and dissembling about certain “Christian” virtues than to actually have them.

15

See P VIII 36. See also P VII 29 for Machiavelli’s praise of Borgia’s ability to deceive.

16

In the visual arts, illusion or the trompe l’oeil effect was one of the major innovations of the Italian Renaissance.

17

In The Birth of Tragedy, Geuss, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 148.

18

Ibid. p. 113.

19

Ankersmit points to the thought of Carl Schmidtt as the paradigm of the dangers of mimetic representation, when there is a desire to see an identity between the leader and the people, something that ends in tyranny.

20

Ankersmit, p. 28.

21

An example of representation is US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech on Iraq at the UN before the start of belligerent actions in 2003. Powell presented the facts in a way favorable to US interests.

22

Not being hated is important in avoiding conspiracies (P XIX) and is even more important than having fortresses to protect oneself (P XX).

23

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi shows how Mussolini manipulated the masses in Fascist Spectacle.

24

Nietzsche’s personal attempt to manage his sickly constitution can be seen as a microcosm of the analogy of medicine in political theory as a way to establish a healthy political constitution.

25

See P VII 27 for Borgia’s “architectural” attempt. See also P III 7; VI 25; XXV 98.

26

This alternative sensualist history of art is given by Faas, The Genealogy of Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

27

“Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception,” APSR 80, Sept. 1986.

28

Perspectival painting is one of the major innovations in Renaissance art in comparison to Medieval art. Alberti wrote the first treatise on perspective in art in 1435.

29

Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 83.

30

The “aestheticism” that gives art pure autonomy.

31

Following Arendt’s notion that taste appeals to common sense (Crisis in Culture, p. 222).

32

Dave Hickey seems to possess a similar view of taste in his Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Art Issues). Quotidian free enjoyment animates his definition of taste.

33

Thus one could say (tongue in cheek) that the debate is not, like Ben Barber affirms, between McWorld and Jihad, but between McWorld and “Kebab-land.”

Chapter 6

Aesthetic Political Theory and Modernity

Introduction

Aesthetic thought and modernity are coeval. To systematically think about the subjects of aesthetics, namely art, beauty, and taste, is part of the modern enterprise, for giving autonomy to the realm of the artistic was not something that existed in antiquity. In antiquity the artistic was embedded in a network of social, ethical and communal ties that did not allow for the idea of free individual creativity or for the practice of art as something independent or capable of autonomy. Thus, to think of “aesthetic” is to think of the modern. It is a concept that grows simultaneously with the Western notion of what it is to be modern. If this is the case, it is important to examine the relationship between aesthetic political theory and modernity and to see how its implications enter our analysis of contemporary political thought and political events.

As we pointed out earlier, Alexander Baumgarten first uses the term “aesthetic” in 1735. At the height of the Enlightenment, the attempt to comprehend art, beauty, and taste as such in a systematic, rational manner is thus born. Yet before this pivotal epoch in the course of modernity, there are two other periods in which the embryonic notion of the modern grows. But what is “modern”? I believe the clearest understanding of this notion is one that is four-fold. The modern is the advancement of four principles that together comprise the grand narrative of a Western reality and dream. These three principles are reason, freedom, equality and exchange. In the realm of the social, rationality is what should order institutions. In the field of politics, freedom is the ever-unfolding condition that must be balanced with equality. And in the economy, organized commercial exchange over a large area is part of the modern conception of an effective way of producing and consuming goods. Taken together, these principles form the self-understanding of Western modernity, a notion that is to have a world-historical profundity and breadth across vast regions of the globe beyond its simple denotation of “the present.”

The two historical periods preceding the Enlightenment that are crucial to the development of modernity are that which contains the birth of Platonic thought (fourth century Athens) and the Renaissance. With Plato’s interpretation of Socrates’ teaching, we have the makings (and perhaps apotheosis) of the primacy of reason. With the Renaissance the progress of reason is given greater impetus, while the idea of free individual creativity, built on Augustine’s notion of free will and the “cult” of the individual in Italian Renaissance culture, emerge as central components of Western life. Moreover, some of the Italian city states of the period begin to resuscitate republicanism but with a greater egalitarian sense and begin to engage in complex activities of commerce that take their representatives to distant corners of the globe, thereby initiating the unification of humanity through commerce and commercial conquest.

Here is where the centrality of the discovery and conquest of America, through the extension of Spanish dominion, becomes the paradigmatic moment of modernity.¹ The reason this is so is that the principles at the core of the Western modern ambition are thus realized in concrete, material reality in a geographical and territorial sense. Thus power, or more precisely political power, is also central to the notion of modernity. And here is where we see why we must become engaged with political philosophy (not just philosophy as such).

To understand aesthetic political theory it is crucial to understand its location within and alongside the progress of the notion of modernity. What is the relationship of modern political philosophy to aesthetic thought? By understanding the way in which Plato’s Socrates thinks of “art” we will see why aesthetic political thought must be comprehended as modern. To further delineate the aesthetic political theory of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, we can have recourse to two critics of modernity who help us elucidate the relationship of art to power: Heidegger and Arendt. These thinkers were deeply influenced by Nietzsche, and the latter also by Machiavelli. To understand the significance of the relationship between the thinkers for modernity, we shall then discuss the views of Leo Strauss. This will set the stage for a critique of conventional political philosophy that defends the liberal democratic episteme. With the enlightenment we gain from them (even if some consider them “post-modern” thinkers) we can then try to engage aesthetic political theory with the dominant political theory or contemporary times, Rawlsian liberalism.

Plato’s Artistry

As with many Machiavellian problems, we must often go back to the beginnings of things. We pointed out in the preceding chapter that in political philosophy it is with Plato that the distinction between art as a practice and aesthetics as a study of what art is begins. In the work of Plato we find the distinction between dialectics as the highest of the human arts, understanding the term art as techne, and his view of artworks (in the sense we understand as poetry or music or the visual arts). The latter are deluding because ontologically subsequent to the Ideal forms. Thus what must be seen in Plato is an account of how “art” has a dual character: techne is art properly understood, and art that merely imitates is both inferior and dangerous. This distinction forms the basis of modern aesthetics, since it takes the art of the artists as a subject of analysis, even if Plato does not use the term.

Techne properly understood for Plato as well as for Greek antiquity, is the term for art that refers to the intentional bringing about of an object, idea, or condition. Thus, it refers to a purposive act, one that is constructed along the means-ends performative logic. For Plato techne is art that is useful, social, systematic, and that requires an element of human skill or practical judgment for its execution. The highest art is the dialectic, that is, the use of reason as exemplified in the Socratic dialogues, for it allows for everything else that can be rationally constructed. Thus art properly understood for Plato is rational and technical and social. It is not a matter of creativity, subjective imagination, or individual genius. Art must have a use, it cannot be appreciated per se. It must be social, that is, it must fit and emerge within a network of social relations rooted to a particular culture. It is systematic, in the sense that a work of art cannot stand alone as a unique thing unrelated to its surroundings and without a method that can be utilized by others in similar situations. What is similar to our modern conception of art is that there is room for human subjective action, yet it to be determined by one’s skill and practical judgment learned within a cultural tradition.

The kind of art that Plato criticizes in The Republic, insofar as it is relevant to political theory, is what he calls the imitative arts, as we saw in the previous chapter. Taking Homer’s poetry as an example, Plato’s Socrates tells us this kind of art, which is not grounded on rationality, is dangerous because it is merely an imitation, because it is emotional, and because it has an uncertain connection to the problem of how to organize a political constitution. Plato thus makes a claim that there is a true art (techne) and a false art (mimesis). The Platonic political art (techne politike) is the human skill of constructing a constitution that is suited to the ideal, rational conception of justice.² Thus it is a kind of art that is immanently connected to reason. From the perspective of Nietzsche, the demise of the tragic arts through the arrival of Socratic rationality and its excessive thirst for knowledge is the first instance of the decay of antiquity and shapes the basis of the modern.

While Plato seems to assault a conception of free artistic creativity in a way that appears to sever any possible deep link between art and political authority at the conceptual level, in fact there are three ways in which Plato’s own enterprise can be seen as inherently aesthetic. There is a profound (Nietzsche would call it sickly) hyper-rationality in Plato’s Socrates, but scratching beneath the surface we find that in fact he does not succeed at fully establishing politics on a rational basis. The first element of this is that he does conceive of politics as indeed an art: there is room for individual judgment, whereas in a more rational approach to politics (such as one based on exact sciences) no such leeway could be conceptually possible: calculation, rather than judgment, would mark the role of the human subject. Moreover, techne is indeed about skill, about technique. This is a component that is also shared by the arts (such as poetry, music, sculpture, and drama). A more rational, scientific approach to politics would seek to minimize this uncertain element by establishing rules that reduce the possibility of human error in the establishing of laws and constitutions in a much more comprehensive way.

At the same time, we must recall that the foundational metaphysical doctrine of Platonic metaphysics is Eidos, or the Forms. Now the Forms in themselves have an aesthetic element, for Plato often understands them as primordial templates that express the perfect patterns of things. In a sense there is beauty in the mathematical, for the patterns that comprise the Forms are appealing in their mathematical perfection. The geometrical forms that exist in the metaphysical reality are thus admirable for their very perfection and symmetry. The term “form” is thus shared both by Platonic metaphysics and later modern formalist theories in aesthetics such as those of Clive Bell. The constitution of the politeia is itself an aesthetic product because it is the human artifactual effort to put into material reality the ideal form of justice as it exists in the realm of true reality. Much like idealist aesthetic theorists like Croce and Collingwood, who argue that the essence of art lies in the creations of the imagination in the minds of artists, Plato believes humans create physical things by grasping what exists in the collective mind of humanity through the process of anamnesis, or recollection of the things as they really are after countless reincarnations of the soul.

Lastly, Plato’s own work is itself aesthetic because of its style. Plato decries the work of the misleading artists, those who manipulate people with words and drama. He is wary most of all of Homeric poetry for its power to seduce and corrupt. Much like the sirens, Homer, in Plato’s eyes, pulls our navigation to the dangerous rocks of emotion and physicality and away from the reasonable course of action. But what characterizes the writings themselves of Plato? To be sure, the dialectic is the expression of reason. Yet often the style with which Plato chooses to write (whereas Socrates never wrote anything) is such that it is itself seductive. Alongside the perfect reasoning there are comic tones, tragic tones, and other manner of emotional pull. Perhaps the most salient example of the stylistic artistry of Plato that he uses in The Republic (besides the widely known metaphor of the cave) is the myth of Er. Instead of providing a rational argument for his view urging for a life guided towards virtue and justice, Plato chooses metaphor, symbolism, imagery, and enigma when he describes the Spindle of Necessity. For a hyper-rationalist such as Socrates, at least in the sense that Nietzsche understood him, to use artistic methods to persuade smacks of an aesthetic approach that undermines the claim that politics can be fully grounded on rationality.

Plato’s assault on Homer is almost ad hominem. No one, he tells us, has done as Homer taught. Homeric men have constructed no great cities. In terms of public life, the Homeric virtues are worthless. Solon founded Athens, Charondas founded Sicily, but Homer founded nothing. He had no deep knowledge of armies, wars, civic education, or heroism. He does not know what he is talking about. Plato’s Socrates accepts Homer’s cultural value, but politically it is another matter. His error was to seek to imitate, not to know. The philosopher, on the other hand, seeks truth and finds it through rationality. But as we point out above, Plato himself is an artist of words who chose to write rather than merely teach in spoken language as Socrates did. Plato’s writing, for instance in The Republic, portrays an imitation of a real dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon. He also uses rhetorical techniques such as repetition (he reiterates the fact that art is three steps removed from reality). He uses vivid imagery and metaphors, such as the symbol of the sun as representing reason and truth and the cave as our material existence. Moreover, he at points engages in intellectual bullying, for he mocks Glaucon and often uses him merely as a prop rather than as equal participant in a dialogue. Not all kinds of writing is aesthetic; but the use of particular techniques and styles makes it so. If this is the case, Plato’s political writings do not accord with his idea that imitative art should be altogether banished from the ideal city. What they do is to complicate the relationship of aesthetics and political philosophy in a way that makes then enmeshed during the birth of modernity.

Heidegger and the Politicized Work of Art

Nietzsche’s claim that Platonism is Christianity for the masses refers to the otherworldly reality of both systems of thought. For Nietzsche the real lies not in a land beyond our perception. We are living, corporeal, somatic beings through and through. And it is through art that we come to express, live, and justify such an existence. Putting it in a somewhat exaggerated fashion, Nietzsche believes “the craving for art and beauty is an indirect craving for the ecstasies of the sexual instinct”( WP 805). The desire or need for art is akin to an erotic impulse: our life becomes affirmed upon the world through our appreciation of art and sometimes of beauty.

No Nietzschean thinker is as devastating to the metaphysical aims of Platonism as is Martin Heidegger. His treatment of the relationship of art to truth and to political power is a response to Plato but also a critique of the modernist aesthetic impulse. It is important to examine his thoughts on the subject, largely to determine how not to view the relationship of art to power. But his thought is important to us in that it sees the nexus philosophy-poetry in a way that is not too distant from that of Machiavelli or Nietzsche. Still, what we must be cautious about is that in spite of a philosophical affinity, Heidegger politicizes poetry (or in the parlance of modern political science, mobilizes it) to reach nationalistic aims. This is something that neither the Florentine nor the Dionysian thinker does. Thus Heidegger’s views on the link between art and knowledge is important in validating the task in the hands of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, but also to distinguish their enterprise from a nationalistic, crypto-fascist one.

Heidegger’s major writing on art is “The Origins of the Work of Art” (written in 1935). Through this work, Heidegger seeks to posit an alternative to the Platonic conception of art and to the subjectivist, humanist view of art in modern Western aesthetics. For Heidegger any theorizing about art seeks to isolate the art object in question and to examine it as if it were a piece in a museum. This modernist conception of aesthetics, which Heidegger claims begins with Plato’s effort to examine art, is thus the predominant mode of doing aesthetics or philosophy of art in the modern tradition. Much like a biologist who examines a dead organism under a microscope in a laboratory to understand its inner organs, the modern aesthetician seeks to understand the autonomous laws of a piece of art.

This, for Heidegger, is one of the central ills of modernity. By removing the work of art from its life context, the aesthetician surgically removes its meaning, for it no longer carries a social, cultural value as it did when seen in its matrix of contexts. Thus Heidegger objects to Plato’s first move, and following his life-long Hellenophilia, seeks to recover the pre-Socratic appreciation of art as he understood the ancients held it.

Art objects, for Heidegger, are concrete manifestations of truth and constitute meaning for humans. In this sense, there is a sort of “agency” that artworks have, for they have effects on persons and cultures. Critical of the hyper-rationalism of Plato’s Socrates and its attendant metaphysics, Heidegger wants to recover some of the meaning of techne for a modern world. Art requires skill, and this Heidegger recognizes in appreciating why the Greeks made no distinction for the terms art and craft and instead used the single term techne. One of the two central examples of art objects that Heidegger uses in his essay is Van Gogh’s Peasant Woman’s Shoes. By selecting this example, Heidegger shows that he is cognizant of the skill the Dutch painter must of necessity have had to possess in order to render the image meaningful.

Yet techne moves beyond art or skill. Art objects are productive, constitutive, and illuminating. More than merely being imitations of limited value, as Plato avers, artworks give us meaning. The example he chooses for this is the Temple at Paestum. To observe the temple without any knowledge of its context—religious, social, cultural, and historical—is to be completely ignorant of its meaning and its power to give people the values that can be held in common. Thus Heidegger assails Plato’s analytic project, since it was the beginning of the severing of artworks from their location in time by seeking to examine them as such. By thinking about art objects as material things that provide meaning through the contexts in which they are located, Heidegger undermines the Platonic attack on mimetic art and also argues for a materialist vision of art that is rooted in a terrestrial, as opposed to metaphysical or ideal, worldview.

For Heidegger art allows for illumination or knowledge. This view is similar to that of Machiavelli, who believes that poetry is a means to elucidate politico-philosophic problems and the human condition. It is also akin to the Nietzschean project of writing literature that has philosophical content, a quest for knowledge or wisdom that is carried out poetically. Thus for Heidegger philosophy and art (more specifically poetry) are not locked in a fight like two contesting rams; philosophy and poetry are coterminous, they are two ways of thinking and writing that are equally necessary by men to discover the nature of the world and of their condition. For Heidegger, they are specifically needed to unlock the mystery of Being. As Miguel de Beistegui tells us, both inhabit the world of language and give us its essence, the “essence of language as Sprache.”³

Language, for Heidegger, is essentially poetic. Thus poetry is the essence of the practice of speaking in a community. Poetry distills, into fewer and more precise words than prose, the gist of a meaning or message. Poetry is the harmonious concatenation of words that are not merely colloquial instruments but of life-redeeming aesthetic value. Yet for Heidegger these words are historically located. They can only be understood in the contexts in which they emerge.

The contexts in which an artwork must be located, for Heidegger, are three. The first is cultural. An object of art cannot be understood outside a reference to its cultural bases. Secondly, the artwork is situated in a context of relations, both the relations of elements within the work (such as the shoes’ relation to the ground in Van Gogh’s painting) and to like objects. Thirdly, the artwork must be understood in temporal terms: both in its location in time and history, and also in the way that an artwork is understood over the minutes that one takes to grasp its meaning. That is, a great work of art requires temporal engagement with it if one is too grasp its meaning, and this requires a period of time in which its elements are tied together, synthesized, and analyzed. Great art cannot be comprehended immediately. And for Heidegger great art is still possible in the future, particularly when connected to the Nietzschean project of revitalizing a culture with a rebirth of true art and a proper use of power.

What is the argument behind these assertions? Before Danto and Dickie, Hegel had argued that the end of art had come. Heidegger agreed, but for different reasons. For Hegel, it was a good thing that art had died, for this meant the apotheosis of Reason and its institutionalization. Heidegger agrees that great art is no longer possible in modern times, but this he believes is due to the way modern men think. It is a matter of art versus aesthetics: actual, real art was replaced by thinking or studying art, in a way we describe above with the inception of the Platonic view of mimesis. The ancient Greeks before Socrates and Plato made no distinction between truth and art and a community’s ethics. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger sees Homer as synthesizing values and art in a cultural process that represent the identity of a collectivity. With Plato the gaze of reason replaces the gaze of admiration—and thus artworks lost their connectedness to the community in which they were born. Kant and Burke only intensified the treatment of art objects as discrete by seeking out their inherent qualities. The result of this is an attitude towards art that creates a domain of a privileged few who have time, interest, and money to care about the “artworld.” Yet this artworld is largely removed from the rest of society, and the artworks produced in it acquire meaning only in relation to the language, traditions, and conventions internal to it, rather than to those of society in general or of a particular culture.

Unlike Hegel, Heidegger believes great art is indeed possible in the future, even if hindered by the ills of modernity. Significantly for our purposes, its possibilities of rebirth are tied to a political problem. For Heidegger art works are not to be defined by any essence (as is mistakenly the case in Platonic metaphysics). They are not reducible to their thing-ness, nor are they merely the products of artists. Moreover, people make the mistake of assuming that art objects are fixed, static objects, when in fact their meaning is to be found by appreciating the fluid, temporal, changing, and transforming power that they have. Their Becoming is what should replace our sense of their fixity. Following Nietzsche, Heidegger argues against taking language too seriously: we cannot give the words that we use in understanding art’s meaning the fixity that they seem to have when we read them on a page. Refusing to use the language commonly used, Heidegger deploys his own army of metaphors to explain his understanding of why art is “a happening of truth at work.”⁴

The way truth is revealed by art is the result of a dynamic process involving “the world” and “the earth.” Neither of them is to be understood in their literal meaning, but both are necessary to make sense of his view that art reveals truth and meaning. The world is the horizon of experiences that we all have and is particular to us in a given historical setting. Thus the world of the baker is the world of ovens and dough and aprons. The world of the academic is that of classrooms, lectures, and papers. The world of the peasant woman is that of soil, wheat, plows, and axes. These objects are intelligible only in a relational manner. Thus the term “world” is associated with clarity and clearing of meaning. The earth, on the other hand, is the ground on which meanings can be sustained, fed, and nurtured. But because the relation between, for instance, the woman’s shoes and the soil is unclear, the earth is associated with the obscure, the unintelligible, and the mysterious. The interplay of earth and world in a dynamic manner is what allows the observer to appreciate the meaning that is the result of the artwork’s intertwining of world and earth qualities. World is not fully clear, and earth is not fully mysterious, yet their bond is what allows for meaning. This is most evident in the contrasts of light and dark on a painting’s surface.

Following Nietzsche (and also Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher admired by Nietzsche), Heidegger points to the important struggle that exists between two forces but ends in a productive result. The agon, or combat between the earth and the world, is not one of destruction, but one that is productive because it allows us the power to decide over meanings. Because the interplay of light and dark is uncertain, a gray area emerges where we, as observers, must make decisions regarding the artwork’s meanings and value. Without the gray areas, we could not make any decisions; and these decisions are what make our lives meaningful and of value. Because of the dynamism of the interplay, there is a “work” that takes place, which produces an effect. The effect is the unconceal-ing (aletheia) of the essential being of the work, and as such it is a work that leads to “truth.”

Heidegger goes against the Platonic criticism of mimetic art, and he also assails the modernist attempt to isolate the artwork from the culture in which it emerges. Yet, at the same time he gives an autonomy to artworks that is not present in pre-modern understandings of it. So while Heidegger seeks to recover some aspects of the ancient Hellenic artistic tradition, he does so within a modernist purview where art is something to be considered worthy in itself because it has a power to give meaning. This philosophical analysis is of necessity modern because it is engaged in an effort to understand—through reason—a cultural phenomenon. It does not simply admire it as a part of a great civilization of antiquity. Heidegger himself is engaged in Plato’s task of philosophical analysis, not in Homer’s task of artistic creativity. By not rejecting reason entirely, Heidegger does not move into a realm of the “post-modern.” Great art in fact is still possible for Heidegger because the likelihood that art comes to be value-giving is still there; the artwork eclipses the artist, overshadows him, as we can imagine the statue of David did Michelangelo. This power over humans is even more evident when we think of architecture, such the Temple at Paestum, which is a beautiful construction that has lost memory of its builders but allows us to dwell in them even now.

For Heidegger great art can again be possible for two reasons that are intimately tied to the nature of political power. One is that art, because it has a creative power to give meaning, is generative; it has the power to establish new foundations. It is creative because if it is the first instance—the origin—of something new, then it can be great. This is akin to the idea of political foundings found in Machiavelli. For Heidegger there is little distinction between foundings in the artistic world and the political world. Both generate new values, new ways of living and looking at life. Indirectly supporting a Machiavellian view of political foundings, Heidegger believes new political regimes are like great artworks that transform the landscape of Being. The second point is that for Heidegger art is essentially poetic. For him the quintessential art is poetry, for language is the only medium that allows humans to name things, compose them, and express them with beauty in an intersubjective manner. Art works that have this power to communicate beauty are therefore poetic because they do so in a manner similar to the inter-personal understanding of poetry. Poetry is communal for Heidegger, that is, it is embedded in particular peoples with their own history. Poetry is for a people, it is not universal. It is for this reason that Heidegger believed Holderlin represented a possible rebirth of the Hellenic spirit in the context of twentieth century Germany, for he represented the German Volk’s “historical essence.”

Here we see that Heidegger’s thoughts on art and power are neither pre-modern nor postmodern. Engaged as he is with the modernist task of rational explanation, he seeks to recover a central aspect of Hellenic views on art (the importance of not deracinating art from its cultural context and allowing it to give us meaning) while aware that conditions in modern times have changed. His conception of politics is deeply aesthetic because his desire to see a regenerated Germany hinges on the possibility that great art can again be possible in the early decades of the twentieth century in an age of mass society. This faith is not unlike that of Nietzsche’s temporary trust in Wagner, and while both Nietzsche and Heidegger lost faith in their respective “muses” (Wagner and Holderlin) they both moved to the idea of the “poetic” (Nietzsche in his own writing and Heidegger in his concept of in the poetics of politics). To think that poetry and politics are intertwined is something that Machiavelli was alive to as we can see in his writing The Ass. The Florentine and the man from the Black Forest share the notion that revealing the truth of a political problem is a task than can best be performed or come to presence through an artistic process. More specifically it is poetry that, because of its precision, rhythm, order, and emotional allure can communicate ideas and sentiments that are not easily expressed through prose or other sorts of writing.

There is, however, a fundamental problem with Heidegger’s aestheticization of politics (and politicization of the artistic). It is that which F.R. Ankersmit points to in his analysis of mimetic representation. For Heidegger the German people’s “historical essence” (a vague but pivotal notion) could be and should be found and replicated in poetry, as Holderlin purportedly achieved. This replication is in no way representation, because it merely reflects the “essence” that Heidegger claims is inherent in the German Volk. With such a conception of mimetic representation, there is nothing that distances German society from its political state; the state becomes a miniature version of “Germany” writ large. With such a conception, a corporatism is bound to emerge where a leader is conceived of as the capital figure, the head, while the people are seen as the appendages, or the masses. Here is where the artistry of Fascism emerges as Falasca-Zamponi tells us. When the statesman thinks of the masses as inert matter to be molded once they have been “an-aesthecized” by being treated merely as objects and not as persons, then the tyrannical urge that Ankersmit fears is bound to rear its head. Fascism indeed had an aesthetic dimension to it, yet this was of a kind different from the aesthetics politics that can still be found in other forms of politics. The central difference, again, was the absence of distance between the represented and the representatives. Heidegger committed the error of following such a mimetic sort of representation in placing his trust in Holderlin’s “Germanic” poetry. Having no intermediary categories or institutions between state and society, tyranny is invited in.

If there is merit in considering Heidegger the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, it is essential that we seek to critically comprehend his views on the relationship between art and power. By ascribing an essence to a people through the idea that a common language was spoken and understood by a people over a long period and a large territory, Heidegger links poetry and politics. Yet there is no reason to believe that this should be the putative “essence” of a people, for the very notion of a people is then given a fixity that his own dynamic sense of time would seem to urge against. What is more compelling is that he seems to possess a sense of foundations in politics that is similar to the Machiavellian idea of beginnings as something worthy of admiration. If we can reject his claim that poetry and politics must of necessity be tied together, then we can embrace his idea that a reconstitution of a civilization can occur if states are forced to re-examine their relationship to their respective cultures more critically. To go back to first principles is indeed vital; yet this can be done through recognizing that the culture of a given state has become transformed over the centuries by becoming more diverse and pluralistic. This embrace of pluralism is central to aesthetic political theory’s notion of perspectivism. Rather than a unifocal view of “a people” as Heidegger does, we should heed aesthetic political theory’s recognition that there is no privileged point of view but a multiplicity of perspectives even within a single culture. This is what should be reflected in the political constitution of a state.

Arendt’s Blurred Kantian Lens

A thinker deeply concerned with the dangers of Fascism, Hannah Arendt approaches politics through a lens that is tinted with aestheticism. Of course, this aestheticization of politics is altogether different from that of Fascism, but the fact that it is there shows us another instance of the omnipresence of aesthetic politics. Influenced in some key ways by Heidegger and Nietzsche, Arendt’s aesthetic politics is ultimately founded on Kantian grounds, and for this reason stands in sharp contrast to the aesthetic political theory of Machiavelli and Nietzsche.

Like Heidegger, Arendt is another sharp critic of modernity. While never directly confronting Heidegger’s personal association with Nazism or the philosophical affinities between Heidegger’s thought and the ideology of Nazism, Arendt is nonetheless urgently engaged in developing a mode of politics that can avoid modernity’s slippery slope towards authoritarianism. In the shadow of the Holocaust and under the clouds of Soviet gulags, Arendt’s thought stands as a clearing in the receding area of modern democratic political thought that seeks to find in the ancients a richer soil to nurture citizen participation and an active public life.

The key term in Arendt’s aestheticization of politics is “publicity.” In her analysis of art in Crisis in Culture, she makes the claim that the conceptual overlap between art and politics is publicity: “The common element connecting art and politics is that they both are phenomena of the public world.”⁵ For her, politics and artistic creativity share not only a term, but the very inner logic of the term. Both can only be possible when presented to a multiplicity of people, not to a small group or to a private domain. To be public means to be related to the people, to the sphere of the many as opposed to the few. Publicity in this term has a democratic kernel that Arendt does not recognize explicitly. It is for this reason that her analysis of the overlap of art and power is problematic.

Because she does not question the people-rooted definition of “the popular,” which is at the heart of the term “public,” Arendt is working with a definition of politics that is particular, not one that can be easily applicable to all sorts of politics. ⁶ It is the politics of democratic engagement, something that is not common to all politics. Thus her political theory is indeed democratic yet in her aestheticization of it, she does not tell us that she will limit herself to democratic politics. She seems to makes the claim that all politics is public; this is her universalist, philosophical argument.

Why is this a problem? Following the Machiavellian conception of politics as a realm of appearances and (mis)representation, it is clear that there are some forms of politics that are inherently not public. We may assume that Arendt is providing a normative argument; but from a prima facie reading of Crisis in Culture (where the gist of her views on the overlap of art and power can be found, in my view) there is no indication that she is merely providing a normative argument. She seems to makes the claim that all politics is public; this is her universalist, philosophical argument.

Why is this a problem? Following the Machiavellian conception of politics as a realm of appearances and (mis)representation, it is clear that there are some forms of politics that are inherently not public. We may assume that Arendt is providing a normative argument; but from a prima facie reading of Crisis in Culture (where the gist of her views on the overlap of art and power can be found, in my view) there is no indication that she is merely providing a normative argument. She seems to make the analytical claim that all politics is by definition public. The Machiavellian perspective that much political power is exerted “behind closed doors” and surreptitiously runs counter to this claim. From the killing of Vitellozzo Vitelli to the motives behind the execution of de Orco, the Florentine praises Borgia for his ability to deal in deception, to act behind public arenas, and to be effective in establishing his own power on this basis. While we may wish to think that politics has a benign, public and open air to it, we can easily think of counter-examples. We cannot make the facile assertion, as Arendt does, that (all) politics is public.

For Arendt politics is like art in that the metaphor of the stage can capture their essence. A theatrical stage requires an audience for whom actors perform in an open display of ideas and action. Art, of all manners, requires such an audience if it is to be meaningful, and in a Heideggerian sense, to have rootedness to the culture in which it is nurtured. Politics, for Arendt, must also be performed through actions that are in front of others to communicate ideas and to debate problems. Politics is the field of spectatorship. It is here that the Kantian core of Arendt’s thought is visible. For her, as for Kant, a disinterested observer is the ideal spectator in matters of philosophical inquiry. To get to the right knowledge of things, one must be impartial. The proto-Kantian, quasi-Stoic thought of Cicero is also invoked by Arendt to argue in favor of being “an indifferent lover of wisdom.” Yet this idealist strain seems to forget that its founder, Plato, posited a view of the philosopher who was far from indifferent: the philosopher-king wants to order the city according to his view, a view that is purportedly objective because reached through the precepts of reason. Yet it does not cease to be an interested point of view. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Machiavellian response would be to say that all politics is perspectival; Nietzsche would add that all existence is perspectival. This perspectivism is by necessity also tied to interest, since the aims of durability (Machiavelli) and health (Nietzsche) are the interests of the observer. Both would also argue that the interest of the observer is to increase his or her hold of and intensity of power.

Arendt’s claim that we can gain an enlarged mentality through intersubjective efforts to view the whole of a situation does not follow easily from the premise that there are many points of view, many of whom may not be compatible or reconcilable. Sharing the world with others does not necessarily lead to a Kantian objectivity regarding the nature of a given aesthetic object precisely because there is multiplicity of views on them. Arendt claims that there is objectivity in the process of observing the world because we all observe the same world, and she says that therefore the process cannot be entirely subjective because it is focused on the same object. But this ignores the fact that each individual will only see a partial component of the world, rather than the whole of it. Moreover, these participants may not necessarily communicate (or wish to) with each other about what they see. There is no imperative to share information of views of what is seen in common. There is no reason to think that all relevant observers will look at the same part of the whole at a given moment in time. Therefore we cannot assume that we share the world in a comprehensive, objective way.

Arendt tells us that “truly political activities cannot be performed without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by many.”⁷ It is not clear why “truly” political should mean public; that the root of the term politics refers to the term polis does not necessarily make it fully democratic, for even Athenian democracy depended on slavery and on small groups to determine policy decisions. If by politics we understand the positive freedom involved in having an engaged citizenry determine the course of the state in the sense that Viroli explains politics was once understood,⁸ the response to that can either be that such an ambition is either somewhat idealistic or is no longer feasible in modern states because the meaning of politics has changed. From decisions to go to war to bargaining over policy priorities, much if not most of modern politics actually occurs among small groups. Arendt’s analytical and normative claims become mutually obscured and we lose sight of their prof itability.

While the central category of publicity seems to fail in Arendt’s aestheticization of politics, three attendant notions that are relevant to our project provide more promising possibilities. These are the ideas of beauty, performance, and taste, cardinal to the meanings of the term “aesthetics.” For Arendt beauty can be found in politics when something manifests imperishability. Aware that human beings fear their death and dread being forgotten, especially in an age of mass society, the very idea that something durable of which they can be a part is appealing and pleasure-giving to most people. She believes an admiration of man’s creations, when perdurable, is an integral part of the art of politics because states can show such permanence. While this notion of perishability as a manifestation of beauty seems related to the Machiavellian idea that durability is the aim of states, Machiavelli himself does not use the term beauty for it. His is merely an analytical, descriptive aim that lacks the desire to find beauty in things he admires. In this sense his perspective is closer to modern aesthetics (which dis-places beauty from the center) than Arendt’s.⁹ From the Machiavellian-Nietzschean perspective, durability is admirable without necessarily possessing beauty.

The second notion is that of performance. Arendt understands art and politics to also be about actions, deeds, and the performative. This immediately appeals to the point of view of aesthetic political theory, since it moves away from intentions and moralism and towards effective, observable deeds. For Arendt politics is the ensemble of actions that are performed in public by political actors. While for her this sense of performance has the openness and publicity that we describe above and which is not shared by aesthetic political theory, the emphasis on the deed rather than the doer is important and valuable. Politics in this view is similar to the Machiavellian world of appearances where actors appear and reveal, disappear and conceal, at different points. Just as Machiavelli admitted that he could not really understand the psychology of Borgia but admired his deeds, the Arendtian focus on actions and performance rather than intentions has a valuable sense of “theatricality” that nonetheless does not seem to fully accord with Kantian principles of publicity because moral intentions are not visible.

Lastly, Arendt links the faculty of taste to politics. The faculty of taste is clearly one of the central categories of aesthetic analysis, and again Arendt derives a crucial idea from Kant rather than Heidegger or Nietzsche when it comes to her aestheticization of politics. Taste as judgment is necessary for having the right kind of love of beauty and philosophy, Arendt tells us, and this taste is gained through one’s being in a polis or political community. Taste is a political faculty, dependent on one’s location in a community. Citing Pericles, she recalls that the Greeks “love[d] beauty within the limits of political judgment.” Only in intra-communal sharing of values and institutions could something be judged to have the qualities that could add up to beauty.¹⁰ In this, Arendt is surprisingly distant from Kant’s effort to find a reconciliation between subjective and objective views of beauty. This pre-modern conception seems close to what we describe about taste in aesthetic political theory in the preceding chapter: owing to the diversity of cultures, taste cannot be seen as universal but only as particular to specific communities. What we wish to emphasize is that this capacity of taste also has a level of individual, not merely communal, relativism. Taste may be acquired and shaped by community ties, but this is not the entire story. Taste is also ineluctable tied to one’s individual, subjective, and organic response to the world outside. It is in the interplay of one’s taste tendencies and one’s community taste standards that a final judgment about political taste can be made. Yet, contrary to the Kantian project of seeking to establish taste on an objective basis that takes into account the subjective experience of art, it is difficult to see how political taste could be made objective; it is precisely because it is to be rooted in particular sorts of poleis that it cannot have universality.

Arendt’s aestheticization of politics provides important elements that help ground aesthetic political theory on a more solid foundation. While her emphasis on Kantian principles runs counter to the basis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche that our aesthetic political theory possesses, her discussion of performance, durability, and especially taste, if examined by trying to underscore their analytic value and minimize their normative content, are useful for our construction of aesthetic political theory. Her work underscores the immanent affinities that exist between political action and aesthetic comprehension. There is, however, a tension in her use of models of thought that are ancient in origin and a modern Kantian ethical and aesthetic lens: the former leads to particularism, the latter to universalism.

In an age of imminent authoritarianism shaped by the totalitarian tendency to treat masses as objects to be shaped aesthetically, it is not clear how Arendt can balance these two tendencies in one political state. This seems especially the case when the concept of beauty is used to refer to political creations, something that neither Machiavelli nor Nietzsche advises. While their work points to using aesthetic categories such as representation, emotion, form, and perspectivism to understand politics, the focus on beauty seems rather to point to a dangerous slide to Fascist or totalitarian aestheticism and to the frailty of democracy.

The Art of Esoteric Writing: Strauss and the Aesthetics of Politics

There is perhaps no more incisive commentator on both Machiavelli and Nietzsche than Leo Strauss. The German émigré is the theorist who gives the relationship between Machiavelli and Nietzsche salience by using them as demarcations for modernity. Strauss did not discourse at length on this relationship, nor on the artistic or aesthetic aspects of it, yet in his underscoring of the importance of each thinker to what we understand as modernity we can gather valuable insights into the pairing of these critics of Christianity and conventional morality. However, while Strauss was aware that political writing is an “art,” he missed the aesthetic component of each writer’s contribution to political philosophy.

Was Strauss correct about the modernity of Machiavelli? What we have in fact in the works of Machiavelli is a representation of the transitional figure from pre-modern to modern times. Machiavelli was not free from medieval influences, nor was he beyond the grip of Christian morality or ethos. As a good man of the Renaissance—particularly the Italian, Florentine form of it—he was embedded in the Christian or specifically Catholic lifeworld of his time. References to God abound in his writings, and it is a Christian God. Even if it is a rhetorical God, we must accept the fact that Machiavelli was no Nietzschean Free Spirit avant la lettre. He was certainly a precursor of such a being, but not a fully fledged one. The most important evidence of the pre-modernity of Machiavelli is his use of astrological science. As Anthony Parel has shown, Machiavelli was rooted in the mentality of the time, which thought that the astral forces had deep influence on the actions and bodies of humans on earth. Moreover, Machiavelli believed in signs and augurs in the way that the ancients did, not as purely rhetorical figures of speech. In this, we see a Machiavelli that is pre-modern, a man who is not entirely within the rational, scientific mindset of the modern world. Still, astrology was an accepted “science” in the Renaissance, so in that sense he was a thinker who believed was engaged in some sort of scientific, rational enterprise when accounting for the influence of the stars on bodily humors.

In effect, Machiavelli had one foot in the pre-modem world and the other in the modern world. He is the gatekeeper for the Western world’s entrance into a realm that can be called modern because it is a world in which there is no unifying, cohesive matrix that ties all spheres of life together as was the case with the ancients. Religion is used by Machiavelli, but it is used as an instrument, not as a basis of his political philosophy. Modernity means the present world, and the present world is one with brokenness at its core. Brokenness means that individuals are located as discrete, relatively autonomous beings upon a world that has multiple layers, diverse spheres, not all of which can be tied together to give meaning to one’s life or to a universal purpose. The modern condition is a condition of individuals being thrown upon an alienating, confusing world, without the parapets of religion or something else to guide them across their journey. This is the essence of Machiavelli’s poem The (Golden) Ass. It is this sensibility that makes Machiavelli one of the first moderns.

Was Machiavelli engaged in “political science”? This question is important because the concept of science is a modern one. It is also what Strauss believed he was doing when examining the history of philosophy. This means to exercise rationality in a rigorous, methodical and precise manner, such that facts about the best way to live and govern can be determined. But we do not see the same in Machiavelli: the Florentine was engaged in a rational assay of history, to be sure, in order to determine the best manner to govern a state. Yet his methodology (if one can find one) is very loose; it is artistic rather than scientific. His use of historical examples is manipulative, artful and deceitful, even to the point of creative flights of fancy such as placing weapons in the hands of David in his agon with Goliath that are not in Scripture. Countless examples can be found in the way that he invents or re-invents history, such as when he creates entire (imagined) speeches out of thin air in The Florentine Histories. Science understood as knowledge acquisition was perhaps Machiavelli’s intent, but what we understand as modern scientific methodological inquiry is not apt to describe what Machiavelli performed.

Strauss points us in the right direction, even when he does not give us much guidance in terms of the relationship between the two thinkers. They are equally important to him, in the sense that they offer true insights (i.e., philosophical facts) into the political world, but he does not elaborate on their connection. Machiavelli begins the first wave of modernity because he dissects and pulls apart the decaying morality that is provided by Christianity. This gradual decline of the cogency and potency of Christianity to answer life’s questions and organize the political realm is the last throes of a pre-modern ethos. Religion in general no longer can serve as the cardinal center of societies in flux. There are a variety of economic, social, and political reasons for this (such as the development of modern market economies and large states) but there is also another, more metaphysical causal force. This is the impact on the real world of the ideas of Machiavelli, principally the idea that immorality is part and parcel of the political realm and that in fact this domain requires amoral or immoral acts for a political act to be successful. This idea not only reflected reality, it also shaped it. Readers of The Prince, either supportive or critical, now had to deal with the fact that such thoughts were written down and existed in the world. Strauss’s admiration for Machiavelli is partly rooted in the Florentine’s critical and (according to Strauss) correct interpretation of Christianity. The Catholic religion (“our religion” as Machiavelli called it) weakens men, makes them otherworldly, and denigrates the political (see Discourses II.2.2), when in effect what we most need in a modern world is active, engaged political men and women.

The first wave of modernity was thus established by Machiavelli, according to Strauss. Yet Strauss did not see that Machiavelli was not a pure modern or the transitional figure between the ancient/medieval world and the modern /contemporary world. Strauss fails to see this, as he fails to see (or theorize, as an act of seeing) the aesthetic angle from which Machiavelli writes. The closest to an artistic sense that we get in Strauss is in his Persecution and the Art of Writing. This is a central text in understanding Strauss, for it shows us the distinction between exoteric and esoteric writing and it uncovers the fact that many if not most of the key thinkers of political theory were writers, in other words artists of the word. Writing is not a plain, self-evident task. Writing political theory requires hiding and concealing, illuminating at certain points, playing with words in a way that will be accessible only the close reader, to the connoisseur, not the dilettante. This is not a scientific task but closely resembles the task of the artist. This is especially true if we understand art in the Platonic sense, that is, as an act of deception. Esoteric writing must delude the dilettante and the censor, while it captures or represents the truth accurately for the well-versed, incisive reader or critic. There is a “popular” or exoteric reading that is superficial and surface-oriented, while the educated eye can see through it and into the essence or true meaning of an artistic work. This esoteric theorizing requires care and attention, but it also requires a certain cynicism: the critic must accept or recognize the fact that the author meant to delude, in other words, was engaged in properly immoral behavior. This is true of Plato’s writings as much as of Machiavelli’s or Nietzsche’s.

Nietzsche, for Strauss, represents the ascendancy of the other significant wave of modernity. Rousseau stands between Machiavelli and Nietzsche, but Rousseau’s critical views on Christianity are too similar to those of Machiavelli to warrant a claim for originality. Christianity, for the citizen of Geneva, is useful as the glue that holds the people together in a cultural-moral sense, even if it is false and deluding. This is fundamentally an appropriation of Machiavellian political theology if one could call it that. Moreover, Rousseau’s chief task is to legitimate government in the face of immorality, something that Machiavelli does not do; for Machiavelli there is no need for legitimation because power, rather than justice, is what underlies politics. Rousseau felt compelled to follow a Kantian desire to justify through reason, whereas Machiavelli accepted that how to acquire, maintain, and expand power (and use it upon others as one shapes a sculpture) is the essence of politics. Only when we arrive at Nietzsche do we find a similar concern to that of Machiavelli: legitimation cannot work because we are not all equal in any sense of the word. Asymmetries of power, intellect, and personal integrity (understood as having a strong self) exist in all spheres of life. In such a context, there cannot be a pure exchange of ideas that arrive at an eternal truth.

We know Strauss had a sort of furtive admiration for Nietzsche.¹¹ Laurence Lampert rightly tells us that there is much that is left open and ambiguous in Strauss’s reading of the author of Beyond Good and Evil. There is certainly a denunciation of Nietzsche by Strauss in the sense that he thinks he destroyed, philosophically, the human desire for certainty. This, Strauss believes, is politically dangerous, for it leads to a nihilism that rejects politics altogether. Of course, Nietzsche was not a nihilist; he opposed the “will to nothing” that he saw in haters of the body, believers in intellectual tameness or compassion, and other forms of easy philosophical “coasting.” For Nietzsche living dangerously meant questioning everything, and he saw those who didn’t as nihilists. Strauss sees this, and condemns Nietzsche for thinking (or writing) aloud. Fragile minds might be within earshot, and to declare such radical, stentorian pronouncements may demolish the house of politics. This is the core of Strauss’s critique of Nietzsche: to undermine public morality leads to the shaking of faith in politics, especially in the modern world of mass politics, and this may lead to an anarchy that may prevent the elite from carrying out their task of proper philosophizing, something that, for Strauss, redeems the human race as a whole.

But does this mean that Strauss actually disagreed with Nietzsche? In reality we see that Strauss agrees with the diagnosis of the modern world presented by Nietzsche. Here the relationship between Machiavelli and Nietzsche is pivotal. Strauss fails to make it explicit, but if we see Nietzsche as Machiavellian and Machiavelli as Nietzschean (in other words as mirror images of each other across time), the tasks they pose themselves are not that different. Strauss admires the pleasing blasphemies of Machiavelli. ¹² He does so because he agrees that Christianity has prevented the properly political from truly emerging in the modern world. As Dana Villa has argued, Strauss is in a sense more Aristotelian than Platonic: the political is more important to Strauss than the abstract, philosophical pursuit of truth, even if he seems to say otherwise. Coming from the ravages of Nazi Germany, Strauss was keenly aware that there is no such thing as pure, unalloyed political philosophy (even though he seems to argue for one). Writing politics is an art that requires furtive escape from censors and opponents and also torturers. It is not a quaint practice. Machiavelli’s torture by the Medici, Nietzsche’s torture by his own body, and the torturous path lived by Strauss himself pointed him to the idea that a well-organized, ordered society is essential for the human pursuit of the truth. For this reason the political life is necessary. This is also Machiavelli’s insight, for the Florentine valued peace and order as well.

Nietzsche does not share this view: in fact his rejection of democracy, socialism, liberalism, and nationalism is basically a rejection of all modern politics. But we know he envisioned a “great politics,” one for a “good European.” This is the hint of a thinker who believes there is no one single, universal form of truth about politics that is applicable to all societies (a Platonic idea) but that the best regime must be rooted in the specific, particular cultural practices of a given ethnic-geographic bloc, in this case the regionalism of European identity. We know Nietzsche wanted to write about great politics and perhaps his life was cut short for this task. Yet his concept of the good European represents the notion that rather than an all-encompassing universalism, what is most cogent is a localized, historicized identity that can serve as the basis of a political unit and sense of community. Strauss understood Nietzsche’s ideas as European ideas, ideas that led to Heidegger and perhaps influenced Hitler. This latter point concerned Strauss, for he saw the real potentiality of evil and sheer moral anarchy in times of mass politics and propaganda. Yet Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality, specifically Christianity (and here we should think of Protestantism more than Machiavelli’s target of Catholicism) is something that Strauss finds value in because it is a religion that does not go well with the political life. Still Nietzsche did show glimmers of being interested in writing some sort of political theory for good Europeans at the end of his life. This concern with a kind of polis must prevent us from dismissing Nietzsche as apolitical or entirely philosophical.

While Nietzsche is “elevated to the highest plane” by Strauss in his essay prepared for Interpretation,¹³ what is shocking is the contrast between the public denunciation of Nietzsche and the more private admiration for him. This can be explained in part by what Lampert calls the “games” played by Strauss. This reminds us of the games played by the elder statesmen in Plato’s Laws. Wise, older men can have the freedom to play such games, for the ludic spirit builds imagination and maintains agility of mind. Strauss “never tires of pointing out that artful writers in the past played little centering games.”¹⁴ This task is not scientific but aesthetic: “his readers are trained to look at the center”¹⁵ in a way that emulates artistic observation or critique. Here we must be poised over a text as it were a painting. The center holds our attention; it is “the most exposed part.” In this manner, as Lampert rightly shows, he places Nietzsche at the philosophical center. Strauss’s Nietzsche is “like Strauss’s Machiavelli: he fascinates his reader by confronting him with [playful] riddles.” ¹⁶ These riddles are part and parcel of the aesthetic, imaginative and creative style of writing that Nietzsche and Machiavelli share. Strauss is vaguely aware of this, for he at least points in their direction; this shows the “artful Strauss” that Lampert perceives.

Strauss thus is not only giving us the light with which to locate the relationship between Machiavelli and Nietzsche, but he also catches glimpses of the aesthetic method used by both thinkers. This method places them at the center of modern political philosophy. Of course their great opponent is Plato, as we saw in earlier chapters. But for Strauss Machiavelli and Nietzsche are worthy opponents of Plato, thinkers/artful writers who may be able to challenge Platonic truths. The link here is art: if we agree with Plato that art is deception (rather than direct representation, or other theories of art) then we see that for Strauss art is central to politics and political writing, in the same manner as it is for Machiavelli and Nietzsche. This is especially true if understood as rhetorical writing, where “the facts” can be molded as desired to target an intended audience and shape its views by convincing them of ours. This is necessary in a democracy, where the free exchange of ideas is what is supposed to shape public policy and maintain proper representation. But for Strauss democracy is fragile, and hence we must not forget that the art of political writing is a creative and constructive task that faces many undermining currents.

The Fragility of Beauty: Liberalism and the Aesthetic

The currently preponderant modern political philosophy, at least in academic circles, is that of liberal democracy. For a variety of reasons, it is the field in which much (if not most) political theory is carried out. There is indeed much to be gained from this tradition. However, some of its weaknesses can be perceived when we examine it through our lens of aesthetic political theory.

The various liberal deontological-normative perspectives that currently dominate discussion arise largely from the legacy of John Rawls. While Rawls himself was not greatly concerned with aesthetic politics, a recent contribution by a philosopher of aesthetics makes an important link between Rawls’ work and aesthetic thinking. By examining this link, we may shed some light on the purported universalism of liberalism. Elaine Scarry’s recent work On Beauty and Being Just is the work in which this link is made We can see how the Rawlsian model is not sustainable by having recourse to a thinker deeply influenced by Machiavelli and Nietzsche, Leo Strauss.

We have found that while Heidegger and Arendt largely follow themes that are shared by the aesthetic political theory of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, there are significant problems with the way they conceptualize the relationship of art and politics. For Heidegger, the desire to have no distance between society and the state leads to what F.R. Ankersmit calls mimetic representation, something that is conducive to tyranny. For Arendt, the Kantian lens she employs leads to a democratic concept of publicity that is absent in most other forms of politics, and this is problematic because in the history of the world most political regimes have been (and are) far from democratic. This undermines the universality of her remarks concerning publicity.

The observation that most political regimes throughout history have not been democratic is one of the central points in the thought of Leo Strauss. The modern, or rather contemporary, prejudice of thinking that politics is somehow inherently tied to democracy is something that Strauss wanted to think critically about. It is not that he wishes to bring democracy to the non-Western world, but rather that in his attempt to understand the history of political philosophy from a “scientific” or factual point of view, he observes that the absence, rather than the presence, of open, public discussion and mass participation is what characterizes most social contexts in which great political ideas were put to paper.

For Strauss, persecution, in its various forms from imprisonment to ostracism, is the norm in most cases where politics is written about. This stands in sharp contrasts to the analytic-normative view given by Arendt where publicity is inherent in politics. In regimes where civil liberties do not exist or are continually undermined, there is little room for an open, free exchange of ideas in a public forum. And, Strauss believes, this is the typical scenario in most if not all historical periods. Even when torture and abuse are not present, pariah status can be assigned to thinkers deemed dangerous to the regime.

This view of politics, in my assessment, seems to be largely correct. Tyranny rather than freedom is what marks the political history of the world, with Western-style democracies as a recent, and fragile, form of government. From Africa to Latin America to Asia and to certain periods in the history of the West, tyranny has been preponderant. If this is the case then the Arendtian claim about publicity as inherent to politics is either analytically incorrect or normatively wishful. Yet this view that we can have a deontological model for political ethics that can then be put to use in actual constitutions is not only Arendtian, but is cardinal to the Rawlsian liberalism.

Elaine Scarry seductively proposes that there is a certain kind of beauty about a liberal democratic constitution built along Rawlsian lines. Yet, because of the standards that she employs to determine such beauty, her argument falters. It falters not only because of the criteria she uses but also for the very use of the term beauty in the context of modern political philosophy. If we take guidance from Strauss, we can see in what ways her argument loses its footing.

As we saw above, for Strauss political philosophy is really an “art.” He calls it thus in his Persecution and the Art of Writing even though he does not expound on the term therein. What is clear from his analysis, though, is that most great political writers, from Machiavelli to Rousseau and even Locke, wrote under conditions of duress and could not, even in theory, act publicly. Political philosophy thus is not isolated from the real world; it is part and parcel of the vicissitudes of power and persecution, and therefore cannot be seen as a rarefied activity that is somehow beyond lived experience. Strauss was alive to the travails suffered by great political commentators, perhaps because he himself had been obligated to emigrate Nazi Germany.

In this realistic, human account of the way politics is written about, Strauss implies that the affinity between political writings (which are a form of political action) and art is the idea of deception. Esoteric writing is needed to insert deep meaning into one’s writings, and exoteric form is necessary to mislead or deceive the vast majority of careless readers, some of whom we can assume would be the author’s enemies (who might be placed in high places).

The esoteric and the exoteric work together to hide the meaning of a text in a way akin to the play of world and earth in Heideggerian thought. Their interplay illuminates the reader who is able enough to read judiciously. A simple, matter of fact, direct style of writing is something that no great political author possesses, since he or she is aware that deception is needed if his or her ideas are to survive persecution. Writing in a manner that blends exoteric and esoteric elements is thus an art like the painting in dark and light hues that a painter must engage in. There is no science to it, there is no systematic method that can be replicated by other authors. The art of writing political philosophy, for Strauss, blends the Platonic idea of techne and the modern notion of art. It is like techne because it is socially useful and requires certain skills of the doer, and it is like modern thought regarding art because it does not treat its deceptive quality negatively. It finds in its imitative, representational, and deceptive elements the path to an illuminating and creative process that can be available to some perspicacious readers. Strauss is thus a thinker who straddles the modern and the ancient.

The idea that deception and delusion are integral to artworks is Platonic. This idea goes back to the pejorative vision of imitative art in Republic X. However, Strauss drops the pejorative connotation and chooses to present deception in a positive light. This is the Machiavellian and Nietzschean influence in Strauss. Deception does not lead to ruin; in fact it can lead to very productive social and personal results. None of the great political texts of the West could have been possible had they not been written under conditions requiring them to possess duplicity immanently. With deception persecuting authorities are duped and great ideas are transmitted across time to sustain philosophy and civilizations.

There is nothing inherently right- or left-wing in this account of the art of writing. Neither is there anything that would be considered Western or anti-Western. To be sure, Strauss above all wants the continuation of philosophy in stable social conditions. But there is no prescription in his works about the kinds of regimes that should be constructed. Above all, Strauss is noncommittal about democracy itself. He seems to abhor the cultural forms of democratic thought, which may undermine the ability of philosophers to do their work, but he is certainly not engaged in a project to either dismantle or promote democracy.

What is significant about Strauss treatment of the relationship of art and power, for our purpose in examining aesthetic political theory’s relation to liberal democracy, is that it points primarily to deception as a common denominator. It is not beauty, which is the perspective on liberal democracy of the contribution by Scarry. For Scarry beauty is the common link between liberal justice and an aesthetic conception of the world. Scarry provides a valiant retort to much of modern aesthetico-political thought by seeking to recover the notion of beauty as a central aesthetic and political concept. Contraposed to Strauss’s views, however, her effort does not stand firmly.

For Strauss democracy is a rare and fragile form of government. But this does not make it valuable as such. What Strauss recognizes in Machiavelli and Nietzsche is that they are able to grasp the fact that deception, (mis)representation and the use of rhetoric and emotions are central to both cultural and political transformations. These are the criteria that we should think about when examining the overlap of aesthetic and political thought. Yet for Scarry the central notion is beauty, and this beauty is most closely connected to the idea of symmetry.

Scarry perceptively tells us that we live in a culture that no longer prizes beautiful things. She points to two perspectives that seem to have contributed to this state of things. One is the (apparently Marxist) idea that paying attention to beautiful things distracts our attention from social justice. The other (apparently feminist) idea is that paying attention to beauty objectifies the focus of our gaze. Scarry aims to show that the former view is entirely misguided, and that the latter is nonsensical.

Using Simone Weil’s idea of decentering, Scarry argues that beauty effaces our ego and allows us to see the world in a disinterested manner. This capacity is what allows us to see the conceptual link between physical, material beauty (such as that of a vase or human face) and the social world. Our being disinterested provides us the chance to see that symmetry, of all concepts, is what ties all beautiful things together. The symmetry of a beautiful face, of rowers on a boat, of a grand Capitol finds a parallel in the symmetry that John Rawls describes in his theory of justice. Rawls’s idea of fairness is one where equality is the guiding principle, and this equality between persons is akin to the equality between two sides of a line divided at the middle. This mathematical/geometric symmetry that Scarry believes is at the heart of beautiful objects thus finds a counterpart in the conceptual notion of equality in justice. Moreover, the etymological origin of the term “fairness,” she tells us, refers to beauty, not just to justice. Thus, there is a conceptual and genealogical point of commonality between the beauty of objects and the beauty of liberal justice.

What is unconvincing about this account? The first point is that while Scarry may well be correct about her argument that the views against beauty that she initially assails are mistaken, her reasons lack philosophical robustness. The critique against the view that gazing objectifies persons is not thoroughly refuted because the analysis remains at a largely socio-cultural level. Moreover, the view that paying attention to beauty actually helps justice rather than injustice (as a counter-argument to the first perspective) seems to fail because it hinges on the notion of symmetry. As we have pointed out earlier, some aesthetic traditions do not value symmetry, but rather asymmetry. In Japanese aesthetics, for instance, symmetry is seen as inelegant, whereas off-center arrangements are beautiful.¹⁷ If it is the case that in at least some aesthetic traditions symmetry is not at all associated with beauty, then Scarry is not justified in making the universalist philosophical assertion that symmetry is at the heart of beauty as such without at least dealing with those perspectives. In addition, taking a Nietzschean genealogical-etymological approach, which Scarry herself seems to endorse, we can point out that the term “fairness” in one sense refers to the property of having a naturally light complexion. Some synonyms for fairness are equity and beauteousness, but also blondeness and paleness. This implies whiteness, something that may point to a Eurocentric approach to the meaning and implications of the term. While Scarry seeks to defend Rawlsian political theory using a universalist point of view that is tied to aesthetic thinking, she does not deconstruct the term far enough. To be sure the term “fairness” is obviously Eurocentric because it is an English word; but this minor point is really secondary to the point that the philosophical attempt to link it with beauty and justice ignores its other central meaning, that of whiteness. “Fairness” thus loses its universalistic appeal and becomes reducible to a localizable term.

The fact that this Western-centered concept is at the heart of her views, and that it is not explicitly acknowledged as such, is highly problematic. It points to the particularistic origins of a view that purports to have universality. This is the same problem that exists in Arendt’s Kantian political aesthetics and in Rawls’s theory of justice, for it is grounded on a Western concept of the “reasonable” that is not necessarily shared by other cultures. Deontological normative liberal democracy thus rests on unquestioned assumptions that philosophical definitions are not necessarily tied to concepts that are particularistic in nature. Without dealing with alternative philosophical traditions that deal with the same themes, such arguments lack philosophical robustness. This is especially evident in discussions of aesthetics and politics, since as we saw in the last chapter that there is nothing definitive about what art, beauty, or taste are.

To the extent that a social group shares in the values, traditions, and beliefs that make certain politico-aesthetic arguments plausible, they may indeed be valuable. But this must be stated explicitly. This, however, is patently a problem for universalistic theorizing that seeks to provide definitive perspectives on given politico-philosophic problems. Arguments built on “views from nowhere” where disinterested observers can determine the right way to understand concepts or courses of action a priori seem to be especially vulnerable to the charge that they rest on culture-specific conceptual frameworks. The veil of ignorance, in Rawls’s schema is of course intended to efface such specificity, but when we examine notions such as symmetry it loses its cogency.

Conclusion

At least with reference to the connection between liberal justice/fairness and aesthetic beauty, we see that the liberal democratic tradition makes the error of treating particulars as universals. What is the proper response of aesthetic political theory to this crucial weakness in liberal democratic theory? Aesthetic political theory can respond in three different ways. One is to emphasize the notion of perspectivism, which leads to the abolition of a universalist point of view. Another is to underscore the fact that aesthetic political theory is fundamentally amoral, for it seeks to observe rather than adjudicate based on ethical arguments. Finally, if pushed to recognize ethics, aesthetic political theory can be in a way linked to consequentialist ethics to provide a non-universalist account of the proper way to live while addressing the problem of how to achieve justice.

The first point is that which we have claimed earlier: aesthetic political theory understood from the modernism of Machiavelli and Nietzsche is perspectival. It is not like the modern aesthetics of Kant (the inspiration for Rawls), which seeks to provide a universalist account of what taste, beauty, and the aesthetic experience are. Owing to the “brokenness” of the world, there is no single point of view that is privileged over others in the process of describing or drawing an image of the world. Much like a shattered mirror, each piece reflects the world from a different angle and in a different way. The mirror cannot be reassembled to provide a full image of the totality of the world.

The second point is that aesthetic political theory, in the manner that follows Machiavelli and Nietzsche, seeks to avoid a Manichean morality. Moreover, the foundation of Machiavelli’s view is the idea that ethics are not denied but are deemed separate from political activity. The attempt to realize justice is thus not in the purview of politics proper. For Nietzsche, this is also the case but there is a sense in which “ethics” does exist, and that is in the desire to develop a way of life for the individual that is justified and leads to greater perfection. Yet even in this ethics, amorality and even immorality are present: to act for the good is not a central aim. If the aesthetic political theory of these two authors is thus fundamentally amoral, it urges to observe politics as it is without seeking to reform it based on moral grounds as liberal democracy does. From this perspective, the moralizing aim of liberal democracy is either unnecessary or misguided.

The natural response of a proponent of liberalism might be that this simply begs the question: aesthetic political theory is noncommittal about how to live and therefore has no contribution to make to a prescriptive account of politics. It merely observes and sometimes dangerously foments immorality. A Nietzschean response to this would be to say that behind this moral argument lies a will to power that seeks to dominate and control by having a good-faith argument; being benevolent allows one to think of one’s position as more legitimate than others’. But at the same time, if pressed to make a link to ethics, we could respond that aesthetic political theory can find an affinity with consequentialist ethics, not deontological ethics, owing to the fact that both are concerned with effects.

Consequentialist ethical approaches, as their name implies, determine if an action is good or bad according to its consequences, particularly over all the people involved in the action. Deontological ethics is grounded on a theoretical account of duty. Aesthetic political theory is indeed concerned with primarily observing how aesthetic principles such as representation, emotion, and form are manifested in politics. Yet if someone were to ask what is the prescription for living that it may give us, we can say that an aesthetic political actor seeks to create the kinds of effects on an audience (of citizens) that is deemed to their taste. The political actor thus seeks to create policies, laws, and institutions that have an effect of being appealing to the people. The measure of the policies is thus the degree to which its effects are accepted and found in accord to a people’s preferences, even if those preferences are not rationally or morally justified. In this manner aesthetic politics may be linked to the ethical approach to politics.

Whether aesthetic political theory remains amoral or it is linked to a consequentialist ethics, its effect is to diminish the role of moralism in politics. Its concern is with effectual results rather than motives or normative aims. It is not grounded on any specific ethical tradition, such as one that may be religiously based or another that may hold egalitarianism as the highest good. Its ambitions are in a sense quite humble: to understand politics through aesthetic categories because it claims that politics is aesthetic in nature. This limited point of view is thus analytic and observational, and does not privilege any particular moral perspective. In this manner it distances itself from views that are rooted in fundamentalism, fanaticism, and moralism in politics. It accepts modernity as the current state of things while trying to refound modern political theory on a different ground, that of artistic logic rather than on ethical terminology. Owing to its perspectivism, moral pluralism is more amenable to it.

The term modernity implies the present and the new. Aesthetic political theory is a new way to approach political life. It allows us to refrain from the sort of universalist ethical language that has led to cultural clashes over the proper way to live. And as we will discuss in this work’s Conclusion, it has actual applications for our contemporary world.

Notes

1

While Spain was far from the most advanced modern European states of the period, its conquest of Latin America was the moment in which modernity was consolidated, that is, when the West could assert the primacy of its principles over those of an “Other” (See Dussel, Encubrimiento del Otro/lnvention of the Americas, passim).

2

I thank John Wallach for discussions on these themes. See The Platonic Political Art (Penn State).

3

De Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political, p. 91.

4

“The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, p. 164.

5

Arendt, Crisis in Culture, p. 218. However, earlier she says that “only works of art are made with the sole purpose of appearance” (p. 210).

6

Publicus is akin to populus, the people, in Latin.

7

Arendt, Crisis in Culture, p. 217.

8

See From Politics to Reason of State, Cambridge University Press.

9

One additional consideration against using the term “beauty” as connected to im-perishablity from a philosophical point of view is that some cultural traditions, such as the Japanese, find beauty in precisely the opposite, in perishability. See Hume, Nancy, Japanese Aesthetics and Culture, passim.

10

A penetrating discussion of this theme is given by Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment.

11

See Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, p. 5.

12

Vide Ibid, p. 9.

13

Ibid., p. 11.

14

Ibid.

15

Ibid. (Second emphasis added).

16

Ibid., comment added.

17

See Hume, Nancy, Japanese Aesthetics and Culture, p. 36-40.

Conclusion

Spectacular Politics

Introduction

Politics itself is an aesthetic practice. It is a human endeavor that is rooted in individuals’ desire to impose their imprint upon particular situations and things. In order to shape their world, they must utilize means to represent ideas, sometimes misrepresent motives, carefully imitate past deeds and actors, and mobilize people through the rhetorical manipulation of emotional reactions. All this is for the grand aim of giving lasting form to a particular state, political struggle, or to shape the course of a movement.

In the past, some theorists, such as Arendt and Heidegger, have recognized aesthetic aspects to politics. Yet the rubric in which they have worked has always been that of normative, ethics-based thinking about politics. To be sure, there is an important link between ethics and politics, but what has been missed in the past is that this link is neither necessary nor sufficient to understand political life and phenomena as such. The Machiavellian insight that there is a wide chasm between the two fields has not generally been heeded. As a result, it has remained largely buried under centuries of the kind of normative philosophizing that owes its origins to Plato. To excavate the political field, in order to uncover this alternative approach, and to see how Machiavelli re-establishes political theory on aesthetic rather than ethical philosophical grounds, has been the task of the present work.

There is no doubt that most political aims can be understood as subsumed into the ethical world. What one political leader proposes as opposed to another is his or her own way of answering the question, “how should we live?” Yet this is one interpretation of the political phenomenon. The other is based on the question, “how can I achieve the effect I desire?” in order to acquire, maintain, and expand a person or group’s political power. In many cases the ethical aspect is lost, for the salience of the question rests on the deep-seated ambition to express oneself upon the world rather than to act in a way that seems to be morally justifiable.

It takes a perfunctory glance at politics across the globe to recognize one thing: in many (if not most) real cases, political actors seek to do as they want, not as they think they (morally) should. This is the common-sense, average-person insight that has been almost completely lost to political philosophers. Most people distrust politics. If you ask the person on the street, they will tell you that politics is often corrupt, politicians are corruptible, and morality is hardly ever able to restrain political actions. To understand politics, this fact cannot remain in the background while theorizing about politics in moral language dominates academic discourse. Perhaps this is a difference of opinion; but there seems to be enough historical and empirical evidence to support the claim that politics is about acquiring and using power for the political agent’s aims rather than for the service of the belief that we should live in a morally justifiable way. Would that this was the case, but it seems that it is often not.

Can we think of examples of how aesthetic political theory might be useful in comprehending actual experience? In this concluding discussion, I will seek to proffer some instances where the use of aesthetic concepts helps us view politics in an analytic, realistic manner.¹ While many thinkers in the early twentieth century believed that to aestheticize politics leads inevitably to fascism or totalitarianism, I believe any kind of politics can be discovered to be fundamentally an aesthetic practice. In what follows we provide a schematic account of how aesthetic principles are found in the politics of fascism, republican nation-states, the events of September 11, 2001, and the case of war, with the example of the US-Iraq war that began in 2003.

Representations of Power

Walter Benjamin warned of the danger or aestheticizing politics. For him, to make politics appear like an art form would ultimately lead towards fascism or totalitarianism. From the experience of twentieth century fascism and Nazism, it seems that he was right. Yet, to aestheticize politics is not the same thing as finding that politics as such is aesthetic in nature. To be a political leader that thinks of himself as an artist who shapes the world in the manner of Mussolini is not the same as discovering that aesthetic categories such as representation, expression, and form are applicable to all sorts of political endeavors.² Benjamin’s warning was accurate at least insofar as fascist politics is concerned.

Perhaps the most overwhelming example of the fascist aestheticization of politics can be found in a visual document that we know as Triumph of the Will. Leni Riefenstahl’s film captures the aesthetic essence of Nazi fascism while it itself is a work of art. Riefenstahl recorded the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally of 1934 on film in a way that blurs the lines between art, propaganda, documentary, and entertainment. The eerily sparse soundtrack makes the images even more salient, as we witness a crescendo of energy that eventually congeals into a political dream for Nazism and a nightmare for its enemies. Reprehensible to many, the film is still considered a chef d’oeuvre by others owing to its technical innovations, rich technique, creative imagination, and stunning images verging on beautiful forms. Triumph of the Will is a document of the way art and politics blur into each other. It is also an example of art beyond good and evil: that is, its aesthetic power is such that one is forced to somehow ignore or relegate its immoral content or implications.

Aristotle tells us that we can only feel true pleasure from the right things, not those that are morally bad. The black and white images of soaring airplanes, well-structured phalanxes of soldiers, and even laughing young Teutonic boys in Riefenstahl’s work, however, are so well put together that we are impacted deeply by the significant form that they possess. The emotion of awe—bordering on fear—is elicited by the energy of thousands of men (and some women, for the film seeks to reek of masculinity) who gather in a show of martial brotherhood. Germany’s renaissance seems to appear before our very eyes. Yet for a contemporary viewer, the eventual realization that the scene captures immoral events (because Nazism sought the elimination of millions of innocent people) comes only after we have experienced the grand spectacle of power. It would appear Aristotle’s claim no longer works in modern times, when beauty is an afterthought to properly constructed representations, emotional pulls, and form-giving.

As Mary Devereaux has noted, what Triumph of the Will tells us is that we must ask more difficult questions of the relationship of politics to aesthetics.³ More specifically, we must ask if there is more than art to aesthetics, and if there is more to aesthetics than artistic beauty. Riefenstahl’s work makes us uneasy because it exposes the inadequacy of the models that we have tended to utilize to define art, politics, aesthetics, or beauty. If in fact aesthetics cannot be limited to art, we must explore the fields onto which its categories overflow. And if beauty is not the central criterion of aesthetics, then we must examine what sorts of criteria must be met to call something a work of art or an aesthetic experience. Just as nature was replaced by artworks when theorizing about aesthetics, we must now further explore the way that aesthetics supersedes the art world (of paintings, music, sculpture, et al.) and overflows upon the political terrain.

This overflow was caused by the explosion of nearly unanswerable questions that works like Riefenstahl’s posed to us through their disturbing impact on us. As the dam broke, we were left to ponder the question of whether only fascist politics has an aesthetic side. The short answer to this is simply no. From the foundation of creole republics in Latin America to the spectacle of election-year conventions in the contemporary US, to the way that September 11 can be seen as an immoral act with representational overtones, we must recognize that the “ethical basis of politics,” which we hold close to our hearts, is not the only foundation of modern politics. An alternative approach exists, and that is the one built on the aesthetic basis of politics.

This alternative, which as I have argued is based on the writings of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, has no fundamental affinity with the political ideology of Fascism. Why are these thinkers not proto-Fascists? Principally because the ideology of Fascism, if it were to have a philosophical basis, would be grounded on the notion of totality. Fascism as a political ideology is a form of totalitarianism. Many regimes are casually referred to as “fascist,” yet the Italian and the Nazi regimes that are the original templates for this term were quasi-totalitarian in the former case and fully totalitarian in the latter. This means that the leaders aimed at the complete control of society by the state. A holistic subordination of society premised on the philosophical assumption that the leadership could grasp the totality of political reality is what might be considered the basis of these Fascist regimes. For Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the opposite of totality undergirds their aesthetic political view: partiality. Only a partial (i.e., a part) account of reality can be grasped because of the inherently perspectival and subjective nature of cognition through the senses. As we saw earlier in this work, this is one of the key affinities between these thinkers. For them there cannot be a complete, overarching perception of “total” reality because one’s acquisition of information, images, and knowledge is always grounded on a particular, partial, and incomplete perspective.

Fascist politics, as any other kind of politics, can be understood as aesthetic in nature. This is because perception through the senses, particularly the visual, is intended to impress upon people certain emotions and ideas that further particular political agendas. The use of means of political representation in an aesthetic sense is not delimited to authoritarian regimes. It can be seen in other forms of government as well.

Monuments, Statues, and Symbols of the Republic

Few works in recent social science have had the impact of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. The great achievement of this Marxist thinker was to think in un-Marxist ways to produce a new sort of Marxisant logic. The nation as a collective ideological construct largely shaped by elites and the print media is now a watershed notion in political analysis, constructive critiques notwithstanding. How is this approach related to the aestheticization of politics? What I want to underscore is the way that Anderson points the way to a path that allows us to see republican politics (the opposite of fascism) as aesthetic through and through. Principally, the notion of imagination is the nexus between aesthetic theory and political theory that we must perceive even though he did not make the link explicit. Desirous of finding an un-orthodox Marxism inspired by Gramsci, Anderson unconsciously follows the Gramscian model of thinking of aesthetic questions and political questions simultaneously.

However, the key concept in Anderson’s work is not “materialistic” but rather “idealistic.” As we mentioned earlier in this work, a set of theories of art argue that the essence of art lies in the mind of the artist. Collingwood and Croce are two paradigmatic thinkers in this respect, for they believe that creative imagination is really the core of what makes something artistic. The artist must prove his mettle not so much in the physical world of artisanship and craftsmanship but in the realm of ideas and originality. For these aesthetic thinkers, whether or not an original idea is crystallized into an actual physical object is not crucial.⁴ This explains why literature is an artform: the words that are written on a piece of paper are not anything that we might call “made” objects; the totality of the story told by an author, using her mastery of diction, rhythm, and syntax, is what grips the reader’s imagination. When the reader captures what the imagination of the author created, then we can say that she has experienced an aesthetic moment.

The idealistic aesthetics of Collingwood and Croce are far from the historical analysis of Anderson. Yet, theoretically, the fact that they share a key concept, imagination, must force us to think whether the connection is merely semantic or holds a deeper meaning. When we press the question we see that in fact the faculty of imagination is cardinal to the way that we experience political belonging in a nation state of any kind. But it seems the republican kind is even more a propos.

A republic is a form of state that is premised on the rule of law. Opposed to tyranny, it posits that no one is above the law and that citizenship means—in the classical sense of the term—acting for the common good, for the res publica. The modern interpretation of this term comes to us post-1789, when the notions of individual equality and freedom—weaker in the classical Platonic or Roman conceptions of the republic—are the bases of the rule of law. The individual, in a modern state, is entitled to ask the question of whether he or she should wish to belong to his or her state.

This question is answered by the modern republican state through rituals of performance, symbols of identity, and representations of belonging. To the question “why should I belong to this state?” posed by an autonomous individual, the state as an institution develops a variety of aesthetic forms that seek to impress upon him the idea that his very identity depends on his acceptance of the notion that the nation is his rightful “home.” This is done through affective representation: rituals, monuments, statues, anthems, patriotic events, all aim to elicit an emotional response from the individual by providing her a “home” to call her own.⁵ One’s very personal identity is thus intimately tied to the acceptance of a patria, of a homeland that will serve to answer the existential question of where one should belong.

Anderson tells us that the first acts of imagining nations as collective belonging took place in the Americas. To be more precise, Latin American creole leaders seeking independence from Spain (the former madre patria) began to establish journals, magazines, newspapers, and national literatures that conceived of those in a given territory as belonging to a common land, possessing a common destiny. The process was artifactual through and through: objects, artifacts such as journals, propagated the idea that one belonged to nation called, say, “Colombia” or “Bolivia.” In the former, monuments to Columbus sprung on plazas, in the latter statues depicting Bolivar could be found in a city’s prado. Particularly through war the myth of national identity was shaped; not only through the wars of independence, but also the later wars amongst Latin neighbors. One was essentially “Peruvian” or belonged to something called “Colombia” when identity was forged through combat experience (as in their war of 1932-33). The soldier fought side by side with another soldier from a different part of the national territory and concomitantly imagined himself to be “Bolivian” or “Paraguayan,” as in the Chaco War (1932-35).⁶

In times of war or times of tranquility, national identity thus serves to give a sense of belonging. It pays to imagine oneself as a member of a nation; everyone else has a nation, so why should not I? When asked who you are, you can claim, proudly and with an inflated chest, that you are Malaysian, Portuguese, or American. The faculty of imagination that Croce and Collingwood argue is the gist of art is what allows for the artifacts of nationhood to be effective. Monuments and Capitols all represent national unity and identity, elements that each individual uses to satisfy certain existential lacunae.

As Marc Redfield has shown through the ideas of Benedict Anderson, aestheticized politics is thus not merely the province of fascist ideology.⁷ Republics do not rely on coercion (most of the time) to receive the adherence of their citizens. This adherence is created through a variety of aesthetic (imagined, representational, emotional) experiences that are often manifested by actual works of art such as monuments and statues. In times of peace these are comforting symbols; in times of war, the experience becomes intensified. We can see this even in our present time.

The Performance of Terror

On the morning of September 11, 2001, two fuel-full airplanes burst into flames as they exploded the sides of the World Trade Center in New York City. Soon the two giant towers collapsed, enveloping the world’s most important city in a cloud of opaque dust and noxious fumes. This moment was unlike any other in the history of humanity, for a variety of reasons.

One interpretation of the event is that it was carried out of pure evil. President George W. Bush came to describe it thus and to think of it in this way to guide the policies his government would follow in response to this dreadful event. A clear-cut Manichean morality seemed well suited to such a horrific event, one of unprecedented historical proportions. While it is true that similar devastation had been wreaked in the past upon many other settings, this was the first time that the United States, the most powerful nation that has ever existed, was struck in its “heartland.” No such attack upon the most powerful nation on earth had been carried out before, whether when Rome was the “head of the world” or when the sun never set on Britain.

Another interpretation is that behind this utterly immoral performance of terror, spectacular politics had reached its historical apogee. The terrorists, evil as they were, had achieved something that was unprecedented in the sheer spectacle of a brutal event. Not only had the act been the result of a macabre design that had obviously necessitated sophisticated logistics, but the aim was largely symbolic: the terrorists had sought to strike at sites that represented particular aspects of US power. The Twin Towers stood for the financial might of capitalism, and that same day a plane struck the Pentagon, the symbol of US military muscle. Had the third attack been successful, it might have struck the White House or the Capitol, symbols of the US model of political organization. The attacks could have perhaps been more effective militarily had they been aimed at army bases or nuclear facilities, yet the aim was different: to show the world, through the expected repetition of images on television screens and print media, that the US had enemies somewhere who abhorred its mode of economic, political, and military organization. This was an act representing the hatred filling the terrorists’ souls.

Viewed purely from an observational perspective, the event must be recognized to possess representational aspects. We all agree that it was a horrific day. But we must not miss the point that the perpetrators’ act was a symbolic-political one, for it was directed to change the shape of power relations. And the method that they sought was not through an ethical modality. Rather, they sought to carry out an attack with modern aesthetic implications. No, beauty was nowhere to be seen; just as beauty is no longer the central part of the modern aesthetic. In its place was the desire to shock, to do something new and unexpected, to impact sensory perception. The purpose was symbolic; i.e., representtational. Moreover, there seems to be no doubt that the perpetrators sought to shake the emotional stability of the American people, that is, to cause a massive tidal wave of emotions. Ultimately they seem to seek the transformation of the power structure of the international order; hence to change its form. Examined analytically, the language that seems most appropriate to understand the event itself is aesthetic.

To be sure, the act was utterly immoral. Killing and maiming is as low a form of human behavior as can exist. But what is the problem with seeking to understand the event as fundamentally or solely a moral one? In the first place, moral condemnation of the perpetrators does not have an impact upon them or their supporters. Anyone willing to participate in such an act of terror is beyond moral opprobrium; he or she feels, for some reason, legitimated in acting savagely. In the second place, it is not difficult to imagine that however twisted, there was a moral logic somewhere in the minds of the terrorists. Just struggle, anti-colonial resistance, a cry against exploitation, a response to religious discrimination, a religious-moral command, and many other beliefs may have been at the root of the actors’ motives. If this is the case, we are faced with two competing moralities, which may or may not be reconcilable.

In addition, the most likely response to such events is that of retaliation. Here the logic of “just war” can be called upon, arguing, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has, that such events necessitate a strong use of force in response. What is the problem with this view? In principle, it is inherently contradictory: violence committed as a response to violence, however justified, is still a form of immorality, for it requires the harming of others. Moreover, in this particular case the culprits were long dead: against whom should we react? A consequence of rapid reaction could be the unwitting killing of innocents who simply happen to be close to terrorists and their associates. There seems to be no way to avoid the oxymoronic sense in a term such as “just war;” some kind of immorality must be performed even when justified by grand arguments. Real people die even if the theory seems cogent.

Thus we have two problems: that of clashing value systems and that of the inevitable tragedy of strong military action. With the former, we can never fully ascertain the moral motivations in the actors, and it seems that apologists and academics could make a case for either side. With the latter, the tragedy lies in the fact that beyond ratiocination and serious debate (which may stamp an approval upon a military retaliation) living human beings, many of them innocent of wrongdoing, are likely to be killed or maimed.⁸ Thus it is not clear how we gain a better understanding of the actual event and of the purposes for which the act was committed if we only focus on the ethical side. Analytically, we are better served by observation of its characteristics as a performance or act.

What was the central characteristic of this deed or performance? The spectacular. In what seemed to be an episode taken from a big Hollywood production, the towering inferno was viewed live on every channel in the metropolitan New York area and then the nation. The images were repeated over and over all over the world, and it did not lose its spectacular essence. Spectacular because immense, awe-full and awful, but also because it had a surreal streak to it that really did seem to make it more appropriate for a Cineplex screen. This time spectacular politics, however, was not the domain of advanced, industrialized nations and their election-year convention shows or “missile-in-the-sky on CNN” images; this time the actors came from the so-called “Third World,” the periphery, even if behind a murky cloud of complicity by unknown figures.

A new era has dawned in world politics. It is an era where all political actors, from the left and the right, the metropolis and the periphery, act with the aim of representational objectives. Moreover moral motivations matter less than the sensory impact of particular acts that have political aims at their base. Why? Because through globalization mass media have reached the far corners of the world. Never before could a peasant far away watch an event that day in lower Manhattan. From a village in Honduras to a home in Nigeria to a factory near Tokyo, the same images can be broadcast to millions of people. Sensory impact, particularly the visual, has become central to the very essence of politics.

Acts of War

There is a series of events that precede 9/11 that paved the way for the mass-society, technology-based aestheticization of politics that culminated in that dreadful day. In his fine collection of essays following the 1991 attack on Iraq, Theater of War, Lewis Lapham invokes the wisdom of Niccolò Machiavelli to explain the new sort of politics that has permeated US politics since the Kennedy era. Lapham rightly points to Machiavelli’s understanding of appearances when he observes that Kennedy’s photogenic qualities ushered in a new period in which form often mattered more than substance.

Kennedy’s legacy was far-reaching. The Vietnam War was also deeply affected by the images that were received by US homes through their televisions. The actual power of visual perception gained increased importance; and policy towards the war was to a significant extent determined by public opinion, which itself was shaped by what people saw of the events in Indochina. During the Cold War, the figure of Ronald Reagan stood imposingly. Lapham tells us that, in a sense, life imitated art, for the one-time movie actor became the real leader of one of the two global superpowers. Reagan’s genius lay in his ability to capitalize on his demeanor as it was perceived visually by audiences and voters. Ironically, the legacy of the Democrat Kennedy was best utilized by the Republican Reagan, who even upon his death in 2004 was widely credited with “ending the Cold War.” Whether or not this is true, what is remarkable about Reagan was his ability to translate his “artistic” skills from the screen into the political arena.

In the years since Reagan left office, we have witnessed the continued relevance of the management of appearances for political purposes, to the extent that there is no longer a line between them.⁹ Doubtless Reagan was possessed by the moral desire to free enslaved peoples, but the same could be said of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas or Salvadoran FMLN Marxists whom Reagan warred against and decimated in the nineteen-eighties. What is remarkable is that much of what occurred was a distant echo, since it did not appear daily on our television screens. Its absence from visual perception almost makes it seem that that war never occurred at all.

One war that certainly occurred was the war against Iraq undertaken by George W. Bush. In March of 2003 the second episode of the Mesopotamian adventure took place. The first one, “Desert Storm,” had left “unfinished business.” The sequel, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” was to be the final blow to tyranny in Iraq. Egged on by the so-called “neo-cons” at the Defense Department, some of whom claimed guidance from the writings of Leo Strauss, the moral crusade was intended to bring about a lofty, ethical state of things: freedom and democracy.

In a fantastical show of theatricality, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations Security Council—and in front of millions of TV viewers—to proclaim that hard evidence existed of the “weapons of mass destruction” held by Saddam Hussein. A few images of dark cylinders later, the world was informed that war could be a possibility. In the deliberative forum that is supposed to be the UN, there were a few disagreements. But rather than reasonable disagreement leading to a compromise solution or the aggregation of votes by smaller states against the world’s only superpower, the end result was eventual war decided unilaterally by the US.

As of July 2004, no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. The Butler commission in Britain acknowledged that Prime Minister Tony Blair had acted based on unreliable, or plainly wrong, intelligence in supporting the coalition’s efforts. In the US, similar results were found. Instead of weapons of mass destruction, the war had been orchestrated with a massive show of deception, either willful or not. Apologies were delivered, heads were scratched. But the fact was that thousands had been killed. Nothing could turn back time. Deception, that quality of art that Plato had assailed long ago, was shown to be part and parcel of politics. If Hussein had hidden the weapons, he had been a master of deception. If the coalition had failed to turn up the weapons, it had either deceived or been deceived by its own intelligence. Surely the irony of this cannot be lost on the “Straussian” neo-cons in the Defense Department. In their effort to bring about the moral aims of open societies and democracy, deception had actually been one of the key factors in the war.

Few images of the Central American wars during the Cold War of the nineteen-eighties trickled onto US television screens, but the opposite occurred during the Iraq war, particularly during the Abu Ghraib torture scandal of April 2004. The images that were leaked to the press in a sense validated the facts; without them, there was no reason to believe that any such acts had actually been committed. Thus we see another new factor of world politics: if it is not seen, if it lacks appearance, it does not exist or does not matter. Only when something comes to cognition through the senses, especially through visual channels, does it gain gravity. The photographs of US soldiers degrading Iraqi prisoners in fact seemed to matter less for what they actually showed than for the fact that they existed at all, thereby damaging US prestige across the globe. The moral transgression, it seems many felt, was for the images to have risked US interests, rather than the actual torture/degradation of human beings depicted in the photographs. Politics is about appearances and visual, aesthetic impact, and it seems this factor is gaining more relevance than the ethical approach to political action.

Conclusion

As we proceed further into the twenty-first century, the aesthetics of politics are gaining force. We live in an age of constant fusillades of data, images, sounds, and globalized information media. Aesthetic experiences permeate our modern lives. Few political events can remain local for long. One way to make sense of them is to approach them through categories borrowed from aesthetic theory. If we understand aesthetics in a modern sense, that is, in a way that does not take beauty as its central concern, we can think of it as the way in which we cognize through the senses. In our epoch, the visual sense is the most politically apt of all. From the masterwork Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl to Mussolini’s parades, to monuments to creole founders in Latin America, and even to the spectacle of democratic elections and undemocratic wars, aesthetic perception is inherent in the way that politics functions.

There is no doubt that ethics can be seen to be involved in political life, but for analytical purposes—to see how politics really works—it is necessary to think of the possibility that the aesthetic basis of politics precedes the ethical discussions that rest upon it. This is the insight that Machiavelli and Nietzsche proffer. Ethics is neither necessary nor sufficient to understand politics; it is not absolutely necessary because there are alternative means (such as aesthetic political theory) and it is not sufficient because it may miss either the real motivations of political actors or the actual, effective results of political phenomena. In order to bring new insights into view, the academic field of political theory should continue to explore the bridge between aesthetic theory and the world of politics.

Notes

1

One is tempted to say “objective,” since it treats politics as an object of examination. Yet this would miss the point that there is a subjective, perspectival epistemic basis.

2

See Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. See also Berezin, Mabel, “Cultural Form and Political Meaning: State Subsidized Theater, Ideology, and the Language of Style in Fascist Italy,” 1994, American Journal of Sociology, 99: 5.

3

“Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’” in Aesthetics and Ethics, edited by Jerrold Levinson, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

4

Jeff Koons, for instance, is a great artist. He is responsible for the conception of innovative artworks, even though he himself does not build most of them.

5

See for instance “Place, Symbol and Utilitarian Function in War Memorials,” 1949: Social Forces 28.

6

See Centeno, Miguel, Blood and Debt, University Park: Penn State Press, 2002, Chapter 2.

7

See Redfield, Marc, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism, Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003.

8

For Francisco de Vitoria, a Dominican founder of the just war theory, war must be a last resort, after diplomacy has been exhausted, moral harms evaluated, killing of innocents is avoided, and—most importantly—a real sense of being fundamentally threatened is determined to exist.

9

The case of Arnold Schwarzenegger is the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon.

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Index

9/11, September

Acquisition

Acquisitiveness

Aesthetic

Agathocles

Agon

Agonism

Alexander VI

Alienation

Althusser, Louis

Ambition

Amoral

Anamnesis

Anarchy

Anderson, Benedict

Animals

Ansell-Pearson, Keith

Apollo

Appearance

Apuleius

Arendt

Aristotle

Art

Ass/donkey

Astrology

Athens

Ball, Terence

Baumgarten, Alexander

Beauty

Bell, Clive

Benjamin, Walter

Berkowitz, Peter

Berlin, Isaiah

Bible

Bock, Gisela

Body

Borgia

Bourdieu, Pierre

Brokenness

Burckhardt, Jacob

Camus, Albert

Capitalism

Catholicism

Chabod. Federico

Chaos

Christianity

Cicero

Circe

Coleman, Janet

Collingwood

Comedy

Commerce

Compassion

Conway, David

Cosmos

Creativity

Croce, Benedetto

Cruelty

Dante

Danto, Arthur

David

De Beistegui, Miguel

De Grazia, Sebastian

Death

Deception

Deliberation

Democracy

Dewey, John

Di Maria

Dickie, George

Dietz, Mary

Doctors

Drive

Dussel, E.

Duty

Eagleton, Terry

Emotion

Empire

England

Enlightenment

Equality

Eros

Esoteric

Eternal recurrence

Eternal return

Ethics

Europe

Evil

Execution

Existential

Exoteric

Expansion

Expression

Faas, Ekbert

Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta

Fascism

Fear

Ferguson, Kenan

Fiction

Florence

Force

Forgacs, David

Form

Fortune

Fox

Fragility

Fraud

Freedom

Friendship

Fry, Roger

Games

Gender

Germany

Gilbert, Allan

Gillespie, M.

Glaucon

Glory

God

Goliath

Good and evil

Good

Goodall, Jane

Gooding-Williams, Robert

Gramsci, Antonio

Gray, Richard T.

Greece

Guicciardini, Francesco

Hannibal

Hate

Heaven

Hegel

Heidegger, Martin

Hell

Heraclitus

Herd

Hero

Herodotus

Heroism

Hickey, Dave

Higgins, Kathleen

Historicism

Hitler

Homer

Honor

Hope

Hulliung, Mark

Humanity

Lampert, Lawrence

Hume, Nancy

Humors

Imagination

Imitation

Immoral

Impartiality

Imperialism

Independence

Inequality

Ingratitude

Instinct

Irony

Italy

Jesus

Julius Caesar

Justice

Kahn, Victoria

Kant

Kateb, George

Kaufmann, Walter

Knowledge

Language

Lapham, Lewis

Latin America

Latin

Laughter

Law

Leadership

Lessing

Levinson, Jerrold

Liberal

Liberalism

Liberality

Liberty

Lions

Locke

Loneliness

Lost

Love

Lust

Luther

Machiavelli ; Chief Works; The Discourses on Livy

Najemy, John

Naples; Florentine Histories; Lust and Liberty: The Poems of Machiavelli The Prince

Magnanimity

Mansfield, Harvey, C.

Markets

Marx

McCormick, John

Medici

Mercy

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

Middleton, Christopher

Mimesis

Modern

Modernity

Morality

Moses

Napoleon

Nationalism

Nature

Nederman, C.J.

Nehamas, Alexander

Nietzsche ; The Anti christ; Beyond Good and Evil ; The Birth of Tragedy; Ecce Homo; Gay Science ; Genealogy of Morals; Human, all too Human; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Twilight of the Idols; The Will to Power

Nihilism

Nobility

Noble

Nussbaum, Martha

Optimism

Orco

Order

Ortega y Gasset, José

Overman

Pain

Parel, Anthony

Particularism

Patriotism

Peace

People, The

Perception

Performance

Permanence

Perspective

Perspectivism

Pessimism

Philosophy

Pippin, Robert

Pisa

Pitkin, Hanna

Plato

Platonism

Play

Plutarch

Poet

Poetry

Political science

Politics

Religion

Post-modern

Power

Pre-modern

Prince

Protestantism

Rational

Reason

Redemption

Redfield, Marc

Regionalism

Representation

Republicanism

Ressentiment

Revolution

Rhetoric

Riefenstahl, Leni

Romagna

Rome

Romulus

Rosen, Stanley

Rousseau

Safranski, Rüdiger

Savonarola

Scarry

Schacht, Richard

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Science

Scientific

Scipio

Self

Senses

Skinner, Quentin

Slave

Socialism

Socrates

Soderini

Solitude

Solomon, Robert

Soul

Spain

Sparta

Stoics

Strauss, Leo

Strong, Tracy

Subjectivity

Suffering

Taste

Terror

Thucydides

Tolstoy

Torture

Tragedy

Truth

Tusiani, Joseph

Tyranny

Unamuno

Universalism

Utilitarianism

Valentino

Values

Vattimo, Giorgio

Venice

Vettori

Villa, Dana

Violence

Viroli, Maurizio

Virtù

Virtue

Visual

Vitelli

Wagner

Wallach, John

War

Whiteside, Kerry

Will to power

Wolin, Sheldon

Woman

Women

Young, Julian

Youth

About the Author

Diego A. von Vacano is assistant professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He has served on the faculties of Hunter College CUNY, Vassar College, and Williams College. He was also a Visiting Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbia University. Originally from Bolivia, he holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies from Wesleyan University, a master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University, and a doctorate in Politics from Princeton University.