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A secret |
17:29 - 8 Maggio 2005 |
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Introduction to "Princes without fathers. A reading of Machiavellis The Prince"
translated by Katy Goldman |
1. A part of chapter 56 of book I of The Discourses, entitled «Before Great Misfortunes befall…», reads as follows:
«How it comes about I know not, but it is clear both from ancient and modern cases that no serious misfortune ever befalls a city or a province that has not been predicted either by divination or revelation or by prodigies or by others heavenly signs. There is no need to go far afield to prove this. Everybody knows how before king Charles VIII of France came to Italy, his coming was frequently foretold by Friar Girolamo Savonarola, and how, in addition to this, it was said that armed hosts had been heard and seen in the sky above Arezzo fighting one with another. Everybody knows, too, how before the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici the elder, the upper part of the cathedral was struck by a thunderbolt which did much damage to that edifice. Everybody knows also how a short time before Piero Soderini, who had been made gonfalonier for life by the people of Florence, was banished and stripped his rank, the palace was in like manner struck by lightning.
The cause of such events should be discussed and explained, I think, by some one versed in things natural and supernaturals, and this we are not. It may be, of course, as some philosophers would have it, that the atmosphere is full of spirits, endowed by nature with the virtue to foresee the future, who out of sympathy for men give them warning by means of such signs so that they may look to their defence. Anyhow, whatever be the explanation, there is evidence showing that such things happen, and that, after them, in all provinces there supervene extraordinary and novel events.»
One may choose to interpret these words in two ways: by attributing their writer with a superstition that would make him a figure of his own past, or as consistent with the novel ideas found in his works.
This second choice gives these words an important meaning: that men “sense”, in ways not involving conscience, the nearing of great events before they even occur; events which bring about a crisis in their way of life. These words might also mean that men, not recognizing in themselves this ability to “sense”, interpret the minimum that they are able to perceive as mere day-dreams, and attribute the events to the work of “natural and supernatural” beings.
There is much more to say about this chapter in terms of its interest in aspects of the human mind which still had not been examined. But I prefer to emphasize how concrete this interest was, its “not go far afield (non si discostare da casa)”, its emerging from experience, its being rooted in history.
This chapter explicitly connects its proposed reflection to then-recent events in Florence.
Florence undoubtedly sensed, at that almost entirely peaceful time, the approaching of not only the French invasion or the death of Lorenzo, but also other great events “beyond any human conjecture” of the late fifteenth century.
Savonarola, with his rhetoric about the apocalypse, represented only one side of the matter. On the other side were those who, while later turning to him for comfort after those events began to arise, had been previously opposed to him, nonetheless experiencing a period of depression managed into melancholy which allowed them to stay on the edge of anguish without actually falling in.
The humanist culture of the Florentine Academy, which came together around Lorenzo the Magnificent in the Careggi villa, was actually characterized by a vague sense of impending “new and extraordinary things” which would represent their demise, and in their attempt to avoid such demise, interpreted that sense through an antiquated vision of the world.
This attempt was the subject of a project I worked on many years ago (1). It concluded with a nod to Machiavelli as one who related to that sense without attempting avoid the crisis that it entailed and, instead of explaining or resolving it through an antiquated vision of the world, proposed other ways of doing so which were in themselves a “new and extraordinary thing”.
2. My interest in Machiavelli dates back to when I read Ernest Cassirer’s The Myth of the State, three chapters of which were dedicated to The Prince.
Cassirer wrote that book in 1946 following the catastrophic events of German and world history, which in the same period also inspired T. Mann’s Doctor Faustus which, using the history of Nietzsche education, narrates the events of a mind progressively shrouded by the darkness of an unconscious responsibility in that catastrophe.
Reflecting upon that same catastrophe not as an artist but as a philosopher, Cassirer placed it in the context of a global view of history.
He used the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat, deriving from the same origin from which Freud would discuss the two concepts of Eros and Tanatos, to say that the historical period which ended with the defeat of Nazism could have been comprised in the event represented by that myth; therefore as a moment in the struggle which had “always” set the god of light against the god of darkness and in which men intervened in the attempt to realize a “state”, to establish a “never-ending pattern” to follow in order to set themselves against Tanatos and against their feared catastrophe.
Cassirer drew the term “never-ending pattern” from Tucidide, whose writing followed another catastrophe, Athens in the war against Sparta. Tucidide declared his desire to tell the story in order to define a “κτημα ες αει”, a stable principle against the event’s repeating itself.
The philosopher could therefore portray Machievelli as a moment in this history of research about a “state”, a point of no return in the struggle between Tanatos and Eros; but also a moment that is unique because of its place in that history, in a way that is impossible both to forget and to own, a moment that remained unexplained in time, a “secret” (Cassirer 1950, p. 177).
Benedetto Croce would soon say something similar about Machiavelli, as a problem that would never be resolved (Croce, 1949).
It is not of interest how these two philosophers interpret Machiavelli’s secret or his being irresolvable problem: it is sufficient to note how they trivialize the secret, reducing the treatise to an episode in the general development of natural science (2) or of the history of political rationalism.
It is of interest, however, that after 1946 the secret still remained. In 1976 a review of research on Machiavelli described him as a “radical enigma” (Geerken 1976 p.351); in 1983 one wrote that the fundamentals of his doctrine “are yet to be discovered” (Hulliung 1983, pp.3-4); and even in 2000 a fine book called Il sorriso di Niccolò drew attention to how sarcastic, evasive and enigmatic the author of The Prince was (Viroli 1998).
It seems that I can therefore conclude, although I am not familiar with all of the literature which has appeared on this matter and therefore cannot exclude the possibility that someone somewhere has taken it to another level (3), that the secret remains.
Since 1946 research on Machiavelli has made great progress in terms of restoring texts, publishing previously unpublished works, exploring new sources, defining chronologies, researching certain problems of interpretation, trying to break free from the confines of “machiavellism”; but this is precisely how they took attention away from the secret, despite having opened the doors to its eventual deciphering, leaving it intact (4).
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