To be a prince is to be principal, to be the one. To be a prince is also to be a principle, to embody the architectonic idea, forming and originating. ‘Principle’ and ‘prince’ in Greek are archē and archēgos. In the New Testament, Jesus is the Archegos, the Prince of Peace, both the one or the ruler and the principle of human life and salvation. Machiavelli-as-prince seeks to acquire the worldwide empire of the Prince of Peace.
To hold on to what you acquire, you must know the truth, feeling rather than merely hearing or seeing. But you cannot feel—much less hear or see—everything. You depend to some degree upon people who say they tell you what you need to know. Can you trust them? Might they not do to you what you did to the fool you deposed? Or, absent supreme ambition, might they not tell you what they believe you want to hear, instead of the effectual truth you need to know? John Adams makes observation into an argument for republicanism. Monarchy, the rule of the one, lends itself to excessive secrecy; the monarch cannot know his own enemies. Republics require men to state their opinions as a part of their quest for authority. Everyone knows his friends and his enemies. Republicanism thus rewards the “manly mind,” open in its loves and hates. [1]
Machiavelli prescribes a different remedy: As a prudent man, seek prudent advisers. To maintain a decent fear for your person, teach them to speak only when spoken to. But speak with them often. Make them fear not telling you the truth more than they fear deceiving you. (In Machiavelli, too, fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom—but it is wisdom at the service of the lord.) After thorough discussion, deliberate alone, decide alone, and execute swiftly, leaving no doubt of your resolve in the minds of other even as you leave plenty of doubt concerning what you have resolved. In counsel as in all things, the prince must fight with his own arms. “A prince who is not wise by himself cannot be counselled well.” The prince is alone. To really rule, he must really know; to really know, he must in the end create all things.
How, then, can a prince ever know he does not delude himself? If the effectual truth is the truth he effects, if he disciplines himself to turn his affects into effects, his thoughts into plots—if, when he writes, he supplant the master-plot of the Bible with his own vast ‘history’—then he has, to say the least, minimized the problem.
Or has he maximized it? If I dream of being Napoleon and then become Napoleon, how do I know that I am not still dreaming? For that, do I need a method? Bacon says: experiment. Descartes says: mathematize according to the ‘new math’ that grasps the new truth, the dynamic calculus that replaces static geometry and arithmetic’s tortoise-like plodding after change. Replace the faithful certainties of the Bible-believer with the palpable certainties of creative modern science, whereby theory and practice, thinking and making, fuse. Alone, Godlike, you know what you make. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is monotheism in it atheist formulation. Certainty replaces the wonder of the old philosophers. What Nietzsche will call the will to power, Descartes calls the master passion of technē. This form-giving and methodical or form-taking passion orders the private ‘soul’ or self and the public ‘soul’ or regime; the latter will be ‘enlightened,’ that is, founded according to the technocratic fusion of philosophy and the city, the fusion Socrates reject in disputing Protagoras.
For the public, any doubts concerning the prince’s ambition will be assuaged by enjoyment of the fruits of the tree of technique, whose roots extract and transform the minerals of the earth. As for the prince himself, doubt is no longer an affect but an effect, a technique for testing, feeling, nature—the better to caress or annihilate, to use, her parts. Descartes bids his techno-princes to wipe out their natural trust in the senses upon which Socrates began his philosophizing. What if God is the God of the Gnostics, an Evil Genius who comprehensively deceives his creatures? Then the very evidence of our senses is no longer trustworthy: Only the ‘I think, therefore I am’ is trustworthy. The unspeakable name of the Biblical God becomes the self-asserted identity of the thinking human self, the architectonic, auto-nomous or self-legislated act of world-creation that is the one sure way of world-ruling.
But how does the human ‘self,’ alone, indeed how does God, alone, know that it, that He, thinks sanely? Having learned from the Bible to put the highest emphasis on faith and certainty, and having been tempted to aspire to supreme creativity and power, modern philosophers find that human beings nonetheless have difficulty in making everything over in their own image. What if the core of Machiavellian ambition is itself the core of a delusion? What if power fantasies are the supreme human delusions? Solid empiricism—the Lockean attempt to re-ground Machiavellian certitude in the Socratic trust in sense perception by call sense perception ‘self-evident’—yields Humean doubt about precisely the things Machiavellians need most to master: cause and effect. Kant therefore begins anew, abandoning empiricism as a dead end.
He abandons empiricism in order to save empeiria. The distinction between phenomena and noumena, nature and freedom, science/understanding and morality, Newton and Rousseau, is in one sense precisely the attempt to ‘save the phenomena,’ and therefore to save empiricism from itself. Cause-and-effect is not an empirical phenomenon—there Hume was right—but a prior concept that frames our sense-data. Space and time are two more such concepts, indispensable for channeling the sensual stream to the human understanding. Noumenal limits make phenomena intelligible. Without such conceptual constraints, life would be what some narrative histories seem to make it: one damn thing after another.
At the same time, the concept of the noumenal saves human freedom from materialist determinism. Here is Kant’s link to Rousseau and, indirectly, to Machiavelli. The noumenal frees the mind from externals, from things. In the noumenal realm reason can perfect itself in autonomy—giving itself its own laws, it universalizable maxims. This noumenal, rational, moral law then feeds back into the phenomenal/natural world, in a variation of the Machiavellian fusion of theory and practice—effectively a predominance of autonomous human practice over ‘theory’ or the understanding of the determined, ‘Newtonian’ world.
This result is paradoxical because on its face (phenomenally, so to speak) Kantian morality seems the very opposite of Machiavellianism. “Let justice prevail though the world perish for it” lacks that Florentine tang. In establishing human autonomy, Kant follows Rousseau in trying to make Machiavellianism sincere. Kant revives the Socratic teaching about “the lie of the soul,” but then appeals, quite un-Socratically, to the thumotic passions of honor and contempt, along with the thumotic principle of “human dignity,” to extend the prohibition against lying to social relations. Kant also advances a quasi-Aristotelian argument: Speech is distinctively human; the purpose of speech is communication; lying impedes communication and thereby contradicts human dignity, making oneself the mere appearance of a human being rather than the noumenon of a human being. Lying means that one uses oneself, one’s own speech, as a means to an end—as Machiavelli commends.
The noumenal character of human being is humanly accessible, unlike the noumenal in external nature. This is so on Cartesian grounds. We really can know ourselves as we are ‘from the inside.’ That is why the noumenal is freedom for man. Kantian self-reflection yields the same urge to conquer nature that Machiavellian self-reflection does. But Kant additionally claims to discover a universalizable law commanding human beings to treat one another as ends, not as means. Kant wants the will to power, but only if its truth is honest, sincere. Noumenality limits itself by the principle of non-contradiction. As for Realpolitik, it allows the moral man to behave well and get what he wants, too. Let ‘history’—determined, phenomenal ‘history’—do the Machiavellian dirty work.
Nietzsche returns to a more nearly pure Machiavellianism, while never abandoning the ‘German’ inclination to make Machiavelli noble. He begins “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” with Lutheran sternness, condemning philosophic pride in reason as a form of human self-flattery. Like Descartes, he criticizes the senses. But he involves himself in a serious difficulty. If senses “nowhere lead to truth” but “are content to receive stimuli,” by what agency can Nietzsche say “are”? Not by reason, puffed up as it is with pride. Not by introspection, as in Descartes: “What does man know about himself?” If what is called truth comes into existence by way of social contract, by convention, then by what agency does Nietzsche perceive chaos, that tiger within the human soul? How does Nietzsche know that nerve stimuli transform into images, then into sounds, in an ever-falsifying chain of metaphors?
Further, if metaphors then become concepts, equating unequal things, why is that a problem? Do I need to be as good at playing basketball as Michael Jordan to be described truthfully as a basketball player? (If so, what does it mean to say ‘National Basketball Association’?) Is there any serious problem in saying that two leaves are oak leaves, or leaves, even though they are not in all respects identical or ‘equal’?
There is something other than an ‘argument’ going on. Nietzsche condemns epistemological egalitarianism in order to escape Kant’s universalizability criterion, which sets noumenal limits on noumenal freedom. Nietzsche condemns ‘truth’ in order to promote creativity or art, in which limits on freedom are thumotically not rationally willed. Hence the use and abuse of history, which recalls Machiavelli’s advice not to be but to use. To Nietzsche as for Machiavelli, the noumenally human is the will to power. But in Nietzsche even more than Machiavelli (who retain the wily fox) the will to power glories in its arbitrariness. Nietzsche too wants to be salvific creator-god, or perhaps, more modestly, the destroying ‘anti-Christ’ who will clear the way for the real creators. Perhaps the latter role makes him less cautious in principle–that is, as a prince—than the principal modern Prince, who wants to rule, not only ruin.
NOTE
1. John Adams: A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, in Charles Francis Adams, ed.: The Works of John Adams, Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851, IV. 289.
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