If Fortuna is a woman, what then? Beat her into submission, Machiavelli urges. Sweep aside all effeminacy (that is, Christianity), and conquer.
Machiavellian spiritedness did not so much conquer the Christian spirit as amalgamate with it, yielding the wars that wracked Europe in the 17th century. Then a saner modernism emerged, one that channeled manly spiritedness into the peaceful bays of commerce and republicanism.
There was a problem with the commercial republican solution. It could not satisfy the most spirited men and women, whom such glory as parliamentarism conferred could never satisfy, for whom business was a bore. Beginning with Rousseau, who revives Machiavelli’s founder in the person of the Legislator, moderns seek a vaster scope for their ambitions than bourgeois waters afford.
The tribe of the lion and the eagle: Stalin was such a predator. The Foundations of Leninism introduces readers to a distinctly modern tyrant, one who justifies his actions according to a comprehensive doctrine reducible to a partisan ‘platform.’ The Party, like the Machiavellian prophet, must not go forth “completely unarmed” (102). The Party must be both “bold” and “flexible,” leonine and vulpine (102-103). The Party’s very doctrine is a weapon; “the Party must be armed with revolutionary doctrine” (103). The Party determines the content of its prophecy in accordance with “a knowledge of the laws of revolution”—laws of kinesis, unlike the laws of yesterday, which do not stabilize human societies but heat and reshape them. The Party does not merely govern; it guides. The head of the Party is no statesman; he is the leader of the Party even as the Party “must lead the proletariat” (103-104), which leads all humanity. The Americans had compared Washington to the leader, Moses, during war, then to Cincinnatus in peacetime. So long as there is the Party, there will be no peace. The Party consists of “the General Staff” (104) of the proletarian army, conquering Fortune—the fluctuating, circulating, up-and-down stock market life of the bourgeoisie. Like Machiavelli’s army in The Art of War, the Party replaces virtue with virtù, piety with discipline. ‘Civic life’ be damned; the proletarian dictatorship has a world to win, and no time for the chattering slackers of parliament buildings and newspaper offices.
“The Party is the embodiment of unity of will, unity incompatible with the existence of factions” (113). James Madison need not enlist; his are the devices of the commercial-republican halfway-house, a drafty structure of rickety architecture, to be demolished by a new, more scientific Corps of Engineers adept at gaining the masses’ “conscious and voluntary submission,” which Stalin (ever the ex-seminarian) rightly sees as the only “truly iron discipline” (114). These incorruptible disciplinarians shall purge their ranks of petty-bourgeois opportunistic polluters, whose dispirited “spirit of demoralization and uncertainty” accords ill with the new spiritedness, the new scientific faith or dialectical prophecy of the bringers of the new order. And what could be more certain than death? Charles de Gaulle told André Malraux that “Stalin said only one serious thing to me: ‘In the end, death is the only winner.'” Genocidal terror gets ‘History’ on your side, with no back-talk. What could be more unifying than a mass grave”
Stalin, straightforwardly a tyrant, needs smart sycophants willing to trick himout in attractive finery. Georg Luckács does the honors, doing himself no honor thereby. His apologia for Stalin is a contemptible performance, and one of the most valuable any young ‘intellectual’—to say nothing of “the young generation of the Communist Party”—could read. It shows how not to be an intellectual, how an intelligent person can ‘dialecticize’ his way into a sacrificio d’intellectio that excuses mass murder, emitting polysyllabic sonorities and gesturing nobly all the while.
Lukács correctly sees that Marx transforms transcendence into immanence, divinizing the course of human events and above—no, wrong metaphor: beyond—all else exalts the Party and its Leader. There are no conceptual constraints on the Leader’s tactics; they are, in Lukács’s fine phrase, “conceptually indeterminable.” They sure are—with a vengeance. “The sense of world history” (which is no rigid concept) alone determines the Leader’s tactics.
This yields a new super-imperative, ‘super’ because it is no longer categorical but supremely spirited: Act as if your action or inaction will change the destiny of the world, All is partisan; the only right consciousness is class-consciousness; you are either with us or against us.
So far, this is standard Marxist fare. But the special Lukácsian signature comes at the end. Ardent but sensitive young comrades, our consciences must not be allowed to make cowards of us all. Prince-of-Denmark vacillation can never be allowed to persist in a young captain of the world-historical revolution. Virtue must become a noble tragic sacrifice of the priests of virtù, inspirited by the historical Law—rather as Christians are adjured to allow the Holy Spirit to think and act through them, martyrs if they must be. So, as I advance upon my class enemy, truncheon in hand, intending to break his kidneys, I shall assure him, ‘This is going to hurt me even more than it will hurt you. I am no Sadist, taking pleasure in your pain. I do more than feel your pain; I feel my own far more exquisite and tragical agony.’
By contrast, Rosa Luxemburg shows distinct signs of sanity and decency. She does not lack a certain old-Whig charm, with her insistence that the proletarian democratic-dictatorship replacing the bourgeois democratic-dictatorship retain the proven forms of republican civic life. She truly sees that rule by terror ultimately will demoralize and not re-inspirit the too-spirited terrorizers. In partly excusing the Leninists by arguing C’est la guerre, she exhibits (calculatedly, perhaps) that winning if foolish generosity her enemies despised.
Her mistake is obvious and comes early. In 1917 Russia, “The democratic republic was the complete, internally ripened product of the first onset of the revolution.” Wrong metaphor: in Russia the democratic republic was the weak infant of the revolution. It needed the most patient nurture, this child of a people who, unlike the Americans of 1776, had little if any experience in self-government. She compounds her error by endorsing the vast project of nationalizing agriculture under large, state-run farms. If done Leninistically, this will bring bureaucratic centralism, injuring civic involvement. If done democratically (as Luxemburg wishes it were) it will load the backs of infant democrats with adult complications unsolved by the most mature republicans. Never fear, she assures us, predicting that “living history,” especially in its scientific-socialist phase, “has the fine habit of always producing with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution.” Caught you, you Emersonian. Would that it were so.
Like his countryman Machiavelli, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti is a founder. Like Machiavelli’s founders, Marinetti’s are men alone. (Even Machiavelli’s Centaur makes an appearance in The Futurist Manifesto, Machiavelli’s educator of founders.) Marinetti’s founders, like Machiavelli’s, distrust the deceiving senses of sight (classical philosophy) and hearing (Biblical prophecy), but while the politic Machiavelli commends the sense of touch—caressing or annihilating, as circumstances dictate—the artist Marinetti cries, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts,” our “young lions.” Surely taste will not be the sense preferred, smacking as it does of bourgeois proprieties and genteel refinement.
As in Machiavelli, the castles-in-the-air of old philosophies and faiths must be brought to earth. Away, pachyderms of “pensive immobility”: “There is no more beauty.” Masterpieces must be spirited, “aggressive.” Sing, goddess, of “the man at the wheel”—not on the wheel—of Fortune. “Time and Space died yesterday,” conquered by the speeding vanguard. Like modernity itself up to his time, Marinetti begins with Machiavelli and ends with Nietzsche. Pitliess, ‘unjust’ action and creativity constitute the only real art, which is the best of life, which is superior to truth.
André Breton shares this ‘life-over-conscience’ view, which he associates with freedom, “the only word that still excites me.” His freedom is freedom of imagination, which “alone offers me some intimation of what can be.” In The Surrealist Manifesto, he does not explain why imagination does not equally and perhaps more likely offer me intimations of what cannot be, except in dreams. Realism be damned; it is mediocre, hateful, boring, the stuff of novels.
Breton criticizes logic, meaning analytical logic; he wants do delimit analysis not by noēsis but by imagination. Looking for noēsis, he finds fantasia. The dream is an isle of unlimited, self-satisfying spiritedness or thumos in a vast sea of bourgeois/analytical-rational banality. Like any thumotic personality, he longs for certainty. In this sense he is a Cartesian who rejects Cartesian method, Cartesian rationalism. He drams of a synthesis of dream and reality, surreality, which alone will have the absolute properties of Hegel’s end-of-history with none of the latter’s constricting finality. Surreality is reminiscent of the thumotic Carlyle’s “Natural Supernaturalism.” Surrealism is the dream of Machiavelli’s lion untampered by the shrewdness of Machiavelli’s fox: “Isn’t what matters that we be masters of ourselves, the masters of women and of love too”? To love is to love some thing or some one; love implies the noetic limits imposed by the nature of the object or person loved. but the thumotic man wants to master love, experience pure freedom. Surrealism will make praxis poetic, in acts of Nietzschean fortitude and endurance: having borne, camel-like, the burdens of bourgeois life, having rebelled leoninely, the new artist will be as a dreaming child.
It turns out that Breton too has a method. Thumos must be freed, but only indirectly (and paradoxically) by an act of passivity. This act is ‘automatic writing’ or ‘stream-of-consciousness,’ whereby ‘Freudian’ subconscious forces are tapped without the unfree, scientistic, analytical trappings of Herr Doktor’s couch. This exercise could happen no more in the ancient world, with its sense of limits and balance, than in Christendom, with its fears that such spiritual exercises could call up real demons. (Surrealism is a modest curlicue on the line of Satanists and mock-Satanists of Romanticism and the later ‘Decadence,’ the line that runs, in different ways, from Sade and Blake through Les Fleurs du Mal and such ‘spiritualist’ doctrines as Theosophy. Hence Breton: “We cross what the occultists call dangerous territory.”
Surrealist freedom does necessarily not end in anarchy. Breton quotes Baudelaire on the spontaneous and despotic coming of Surrealist images. ‘Sovereignal freedom’ is the result of unlimited freedom. It is as if Rousseau’s solitary walker also wanted to be Rousseau’s Legislator. A “new morality” will be imposed, but, like many a founder, Surrealist man writes books and denies authorship of them. Like Machiavelli’s and Marinetti’s founders, he too will be a man alone with a godlike power or “invisible ray” that will enable him to triumph. (Tristan Tzara rehearses these and other Nietzschean tropes more playfully; his attack on the characteristic question of philosophy—What is?—is especially amusing, albeit sophistical.)
In art and in politics, the type of soul Plato calls the guardian no longer wants to guard but to rule. In order to rule thumotically, however, it cannot stand still. It must endlessly assert and reassert its freedom. In politics, the triumph over the limits of nature, of the human body, ends in tyranny and death: a stack of dead bodies. In art, the triumph over life—the free, undefinable future of Futurism, the above-it-all freedom of Sur-realism, the comic freedom of the undefinable (thus free, beyond the whatness of nature Dada—all end in another sort of nothingness, the walls of museums and office builders and rich collectors.
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