Continued from Part Two

Machiavelli’s “Collaborators”

Machiavelli died in 1527. His fellow Florentine, Galileo was born in 1564.   Without the conquest of nature made possible by Galilean science, Machiavelli’s world-historical project would probably have died with him. While Machiavelli fathered a democratic political science, Galileo fathered the democratic cosmology needed to fashion a new dispensation for man. Galileo’s mathematization of nature—his synthesis of astronomy and physics—overthrew the hierarchically ordered and finite universe of classical (and medieval) philosophy. Heaven and earth now manifested the Idea of Equality. In the mechanistic world inaugurated by Galileo (and perfected by Newton), man can no longer rely on nature or on God for objective and universally valid standards as to how man should live. All ideas on this crucial subject were made equal. Hobbes, who had admired and visited Galileo, saw the consequences of the new “value-free” science: a war of every man against every man, wherein “nothing can be unjust” because in war “the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place”:

In such condition [writes Hobbes], there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building … no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[19]

Men would resemble so many bodies in ceaseless motion or collision. Accordingly, Hobbes believed that only the most powerful instinct of the human heart, the fear of violent death—Hobbes’ summum malum—could provide a solid, natural foundation for political life. No wonder Hobbes regarded self-preservation as the fundamental law of nature. Only in this debased respect does nature provide a standard for mankind and even dictate a moral imperative: seek peace. Peace requires that men renounce their claims to moral or political superiority; it demands equality. It also requires the recognition that

Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different; and divers men, differ not only in their judgment, on the sense of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to reason, in the actions of common life.[20]

Notice that good and evil, according to Hobbes, have no more rational or objective basis than those secondary qualities of which Galileo said, “I do not believe [that they] are anything but names.”

By dispelling men’s illusions that their ideas of good and evil have any divine sanction or are rooted in nature, Hobbes would turn mankind’s energies away from devastating religious conflicts—his current disciples say “ideological” disputes—to the peaceful conquest of nature. For this purpose he constructed a utilitarian morality based on political hedonism (in contradistinction to the apolitical hedonism of Epicurus).

Kant, who accepted the Galilean-Newtonian physics, preferred a morality based not on men’s inclinations or some pleasure-pain calculus, but on the concept of the free moral will. His categorical imperative—“Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”[21]—should be understood as an attempt to substitute categories of reason for the two sources of morality undermined by the new physics: nature and God. Fundamentally egalitarian, Kantian morality is a form of secularized Christianity. Like Christianity, it is intended for men of ordinary reason:

But the most remarkable thing about ordinary reason in its practical concern is that it may have as much hope as any philosopher of hitting the mark. In fact, it is almost more certain to do so than the philosopher, because he has no principle which the common understanding lacks, while his judgment is easily confused by a mass of irrelevant considerations, so that it easily turn aside from the correct way. Would it not, therefore, be wiser in moral matters to acquiesce in the common rational judgment, or at most to call in philosophy in order to make the system of morals more complete and comprehensible and its rules more convenient for use …?[22]

Did not Machiavelli say (quoted above): “[A]s regards prudence and stability, I say that the people are more prudent and stable, and have better judgment than a prince”?

With God and nature having been eliminated as sources of morality, man must find the source of morality in himself. He has tried to do so; every effort has resulted in dismal failure. Bringing heaven down to earth by way of Galileo’s cosmic uniformity has leveled mankind.

Now for a rapid survey of some of Machaivelli’s “collaborators” (discussed at greater length in my book Jerusalem vs. Athens).   Francis Bacon was a sympathetic reader of Machiavelli. His work, Of the Interpretation of Nature, linked science to technology.[23] The purpose of the new science? To alleviate the human condition. For the first time in history, science, divorced from philosophy (the preserve of the Few, i.e., the “proud”), was to serve the Many.

Bearing in mind that the philosophers of modernity regarded religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as their sole competitor as well the greatest barrier to the conquest of nature and to human progress, Hobbes and Locke engaged in a subtle attack on the Bible. To convey their atheism with some subtlety, Hobbes interspersed references to God by saying everything is matter in motion, while Locke paid homage to the deity by proclaiming that human labor is the source of all value. (By the way, the “state of nature” of these two philosophers is nothing more than a hypothetical construction—really a fiction to replace the Creation Narrative and thus propagate a secular, political society.) Influenced by Locke’s exaltation of commerce, Adam Smith produced the Wealth of Nations, the bible of Capitalism, in which he also propagated the novel idea that war could be replaced by economic competition (a prejudice that even two World Wars has yet to dispel).[24]

In Benedict Spinoza Machiavelli had another collaborator. As may be seen in his Theological-political Treatise, Spinoza was the first philosopher who was both a democrat and a liberal; he is also the father of “biblical criticism.”[25] His Treatise exalts democracy as “the most natural form of government,” for there “every man may think what he likes, and say what he thinks.”[26]

Jean-Jacque Rousseau, a philosopher of democracy who nonetheless opposed the commercial society, advanced the Machiavellian idea that man’s nature is infinitely malleable, a product of historical accident. But whereas Machiavelli said that man is by nature “bad,” meaning egoistic, Rousseau held that man is by nature benevolent, that human conflict can be overcome by a “social contract” based on the “general will.” Karl Marx went further. As I have written in Demophrenia:

Marx not only rejected all hitherto existing morality, but also the belief in the naturalistic foundation of egoism. According to Marx, egoism, no less than morality, is an historical product. And only with the simultaneous disappearance of egoism and morality will man achieve true freedom and equality, meaning genuine as opposed to a factitious democracy. How is this to be understood?

Marx believed that man’s exploitation of man is rooted not in any defect of human nature but in the poverty of physical nature. Nature simply does not provide sufficiently for human needs. In other words, not egoism but economic scarcity is the original cause of human conflict and servitude, of human misery and inequality. But with the abolition of private property and the scientific conquest of nature, human exploitation will come to an end. Egoism, which is but a consequence of history, will dissolve, as will morality, which has ever been the morality of the ruling and exploiting class. Henceforth man will be animated by his “generic consciousness,” which alone distinguishes human nature from that of mere animals.[27]

What will replace egoism and the restraints of morality will be a spontaneous fraternal disinterestedness. This, for Marx, is the only true humanism, the only true democracy.

Continued in Part Four