Posted on 12/24/2001 11:15:18 AM PST by cornelis
I must give a superficial and popular account of the most daring and far-reaching project ever conceived by man, of what d'Alembert called "the conspiracy" of Enlightenment. It was an attempt to alter completely the character of political life on the one hand, and intellectual life on the other. But above all it was an attempt to alter the relationship between the two, and it is that relationship which is the privileged perspective of thoughtful men.Enter Machiavelli
The image of the transformation is projected by Machiavelli, who appears on the scene almost as a beggar, a suppliant, humbly beseeching a glorious prince to look down upon him with favor. This was the permanent relation of wisdom and power as understood by the old philosophers. But in a sudden shift, Machiavelli still covertly but with expectations of perfect openness in the future, himself becomes the prince. He plots means for the wise to seize the levers of power and actualize the dream of philosophers becoming kings, a dream as old as political philosophy itself. But precisely for Plato it was only a dream, ad dreams must give way before reality. The fact that the dream is a dream meant that philosophers in the real world have to make their plans accordingly, lower their expectations, and keep their distance from the powers Machiavelli and his followers revered all that, and it is in this dispensation which we still live
The scramble for happiness
To begin from the political side, the new political science can be understood to be a great humanitarian endeavor. For all the nobility of ancient political science, it offered no way to realize its high goals. Human beings still suffered from as many ills as they always had. Practically, it offered only endurance or resignation. What men need is peace, stability, law, order, and relief from poverty and disease. The ancients talked only about virtue and not about well-being. That in itself is perhaps harmless, but the moderns contended that the concentration on virtue contradicts the concern for well-being. Aristotle admitted that "equipment" as well as virtue is necessary for happiness, but he said nothing about how that equipment is acquired. A careful examination of the acquisition of equipment reveals that virtue impedes that acquisition. Liberality, for example, presupposes money and not caring for it overmuch. But one must care for it to get it. Moreover, spending money exhausts it, so that liberality makes the need for acquisitiveness greater than it would have been without the virtue. Liberality both discourages and encourages acquisitiveness, putting man in contradiction with himself. This virtue is too weak to overcome selfishness, but is powerful enough to prevent certain positive effects which selfishness might cause. The miser is not likely to need to steal. And his quest for profit can, properly channeled, produce benefits for others. In the old system he is given a bad conscience and a bad name. But it would seem that nature is not kind to man, if the two elements of happiness--virtue and equipment--are at tension with one another. Equipment is surely necessary, so why not experiment with doing without virtue? If a substitute for virtue can be found, the inner conflict that renders man's life so hard could be resolved.
The new good: the natural rights of passion
This is what Machiavelli means when he says that men ought to do as they ought to do but ought to do as they do do . . . He puts this with outrageous clarity when he says men are never all good or all bad, implying that since they cannot be all good (for self-love is an inextinguishable part of us) they ought to be all bad. In this way alone can they overcome their dividedness. But if the distinction between good and bad in man is suppressed, then the badness, the standard for determining the bad, is also suppressed. In short, if the passions remain while the virtues which govern them disappear, the passions have unrestricted rights, by nature. They can be judged only in terms of their desirable or undesirable social effects. The is how the despised usurer is miraculously transformed into the respected banker. The new political scientists decided to abandon the pedantic and fruitless practice of inveighing against the passions and to become instead their accomplice for the sake of effectiveness. Instead of asking men to think of the common good, which they were unlikely to do, they told them to think of themselves, which they were strongly inclined to do, and to transform loyalty, patriotism, and justice into calculations of benefit. After Prince XVI the theoretical foundations of commercial society have been laid, just as the new argument for democracy is well begun in IX. There Machiavelli removes the moral basis of aristocratic rule by denying that aristocrats are any less concerned about money than are oligarchies.
Equality begins in modern thought in the assertion that there is no politically relevant public spiritedness. Men are all equally selfish. Men's concern for their preservation and their comfort an, if the waters are not muddied by extrinsic considerations, be motors for the production of prosperity. The passions, instructed by the philosophers as to their true meaning and end, will suffice; and the collaboration of the philosophers with the passions results in the formula of commercial society, enlightened self-interest. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself. At most they talked bout the pursuit of happiness. No longer was the concern for the rare perfection of man; the focus became our common vulnerability and suffering. Politics came to be the care of the body, and the soul slipped away.
The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic or the inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central rule in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the "economic" view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And I there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance--and this for two reason: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man's natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.
The new virtue enslaves
The historicism, romanticism, and idealism that built on the Enlightenment foundations were, from the point of view of the originators of modern political philosophy--building castles in the air, dreaming that the classical good and noble would emerge out of modern utility and selfishness, Plato's ideas out of Descartes' extension. The first discipline modernity's originators impose upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
Science, then, became active; and its motto was "give us your tired, your poor. . . . " But the benefactors, too, had a motive. by their usefulness to mankind at large they expected to get gratitude and, thereby, a freedom hitherto unavailable to them. Gratitude, according to Machiavelli's analysis, is an effective motive when there is hope of future benefaction, not when there is only memory of past benefaction. Gratitude is, in other words, ultimately a function of fear. Power, present and future, and the opinion thereof, is the only guarantee of men's goodwill. Men previously did not have the opinion that science is powerful, or was it. To have a secure position in civil society, science both had to be productive of power and appear to be so. Innovations in politics and medicine, patently useful to men, were to be the signs of science's special status as a powerful benefactor warring against men's darkest fears of death and destitution.
exactly.
the founding fathers of the american republic understood this well.
both parties are rotten, power corrupts, so alternate parties.
our problem today is that we've suffered thru' 70 years of fdr-lbj, democrat control of the congress, and suffered thru' two political parties that have grown more alike.
Perhaps power is not the only thing corrupting. Is the efficiency of egoism a dead-end?
As we see politics unfold nowdays, the "Old Prince" would be somewhat proud.
Those outside this template are called radicals. The pseudo-radicals, who work for agenda, are the trully useful idiots.
Where are the free-thinkers?
Do you mean, protect from, say, the evil, or corrupting power of politics? Or do you mean, protect from the good of politics?
What good of politics do you have in mind?
Regards,
LH
Economic freedom is neccesary for a materially productive society. However, it should also be realized that part of the real wealth in life is family relationships and other interpersonal relationships. For these to survive, there must be at least some personal virtue. The cult of selfishness has produced millions or abandoned and rootless children and rates of depression five to ten times that of 45 or 50 years ago within a glut of material abundance.
I might add in this context, the vampires do so quite self-righteously by quoting various economic laws.
This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
-- James Madison
Unfortunately the founders were already modern. The idea of returning to the ancients is intriguing, but our traditions now have already long been transplanted to modern soil. Still, this article does look like it's worth reading at greater length when things ar less hectic.
and unphilosophical, if you mean to turn the clock back. But as Bloom notes, the philosophical question of what man is, doesn't just belong to the ancients. Here's an additional excerpt which promotes a respect for the ancients:
If we do not have completed final wisdom, then our most important task is the articulation of the fundamental alternatives. This can be achieved only by maintaining an authentic knowledge of the best earlier thought, understood in its own terms, divested of distortions imparted to it by the thought which superseded it. Descartes gave a full presentation not only of the prescientific world but also of the previous philosophic interpretations of it. Those who followed him accepted his rejection of earlier thought without themselves having gone through his analysis. What was still a serious alternative for Descartes no longer was one to his followers, and knowledge of it deayed. Thus knowledge of the tradition of philosophy is necessary to philosophy and required for philosophic freedom from tradition. Philosophy has, at its peaks, largerly been dialogue between the greats, no matter how far separated in time. Without the voices which come from outside the cave constituted by our narrow horizon, we are ever more bound to it.
But about your "return to the ancients," here's this from Voegelin:
The Age of Descartes and Newton appears as the great epoch: what lies before it is an intellectual prehistory, and what comes after is the truly modern age of mathematized science and critical method. If this pattern is accepted, the bearers of the great countermovement to Enlightenment must appear as thinkers who could not free themselves from the shackles of a past that had gone. They must appear as reactionaries, as pessimists, as men who struggled against the current of progress but who would be swept aside. If they are of sufficient stature, they will either be disregarded, as Schelling was, or wildly misunderstood, as Nietzsche. This consturction is inadmissable in a critical history of ideas because it endows the epoch of mathematized science and reason with a specific authority and interpets other periods and movements by orienting them toward the authoritative period.
Your quote is intriguing. I suspect a lot of people who would reject modernity as a whole aren't really sincere or don't know what it would entail. There is talk about such a return to the ancients among the Straussians. I haven't explored it further and don't know what to make of it. It's doubtful to me that Bill Kristol really does want in his heart of hearts to return to the ancients and reject what came after, but there may be some people who do.
We are all modern to some degree. Some may dislike and try to reject that modern part of themselves, but it isn't all bad, and it's something we'd discard at our peril.
Perhaps what's valuable is not the modern departure or the turn to the modern, but the turning to modernity -- not the break with the past and desire to begin anew on secular, scientific, and antimetaphysical foundations, but the turning on the spiral that brings older ideas into the scientific age and tries to build on both.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the dichotomies or categories, but it does seem as though the bad side of modernity is the all-or-nothing quality. Spirit or soul or value is rejected in favor of matter, etc. A better modernity would build on science and not reject it, but also not reject the non-quantifible and intangible.
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