Ambiguity, Conflict, and Irresolution in the Socratic Rhetoric of
Machiavelli and Melville
I
The Western intellectual tradition lives still in the
wake of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.1 In its simplest form,
this quarrel pitted philosophical speculation about the universal and eternal
principles of nature and society against the unreflective, poetic standards of
societies still regulated by local, traditional, and religious measures.
"Poetry" here is, therefore, a metaphor for pre-rational custom and
tradition. It is the attempt to tame an unpredictable world not through reason,
but by a scrupulous adherence to the principles and practices of founders,
heroes, and prophets whose exploits are celebrated in rhetorical lore like the Iliad,
the Chanson de Roland, the Niebelungenlied, or the Pentateuch.
To the speculative mind of the philosopher and the
scientist, such unreflective practices lack proof, universality, and
permanence; they must, therefore, be mere opinion. Though in recent thought
figures like Heidegger, Gadamer, Robert Bellah, and Alasdair MacIntyre have
appealed to tradition to stabilize a wobbly postmodern world,2 the habitual
form of Western thought has been the rational explanation, the linear cause and
effect argument that exiles ambiguity and randomness. And certainly, if
rational wisdom be the world's and humanity's most important characteristic, it
is fitting that the tradition has preserved the Hellenistic practice of raising
the vita contemplativa over the flotsam and jetsam of the vita
activa.3 From its earliest
beginnings, therefore, social science became—as Hayden White said of historical
studies—¡°the refuge of all those ¡®sane¡¯ men who excel at finding the simple in
the complex and the familiar in the strange.¡±4
However, as diverse as the poetic and philosophical
paths may be, both the rational and the "irrational" traditions share
an appeal (usually unconscious) to some higher, legitimating principle or
authority to which the prophet or the philosopher has access. Today we are
familiar with the idea of the "unsaid" foundation as the Grund,
the "self-evident" principles upon which a culture rests.5 Whether secular or religious, this
principle functions as the cultural keystone upon which everything else rests.
If one wants to maintain an order of things, said Machiavelli, one must
understand that "the foundation of every religion lies in some ordinating
principle (qualche principale ordine suo) ....(And)
princes of republics and kingdoms must maintain these foundations of their
state's religion....even when they believe them to be false (le giudicassano
false) (DI:12).
Whether the appeal is to tradition or
"reason," then, there is an almost automatic rejection of the idea
that great social, historical, and political events could be the result of
simple inadvertence, plain luck, or even mere human choice. Rational political
theorists, therefore, appeal to so-called structural or historical causes: The
1789 Revolution was the inevitable result of a shift in social or economic
forces; Lenin was the logical result of underlying structural shifts in a
seventeenth century nation caught in a twentieth century war; the tumult of the
1960's and 1970's in America was the natural product of underlying social and
political imbalances. Rhetors of the poetic tradition, on the other hand,
prefer that all three upheavals were the result of a denial of the sacred
alliance of throne and alter, the principles of Holy Mother Russia, or the
inalienable rights with which men were endowed by their Creator. The accepted
metaphors of the philosopher and the poet, in short, have always been that of
equilibrium, resolution, and the eventual, natural conjunction of theory and
practice. Imbalances, the conflict of master and slave, were either the result
of some violation of the laws of nature or God that could have been prevented
with proper reason or were temporary aberrations and part of the necessary
process of Aufhebung that led to eschatological resolution.
One might quibble about whether a poetic or historical account uncovered the proper cause of some imbalance; but few would dispute that balance itself was natural or the norm.6 Fewer still, until recently anyway, entertained the idea that--even assuming there could be agreement on anything as problematic as a "cause"--a "cause" could produce a random effect or an effect out of proportion to the initial input. Such ideas defied "reason" and "reason's God." As Stephen Jay Gould put it, we do not like to believe that something as serious as history or evolution could just as well have produced a world ruled by dinosaurs. 7
The purpose of all these poetic and theoretical
whistles-in-the-dark, of course, lay in their supposed ability to exile the
forces of chance, contradiction, and fate (Moira) and sort the world
into its natural categories.
The shipwreck of modernity, however, has made many
uncomfortably aware of the illusion at the base of science. As Nietzsche put
it, "science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward
its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers
shipwreck."8 However elegantly reasoned and wonderfully complete our
explanations, we seem today to sense the demonic chance that lies beneath our
poetic and rational constructs: If only Louis XVI had been a more forceful
person in 1789, if Lenin's train had just gone off a bridge in 1917, or if,
just in the nick of time, Jack Kennedy's ankle had been bitten by a mosquito,
then the same historical forces that supposedly produced their necessary
effects would have produced radically different effects that would then have
been seen as rational, historical, and natural.9
Awareness of the real underlying craziness of the
world--the fact that momentous events do result from a non-train wreck, a
pedestrian character flaw, a stupid political blunder, or a freak bulls
eye--have unhorsed modernity's heroic reason and the poet's nostalgia for the
past. They have made us conscious of how freely Pandemonium has always careened
about beneath our poetic and theoretical mirrors.10 The postmodern revolution has, in short, struck down the
metanarratives of both opponents in the "ancient quarrel" and made us
aware of the fragility of the flooring.
Long before postmodernism, however, there were some who objected to humanity's confident reliance on reason and tradition.11 In this paper, I shall explore some of the ways that Machiavelli and Melville problematized these two time-honored refuges. Though separated by four centuries and two conventions of writing, Machiavelli and Melville were nonetheless joined at the hip in the conviction that all thought--whether discursive or analytical--eventually collided with the world. Such a tragic12 view of the human condition departs from the fact that all moral doctrines, however reliable in trivial day-to-day matters, proved ultimately dysfunctional and incongruent in resolving the great questions.
The
Postmodern World of Machiavelli and Melville
A: Machiavelli
Postmodern thought likes to stress the conventional
nature of philosophy and science. Following Heidegger, 13 it asserts that the logos
is a mere convention with no more natural attachment to the world than any
other construct.14 This insight
leads to the postmodern conviction that poetry is not a mere confusion of
tropes that philosophy and criticism can straighten out, but that philosophy is
itself a trope. In short, "the ancient quarrel" between philosophy
and poetry or logos and mythos has today been won by poetry: All
knowledge--whether logos or mythos--is poetic, rooted in the
imagination and later sanctified by nothing more--and nothing less either--than
usage.
In this insight, postmodernism shares a great deal with
Machiavelli, whose maverick world also defied the conventions of reason and
poetic common sense. But Machiavelli, unlike many postmodern voyeurs, was not
content to cheer on the dragon's pursuit of the damsel. For him, humanity's
charge was to struggle on despite the insuperable odds against closure.
For Machiavelli,15 humanity had been "thrown"
by chance (DI:2; DI:6) into a world over which they had only tenuous control
and where the norm was disequilibrium. Oh, the world might contain roughly
constant quantities of good and evil, strength and weakness, wealth and
poverty; but these were so constantly changing their locations, that the rule
was a constant rising and falling of human institutions: "Since all human
institutions (le cose 16 degli uomini) are in constant
movement and cannot be stabilized, they naturally rise and fall" (DI:6).
Not only was this rising and falling natural and
autonomous (DI:16), but where man could intervene, fortune controlled the
outcome of at least half of human undertakings (P:25): And "fortune blinds
human minds when she does not wish them to resist her power" (DII: 29).
Summoned into perpetual battle with forces that had a life of their own, humans
found it "impossible to establish an equilibrium (bilanciare)"
(DI:6) in human things (P:25).17
Thus, against the traditional root metaphor of the West, Machiavelli
found that all supposed equilibria were temporary, unnatural, and in need of
constant maintenance. And in the end, all maintenance was inadequate.
Machiavelli thus approved of Cato who, seeing that the
youths of Rome had begun to admire the Greek philosophers Diogenes and his then
disciple Carneades, "recognized what evil would ensue in the patria
from such honest leisure (onesto ozio)18 and saw to it that no
philosopher could be accepted at Rome." In short, Machiavelli seems to
have seen early on the fatal hypnotism of philosophy. In this, he shared
Cicero's revulsion for anyone who became "so rapt in the investigation of
the mysteries of the universe, so absorbed in the contemplation of the most
sublime objects, that if suddenly apprised that his country, his father, or his
friend, was in danger or distress, would not abandon all his studies and fly to
the rescue, even if he imagined he could number the stars and measure the
immensity of space."19 What
good was star-gazing? Humans would never act benevolently, even if benevolence
could be defined.
Certainly, Machiavelli agreed, it was human excess that
caused all this upset and disorder; but excess was natural; and men, therefore,
go naturally astray (DIII: I) Thus, acquisition of goods and property "is
a very natural and ordinary thing,"(PIII) but unfortunately "nature [la
natura] has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable
to attain it; for desire always exceeds the ability to acquire" (DI:37).
According to Machiavelli, dissatisfaction with what one has is the very nature
of the human condition: "Human desires are insatiable because their nature
is to have and to do everything while fortune limits possessions and the capacity
for enjoyment. This causes a constant discontent in the human mind and boredom
with the things they already possess." (DII:Intro). In short, ¡°where
choice is available (dove la elezione abonda), humans always choose
excess (usare licenza)" (DI:3). For Machiavelli, there was,
therefore, a natural disjunction between man and order; and political life was
always apt to disintegrate.
When humans can neither fully understand nor fully
control fortune, they become desperate and invoke mechanical reason or cling
blindly to tradition. The world, however, sails its own autonomous course.
Following the dictates of tradition or reason, therefore, often proved immoral
or ruinous in practice. This "banality of evil" resulted because of
the disjunction between theory and practice: "Since how we live is so
different from how we ought to live....a man who makes a profession of doing
good in everything [fare in tutte le parte professione di buono] will
come to ruin among so many who are not good. Therefore, a prince who wishes to
preserve himself, must learn how not to be good and use [that knowledge] when
required" (P.XV). In short, since "it is impossible to give any
precise rules" (DI:18), one ¡°must think about everything (ragionare
d'ogni cosa¡± (DI:18).20
The imperative to "ragionare d'ogni cosa"
results from that terrifying absence of order in the world and it leads to the
conclusion that reason and tradition are snares. It problematizes not only
Aristotelian good habits, the Christian beatitudes, and Chivalric codes, but custom,
common sense, and all the other adhesives of society. Every habitual,
nonchalant, and accepted norm can be, and eventually will be, disastrous.
According to Machiavelli, all "ancient orders [gli
ordini antichi]...were not good" (P:26). They had failed because they
had succumbed to mechanical consistency and were undone by the unexpected.
Artificial constructs of virtue could never tame man's natural cupidity and
wickedness; nor could reason or poetry ever dominate fortune. And even if they
could, men as they are and must be--"ungrateful, voluble deceivers,
dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain" (P17)-made the
advice of philosophers and poets impossible to follow.
Though Machiavelli's path, of course, represented only a
rejection of the rules and "oughts" of ancient and Christian
philosophy and poetry, the repudiation seems to apply to any such reliance
whether on natural law, philosophy of history, or some other Sermon on the
Mount. For Machiavelli, in other words, a separation of "is" and
"ought" or "fact" and "value" had nothing to do
with naive positivism or the vain search for scientific truth. Rather it was a
rule of prudence emerging from the failure of automatic poetic and philosophical
"oughts" and "values" in the real world.21 But, more importantly, it was a
recognition that "facts" were everywhere constructed differently.
Blind adherence to one's own traditional engineering could blind one to
alternative constructions. Moreover, the supposedly simple "is" of
the world was itself a construct built upon an arbitrary rational or
traditional identification of what was "significant."
The Machiavellian "fact/value distinction," therefore, has nothing to do with modernity, as Strauss argues, but is rather a distinctly anti-modern, almost unheard-of subordination of the vita contemplativa to the vita activa. Thought--like fortresses, roads, laws, and cities--must conform to the character of fickle men and not the character of men to the abstract ideas. Machiavelli, therefore, rejected any possibility that the abstract principles of the philosopher and the poet could eliminate the unpredictable outcomes of human history: "If one considers everything carefully, it will be found that something that seems good (parra virtu) if pursued, will produce one's ruin and something else that seems evil (parra vizio), if followed, produces one's security and well-being"(P15).
It was, moreover, said Machiavelli, not only the
consequences of a pigheaded adherence to principles that made the rigid
application of philosophy or poetry unwise; it was that one could never be
sure, whatever one did, that one's actions would, in fact, produce the intended
effect.22 Thus, "two men
operating in different ways, produce the same effect while when two others act
in the same way, one gains his end and the other no. This also accounts for (Da
questo ancora depende) changes in prosperity; for if the times favor one
who acts with prudence and patience, then he will succeed; but if the time and
conditions change and he does not [also change], he will be ruined"
(P.25).
Finally, according to Machiavelli, in this Sophoclean
world, even if one could determine the proper action to be taken and be sure
that it would produce the desired effect, one would find that the more worthy
and virtuous the undertaking, the more one must be willing to defy the norms of
civilized behavior. This willingness to defy poetic and philosophical
convention for higher ends "is no accident," said Strauss. It is
fundamental and "there are other elements of [Machiavelli's] teaching
which are no less obvious and yet are not universally admitted." As Jaffa
put it, "there are no moral rules to which exceptions might not be found,
where 'the safety and happiness of society' are at stake." It may,
therefore be necessary "to contemplate extreme actions in defense of the
rule of law by wise men whose unfettered wisdom may sometimes be the necessary
condition for the establishment or survival of a decent constitutional
order." This is, said Jaffa, what is meant "by saying that natural
right--or natural law--is altogether changeable."23
As the cases of Moses and Romulus testify, a willingness
to engage in wickedness proportionate to the intended good may be one of the
horrible burdens that few heroes can escape (DI:12; DIII: 22; DIII: 28).
"In all human things," argued Machiavelli, "if one considers it
carefully, this will be clear: One cannot eliminate one problem without
producing another" (in tutte le cose umane, si vede questo, chi le
esamina bene: Che no si puo mai cancellare uno inconveniente che no ne
surga un'altro" [DI:6]. From this it follows that even when humans try
to be good and engage in manifestly well-intentioned acts, they are frequently
required to engage in wickedness and even then often produce consequences far
worse than those that ill-intentioned bad men could ever have consciously
achieved.
B: Melville
The same disjunction between theory and practice, action
and result, and necessity and virtue fascinated Melville24 and set him apart
from the general ebullience of his age. Against Whitman's and Emerson's general
optimism, Melville found that it was
Hawthorne's black vision of the human condition that ¡°fixes and
fascinates me.¡± When confronted with optimistic abstractions, Hawthorne utters
an apocalyptic NO. ¡°There is a
grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says No! in thunder; but the Devil
himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie."25
And Melville's roller-coaster experience with good and
evil was not abstract. If his works were filled with ruminations about the
innate depravity of man, the punishments of an inscrutable and unpredictable
God, and the transformation of apparent good intentions into bad results, so
too was his own life filled with the extremes of fortune and experience: Thrown
at the age of ten from worldly comfort into poverty by his beloved father's
business failure, sudden madness, and death, Melville was left entirely in the
hands of his reclusive mother whose life was dominated by the dark Calvinism of
the Dutch Reformed Church. Then as a young man, he signed for a five year tour
aboard a merchantman and then aboard the whaler Acushnet bound for the South
Seas where he jumped ship and spent
a year among the sexually uninhibited and probably cannibalistic
Polynesians. It was the description of this exotic South Sea world that brought
him sudden literary fame and led to Moby Dick. Then, like his father's,
Melville's career underwent a decline even more meteoric than its rise; and
from 1857 to 1892, he lived in near complete literary silence and obscurity.
Melville begins with the assumption that it is human
arrogance to think that one can know the truth which ¡°in this world of lies¡¦is
forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands, and only by cunning
glimpses will she reveal herself.¡±26
We are, says Melville,
flung into this world by ¡°the fates¡± and then blown about from place to
place without the time or skill to find accurate bearings or chart a safe
course. Melville¡¯s characters, like Machiavelli¡¯s, find their lives rule by
fortune, usually bad. Thus Ishmael found himself driven to sea for reasons he
could not explain; and once aboard the Pequod had no idea "why it was
exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part
of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high
tragedies" (Ch. 1).27
Like Ishmael, Billy Budd, the archetype of innocent
Christ-like virtue, as far as he knows, entered the world by complete chance:
An illiterate and a foundling, he has no idea where he came from. And when,
having more or less accustomed himself
to the world into which he had been flung, he was--due to a completely
chance encounter between the ship on which he was a passenger (named, naturally,
the Rights–Of-Man and a short-handed British warship named, naturally HMS
Indomitable) taken and impressed into the Royal Navy. This passenger-through-life had, in short, been snatched
from a ship where he had rights and interests but no duties and deposited upon
a warship where he had duties and no rights. Budd¡¯s voyage at sea, as in so
many of Melville's works, is a symbolic passage. But unlike many such passages
from innocence to maturity, Budd's is a sheep-like "Father-forgive-them"
journey to his own execution. Unable to comprehend greed, spite, jealousy, or
rage, even when they are turned against him, this symbol of unarmed virtue is
ultimately defenseless.
And in those areas where Melville¡¯s characters were able
to choose their own course, they were, like Machiavelli's characters, unable to
distinguish good headings from bad; for evil and good are always ambiguous and
in flux: "There is," says Ishmael, "no quality in this world
that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself" (Ch.
11).
Jonah, in the Biblical tale, learned the difficulty of
determining good and evil after he (finally) determined to carry out God¡¯s
mission to Nineveh, the Israelite symbol of luxury and dissolution. When God
told Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn the city that it would be destroyed for
its sinful ways, Jonah was afraid to undertake the dangerous mission and fled
aboard an Egyptian ship. A resourceful God, however, produced a terrifying
storm; and after Jonah confessed that he was fleeing his (not their) God, the
crew took him to be the cause of the storm and threw him overboard. Swallowed
up by a whale (or some other large fish), Jonah prayed for forgiveness and
agreed to go to Nineveh to deliver God¡¯s warning. To Jonah¡¯s dismay, however,
the Ninevite king, the citizens, and even the animals (!) listen attentively
and promptly change their ways. When God forgave them Jonah felt betrayed; for
after carrying out his assignment, he wanted God to carry out His part of the
bargain and destroy Nineveh. God¡¯s lesson to Jonah is that rewarding good and
punishing evil are not easy decisions. The heathens who did not know their
¡°right hand from their left¡± had repented and followed God¡¯s ways rather than
their own. Indeed, throughout the tale, the author emphasized that mere human
vision, perhaps because of original sin, is often flawed, that Jonah cannot
know the will of God at every moment for he has a merely mortal vision.
The irony that pagan Egyptians and Ninevites find the
just course by obeying the God of Israel while the Israelite Jonah fails to
please Yahweh by blindly following His orders, makes plain that though the
God¡¯s mission cannot be abandoned it must always be undertaken with humility
and an awareness of humanity¡¯s limited knowledge of ultimate ends.
Ahab, in Melville¡¯s modern Jonah-tale, is the symbol of
an impudent modernity that has not learned the ambiguity of good and evil and
that mere humans, like Jonah and Ahab, are, therefore, unable to always know
the course of virtue (Ch. 9). And so, determined to follow his own vengeful
course and eliminate evil, he brings about his own destruction as well as that
of his own city (the Pequod).
In the chapter entitled ¡°The Whiteness of the Whale,¡±
Melville foreshadows the end of the Pequod by highlighting the ambiguity of
human goals, the need to suit the course to the shifting wind; for evil is a
sinister force that, as Machiavelli saw, comes often colored in the garb of
goodness and innocence. Thus Ishmael reflected upon "the heightened hideousness"
of the Polar bear whose "irresponsible ferociousness...stands invested in
the [white] fleece of celestial innocence and love," the color of so
"many touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of
age." Beneath the serene mental placebos we administer to our souls, there
lies in all of us, said Melville, the awareness of lurking chaos, an innate
understanding and terrifying "knowledge of the demonism in the
world."
And it is not only the confusing white camouflage that
evil wears that mocks human judgment, but the unnerving way black and white
intermingle to scar humanity itself. Thus Ishmael noted that the sun-blackened
body of the Master of the Pequod, "fearless, black-clad and peg-legged,¡±
Ahab had been branded at birth by a "vividly whitish" scar that ran
"from crown to sole," from the gray hair on his head to the whalebone
"barbaric white leg" on which he stood to conduct his malignant and
circular search for the white whale. The entire book, with its constant
references to the illusory nature of good, the difficulty of choosing right
over wrong, and the suspicion that "all deified Nature paints like the
harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within,"
recalls Machiavelli's suspicions about that which "appears good."
And if it recalls Machiavelli, it foreshadows
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and their reduction/deconstruction of the principle
of identity or individuation," the key element of all thought. Thus in
Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche played upon the contrast between light and
darkness, reality and illusion, upon Apollo as ¡°der Scheinende,"
the shining one who could identify moral landmarks and Apollo the god of
alchemical illusion or "Erscheinung" who saw how all
identities blended together. "We might apply," suggested Nietzsche,
in a strikingly Melvillean passage, "to Apollo the words of Schopenhauer
when he speaks of the man wrapped in the veil of maya (Sanskrit for
"illusion"): 'Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all
directions, raises and drops mountainous waves, howling, a sailor sits in a
boat and trusts in his frail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments the
individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principium
individuationis."28
Again and again, Melville likens the whale that Ahab--impudent modernity--pursues to a Sphinx who represents the ephemeral and potentially lethal nature of all evidently benign human goals. Thus, in the chapter entitled "The Fountain"--referring to the spout sent up by a whale as it breeches--Melville gave us a metaphor for the transient and shapeless fumes and vapors of the "eternal" truths of philosophy and religion: "That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions of ages before--the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea,.. sprinkling and mystifying...and yet, that down to this blessed minute...it should still be a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor--this is surely a noteworthy thing....And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Phyrro, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts."29
For Melville, the Pequod was a metaphor for a world of
limitless ambition just as the tuberculosis sanitarium in The Magic Mountain
was Mann's symbol of a diseased world "Yes, the world's a ship on its
passage out, and not a voyage complete" (Ch 8). It is Ahab who completes
the voyage when his Faustian quest makes the ship a coffin. The coffin, the
certain spoiler of human arrogance, appears not only unexpectedly, as it did to
Cesare Borgia and Ahab, but all along "the way" as the (unheeded)
reminder of human temporality: Peter Coffin, landlord of the Spouter-Inn; the
coffin in which Queequeg sleeps; the coffin of human finitude that Ahab assails
in his last curse: "For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink
all coffins and all hearses to one common pool."
But when heeded, the coffin, like some early version of
the Sein-zum-Tode, also provides a rebirth, an awakening from the
mindless pursuit of small things: the coffin that led to the birth of Nantucket
Island (Ch 14), birthplace of those who accustom themselves to rolling decks
and walk warily on deceptively stable land; and the coffin that saves Ishmael
when the Pequod goes down.
The same ambiguity between significance and utter
insignificance, between good and evil, pervades Benito Cereno.
Here the virtuous Captain Delano, having chanced upon and then rescued a
troubled ship, finds himself vainly reviewing again and again and again the
insignificant (or significant?) gestures, remarks, and behavior of the rescued
Captain and crew to see whether they are evil men or good. But, as Delano had
reluctantly to conclude, since "intense heat and cold, though unlike,
produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt...[bear] one seal".30
In short, Melville's characters are determined to pursue
goals that have all the appearance of normality--even benignity--but nearly
always produce terrible consequences: Thus Pierre, the anti-hero of Melville's
last book, had, for reasons he cannot understand, always longed for the
companionship of a sister. And not knowing of his own father's earlier sexual
escapades, he at last finds precisely a sister in the girl with whom he
eventually falls in love. Pierre "did not then know," as Melville put
it, "that if there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing
is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his
youth."31
In so uncertain a world, Melville likened humanity's
fruitless search for certainty to the frantic food frenzy of a "loose
fish" swimming the Nietzschean sea.32 Falling for one bait after another, it does not want to
believe that it "knows nothing." Humanity wants only to cease being a
"loose fish." It wants "to make existence appear comprehensible
and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their
aid." It seeks to become a "fast fish" by attaching itself to
the desperate thoughts of desperate men: "What are the Rights of Man and
the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions
but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish?
What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you,
reader, but a loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?" (Ch.89)
*****
Like Socrates, Machiavelli and Melville knew nothing.
Their work produced no coherent answers or programs but only clusters of often
incompatible ideas around certain eternal problems. Philosophy for them was
thus transformed from a pretentious knowledge of Being to an awareness of
ignorance; and the knowledge that when resolution occurs, one can be sure that
one has suppressed part of the evidence for, as Ishmael put it, "darkness
[is] indeed the proper element of our essences" (Ch 11).
If what Melville and Machiavelli argue is true, then
relying on the conventions of either reason or poetry blinds us not only to the
world's marvels, its miraculous existence, but will eventually give us false
headings. Excluding so-called normative or poetic values and relying solely on "reason"
merely gives poetry a rational form no more congruent with the world than any
other language of the cave; for the "value-free" thought of
philosophy and science is as much a construct as normative thought.
In other words, like Nietzsche, Foucault, Kuhn,
Feyerabend and many others today, Machiavelli and Melville had concluded that
there was a fundamental equation between poetry and rational philosophy.
The power
and the danger of thought--poetry as logos or mythos--lay in its immense
capacity to hide the disjunction between thought and the world and thus to
produce a complacent or dogmatic response. Founder-poets--i piu eccelenti--like
Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus were revered because they established moral
codes; but what truly made them great was their imaginative rejection of
tradition and philosophy and their creation of new orders of things.33 Unlike Ahab, they did not blindly and
unimaginatively pursue an inner demon of vengeance.
Machiavelli and Melville are, therefore, not moderns, but,
if anything, sophists who foreshadow the postmodern challenge to the entire
tradition of the fixed and eternal, the "everywhere and always" of
ancient and modern thought that leads to rigid behavior: the absurdly futile
virtue of Billy Budd; Ahab's "determinate, unsurrenderable"
single-minded pursuit of the whale; Pierre's compulsive search for a sister; a
ruler's dangerous determination to seek peace, goodness, and prosperity. Like
the search of Oedipus for his father's murderer, nearly all single-minded
voyages end badly. All end like Oedipus' search for his father's murderer.
Machiavelli and Melville, in short, were spiritual predecessors of Nietzsche
and aimed at dragging humanity out of the metaphysical world of fable to face
the "is." 34
The question for Machiavelli and Melville was still
"what is virtue?"35; but rather than presenting the question in a
stable, contemplative, Aristotelian or Christian world, they recalled Cicero's
warning that "it is not enough to possess virtue (nec vero habere
virtutem), as if it were an art of some sort, unless you make use of it
(nisi utare)."36 Virtue is not contemplative; it requires
entry into the fluid course of human events and a willingness to sacrifice
conventional morality and even one's soul37 for the sake of the country. To be
virtuous in the real world is to understand the Sophoclean ambiguity of good
and evil and to still captain the ship and lead the city.
The driving force behind Machiavelli's and Melville's
writing was, therefore, irresolution, the awareness that the archae that
lie at the base of the human condition are incompatible.
1. Republic
Bk X. 607b; see, too BK I. 334b; Bk II. 376ff; Bk .III 386ff.
2.
C.F. the "framework" (Gestell) of Heidegger, e.g in
¡°The Question Concerning Technology,¡± trans. William Lovitt, (New York: Harper
and Row, 1977): 3-35; the "episteme" of Foucault in The
Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973) where Foucault establishes the
difference between the episteme of the classical age and the modern; the
"transcendental signifier" of Derrida. See Of Grammatology,
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 18ff; or the
"paradigm" in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
3. According to Cicero, true learning had once been
philosophy and poetry or rhetoric, a unified wisdom that brought "is"
and "ought"' together and taught humanity what to do. But then the streams of learning flowed
in different directions, so that the philosophers passed, as it were, into the
Upper or Ionian Sea, a Greek sea while the Rhetors [passed] .into the Lower or Tuscan [sea.]. (De Oratore,
III:xvi, 68ff.]. According to many-Heidegger, Derrida, Strauss and many
postmoderns we have inherited only the philosophical metanarrative and have
forgotten the probable, possible, and the Being question. See Heidegger, e.g., Being and Time,
trans. John Marquarrie and Edward Robinson, (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) p.
21. In Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Philosophy, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A.
Capuzzi, (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 79, Heidegger asserts: "The
relation between thinking and Being animates all Western reflection. It remains
the durable touchstone for determining
to what extent and in what
way we have been granted both the privilege and the capacity to approach that
which addresses itself to historical man as to-be-thought." Derrida, Of
Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spiva, (Baltimore Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976, p. 3) establishes logocentrism as the key to Western
thought. Leo Strauss, in On
Tyranny, rev. ed. ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, (New York:
The Free Press, 1991), p. 207, argues that "modern philosophy"' as a
"secularized form of Christianity," (i.e. a philosophy with answers
rather than questions, has dominated Western thought. In Thoughts on
Machiavelli: (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), p. 295, he
similarly asserts : "The classics understood the moral-political phenomena
in the light of man's highest virtue or perfection, the life of the philosopher
or the contemplative life. The superiority of peace to war or of leisure to
business is a reflection of the superiority of thinking to doing or
making."
4.
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 50. See, too Ilya
Progogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with
Nature, (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 7: "What are the assumptions of
classical science...? Generally those centering around the basic conviction
that at some level the world is simple and is governed by time-reversible
fundamental laws. Today this appears as an excessive simplification."
5.
C.F. the "framework" (Gestell) of Heidegger, e.g in
¡°The Question Concerning Technology,¡± trans. William Lovitt, (New York: Harper
and Row, 1977): 3-35; the "episteme" of Foucault in The Order of
Things (New York: Vintage, 1973) where Foucault establishes the difference
between the episteme of the classical age and the modern; the
"transcendental signifier" of Derrida. See Of Grammatology,
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 18ff; or the
"paradigm" in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
6.
But, c.f. Machiavelli, DI:6
7.
The role of randomness, contingency, and chance is the main theme of
Gould's text on the fossils of the Burgess shale. According to Gould, the
engine of evolution is caprice: It is not the survival of the fittest, but the
luckiest. See Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History,
(New York: Norton, 1989), 318, but throughout.
8. Birth
of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1967): p. 97.
9.
Far from being generative as they were at their origin, rational and
poetic conventions seem to have become ossified rituals daily performed to ward
off marauding chance. The rituals, as Kuhn sees it, are defended
"down-to-the-last-man: Only when the partisans of an accepted theory are
all dead, can new ideas enter the academy, See, Ch. VIII, Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, op. cit.
10. The
enlarged role of chance means that in principle knowledge must always be
incomplete. Such matters are discussed in the hard sciences by figures like
Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, S. J. Gould, and Ilya Prigogine. In the social
sciences, they are discussed by figures like Jon Elster, Leo Strauss, Michel
Foucault, Umberto Eco, Hayden White, LaCapra, and others. Ilya Prigogine, the
Nobel prize-winning physicist of chaos theory, suggests that the proper
approach for theory would be a "conversation" with nature. See, Ilys
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue
with Nature, op. cit.
11. For
example, figures like Plato, Aristophanes, Cicero, Machiavelli, Montaigne,
Vico, Melville, Nietzsche, and the like. Postmoderns include Derrida, Foucault,
Heidegger, LaCapra, Lyotard, MacIntrye, Strauss, White, and others.
12. Or comic, as in Aristophanes' lampoons of theoretical wisdom or Bachtin's "carnivelesque" dismantling of human orders .
13. What
interested Heidegger was that we have objectified or enframed Being and made it
and ourselves no longer the question, but the answer. The Western tradition,
according to Heidegger, had divided the Being-question into two questions, that
of essence and that of existence, ignoring the way Dasein one-sidedly
"imposes" or "enframes" essence when it merely sees/says
existence. See Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(New York: Harper and Row, 1969: 23-41. See too, Being and Time, p. 15:
Humanity's conception of Being as substance reflects back upon itself and it,
therefore, see itself as substance. For Heidegger, since Being was "time
as destiny," the framework (Ge-stell) or grid through which Dasein
sees, could not be eternal but only transient; for "enframing" is
always temporal. Ge-stelle has roots in Stelle or
"place," "spot," "situation." Thus stellen
is "to put," "place," "situate." They are words
that recall man's situated position, his "thrownness"--the temporal
position {Plato's cave} from which he "enframes." And they point up
the intimate relationship of "to throw" (werfen) with "to
project" (entwerfen) and "the project(ion)" (Entwurf).
Dasein is "thrown" (geworfen), into a situation not of
his own choosing and projects (Entwuerfe), as on a blank screen, the
framework (Gestell) of the time.
14. After
Nietzsche, every linking of "is" and "ought" is now a
"point of view," a "metanarrative," a "paradigm,"
an "episteme," a "transcendental signified," and so
on. The tradition that had run from Plato to Hegel has been undone. As Fukuyama
put it, it is the "end of history" and "unprecedented disasters
await us." See The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: The Free Press, 1992), pp. 3-4 . Our discussion of truth-claims
today, in other words, is governed by their recognized status as Foucauldian pouvoir/savoir.
Thus, when a truth-claim is made--"such and such is moral,"
"this activity is natural," "this rule is just," "this
is true," and so on--we do not ask if it is true. We know better. We ask,
if this is made "true" ("just," "natural," etc)
and put into practice, what will be the effects, who will be marginalized?
15.
Footnotes to Machiavelli are in the text with P for The Prince
, D for The Discourses , FH for The Florentine
Histories, all followed by
chapter number in Roman numerals.
All translations are my own from
Machiavelli: Tutte le opera, ed. Mario Martelli, (Florence:
Sansoni, 1971), The literature on Machiavelli is massive. The works that have
most helped me are Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (1979); Four
Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the
History of Prudence (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1987); Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the
Renaissance, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian
Rhetoric, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli's
New Modes and Orders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); John M.
Najemy, Between Friends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1975); Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli
(Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1957); Leo Strauss: On Tyranny,
re. ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, (New York: The Free Press,
1991); Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1973); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and especially,
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
16. In
Italian, cosa replaces the Latin res which is commonly understood
as "institution" as in res publica.
17. P: 25;
DII: intro; Florentine Histories, BK.V: Ch. I
18. Florentine
Histories V: 1). Machiavelli's ironic juxtaposition of onesto
(honest) and ozio (loafing about) do not, perhaps, come across in
English; but they are part of his general belief that if wealth and leisure
corrupt--"hunger and poverty make men industrious" [la fame e la
poverta fa gli uomini industriosi)(DI:3; DI:1, then idleness corrupts, as
in the old Italian proverb l'ozio e il padre dei vizi--"free time
is the sire of the vices"--or in the English saying that "idle hands
are the devil's workplace."
19. De
Officiis (on Moral duties)I: 43
20. and see
Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 125; 247.
21. If
theory and practice did coincide, it would be a strange world indeed:
Meteorology would be an exact science; interest rates would have exactly the
desired effect; earnings per share would have a direct bearing on share price;
physics would be the master science and be perfectly understood. In short,
there would be no place for imagination or virtu.
22. Thoughts
on Machiavelli, p. 285.
23.
Therefore, says Jaffa to Drury: "Your attempt to discover a
sinister Machiavellianism in the changeability of the precepts of the natural
law is simply without any foundation." Jaffa, p. 318-319.
24. The literature on Melville is perhaps less well known. After the initial popularity of Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and even the highly symbolic Redburn, White Jacket (1850), and Moby Dick (1851), Melville's popularity went into decline. The 1852 publication of Pierre; or the Ambiguities convinced many fans of his earlier "adventure tales" that he had gone mad. Interest in him did not arise again until 34 years after his death when, in 1924, his biographer, Raymond Weaver, produced the posthumous publication of Billy Budd. However, his work was still greatly disparaged. Major critics like the Progressives Vernon Parrington (in Main Currents in American Thought [many editions in 1920's and 30's]) and Van Wyck Brooks ("America's Coming of Age" [1915]), dismissed him as either not really "American" or as a malignant literary desperado who undermined the moral virtue and confidence that Whitman, in Democratic Vistas, had placed in "the people." However, when Perry Miller, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Kenneth Murdock (the so-called "three M's") replaced the Progressives as America's primary literary critics, American intellectuals began to focus not on the virtues of "the people" but on their innate wickedness. This exploration of Puritan interest in human depravity led to a revival of interest in Melville. This revival commenced with Alfred Kazin's "Introduction" to the Riverside edition of Moby Dick (1950) where Ishmael appeared as "modern man, cut off from the certainty that was once his inner world," while Ahab represented Faustian impudence. A definitive Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's works, The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker was begun in 1968. Works like Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael (1947) and Archaeologist of Morning (1974), Richard Chase's The American Novel and its Tradition (1957), and Larzar Ziff's "Shakespeare in America" (1978) uncovered Melville's large debt to Shakespearean tragedy and argued that it was not simply modern man but mankind that was marked by uncertainty and fear. Still Melville remains controversial. His works, said R. W. B. Lewis Herman in Melville: Stories, Poems, and Letters (1967) are mere "novel[s] of tension without resolution." Much of the controversy stems from Melville's Billy Budd and his last work, Pierre. In Billy Budd, one finds the symbol of absolute innocence who suffers the penalty of innocence when he encounters Claggart, the symbol of incarnate malignity. Those who, like H. Bruce Franklin, "From Empire to Empire, Billy Budd, Sailor," in Herman Melville: Reassessments (1984) believe one can (or should) be innocent, attack figures who like Hannah Arendt (On Revolution 1965), argue that innocence is lethal in a wicked world. Pierre is, perhaps, not as great a literary achievement as it is a thoroughly Nietzschean interrogation of the entire ambiguity of identity and of incest and adultery: If there is no fixed identity, can there be incest? More recently, postmodern critics have explored Melville's interest in reason and madness, and his similarities to Dostoevski's existentialism, and to the indeterminate perspective of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Mann. See Critical Essays on Melville's Pierre, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (1983). William B. Dillingham, Melville's Later Novels, (University of Georgia Press, 1986).Walchee-Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989). Paul McCarthy, The Twisted Mind: Madness in Herman Melville's Fiction (Iowa City, IO, University of Iowa Press, 1991). Hershel Parker, Reading Billy Budd (Evanston, IN: Northwestern University Press, 1991). Dennis Pohl, Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, (Colombia, MO: University of MO Press, 1989) Franklin D. Reeve, The White Monk: An Essay on Dostoyevsky and Melville (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989). John Samson, White Lies: Melville's Narrative of Facts, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). John Williams, White Fire: The Influence of Emerson on Melville,(Long Beach CA: University of Californian Press, 1991).
25.
Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Moby Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford
and Hershel Parker , ( New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 542-46.
26. All
citations to Moby Dick are to the 1993, London, Everyman edition.
Where the chapters are quite short, pointed, and relevant, as they mostly are,
I have cited the chapter as a whole rather than the page.
27. Birth
of Tragedy, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
28. Pp.
309;345 and see too the image of the whale created by the picture on the wall
of the Spouter-Inn
29. In
Herman Melville, Billy Budd and other Tales , (New York: A Signet
Classic, 1979), p. 172.
30. Pierre or The Ambiguities, ed Harrison Hayford et.al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), p. 7.
31. Birth
of Tragedy, op. cit., p. 96
32. This illustrates the agonistic nature of foundings; On the one hand, they break with the existing conditions that depend on automatic responses and on the other, having established a new order of things, they must immediately guard it by engendering new thoughtless action.
33. For Nietzsche, the key event was the death of God, the Hegelian logos. For Machiavelli, it was the continued life of Christianity, an earlier logos now on a futile life-support system. Nietzsche's Prince, in short, is Zarathustra. Nietzsche, in fact, endorsed Machiavelli in Will To Power 304 and in 1005 where he noted that Machiavelli had an instinct for life.
34. As
Strauss put it, Machiavelli's longing for classical virtu is evident,
for example, in the life of Castruccio which is in contrast to "Biblical
righteousness." See, On Tyranny, pp. 184-185.
35. Republic
I: ii. 2.
36.
Machiavelli, Letter to Vettori, number 321, 16 April, 1527: "Amo
la patria mia piu dell'anima."
37.
Machiavelli, Letter to Vettori, number 321, 16 April, 1527: "Amo
la patria mia piu dell'anima."