Machiavelli

[Music] machiavelli's the prince is one of the most important turning points in the history of western political philosophy it was written while machiavelli himself was in retirement from active political life 1532 and prior to that he had worked for the medici family in florence and he was one of the great dark characters in the history of western thought in some respects he's kind of like the darth vader of philosophy he represents all that is evil and unholy in some respect the spiritual antipode of someone like marcus aurelius machiavelli is a very secular this worldly sort of thinker he's the kind of person that plato warned us about the kind of man who self-consciously seeks only the gratification of his desire for political power a man who turns ruthlessness and treachery into matters of principle and that's what makes him so good at them it doesn't it's not that he's treacherous or lying or faithless or ruthless once in a while he's that way all the time he's turned it into a system in that respect the writings of machiavelli which are not limited to the prince he also wrote a number of historical works a work called the discourse on livy he studied roman history a great deal machiavelli's works our kind of handbook on how to be bad particularly how to be politically treacherous how to gain power for machiavelli the ultimate good for human beings is the attainment of political power and he is not choosy about the means whatever works works he is among the most practical of men his idea of an of an excellent politician is someone like caesar borgia caesar boys mentioned many times in the prince and if you know what caesar voyager was like he has quite an interesting career his father is pope alexander vi we won't discuss how that could be the case of course but he's the illegitimate son of alexander vi his sister is lucrezia borgia a most unpleasant woman who spends a good bit of her time poisoning their friends and political rivals and uh caesar borgia was the sort of guy who wouldn't let mere family ties get in the way of political power his older brother was the one who was destined or chosen by the father alexander vi to get most political performance and seize a boy who didn't like that so he killed his older brother conspired against him and killed him machiavelli thinks that's wonderful machiavelli says that warms his heart makes him feel that's finally somebody sees through the lies and the illusions and the pretensions of conventional morality for machiavelli we live in the jungle we live in a totally amoral universe independent of scripture independent of revealed religion independent of the will of god there's only the will of man in that respect machiavelli is a path-breaking political philosophy no matter how evil or pernicious his teachings we ignore him at our peril and like it or not there is a dark and sparkling brilliance to this like black diamonds you look at it and you realize that however horrifying his conclusions there's a certain grim truth in what he says and we may not accept the entirety of it but like it or not the world of politics isn't ugly profane immoral place at least to a great extent and those of us who wish to be practical politicians will find it very hard to keep our hands completely clean machiavelli wishes to liberate us from what he views as being childish insipid guilt feelings about political morality there are no rules in politics in the same way and for the same reason there are no rules in nature with machiavelli we have one of the great restatements of a political theme introduced in western political thought in the first book of the republic if you stretch your memory back to professor rakuti's lectures last time when he talked about the republic in the first book of the republic socrates primary antagonist is a man named thrasymachus he's a sophist anthrosimicus holds the view that justice is the advantage of the stronger in other words whoever it is that has the most force the most military power makes the rules and justice is whatever they tell you to do so when the nazis win whatever they tell you to do is just if the stalinists win whatever they tell you is just if machiavelli wins or the borgias win doesn't matter as long as they have the power to coerce you whatever they tell you is just so simica's view then is that justice is a simple matter of coercion and there is no moral order to the world now this view is thoroughly criticized and at least apparently refuted in the first book of the republic but like all profound ideas resonance of it is always at least implicitly in the western political tradition and machiavelli regains the nerve to say there is no moral order to the world he's the first man to reassert what thracemica said in the first book of the republic that we live peculiarly and exclusively here in the realm of nature that there is no metaphysical realm by which to judge the good and evil of human actions there's only power force brutality you adjust to it or you succumb to it those are your choices machiavelli wants to teach us how to become tyrannical men and if you stop and think about the first book of the republic i believe you will recognize that thrasymachus has the tyrannical soul the soul is driven entirely by passion that thinks reason is something is an afterthought for the feeble who want to make up stories about why we ought to be good rather than evil machiavelli and thrasymachus both wish to liberate us from metaphysics and morality both of them say in this world of darkness flux double crossing and backstabbing the only way to get ahead the only way to achieve human felicity human happiness human goodness is to get them before they get you donald trump recently wrote a book called the art of the deal you could say that machiavelli's book is the art of the double cross he not only explains how to be treacherous he gives you examples he calls them from history he calls them from contemporary politics as well but in every case he shows that crime not only pays but that goodness is a waste of time and goodness will ultimately be your downfall in some respects machiavelli's project is like that of friedrich nietzsche it'll be a re-evaluation of all values he's going to stand the christian and the platonic view of righteousness of political morality on its head all the things that we previously thought to be good turn out to be evil all the things that we previously thought to be evil turn out to be good or if not good pleasurable practical useful handy machiavelli has written a number of works the prince which is his most famous work is a remarkably brief piece of work usually when a great philosopher has some important message to give he can't control his pain and if you look at say aquinas's theologica it goes on and on and on it's interminable machiavelli has not written that sort of a book it's a 90-page book in and out it's meant to be a practical handbook for the tyrant machiavelli's book the prince was joseph stalin's favorite work he kept it on his night table and it's not hard to see why it shows you how to be a good tyrant a good in the sense of effective good in the sense of practical not good in the sense of morally good because that's only for old ladies and kids nobody seriously believes that stuff now this may sound like a very cynical set of ideas in fact it is but although it is very cynical there is an element of it which is practical which is true like it or not if you are completely good completely virtuous i am not certain that you will be a completely effective and efficient politician i don't know that i want the president to be as kind and as thoughtful and as philosophical as marcus aurelius maybe we would be harmed as much as benefited by that i am sure on the other hand that i don't want the president to be like machiavelli's prince because it's a sure thing we will be harmed rather than benefited by that prior to going into seclusion and writing this book machiavelli had worked for the medici family in florence who were influential figures in florentine and thus in italian politics and although he had been serving them and helping them out and advising them on political matters the medici had been thrown out of florence had been chased out and with them goes machiavelli he goes into retirement now there's a definite sense here that here's a man who's very intelligent very bright but awfully frustrated he gives you that sense when you read the book of being a monday morning quarterback god how he wants to go back into there in practical politics he hates being among the musty books in the library it's not interesting to him what he primarily wants is to run people's lives what he primarily wants is political power and after he gets political power what he wants then is more political power because you can never have enough as socrates pointed out about the tyrannical man this is a thirst that can never be slaked no matter how much satisfaction you get for these desires nothing is ever enough you're like someone that can't get enough to eat or can't get enough to drink no matter how much you eat a drink it's never satisfactory so here's one of the great dissatisfied individuals and he's even more dissatisfied because he's forced to be an armchair quarterback and no one is more practical than nicola machiavelli he dedicates his book to one of the medici family and it's one of the most flowery and flattering and adoring introductions one could possibly imagine and of course it's no less cynical than the rest of the book the book itself tells the wise prince the monarch the he who would be tyrant that he must be very careful to avoid flatterers because flatterers are dangerous men your noble highness a clever fellow like the medici for whom machiavelli is writing the book is going to see through the introduction but then wonder do i want this guy on my side or do i want him on someone else's side this is a very difficult thing to consider a difficult concern for a real prince look at the examples that we get in the in machiavelli's the prince he gives examples of how to take over countries that you are born to for example if your father is the king and your f and your your father dies how you take succession there very easy the people will accept it you won't have any problem with them and when you are trying to establish your rule as a new ruler in this legitimate government the best thing to do is to establish fear because you can count on fear machiavelli says it would be very nice if you could be loved having being loved by your people by your subjects is a very handy thing for ruler and machiavelli says it's not that love is intrinsically good but rather love is handy and practical and if you people love you they're less likely to give you a problem so you should cultivate love now love is is a nice thing to have but fear fear is the kind of thing machiavelli really understands he likes fear because fear is one of those things you can count on and if as machiavelli points out you are forced to choose between having the people love you and having them fear you make sure you have them fear you because you can count on fear people's love you'll never be sure enough about that but fear you can count on so it's important to be feared the next best thing is to be loved the only thing the prince must avoid according to machiavelli the prince cannot afford to be hated when the people hate you they will come and get you one way or another they will depose you and the whole name of this game is to take power and to control power and to make it your own and then to absorb more power there's a part in which he says well it's nice if you can inherit a kingdom from your father if your father has to be the king but very few of us are lucky enough to have that circumstance now you must think back to your head that in your head that machiavelli's father was the pope which is very handy circumstances just the problem is you you can't get to the papacy by hereditary succession so we have kind of a difficulty there yeah they've been careful about that well machiavelli says if you don't have to be born to the throne if you don't get the royal purple by matter of birth there's always usurpation which is a great favorite activity for him he really likes usurpation so the idea of getting close to the throne of gradually weaseling your way into the court and telling of course the king or the prince or the legitimate ruler how much you admire him and how well you think of him and how important it is to constantly be pursuing machiavellian political policies the more you'll become important indispensable the more you could stab him in the back and take control of the government yourself machiavelli's moral universe is the moral universe of the wolf of the predatory animal machiavelli and his political philosophy has a horrifying brilliance through it on account of the fact that it's consistent with much of what we see in political life on an everyday basis the drawback of this conception of political philosophy and the contempt and conception of an amoral universe is that it makes people no longer social animals stop and think about what the machiavellian wants us to do he wants us to constantly betray others both above us in the political structure and below us in the political structure in order to satisfy our own lust for power a lust which is never satisfied which only grows bigger and bigger as its objects become bigger and bigger that's one of the reasons incidentally where machiavelli likes roman history so much roman history is full of creatures like this machiavelli thinks they're wonderful he thinks that the italy of the 1500s 16th century italy is feeble prostrate broken up into fragmented warring little cliques that prevent real political glory from coming into being the reason why he likes a horrifying figure like caesar borgia is that caesar borgia is the man of virtue virtu virtue is exactly the opposite of platonic virtue it is much more like thrasamakian virtue it is the virtue of the man that tells lies that stabs people in the back that does whatever it takes to satisfy his unquenchable desire for power so what we need is a man of year two and this book is designed to create veer two the problem is that this viewer ii is the virtue of the predatory animal not of the rational human being or it's the rational human being insofar as that rationality is completely subjugated or subordinate to one's irrational desires and if you stop and look back at what the soul of the tyrannical man was supposed to look like in the republic you realize that the desiring part is really running the rational part the rational part of the soul is just an instrument in the hands of his desire for power or sex or money or what have you machiavelli takes that same conception of the soul desire comes first my desire for power determines all my other activities and my rationality is subordinate to that so machiavelli wants us to have that kind of veer too the virtue of the leopard the the guiltless killing of the hawk the hawk doesn't feel bad about killing sparrows that's the way hawks are the way of nature is the way of cruelty we must learn to live with that or die with that if you get if you get your way through machiavelli excuse me now let's come back to the problem of italy italy is fragmented italy is broken up italy is in a historically horrible set of circumstances and machiavelli is sounding a clarion call to break through from old ecclesiastical borrowings old scriptural conceptions of virtue old greco-roman conceptions of morality what machiavelli wants is a good practical politician that will scheme and lie his way to the top and once he gets to the top of a particular italian city-state he will attack one city-state after another and unify italy and create something like a new roman empire there can be new glory a new this worldly satisfaction of the potential for human greatness remember that machiavelli is completely opposed to all metaphysical interpretations of the world machiavelli does not believe in heaven and hell machiavelli does not believe in god machiavelli does not believe in the realm of the forms all machiavelli believes in is here and now the main chance how are we going to get what we want right now and machiavelli's conception of virtue of the blessed human condition of the well-organized human soul and of the practically run political society all come together in this figure of the ruthless tyrannical prince now this tyrannical prince will be as machiavelli says like a lion and a fox when he's faced with military dangers or threats that are direct and obvious he's a lion he can withstand anyone else's direct coercive force because he's a military man machiavelli likes blood and gore he's a very military kind of fellow he really likes military solutions but in addition to that being a being a lion is not enough in addition to that it's also necessary to be a fox what we mean by being a fox is that one must be clever sly cunning deceitful and when you're powerful and at the same time deceitful when you can confuse them when you can confuse your opponents and defeat them in a practical coercive sense then you are the man of realver2 this is the kind of guy that's going to go straight to the top he's going to climb a pile of corpses on his way there but then again he has no moral compunctions about it there is no god to judge him there is no metaphysical standard by which to judge this he either succeeds or he doesn't it's a sort of nihilistic approach to politics in which the gratification of the individual ego is raised the status of a principle in some respects this is why the renaissance and particularly the the human-centered political science that's characteristic of the renaissance which is a big change from that of the middle ages is such a turning of the corner in the western political tradition we're moving away from god-centered politics toward man-centered politics and man-centered politics is ugly man-centered politics is bloody and man-centered politics serves no ends but human ends and human desires there is no ultimate summum bonum no ultimate good that politics gestures at machiavelli gives a very fine example of a of an action which he considers to have great political wisdom in it i think you'll like this there was a ruler who attacked and conquered another city-state but there's still a great deal of banditry a good bit of outlawy uh political chaos in the countryside so this ruler and machiavelli thinks this rule is a very wise fellow he sends his second in command his lieutenant to that city and he says i give you complete power of life and death over all the citizens of that city because now they're mine and i want you to go down there and lay down the law i want you to ruthlessly exterminate all of my enemies i want you to to make the decrees i think appropriate and whatever degrees you think are appropriate make them all and lean on these people go in and coerce them intimidate them frighten them until they concede that i am the legitimate ruler here and that you rule in my name and i give you complete power if any of them complain about you tell them i've given delegated my authority to you and if they give you any more problems beyond that kill them now that's only half of the story there's more to it after doing that the prince lets this guy do it for a couple of months three four five months and this very cruel very bloodthirsty very ruthless second in command dominates the people lots of mass executions cruel tortures horrible bloody spectacles which frighten the people there out of their wits now here's a problem this is part of machiavellianism fear is a good thing you can count on people's fear and this guy's made him plenty afraid but we have a problem here the potential for hatred certainly if you've killed someone's father mother son daughter husband wife it's going to be payback time machiavelli has no conception of forgiveness no idea that charity ought to be extended to us sinners he thinks that's for children and old ladies no machiavelli says the right way to handle this is the way the prince in this case handled it he went to that second city and he asked the people in that city what do you think of my new ruler here is he a nice fellow a real charmer isn't he and it turns out that the people were horrified by the terrible cruelties the tortures and the murders the public executions that he had imposed on them so secretly that night the prince was sitting back there thinking about this and he orders his secret police or his private guardsmen the ones he can really trust whoever they are it tells them i want you secretly to go to the room of my second in command the man i gave this bloody authority to and i want you to take him out to the center of the square of this town and i want you to cut him in half and leave him there next morning the people of the town get up and what do they see but a man who is the object of intense hatred to them pieces of him all over the center of the square and then our prince sets out a decree that he had heard through some source which he isn't going to name that this man had been very severe and very violent and we can't have any of that in a well-run state he had heard that this man had usurped power that the prince had never given him and because the second command had been so bloody-minded and such an evil cruel fellow the prince's justice the prince's mercy and the person's prince's honesty required that he'd be cut in half the art of the double cross you send a guy out to do the dirty work you cut his throat you throw them to the wolves you give them to the people that are left over and then you clean up the gravy at the end of it this is machiavelli's conception of good politics he specifies that particular example as an example of a man who really knows his way around political stuff first you'll first you conquer people that you have no right to and then you send somebody out there to do extremely evil and unpleasant and violent things to them and you lie to him and say that you do it with my blessing and then you go to the people and you act like you're blameless so they won't hate you and then you kill this guy throw him to the wolves and the people lap it up and say what a nice failure i'm glad we got a prince like you much better than the guy we had here we thought he was acting with your authority but of course now we see that he wasn't that's what the word machiavellian means two three four levels of meaning all devoted to the same task to the organization and acquire acquisition of political power by any means necessary this man is not careful about the means that he uses to achieve his ends so machiavelli writes his prince 90 pages in order that a practical politician can have this around for inspiration and isn't it inspirational reading those of you who have looked at it before will find that like it or not it is in some respects inspirational reading simply because of the single-mindedness the ruthless pursuit of practical political power as a handbook for doing that i think it has never been excelled the difficulty of course with this is as i said a little earlier it prevents human beings from being social animals stop and think about it for a minute suppose you're a member of the medici family and suppose this guy machiavelli writes the prince and dedicates it to you and tells you to beware of flatterers and beware of people that are trying to get in good with you because you can never trust them they may stab you in the back suppose you were a political ruler and he wrote it to you would you hire him to work for you what would happen if you had him on your staff where's where your staff is going to start disappearing right unforeseen accidents they're all going to start as he moves up the ladder of command bad things happen to good people all kinds of stuff could happen here and then it may well be that some horrible misfortune may occur while you're out riding while you happen to be asleep well you happen to have your back turned in other words he is here so he can usurp your position why oh why if you had any brains at all would you choose to have him on your staff there is no man who is less appropriate to the staff of a politician than machiavelli and yet in some respects there is a lure he does show you a horrible worldly wisdom which maybe you want on your own side rather than on your other rather than on your opponent's side but if he's on your side well i guess he really can't be on your side i guess he's always on his own side which is part of the problem machiavelli is not a team player if you were a ruler you would never in your right mind have to keep work for you turn it around suppose a ruler is foolish enough to bring a machiavellian in the machiavellian kills him makes it look like someone else did it he takes over the throne a person would have to be crazy to work for machiavelli as opposed to have him in in addition to having him work for you in other words suppose he were to become the prince of the king what's he going to do with you when you become his number two or number three or number four man you are expendable everyone is expendable to the machiavellian you have no intrinsic value except as a vehicle by which he can satisfy his desires by which he can gratify his lust for power so the machiavellian soul is the tyrannical soul in some respects when you go back and look at plato's republic almost all the great themes in western political philosophy are to be found there machiavelli is nothing really new machiavelli is a codification not quite a systematization but a handbook for the would-be tyrant he's a handbook of it's a handbook of sophistry right because he says one thing it means another and in fact the meaning of his statements doesn't matter so long as it gets the practical result of achieving political power and it's an entirely this worldly orientation if we had to look at the ancient political tradition both platonism and christianity organized the political theory with reference to the will of some giant metaphysical law giver in the case of plato it's the form of the good in the case of christianity it's god's omnipotence but in either case the key issue is making our behavior and our souls and our lives consistent with the obligations imposed by this thing in the metaphysical realm once we abolish the metaphysical realm there is no law or ultimate standard by which to judge our actions and by which to judge our good and evil and that means there's only the satisfaction of desires down here and this leads straight to the softest political position that political power is an end in itself that the satisfaction of people's desires has an end in themselves and the real true state of human felicity is having profound vehement extraordinarily forceful emotions passions and then satisfying them and the continuous satisfaction of vehement passions is what machiavelli and the sophists and all of this cynical political tradition cynical not in the literal sense but in the broad general sense this cynical political tradition enjoins us too so all of you who are would-be rulers this is the book for you the difficulty is is that it tells us all or perhaps not all of us but all of us who have the nerve not to succumb to metaphysics who are willing to break free of the mold of mere morality it tells us how to become chiefs and no longer indians and of course if we were all to follow that there'd be all chiefs and no indians but machiavelli is under no illusions about everybody having the capacity to do this it's only the extraordinary individual like himself or like caesar borgia or like a handful of the other great tyrants in history that have really shown us what human beings are capable of in some respect machiavelli is similar to plato in that both plato and machiavelli are trying to show us something buried deep in the marrow of the human soul at the very center of it plato thinks there's an eternal goodness a final spark of the divine soul which allows us to get some access to the mind of god and to the understanding of ultimate truth and wisdom machiavelli believes that at the core of the human soul in the marrow of the psyche there is a beast an untamed animal which wants only the satisfaction of its desires in some respects this is a very prescient theory because it anticipates many of the views that will later be held by sigmund freud underneath our superego underneath this veil of civility this veneer of righteousness in fact we are animals exclusively concerned with the satisfaction of our physical desires we are beasts with a very very thin shell of rational morality machiavelli suggests that we should become on the outside what we are on the inside except in such cases when it's inconvenient if it's convenient to look pious gentle kind and good well that's just fine the important thing is not to be gentle kind and good the important thing is to be ruthless and rapacious and treacherous if you are familiar with the play king lear the edmond and edgar characters particularly the uh the bastard son i think it's edmund gives a wonderful speech in which he talks about legitimacy in which he talks about the order of political right and the circumstances of inheritance and social status and when he says in the beginning of that soliloquy thou nature art my goddess and to thy law my services are bound that prayer was about the only prayer that machiavelli could say with a straight face nature red and fang and claw is the goddess to whom his services are bound nature which is the fundamental reality we are human physical things that's remember where that's where the word nature comes from from the greek word phusis right so we are physical beings we are not spirits in a material world we are rapacious bits of meat that do whatever we can to take advantage of each other except when we're deluding ourselves with things like morals religion kindness gentleness milk of human virtue that sort of thing but apart from delusions like that and silly poetry appropriate for the feeble the weak the christians in life there's only blood gore power the intoxication of not only surviving but conquering we might say that machiavelli's conception of virtue harks back not to the socratic conception of virtue but to the conception of virtue characteristic of homer in the iliad in the odyssey it's the lying treacherous virtue of odysseus it's the powerful lion-like virtues of achilles if you are a good warrior able to coerce other people able to impose your will on a universe that is both indifferent to you and indifferent to any moral structure you might create then and only then are you a man worth taking seriously he enjoins us to create to go back to the earlier pre-socratic pre-christian virtues we hear the drums of a primitive heroism in this book it is a blast from the past and at the same time it is one of the most modern of political works if we take for granted and i think it a fair assumption that at this point in time we live in a secular age we live in an age which is contemptuous of metaphysics which is contemptuous of references to abstract morality then in some respects we live in a machiavellian universe even if we have some sort of ativistic connection back to an earlier morality that meant something more than personal self-gratification in that respect machiavelli is a very modern political thinker he is the first political thinker to break from that metaphysical tradition towards a completely physical tradition to move from a sacred politics to a profane politics or you might say that he undoes the distinction between the sacred and profane by abolishing the sacred so the world around us is neither sacred nor profane it just is what it is and you are what you are and what you are in fact is a wolf guarding the sheep if you remember the analogy that thrasymachus makes in the first book of the republic that the ruler relates to the citizens that he that are his subjects the way a shepherd relates to a sheep or to a flock of sheep he keeps them there not because he likes the sheep not because he has any moral obligation to the sheep but because he likes pork he likes lamb chops he likes to turn these things into his sustenance well other people the subjects in the machiavellian state will exist only in order to satisfy the physical carnal carnals are well chosen where they're carnal desires of the machiavellian prince achilles might have liked machiavelli if he had understood what was being said odysseus i think certainly would have liked machiavelli because he brings together both the lion and the fox i would say not so much achilles because achilles is a little on the dumb side but odysseus as the perfect machiavellian hero brings together the willingness to lie the willingness to violate oaths the willingness to break whatever social conventions are around you in order to achieve your ends the centered focused fierce desire to satisfy your innermost longings in some respects machiavelli is what people would be like in the freudian sense if you took away the superego altogether or if you only kept the superego the conception of righteousness of moral virtue as a veneer to protect you from other people's condemnation but what we are down deep is a mass of desires that we neither choose nor control and human felicity simply exists in the satisfaction of these desires oxen are happy when you give them straw machiavelli is happy when you give them a government fundamentally there is no difference each animal gravitates towards its own appropriate object machiavelli in that respect is the is an ancient political theorist at the same same time a modern political theorist he represents nothing new in politics but rather an ever-present temptation it is always tempting for human beings to take the easy way out and decide that they're going to be meat that they're going to give up the attempt to kindle the divine spark which is what marcus aurelius called the soul called the disposition to moral virtue machiavelli doesn't want to climb what plato called the ladder of beauty in the symposium because he finds the world ugly violent and evil and he likes it so in other words not only does he know that he's in the cave but he thinks that any attempt to move out of the cave is a kind of letting down of nature it's an attempt to move away from nature towards some sort of shemerical poetic i know not what and machiavelli is the saint is a patron saint of all politicians who would be exclusively and immorally practical one of the great difficulties in evaluating machiavelli is to give him his due in other words to be intellectually fair fair to him because he is a great genius there's no way that we can honestly take that away from him but it's also a mistake to say that while he's a great genius we can in practice use this as a guide to life if people were to take this seriously and although god help us some of us do it would be a disaster for the social structure and it would be disaster for politics the difficulty is is that we seem to vacillate between one and the other when the better angels of our natures take over we can see how marcus aurelius is a fine politician and how plato offers us something real solid substantial in organizing our emotions organizing our lives organizing our standards of judgment the problem is that we tend to vacillate back and forth every once in a while when we think nobody's looking we have a sneaking suspicion that machiavelli may be right let him who is out who is without sin cast the first stone i think every one of us has done stuff that we knew was wrong at one time or another machiavelli is saying i wish to liberate you from the guilt of thinking that that is a mistake your mistake is in not doing that all the time do not succumb to the temptation to be an angel you have no chance of doing that you are meat you are meet with a rational soul but your rational soul is nothing that glows in the dark it's nothing metaphysical it's just the rational part of you that allows you to decide how to best satisfy your irrationally developed desires so machiavelli is a kind of standing temptation he is a great political genius and we must give the devil his due almost literally speaking but at the same time we have to understand the limitations of this limitation number one is it prevents us from being what we really are which is social animals a machiavellian would be unfit and subordinate and would be unfit as a superior nobody in his right mind would work for machiavelli or have machiavelli work form number two it is a denigration in some respects of human nature it is a cynical analysis of what people have done in worst case circumstances it is almost an entirely hopeless philosophy by rejecting the christian virtues of faith hope and charity well i suppose we might get by without charity i suppose in this case we might get by without faith but the problem with this philosophy that i think even bothers those who acknowledge its brilliance is that it is entirely hopeless philosophy what can we expect from the next government the same thing we can expect from this government which is that it will be rapacious that it will be treacherous that it will be evil and that it will be powerful and that it will dominate us the only way out of that merry-go-round is to dominate everyone else nature red in fang and claw enjoins us to make a meal of our own and joins us to become the wolf among the sheep and if we have both the inclination and the unwillingness to philosophize in the platonic sense then it seems to me that the only logical conclusion is the one that machiavelli draws so if you wish to go for the strictly physical strictly anti-metaphysical politics we're going to have a hard time connecting politics and ethics one of the great achievements of plato's republic is that politics turns out to be ethics writ large that what is good for the soul of the individual man the organization of the reasoning the spirited and the desiring parts it also turns out to be isomorphically good for the society because we will organize the rulers the rational folks at the top of society who will have the guardians their auxiliaries the spirited part and we'll have the bronze people at the bottom getting as many of their desires satisfied as possible for plato there's a one-to-one connection between politics and ethics that will be true of all the metaphysical thinkers also be true of the christians on the other hand if one wishes to adopt the single world entirely physicalistic interpretation of human life and of ontology and of politics of necessity there will be a disjunction between politics and ethics we will hear this again when we deal with david hume's theory of justice so if you wish politics to be moral if you complain that politicians take too many bribes and cut too many corners and are unwilling to do what they ought to do and meet their moral obligations you are implicitly making an argument which is founded on some sort of metaphysical conception no matter how in koat you might as well fess up to it now you're all metaphysical believers if you don't wish to be a metaphysical believer that's another possibility be careful you don't move down the slippery slope to machiavellianism because we move from the state of society to the state of nature and the nature that machiavelli has destined for us will be worse than any hell because it will be immediate and tangible and there's no way around it it's a necessary element in the human condition machiavelli offers us a secular substitute for salvation machiavelli offers us a chance for this worldly gratification and since there's no other world for us to go to no final judgment of god no ultimate moral order this is the best that the human species can attain the homeric virtues the military virtues the treacherous political virtues those elements of roman history which are the most disgraceful and the most appalling machiavelli wishes to raises those to the status of universal human felicity and unusual well perhaps not an unusual unnecessary but lamentable temptation and insofar as we wish to avoid that we must go back and think about the idea of politics and ethics the implications that it holds for ontology because it implies metaphysics the implications that metaphysics have for our conception of the rest of philosophy and the way in which knowledge holds ethics virtue and human experience together the way it connects our conception of the individual soul and political order and the way in which our own lives would be influenced by a decision to either succumb to the lure of this world or to take the chance that another better one awaits us it is not a decidable proposition machiavelli wishes to offer us one possible solution to the set of intellectual difficulties you

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Comte, Origins, Sociology

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Length: 42min 50sec (2570 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022