It has always seemed to me that comments on the text of The Prince were only half correct, that somehow neither the comments I had read nor the translations I had seen reproduce the resonance of theoretical brilliance one gleans from the original. To an Italian reader Machiavelli seems famous, or rather infamous, for the wrong reasons.
Machiavelli is attempting to describe the nature of effective political actions but he inherits a set of concepts not adequate to the dynamism of his perceptions. He does two things with these concepts: he reframes them, giving them different uses, and he reframes them in a character. The latter is compelling enough to assume a startling status among the characters of Western literature--a character with many shadows in the literature that follows him.
Our task is necessarily twofold. We must see the history of the concepts and the congruence or incongruence of the various frames in which they have been set and what Machiavelli has done to them. Once these concepts have been unearthed and brought into our focus--a bare, ruined choir animated by the Prince--we, ourselves, must animate that character. To do so requires an act of passionate identification with the text. As Heidegger says, before we can translate we must first be translated.
Granted our concern for philologically enlightened language, we must in translating first of all think about the matter involved...To that end our thinking must first, before translation be translated to what is said...(Early Greek Thinking, pp.14, 18).
So saying he rejects the historical for the poetic method ("..thinking is poeticizing.." Early Greek Thinking, p. 18). So doing we aim to be pregnant, not exhaustive.
Machiavelli is immoral.
We have heard men say that for years. What does it mean? How do we account for the attraction these same men feel for an author they villify?
The mistake is to speak of morality or immorality as indivisible qualities at all. What we see is not immorality or morality but a conception of the world and a stance in it. Can we assume this conception and stance to be opaque to our analysis?
For Machiavelli there is nothing prescindant from the world in which he finds himself, nothing transcendant from the affairs of men. He is a secular thinker. Success is not Truth, it is just Success. There is no transcendental object as in Plato's essences, or transcendental subject as in Husserl. We can identify with nothing other-worldly. There is only ourselves in relation to the actions of men and the occurrences of Nature. But Machiavelli did not invent this epistemological schema, he inherited it.
It is clarified as to concept for the first time in the Sophists. Machiavelli never read the Sophists and it is consequently implied rather than stated in Machiavelli.
The parallels, however, are ineluctable.
The resemblance has not gone unnoted by scholars:
As they were described by Plato, especially in the Gorgias and in the character of Callicles, the Sophists seem to be prototypes of Machiavellism..(Machiavelli, Guiseppe Prezzolini, p.87).
But it is more than a resemblance, although that is what it appears to be on first reading. It is a shared cognitive arena, a stance in the world that frames it a certain way. The Sophists differ from Plato in ways congruous with Machiavelli's differences therefrom. Their eschewal of moral concerns, their emphasis on practicality, and, most of all, their position on one of the most important philosophical debates of their time find fulfillment and mutation in The Prince. There is no question of Machiavelli's having read them (Machiavelli, p.88). We are investigating, not an influence but a congruity.
The conceptual opacity of the key words in Machiavelli has lent an opalescence to the thought of the descendant epochs that have used it. One may read Machiavelli in a certain way in order to clarify the notion of raison d'etat but, as J.H.Hexter has noted (The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation, pp.150-173), that does not clarify Machiavelli. We must deal with the text and its relation to Western thought. We cannot help but bring to it some notion of conceptual phylogeny.
According to what concepts is this stance, common to the Sophists and Machiavelli, defined? What is the nature of the "resemblance"?
In his book The Sophists, W.H.C.Guthrie analyzes the physis/nomos debate among the Greeks of that generation.
...The meaning of physis emerges from a study of the Presocratics. It can safely be translated "nature", though when it occurs in conjunction with nomos the word "reality" will sometimes make the contrast more immediately clear. Nomos for men of classical times is something that nomezetai, is believed in, practised or held to be right; originally something that nemetai, is apportioned, distributed or dispensed. That is to say, it presupposes an acting subject--believer, practitioner or apportioner--a mind from which the nomos emanates. Naturally therefore different people had different nomoi, but so long as religion remained an effective force, the devising mind could be the god's and so there could be nomoi that were applicable to all mankind...an effect of the nomos-physis antithesis...will be found to enter into most of the questions of the day. Discussion of religion turned on whether the gods existed by physis or only by nomos; of political organization, on whether states arose by divine ordinance, by natural necessity or by nomos; of cosmopolitanism on whether divisions within the human race are natural or only a matter of nomos...and so on. (The Sophists, pp. 55, 57)
From there, Guthrie divides the thinkers into two headings--
the upholders of nomos and its opponents. In the upholders of nomos he sees moral imperatives.
...Critias, Isocrates and Moschion all name nomoi as the means of raising human life above the level of the beasts. The climax of Antigone's chorus is the declaration that technical achievements in themselves are neutral: they may bring man to evil as well as good. The essential is that he observe nomoi and follow justice...For Protagoras...then self-restraint and a sense of justice are necessary to society, which in its turn is necessary to human survival; and nomoi are the guidelines laid down by the state to teach its citizens the limits within which they may move without outraging them. Neither nomos or the political virtues are "by nature" but "a return to nature" is the last thing that is wanted...(The Sophists, pp. 63, 68).
In the opposite camp, Thrasymachus, Thucydides, Glaucon, Gorgias and Callicles argue from physis:
Self interest, says Glaucon, is what every nature (physis) naturally pursues as a good, though law or convention (nomos) constrains it to diverge into respect for equality. This is the kind of realism or fact-facing which we meet in Thucydides, in the often repeated statement that it is human nature to do wrong and dominate others whenever possible, and in the Sophist Gorgias "It is not in nature for the strong to be thwarted by the weaker, but for the weaker to be ruled and led by the stronger, for the strong to lead and the weak to follow." The factual or amoral character of the current attitude to human behaviour is emphasized when, as often, we find nature coupled with the ideas of necessity. In the Melian dialogue the Athenians claim to rule "by natural necessity"...This association of necessity with nature is used as an argument by the opponents of nomos, which they represent as an attempt to thwart natural forces that is rightly doomed to failure. (The Sophists, pp. 99-100).
The question is precisely one of "morality." Protagoras teaches rhetoric and arete (in this instance, civic virtue). Gorgias, also a rhetorician, laughs at this. He gives men sophes not arete--skill not virtue. Attempts have been made to solve the dilemma:
One can hardly do better than close this account of the immoralist champions of nature against law with Plato's summary of their arguments in the Laws. The greatest and best things in the world are the works of nature, or chance (which is the same thing). The four elements, and the earth, sun, moon and stars which are made of them, are lifeless matter. Moving in accordance with their chance-got properties, the elements somehow got together suitably--hot with cold, dry with moist, soft with hard--and combining by the inevitability of chance generated the whole cosmos and everything in it. Animals, plants and the seasons of the year all owe their existence to these causes, namely nature and chance: no god, intelligence or art had any part in it. Political skill has some slight connection with nature but is mostly a matter of art and legislation has nothing to do with nature at all. It is entirely artificial and its postulates are untrue...The general non-theistic foundations of Presocratic science were enough for Plato's humanistic opponents; they did not trouble to discriminate too nicely between them. (The Sophists, pp. 114-115)
That solves it for Guthrie. But he is a philosopher and classical historian, not a political theorist, and we must remember that there are no politics in The Republic. Plato's "superior" cosmology has eliminated the need for them.
Politics is what Machiavelli is investigating. He doesn't do it by focusing on the transcendentally grounded nomos of men--he regards these as tools of the powerful. Rather he turns his eye on the ascent to power through a knowledge not of the conventions but of the nature of men. He differs from Aristotle on precisely this point. Aristotle investigates institutions--nomos. Machiavelli investigates political activity as it is generated in the physis of its actors.
But the objection may be made that Machiavelli never mentions physis. He is of course, unlike Callicles, not Greek and would have trouble, speaking in the tongue. But the idea of physis and, not so much its advocacy as with the Sophists, but its investigation adheres to him. That adhesion has not been missed even in his most analyzed and least understood concept:
What then is virtu? It is force and ability, daring and prudence, efficiency, energy, dynamis......" (Machiavelli, p.22)
Where have we seen dynamis before?
(Toleration is asked for a lengthy quotation from Cornford, indeed for all these lengthy quotations. The passage is admirably succinct in the description of the word's use and dovetails into our thesis.)
....Dynamis is the substantive answer to the common verb "to be able" and it covers the ability to be acted upon as well as the ability to act on something else, whereas most of the common English words...suggest active as opposed to passive ability....The notion of body or matter as endowed with properties both active and passive, capacities both causing and suffering modification is deeply rooted in primitive common sense. The warmth in my hand is capable of acting on a stone and making it warm; it is also capable of being acted on by ice and reduced to or replaced by coldness. The notion had acquired a technical signicance for obvious reasons. A doctor's business is to find substances that will modify our physical states, things that have healing powers or virtues....He thinks of "the salt", "the bitter", "the sweet", "the astringent", etc., not as simply permanent states of a substance, but as "powers" or "virtues" and of similar properties of the patient's body as capable of being modified by the action of a corrective drug or diet. The action of qualities, again, is their dynamis. The term designates at once their essence and their proper manner of manifesting themselves. Later Dr. Souilhe shows that in these Hippocratic treatises which show the influence of early cosmological ideas, the term dynamis stands for the characteristic property of bodies, their exterior and sensible aspect, which makes it possible to determine and specify them. Thanks to the dynamis, the mysterious "nature" (physis) the substantial form (eidos) or primordial element makes itself known and does so by its action. This explains why it was possible, especially at a later date, to pass from a known to the unknown, from the appearance to the reality, and how easy it was to identify the "nature" (physis) with the dynamis. To state the nature of a thing is the same as to state its property, since the nature is made evident only by the property, the two are inseparable and a genuine causal link unites them....Dr. Souilhe then shows how the Sophists adapted and transposed this terminology and finally facilitated the introduction of it into philosophy. In Plato's early writings there is hardly any occasion for the term in its medical sense, though dynamis meaning the "virtue" of a drug occurs in the Charmides....Summing up the philosophic use of the word in Plato, Dr. Souilhe says that the Platonic dynamis can be defined as the property or quality which reveals the nature (physis) of a thing. The dynamis makes it possible to give everything a name conforming to its peculiar conditions...In a word, it is at once a principle of knowledge and a principle of diversity. (Plato's Theory of Knowledge, pp.234-7)
Dynamis as "the property or quality which reveals the nature of a thing" is very close to the Roman's sense of virtus as revealing manly nature or genius ("On Genius", Playboy Magazine, December 1969). That was an appropriation of a Greek analytical model (probably from Hippocrates) to isolate and extoll a Roman necessity. It was not a further analysis of the model. Machiavelli is well known to have used that Roman concept of the word. Before he does, though, the Middle Ages intervene, impose their use of it and color the restoration and extension of it in a particular way. The medieval cosmology hypostatizes dynamis and physis:
The notion of force (dynamis or virtue) did nothing to simplify this complexity; the universe was run, not by a force, but by a multitude of different forces...The virtues of stones might be related to astrology but these virtues, once achieved, were distinct from astrological virtues. The multiplicity of virtues is particularly apparent in medieval medicine. The elements of hot, cold, wet, and dry were of course basic in theoretical accounts of herbs, but the virtue of a particular herb was not subsumed by theory; the virtue of an herb, its power or force was unique. (The Shape of Medieval History, William J. Brandt, pp.34-5)
...we translate the word as "nature" only at the risk of profoundly misunderstanding our sources. If upon some unimaginable occasion to speak of the "nature" of goats, he would mean, with Isidore, a constellation of physical and behavioral traits; but he would have in mind a different sort of constellation. Goat nature would be assumed on a priori grounds to be self-consistent. Given certain facts about goats...we can accept or reject further assertions on their consistency, with what we know. We can err in such judgement, of course. The medieval conception of the nature of an individual thing--goat, planet or civilization--did not permit the judgement in the first place, because it did not presume any sort of consistency among the elements of that natura...for us "nature" has a double significance. It refers to the individual thing, but it also refers to the collections, classes, or species in which the individual may be grouped. We are able to reject Isidore's statement about the panther because it is inconsistent with our conception of animals, or better "animalness" and it (our conception) is not static but dynamic, a conception not of qualities but of function. (The Shape of Medieval History,pp.38-9)
Having appropriated only the static and vertical sense of dynamis the medieval view of nature precluded dynamic analysis. It applied to human nature as well.
The medieval clerk should have been able to describe a human being exhaustively by a list of adjectives specifying his qualities and actions and these adjectives, having no common ground, would be more or less independent...In short man as a natural object was in all essential respects like other natural objects according to the encyclopedists of the Middle Ages (and the scientists upon whom they drew). He was a collection of quasi-independent powers and states and he might be known by an examination of these powers and states. But his view of the species, because it does not envisage the possibility of any coherence in human character or behaviour, denies the individual interest of significance. (The Shape of Medieval History, pp.159-60)
To have covered forty-four hundred years on the phylogeny of a set of concepts in so short a space (and at such lengthy quotation) is, under even the most tolerant judgement, unforgivably brisk and sketchy. But it is essential that we encounter Machiavelli on his thresholds and not our own. This hypostatization and incoherence of both the human and non-human cosmology laid the arid ground from which the Renaissance would spring. In sum, since the separation of virtues into discrete forces isolates one action from another, no coherent human nature can be seen. We have activity and stage but no actor. Man is, recalling Bayeux, a frozen figure in a tapestry, indistinguishable from the yarn that represents the sea. In the mercantile Renaissance this tapestry billows like a sail and deliquesces into pure movement. Concepts straggle after. Suddenly there is the animus of The Prince.
It was a discovery that has often been compared to the discoveries a hundred years later of another Italian. Certainly both Galileo and Machiavelli rethink, in their respective universes, the concepts of physis and dynamis. But to call them both "scientists" (as if that told us anything) is to miss the point. The knowledge accumulated by the two men is different essentially. The concern for a new place to stand, and a striking similarity of that place is common.
What Galileo gained with his idea of relativity was the cancelling of the absolute reality of place...Galileo's doctrine of motion is rooted in nothing less and nothing more than a new standpoint from which to estimate and measure the phenomena of motion in the universe..."It is not place which determines the rest and motion of bodies. For it is in itself neither a being nor an effective cause; rather bodies determine their mutual place and position by virtue of the forces which are immanent in them." The place is a nothing; it does not exist and exerts no force but all natural power is contained in the bodies themselves. (Substance and Form & Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Ernst Cassirer, pp.361-2)
Bodies now cease being the phylacteries of discreet virtues which are exterior to them (such as place) and become the "bodies themselves." Just as in Machiavelli, the actor is restored to us in a relativistic universe. When Galileo dismissed place as not an "effective cause" he is remarkably close in language to Machiavelli's "le verita effetuale della cosa" (Il Principe, p. 94)--the true force of things. This is what Machiavelli sought in political affairs but he looked for it without the formal cosmological revolutions of the 16th and 17th century. These revolutions have been called Renaissance science (The Idea of Nature, R.G.Collingwood, p.4), and it can be seen that the refocusing on physis and dynamis is implicit in the Renaissance view. It is silently repressed. The first Italian to incorporate the Copernican cosmology into philosophy was gleefully put to the stake by the Church during Machiavelli's lifetime. Even had Machiavelli wanted to handle such a broad philosophical question he would have known better. Only in the obliquity of his conceptual language and then only upon close and sometimes "poetic" reading can we discover what we know is there, the common dynamism of universe and actor.
We must remember the Sophists. Like them Machiavelli conceives of nature as chance (fortuna) but unlike the Sophists this is placed outside his knowable universe with the result that within it knowledge of physis is possible except that it is human physis, a move Vico, the Owl of Minerva of this tradition, will make overt in his verum/factum principle. Machiavelli is not a political scientist; he is a political rhetorician.
Machiavelli's The Prince can be treated as rhetoric insofar as it deals with the producing of effects upon an audience. (Th Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke, p.158)
Yet unlike the rhetorical handbooks of the Sophists, The Prince is useful as theory. The reason is dynamic prejudice. It analyzes the nature of actor and audience because it is concerned with activity not just oration. There is a complete universe in The Prince. It has nomos, physis, and dynamis. It is precisely because it is not an autonomous universe that it is not immune to the phylogeny of concepts traditionally foreign to it.
The concept by which Machiavelli avoids an actor/audience dualism (and hence separate rules for intuitively identical human natures) is called by him "lo stato". It is important that we not see it as a place but as a movement. For this view we are enormously indebted to J.H.Hexter who, in his book The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation rids the phrase of its nineteenth century baggage and restores it to us in its use (pp.150-174). By analyzing the verbs acting upon the word and marking its own passivity, Hexter concludes that "lo stato" does not mean "the state" but something close to personal command and influence over men, as extension of an actor's being through a dynamis common with his audience over his audience/stage. It is gained, lost, maintained and consolidated by action. That action reveals the actor's nature and Machiavelli often refers to the property of this action as virtu. The dynamistic heritage is quite clear even when the usage conforms to the Latin usage. The nature that is not revealed in personal action, which impinges on it without emanating from it, is not susceptible to the same laws of investigation and is called "fortuna". It, however, molds conditions. The nature of the audience, indivisible in principle from that of the actor, is revealed in the actor's actions and by his virtu. In this universe of relation among men and the individual actor there is a dynamic, a nature, as we have said, that is revealed in action and a nature which creates occasion for that action. Those natures have a common dynamis. That is the conceptual framework we will see in The Prince. Hexter's analysis of the occurrences of virtu in the text incorporates no conceptual framework and hence he sees The Prince working not as theory but as "vision". That is not my experience of the text.
One more thing need be said before we begin our textual investigation of virtu. Our narrative of the philological history of the concept of dynamis has concentrated on its relation with nature, a relation clear, though not often explicit, in the Roman virtus with genius. Machiavelli in fact does use both words in conjunction that way (Il Principe, p. 45). The usage is not unique to Machiavelli. What is unique is its role in an antinomianist stance and the resuscitation of its dynamic mode. The first antinomianists, the Sophists, never incorporated a concept of physis or dynamis in their works dealing with agent/audience manifolds. Their pronouncements on physis are always justifications for a certain type of behaviour not analyses of it. The Sophists do not deal with the agent/audience manifold as a universe with a physis and dynamis but, ironically enough, in terms of nomos. The nature of the audience does not concern them. What concerns them is elaboration upon topoi (topics) in terms of what the audience will believe or be made to. This concept of the audience's act of belief in topoi has an unmistakably nomitic character to it--something like public opinion. Machiavelli is the first to conceive of the actor/audience relationship as a universe unto itself--with a dynamis and physis of its own. His contribution to Western self-consciousness is not to be under-estimated. Appropriating a Roman use of a Greek concept and a sophistic antinomianism combined with the tendency of his time generally to redefine the world, he creates something entirely new.
We are ready to confront the text itself.
The word "virtu" does not make things easy for us. To begin with it is an invariable substantive, i.e. whether it is plural or singular it is still "virtu" --something like the word "sheep" if it meant something different in the plural than in the singular other than mere plurality. To say of Hannibal's character "con infinite sua virtu" (his infinite virtues) (Il Principe, p.100) and to say of Cesare Borgia "et era nel duca tanta ferocita e tanta virtu" (there was in the duke much ferocity and virtu) is to say something slightly different.
Keeping distinctions like that in mind, we may analyze the relevant uses of virtu in the text. Some but not all demand deep analysis.
Chapter I
Virtu is used once and for the first time in this chapter. It is contrasted with fortuna and identified with the use of one's own arms. Fortuna is identified with the arms of others. It unmistakably indicates military virtu (as it usually does) but is consistent with the sense of the extension of one's own powers through or by one's stato (Il Principe, p.15).
Chapter III
Used once in this chapter, it still carries military overtones but is allied with prudenzia--prudence (Il Principe, p.27).
Chapter IV
Once. The first non-military use. It indicates the ability to maintain "lo stato".
Chapter VI
Virtu is used thirteen times in this chapter; once in the title and six times in the first four sentences. Three uses are especially noteworthy.
Machiavelli is talking about imitating the virtu of the ancients:
...se la sua virtu non vi arrive, almena ne renda che odore; e fare come li arcieri prudenti; a quale parendo il loco dove disegnono ferire troppo lontano, e conoscendo fino a quanto va la virtu del loro arco, pongono mir assai piu alta che il loco destinato...(my italics) (II Principe, p.40)
...if their [the ancients'] virtu doesn't inhabit you then you will have at least got a whiff of it; but make like the prudent archers, who, wishing to hit too far a spot and knowing the virtu of their arc, aim above the target...(my translation).
(Almost an Oriental use of the word--the tao of the arrow.) It is clear to anyone with a sense of the history of the word that here virtu means dynamis. This virtu does not belong to the man but to the trajectory of the arrow, the "sensible form" of its existence as trajectory. The use of the word is almost Galilean in its idea that pure movement can have its own essence. To my mind it is a stunning metaphor for human aspiration. We have appropriated it and made it banal without seeing the universe in which it was thought. The real way the trajectory manifests itself, the way in which we know ("conosciuta") it is by its dynamis. This use comes as naturally to Machiavelli as any of its other uses in The Prince and shows his awareness of its dynamic meaning. This awareness never slackens on any occasion of "virtu's" use for us if we remember the fluid state of "lo stato" and keep in mind that most of the time Machiavelli is talking about the virtu of commanders, the way in which they show their natures as such, and that is usually military. The next time Machiavelli uses virtu to describe an inanimate object we must remember the example of the arc and the arrow.
The second noteworthy use of virtu in this chapter (Il Principe, p.41, l.10) shows us for the first time its dynamic participation with the nature that produces occasion:
...e sanza quella occasione, la virtu dello animo loro si sarebbe spenta, e sanza quella virtu la occasione sarebbe venuto invanno.
...and without those occasions the virtu of their spirit has been wasted and without that virtu those occasions would have come in vain. (my translation)
When he uses virtu in this way he hints at a dynamic that a few sentences later he makes explicit.
...la eccelente virtu loro fece quell occasione conosciutta; donde la loro patria ne fu nobilitata e divento felicissima. (p.42, l.1)
...their excellent virtu made those occasions known, ennobled and made prosperous their countries. (my translation)
The second time virtu is used in the same sentence with conosciuta! The role of virtu as dynamis and dynamis as a "principle of knowledge" can no longer be doubted. The virtu of the great ancients is not only their virtu but the virtu of the occasion in which they find themselves. Nor should one doubt that a non-human nature is manifesting itself in this seemingly human virtu:
Machiavelli's concern is brought out clearly by La Rouchefoucauld, in his comments Des Modeles de la Nature et de la Fortune. "It seems," he says, "that Fortune, changing and capricious as she is, renounces change and caprice to act in concert with nature, and that the two concur at times to produce singular and unusual men who become models for posterity. Nature serves to furnish the qualities; Fortune serves to put them into operation." By "nature" he is obviously referring to human nature, capacities of human agents; "fortune" is his word for scenic conditions, which impose themselves independently of human will. He calls the congruence of agent and scene an "accord de la nature et de la fortune". (The Rhetoric of Motives, p.164)
But we have already seen that fortune for Machiavelli is what nature was to the Sophists--almost pure chance. The "scenic conditions" have an animating nature also and Machiavelli, not having access to cosmological revolutions that followed him, sees that nature as sometimes capricious, but also, as in the second to last chapter, occasionally deliberate. Nature occasionally abets human circumstances or frustrates them as in Cesare Borgia's. Being nature it is only known through a virtu. This virtu reveals both human nature and the occasional deliberate outcroppings of non-human nature. It is a shared dynamis.
The other uses in this chapter refer to the manifestation of commanderly qualities but again, they are no more natural than the uses quoted nor do any of them violate the conceptual schema we have worked out.
Chapter VIII
Here virtu appears eight times. Of note (p.45, l.12). Here it is used in conjunction with "genius" ("ingegno e virtu") in the Roman sense. In this chapter the general use becomes more solid, clearly meaning the ability to acquire and use command over "lo stato" by ones own action, as opposed to fortune. From here on it will assume that meaning whenever it is contrasted with fortuna. It is also distinguished from mere "potenzia"--power.
Chapter IX
Seven times. Here, quite importantly, it is distinguished from scelleratezza in quite strong language.
Non si puo chiamare virtu ammazare li sua cittadini, tradire li amici, essere sanza fede, sanza pieta, sanza religione. (p.58, l.14)
It cannot be called virtu to slaughter one's fellow citizens, betray one's friends, be without faith, without pity, without religion. (my translation)
Machiavelli does not contradict himself later. One should never be without these qualities but, says Machiavelli, one should not fear transgressing them when the occasion demands. Evidently Machiavelli sees the above as human qualities which virtu must at least occasionally manifest.
Chapter IX
Once: contrasted to "una astuzia fortunata" a lucky cunning. In the same vein but less extreme than scelleratezza--outright villainy.
Although used twice in Chapter XI (Hexter's table is wrong here) and six times in Chapter XII, nothing we have not gleaned so far is gained until in Chapter XIII virtu is opposed to "ignavia" which means criminal sloth and has tinges of feminineness to it. The dynamic character of it is reaffirmed as well as its Latin tradition.
We are approaching the climax of the book, Chapters XV and XVI, in which virtu's use as the dynamis of something inanimate induces an antinomian reversal of frightening proportions. Here Hexter's argument (The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation, pp.190-1) that the three uses of it in this chapter are according to our sense of "moral virtue" is so egregiously wrong as not to be excused even in an autodidact. His statement "And this is evident from the fact that on each of virtu's rare appearances in this very common sense of moral qualities it is accompanied by an admonition to the prince that for his own good he had better avoid it or that only a lucky prince could get away with it..." is in plain contradiction to the facts. Machiavelli is dealing with illusion and reality in these chapters and what distinguishes what is called virtu from what is really virtu ("parra virtu" & "virtuosamenta") Hexter has looked at the sentences without reading the philosophy or plain thought. His argument is simply propagation of error. Coming as it does at the crux of Machiavelli's antinomianist investigation it is doubly crippling to the English reader. In fact the prince is eventually encouraged to use it (virtu) as it is mentioned for the first time in Chapter XVI (p.94,l.6) and discouraged from using a particular popular misconception of it ("questa virtu") the second time it appears in that chapter. Both times it means dynamis not "virtue" as will become plain.
In Chapter XV and in Chapter XV only does Machiavelli use virtu in the sense of "virtue". He does so for the purpose expunging that sense of it from the book altogether, concluding:
...si troverra qualche cosa che parra virtu, e seguendola sarebbe la ruina sua e qualcuna altra che parra vizio, e seguendola ne riesce la securita et il bene essere suo (p.93-4, l.21--emphasis mine)
...one finds that those things which seem virtues result in your ruin while those that seem vices result in your security and well being (my translation).
Virtu is plural in this passage where it means "the very common sense of moral qualities." In Chapter XVI it is in adjectival and singular form. Naturally this passage is one of the few times translators actually translate the word as "virtue". Most of the other times virtu is a principle of action, dynamis. Since he is talking about the virtu of princes the word would naturally assume a martial character but in so doing never contradicts its sense as dynamis. This last sentence in Chapter XV (above translated) is the assumption we must make in Chapter XVI. The language in both chapters is so similar (several phrases are repeated) that they must have been written apace. Liberality and parsimony may be considered virtue and vice by others but not by Machiavelli who uses the neutral "qualita" to designate both. Neither time that it is used in Chapter XVI can it possibly mean moral virtue. Yet I have not seen a translation that acknowledges that. To miss that is to miss the entire point of the chapter. Let us analyze the phrase in which virtu first occurs. Machiavelli is speaking of how to use liberality:
...perche, se ella si debbe usare virtuosamente e come la si debbe usare...(p.94, l.6).
It is translated in my English edition as:
because if used virtuously and in the proper way...(The Prince and the Discourses,p.57)
Which to my mind is completely wrong. First of all to translate "virtuosamente" into "virtuously" is not only to make an exception to all the other occasions of translating its occurrence but to go against Machiavelli's expressed wishes in the preceding chapter. Secondly and even more egregious is to translate "e come la si debbe usare" as "in the proper way"
which might be close if the phrase were "e come si debbe usare" but it is not.It is "come la si debbe usare" which translates for the entire fragment as:
...because if you use it virtuosamente and that is the way you must use it...
To make matters worse the misreading is carried further in my text by the addition of a word which is plainly neither meant nor used in the rest of the sentence and whose only inclusion is to buttress the misinterpretation.
e non ti caschera l'infamia del suo contario. (Il Principe,p.94,l.8)
Which is translated in my edition as:
you will incur the disgrace of the contrary vice (The Prince and the Discourses,p.58).
If Machiavelli had wanted to use "vizia" he would have used it. He used it twice in the last chapter and he is not usually imprecise in his expression. It is clear here that he wishes not to. Virtue and vice are transcendental moral qualities for which Machiavelli has already shown contempt. He is concerned with "le verita effetuale della cosa" (p.92, l.9), a phrase he used to begin Chapter XV. He is after the true force of things, not their appearance, and this is where he distinguishes between these most severely. Liberality and parsimony are not virtues or vices but modes of activity, which he describes as such in Chapter XVI. The true force of things, the quality which reveals them is their virtu. This is the way he means virtuosamente. It makes no sense the other way. How does one use a virtue virtuously? How can one avoid using it virtuously? Are we willing to select this sentence as the only redundancy Machiavelli ever wrote in his life because he surely wrote no other as even Hexter admits. Clearly we must amend our sensibilities. Now is when we must remember the arc and the arrow and the tendency of virtu to be a shared dynamis. Remembering that and remembering Heidegger's caution, we are now ready to translate this crucial sentence.
si ella si usa virtuosamente e come la si debbe usare la non sia conosciuta e non te caschera l'infamia del suo contrario
(Note well the use of "conosciuta"--to know--the only time it appeared in a sentence with virtu before was in the sentence about the arrow and the only one in which we noted a shared dynamis of two natures--the only other time out of seventy uses!)
...if you use [liberality] according to its own virtu and that is the way you should use it, it will not be known (appear such to the public) and you will incur the infamy of its opposite.
But note that he goes on to describe the mode of activity which will get you the name of liberality and says of it:
Un principe, adunque, non potendo usare questa virtu del liberale sanna suo danno, in modo che la sia conosciuta, debbe, s'elli prudenti, non si curare del nomo del misero.
Which should be translated as:
A prince then cannot use this virtu of liberalness in the way in which it is known (to the public) without incurring his own danger. He should not, if he is wise, abjure the name (Nomos) of miser.
The translation I have:
A prince, therefore, not being able to use this virtue of liberality without risk if it be known, must not, if he be prudent, object to being called miserly. (The Prince and the Discourses, p.58)
not only makes no sense but misses fully all of what is going on.
What have we gained by this? Only Machiavelli's vision of "le verita effetuale della cosa." Liberality has its own virtu, its own way of really manifesting itself. Machiavelli describes virtu by contrasting it with what appears to be in the popular mind, with, in short, nomos. He concludes.
...talmente che viene a usare liberalita a tutti quelli a qui no toglie, che son infiniti, e miseria a tutti quelli che non da, che son pochi. (p.95)
The translation I have:
...so that he really is liberal to all those from whom he does not take who are infinite in number and niggardly to all those to whom he does not give (which are few enough)...(The Prince and the Discourses, p.58).
While bad grammar is, ironically, accurate, though much weaker than the text. After the complicated reasoning about illusion and reality no English word can reproduce the force that "talmente" has in this passage. "Talmente"--that which is implicit in the use of the word, that which sits behind its meaning, that which really is, factness as fact. In a work noted for its brilliance of style and thought, these two chapters are white hot. It is exaggerating nothing to say they contain some of the finest prose of the Italian language. Machiavelli begins Chapter XV by taking his hit at Plato and continues, redefining reality as activity in the real world, until, at the finish of Chapter XVI the reader is convinced that a serious and enduring antinomianist position has been secured. From these chapters to the end of the book the prose takes a quantum jump in intensity. With no slackening of pace or insight he concludes that it is better to be feared than to keep faith. After the initial reversal of parsimony and liberality, as they seem among men (nomos) and as opposed to what they really are (physis), follows reversals of nomos of the most radical sort culminating in:
...non puo osservare tutti quelli cosi per le quale li uomini sono tenuto buoni sendo spesso necessitato per mantenere lo stato, operare contro alla fide, contro alla carita, contro all umanita contro alla religione. E pero bisogna che elli abbi uno anima disposito a volgersi condo che'e'venti e varazioni della fortuna li commandono, e, come di sopra dissi, non partissi dal bene, me sapere intrare nel male, necessitato. .(Il Principe,p.104-5).
[a prince]...cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And therefore he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind and as the variations of fortune dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained. (The Prince and the Discourses, p.65).
One might note that for the underlined phrase Machiavelli could have substituted virtue as in "moral qualities" for a gain of ten words. He did not and he is not known for being long-winded. He abjured it on purpose.
This reversal of nomos is not merely advised, it is arrived at by the application of a physis/dynamis analysis to concepts previously relegated to nomos. He shows that what is niggardliness according to nomos is by its dynamis, its action, really liberality. How can we contradict him on that example? When applied to the abstract qualities of love, faith, fear, and others, this method establishes an antinomianist position of compelling intensity.
Plato concludes that the physis of a quality is its transmundane essence. Machiavelli shows it to be its action in the real world, its dynamis, the principle by which a thing "comes forward into the expanse of unconcealment." (Early Greek Thinking, p.35)
The crucial use of virtu in those middle chapters brings us into a land of pure dynamis. We cannot come to it, though, with unschooled judgements and hence Machiavelli's concern with history from which we must abstract a recognition of the virtu of the ancients so that, once immersed in the moment, with our minds as mutable as wind, we may recognize not only our own virtu, but the virtu of those things we wish to use and the virtu of the occasion in which we find ourselves.
There is a caution here. Given no transcendental justification for action, we are left to determine our intentions ourselves. ¨The Prince deals, quite frankly, with the acquisition and use of "lo stato". As Machiavelli says:
..e nelle azioni di tutt li uomini, e massime de' principi, dove no e iudizio da reclamare, si guarda al fine..
..and in the actions of men and especially of princes from which there can be no appeal, gauge the results.
(The last phrase is translated in my book as "the end justifies the means". PURE FANTASY--making Machiavelli say what his reputation says he should rather than what he did.)
An anticlimactic note on the last chapters:
It is dangerous to speculate on Machiavelli's intentions unless one has felt his prose in one's own mouth. The last chapters down to the end are extremely intense. I no longer doubt their genuineness. In the second to last chapter Machiavelli merely distinguishes different virtu according to different natures. There is "ordinata virtu" (orderly virtu) "conveniente virtu" (discreet virtu) which are identified with "respetto," "arte," "pacienza" and opposed to "impeto" "violenzia," and impatience. These latter no doubt also have their virtu. Ruling natures are determined by the situation. In one situation a cautious man may rule successfully, in another an impetuous one. That is a consequence of two natures sharing a common dynamis. The continuity of Machiavelli's thought is unbroken down to the end. In the last chapter he calls for the Prince as the agent who is a "virtu duno spirito italiano" by which Italy could show herself.
As for those I have offended:
I suspect they don't take Machiavelli as seriously as I do. The Anaximander fragment is less than a sentence and look what it fuels? Machiavelli is at least as carefully written and more startling in its philosophical schema. Dualistic trains of thought are completely avoided, free will is preserved and one literally finds one's self in the dynamis shared with scene-convening nature. If one feels uncomfortable determining one's intentions for one's self it is certainly not Machiavelli's problem. He would consider that a prerequisite for political consciousness. He's not writing to children.
VIRTU VIVA SPREZZIAM, LODIANO ESTINTA. -Giacomo Leopardi
...SI GUARDA AL FINE. -Niccolo Machiavelli
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