Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

1. Premise

Reason and folly represent two decisive forces for Western culture. The voices of both have always been intertwined since the Greek world; the modern age too is marked by this dialectic. The Renaissance, in recovering the ancient age and its philosophical categories, brings with it the clarity of rationality, but also the abyss of folly [1]. In an original and innovative reading, Michele Ciliberto has connected these themes to the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli in the work Niccolò Machiavelli. Ragione e pazzia, published this year by Laterza. Ciliberto's reading offers an unusual Machiavelli, since the critical literature has always placed him within a rationalistic horizon. The separation between ethics and politics, as philosophical historiography teaches us, portrays Machiavelli's intellectual personality, in the sharpest terms, as that of a thinker who calculates advantage, "la realtà effettuale della cosa", the plain evidence of the practice of power (we think, of course, of The Prince of 1513); by contrast, Ciliberto speaks of the Florentine author as a passionate character, rich in facets of temperament, presenting him as the spirit of his age: «[…] folly can be something else: the capacity to set oneself against common opinions, to risk everything by climbing the ridge that divides life from death, to fight so that the reasons of life – that is, of politics, of the State – may prevail over the forces of crisis, of degeneration, of the end: even while knowing that in the end it will be death that prevails over life, because this is the destiny of all things»[2].

2. Machiavelli's originality

His work as a diplomat leads Machiavelli to a highly complex strategic capacity, but the force of his ideas does not stop there. According to Ciliberto, Machiavelli's interest in Girolamo Savonarola confirms this interpretation since, despite an absolute theoretical opposition, he sees in the preacher and in his excessive oratory the force of passion and of folly itself, two elements that stood in sharp contrast to the political institutions and their intrigues of power. Ciliberto reflects: «Savonarola, for Machiavelli, is certainly shrewd, cunning, malicious: in a word, he is "versuto"» [3]. For Machiavelli, as is well known, religion has no inner truth and is merely instrumentum regni; yet it is useful to him for analysing the dark side of rationality, the advent of the irrational dimension. Machiavelli's atheism is not mechanistic (as that of the Enlightenment thinkers would be) but, for Ciliberto, is close to that of Giordano Bruno [4] and Baruch Spinoza, despite specific differences (Bruno is an author widely studied by Ciliberto, as his numerous publications on the matter demonstrate). For Machiavelli, everything ends with death. For Bruno matter has infinite renovationes, but without a God or a preordained and providential plan.

The view of religion is determined by the critique of the falsity of the mystical attitude, but it does not rest simply on rationality, in that it also greatly involves the dimension of passion. I would like to underline the very important link between this vision of Machiavelli's and the concept of desire; above all in the theatrical works, La Mandragola, Clizia, L'asino, this theme emerges which, as in Spinoza's Ethics, becomes an affirmative force, an expressive power that unites reason and passion. Machiavelli manages to introduce into political-philosophical discourse the element of desire, which connects to the question of conflict. In his notes Antonio Gramsci channelled this nexus into the bed of the class struggle, of struggle tout court against the domination and repression of power and of the powerful, showing the revolutionary side of Machiavelli, the one for which politics is conflict, struggle, the overturning of the state of things [5]. As Ciliberto recalls, Machiavelli lives in a Florence that is dense and full of plots, conspiracies, cabals (let us recall the most important and famous, the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478) and does not take refuge in the imagination of an ideal state, in utopia, as do other authors, among them Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella or Francis Bacon of New Atlantis, as well as James Harrington with Oceana. Machiavelli knows the concrete and real dynamic of politics through his activity as a diplomat but, at the same time, he holds that its soul is tumult, the political category of indignatio [6]; this feature is necessary precisely because it is in the oppositional relation, in the impassioned contrast, that vitality is generated. I underline, in agreement with Ciliberto, the closeness between Bruno and Machiavelli, because the Neapolitan philosopher speaks precisely of a continual vicissitude of matter as life, which the individual can grasp only with a titanic surge, the "eroico furore" (furor heroicus) [7].

3. Bruno and Machiavelli

For Ciliberto, both Bruno and Machiavelli hold that reason is a path full of passion, never tranquil, because every act and gesture of rationality is intertwined with folly, that is, with disharmonic tension and with the rupture of the rigid scheme. Reason and passion are, for Machiavelli, the essence of man. For the Florentine philosopher and historian, human nature is radically conflictual; there is no solidarity or goodness in nature, as, on the contrary, Rousseau will hold. If we think of the work Discourses on Livy, we have the classical soul of Machiavelli, where harmony, balance and symmetry triumph (medietas virtus est); when the classical Machiavelli meets concrete political reality, he affirms the necessity of passion as the only dimension capable of living and sustaining conflict, of grasping the fluidity of tumult. Machiavelli's political ideal is certainly not the principality, useful only at a given moment of crisis (Duke Valentino, Cesare Borgia, is highly capable of handling this situation, he is "golpe e lione", skilled in "simulare e dissimulare" everything), but the political dream of the Florentine author is the republic, a field of struggle between reason and passion, between rationality and folly, on the model of the Roman republic. The Secretary's true political allegiance is evident from the Discourses and is indisputably republican.

The humanistic dimension takes on, in Machiavelli, anti-classical features, yet ones still internal to the classical; indeed Machiavelli's man has no kind of ontological centrality, possesses no originally privileged identity, has no essence. As will be the case for Marx, Machiavelli denies the positivity of human nature, because every action and practice of life, as in politics, is already marked by artificiality, by the construction that unites reason and passion, folly and rationality. We can affirm that the centrality of the category of conflict goes beyond politics, since it invests the Florentine Secretary's entire approach to existence. Conflict is animated by passion, by folly itself joined to strategic reason, to utilitarian calculation; yet the power of folly, of furor, of excess (as in Bruno and, at the opposite pole, in Savonarola) marks a radical difference from that Machiavelli who has too often been described as a lucid and cold rationalist. Indignatio and conflict rise to become keys of political and historical reading for understanding the dynamism of the relation between virtue and fortune; fortune is comparable to chance, to the example of the river that risks overflowing its banks, and virtue, conversely, which implies the capacity to manage this violent flow. The same holds for the prince, who must devise a strategy to contain revolts and seditions without repressing them, but turning them to his own advantage. The figure of the prince is not only a guide: he is also a strategist, and it is no accident that in Machiavelli's bestiary he can only be the centaur, half man and half animal, the princely symbol par excellence. Again Ciliberto writes: «Enemy of "neutrality", Machiavelli was an "extremist" convinced that only bold, mad, excessive actions could yield any result – in politics as in "Love" -; without ever, however, harbouring any illusion» [8]. What counts, for Machiavelli, is the clarity of the inquiry into the real and the spasmodic, impassioned and mad striving for freedom. He too is close to the Copernican climate that will mark modernity and its innovation, where the spiritualism of providentialist and mystical heritage shatters, to the advantage of an infinite search of man and of his world-shaping action. Antonio Banfi recalls: «Thus for Galileo the Copernican man is the enlightened spirit, for whom truth is the result of an infinite search in the continual interaction of reason and experience, an open truth, for which reality cannot be enclosed in an absolute, finalistic system» [9].

4. Machiavelli the classic

Machiavelli set out on this path but, as we have understood from Ciliberto's original interpretation, the gesture of the Florentine Secretary is not exhausted in the search for strategies for the ends of power; on the contrary, the republican trace is kindled in Machiavelli's soul through passion, through the example, in which he does not actually believe, of the mad friar (Savonarola), all the way to the political fury that invents tumult in order to think and live another city, another possible community, a heroism similar to that of Bruno, where man, being an animal among animals, must distinguish himself through the construction of an existence and a language that is the harbinger of freedom. Again Ciliberto: «The State, in order to develop and become powerful in a condition of freedom, needs movement, dynamism, and order. What interests Machiavelli is to interweave order and life, inserting a principle of order into life: he is interested in "dynamising" order and "ordering" life which, if it is not ordered – that is, healthy -, decays, dies. Order and life must join together in a dynamic way, and it is in this context that the decisive importance – but only when it is ordered – of conflict appears» [10]. As a "classic", the Florentine Secretary spills beyond modernity itself, placing himself transversally, refusing the naive optimism of the progressives, the utopianism of future worlds, the false promise of a salvific beyond; nevertheless, he remains a "classic", since, among its attributes, this category essentially requires one decisive factor: critique. Machiavelli was a critic of his time, but the originality of the figure restored by Ciliberto shows us that the method used by the author of The Prince is not made of pure reason, but is a passionate inquiry aimed at understanding his own time in its foundations. It is no accident that Italo Calvino located the power of the classic in telling us the unsayable, in radically disorienting us: «The reading of a classic must give us some surprise»[11]. Machiavelli is immersed and intermingled in the tragic events of his age in a circularity of the timely and the untimely: on the one hand, indeed, he marks with great pertinence the rhythm of the events contemporary to him; on the other, however, he universalises their contexts, giving rise to a reflection on the foundations of politics and, a fact anything but secondary, of psychology. Max Horkheimer recalls both these aspects: «Machiavelli's greatness consists in the fact that, at the dawn of the new society, he recognised the possibility of a science of politics that in its principles corresponds to modern physics and psychology, and that he formulated its fundamental features in a simple and precise way»[12].

Ciliberto's reading places Machiavelli among the standard-bearers of an anti-modernity or, better still, of an anti-humanistic and anti-spiritualistic modernity, where the cluster Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel is opposed to the axis Machiavelli, Bruno, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche. «Machiavelli is totally extraneous to humanistic ideology; he belongs to other experiences, to other cultural worlds […] Machiavelli's is also an experience distant from, or extraneous to, Christianity» [13]; Ciliberto confirms the renovatio with regard to the hermeneutics of the Florentine author, removing him from the tradition that insisted simply on the separation between ethics and politics against a purely rational background. It is clear that this split is confirmed by Ciliberto's study; yet it comes to open up, revealing a passional substratum not previously explored, whose discovery outlines the ambiguity of an author but also of an age. The aspect of political reason, interwoven with the irrational conatus, makes Machiavelli a profound analyst of emotivity tout court. Beyond the search for the "realtà effettuale della cosa" in the political sphere, the Florentine Secretary traces the effectuality of the various affective tonalities, the Stimmung that cuts across the human unconscious, independent of historical periodisations. A modern politicity shows itself tenacious in critically undertaking that contradictory bond between the institutional aspect (the nefarious yet ever-pursued logic of compromise that the diplomat Machiavelli knew well) and the passional magma that animates the political arena; a contemporary scholar such as Miguel Abensour grasps its features: «[…] Machiavelli is not content to think politics and domination together, but articulates them within a dynamic relation, the antagonistic and invariant relation between the great and the people – as if he wanted to make his readers understand that the people's desire for freedom is dialectically connected to the desire for domination of the great, because he thinks that freedom is born permanently in the struggle against it» [14]. This philosophical position marks a new classicity even in the very conception of the history of political philosophy that broadens its own categories into the recesses of universal pathicity.

5-Concluding remarks

Machiavelli is finally received by a large part of current historiography as a moving bridge between various positions, with no possible unitary identification: humanist and not, drawn to the religious yet forerunner of a modern atheism, diplomatic and conflictual, rational and passionate, moral and libertine; antiquity, in the last instance, perhaps represents the continuum to which his thought and his activity turn in the evening company of the great Roman classics (from Livy to Sallust and Tacitus). Ciliberto has synthesised this "unprecedented Machiavelli" through the pertinence of his relations with other philosophers and figures contemporary to him (above all Giordano Bruno and Girolamo Savonarola), showing connections and oppositions that restore the internal dialectic, at times pushed to the oxymoron, that animated Machiavelli. The trail traced by Ciliberto is fruitful for further study, both with respect to the confrontation with the Renaissance climate (from the utopian writings to the scientific paradigms then arising, from the religious Reformation to the new metaphysical theses) and as regards our own time, which is compelled, it seems to us, to reappropriate Machiavelli's categorial lenses in order to decode today's processes. The "classic" Machiavelli carries within himself eternal truths of the political arena, and Ciliberto has directed us toward their rediscovery. Classicity and critique, a threshold between passion and rationality toward freedom. And Machiavelli's freedom is precisely there, between reason and folly.

Notes

[1] Among the many studies, by now classics on the subject, we may recall the most paradigmatic: cf. J. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, Basel, 1860; It. trans. by D. Valbusa, La civiltà del Rinascimento in Italia, Newton Compton, Rome 1994; E. Garin, Medioevo e Rinascimento, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1966; K. Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, Berlin-Leipzig, 1918; It. trans. by D. Cantimori, Riforma, Rinascimento, Umanesimo, Sansoni, Florence 1986. Fundamental is the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam: cf. Erasmus of Rotterdam, Elogio della follia (1511), It. trans. by L. D'Ascia, Fabbri Editori, Milan 1996.

[2] M. Ciliberto, Niccolò Machiavelli. Ragione e pazzia, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2019, p. XII.

[3] Ibid., p. 88.

[4] «In Machiavelli the world is finite, and the renovatio occurs a limited number of times: at the end there is, inescapable, death. For Bruno, just as the crises are infinite, so the renovationes are innumerable, in an endless process of apocalypses and renewals»; ibid., p. 282.

[5] In the Gramscian hermeneutic Machiavelli becomes the inspirer of the Prince as collective intellectual, the one who consciously triggers the struggle, who organises the intellectual function in avant-garde fashion: «These two fundamental points: the formation of a national-popular collective will, of which the modern Prince is at the same time the organiser and the active, operative expression, and intellectual and moral reform, ought to constitute the structure of the work»; A. Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli in Quaderni del carcere (vol. 4, 1949), Editori Riuniti, Rome 1971, p. 23.

[6] Cf. F. Del Lucchese, Tumulti e indignatio, Ghibli, Milan 2004.

[7] «Besides, for Machiavelli as for Bruno hell is among men and within men. If hell exists, it is in the human condition»; M. Ciliberto, Niccolò Machiavelli. Ragione e pazzia, cit., p. 148.

[8] Ibid., p. 35.

[9] A. Banfi, Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1961, p. 339.

[10] M. Ciliberto, Niccolò Machiavelli. Ragione e pazzia, cit., pp. 236-237.

[11] I. Calvino, Perché leggere i classici (1991), Mondadori, Milan 2012, p. 8.

[12] M. Horkheimer, Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie, Frankfurt am Main, 1930; Gli inizi della filosofia borghese della storia, It. trans. by G. Backhaus, Einaudi, Turin 1978, p. 5.

[13] M. Ciliberto, Niccolò Machiavelli. Ragione e pazzia, cit., p. 6.

[14] M. Abensour, Pour une philosophie politique critique. Itinéraires, Paris 2009; Per una filosofia politica critica, It. trans. by M. Pezzella, Jaca Book, Milan 2011, pp. 49-50.

Alberto Simonetti (PhD in Philosophy and Human Sciences) studied in Perugia, Florence and Urbino. His publications include: Follia e politica, deComporre, 2014; L'insavio, Morlacchi 2016; La filosofia di Proust, Mimesis 2018; Il penultimo del pensiero, Mimesis 2019. He has written various articles for philosophical and cultural journals on wide-ranging themes.