TWO

Counsels of Fear

In the previous chapter I emphasized the central role in the dominant political philosophy of a certain perspective on human things, a perspective that condenses these things into an element of great simplicity and even poverty, the separate living-individual, an element that has nothing specifically human but that, once established in its role as a basis of all that is human, overturns at once our understanding of the human world and the way we intend to organize it. This perspective does not result from focusing on an aspect of the human phenomenon but from reducing the phenomenon to the fact of the separation of separate individuals. This dynamic image-idea provides the point of departure and the point of perspective for a radically new understanding and organization of the human world.¹ We should pause to consider this thought process with some attention.

As I said earlier, the determining and transforming power of this element—the living-individual—results from the fact that everything that is natural is gathered and concentrated in it. All the energy and the authority of nature are supposed to reside in this element, which is at once simple and indeterminate. In these traits it is more like a constituent of the physical than of the human world. It is not the individuality of the individual—the specific content of his particularity—that is considered, but rather the fact of being a separate individual, an individual “in general,” thus the very fact of separation. From the point of view of conceptual elaboration, it proceeds from modern natural science, or from the modern philosophy of nature, or, again, taking account of the degree of abstraction of the notion of the “individual,” we can say that it proceeds from modern metaphysics. If we consider the notion that originally gave form and life to this element—that is, the notion of conatus/endeavor/“effort”—we see that it belongs to reflection or speculation on natural movement or dynamism in general.

In any case, whether one prefers to speak of physics or of metaphysics to designate the field to which the notion of individual-conatus belongs, what is constant is that it belongs to a theoretical discipline, that it derives from theoretical science. It is in effect entirely determined before the question arises concerning the desirable order of the city or the question of the just action to perform.² One might think that the new physics and the promises that were contained in the reduction of the four Aristotelian causes to the efficient cause had such power over minds that the temptation to think the human world, including and first of all political life, in the same terms became irresistible, and that from this point the individual-conatus, the living-individual-in-movement, appeared or was elaborated as the causal element that was necessary for the intelligibility and the ordering of the human world. To this plausible conjecture we might add the following complementary conjecture, which is no less plausible but tends in the opposite direction: the adoption of the theoretical point of view on the human world was so irresistible precisely because the meaning of practical philosophy, or simply of practical questioning, had already been lost or irrevocably obscured owing to political and religious circumstances. How in effect can one pose the practical question, the question “What is to be done?,” when the authoritative response is twofold, since it may be given by the political authority or by the religious authority? How was the practical question to be posed judiciously when it received two responses, sometimes or often incompatible? In any case, the meaning of the process, or rather of the transformation, is clear even though its causes remain mysterious. The meaning of the process, or of the transformation, is the victory of the theoretical point of view in the consideration of the human world.

The Theoretical Point of View and the Downgrading of Politics

It is hard to say which we should admire most, the enormity of the consequences of this transformation or the simplicity of the thought process that sets it off and continually sustains it. This thought process, as I have said, consists in the gathering and the condensation of human traits or characteristics in the separate living-individual, a being that in itself has nothing properly human: each individual contains and bears the whole of humanity, and this assumption or taking-on of humanity is repeated indefinitely or indifferently for each individual. This operation³ of condensation is illustrated in every way most significantly in the approach of Thomas Hobbes, who means to construct a political order on the exclusive basis of this power-hungry individual-conatus as the constitutive and causal element.

Hobbes’s approach both postulates the homogeneity of human motives—all human beings obey the same motives—and reduces all these to the desire for power. This approach seems legitimate in itself, since one can say, and Hobbes says in effect, that it is on the basis of the dispositions that are the most widespread among human beings that one has the best chance of constructing a stable political order. But what is most decisive and most contestable in this approach is not what it affirms—that the desire for power is the most fundamental human trait—but what it fails to consider, that is, the very question of action, of how the living-individual is also an acting-agent who confronts the problem of practice. To posit that we are all more or less driven by a desire for power that ceases only with death⁴ is to say something powerful and that has a certain verisimilitude, but which leaves aside the perspective and the problems of the agent when he is asking: What is to be done? Hobbes’s affirmations concerning human nature do not confront the questions the agent asks himself because Hobbes ignores the reasons and the language that for every person accompany the supposed desire for power, that specify it not only quantitatively or according to intensity but also qualitatively or according to what I will call the ties of reason: under the conditions of political and social life, the desire for power is excited or on the contrary moderated, or in any case informed, by the idea of the just that necessarily accompanies it, which gives birth to a whole range of human claims in the public space, claims for which Hobbes shows such a remarkable and damaging disdain. By condensing the springs of action down to the desire for power, Hobbes left no place for action’s reasons and postulated or implied that these make no difference or have no determining power. The question posed by Hobbes is no longer the question the agent poses to himself, the practical and “internal” question of reflective choice, but the question posed by the “artisan” or the “artificer,”⁵ the mechanical or “external” question of the best way to organize the cohabitation or the compatibility of desires for power, desires which are all alike in that they are “without reason.”

In this way the theoretical or scientific perspective determines and fixes one element—the living-individual-in-movement—whose content in terms of nature is, one might say, so elevated and so univocal, so determinant and “causal,” that there is no more place for properly practical reason: this individual’s nature is devoid of the interior amplitude and of the indetermination that springs from the meaningful plurality of human motives. Its action is determined in a way that dispenses with deliberation or reflective choice or that reduces these to the smallest share: what sets it in motion is a certain “preference” at which the desiring faculty stops for no particular reason. The individual-conatus is not properly an agent; it produces effects that resemble actions. Under the regime of the theoretical perspective, or of the new science, reason largely deserts the agent of action in order to assume the standpoint of an observer of human nature, who is also the constructor of the new political order.

The approach that we are trying to bring into focus postulates or presupposes that the human phenomenon considered in its essentials can be viewed directly from the theoretical perspective. This postulate or supposition has two inseparable aspects. On the one hand, it is accepted that the phenomenon can be held in view, that it does not overflow our vision, or trouble it, or mislead it, which assumes that this knowledge of the human world possesses from its very first movement something sufficient and definitive, something, as it were, absolute. This first movement can be so self-assured, so sure of the validity of its “take,” only because it proceeds by the simplification and the impoverishment of the phenomenon, which it reduces to the separate individual. The phenomenon offers no rebellion, no resistance, no defiance or reticence to be feared; it is entirely mastered by what will soon be called, with modesty, the “hypothesis.” On the other hand, it is implied that the uncertainties of action have no meaningful or decisive character as concerns the understanding of the human world. Practical questions—which are modulations of the originary question, What is to be done?—do not penetrate the philosopher’s field of questioning, or only do so as objects subjected to a sovereign point of view, and not as questions that affect the very configuration of the field. Not being “touched” by practical questions, the “new philosopher’s” or “new scientist’s” reason finds itself incapable of and little interested in entering into the agent’s reasons. The intelligence responsible for illuminating the human world disdains getting into the question of action and making itself a practical science or at least making a place for practical science. Declining to illuminate or to guide the agent in his action, it devotes all its strength to determining and then to organizing the external conditions of action. In this way Hobbes situates human beings in the framework of equal rights, or equal freedom, by means of the fear inspired by the sovereign. For the rest, as long as they obey the sovereign, the citizens do as they like, the philosopher or scientist having nothing to say or to think about this.

This lowering or relegation of the practical question brings with it a lowering of the status of the political question in which the practical question naturally culminates, since political action is, in the end, “the greatest action,” the action with the highest stakes and the greatest risks. If we lower at the outset the status of the question What is to be done?, we necessarily and particularly depreciate that of the question Who governs? If the question What is to be done? is left to the unexamined freedom of the agent, while the philosopher or the scientist is content to busy himself exclusively with determining the conditions of action, then the question Who governs? can be raised, if at all, only after the conditions of government have been determined. The question of government—the practical and political question par excellence—has no place, or arises only after the institution that is responsible for and productive of the conditions of action—that is, the sovereign state—has already been established. We see then that the political meaning of the modern state is very difficult to grasp, since there are solid reasons for contesting the idea that it is a properly and authentically political institution. It can be considered instead the expression or the concretization of a theoretical point of view on the human world. The sovereignty that defines it operates on a metapolitical or pseudopolitical plane, since it expresses a theoretical viewpoint—a “sovereign” viewpoint—on the human phenomenon. One might say: the state as such does more or does something other than what a human being can do by his action.

It is important not to misunderstand this relegation of the political that is inseparable from the modern theoretical perspective and from the state that expresses and, as it were, institutionalizes this perspective. It would be hard to maintain that Spinoza or Hobbes was less interested in politics than Plato or Aristotle. It would be more correct to say that the moderns expected more from political organization, whereas they accorded less importance and meaning to political action. They expected more from an organization that they wanted to make less political, that is, less dependent on the actions of members of society and, first of all, the actions of those who govern.

Machiavelli, Idealism, and Realism

The hypertrophy of theory, which is characteristic of the approach we are trying to bring into focus, is ordinarily interpreted as the coming or the introduction of a “realistic” or “scientific” point of view on human things, a point of view that has prevailed decisively— a victory that defines modernity itself—over the “idealistic” point of view, the ancient or Christian perspective of beautiful or good action. The contrast between idealism and realism is extremely suggestive, and it has the additional advantage of providing an interpretation of the quarrel between ancients and moderns that is very favorable to the moderns while still appearing generous towards the ancients. At the same time, to say things with simplicity, it is hard to understand why human beings would have waited so long to “see things as they are.”

Let us consider this point. If we look at human things from a “realist” or “scientific” perspective, we do not so much see them “as they are” but rather as they look when we dismiss or hide the acting human being’s point of view. In effect we cannot look at human things “as they are,” since properly speaking they are not; rather, they must be done or “acted.” More precisely, “the things that change because they depend on us” cannot be seen as we see “the things that do not change because they do not depend on us,” except by removing from the former their practical quality and therefore the specific indetermination that is the source of their mutability. This becomes clearer if we consider the move made by Machiavelli, who is now celebrated as the founder of the realist or even scientific point of view on human action, and specifically on political action. I would like to show that Machiavelli in no way looks at human action “as it is,” since he replaces action “as it is”—practical action, one might say—with theoretical action, that is, action as it can be seen, action as it can be taken into view wholly by the theoretician and that therefore is not obscured or confused by the agent’s point of view.

I will comment on what is doubtless the most cited passage in all of Machiavelli’s works:

But since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good. Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.⁶

Machiavelli’s point of departure is thus the very big gap (“tanto discosto”) between the way people live and the way they should live, or the way people say they should live. Practically everyone can agree with this observation. But what follows from this?, and, especially, what is to be done given this observation? The natural approach of the acting human being would be to want to reduce this gap and so, in order effectively to reduce it, to encourage, or persuade, or even force people whose way of life one is concerned with to conduct themselves as they ought, or at least to progress in the right direction as much as possible. In any case this gap only seems so big, and this big gap only urgently requires a solution, in the eyes of someone who is intensely preoccupied with the way we should live and who cannot resign himself to the way people actually behave. It is for the “idealist” that the gap seems so big, whereas, if we give words their natural meaning, the “realist” is content to “take people as they are” without much worrying about what they should be. The spontaneous and sincere debate between the “realist” and the “idealist” on the best response to the chronic failure of human beings in action was portrayed admirably by Molière in the dialogue in The Misanthrope between Alceste and Philinte.⁷ Machiavelli’s approach encounters or creates very different stakes.

In fact, although his first gesture, his first accent, seems to appeal to the idealist in us, immediately afterward Machiavelli turns his back on any action that would seem to be naturally called for by his observation. He does not denounce the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees; he does not overthrow the tables of the money changers; he does not seek “a far-off place on earth where one is free to be an honorable man.”⁸ What does he do, or, rather, what does he say? He advances this proposition in the form of a maxim that we have read: “He who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.” The reader must rub his eyes: Why worry in this way about those who insist absolutely on doing what they should do, since we know—Machiavelli has just reminded us—that most people do something else entirely and since, one might think, they do it precisely in order not to be ruined but to preserve themselves? Who needs Machiavelli’s advice and the “effectual truth” of human things that he promises us? What good is it to recommend to people that they act in the way they act spontaneously? The fate of a few “idealists” or of some Don Quixote may be the stuff of tragedy, or rather no doubt of comedy, but it is quite hard to see what untold motive their misfortune might provide, what “news” either good or bad it might bring, to someone who conforms to the ordinary course of human things and conducts himself in the usual way of those born of woman.

One might say that Machiavelli is simply asking us to regard what people do without indignation or a desire for reform, since what they should do is only a dream and a chimera. Surely it is not good to take more than one’s share, but since people regularly do so, it is reasonable to steal at least when the gain justifies the risk. This in sum would be the realist’s commandment. There is something of this in Machiavelli, but, again, why urge people to do what most of them would do anyway? Why carry coal to Newcastle? Still less can we attribute such platitudes to Machiavelli given that this great mind boasts of bringing human beings a new truth.

We must return to the great “gap” between what people do and what they should do. As I emphasized at the outset, Machiavelli does not draw the practical consequences from this observation that it naturally calls for, that is, the consequences that would be drawn by an agent truly concerned with practice and effectively preoccupied with doing good and performing good actions. At the same time there is no doubt that the recognition of this “gap” is indeed the starting point, or at least a decisive point of support in his approach. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that in Machiavelli’s eyes this gap is evidence less of a practical failure of human beings—of a “sin” by them—than what one might call a gnoseological failure. It is not so much that people do not succeed in doing what they should do; the decisive point is rather that they do not achieve clarity on what they do. They do not know what they do, and for this Machiavelli does not forgive them.

Just what, more precisely, is this ignorance or misunderstanding of the self? I would summarize things as follows: on the one hand, human beings cannot help doing what they do; on the other, they cannot help wanting in some way to do what they should do. At the same times as they do what they do, which is nothing to be proud of, they speak as if they were doing what they should do; often they even find a way to imagine that they are in fact doing what they should. The consequence of this division of the mind or duplicity is that they see double and that, without of course doing what they should do, they do badly what it is that they do. Thus, what they should do, which is summed up in the precepts of natural law or of morality, is not so much what they fail to do, what they do not succeed in attaining or respecting, but rather something that troubles their perspective and falsifies their vision, and so hinders or diverts or in any case diminishes their powers. Human beings cheerfully disobey natural law as soon as it hampers their desires, but they are sufficiently intimidated by it that they do not go all the way in what they have started. Morality weakens them without correcting them. The law that is supposed to regulate their action only deprives it of the energy or scope of which it was capable. This explains why an incestuous and parricide condottiere⁹ dared not raise his hand against Pope Julius II, who had imprudently put his fate in the former’s hands. The condottiere did not accomplish the great action that the circumstances called for, the great action that the circumstances had delivered, one might say, on a silver platter.¹⁰

To be sure, Machiavelli never treats natural law thematically. Still, when he warns the candidate-prince that “men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony,”¹¹ he is invoking at once the commandments of natural law and the irregular relationship between human beings and this law. He only considers it in certain concrete circumstances, where it is present and more or less active in the conscience of agents. He does not criticize it as such, but in every way possible he incites his reader not to be intimidated by it in any case where it might come between the agent and an action worthy of being undertaken. Machiavelli does not suggest that the natural law is invalid itself and that it would be good or at least indifferent to kill and to pillage. There are prohibitions and recommendations that belong to the human condition and that taken together constitute the natural law, and it is good or useful that people in general have a certain respect for the commandments of this law, which protects their “humanity.”¹² But it belongs to those who have the ambition to act on a large scale not to allow themselves to be stopped by this law when it would turn them away from a great and necessary action: they must be ready and “know how to enter into evil” if they are constrained to do so—sapere intrare nel male, necessitato.¹³ Machiavelli cannot wish for the generalization of this audacity, since the success of the prince endowed with virtù—the “good effects” of his bad actions—depends upon the honest pusillanimity that constitutes the “goodness” of the many. The great and brutal action of the prince, which often consists in “executions,” can produce its purging and pacifying effects only because its greatness and brutality break with the horizon of expectation of the many, which is circumscribed by natural law. The people did not expect that, and because surprise is accompanied by a certain admiration, they can hide the fear they feel from themselves, the fear that is the main cause of the efficaciousness of the prince’s action.¹⁴

Thus natural or moral law, which hinders and weakens people of action, is, according to Machiavelli, insufficient for gathering human beings together. The vague wish to do what is right that morality arouses has little power over human desires that are in themselves unlimited. One might perhaps say that it brings people together imaginatively or that it arises from human imagination, not from the special imagination of poets but from the general imagination of the species as shaped by the wise people—philosophers or prophets—who conceive their “imaginary republics.” In its simplest and perhaps most profound essence, the natural law is the way human beings imagine that they are brought together, or the way they conceive the imaginary cause of their union.

According to Machiavelli, it is important and indeed urgent to awaken them from this false dream of unity. There are not so many ways to do this; in the end there is only one, and that is to make them afraid, as we have already seen. The only thing that effectively gathers people together is fear. Fear is, to be sure, a strange way to gather human beings, by making each person feel his limitless preference for himself. Whereas natural law brought people together imaginatively while leaving them passive and separate, fear really unites them by forcing each individual to “recognize himself,” that is, to leave behind the imaginary associations in which his capacities for action are invested and lost.

Here arises an objection, or a complication. Natural law and fear, it may be argued, are not mutually exclusive, since most human beings are at least intimidated by the commandments of natural law—which is moreover the main source of their mediocre obedience to authority as well as of the setbacks they suffer in their political enterprises, as we have seen in the case of the petty tyrant of Perugia. It is indeed precisely this fear of natural law or of the gods who guarantee it that Machiavelli intends to drive from the hearts or minds of those he addresses; in this way they will be able usefully to frighten those who remain intimidated by natural law, and who doubtless will always be the greater number.

I will sum up the gnoseological situation that Machiavelli proposes to sort out and to reform in the following way: If human beings are victims of a great gap between what they do and what they should do; if they continually produce this great gap that confuses their outlook and hinders their action; if, to be brief, they do not know what they are doing, this is because they are prisoners of this knot in which fear of death is interwoven with fear of natural or divine law—the two adjectives are interchangeable here because what these two laws or two types of law have in common (besides the fact that they include largely the same commandments) is that their commandments are produced by no one, in any case by no living human being, even though it is of course human beings who administer their interpretation and execution. In our context, it seems to me that what most decisively determines Machiavelli’s analysis as well as his prescriptions is the contrast between, on the one hand, the fear produced by a person or group of persons engaged in a great action, the fear produced by one or more agents who are determinate and visible, and, on the other hand, the fear of a commandment given by no one and that everyone senses vaguely it would be good or necessary or imperative to obey—that is, a commandment from a source that is invisible and humanly indeterminate or indeterminable. What orders Machiavelli’s perspective is the polarity between a humanity that is poorly unified and torpid, a prisoner of a natural law that is protective but paralyzing, and certain human agents of a new kind whom this law no longer intimidates, and who moreover are up to the task of conducting their action in a manner fully adequate to what the situation at once authorizes and commands.

We see how Machiavelli deals with the great “gap” that provides the point of departure for his approach, the point from which we have ourselves begun. As I have emphasized, Machiavelli does not respond to this “gap” or seek to reduce it practically by indicating paths to a better way of acting—to a more just or wise way—nor, moreover, by suggesting, as will other moralists and political writers, that the goal be lowered and that we not aim at what is too high and impossible to attain.¹⁵ He focuses on this gap and fixes or determines it, and, rather than seeking to suppress or at least to reduce it, he seeks a way around the domain in which this gap is necessarily produced, that is, the domain of practice itself. This gap sums up the practical problem and the traditional formulation of the practical problem, a formulation that Machiavelli proposes to leave behind and from which he proposes to emancipate us. This gap is produced necessarily by the shaky way in which human beings negotiate their conduct, caught as they are between their limitless and essentially irresistible desires and the commandments of natural law that intimidate them without governing them. As paradoxical as it may seem, in order to escape the practical stagnation in which he sees humanity languishing, Machiavelli elaborates and promotes a nonpractical view of action—an action greater than action, or in any case an action no longer subject to the limits that spring from the fact that action is naturally produced by an agent and that it depends therefore on the virtuous or vicious dispositions of this agent, an action no longer determined and limited by the dispositions and ends of the agent but instead opened up to all the possibilities inherent in the situation.

We see how emancipation with respect to the practical perspective and the point of view of the agent seems considerably to enlarge the field of possible actions; for, whereas the exploitation of the possibilities of the situation has been constrained by the dispositions and reasons of the agent, Machiavelli imagines that all the possibilities of the situation might be opened to an agent who may be said to be without quality, one capable of changing “as the winds of fortune and variations of things command him”¹⁶—in brief, an agent unencumbered by the limits that define him as an agent. The possibilities of the situation, or the circumstances, rather than being a component of practical reasoning, a component that is indispensable but secondary because there are circumstances only for someone who acts in a certain way and with a certain goal, now rise to the first rank and exist, so to speak, in themselves, or as sufficient to themselves. This is possible only if one can posit circumstances independently of any action envisaged by a definite agent, thus only if the circumstances can be the object of a purely theoretical regard. It is by this inversion of the relation between the agent and the circumstances of his action that Machiavelli violently subjects the human world to theoretical reason.

The consequence of Machiavelli’s approach is that, although the field of action seems to expand considerably, it becomes indeterminate at the same time and for the same reasons. Paradoxically, it is impossible to derive a “Machiavellian politics” from Machiavelli’s work. What were his political projects? Did the great “realist” really believe that Italy was ripe for unity?¹⁷ Was the pope the enemy to be liquidated, as he regretted that Giovampagolo had not dared to do? Or was he the only person capable of unifying Italy against the barbarians, as he seems to suggest several times? Such questions are fascinating but ultimately vain. By disdaining the question of the limited indetermination proper to action performed by an agent whose dispositions as well as his ends are relatively stable, by treating with contempt the indetermination that is specifically characteristic of practice, Machiavelli produces an indetermination of an unprecedented extent and quality, an indetermination that can be called limitless. But looking at the world as the immense and indeterminate sum of the circumstances of all possible actions—a phrase in which the adjective has become radically stronger than the noun—he invites the undertaking of an action that answers to the limitless quality of these possibilities, an action that therefore requires not an agent determined by his dispositions and his reasons but, on the contrary, an agent who makes himself capable of all possible action by overturning the limits inherent in his character as an agent.

Although it has always been and will always be impossible to derive a political project from Machiavelli’s own words, there is no question of underestimating the effects of his words on political thought and life. By emancipating the human enterprise from all positive reference to natural law, and by opening up an impassable chasm between the domain of the new possible action and the observable condition of human beings, in which the natural law deprives their action of energy and of edge, Machiavelli invites us to reconstitute the political order from top to bottom and to deliver to human beings the great secret of the operation: fear, appropriately applied, will be an advantageous substitute for law. Cutting through the knot where the fear of death is interwoven with the fear of the law, he isolates in all its purity, I am inclined to say, the power of fear—its shaping and founding power. There is no question of making Machiavelli out as a thinker of “individualism.” Still, with an acuity that continues to trouble us, he shows us fear as applied or manipulated by the prince, or by the republican magistrate, seeking out each individual at the point where he or she forgets the law or, more generally, is left with no orienting factor but this very fear. Fear has ceased to be one affect among others that are equally powerful, an affect that has its place in the disposition of affects; instead the fear that one human being arouses in another appears as the greatest power among human beings. This power consists not only in making some people conform to the will of others but, more profoundly, in producing in an absolute sense one who is as independent from all law as the most exalted prince. According to what might be called its most radical or most original definition, the individual is the being whose most active and deepest orienting factor is fear, especially fear of violent death at the hands of others.

By making natural law into this factor, which is at once very strong and very weak, and under whose power human action is obscured and encumbered, Machiavelli contributed more than any other author to the discrediting of natural law. He brought out the opacity and viscosity of this hobbled existence by deploying the polarity—a brilliant polarity that will continue to control if not effectively to enlighten us—between, on the one hand, an action that is greater than action and that despises law, and, on the other, a passion more penetrating than any other and that makes us forget the law. By making the gap between what people do and what they should do the stumbling block that demands that we leave the very plane of practical life, with its inevitable uncertainty and incompetence, Machiavelli instilled in us an excessive desire for clarity that, rather than opening us up to unprecedented domains, closes us off from access to the field of practical life, that is, of action under law, a field in which we indeed observe a great gap between what people do and what they should do.

The Human Condition and the Christian Condition

It remains for me to touch the most delicate point of the situation, that is, of Machiavelli’s analysis and of his dispositions or intentions.

Is this practical condition of which I have spoken—the condition that Machiavelli invites us to overcome, that is, the condition in which members of society, intimidated by natural law, waste or divide their powers by investing them in imaginary republics—is this a general condition of humanity as such, or is it not rather the special condition of humanity as marked by what Machiavelli called “our religion,” that is, the Christian religion? Many passages from The Prince and especially from The Discourses incline us decidedly toward the latter alternative. I do not believe, however, that the question is so clear, since, although Machiavelli indeed insists on the deleterious effects of Christianity in comparison with the bracing effects of pagan religion, he is still left to account for the fact that human beings have proven so well disposed toward the new religion, which made its earliest and decisive conquests without arms. If it appears that human capacities have been degraded by Christianity, then this is because the natural condition of human beings was open to Christian influence, that is, that Christianity found nature to be a favorable terrain. There thus cannot be a significant difference between “the human condition” and the “Christian condition.” One might say more precisely that Christianity expresses and intensifies the practical condition of humanity, the difficulty of a humanity exposed to the “big gap” of which we have already had much to say, a humanity whose strength is divided between its obstructed nature and an imaginary political and religious life. Christianity expresses and aggravates the weakness and the incompetence of human action, placing Christians in what Machiavelli suggestively calls an ambizioso ozio, an ambitious carelessness or irresponsibility, one might perhaps say a pretentious passivity, a disposition that takes to its limits the gap between words and actions to which human beings are naturally led or condemned.¹⁸ The most corrupting consequence of this redoubled passivity is that, among Christians, in Machiavelli’s piercing words, “it is evil to speak evil of evil.”¹⁹ This laziness or pusillanimity discourages speech as well as action, and most especially action tied to speech, thus political action, in the Christian world.

If the Christian religion only expresses and thereby aggravates the natural condition of humanity, then it makes sense that in order to overcome Christian inaction or passivity it would be necessary somehow to overcome the human condition, that is, more precisely, as we have been arguing, to overcome the practical condition that defines human life, to recover action, but to do this by producing an unprecedented action, one that is no longer guided and thus limited by practical reasoning, by “reflective choice.” Now the condition of practice, in a Christian context, is distilled in the notion of conscience, the tribunal before which each person is capable of judging himself as God judges him, provided that his conscience is active and well informed. Thus, for Machiavelli, to overcome and leave behind the human condition is to dismiss conscience, which he does very explicitly and even emphatically, particularly when he urges the prince, as we have seen, to “learn to be able not to be good” and to “know how to enter into evil” when necessary.²⁰

What is most significant in Machiavelli’s repeated advice is not the fact that he invites the prince to do evil when circumstances require it, but that he asks him for this reason to renounce his conscience in advance, to dismiss in advance the natural guide and judge of human actions. It is one thing to say that the necessities of action risk leading you to act in a way that will shock your conscience; it is another to say: learn not to be good even before necessity requires this of you. Such an apprenticeship can only mean in effect the obliteration of conscience itself. It is this erasure or eradication of conscience, of this human capacity brought to light only in a Christian context, that sums up and fulfills the leaving behind of the practical condition that Machiavelli encourages and promotes.²¹ The erasure or eradication of the internal guide and judge leads to the search for external orienting factors, that is, elements in the world such as it is grasped no longer according to practical dispositions but according to various theoretical perspectives. The two great versions of the world considered theoretically can be summed up by the notions nature and history. Accordingly, it is by their “science of nature” or their “science of history” that the moderns will strive more and more to guide and to justify their actions, their unprecedented actions, actions that are greater and other than actions, that is, their revolutions.

At the same time—as it were, at the very same moment when Machiavelli was making his move on the basis of a reinterpretation of ancient and modern political experience—Luther was making an analogous or parallel move on the basis of a reinterpretation of the Christian religious experience. There can be no question here of entering casually into the great, the immense question of the Reformation. Still, it would be a pity to forgo the insight—at once a complement and a confirmation—provided by Luther’s very remarkable approach. Here I will only note what is directly relevant to my subject. In itself, the principle of “grace alone”—sola gratia—does no more than to recall and emphasize God’s sovereign initiative as it is affirmed and celebrated by Christian revelation. The distinctive point of the Lutheran Reformation is focused on the principle of “faith alone”—sola fide—by which Luther escapes from the impasse of a life haunted by awareness of sin. By the leap of faith, he achieves a confidence or a certitude—a fiducia—that, while it does not of course belong to the theoretical order, tends to remove the believer from the practical order, insofar as this certitude accedes immediately to a God whose grace does not really transform or sanctify the sinner, but shields the sinner from God’s wrath by taking the sin upon himself. One might say: where there had been an acting Christian, or a Christian agent, now there is simply a believer.

Here it is indispensable to consider Luther’s very words with some attention. I will take them from a long discussion in which the Reformer intends to refute Erasmus’s diatribe, entitled On Free Will. Luther blames Erasmus for a radically erroneous understanding of the law. Since Scripture abounds in imperative verbs, since it is rich in commandments, Erasmus concludes that a human being is in principle capable of obeying these commandments, which otherwise would be vain.²² Luther responds to this practical understanding of the commandments and the law by opposing to it an altogether different understanding, one to which the adjective “gnoseological” would be particularly well suited: “The whole meaning and purpose of the law is simply to furnish knowledge, and that of nothing but sin; it is not to reveal or to confer any power.”²³ Or again: “What comes through the law is not righteousness but knowledge of sin. It is the task, function, and effect of the law to be a light to the ignorant and blind, but such a light as reveals sickness, sin, evil, death, hell, the wrath of God, though it affords no help and brings no deliverance from these, but is content to have revealed them. Then, when a man becomes aware of the disease of sin, he is troubled, distressed, even in despair.”²⁴ Thus, according to Luther, the law does not guide us, does not show us the way; it does not command actions that, however difficult or even impossible to accomplish without the help of grace, would nevertheless offer a pertinent object for us to aim at and to strive for. The despair brought about by the law throws us outside the regime of action, into a state of dereliction from which we can escape only by means wholly other than an action or a course of action. This means is thus faith alone.

What interests us here is the way Luther understands the meaning of the act of faith, of the gesture of “faith alone.” Without entering into the labyrinth of theological controversies, I cannot avoid saying a word concerning the contending positions. According to the traditional Catholic analysis, faith is an act of the intellect commanded by the will, which is itself moved by grace, an act of the intellect that gives its consent to the salutary truth, that is, to the true good that makes a human being happy.²⁵ From this perspective, faith aims inseparably at an objective truth and an objective good, to be sure a good that concerns me, that is indeed my good, but this as a consequence of my belonging to the human family that is the object of divine benevolence. I believe that God alone has the power to save, that I need his grace as do all human beings, who are all sinners, and this is the truth to which I adhere in the act of faith. The question whether I myself am or will be “saved” is a question that cannot fail to interest me deeply, but it does not enter as such into the act of faith. Where my salvation is concerned, I appeal to specific criteria, and first of all precisely God’s law such as the authority of the church explains and administers it. The question of my salvation is here inseparable from the question of my actions, or my conduct, as these are directed and judged by my conscience, a conscience that is more or less informed, more or less awakened, more or less scrupulous; and this direction and judgment normally require the help of the sacraments and of the church as an institution. Absent a particular revelation, the most I can hope in this order of things is to arrive at a “reasonable hope” of being saved. Though the context may be very special—eternal salvation!—the Christian finds himself in the ordinary and common condition of the agent who can do no better than to act in such a way as to have a reasonable hope of achieving his ends.²⁶

For Luther, of course, all that is a tissue of absurdities embroidered by the devil. For him, I cannot really believe, I cannot seriously believe, unless I believe that I am saved. Only the certainty of my salvation guarantees the authenticity of my faith. Luther opposes this certainty to the uncertainty of those who judge their own actions according to their conscience:

Ask all the exercisers of free choice to a man, and if you are able to show me one who can sincerely and honestly say with regard to any effort or endeavor of his own, “I know that this pleases God,” I will acknowledge myself conquered. . . . Now, if this glory is lacking, so that the conscience dare not say for certain or with confidence that “this pleases God,” then it is certain it does not please God. For as a man believes, so it is with him, and in this case he does not believe with certainty that he pleases God, although it is necessary to do so, because the offense of unbelief lies precisely in having doubts about the favor of God, who wishes us to believe with the utmost possible certainty that he is favorable.²⁷

As this long passage adequately indicates, what Luther means by the term “free will” is what might be called the natural regime of conscience. It is the acting person’s regime of conscience, which has nothing to do with certainty, that Luther passionately rejects, owing to the imperious need he feels for complete certainty. This certainty will be the result of the believer’s effort of faith; the believer wants to believe he is saved and effectively finds certainty in his will to be certain. The virtue of faith tends to become an art of believing, and the believer a virtuoso of faith.²⁸

Luther wanted to escape what was for him the anguished half-light of practical life and to deliver Christians from it. So he orders the human world by juxtaposing contraries or opposites, but contraries or opposites that are or at least appear to be equally clear. Rather than being engaged along a path of improvement, the fragile steps along which the conscience measures with prudence and justice, the Christian, according to Luther, regards himself as at the same time righteous and sinner, simil justus et peccator. Similarly, while God is supremely hidden, Scripture is perfectly clear, and this is why Christians do not need the mediation of the pope or of the doctors of the church.²⁹ Again, in order to exclude all ambiguity, Luther introduces a division and an opposition interior to God himself, between the God who is preached, revealed, offered, and the object of worship and the God who is not preached, not revealed, not offered, not the object of worship, in short the hidden God; between the Word of God and God himself; and, finally, between God incarnate and the hidden God.³⁰ Since the received practice of Christian life depends on the more or less well-maintained balance between the internal conscience of the Christian and the authority of the visible church, Luther attacks with equal vigor these two principles, whose intrinsic solidarity, he discerns, is the condition of a life under the law. In his view, the authority of the visible church captures the consciences of the people in the snare of false laws and false sins, filling the world with hypocrites, while it would be so simple to regulate external acts by the external constraints of the civil magistrate.³¹ Instead of the internal conscience perversely tied to the visible church, there is the separation and complementarity of the invisible church and the civil magistrate. The conscience that linked the agent to the visible church is replaced by the conscience liberated by the gospel, that is, by “Christian freedom,” which judges well only by judging without the law or outside the law.³² The reformed conscience liberates the believer from the law that furnished the main orienting criterion of the practical conscience. The reformed Christian, a virtuoso of faith, finds his completion as a believer, rejecting the acting Christian, the Christian agent, as a Christian blasphemer and a hypocrite, whom he sees as entangled in the bonds of a conscience in bondage. The life of the believer, oriented by faith alone, lifts itself victoriously up above the level of practical life, where the old man, Christian or non-Christian, is subjected to the impossible obligations of the law.

Thus Luther, like Machiavelli, seeks and postulates an exit from and an access beyond the practical condition of humanity, a condition which for both is characterized by a supremely shocking and decisively illuminating gap between the real life of human beings and the law that they intend or pretend to follow. Though Machiavelli and Luther seek solutions in two very different directions, one in the anticipation of necessity and the disposition to “enter into evil” when necessary, the other in the leap of faith that takes hold of God’s righteousness and covers itself with it as with a cloak, they both reject practical conscience as it has been brought to light in the Christian world—the internal judge capable of measuring the distance between the way one lives and the way we ought to live, and thus of guiding our improvement. Both Luther and Machiavelli despaired of the human agent’s capacity for improvement when this agent is prisoner of the bonds of a bound conscience. Since the nature of the human being or of the Christian cannot really be improved or made more perfect, we can only dare radically to change the condition of the human being or of the Christian, and this by a supremely audacious gesture that removes them from their practical condition or lifts them above it. Whether a prince gifted with virtù or a virtuoso of faith, this new human being will approach the conduct of life in an unprecedented fashion; while leaving human nature to its inertia or its insurmountable imperfection, this new approach will introduce human beings into a new state that will allow them to experience an unlimited confidence in the promise they make to themselves. Disdaining the gap between life and the law and leaving behind the burdens and the shame of practical life, this new human being undertakes an exercise of humanity that gives access not to a good that his conscience might situate on the gradient of perfection but to a “better” that knows no criterion of the good or the better, a “better” that has no measure. And yet, by detaching from the practical conscience what must henceforth be the main activity of humanity—the virtuosity either of action or of faith—do we not run the risk of losing sight entirely of the “gap” that the practical conscience once discerned and measured, and thus of no longer knowing from what or for what we have “liberated” ourselves?