THE INFLUENCE OF MACHIAVELLI AND BACON ON MODERN PHILOSOPHY
by Gary L. Morella
n examination of the ways that Niccolo Machiavelli and Francis Bacon found fault with ancient philosophy will be made in order to gain insight into their thought and influence on modern philosophy.
Leo Strauss, a critic of modern political thought from a classical perspective, said that, whereas classic political thought saw the formation of character as the proper aim of politics, modern political thinkers in general adopted lower goals - goals which, they believed, were more likely to be attained. The common denominator of modern political thought was thus its rejection of classical political thought for what seemed to be more realistic thinking. [See Strauss, What is Political Philosophy.] Strauss also said "the fundamental modern project" was "man's conquest of nature for the sake of the relief of man's estate." [See Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern.] A unifying premise for those divorcing themselves from ancient philosophy was, as Strauss put it, "According to the modern project, philosophy or science was no longer to be understood as essentially contemplative and proud but as active and charitable; it was to be in the service of the relief of man's estate; it was to be cultivated for the sake of human power; it was to enable man to become the master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature." [See Strauss, The City of Man.] Hence, the modern project is at odds with the ancients who considered contemplative thought to be the highest achievement of the intellect. Strauss evoked memories of Hobbes and Locke when he wrote: "Very briefly, we can say that the modern project was distinguished from the earlier view by the fact that it implied that the improvement of society depends decisively on institutions, political or economic, as distinguished from the formation of character." [See Strauss, Political philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time.] Finally, he spoke of the "modern tradition" as having "emancipated the passions and hence 'competition,'" and he asserted that this tradition "came into being through a conscious break with the strict moral demands made by both the Bible and classical philosophy." [See Strauss, What is Political Philosophy.] We now consider how this break took place for Machiavelli and Bacon respectively.
To understand the climate spawning Machiavellian thought, one has to first understand the breakdown of Aristotelianism. Aristotle was a pagan, and the Moslem philosophers, through whom Aristotelian metaphysics had become known to the Western World, had introduced along with it a certain number of doctrines completely unacceptable for Christians. Averroism began with the golden age of scholasticism and professed to teach philosophy such as could be found in Aristotle irrespective of whether what was taught should happen to agree with religion or not. [See Gilson, A History of Philosophy.] The characteristic of Averroism was the insistence by an uninterrupted line of masters in medieval universities from the middle of the thirteenth century until the sixteenth century that the "authentic" teaching of Aristotle had been betrayed by the theologians in their effort to adapt it to the needs of Christian apologetics. The main consequence of this was the spreading of the conviction that philosophy as a discipline is mutually exclusive from religion and theology, i.e., there is no connection between reason and faith. Those espousing the Christian tradition began to have doubts with the result that scholasticism began to break down into its two component elements - a religious faith without philosophy, and vice-versa.
Given the break with theology, Aristotelianism was on its own, losing the privilege given it by theologians like Thomas Aquinas of being the preferred vehicle of Christian truth. It succumbed to an indifferentism being just one philosophy among the others, or worse, an aforementioned syncretism ala Averroism whereby it was made to fit the agendas of those having no patience for its metaphysical bridge to theology - so much for Aristotle's De Anima. Thus, the men of the Renaissance, having created no new philosophy, found that the ancients offered them several other views of the world besides that of Aristotle. A little bit of everything began to be tried.
Unfortunately, the scientific problems with an Aristotelian universe exposed for all to see by Galileo ushered in a climate of questioning all propositions held by the ancients to include the metaphysical as well as the physical with the consequence that the "baby was thrown out with the bath water." With the development of mathematics, in particular, its promotion by the likes of the Jesuit, Christopher Clavius, as to its superiority of demonstrations over dialectical disputations, the battle lines were drawn against scholastic philosophy. His criticism of Aristotelian philosophy leading scholars to their endless sterile arguments stood out in a world where startling discoveries in mathematics and science were occurring everywhere. The "disputatious" world of Aristotle, in the mind of Clavius, was crumbling with the Christian world of the scholastics feeling the reverberations. Into the trash went not only perishable physics but also perennial metaphysics. There was now a need for a philosophy fitting the science of the times and not of a man who lived four centuries before Christ. Francis Bacon in England and Rene Descartes in France were to be the new evangelists for this philosophy which, with the trashing of Christianity, would soon show very dark sides in the political thought of Machiavelli.
Jacques Maritain in The Range of Reason gets to the core of the abandonment of ancient philosophy on the part of Machiavelli when he writes: "Machiavelli belongs to that series of minds, and some of them more profound than his, which all through modern times have endeavored to unmask the human being. To have been the first in this lineage is the greatness of this narrow thinker eager to serve the Medici as well as the popular party in Florence, and disappointed on both counts. Yet, in unmasking the human being, he maimed its very flesh, and wounded its eyes. To have thoroughly rejected ethics, metaphysics and theology from the realm of political knowledge and political prudence is his very own achievement, and it is also the most violent mutilation suffered by the human practical intellect and the organism of practical wisdom."
Summa bonum, you say? Telos? Distinguishing between real and apparent goods? These, along with all questions involving the morality of human life, the good for man, ultimate end and moral principles, the structure of the human act, good and evil action, character and decision, prudence and conscience, and religion and morality, are either non-existent or bastardized in the radically pessimistic world of Niccolo Machiavelli. This is a world where there is only one axiom, one law, one primal motivation, one reason for living, "the end justifies the means." The end, of course, relates only to man's quest for happiness in the "here-and-now" as opposed to the "here-after" which, along with the bulk of Aristotelian thought pertaining to ethics, virtues, and perfect and imperfect happiness must, of necessity, be discarded in favor of the politics of expediency.
It is well to note that before Machiavelli, rulers didn't hesitate to apply bad faith, perfidy, falsehood, cruelty, assassination, and every kind of crime of which man is capable to the attainment of power and success and to the satisfaction of their greed and ambition. But in doing so, they felt guilty having a bad conscience to the extent that they had a conscience. This monstrous reflection in their mirrors insured a certain amount of self-restraint - a deeply human uneasiness caused by that nagging little voice, which tells us that we are doing what we know we shouldn't do, what is forbidden by a law that we know to be true.
Post Machiavelli, not only these rulers but the so-called great leaders and makers, the movers and shakers, of modern states, in employing injustice for establishing order, and every kind of "useful" evil for satisfying their will for power, will have a clear conscience and feel that their duties as political heads have been accomplished. Evil can be done for a greater good. Thus, the modern politicians, in the words of Maritain, "will stoically immolate their personal morality on the altar of the political good. What was a simple matter of fact, with all the weaknesses and inconsistencies pertaining, even in the evil, to accidental and contingent things, has become, after Machiavelli, a matter of right, with all the firmness and steadiness proper to necessary things." One is drawn to immediate comparisons with contemporary politicians who employ the useful evil of abortion advocates in order to garner votes from a political constituency that confuses freedom with license. On second thought, this observation is too kind as evil is now mistaken for good in a world turned upside down which accepts homosexuality, sadism, masochism, and pedophilia as no longer indicative of developmental disorders but rather only a cause of concern if the agents feel anxious about their conditions. Such is the position of The American Psychiatric Association in version four of their diagnostic and statistical manual, DSM-IV. Their professional twin, The American Psychological Association tells us, in their most prestigious bulletin, that child sexual abuse is only in the eyes of the beholder by publishing the "research" of contributors to the Journal of Homosexuality who have no problems with "consensual" sex with young children. At least this heinous lie was met with the near unanimous condemnation of congress after the public outcry upon discovering that the authors of this travesty were associated with positions in the Journal of Homosexuality advocating parents taking a loving look at the pedophile who should be welcomed into their homes.
Machiavelli taught us that immorality is the very law of politics. Nowhere is this more evident than with the current leadership of the "free" world. The Clinton Administration will go down in history as the embodiment of Machiavellianism where vice becomes virtue, and the killing of innocents in its most brutal form becomes a defended law of the land for the sake of catering to a bankrupt political lobby in order to stay in power at all costs. Machiavelli constantly slips from the idea of well-doing to the idea of what men admire as well-doing, from moral virtue to appearing and apparent moral virtue; his virtue is a virtue of opinion, self-satisfaction and glory. Thus, if the prevailing opinion is that the President of the United States can engage in the most filthy of sexual acts with a girl young enough to be his daughter in the While House, a house where he is the tenant and not the landlord (the landlords are the American people), lie about in under oath, and demonize all those who would call him to accountability, no problem exists. The President can stand tall with his jaw quavering, a tear in his eye, holding his wife's hand with his while clutching a Bible in his other, look into the camera and tell the country with a straight face "I'm OK, you're OK," and "we must accept the sin with the sinner."
Thank you, Mr. President, for your wonderful example to the youth of America.
We are at a moral crossroads in the United States thanks to Machiavellianism as a country that accepts abortion, infanticide and sodomy as "unrestricted civil rights" is a country going to Hell with the devil incarnate as its leaders! It is a country confronted with impetuous, irrational, revolutionary, wild, and demoniacal Machiavellianism, for which boundless injustice, boundless violence, boundless lying and immorality, are normal political means, and which draws from this very boundlessness of evil an abominable strength. Such is the state of the United States of America under William Jefferson Clinton at the dawn of the third millennium, a country increasingly devoid of the common good by knowing perfectly how not to be good, and whose hypocrisy is conscious, happy, ostentatious, and gloriously promoted to the rest of the world in the name of population control, radical feminism, and sex-ed from cradle to grave as promoted by Margaret Sanger and the criminally fraudulent research of Alfred Kinsey. This is a country whose cruelty wants to destroy souls as well as bodies, and whose lying is a thorough perversion of the very function of language. (Our President doesn't even know what the meaning of "is" is in his attempt to deconstruct the language turning felony perjury into acceptability!) This is a country steeped in absolute Machiavellianism causing politics to be the art of bringing about the misfortune of men.
Jacques Maritain offers a conclusion to the problem of absolute Machiavellianism in The Range of Reason. Machiavellianism's triumphs over mankind will only occur because all kinds of accepted iniquity, moral weakness and consent to evil, operating within a degenerating civilization, will previously have corrupted it, and prepared ready-made slaves for the lawless man. Translation - good men will have done nothing; their silence will be the death knell of civilization as we once knew it. If Machiavellianism is to be crushed, it will only be because of what remains of Christian civilization will have been able to oppose it on all fronts.
A measure of the change that had overtaken philosophy since the Middle Ages was that Francis Bacon was neither a cleric nor a professional philosophy teacher which was previously the case for almost all philosophers who were both clerics and professors. Gilson in A History of Philosophy says that this in and of itself is a measure of the change that had overtaken philosophy since the Middle Ages. Bacon was the product of a slightly less troubled time where there was more room for confidence in search of the quest for the truth. This confidence is conditioned on using the "right method" which knows no class. Bacon was less concerned with the polity of his times compared to the radical revolution proposed by Machiavelli who made men comfortable with their vices. He was concerned with a quest for a new method of reasoning which would be capable of extending the benefits of the new science, freed from its Aristotelian shackles by Galileo and company, to the whole of philosophy. He along with Descartes wanted a new epistemology, a new view of the world in the light of the scientific results of the new methods, a new and scientific program mapped out for mankind.
Bacon recognized that a good classification of the sciences is necessary for the advancement of learning. He divided the sciences according to a three fold division of the faculties, or powers, of the human soul: memory, imagination, and reason.
Memory gives rise to history with natural history including the observation and recording of all facts and beings found in nature. What man makes of nature represents an order of facts called natural. Bacon called this nature in bondage to man, or chained nature. Per Josef Pieper, there is a direct path from Francis Bacon who said, "knowledge is power," that the value of all knowing lies in the provision of human life with new discoveries and helps, [Novum Organum I,3;I,81] to Descartes, who in his Discourse on Method explicitly formulated the polemical program to replace the old "theoretical" philosophy with a new "practical" one, through which we could make ourselves "the Lords and Masters of nature" [Discourse on Method, 6]. From there the road leads directly into the well-known saying of Karl Marx, that up until his time, philosophy saw its task as one of interpreting the world, but that now its task was to change the world. Of course, the "theoretical philosophy" referred to was the contemplative sphere which the ancients saw as the highest of intellectual acts.
What Bacon and his contemporaries saw the need for was an application oriented renaissance version of modern public education's "school-to-work." If something was deemed impractical, it wasn't worth the time of day. Such was the fate of poetry for Bacon who viewed history corresponding to the "cell of the mind" called memory as analogous with poetry to imagination. He regarded poetry as "feigned history" which describes things such as we would like to have them to be or to have been, that they might give us the satisfaction refused us by reality. He regarded narrative poetry as nothing but an imitation of real history, thereby implying its lower precedence with the only difference being that it recounts an imaginary past. Representative poetry was more respected in that it "is a visible history" representing actions as if they were happening before us. A third kind of poetry called allusive aims to demonstrate and clarify the meaning of what it teaches, e.g., the mysteries of religion and policy, via fables or parables.
Bacon doesn't seem so much to complain about the condition of poetry as he does about its usefulness or practicality. The destruction of its theoretical character seems to be the main focus here as it was for the self-destruction of philosophy, a destruction which in turn rests upon habitually seeing the world only in terms of it being the raw material of human activity. Pieper in Leisure, the Basis of Culture says that "when the world is no longer looked upon as creation, there can no longer be theoria in the full sense. And with the fall of theoria, the freedom of philosophy falls as well, and what comes in its place is the functionalizing, the making it into something "practical" oriented toward a legitimation by its social function; what comes to the fore is the working character of philosophy, or of philosophy so-called. Meanwhile, our thesis maintains that it is of the nature of the philosophical act, to transcend the world of work." For Pieper, true philosophy rests upon the belief that the real wealth of man lies not in the satisfaction of his necessities nor in "becoming Lords and Masters of nature," but rather in being able to understand what is - the whole of what is. Ancient philosophy says that this is the utmost fulfillment to which we can attain; that the whole order of real things be registered in our soul [Thomas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, II,2] - a conception which in the Christian tradition was taken up into the concept of the Beatific Vision: "What do they not see, who look upon Him, Who sees all?" [Gregory the Great quoted in Ibid.]
We come to the third division of the faculties of the human soul - reason or philosophy which is divided into divine philosophy, or theology, natural philosophy, and human philosophy.
Divine philosophy, still called natural theology, is the rudiment of knowledge about God that can be obtained by reason from the consideration of creatures. Bacon defines its nature and determines its limits: This knowledge "may be truly termed divine in respect of the object, and natural in respect of the light;" as to its bounds, they are "that it suffices to convince atheism, but not to inform religion" [Of the Advancement of Learning]. This represents a rationalist/fideist polarization where reason is divorced from faith entirely.
Natural philosophy (or science, or theory) divides into physics and metaphysics where Bacon retains ancient names albeit giving them new or renovated meanings.
By "metaphysics" Bacon doesn't mean the highest rung on the philosophical ladder of Aristotle, the "prime philosophy" which is the common source of all knowledge of which we know a little - the bridge from the natural to the supernatural. What is Bacon's metaphysics concerned with? Whereas physics is concerned with that which is inherent in matter and thus transitory, metaphysics deals with that which is abstracted and fixed. The former handles the material and efficient causes; the latter handles the formal and final causes. However, some huge differences exist in the consideration of these causes.
The inquiry into formal causes, which belongs to metaphysics, in no way resembles traditional speculations regarding the specific forms of beings and things. What Bacon intended was something like the generalities of physics or the knowledge of the properties that are the common position of the essences of all actually existing things or beings. His metaphysics is a restricted level of abstraction as his notion of "formal cause" is more attuned to the general laws of physics than with Aristotelian essential "forms." Final causes in physics are like virgins consecrated to God. They bear no children. They can serve in making the wisdom of God more admirable, but final causes cannot teach us anything as to the nature of things. Ergo, metaphysics is the place for them. It seems that for Bacon, metaphysics is relegated to the intellectual trash bin as anything not related to the mastery of nature meets the same fate.
Consequently, Bacon demolished the traditional philosophizing pertaining to the "superstitious" or "theological," the kind that freely invents "abstract forms and final causes and first causes, with the omission in most cases of intermediate causes," an "unwholesome mixture of things human and divine" [Novum Organum]. He cites Pythogoreas and Plato and his school as examples covering the entirety of Christian scholasticisms whether Platonic or Aristotelian. All finality beyond that necessary for the conduct of human affairs is excluded with this finality itself restricted to a purely materialistic and naturalistic scope. Hence, there is no need to consider proofs for the existence of a first mover such as Aquinas did in the Summa Contra Gentiles building on Aristotle. To do justice to Bacon he seemed to recognize that a drop of philosophy may invite atheism, a strong dose of it will bring man back to religion [De augmentis scientiarum]. He wrote a book entirely devoted to the consideration of divine learning entitled Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human. One can't help wonder, given Bacon's self imposition of a very restricted definition of metaphysics just how his philosophy would "bring man back to religion." You can't climb a ladder if one of the rungs is missing, and you most certainly can't get to where you're going if that rung is at the very top.
Bacon said in the New Organon that the method usually followed by philosophers should be inverted. Instead of coming down from axioms, e.g., first principles to particular conclusions, as in syllogistic deduction, a prime logical tool for the ancients, the scientist should go instead from particular experiments and observations up to axioms - induction, in other words, should replace deduction.
A central difficulty in Bacon's positive conception of nature is the lack of a sound conception of causality. The scholastic conception is to be avoided at all costs, i.e., that of a formal principle so real in itself that it could exist independently of the realm of concrete things. Bacon left no systematic program assuring the proper acquisition of sound notions in general sense, a consequence of the inverted logic of induction. While the New Organon lays down some basic rules governing induction of axioms or universal principles, these axioms are functions of terms which have to be presupposed before the inductive axioms can be of any value. This is a paradox in that in going from down to up, the down position presupposes up which is what is to be shown.
James Hitchcock in What is Secular Humanism said that "the philosophers inspired by the new science like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, took pains to protect religious belief from skeptical attack. Their very act of protecting it helped subtly to undermine it. They seemed to imply that faith could not withstand rational scrutiny and was primarily a matter of subjective choice." Such was the effect of the fideism of Bacon who came to believe that the traditional process of deduction from supposedly self-evident principles had produced little new scientific knowledge; it either gave back what we already knew or else led us astray by giving an illusory support to our confusions. What was needed was a confrontation with obstacles to knowledge, false idols as Bacon called them in the New Organon. Also needed was the systematic understanding and control of nature based on an empirical method with less emphasis on the demonstrations of the ancients. The resulting axioms of Bacon's philosophy would be statements of natural causes and laws derived by induction from scientific observation and experiments. While his positive contributions in regard to the new sciences, at least the natural sciences, as opposed to the mathematical sciences are not to be minimized (Bacon failed to appreciate the overriding value of mathematical exactness and projection built on a foundation axiomatic system), he suffered from an inability to admit to the fact that faith enables reason and reason substantiates faith. The metaphysics of Aristotle, in particular, the De Anima don't appear to be in Bacon's vocabulary for the new logic, the new philosophy which the new science demanded.