Our current moment is defined by an obsession with the new, a new for new's sake that no longer exists on a timeline, but has rather become epistemologically, spiritually, necessary. This obsession was born with modernity, the Renaissance, the 'discovery' of the New World and the desire to have a blank slate, a new society without ties to the past. As we know, that never existed. Professor Francesco Erspamer contrasts this with political philosopher Machiavelli's different modernity: one that privileges, above all, duration in time. He defends a reformulation of the present moment that would better allow us to survive current crises.
The basis of this short article, and in general of my studies in recent years, is the conviction that modernity, as it affirmed and represented itself, was based on a single concept: the new. Which at the dawn of the 16th century began to be understood no longer in a temporal sense, to indicate a recent thing or event, but in an epistemological sense, to qualify anything that could guarantee superior knowledge without requiring the validation of pre-existing paradigms and authorities. Indeed, scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn explained, occur and multiply when ignoring and forgetting previous conceptions proves easier than revising them or integrating subsequent discoveries with them. Modernity as we know it, and to which we belong, is conditioned by this utilitarian paradigm of change: progress, development, growth, fashion, avant-garde, innovation, are just some of the many terms that confirm the hegemony of the new. But the degradation of the environment, rampant individualism, technocratic nihilism, compulsive consumerism, show that one does not live by novelty alone. Perhaps we need a different modernity, perhaps a different modernity is possible. To begin to imagine it, I suggest we go back to one of the witnesses and protagonists of the birth of modernity: Niccolò Machiavelli.
SUGGESTED READING
Liberalism's fatal flaw
By Stuart Gray
Some consider the Renaissance the dawn of modernity and Machiavelli the inventor of modern politics. I agree, but with the caveat that his was not our modernity—the line that leads from Galileo to Elon Musk—, which could be called successful modernity precisely in the sense that what qualifies achievements is their success, a past participle (of the Latin verb succedere “to come after”), thus founded on a utilitarian and non-teleological conception of the world and society (and, of course, of economics), privileging results rather than goals. Fully modern was Machiavelli, indeed, but of another modernity, which it might be vital to recover in order to save an all too successful modernity from itself.
___
One need only note the obsession, certainly in my university, with a device such as the ‘start-up’, that is to say, with a project that deliberately emphasizes only the moment of beginning, and not a past beginning which has become origin, but rather a future beginning, the assumption of a beginning.
___
These are reflections prompted by the current crisis in the humanities. Despite its complexity, I tend to trace it back to a single cause, highlighted in the title of this article: the renunciation of duration, even the intent to last, as if it were a problem or a fault.
One need only note the obsession, certainly in my university, with a device such as the ‘start-up’, that is to say, with a project that deliberately emphasizes only the moment of beginning, and not a past beginning which has become origin, but rather a future beginning, the assumption of a beginning, yet endowed with a presumption of validity and attractiveness even before it exists, and without any guarantee of durability—in other words, a self-fulfilling innovation, the new for the new’s sake.
After all, modernity has declared itself a start-up since its inception in the 17th century. What else was the superiority attributed by Galileo to the mere observation of the present? (A key sentence from the first day of the Dialogue: ‘a thousand Demosthenes and a thousand Aristotles would not stand a chance against any mediocre intellect that had the good fortune to encounter the truth’). What else was the tabula rasa required by Descartes to start thinking and thinking about the self? What else Bacon’s ‘going beyond’ in order to increase (augebitur) knowledge? (I am talking of the title page of the Novum organum, perhaps the earliest example of the shift of an ancient metaphor, that of ‘growth’, from a limited temporality leading from infantia and pueritia to the stability of maturitas and the decadence of senectus, to an absolute temporality that invites progress to an unchecked and unlimited expansion, ignoring the limits of available resources and space).
The modern new has been consistently and intentionally an emergency, in the double meaning of something that emerges and something that does so in an unforeseen manner, suspending and then erasing a past that is perceived as obsolete and therefore useless. But it is characteristic of any emergency to have no time to think, which not only exempts it from the patience of doubt and the humility of verification, also from prudent preparation for future emergencies. There is, in short, a significant difference between a state of exception proclaimed at the moment of the exception, and a regulation in advance of the exception, such as for Machiavelli the embankments built ‘during quiet times’.
___
Machiavellian experience was a virtue, not a demonstration or an experiment; it did not establish laws, only attitudes. Experience was an educational device.
___
It is important to note that the realist Machiavelli was not such in the sense we tend to give the adjective today, i.e. in reference to a natural, objective reality (mathematical, statistical, experimental). For him, experience could determine political outcomes only half the time; the other half depended on fortune. Consequently, Machiavellian experience was a virtue, not a demonstration or an experiment; it did not establish laws, only attitudes. Experience was an educational device. By leaving half of the real to chance, Machiavelli introduced a modernity that was not mechanical and not based on (true or supposed) necessity; rather a teleological modernity, a modernity of ends instead of means. (The opposite of our current modernity).
If any book is about the new, it is The Prince; however, Machiavelli would never have titled it “The New Prince”: for him the new was justified by the end, not the beginning. Quite the opposite than Francis Bacon’s ‘Novum’ organum (1620) and ‘New’ Atlantis (1627), or Galileo’s Due ‘nuove’ scienze (1638), or Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Even two thinkers who, like Machiavelli, were not expressions of winning modernity, I mean Leibniz and Vico, could not resist the allure of the new: ‘Nova’ methodus (1684), Système ‘nouveau’ de la nature (1695), Scienza ‘nuova’ (1725). But the paradigm of the new had emerged even before Machiavelli: as early as 1504 Mondus ‘novus’ had been published the by his fellow Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who earned himself a continent thanks to that adjective.
Machiavelli had little interest in geographical discoveries; his modernity did not need that kind of novelty. Just read the prologue of his Discourses on Livy: ‘Although it has always been just as dangerous to establish new orders and institutions than to go in search of unknown seas and lands, nevertheless, driven by the natural desire I have always had to work without fear on things that I believe bring a common benefit to everyone, I decided to embark on an unexplored path’. A relevant paragraph for understanding the common good as a political end, and thus the fundamental relationship between means and ends, which I cannot dwell on here. I would rather stress the analogy between the new state and the New World, those ‘unknown seas and lands’ so difficult to navigate and reach. A comparison abandoned immediately, undeveloped, by Machiavelli. Why? For the same reason, but with opposite effects, that inspired Thomas More’s Utopia, contemporary with The Prince and the Discourses. That is, because America immediately appeared, to More as it did to Machiavelli, to be a utopia, a place without origins and that therefore could be filled with any meaning. America, already in Vespucci’s descriptions, was shown as devoid of history, hence either an outopeia, a ‘non’ place, or an eutopeia, a ‘good’ place. In both cases an unconvincing myth for Machiavelli, who believed neither in nature as origin nor in the natural goodness of mankind, positions that will instead be so important for thinkers such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau.
___
He realized, or just sensed, that a modernity of the new risked becoming a present without memory, without culture and without politics, that is without negotiations between conflicting stances, replaced by objective or universal facts, scientific or statistical, all justified as necessities.
___
Vespucci, Galileo, Descartes and Bacon transformed the new from a retrograde extension of the present (that which is recent and therefore perceived as contemporary and constitutive of our identity) into an anticipation of the future, a future already here. St Augustine’s logic is incontrovertible: ‘Those who claim to see the future do not see the things themselves, which are not yet, but rather, perhaps, their causes or their signs, which already are and therefore are present to those who see them’. In order to circumvent this antinomy, modernity invented the notion of progress, whereby the causes are already ‘the things themselves’, an inverted teleology in which the telos is not at the end of the process, often unattainable, but at the beginning, a manifest destiny that requires no verification or fulfilment because it is true and full.
Machiavelli resisted this perspective. He realized, or just sensed, that a modernity of the new risked becoming a present without memory, without culture and without politics, that is without negotiations between conflicting stances, replaced by objective or universal facts, scientific or statistical, all justified as necessities. For him, the origin was not natural: it was political, civil, an irreversible act of liberation from nature and a discovery of virtue as the only antidote to the power of fortune. The Prince is an anti-Utopia. Machiavelli was not interested in non-places—too easy to mould. Only in very concrete places, and one above all, Florence, so that he could use them to explore what really mattered: the non-time, which is the future, time new. On the other hand, there were no new spaces and therefore there could be no new foundations, no new origins. Even the New World was already there.
That is why Machiavelli’s new prince was not a founder of new cities, but rather a saviour of old ones. That is why whenever a situation became untenable, Machiavelli suggested change, novelty, but always within the existing social paradigm; and when a city verged on social collapse, his solution was a return to the origins. Machiavelli’s modernity cannot create origins; its very nature of accelerated change denied this, on pain of reducing origins (as in fact happened later) to momentary trends. Modernity, for Machiavelli, was coming to terms with a smaller and ageing world, which had lost its innocence and could not recover it. Finished was the time of Plato’s Politéia, in which Socrates had pointed out the responsibilities of ‘city founders’ (oikistái pólemos) such as himself. Finished and irretrievable: the age of heroes was over. Hence the need for a new politics, yes, but not a politics of the new. Rather, as Antonio Gramsci intuited, a politics that merged with ideology ‘in the dramatic form of myth’, to give the people (a concrete, historical people) not novelties but a ‘collective will’.
I will conclude with a sentence from the Prince: ‘The memories of innovations and the reasons for them are extinguished by the longevity and continuity of rule; because one change always leaves a toothing-stone (addentellato) for the next’. The addentellato, a projection at the end of a wall intentionally built to provide, in an unknown future, for an unforeseen continuation. What an appropriate metaphor for another modernity, a durable, prudent, sustainable, far-sighted modernity; modernity as a toothing-stone.
Join the conversation