The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (25 page)

The exhilarating conclusion is “that all that men know is almost nothing compared with what remains to be known.” And as a token of his hope for those vistas of the unknown, he ends his
Discourse
by declaring his resolve not to spend his remaining life “in any other matter than in endeavouring to acquire some knowledge of nature, which shall be of such a kind that it will enable us to arrive at rules for Medicine more assured than those which have as yet been attained.” Descartes was plainly not frightened by paradox. His declaration of the independence of the self by no means prevented him from seeking the forces that shaped the outer world.

Descartes hoped to share discoveries to improve the condition of the human race, and yet not disturb the state or dissent from established religion. Appending
Essays in This Method
“to show that this method is applicable to all sorts of investigations,” he included a section called
Dioptric
on the eye, vision, and optics,
Meteors
on the winds, weather, and colors of the rainbow, and
Geometry
on his method for solving unsolved problems. No mere speculations, each added substantially to man’s mastery of nature.

Here he formulated the law of refraction, related the weather to changes in barometric pressure, and offered the momentous new techniques of analytic geometry, applying algebra to the problems of geometry. Descartes’s faith in mathematics as a means to certainty in the solution of problems was reinforced by his own system of mathematics, of which his analytic geometry was the most widely known. Incidentally, he invented much of the basic vocabulary of algebra and mathematics. This included the form of the equation, the use of
a
and
b
for knowns, of
x
and
y
for unknowns, of numerals (instead of words) to express powers, and the form of the square-root sign. He had simplified algebraic notation by substituting letters for numbers to designate quantities, and numbers for arbitrary symbols to indicate powers. He made it possible to represent a point by a pair of numbers and to represent lines and curves by equations. So his Cartesian coordinates had made possible his analytic geometry, which reduced all geometric problems to the formulas of his new algebra, and opened unimagined new opportunities for the sciences. It is hard to enlist modern physical sciences without the use of this vocabulary. And it is not so surprising that Descartes himself harbored extravagant hopes for applying mathematical techniques to all problems.

While Descartes believed that “there is nothing entirely within our power but our own thoughts,” he gave his thought a wonderful centrifugal character. Perhaps no other great philosopher except Aristotle spent so much time or was so versatile in experiments. Among these were studies of anatomy, dissection of embryos of birds and cattle, observations on the weight of air, the vibrations of strings, optical phenomena, and the reproductive generation of animals and men.

Another sign of his modernity, besides his focus on the self, was his close connection of physiology with the axioms of his philosophy. From his earliest writings on philosophy he suggests that all animal and subrational human movements are controlled by unconscious physical mechanisms. He imagined a two-step process by which external physical stimuli entered the human body to a “pineal” gland (at the base of the brain), which then directed the human response. A kind of mechanism or automatism underlay it all. Except only for phenomena caused directly by the human will, then, everything in the world could be explained by mathematics, measurable forces, shape, and motion.

It was appropriate, too, that he did not lead the life of the monastery or the university, nor did he surround himself with disciples. Instead he sought repose for his reflection and experiment, even suppressing publication where it was necessary to secure that repose, and he did not seek public position or responsibility. Lucky in having inherited property that gave him independence, he spent his life as he wished—in travel, study, and experiment. He formed warm, continuing, and fruitful intellectual companionships. His chance encounter at the age of twenty-two with Isaac Beeckman had encouraged his mathematical interests and ambitions for twenty years. His schoolmate Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) became a scientist of note, remained his lively correspondent, and defended Descartes against clerical critics.

Descartes had a remarkable capacity for lively friendships with young women intellectuals. In 1640, when he was forty-seven, he met the charming twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine. She had a talent for languages, had read some of his work, and was receiving instruction from university professors in philosophy and the sciences. She brought friends to visit Descartes, then living in a remote village in the marshes. Thus began a correspondence of which there remain twenty-six letters from Elizabeth and thirty-three from Descartes, on all sorts of philosophic and scientific subjects. Although he was a confirmed Catholic and she had been raised a Protestant, in an age of religious wars they still shared theological concerns. She needed his solace, especially on receiving news of the beheading of her uncle Charles I in England on February 9, 1649. Up to a point she shared Cartesian doubt, but oddly wrote that “you . . . alone have kept me from being skeptical.” They also shared mathematical puzzles like the ancient problem of the three circles, which she delighted him by solving.

The young intellectual Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), who had been receiving Descartes’s writings from his friend and admirer who was the French minister in Sweden, wished to add him to the circle of brilliant celebrities at her court. He was reluctant to leave his village retreat at Egmond, but she pressed him with an offer of a naval vessel to take him to Stockholm. When he finally gave in and arrived in October 1649, he was impressed by the twenty-three-year-old queen’s lively mind. In that “land of bears between rock and ice” he observed that “men’s thoughts freeze during the winter months.” She set the bitter-cold hour of five o’clock in the morning for their tutorial sessions, which gave him chills, brought on pneumonia, and led to his death in February 1650. He received the last rites and died as a Catholic. During the French Revolution his remains were removed to the Pantheon.

THE LIBERAL WAY

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end.
It is itself the highest political end.

—LORD ACTON,
HISTORY OF FREEDOM
(1907)

Machiavelli’s Reach for a Nation

The Renaissance in Europe, a great age of poetry, the arts, and architecture, and epochal adventures of discovery, never produced a great work of theoretical philosophy, nor a work of history to live alongside Herodotus and Thucydides. The widening vistas of experience diverted man’s seeking spirit from the ways of the Creator to new areas of man’s own dominion. So the age did produce the pioneer work of modern political science. It grew out of the experience of a perceptive and eloquent Florentine Seeker, active in the life of the Italian city-state and its battles with the papacy. The name of this first modern political scientist would become an eponym for the evil and devious ways of politicians. The reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) has suffered in history. He has been treated as a shallow polemicist for political immorality when he was a subtle interpreter, a Seeker of the grand truths of European political experience. His thought judged solely by his hundred-page essay,
The Prince,
has been as little appreciated as Karl Marx’s ideas would have been if judged solely by
The Communist Manifesto
without referring to
Das Kapital.
To rediscover Machiavelli is to see the foundations of modern political science.

Born in Florence to an impoverished father of a noble family, who had been denied public office as an insolvent debtor, Niccolò did not receive the education customary for his prominent family. As a youth he was mostly self-educated by the books he read and by an occasional private tutor. He learned Latin, but not Greek. So, luckily for his later work, he was never overwhelmed by pedantry or erudition and retained the alertness and curiosity of the amateur. In the turnover in the government of Florence after Savonarola had been tortured, hanged, and burned, the young Machiavelli in 1498 was employed in the new government in the “second chancery,” which dealt with foreign affairs and defense.

Minor diplomatic missions to France opened his eyes to the working of strong government. Returning to Florence, he saw how the ruthless Cesare Borgia had created a new state for himself in central Italy. Determined to strengthen his home city of Florence, Machiavelli promoted his idea of displacing the usual foreign mercenaries by a militia drawn from the people themselves. Missions to Pope Julius II, and across the Alps to Germany, produced his perceptive reports on the strength of the enemies of Florence and the invaders of Italy. He commanded his militia successfully in the capture of Pisa and in defense of Florence against the invaders. In the volatile wars of the city-states his patron the gonfalonier (chief magistrate) Soderini was removed, and in 1512, when the Medici returned to power in Florence, Machiavelli lost his place in the government. The Medici imprisoned and tortured him on suspicion of conspiracy, but he gave no false confession.

Having tried unsuccessfully to win the favor of the Medici, Machiavelli retreated to his family property near Florence where he wrote his influential books. He had been well baptized in the currents of political power. To his friend Francesco Vettori at the papal court in Rome in a familiar letter, he recounted the new delights of his life with books in his study.

On the threshold I slip off my day’s clothes with their mud and dirt, put on my royal and curial robes, and enter, decently accoutred, the ancient courts of men of old, where I am welcomed kindly and fed on that fare which is mine alone, and for which I was born: where I am not ashamed to address them and ask them the reasons for their action, and they reply considerately; and for two hours I forget all my cares, I know no more trouble, death loses its terrors: I am utterly translated in their company.

We owe Machiavelli’s passionate and illuminating primers of political science to his retreat from active politics during his fourteen-year exile on that farm outside Florence. If he had been a more successful politician, the literature of modern Seekers in political science would be much poorer.

He wrote his short book,
Il Principe
(The Prince), in a few months in 1513. It was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici (the Magnificent), presented to him, and circulated in manuscript. His long work, his
Discourses
on the first ten books of Livy, was written over those many years of retreat. He was well aware that he was on a new track, as he explains in his introduction:

Although the envious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents, yet, animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the common benefit of all, I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one, and may prove difficult and troublesome.

In the last chapter of
The Prince,
“Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians,” Machiavelli gives us a clue to the new purpose he sees taking shape in modern history. The strategy of power that he describes will not be for its own sake but to fulfill a nation. It was said that “it was necessary in order that the power of Moses should be displayed that the people of Israel should be slaves in Egypt.” Similarly, Machiavelli ventures, “in order that the might of an Italian genius might be recognized, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to her present condition, and that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, and more scattered than the Athenians; without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated, and overrun, and that she should have suffered ruin of every kind.” He calls on Lorenzo de’ Medici and his “illustrious house” “to follow those great men who redeemed their countries” so “in order to be able with Italian prowess to defend the country from foreigners.” He saw the nation as a way of organized liberation from alien dominion. The modern state in Italy that Machiavelli glimpsed was not to become real until the nineteenth century. Three centuries earlier he had prescribed ways to create and preserve such a nation-state.

The Italian peninsula in his day, split into numerous small states, whose lives were complicated by the papal reach for power, was again and again overrun by French, German, Spanish, and Swiss armies. The tiny states, trying to defend themselves with mercenaries, lacked the power to repel the invaders. It is no wonder, then, that Machiavelli saw the primary “aim or thought” of the Prince to be “war and its organization and discipline.” And that he should foresee the “redeeming” of Italy in a strong, centralized state, defended by militias of its own people. So Machiavelli’s classic guide to national power came out of the desperate confusion of the numerous warring states of Renaissance Italy. The Italians needed his insights. But even with them, his Italy would be among the last of the great modern nations of Europe. “This barbarous domination stinks in the nostrils of everyone.” What Machiavelli provided, and what his country wanted, was not a political theory but political science and technology. He offered not a theory of the state but a manual for creating and preserving a state. No other part of Europe more desperately needed his prescriptions for political community.

A passionate pursuer of experience, he greatly admired the ancient Roman republic. And in his sprawling
Discourses
on Livy’s Roman history he reveals the special strengths of the government of the Roman republic—the balance of forces of the tribunes, the consuls, the Senate, and the people. In his rambling, suggestive exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of ancient society, he always has an eye on the recent experience of Florence and of Italy. So he cannot underestimate the power of religion, “the most necessary and assured support of any civil society.” And he sees ancient Roman society held together by religion. “The people of Florence are far from considering themselves ignorant and benighted, and yet Brother Girolamo Savonarola succeeded in persuading them that he held converse with God. I will not pretend to judge whether it was true or not, for we must speak with all respect of so great a man; but I may well say that an immense number believed it, without having seen any extraordinary manifestations that should have made them believe it.”