Socrates Meets Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft

Author:Peter Kreeft [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898709261
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-03-29T06:00:00+00:00

11

Machiavelli’s Ethics

SOCRATES: Still there, Niccolò?

MACHIAVELLI: After that low blow, why should I stay?

SOCRATES: Why do you call it low?

MACHIAVELLI: Because it was not an objective logical argument, which is what I thought your job was here. It was more like—

SOCRATES: Like a sneer?

MACHIAVELLI: A sneer does not fit your face, Socrates.

SOCRATES: Only yours?

MACHIAVELLI: Well, yes. But you are supposed to be pure logic incarnate, without personal tricks.

SOCRATES: Is it a trick to make an accurate description of another’s face? Is a mirror a “personal trick”?

MACHIAVELLI: I thought you were here to examine my book, not me.

SOCRATES: Correct. The latter task can be carried out only by two, and I am not one of them.

MACHIAVELLI: Two? Who?

SOCRATES: Why, the only two whom you can never escape, to all eternity.

MACHIAVELLI: God, you mean? I’ll take my own chances there, thank you. But who else?

SOCRATES: Yourself. But you are right: we should be examining your book. Shall we review what we have found so far?

MACHIAVELLI: I think I do not have much choice.

SOCRATES: We have been evaluating your philosophy of man by your own standards, to see whether it is realistic and practical. We have discovered that you deduce many of your practical conclusions from the principle that all men are bad. Thus you discount many things previous thinkers took very serious account of: the common good, the moral force of conscience, the power of a saint with no arms, trust in your friends, and love. It seems that you are neglecting much in human nature—thus not being realistic or true to reality. On the other hand, the things you do emphasize—fear, force of arms, and human wickedness in many forms, which are indeed real—not one single true observation you have made about them has been unknown to the ancients, to the old moralists like myself and Moses and Solomon and Jesus and Muhammad and Confucius and Buddha and Lao-Tzu.

That is my summary of what I have found so far. And it puzzles me how such a contraction of the horizon could appear to anyone as a bold, new expansion of horizons, Yon say you will teach us how to be bad, where the ancients had only taught us how to be good. But we have always known how to be bad. By your own account this is true, for you say all men are wicked.

MACHIAVELLI: Hmph!

SOCRATES: Is that your answer to these charges? “Hmph”?

MACHIAVELLI: My answer is in my particular advice. Your charges are all abstract and general. I thought you were going to examine what I actually wrote, in detail.

[Wootton, p. 47, ll. 33-34.]

SOCRATES: That is exactly what I am doing. So let’s see exactly what you say about good and evil, “those factors that cause men . . . to be praised or censured”, to use your formula and chapter title. Chapter 15, I think.

MACHIAVELLI: Examine away, then.

SOCRATES: There is a passage about this same topic earlier, in chapter 3, that is revealing, too; let me quote that first:

[Bull, p. 42, ll.

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