Cassirer, Machiavelli, and Political Myth

Abstract: Basic introduction to Ernst Cassirer’s idea of “myth” and its political relevance. I analyze Cassirer’s treatment of Machiavelli. Conclusion: there is a permanent relevance of myth to politics; no rational system exists without being buttressed/surrounded by mythic antecedents and ancillaries.

Though his background was situated in the hard sciences, Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical neo-Kantianism led him to complete a three-part survey of the phenomenon of myth between 1923-1929. He frames the problem of myth largely in terms of a priori categories roughly parallel to, and derived from, Kant’s notion of the transcendental. For Cassirer, this means that myth operates at the same architectonic level as do other “symbolic forms” such as music, art, and even history: they are framing categories of apprehension that enable the veridical and juridical aspects of “knowledge” to emerge in their separate-though-interconnected domains. What distinguishes these “genres” of symbolic form from one another are the structuring truth-conditions unique to each system—each claims a different status and method of “truth,” inviting a basic pluralism of human world-creation and world-apprehension.

From these grounds, Cassirer builds an evolutionary-historical model of myth-development that appropriates aspects of Hegel’s universalizing historicity. This in part means navigating between treating myth as a mere function of the conscious/subconscious, popularized by Freudian psychology, and seeing myth as an expression of a higher metaphysical principle, reflecting Schelling’s influential notion of the “Absolute” and its unfolding through history. According to Cassirer, myth develops concurrently with language, as both share an immediate structural generality predicated on existential confrontations with externality—the myth is set to explain concrete rituals of human activity, to plug the conceptual hole that justifies and subdues where there was otherwise only the cacophony of “mere” activity. In this manner, the pulse of myth is ever-present, though subject to transformation and dynamic fluidity across time and space.

Cassirer’s rendering is an important one. Interestingly, in Cassirer’s earlier career he had fashioned this theory of civilizational history along a trajectory of symbolic development, with reason and science trumping myth as a necessary but only initial phase. Myth thus came as an early stage in a greater sequence of general progress, with the promise of rationalization (and demystification), brought by the burgeoning sciences, operating as the theoretical force capable of extinguishing the ignorance associated with mythic worship. By his later career and the development of The Myth of the State in 1946, however, the impact of Nazi propaganda and Cassirer’s proximity to the ensuing mobilization of the masses had dramatically altered his original thesis. Writing right after the war’s conclusion, Cassirer’s experience lead him to a radical redeployment of the myth’s political relevance: “It has been reserved for the twentieth century, our own great technical age, to develop a new technique of myth. Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon—as machine guns or airplanes. That is a new thing—and a thing of crucial importance. It has changed the whole form of our social life.”[i]

Cassirer’s rendition yields critical insights that illuminate the process by which the pre-political mode of myth-making operates. Cassirer sees this novel “technique” of the myth as clearly hazardous—something to be approached with great caution. This is understandable, given his insistence on the “manufactured” nature of its strategic—and explicit—use within the skeleton of Fascism. While the myth originally developed in tight structural symbiosis with the symbolism of linguistic signs, by this later turn what stands behind the myth is the nudity of conscious manipulation. Cassirer ultimately bridges this by linking his original, semi-ontological treatment with a political lens he finds in Machiavelli.

While for Cassirer Machiavelli inaugurated the first political science, he also relied on the use of myth in a novel, secularized manner. Breaking with the “King’s Mirror” literature of the renaissance and perfecting Guicciardini’s much less robust realism,[ii] Machiavelli developed the terms of a unique political discourse as autonomous from the religious and ethical currents otherwise seen as intrinsic to the political model. This break meant a particularly ambivalent treatment of the myth for Machiavelli: while rejecting Christianity as the enervation of roman virtu on the one hand, Machiavelli also saw the right kind of religion, say, in the hands of a Pompilius Numa, as a magnificent political tool.[iii] The measurement of “good” vs. “bad” use, according to Cassirer, is related to the development of the common good, a theme most prevalent in the shift Machiavelli makes from The Prince to his Discourses.

The autonomization of political knowledge from the sphere of the ethico-religious is itself a simplification, of sorts: the “secularized” myth is now seen as political tool, to be designed and wielded as a means to particular ends. Machiavelli thus developed the myth of fortuna, according to Cassirer, within these instrumental means of a cool and distanced rationality. It is at this juncture that Machiavelli links the myth to his early—but deep—version of political judgment. Here is Cassirer commenting on Machiavelli’s notion of prudence, derived from virtu:

[The Prince] explains tactical rule for this great and continual battle against the power of Fortune. These rules are very involved and it is not easy to use them in the right way. For they exclude two elements that exclude each other. The man who wishes to stand his ground in this combat must combine in his character two opposite qualities. He must be timid and courageous; reserved and impetuous. Only by such a paradoxical mixture can he hope to win the victory. There is no uniform method to be followed at all times….We must be a sort of Proteus who, from one moment to another, can change his shape. Such a talent is very rare in men.[iv]

Note Cassirer’s insistence on the “paradoxical mixture” involved in this Machiavellian prudence. The prudent ruler, apart from recognizing and seizing the appropriate occazione, must be a creature of unbound adaptability. Indeed, it is in the resultant impossibility of such a consistent ability that the myth of fortuna seems to truly emerge.[v] Here is Machiavelli’s own two points on the reasons that sustain man’s perennial political failure:

There are two reasons why we cannot change ourselves: first, because we cannot oppose the ways in which Nature inclines us; second, because once a man has truly prepared by means of one method of procedure it is impossible to convince him that he can benefit by acting otherwise. As a result, it happens that Fortune varies for a single man, for she changes the times while he does not change his ways.[vi]

A definitive shift occurs between the more optimistic virtu of Ch. XXV of The Prince and this more defeatist, deterministic tone of the Discourses.[vii] Of course, we may reduce this difference to the intended audience—no longer is Machiavelli writing to Lorenzo de’ Medici with the rhetorical flare of the “Exhortation to Liberate Italy” chapter that closes The Prince, but with a tempered compassion for republican virtue. The point, nevertheless, remains: Machiavelli’s insistence on the “Protean” adaptability of the prudent prince is constrained by the “natural” characteristics he himself retains. It is here that comparisons between this Machiavellian idea of judgment and the fate of Sophocles’ Oedipus are most germane: we find in both the tragic irony that it is the very traits that lead to our success which further ensure our downfall. To truly practice virtu, to yield adaptable aggression, is to constantly be in the business of changing and overcoming oneself. That men do not achieve this level of dynamism, and rather sink into habit and convention, engages the very contradictions Casserir drew out: it is against the backdrop of this “natural” inability that fortuna develops as the Machiavellian political myth. Behind every act thus stands the grin of fortune, and, though we may indeed build “embankments and dykes” as precautionary measures against it, the unchangebility of man’s nature means: today we meet success, tomorrow may be ruin. To avoid the nihilism therein, the impossible insecurity brought about by such a fracture, the myth, as political tool, closes the gap and cancels the question.

This leads to the second—and most important—element we may draw from Machiavelli (and from Cassirer’s treatment of Machiavelli). Note Machiavelli’s observation that part of the problem of political judgment is the fact that, once a man is convinced of a successful method, it will be “impossible to convince him that he can benefit from acting otherwise.” I want to dwell on this aspect of “convincing,” as it is precisely where the program for the myth is first developed. Machiavelli’s realism—this is what people actually do—here animates its own political psychology. Men are stubborn, obstinate and, having found a route that works, grow narrow in their range of action. It would seem that Machiavelli implicitly associates this deficit with the resources of reason: the “natural” obstinacy of a man disables reason-based “convincing,” for what can be said to one so committed?

Cassirer’s real contribution viz. Machiavelli hinges on this last point. The myth is sustained in the Machiavellian cosmos of “effectual truth,” verita effettuale, to the extent that the empirical reality of human politics includes the psychological faults of human creatures. “Convincing” these creatures is “impossible”; the real business of political pedagogy is rather conducted in terms of the myth. Taking political realism seriously means taking seriously Arash Abizadeh’s notion of the “motivational deficit,”[viii] and for Machiavelli this means locating the true registrar of motivation far deeper than the cool speculations of reason. “If reason has failed us,” Cassirer begins, “there remains always the ultima ratio, the power of the miraculous and mysterious.”[ix] Cassirer continues, explicitly distancing reason-based processes from the subaltern emotional work of myth: “Myth does not arise solely from intellectual processes; it sprouts forth from deep human emotions.”[x]

What Cassirer feared most about myth was here advanced in full. The model of progress he had developed earlier in his career—where reason had ultimately won against myth—was radically unfeasible in the face of this psychological certainty. Words, arguments, debates—nothing could withstand the deluge brought forth by the mythic image, the animate “Volk” developed by Herder, the symbol of a purified unity that would come to define the “politics of the Will” and subsume all the deliberations of the Weimar period as so much Semitic decadence. “It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths,” Cassirer asserts, “A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms.”[xi] What did Cassirer see actually motivating men? Not so much self-interest, and certainly not reason—it was the existential question for meaning, for purpose, answered with terrifying theatricality. It was this theatricality that operated on a level distinct from the mere futilisms of deliberation; Cassirer’s conclusion mirrors something like William James’s earlier argument for the relation between belief and knowledge, where he observed: “not only as a matter of fact do we find our passional natural influencing us in our opinions, but that there are some options between opinions in which this influence must be regarded as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant of our choice.”[xii] The compulsion of this “necessity” and “lawfulness” was, for Cassirer, the permanent domain and continuous labor of myth.

[i] Ersnt Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 282

[ii] Ersnt Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 152

[iii] Ersnt Cassirer, The Myth of the State, pp. 156-162

[iv] Ersnt Cassirer, The Myth of the State, pp. 160-161

[v] Admittedly, Machiavelli does demonstrate some ambivalence on this point, particularly in his praise/analysis of Caesare Borgia. Machiavelli ultimately ends by blaiming Borgia for his own downfall; though it was fortuna that set hindrances along his path, it was his failure to navigate the storm—namely, in electing Pope ___________--that sealed his downfall.

[vi] Machiavelli, Discourses, BK. 3, CH. 9; p. 383

[vii] I would argue that Ch. 25 may be read in light of Machiavelli’s appropriation of Polybius’ cyclical view of civilizational development—the shift to the determinism of Discourses thus does not reduce our counteract the Prince, but rather adds the context and endgame toward which The Prince was just a minor note: that is, the glory of a stable republican order dominated by the “common good.”

[viii] See Arash Abizadeh, “On the Philosophy/Rhetoric Binaries, p. 449: “First, motivation and social integration are deemed to require mobilization of the ‘passions’, a category in contrast to which ‘reason’ is constructed. Second, this first binary is linked to a set of secondary ones: the passions are said to be left cold by things ‘abstract’ (or ‘universal’, etc.). What is needed to motivate democratic citizens and thus secure social integration is held to be a motivationally efficacious appeal to an allegedly ‘concrete object’ that can anchor the passions.”

[ix] Ersnt Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 279

[x] Ersnt Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 43

[xi] Ersnt Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 296

[xii] William James, The Will to Believe, p. 17