Cassirer locates the cleavage between science and politics, as well as the first attempts to bridge the gap between the two, in the Renaissance, that is, in Machiavelli’s political philosophy.[1] Unable to solve the problem of uncertainty in human affairs, Machiavelli absolutizes it. Vis-à-vis the unpredictable Fortune, the personification of uncertainty, he places a ruler endowed with paradoxical character of a Proteus, who can change his shape from one moment to another. Yet, since Machiavelli secularizes Fortune by the very fact that Fortune is incalculable, he ipso facto secularizes the ruler as well, regardless of the fact that his talents are considered to be very rare in men. The half-mythical character of the ruler symbolizes the infinite potentialities of the whole species. Only one step therefore separates Machiavelli from the claim that we can make today: nothing but the full emancipation of human creative powers can enable the species to respond adequately to the unpredictability of Fortune.

Addendum (March 21, 1981)

In his mini-essay “On Chesterton,” Borges offers a glimpse at Chesterton’s tale How I Found the Superman, which has gradually evolved in my mind into an oppressive illustration of Proteus, the half-mythical homo multiplex.[2] This fragment consequently deserves, and even demands, a rejoinder. Borges writes:

Chesterton speaks to the Superman’s parents; when he asks them what the child, who never leaves a dark room, looks like, they remind him that the Superman creates his own law and must be measured by it. On that plane he is more handsome than Apollo; but viewed from the lower plane of the average man, of course—then they admit that it is not easy to shake hands with him, because of the difference in structure. Indeed, they are not able to state with precision whether he has hair or feathers.[3]

Now this is threatening as a fragment, for it merely suggests and thus entraps. Himself a monstrorum artifex (Pliny, XXVIII, 2),[4] Borges writes about Chesterton’s psyche: “[…] something in the makeup of his personality (sic) leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, and blind, and central.”[5] The polymorphous is prima facie demonic precisely because the average man expects the center to be solid, stable, tangible. The body is still the inverted hieroglyphic of the soul. The average man does not recognize himself as the Superman, and this ironically suggests a “difference in structure.” The alleged monster contemplates this undefined difference with horror. Chesterton’s innocent myth thus simultaneously reveals and conceals that it is but a distorted mirror—both a reflection of the infinite potentialities of the species, and a reflection of the anxiety associated with the realization of these potentialities. Borges fails to notice that this anxiety already suggests the end of the average man. The cleavage between the Superman and his parents, Chesterton et alii, is only the beginning.

Footnotes

1. Cassirer, E., The Myth of the State, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975 (first published in 1946). See especially “The Mythical Element in Machiavelli’s Political Philosophy: Fortune,” pp. 156-162.

2. Borges, J.L., Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965 (first published in 1952), pp. 82-85.

3. Op. cit., p. 84.

4. Op. cit., p. 83.

5. Op. cit., p. 84.