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aspiration to have any status whatsoever, however humiliating, pro–
vided he may still feel himself alive. In both cases Machiavelli is try–
ing to stimulate a sensibility which is otherwise lazy and inert. So also
the
Prince,
on a higher level, is nothing but a lever to lift up the
deadly weight of this apathy.
In reality Machiavelli needed to live, needed to feel himself
alive. It is well known that this need is not felt by men of real
vitality, all of whose activities are equally in balance and alive. Such
men, in a desperate situation, can always take refuge in their
partic–
ulare,
which may be- aside from personal interests as we have al–
ready said- the righteous and tranquil conscience, the taste for in–
dependence, the sense of mystery. The exhausted and insufficient
man, on the other hand, feels a need to make his own sensibility
bleed, to twist tight his own feelings, as with a cord, in order to
strengthen them. Accordingly various contradictions result. One ar–
rives at the Marquis de Sade, who could not love without simulating
the actions of the most bitter hatred. Or, in quite a different order
of ideas, such is also the case with Machiavelli.
If
he had been a
normal, balanced man, Machiavelli would not have written the
Prince,
but rather his political "Memoirs." He would not have tried
to serve the Medici, but would have withdrawn, contentedly, to the
country. Instead, the need to escape drowning in apathy, indifference,
in the boredom of a life without passions or employment-this drives
him to inflict mortal wounds on himself, merely in order to feel
that he is alive; to serve in order to have a function. Thus from a
spasmodic desire for life, expressed in conscious cruelty, there was
born the
Prince,
that encomium of autocracy written by a republican.
As
a result, what he had not succeeded in doing for religion
with Fra Timoteo, for innocence with Lucretia, for love with Calli–
macus, Machiavelli finally did achieve for freedom in the last per–
sonage he created, the Prince. The fact is that whereas the corruption
of Timoteo, the ruin of Lucretia and the lust of Callimacus did not
cut into any of his ideals nor contradict any of his hopes, but con–
formed perfectly to what he considered obvious daily reality to be,
the Prince instead, in all
his
actions and precepts, inflicts wounds
and draws blood from that tiny bit of living flesh which Machiavelli
still had amid the paralysis of all his faculties. In the
Prince
there is
