Philosophies of Political Myth, a Compartive Look Backwards: Cassirer, Sorel and Spinoza

European Journal of Political Theory http://ept.sagepub.com/

Philosophies of Political Myth, a Comparative Look Backwards : Cassirer, Sorel and Spinoza European Journal of Political Theory 2009 8: 365 DOI: 10.1177/1474885109103840 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ept.sagepub.com/content/8/3/365

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article

Philosophies of Political Myth, a Comparative Look Backwards Cassirer, Sorel and Spinoza Chiara Bottici

EJPT European Journal of Political Theory 8(3) 365–382 © The Author(s), 2009 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav [DOI: 10.1177/1474885109103840] http://ejpt.sagepub.com

University of Florence

ABSTRACT:

The aim of this article is to recover a tradition of political philosophy which has been largely neglected and show its relevance for contemporary political thought. By arguing for the need of rethinking political myth today, the article reconstructs the philosophical reflections on this topic of Cassirer, Sorel and Spinoza, discussing both their strength and shortcomings. By adopting a comparative look backwards, it shows why they provide an ideal starting point for a philosophical approach to political myth which is aimed at both understanding what political myths are and how should they be evaluated.

KEY WORDS:

Cassirer, political myth, prophecy, Sorel, Spinoza

When analysing the modern technique of power, Cassirer observed that modern politicians fulfil the functions that, in traditional societies, were performed by the homo magus and the homo divinans. Prophecy, he observed, is one of the most important modern techniques of power. Our politicians, he wrote at the end of the 1940s, not only promise to cure all social evils, but also continually foretell the future. Certainly the new techniques of divination and prophecy have deeply changed up to a point where they have lost any magical aspect, but they have by no means vanished. As an example of such new techniques, Cassirer looked at the role of scientific literature, and, in particular, at the prophecy of the ‘decline of the West’ from which the Nazi regime largely drew. As he wrote, Curiously enough, this new technique of divination first made its appearance not in German politics, but in German philosophy. In 1918 there appeared Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Perhaps never before had a philosophical book had such a sensational success. It was translated into almost every language and read by all sort of readers – philosophers and scientists, historians and politicians, students and scholars, tradesmen and men in the street. What was the reason for this unprecedented success, what was the magic

Contact address: Chiara Bottici, Department of Philosophy, University of Florence, Via Bolognese 52, 50139 Firenze, Italy Email: chiara.bottici@unif

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European Journal of Political Theory 8(3) spell that this book exerted over its readers? It seems to be a paradox; but to my mind the cause of Spengler’s success is to be sought rather in the title of his book than in its content. The title The Decline of the West was an electric spark that set the imagination of Spengler’s readers aflame.1

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The passage cannot but call our attention to the ‘sensational successes’ of our epoch. Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations also seems to owe its extraordinary success to its title much more than to its content. Is Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations the Decline of the West of our time? The idea of a clash between civilizations had been strongly criticized as scientifically naive and too simplistic to explain the complexities of world politics when it first was proposed in the 1990s. Nevertheless, particularly after 11 September, many people came to believe that a clash between Islam and the West is taking place.2 How is it possible? How can a theory that has been so strongly criticized have turned into an apparently fulfilled prophecy? Which sort of mechanism is here at stake? Prophecies and divination are a feature central to modern politics because they are a central component of political myth. The aim of a political myth is to become a prophecy. A political myth cannot be falsified because it is not (only) a scientific theory about the constitution of the world, but also (and foremost) the expression of a determination to act within it. It cannot be simply ‘true’ or ‘false’ because it aims, so to speak, to create its own truth. As a consequence, it aims to be not simply a prophecy, but a self-fulfilling one. Huntington’s idea of a clash between civilizations, like Spengler’s decline of the West, perfectly show this: they are not only scientific theories, but also self-fulfilling prophecies, and this is the reason for their success as lenses through which so many people look at the world and act within it. The main purpose of this article is to show that there is a neglected tradition of political thought that could help us understand why political myths are so central to politics and why they aim to be self-fulfilling prophecies. Contemporary political philosophy, concentrated as it is on the conditions for communicative and public reason, seems to be still largely ill-equipped for this task. By focusing only on political reason, political philosophy risks elaborating models for a world that does not exist. Human beings do not only act on the basis of rational motivations and calculations, but also on the basis of myths. Together with the analysis of the conditions for public reason, we need a deeper understanding of those for public myths.3 This does not mean neglecting the crucial role of the former, but rather to place it besides a stronger development of the latter. What is at stake is not simply getting a more elaborated and refined philosophical theory of what politics is about, but also a better understanding of the world we live in. The philosophical reflections of authors such as Cassirer, Sorel and Spinoza, particularly when taken together, provide a solid basis for a philosophical theory of political myth, which takes into account both the dark side and the potentially liberating power of political myth. In order to show why in their reflections we can find important insights as to the conditions for public myths, I will follow a chrono-

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth logical order a contrario. Indeed, what interests me here is more to lay the bases for a systematic theory of political myth rather than to elucidate the historical context and evolution of such theories. And, as I will try to show, this can best be done a contrario, as it is in Spinoza, therefore going back to the emergence of another Enlightenment, that we can find a possible answer to problems unsolvable within the conceptions of more contemporary authors such as Sorel and Cassirer. By starting with the most recent author, Cassirer, I will try to show that his theory of political myth contains important insights, but ultimately remains too much linked to the specific example of the Nazi myth of the Aryan race, on the one hand, and to the general premises of his philosophy, on the other. This prevents him from recognizing that if political myths are prophecies, this does not mean that they are always religious ones and even less that they are always the sign of a regression into primitive forms of consciousness. I will then turn to Sorel, who focused on the specific example of the myth of the proletarian strike and argued that political myths have a potentially liberating power because not every myth is a form of religion or primitive consciousness. Political myths are determinations to act and in this sense they are self-fulfilling prophecies, but, we must add, they can also be secularized prophecies. If political myths are a form of regression for Cassirer and a form of progress for Sorel, Spinoza, with his reflections on the role of prophecy in the constitution of the ancient state of Israel, shows that political myths can be the means for both. If all societies have to rely in one way or another on political imagination because people prefer to be taught by imagination rather than by ratiocination, what they differ in is the degree to which this imaginary dimension remains open to further re-elaboration and discussion.

Political Myth as a Regression: Cassirer’s Enlightened Approach to Myth Cassirer’s The Myth of the State, which was published posthumously in 1946, is the only major work in western philosophy that, from the very title, promises to deal directly with the power of modern political myths. Cassirer deeply felt the challenge that the affirmation of Nazism, with its strong reliance on the myth of the Aryan race, posed to him. Like all those who had believed in the Enlightenment, with its promise of liberation of politics from myth, the successful recourse to political myth could not but appear as a form of regression, standing in deep contrast to the progress made through natural sciences and the technical mastery over nature.4 How is such a chasm between practical and intellectual life possible? How can the progress of the latter go together with the regress of the former? For a philosopher who saw in modernity a fundamental trajectory of progress and the exit from myth, this is particularly difficult to explain and, as I will try to show, Cassirer ultimately fails to provide a convincing explanation. One of the problems is that political myth is not for Cassirer just a simple way of thinking or speaking, but it is a whole form of life (Lebensform). Drawing from Doutté’s anthropology,

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he affirms that a political myth is a ‘collective desire personified’.5 This desire is the result of an entire form of consciousness, the ‘mythical consciousness’, which encompasses all that which anthropologists have described using such different names as ‘magic’, ‘religious practices’, ‘beliefs’, ‘worship’ and ‘rituals’. The difference between modern and traditional societies is precisely the difference between a community (Gemeinschaft) held together by mythical beliefs and practices and a society (Gesellschaft) that is a product of the will. The latter corresponds to what Cassirer also calls a community of will (Willensgemeinschaft), whilst the former is a community of fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft).6 If myth is what characterizes traditional forms of political communities, the problem is to explain how the appeal to the myth of the Aryan race could have been so successful in a modern polity. The Myth of the State, which presents itself as an analysis of the role that myth plays in the state, is in fact the reconstruction of the western attempts to get rid of myth, as a simple look at its table of contents shows. A direct discussion of political myth appears only at the end of the text, in a section that significantly recalls Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, one of the main ideological texts of Nazism.7 It is only here, when faced with the advent of Nazism, that Cassirer has to come to terms with the presence of myth within modern politics and his failure to provide a convincing explanation is the sign that the very premise of the modernity’s exit from myth was ill founded. Political myths have not ‘returned’, as he claimed, because they have always been there, albeit at times, in a less conspicuous way. With the advent of Nazism, Cassirer was facing a counterexample to his theory of myth as a primitive form of consciousness. The whole theory he had been developing in his monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is indeed based on the dichotomy between mythical and scientific consciousness, understood, respectively, as the typically primitive and modern form of consciousness. Having classified myth as a primitive residual that has to be superseded by modern rationality, he can only explain the presence of myth in terms of regression. However, this view of mythical consciousness seems to be inadequate for explaining the presence of political myth in modern politics. Instead of reconsidering his theory, he attributes this anomaly to the development of new techniques. Yet, as we will see, none of these techniques can fully explain the success of the myth of the Aryan race. As I have mentioned, political myths according to Cassirer are collective desires personified, but here, he observes, we find myth made according to plans. The new political myths do not grow up freely; they are not the wild fruits of an exuberant imagination. They are artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans.8 Among the techniques that enabled the fabrication of the political myth of Nazism, he analysed three: the magical use of words, the use of rituals and, finally, the recourse to prophecy. Words, according to Cassirer’s general philosophy, can be used either semantically, to describe an objective state of affairs or magically, in order to have a certain impact on the audience. Nazi politicians managed to combine the two:

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth words were increasingly charged with feelings and violent passions and used more to produce certain effects than to describe them.9 The skilful use of words was then rendered more efficient by the recourse to new and innumerable rites.10 The parallel is, again, with primitive societies, perceived as forms of life vinculated by thousands of rituals and social practices. The modern techniques of power, by overwhelming the individual with a bulk of rituals, suppress the sense of individual responsibility and, in this way, destroy freedom, the freedom that, following Kant, Cassirer understands as an ethical imperative: to be autonomous. The suppression of the freedom of the subject and his or her autonomy is the sign that we are abandoning modernity for a return to more primitive forms of life. Yet, at this point of the argument, we still do not know how such a change was possible, why modern enlightened individuals agreed to exchange their freedom for a return to earlier stages of the evolution. A partial explanation is given by the reference to the prophetic nature of political myth, which is the third of the techniques of power he analysed. Nazi politicians do not only use words in a magical way, but they also promise the medicine to cure all evils. The sorcerer, the homo magus, is at the same time the homo divinans: . . . our modern politicians know very well that the great masses are much more easily moved by the force of imagination than by the sheer physical force. And they have made ample use of this knowledge. The politician becomes a sort of public fortune-teller. Prophecy is an essential element in the new technique of rulership. The most improbable or even impossible promises are made; the millennium is predicted over and over again.11

This passage cannot but alert us: it seems as if the most improbable and impossible promises are still made and even the millennium continues to be predicted. Modern prophecies may no longer be religious ones, but they still are prophecies. And when they are part of a political myth they tend to be self-fulfilling ones. Nazism’s recourse to prophecy is not an anomaly in modernity: far from being a prerogative of totalitarianism, secularized (when not religious) prophecy is part of the techniques of power of very different political regimes. As we have seen in the opening quotation, the modern prophets do not resemble at all the religious prophets of the traditional societies. In contrast to primitive societies, where politics can hardly be separated from religion, in modern societies we have witnessed a process of social differentiation whereby the political and the religious functions have been separated. But if divination has changed its face, it has by no means vanished. To paraphrase Clifford Geertz, the extraordinary has not gone out of modern politics, however much of the banal may have entered it.12 Spengler is not a priest, but a philosopher. Still, his book managed to foment a prophetic sense of fatalism analogous to that generated by religious prophecy. In this sense, he is also a prophet, although a secular one. When Cassirer moves on to specifically analysing the way in which the new myths work, all the dichotomies that he had built break down. Spengler’s catastrophic prophecy cannot be grasped through a dichotomy such as ‘semantic’

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versus ‘magic’ uses of the word. Spengler’s words, even if they were not directly aimed at dominating people’s deeds and minds, worked both as semantic and magic devices: at the same time, they served to describe a presumed state of affairs (the decline of the West) and to produce effects in their readers (stimulate their reaction). It is only because it works as both a description of things and a magic word that the title The Decline of the West can have worked as an ‘electric spark’ that set the imagination aflame.13 More generally, we may observe that Cassirer looks at myth in the perspective of modern scientific rationality as a terminus ad quem.14 His whole theory of the symbolic forms is based on the dichotomy between mythical and scientific consciousness, understood respectively as the typically primitive and modern form of consciousness. The distinction between the two depends on the possibility of distinguishing between the subject and the object of the representations, which characterizes scientific representations, in contrast to mythical consciousness.15 The very idea that scientific knowledge can be based on a clear separation between the subject and the object of knowledge is the sign that we are still within the presuppositions of the Enlightenment philosophy of the subject. The scientific subject is portrayed as a punctual ego, which is separated from a reality that he/she is facing. Against those who maintain that Cassirer’s philosophy of myth is not a philosophy of the subject, because he emphasized the social character of the mythical consciousness,16 it can be argued that Cassirer still remains within it, precisely because his very concept of mythical consciousness is based on the contraposition with the scientific subject which is conceived according to a philosophy of the subject. In the perspective of a more general theory of political myth, the problem is that, by analysing myth as a form of consciousness or as an entire form of life, the differences between phenomena such as myths, religious beliefs and practices as well as rituals of all sorts, all get lost.17 But myth, religion and rituals are very different things. First, myth is not religion, and, if it can be argued that human beings are overwhelmed by a religious representation that claims to be the ultimate truth, the same does not hold for myth.18 If religion is always, as Cassirer himself maintains, a matter of life and death, the same does not hold for political myth. As we have seen, if it is true that prophecies are an essential feature of modern politics, it must however be added that they can also be secularized prophecies.19 Secondly, the two categories of myth and rituals must also be kept separate. Even if both myth and rituals are, in a sense, wholes made by language and actions, the concept of ritual brings in a new dimension that is not entailed in the concept of myth. Ritual is not any action. Only a particular class of actions can be classified as ritual. Rite, from the Latin word rite, is literally ‘what is well done’, or ‘what is done according to the rules’. Even if political myths and political rituals are quite often associated, the two work in different ways within a society: political rituals must be kept unchanged to be effective, whereas political myth, in as far as it provides significance within perpetually changing circumstances, must remain open to the possibility of being renegotiated according to new experiences

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth and needs. To put it bluntly, a political myth expresses itself through variants, the political ritual through fixed rules. To conclude on this point, it is precisely because Cassirer remained linked to the Enlightenment dichotomy of ‘mythical consciousness’ versus ‘scientific consciousness’ that his analysis of the myth of Aryan race, even if it provides important insights as to the functioning of a totalitarian myth, is ultimately unable to explain the presence of myth in modern politics in general. Only by following the Enlightenment identification of myth with all that pure reason is not, with a whole form of life entailing religion as well as magic, could he have assumed that, since modernity has undermined the role of religion, it should also have disposed with myth. However, as I will try now to show in the next two sections, not all political myths are a form of regress and should therefore not be seen as an anomaly within modern politics.

Can Political Myth be a Means for Progress? Sorel’s Approach to the Myth of the General Strike Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1975), published in 1908, almost 40 years before The Myth of the State, provides an alternative theory of political myth. In contrast to Cassirer, Sorel strongly emphasized that myth is not religion, and it is precisely for this reason that it can and should play a role in modern politics. In other words, whilst Cassirer saw in myth a form of ‘regression’, Sorel presents it as a means for ‘progress’. In contrast to Cassirer, Sorel was in the first place a political activist. He was not so much concerned to develop a theory of political myth as to enlist it. The aim of the Reflections on Violence is to criticize the parliamentary socialists who neglected the importance of proletarian violence. He perceived the myth of the general strike, a complex of images that immediately evoke all the different manifestations of the war engaged by socialism against capitalism, as the highest point of such violence. As is well known, after first adhering to Marxism and to the left’s cause more generally, towards the end of his life Sorel manifested an ambivalent affinity with the emerging fascism. This ambivalence certainly did not contribute to a full appraisal of his theory of political myth. Still, it can be argued that, notwithstanding all its limits and ambivalences, his theory of political myth contains important remarks as to its nature and scope. In the first place, Sorel showed that people participating in typically modern forms of political mobilization, such as the big social movements, need to represent their action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. Narratives such as the syndicalist ‘general strike’ or Marx’s ‘communist revolution’ are myths because they are constructions able to move people’s imaginations.20 Far from being an anomaly within modernity, political myths are therefore a central component of it: it is when it comes to typically modern phenomena such as the big social movements that their role becomes conspicuous. This can also explain why

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it is only in modern times that the concept of political myth was first elaborated (and it is therefore to three typically modern philosophers that I propose to look in order to construct a philosophy of political myth). Sorel uses the concept of myth for two reasons. First, he wants to establish distance from all kinds of positivistic explanations. There are facts that cannot be explained by the sophistry of a rationalist philosophy.21 The readiness to sacrifice their own lives shown by the Napoleonic soldiers or by the Greeks and Romans cannot be explained on the basis of purely rational explanations. In order to explain them, Sorel has recourse to Bergson’s analysis of the way in which human beings create an artificial world that is placed in the future and that is formed by movements that depend entirely on us.22 Precisely for this reason, these complexes of images can be defined as myths. This, secondly, also enables to distinguish them both from utopia and religion. The general strike is a myth and not a utopia because it is not (only) a theoretical model. The general strike is a determination of the will. A myth is not the construction of the single mind of a theorist who, after having observed and discussed facts, establishes a model for comparing existing societies and measuring the good and bad that they contain.23 A myth cannot be divided in its parts and judged according to their correspondence to reality: a myth is a whole made of images that can express a specific determination of the will only when they are together. Sorel was in the first place interested in understanding in what conditions a socialist revolution was possible. It was therefore crucial for him to distinguish myth from utopia. In his view, despite the fact that socialism had been a utopia for a long time, it had now reached a completely different stage. Socialism was no longer utopia because it had become a preparation of the proletarian masses.24 Myth is not religion, either. Sorel states that people living in this world of myths are secure from refutation; this led many to assert that socialism is a kind of religion and so conflate myth and religion. For a long time, people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism and from that they have concluded that everything that is below science must be religion. But not all that which is not science must be religion.25 Sorel, in contrast to Cassirer, emphasizes this point, and this enables him to recognize the role of myth in modern politics. While Cassirer, by starting from the presupposition of Enlightenment interprets political myth as a form of regression, Sorel recognizes the modern nature of political myth and argues that in certain circumstances they can be a means to progress. If modernity has undermined the role of religion as a horizon of sense in the experience of the world, it has not undermined that of myth. On the contrary, as we have seen, it is precisely in typically modern phenomena, such as the big social movements, that the role played by mythical constructions became evident. In these cases, use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments.26 As a consequence, it might even be the case that nothing that myths contain will

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth ever happen; this will not undermine their pouvoir moteur. In our everyday life, we continuously experience the huge gap between what actually happens and our preconceived notion of it, but this does not prevent us from continuing to make resolutions. Political myths have a prophetic structure because they are projected towards the future. However, they must not be judged as astrological almanacs that foretell the future, but as means of acting on the present in the light of both of the past and of the future.27 But if it is true that myths cannot be falsified, they can, on the other hand, be discussed. Sorel is ambiguous on this point, although, on many occasions, he seems to conceive of myth as an absolute dimension beyond the possibility of discussion. In this reading, we are however back to the dichotomy of myth versus rationality that we have seen at work in Cassirer’s philosophy, albeit with an opposite axiological connotation: here it is rationality that should be superseded by the superior power of myth. This ambiguity also explains the affinities many interpreters have perceived between Sorel and fascism. It is not by chance, for instance, that Carl Schmitt recovers Sorel’s theory of myth precisely by underlining this point: myth is the sign of a vital enthusiasm that breaks the crust of rational procedures and arguments.28 Certainly there are passages that lend themselves to such a reading. For instance, Sorel goes as far as to write that ‘the idea of the general strike is so admirably adapted to the proletarian mind that it can dominate it in the most absolute way . . . and that even the power of dispute is reduced to nothing’.29 However, this statement contrasts with what Sorel himself (in contrast to Schmitt) does, which is to critically discuss a myth. In particular, in the fourth article of the Reflections on Violence, an article devoted to the defence of the general strike against the criticism of many parliamentary socialists, Sorel discusses this myth from the point of view of its rationality. Sorel defends it by showing how it corresponds to Marx’s doctrine. The general strike is well adapted to convey all the most important views and values of this doctrine in an immediate image: the division of the society into two classes, the idea of class struggle and the revolution of the present state of things. This is a crucial point that can be grasped only by looking at the same time at what Sorel says about the myth of the general strike and what he actually does with it. If one looks at both dimensions, it becomes impossible to maintain that, for Sorel, myth is only a matter of faith that eludes any possibility of critical discussion:30 indeed, this is exactly what Sorel does in his work. The reason why Sorel, seems to hold that myths are not subject to rational discussion is that he remains linked to what we can call a dualistic view of the self. Recovering Bergson’s psychology, he develops it according into a theory of the ‘two selves’. In his view, on the one hand, there is the free creative self and, on the other, the rational, external and spatial one. It is to the latter where the stable affirmations of science are due, whereas myth is the product of the former.31 The problem for a general theory of political myth is that we fall here again into the same misleading dichotomy that we have seen in the case of Cassirer’s general philosophy: myth on the one hand, and science and rationality on the other.

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European Journal of Political Theory 8(3) Certainly, myth and science are two different things, the former being a narrative that responds to a need for significance, and the latter a series of rational arguments. But to reify them as two distinct selves (Sorel) or forms of consciousness (Cassirer) is excessive, because it means neglecting the important interplay that can take place between the two.32 Still, Sorel does not go beyond a very brief reference to Bergson’s psychology. He was not so much interested in the philosophical implications of his theory of myth as in its practical ones. His major point was to show that proletarian violence is the real engine of history. In doing this, he formulates a theory of political myth in which he recognizes that there cannot be a mobilization of political action without a powerful set of images that assure those who are engaged in this action about the triumph of their cause, but he does not investigate the psychological implications of such a view. As a consequence, the psychological theory of the two selves, to which he refers, does not adequately support his own analysis of political myth. Sorel’s conception of political myth cannot be grasped through a dualistic approach, nor can what he actually does when dealing with the myth of the general strike. Gramsci points to this when he criticizes Croce’s interpretation of Sorel. Croce himself thought of myth as the product of passions that are impenetrable to rationality and, for this reason, he maintained that Sorel, by rationally discussing the myth of the general strike, dissolves it.33 To this view, Gramsci replies that only such an intellectualistic and idealistic approach as that of Croce could have assumed this. In Gramsci’s view, the myth of the general strike is neither a mere piece of paper (una cosa di carta) that could be dissipated by some doctrinarian pages, nor the expression of a set of passions that are impenetrable to rational discussion.34 Why, one could argue following this line of reasoning, should we assume that reason does not have its own passions and that, vice versa, passions cannot be reasonable? Why should passions disappear when rational considerations emerge? Any dichotomy of ‘passions versus reason’ reveals its serious limitations here. What Sorel does whilst discussing the myth of the general strike is not different from what we all do when reflecting upon a future course of actions: to consider its correspondence to our own views, values and passions, without it being possible to separate out all these components. Far from dissolving myth, Sorel reinforces it by discussing its correspondence to Marxism. He shows the moral of the story, and thereby reinforces the determination to act.

Beyond the Myth/Reason Dichotomy: Spinoza’s Theory of Political Imagination

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At this point of the argument, we are left with a fundamental question: what is a political myth and how should it be interpreted? Is it a form of regress, as Cassirer argues, or a form of progress, as Sorel seems to sustain? The task of this section is to show that important insights to answer this question can be found in Spinoza’s analysis of the role played by the Jewish prophecy in the constitution of the

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth ancient state of Israel. Spinoza is indeed an anomaly within modern philosophy from a variety of points of view, included his emphasis on the symbolic conditions for the constitution and preservation of a polity. Not only, in contrast to other modern philosophers, does he analyse them in detail but he also combines this analysis with a radical theory of democracy. It is therefore striking that Spinoza’s contribution to an understanding of political myths has been so largely ignored.35 In his Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza does not overtly speak of political myth, but of prophecy (prophetia) and imagination (imaginatio). Still, his analysis of the role of prophecy for the ancient Hebrews is the occasion for a more general reflection on the role that the faculty of imagination plays in politics and, as such, it provides crucial insights not only on the relationship between political myth and prophecy but also on the human needs from which both myth and prophecy stem. Moreover, as we will see, he does so by avoiding the trap of the dichotomy of myth versus reason that ensnared both Cassirer and Sorel. Precisely because rationality is a hard and rare stage of knowledge to achieve, he never thought that our everyday world could be completely rationalized. Freed from the idea that it is an exception to the world’s rationality, following Spinoza one can attain a more accurate picture of the role of both imagination and myths in our lives.36 Spinoza’s theory provides the tools for a critique of political myth, but without falling into the problematic dichotomy that sustained Cassirer’s enlightened approach. Spinoza stays thus at the origins of another Enlightenment, one that has largely been neglected by contemporary political theory. As we read in the frontispiece of the Tractatus, the aim of this work is to show that freedom of thought is compatible with both religion (pietas) and the peace of the state. In order to do so, Spinoza engages in a discussion of the interpretation of the scriptures and of prophecy. Prophecies, according to Spinoza, do not derive, as Maimonides concluded, from a particular kind of knowledge: they are not the result of a divine revelation since no divine revelation, as traditionally understood, exists. As he provocatively puts it, God’s words cannot be enigmatic because he does not have a particular style. The obscure, enigmatic and figurative character of prophecies does not derive from God, but from the vivid imagination of the prophets. In order to have a prophecy one does not need to have a more perfect mind, but simply a more vivid imagination.37 If prophecy is the result of a vivid imagination it must however immediately be added that imagination, in Spinoza’s view, is not ‘imaginary’, unreal, false.38 Imagination, according to his Ethics, is a set of ideas produced on the basis of present or past bodily impressions. In its turn, an idea is a ‘concept of the mind’39 and the mind is nothing other than an expression of the body – the body that is felt and thought.40 The mind and the body are the two attributes of God, the ways in which God, the unique substance, is given to us, and the structure of the two attributes is parallel: ‘the order and connection of ideas is, at the same time, the order and connection of things’.41 The theory of a parallelism between body and mind, or extension and thinking,

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does not mean that all ideas are adequate. On the contrary, what characterizes imagination is precisely its inadequacy, because this is only the first level of knowledge. It is only with superior levels of knowledge (respectively reason and intuitive science) that we can guarantee the achievement of adequate ideas. Nevertheless, even if these ideas are not yet adequate, they are not necessarily false, because a mind has false ideas only in as far as it considers these bodily perceptions to be adequate ideas when they are not.42 In Spinoza’s theory of knowledge there is not a dichotomy of ‘imagination versus reason’ and even less so the idea that one side of the dichotomy is deemed or should be replaced by the other. In the first place, the scheme is threefold: imagination, reason and intuitive science. Secondly, imagination is not seen necessarily as false, in contrast to rationality. If imagination is not always adequate knowledge, it nonetheless plays an extremely important role in the sphere of praxis. Prophetic imagination concerns the practice of life and virtue and the authority of the prophets is based on this moral role.43As he repeats in different places, the certitude stemming from biblical prophecy is moral and not ‘mathematical’ – where ‘mathematical’ means the certitude that stems from the perception of the thing perceived or seen.44 The example of the ancient nation of the Hebrews enables Spinoza to make a general point about the way in which an appeal to an imaginative narrative example contributes to justifying a particular set of institutions. When the prophets called the Hebrews ‘the chosen people’, they were performing a function essential to any society: they were using imagination to transcend individual interests and to create a common standard of judgements and of behaviour.45 In other words, they were working on a political myth, a common narrative that transcends the individual precisely because it can provide significance to the conditions and deeds of an entire social group. And significance is more than mere meaning, because something can have a meaning without being significant to me.46 Otherwise stated, it is a moral and not a mathematical certitude which is at stake. The concept that enables Spinoza’s choice to be read in such a way is that of the exemplar of human nature, which is developed in the fourth part of the Ethics.47 Here, Spinoza defines ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as ‘what we certainly know to be useful to us’ and ‘what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good’ respectively.48 Clearly the problem arises of how to determine this utility because what is useful for one person at any given time and place may not be to another. So if the value terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are to mean something more than the mere subjective utility of an individual, then it is necessary to find a basis for transcending the particular judgement of the individual; this is the purpose of the concept of the ‘exemplar of human nature’. As he puts it, ‘by “good” we mean what we know certainly is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model (exemplar) of human nature that we set before ourselves, whereas by “evil”, we mean what we certainly know prevents us from becoming like that model’.49 The concept of exemplar works here as a bridge from subjective to objective judgements because exemplars are formed on the basis of what he calls ‘universal

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth ideas’ – as opposed to individual judgements.50 ‘Universal ideas’, in Spinoza’s use of the term, are not adequate ideas, the clear and distinct foundations of reason. They tend to be inadequate, incomplete and confused images of the world. He distinguishes between ‘common notions’ which are the foundations of our reasoning on the one hand, and notions that derive from other causes and are therefore ill-founded on the other.51 Despite their names, ‘these notions are not formed by all [human beings] in the same way, but vary from one to another, in accordance with what the body has more often been affected by, and what the imagination recollects more easily’.52 Thus, universal ideas can also be characterized as the notions ‘we are accustomed to feign’53 and should, therefore, be called ‘beings of imagination’ rather that ‘beings of reason’.54 Spinoza’s notion of the exemplars of human nature is very close to Vico’s concept of ‘imaginative universals’. In both cases, we have certain constructs of the imagination that, far from being simply individual creatures, aspire to be universal in their nature. In both cases, at the same time, we have universal beings of imagination. It is precisely due to this ‘universality’ that they can serve to mediate between individual and universal judgements. Aristotle also pointed to this in his Poetics, when he said that mythoi are superior to history because they tell things as they could have happened according to what is likely or necessary whilst history tells them as they happened. Precisely because they do not limit themselves to telling what has actually happened they contain a more universal truth.55 The universality of such beings of imagination is not clearly the universality of reason, of formal and abstract principles, but it is the ‘universality’ that derives from the knowledge of different human characters. While Vico, by historicizing his analysis of the role of imaginative universals and attributing this role to the childhood of humankind, limits his theory of imaginative universals to a certain historical phase of humankind,56 Spinoza, like Aristotle, considered the power of imagination as a normal feature of human beings at any time and in any society. Going back to Cassirer, we could now say that political myths are collective wishes personified because they embody exemplars of human nature that set people’s imagination in motion through their narrative structure. In contrast to both Cassirer and Sorel, we should however add with Spinoza that, if such beings of imagination are a product of a universal human faculty that does not necessarily produce falsity or truth, there is no a priori reason to classify them as respectively a form of ‘regression’ or ‘progress’. Spinoza’s major point is that imagination is a universal human faculty which does not necessarily produce adequate ideas, but is also not necessarily a source of error. What we can however do – and what he does in his analysis of the example of the Jewish prophecy – is to set the conditions for the legitimacy of the recourse to political imagination. This is the reason why Spinoza’s analysis can become the basis for a more general theory of political myth – a theory that allows us both to reconstruct the role that myth plays in politics as well as to set the limits for the legitimacy of its use. Spinoza explicitly presents his analysis of the history of the ancient Hebrews as a

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basis for a more general theory.57 The purpose of the Tractatus is to deal with the example of the nation of Israel in order to make a general point: freedom of thought and speech does not harm the state, but is actually fundamental to its survival. His main argument is indeed that, if all societies are, in a sense, imaginary, because people prefer to be taught by imagination than to struggle to reach higher levels of knowledge, where they differ in is the degree to which imagination is subject to critical scrutiny. Thus, despite the fact that most people live at the level of imagination, the state should do its best to guarantee the possibility for those who can elevate themselves to higher levels of knowledge and exercise a critical function.58 What Spinoza actually does in his critique of the sacred scriptures is precisely this. In his view, after the exodus from Egypt, the people of Israel had fallen again into a pure state of nature, because they had not yet been able to build other laws. It was in this context that Moses had called the Hebrews the ‘chosen people’ and had used the idea of the covenant with God as a means of morally encouraging his people to subject them to a lawful condition. The Jewish prophecy is a particular kind of prophecy, one that is centred on an event of the past, but precisely for this reason it is exemplary of the way in which a political myth works. Even when it looks at the past, a political myth works as a means of acting on the present and therefore always aims to be a prophecy. The use of prophecy made by Moses in this context was legitimate for Spinoza because the Hebrews were, by that time, a lawless band of people cast out into the desert, and Moses, in order to give them a law, had to place their particular experience into a framework of a divine plan in which they played a special role. The people listened to the prophecy because it provided them with a consistent set of expectations about the results of their action. The recourse to prophecy was thus necessary because, in this situation, the Israelites were not able to otherwise perceive the necessity of a polity. The more general reason for such recourse is that people are generally much keener to listen to those who appeal to their imagination than to those who want to persuade them through rational arguments. Therefore, as he puts it, if anyone wishes to teach a doctrine to a whole nation, s/he will better seek to support his teaching with experience and examples.59 Persuasion through rational arguments requires a long chain of arguments, and, moreover, very great caution, acuteness and self-restraint – all qualities which are not often found.60 This is the reason why Spinoza, in contrast to most contemporary political theorists, never believed our social world could be completely rational. In his view, imagination is a normal ingredient of social and political life. To sum up, biblical prophecy played a double role for the ancient Hebrews. First, like all the other stories from the Bible, it transmitted a moral message. Second, the story of their chosenness, by addressing their particular needs, contributed to grounding the specificity of their polity: theocracy. It was a religious prophecy, but it was also the means for acting on the present. As a consequence, it was also a political myth, that is, a narrative through which a social group can

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth provide significance to their political condition and needs.61 Both political myth and prophecy are projected toward the future, even when they speak about the past. But the difference is that political myths can also be secularised prophecies and, as an example of a political myth which is not a prophecy, Spinoza quotes the myth of the foundation of Rome.62 What are the conditions for the legitimate use of political myth? After the death of Moses, Spinoza says, the Hebrews’ theocracy degenerated into superstition and this finally led to its collapse. In his view, this is due to the fact that, while Moses used prophecy as a means of morally inciting his people, but never confused it with the eternal laws of nature, the priests that followed him interpreted the message of prophecy as if it were a law of nature.63 One may question the correctness of this reconstruction of Moses’ recourse to prophecy. In particular the idea that Moses, in contrast to his Rabbinic successors, made a legitimate use of political myth, could well be a rather mythical invention on Spinoza’s part.64 But there is no space here to enter a full discussion of the extent to which Moses himself was actually a manipulator of his people through the feeding of their imagination. Independently of the correctness of Spinoza’s historical reconstruction, what is relevant for us here is the more general point that he wants to make through this example. In his view, the role of the Jewish prophecy was that of an exemplar aimed to teach knowledge about the right conduct, not to assert the truth about nature itself. When the beings of imagination are taken as true laws of nature they turn into superstition. From this, we may therefore conclude that the epistemological and practical status of an exemplar is that of a human construct that serves to compare things and their relative values and to promote emulation, but, despite the fact that they claim to represent the ideal or model of all things of a certain kind, they might, in fact, represent only one particular image or a series of images blurred together. In other words, political myths must be recognized for what they are: narratives that provide significance to the particular conditions and deeds of a given social group by putting on the stage particular exemplars of human nature. Their universality is the universality of what we are accustomed to feign and should not be mistaken for the universality of the laws of nature. The reason for this is easy to understand: whilst laws of nature cannot be changed, political myth can and should be changed to adapt to different circumstances.

Conclusion The reason why Spinoza provides a better guide than both Cassirer and Sorel to the theory of political myth is that he never thought our social world could be completely rationalized. The recourse to imagination is not an exception to the world’s rationality, but rather a normal component of it. The lessons that we can draw from Spinoza’s analysis of the Jewish prophecy is therefore twofold. In the first place, we should recognize that, even if imagination is not an adequate kind

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European Journal of Political Theory 8(3) of knowledge, such as that which can be reached by the intellect, it is, however, not necessarily false: it turns into falsehood, or superstition, only when it is taken beyond its limits. These, as we have seen, consist in teaching the right conduct. Second, political myths must remain open to the possibility of a critical scrutiny exercised by those who can elevate themselves to the higher level of intellectual knowledge, but they must also remain open to the further work of imagination. Going back to Cassirer’s analysis of the myth of the Aryan race we can therefore say that the problem with the totalitarian use of myth and ritual is not only that is does not leave space for critical scrutiny, but also that it does not allow things to be imagined differently. In this case it is a certain use of the findings of science, upholding a purported biological superiority of the Aryan race, that, so to speak, closed the myth upon itself, preventing so many people from seeing things otherwise. In the case of the degeneration of the Jewish theocracy, it was superstition that operated an analogous closure of meaning. With the prophets of our time, the danger may be the same. The myth of the clash between civilizations may prevent people from realizing that it is ultimately individuals who ‘act’, ‘hate’ and ‘clash’ with each other, not entire ‘civilizations’, whatever meaning we may attribute to this term. It is not enough to rationally reject the theory of the clash between civilizations as scientifically naive and simplistic, because it may be precisely this simplicity that explains its appeal as a political myth. Myth and theory do not necessary exclude each other: they may also reciprocally reinforce each other, as the myth of the Aryan race shows. Particularly in epochs following traumatic experiences such as the current one or the aftermath of the First World War in the case of Spengler’s prophecy, even secularized publics are more disoriented and therefore inclined to uncritically follow the guidance of imagination. In the face of such a power displayed by contemporary political myths, the task of political philosophy should be to engage in a thorough discussion of the way in which they operate and of the conditions for their evaluation. This is to a large extent still to be done. If compared with the philosophical work done on the concept of political reason, the work done on the concept of political myth cannot but appear minimal: we have been analysing the conditions for a public reason from a variety of perspectives, but we are still far away from a comprehension of those for a public myth. The contribution of this article is showing in what ways an extremely timely (if often neglected) tradition of political philosophy could contribute to this task. Notes

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1. Ernst Cassirer (1973) The Myth of the State, p. 289. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2. Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand (2006) ‘Rethinking Political Myth: The Clash of Civilisations as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(3): 315–36. Philip Seib (2004) ‘The News Media and the Clash of Civilisations’, Parameters, 2004–5(1): 71–85.

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Bottici: Philosophies of Political Myth 3. Only few steps have been taken in this direction. See in particular Ajume H. Wingo (2003) Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chiara Bottici (2007) A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. If compared with the work done on political reason the amount of philosophical investigation on the conditions for public myths is still minimal. 4. Cassirer (n. 1), pp. 3–4. 5. Ibid. p. 280. 6. John M. Krois (1979) ‘Der Begriff des Mythos bei Ernst Cassirer’, in H. Poser (ed.) Philosophie und Mythos: Ein Kolloquium, pp. 199–218. Berlin: De Gruyter. 7. Alfred Rosenberg (1941) Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit. Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag. 8. Cassirer (n. 1), p. 282. 9. Ibid. p. 283. 10. Ibid. p. 284. 11. Ibid. p. 289. 12. Clifford Geertz (1983) Local Knowledge, p. 143. New York: Basic Books. 13. Cassirer (n. 1), p. 289. In the light of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, it appears legitimate to ask whether the distinction between a semantic and a magical use of the word is possible at all. The meaning of a word lies in its use, and its use always aims at describing something by producing certain effects and vice versa. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1976) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford Blackwell. 14. Hans Blumenberg (1985) Work on Myth, pp. 50–1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 15. Ernst Cassier (1977) Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 16. Krois (n. 6), p. 203. 17. The same problem arises with most theory of political myth, which deals with political myth under very general headings such as ‘political symbolism’ (Geertz, n. 12) or ‘veil politics’ (Wingo, n. 3). 18. On this point see also Henry Tudor (1972) Political Myth, p. 35. London: Macmillan. 19. Cassirer (n. 1), p. 48. 20. Georges Sorel (1975) Reflections on Violence, p. 22. New York:AMS Press. 2. Ibid. p. 23. 22. Ibid. p. 30. 23. Ibid. p. 32. 24. Ibid. p. 34. On the difference between myth and utopia, see Bottici (n. 3), pp. 177–200. 25. Sorel (n. 20), p. 35. 26. Ibid. p. 130. 27. Ibid. p. 135. 28. Carl Schmitt (1988) Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles: 1923–1939, pp. 9–18. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot. On Schmitt’s reading of Sorel, see Stathis Gourgouris, (1999–2000) ‘The Concept of the Mythical (Schmitt with Sorel)’, Cardozo Law Review 21: 1487–1514. More generally, on irrationalism and myth in Sorel, see Sergio P. Rouanet (1964) ‘Irrationalism and Myth in Georges Sorel’, Review of Politics 26(1): 45–69. 29. Sorel (n. 20), p. 139. In some passages, Sorel defines myth as a total experience (une expérience intégrale) that cannot be permeated by rational arguments. See for instance, Sorel (n. 20), p. 142. 30. Tudor (n. 18), p. 15. 3. Sorel (n. 20), p. 29. 32. I have criticized this dichotomy more extensively in Bottici (n. 3), pp. 17–44. 33. Antonio Gramsci (1975) Quaderni del carcere: Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci, p. 1308. Turin: Einaudi.

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34. Ibid. p. 1308. 35. Just to give one example, neither Tudor (n. 18) nor Flood mentions Spinoza among the theorists of political myth. Christopher G. Flood (1996) Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction. New York: Garland. 36. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for inviting me to make this point more explicit. 37. Baruch Spinoza (1951) A Theologico-Political Treatise and a Political Treatise, p. 13. New York: Dover Publications. 38. Thomas Hippler (2000) ‘Spinoza on Historical Myth’, in B. Stråth (ed.) (2000) Myth and Memory in the Construction of the Community, pp. 95–112, p. 97. Brussels: Peter Lang. 39. Baruch Spinoza (1985) ‘Ethics’, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, pp. 401–617. Princeton, Princeton University Press. 40. Ibid. p. 457. 41. Ibid. p. 451. 42. Ibid. pp. 468–71. 43. Spinoza (n. 37), p. 27. 44. Ibid. pp. 27, 29. 45. Michael Rosenthal (1997) ‘Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary Function of Prophecy in the Theological-Political Treatise’, History of Political Thought 18: 207–41. 46. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘significance’ is more than mere ‘meaning’ because something can have a meaning but remain completely insignificant (Bottici (n. 3), pp. 116–30). 47. I am following here Rosenthal’s (n. 45) interpretation. 48. Spinoza (n. 39), p. 546. 49. Ibid. p. 545. 50. Ibid. pp. 545–75. 51. Ibid. p. 475. 52. Ibid. p. 477. 53. Ibid. p. 544. 54. Ibid. p. 446 55. Poetics 1451b6. 56. On the possible influence of Spinoza on Vico as well as on the difference between the two, see Samuel J. Preus (1989) ‘Spinoza, Vico, and the Imagination of Religion’, Journal of the Histories of Ideas 50: 71–93. 57. Most probably, Spinoza chose the example of the Hebrews because the story of the ancient Israelites is one of the main narratives in the light of which 17th-century Dutch saw themselves (Rosenthal (n. 45), p. 267). On the mythical appeal that the book of Exodus still exercises today, see Michael Walzer (1985) Exodus and Revolution. New York: Basic Books. 58. Spinoza (n.37), chs 19, 20. 59. Ibid. pp. 76–7. 60. Ibid. 61. Bottici (n. 3), pp. 177–200. 62. Spinoza (n. 37), p. 217. The power of such narratives had been reinforced by a particularly detailed ritual. The aim of their ceremonial law was precisely this: they had to continually confess by their actions and thoughts that they were not their own masters, but were entirely under control of others (Spinoza (n. 37), p. 75). Yet, this extremely strict set of ceremonial prescriptions was only justified on the basis of the contingent situation in which the people of Israel found themselves. But, as Spinoza explicitly says, in no way must these ceremonies be considered as possessing any sanctity in themselves (Spinoza (n. 37), p. 76). In a polity formed by people not used to slavery, political rituals – however necessary – must not take such a meticulous and alienating form. 63. Rosenthal (n. 45), p. 259. 64. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for making me clarify this point.

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