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3 0 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3from what men “ought to do” to what men in fact do without sacrificing thecore of political philosophy as embodied in Socrates’s turn to the speeches. 45The hero’s flagging virtue revives only when, under the encouragementof the beautiful woman, he relinquishes sight for touch in their encounter.He ceases to gaze from a distance at the beautiful externals of ancient wisdomand proceeds to touch upon its internal truth. 46 When he lets his handsroam over the beautiful woman’s body he affirms the truth that Machiavelliappears to understand to be the central teaching of ancient philosophy(IV.124–35). That teaching is pointed to by Machiavelli’s description of thebodily organ that is the source of the sweet and harmonious speeches of thebeautiful woman—her tongue, which moves “like a serpent between her lips”(IV.75). The serpentine knowledge of good and evil and their necessary relation—the“teleology of evil” of ancient philosophy 47 —is the truth which thehero grasps when he penetrates the external beauty of his beloved. He comesto understand that, at its core, ancient philosophy is not only transpolitical,but transmoral in character. With this insight the hero’s virtue returns andmakes possible the pleasure of their coupling. Yet his embracing the beautifulwoman and her teaching leads to a specific kind of lack of awareness on hispart: “full of amorous gestures and words, wrapped up in those angelic beauties,”he becomes forgetful of “human things” (IV.136–38). He has arrived onthe Isles of the Blessed. 4845Thus the beautiful is a central issue for the political philosophy of the ancients; while, startingwith Machiavelli and following in his footsteps, modern political philosophy puts the beautiful at aradical discount. All discussion of the beautiful as an object of philosophical concern is conspicuouslyabsent from the thought of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Spinoza, that is, those inheritors ofMachiavelli’s thought who are the founders of modernity. This discounting of the beautiful is weddedto modern philosophy’s constant emphasis on the issue of self-preservation. The selfless character ofadmiration, and the rushing outside oneself of longing before the beautiful are wholly alien to theconstant awareness of the need to defend and preserve the self that is a hallmark of modern thoughtas initiated by Machiavelli. As a consequence, philosophy is considered almost exclusively from thepoint of view of the conditions required to support and preserve it as the proper good for man, ratherthan as embodying the truth of the apparent freedom and self-sufficiency of the beautiful. Moreover,for the moderns philosophy at its origin is suffused with the practical aims and utility of prudence andthe arts, rather than finding its beginning in wonder (Plato, Theaetetus 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics982b13–14). Wonder, of course, is held at arm’s length by the moderns because of its association withbelief in miracle (Machiavelli, Discourses, 3.14, 33). In the place of Socrates’s dictum that wonder is thebeginning of philosophy, the moderns substitute the Stoic maxim, “admire nothing” (Cicero, TusculanDisputations 3.14.30; Horace, Epistles 1.6.1). Nevertheless, consider the author-hero’s descriptionof his beloved in IV.55–81.46Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 18: “Men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, becauseseeing is given to all, touching to a few.”47Benardete, Argument of the Action, 382.48Plato, Republic 519c.