Moses and the Mountain in Political Thought and Philosophy from Machiavelli to Nietzsche

It’s been a while since I announced this new place for my blogging and then I didn’t post anything. Today I’m positing something at last. A few paragraphs on Moses, the relation between the mountain and his law giving; how that reverberates in Machiavelli (mostly) along with Rousseau and Nietzsche, and some remarks on early modern political and political-theological thought. It is material cut out of something I hope will be published later in the year. News on that when it it happens. I hope to keep posting regularly, but we shall see.

Niccolò Machiavelli was surely echoing, consciously or unconsciously, the relation between the mountain and lowlands in the episodes concerning Moses and the law and the covenant in this particularly passage from the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Mecici that opens The Prince: ‘People who draw landscapes proceed to a low point on a plain in order to study the nature of mountains and higher elevations; they proceed to mountaintops in order to study the nature of the lowlands.’ (2008, 95). Machiavelli uses Biblical references familiar to most at the time, however indirect the form of reference is, to orientate the relation between people and prince, with the writer as the point of union and separation, the point of inversion which claims to preserve the initial ordering. An ordering, a social and political hierarchy which is itself questioned by Machiavelli’s own Roman republicanism with elements of democratic populism. The profound ambiguities of this short passage from the dedication to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino are explored in a manner influenced by Calude Lefort, Jean-François Lyotard by Gérald Sfez in Machiavel, Le Prince Sans Qualités (1998, 61). Further related investigations by Sfez can be found in Machiavel, la politique du moindre mal (1999).

Zarathustra’s transitions between mountain and lowlands, deliberately or not, have echoes of Machiavelli, possibly more from common references more than any deep reading of the the Florentine political thinker. Chapter VI of The Prince explicitly refers to Moses as a prophetic figure who cannot be compared with secular rulers, while also comparing him with secular state founders, so ambiguity about the sacred and the worldly condition Machiavelli’s view of Moses, and is part of the preformation of Derr,da’s comments on Moses, that is a major point of intersection in the network of relevant references across history. 

Other such points include Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s idealisation of Moses as a founder and law giver in ‘On the Legislator’ in On the Social Contract. Benedict de Spinoza’s discussion of Moses as a political figure in the Theological-Political Treatise 17, and across the whole of the book (2007) provides an attempt at a demythologised account of Moses’ role in the formation of an Israelite polity, but nevertheless relying on the Hebrew Bible as the authoritative source. Together with briefer thoughts in Machiavelli and Rousseau, this establishes the centrality of the Biblical account Moses to early modern and Enlightenment political theory, also taking into account the uses Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and many others make of the Hebrew Bible. Moses is the person entrusted with the mission to restore the Israelite land promised to Abraham, so it all flows into the understanding of Abraham at Mount Moriah, reestablishing a covenant with God in the moment of sacrifice and substitution. 

Relaunching the blog

I have some new ideas about how to use this blog, which was originally a teaching aid for my courses at my previous university. I started blogging when blogging was a big deal in many ways which have not lasted. In large part, its functions have been dispersed into the various forms of social media, along with a growth of subscription sites for online essays, featuring free and paid for content. After a long period of inactivity, since 2019, on Stockerblog (stockerb.wordpress.com), I am officially bringing it to an end, though it will still be there for anyone who wants to look. I have deleted all the old posts from this blog.

In a period of diminished exposure for blogs, after a long interval, I have concluded that the best I can do is to start again and use this site as a kind of public stream of my draft work or work in progress. More finished work can be found posted at academia.edu (https://boun.academia.edu/BarryStocker), which is one of the places that has eaten into the ‘blogosphere’: the word itself now seems quaint, referring to a forgotten world from a few years ago.

I was feeling embarrassed about posting work which might never be published, or not in anything like the posted form, but why worry? Failed or exhaustingly extended attempts to publish work is a part of academic life, and there is no need to worry about posting rough work in progress if it is labelled as such. I’ll avoid mentioning possibilities of future publication, but I may refer to news about publications and talks given.

I am thinking of posting various bits and pieces of news about my academic life and maybe thoughts about non-academic interests, again not claiming to offer anything polished. I have thought a bit about the online essay streams (Medium, Substack etc) but that would be a bit more formal than what I am doing here, and I don’t think I am going to try it, or certainly not in any near future.

For today, I will mention that I resigned from the Department of Humanities and Social Science (now rather bizarrely relabelled the Department of Sociology) at Istanbul Technical University (where I have been working since autumn 2006) at the end of last year and that in February of this year I started working at Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University, also in Istanbul, in the Department of Philosophy. This has been a good move for me in various ways. Most obviously, I am now giving philosophy courses for (mostly) philosophy students at undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as supervising philosophy theses. The university, as the name hints, is in a beautiful location overlooking the Bosphorus, with a green and very pleasant campus. The Bosphorus is visible from my office, which is a great pleasure. The university has a long tradition of teaching in English, employing foreign faculty, and attracting foreign students, all of which makes it a very pleasant home for me. During my first semester, I was teaching Foucault to postgraduates and nineteenth century European philosophy (Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) to undergraduates. Next semester, I am down to teachi a large undergraduate class (which I believe will be a mix of philosophy and non-philosophy students), introducing ancient and medieval philosophy, as well as a postgraduate class on ‘Poetics of Enlightenment’ (Giambattista Vico and Shaftesbury).