Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought

Essays to Commemorate The Advancement of Learning (1605–2005)

Catherine Gimelli Martin, Julie Robin Solomon, Julie Robin Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351935890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning. Bacon's interests in natural philosophy, politics, ethics, law, medicine, religion, neoplatonic magic, technology and humanistic learning are here mirrored in the contributors' varied intellectual backgrounds and diverse approaches to Bacon's thought.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Julie Robin Solomon

Setting the Agenda

Natural philosopher, jurist, essayist, statesman, and England’s Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam, needs no introduction. This volume, however, requires something along those lines in order to explain why the editors felt that now was the moment to publish a collection of essays such as these. We both had been struck by the recent claim of sociobiologist E. O. Wilson that Bacon was the “grand architect” of the Enlightenment. Moreover, as Wilson sees him, Bacon was not culpable (as L. C. Knights claimed) for what T. S. Eliot described as the late seventeenth-century dissociation of sensibility between thought and feeling. Nor did Bacon contribute to what C. P. Snow had contended was the mid-twentieth-century antipathy between the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities.¹ Wilson justifies his position by pointing out that Bacon was intent on the logical organization of the intellectual disciplines and advocating induction as a method that could serve, and thus help unify, all branches of learning.² Wilson’s large and programmatic contentions spurred us to ask specific questions about how Bacon might have or have not gone about unifying the sciences and the humanities, linking the various scientific disciplines, and forging connections between past intellectual traditions and emerging knowledge. Wilson names this state of unity consilience.

Opportunely, we found ourselves thinking about these and similar questions in time to pull together a collection commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Advancement of Learning in 2005. While no would-be editor should ignore the providence and promise that commemoration provides, we would like to believe that our decision to compile this collection owes more to intellectual convergence and vitality than to rank opportunism (if such a term can be used to describe the desire to publish a scholarly tome). Catherine Martin, my co-editor, worked her way back to Bacon from her study of the intertwined intellectual roots of Milton’s political and scientific thought and its connection to emerging seventeenth-century epistemologies in England. For Catherine, Milton needed to be rescued from those who misread him as adhering to a hidebound, Christian cosmology, instead of being the admirer of a largely Baconian empirical and rationalist intellectual project. And Bacon then needed to be rescued from critics who misprised his natural philosophy as tyrannical towards nature (and women), by ignoring the degree to which he saw nature as a full and equal, if not superior, partner to human art in his natural philosophical scheme. I, in contrast, approached Bacon by sidling up to him from my study of English Renaissance theater. I then jumped ship from the study of literature to intellectual history–retaining, however, much of my literary training (or baggage, depending on your perspective)–in theory and discourse analysis. The result was a book analyzing the intellectual-historical context and political purport of Bacon’s notions of natural philosophical disinterestedness, or objectivity.³ One thing that troubled both Catherine and me were the divisions that existed among scholars who approached Bacon from their own particular disciplinary perspective with little awareness of how their views might intersect those from other disciplines. We were even more disturbed by the rancorous divide between Bacon scholars working within intellectual history who explored Bacon’s thought in terms of internalist intellectual traditions, and those scholars–often coming from the disciplines of literature and general history–who were interested in relating Bacon’s ideas to his contemporary political, social, and economic context. We thought it was time to bring scholars together from a variety of disciplines to explore in one volume the ways in which Bacon constructed intellectual discourses. We did this with an eye to unifying the intellectual and socio-political field, while acknowledging the inevitable gaps and disunity that such a wide-reaching project would still encounter.

The editors of this volume believe that to establish Bacon’s overarching importance to modern culture one must focus on how he sought to unify knowledge: diachronically, across historical time and, synchronically, across social and intellectual space. We read Bacon not as a “dissociator of sensibility,” one who crudely distanced organic nature from a domineering inorganic technology, a magical worldview from a scientific one, the humanities from the sciences, or the feminine from the masculine. As a proto-Enlightenment thinker, Bacon sincerely struggled to unify–substantially and methodologically, and across both space and time–a range of philosophies, disciplines, practices, and intellectual institutions. Of course in the effort to unify he often recognized the difficulties, even the impossibility, of creating intellectual coherence. He thus tried to forge unity where none was clearly available and often appealed to the notion of what is “unknown” to human minds to beg the question, or to avoid premature formulation of that “unity.” We thus raised the subject of Bacon’s interest in the unity of knowledge to our essayists. Coming from a variety of disciplines, they would shed varied and rich light on this subject. We wanted our authors to consider such questions as how did Bacon seek to establish methodological or theoretical unity among the branches of learning? To what extent did Bacon succeed or not in weaving together threads of ancient intellectual tradition with the new concerns and insights of contemporary thinkers to create a unified discourse on natural philosophy? How did Bacon recast the popular image and rhetoric of natural philosophical learning so as to make its institutionalization conceivable?

The essays

Bacon’s investment in diachronic continuity comes to the fore in his express interest in the ars tradendi or the arts of tradition or transmission (SEH, 4: 405, 438). Bacon’s ars tradendi comprise the various disciplinary, rhetorical, pedagogical, and technological means of conveying tradition. A recent volume of Critical Inquiry hails Bacon as an important early user of the term, and includes essays devoted to the various modalities of information transmission from the ancients to the present.⁴ But by ars tradendi Bacon meant not only the means and media of transmission but the way in which receivers of knowledge traditions would handle the content of the tradition– the way, in other words, knowers would behave in the presence of “received knowledge.” In particular, Bacon feared that deliverers of traditional knowledge would do their best to hide its weaknesses and that slothful receivers of such knowledge would simply take it at face value. For as

Knowledges are now delivered, there is a kinde of Contract of Errour, betweene the Deliverer, and the Receiver: for he that delivereth knowledge; desireth to deliver it in such fourme, as may be best beleeved; and not as may [be] best examined: and hee that receiveth knowledge, desireth rather present satisfaction, than expectant Enquiry, & so rather not to doubt, than not to erre: glorie making the Author not to lay open his weaknesse, and sloth making the Disciple not to knowe his strength. (OFB, IV: 123)

Rather than passively imbibing received knowledge, the Baconian knower would be interested in the “progression” of knowledge (and a natural philosophic thinker in his own right) and participate actively in determining the meaning of received knowledge, remaking that knowledge in the process of knowing it. He would remake traditional knowledge as “as a threade to bee spunne on” and “delivered and intimated, if it were possible, In the same Methode wherein it was invented.” Inductive knowledge is most easily delivered and received in this way, but even non-inductive knowledges should be handled proactively, so that

a man may revisite, and descend unto the foundations of his Knowledge and Consent: and so transplant it into another, as it grewe in his own Minde. For it is in Knowledges, as it is in Plantes; … if you meane to remoove it to growe, then it is more assured to rest uppon rootes, than Slippes: So the deliverie of Knowledge (as it is nowe used) is as of faire bodies of Trees without the Rootes: good for the Carpenter, but not for the Planter: But if you will have Sciences grewe: it is lesse matter for the shafte, or bodie of the Tree, so you looke well to the takinge up of the Rootes. (OFB, IV: 123)

Five of our essayists take up Bacon’s more or less successful efforts to forge a coherent and creative relationship with past intellectual, rhetorical, or religious traditions.

Reid Barbour’s essay takes on Bacon’s complex relationship with the ancient tradition of atomism, and in so doing, demonstrates how Bacon struggled with the very form and meaning of the “particulate” matter upon which he would found his ratio-empirical natural philosophy. As a theory of matter, atomism helped stem superstitious natural theological notions concerning the divinity of nature itself, but it was also distastefully associated with atheism. In contrast, the Stoic theory of pneuma, or spirits animating matter, avoided the charge of atheism, but bordered on reintroducing the idea of natural divinity. At various points in his philosophical writings, Bacon finds himself uncertainly suspended between the superstition associated with natural divinity and the atheistical imposture that shadows the theory of atomism. Towards the end of his life, Bacon seems to have embraced pneumaticism as a hedge against charges of atheism, but he still expressed admiration for Democritus, the founder of atomism, as well as most aspects of the theory. Barbour’s exploration suggests that despite the fact that Bacon shared with E. O. Wilson an intent to unify knowledge through the use of a common method of empirical observation and induction, Bacon himself remained fundamentally uncertain about the very nature of the particulate matter which would provide the material basis for natural philosophic induction.

Michael McCanles’s essay delves into Bacon’s debt to two strains of Franciscan philosophy: transcendental mysticism and Ockhamist nominalism. The mystical strain reinforced Bacon’s ethical fear of the psychological impediments to knowledge posed by the human passions and the will. The nominalist strain led to Bacon’s technical concerns with the intellectual distortions induced by human concept-formation, given that it is limited by the coordinates of human space-time, and discursive, fragmented, and incremental reason. Like the Franciscan mysticism and nominalism upon which he draws, Bacon forges a distinction between “apophatic” and “cataphatic” language. The latter is a first-order form of speech which claims to express, semantically, the truth value or content of that to which it refers. Apophatic language, in contradistinction, recognizes that it cannot express, mirror, or satisfactorily represent the intellectual content to which it refers–it can only point to or refer to such a content without in fact satisfactorily reproducing or representing it. Bacon’s natural philosophy thus shares much with what McCanles labels a “negative theology” that points the way to God’s truth but can never discursively express that truth. According to McCanles, Bacon views human concept-formation or philosophical universal claims as essentially apophatic in nature. In order to have any intellectual validity, apophatic statements must establish their detachment from the self’s desires and from conceptual and semiotic human inventions; they must peel away those aspects of self and society that could corrode their referential validity.

This kind of philosophical apophaticism might have been sufficient for Ockham, who sought to rewrite Aristotelian epistemology, but Bacon’s goal was to advance a natural philosophy that would produce real material effects on the world for the betterment of society. If scientific knowledge was only referential, rather than cataphatic or essential, then how could the new natural philosophy make claims to understand the world as “it really is,” or at least, better than Aristotle or other ancient philosophies? McCanles argues that Bacon solved this dilemma by appealing to the superior value of pragmatically “testing” hypotheses. The problem of validating the relation of ficta or hypotheses to the extra-mental world could be resolved if one could demonstrate the real, pragmatic effects of an hypothesis on that world (66). While not addressing Wilson’s concerns directly, McCanles’s argument simultaneously supports and subverts aspects of Wilson’s idea that the unity of knowledge is indeed a possibility. Insofar as McCanles shows how Bacon turned to experimental practice to insure the validity of natural philosophic knowledge claims, Baconian science foreshadows the workings of modern science along Wilsonian lines. Yet, insofar as Baconian philosophy bespeaks the kind of negative theology or apophatism that McCanles explores, it undermines Wilson’s relatively naive belief in a simple empirical understanding of the world that would ensure consilience. Where Wilson assumes that our knowledge is simply equivalent with the data that we assemble and then analyze, McCanles suggests that Baconian knowledge is a much more circuitous set of signposts and indicators–what Bacon would sometimes refer to as “prerogative instances,” gesturing towards truths that we can access, but whose essence we can never fully know.

Catherine Martin argues that we do Bacon a disservice in accepting the “monological readings” of recent feminists who claim that Bacon viewed “Mother Nature” simply as matter for conquest, or the “feminine mind” as that dangerous ingredient of the human mental apparatus that brings forth a teeming “brood of errors.” As Martin shows, Bacon wrestled with traditional rhetorical tropes of feminine intellectual inadequacy. He frequently reverses his gendered terms, instead viewing nature as male and human art or science as female, as in his reading of the myth of Atalanta (art) and Hippomenes (nature). In fact, she contends that Bacon sought to promote a view of the marriage of art and nature that recognized and respected the rightful powers of each, while maintaining a productive equilibrium between them. The subtle and strenuous workings of nature must be matched by a feminized natural philosophical prudence and imagination that could, if properly restrained, heroically advance the human condition. Martin traces the fate of Bacon’s gendered language in the hands of later Baconians like Sprat who eliminated Bacon’s appreciation of the feminine, and Milton who championed it in his notions of natural philosophy as well as actual companionate marriage. Ultimately, Bacon’s championing of a “feminine” prudential and pragmatic approach to knowledge makes Wilson’s project to unify the arts, sciences, and humanities conceivable.

John Briggs takes up the difficult task of analyzing how E. O. Wilson and Bacon integrate transcendental traditions into their scientific perspectives and hence contribute to the unity of knowledge. Briggs focuses on the way in which Wilson and Bacon respectively “reject”, but then “partially rehabilitate”, the “persistence” of “certain [transcendental] ideas” (89–90) within their unifying projects. To make matters more complex, Briggs focuses on Bacon’s and Wilson’s notions about the status and effect of not any old ideas, but of the category of “metaphysical ideas” themselves. According to Briggs, Bacon borrows from ancient Neoplatonism the transcendental concept of “eidos” or transcendental “Form” and translates and rehabilitates it into his notion of a materially embedded “Law” of nature. This notion does not totally extinguish all of the transcendental meaning of the notion of “form”, but lends to it the important weight of material and operational force, specifically the ability of human beings to transform any bit of matter into any other bit of it. For Bacon the origin of the idea of “Forms” or of other ideas–such as the essential nature of human beings–can only be explained as a coming forth from the “divine limbus” (93), that is, a border or spontaneous opening out from which divine truths come into human understanding. For Briggs, this “limbus” or opening can be unproblematically viewed as simultaneously divine and empirical. Although the origins of such ideas are thus in a sense logically undecidable (being either the consequence of divine will, mechanistic fate, or chance), they are nonetheless susceptible to empirical investigation, calculation, and testing. It is thus, for Briggs, that Bacon’s metaphysical ideas can stand in a mutually interacting relationship with his empirical actions and perspectives. In a similar vein, Wilson’s views about the sociobiological origin of transcendental ideas about religion and the human moral sentiments do not invalidate the fact that such ideas can have real effects on both the course of human being, human thinking, and on the very genetic biology that spawned them in the first place.

Unlike Briggs, Jerry Weinberger digs below the fragile and fabricated surface unity of reason and revelation in the New Atlantis to expose what he sees as an essential conflict between the two in Bacon’s thought. For Weinberger, Bacon achieves only a superficial diachronic unity between reason and revelation through a perfunctory, merely rhetorical, tipping of the hat to that consilience. Weinberger notes that, for E. O. Wilson, Enlightenment thinkers failed to find the means to make religion consilient with scientific reasoning. They pointedly failed to come up with explanations for religious thought and feeling that were consonant with an appreciation of the kinds of emotions, desires, and needs that bring religious experience and feeling to life in human societies. Wilson has firmer hopes for an Enlightenment program informed by a sociobiology that can rationally explain religion in evolutionary terms, while still doing justice to those kinds of emotions, desires, and needs. Weinberger, however, sees Wilson as begging the difficult intellectual question of whether spiritual and rational knowledge can be unified by simply assuming that religious faith or yearning is a natural component of human beings, shaped by evolution and nece...