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Baconian Science and the Intelligibility of Human Experience: The Case of Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2009

Svetozar Minkov
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Abstract

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the founders of the modern technological world, Francis Bacon, has a penetrating and sustained lifelong engagement with the phenomenon of love or eros. Bacon's reflections on eros come in two stages. He first examines the human and moral meaning of love. Bacon attends to the exorbitant promises of love—to bring us into a perfect condition, to grant us eternity—and finds them confused or unreasonable. Bacon then moves away from an engagement with the simple experiences of love and their promises. Departing from the human perspective, he proceeds to examine love, from the point of view of natural science or cosmology, as a fundamental property or principle of matter. This departure tends to lead, at least in the case of Bacon's followers, if not in Bacon's own case, to an obliviousness to both his cynical and appreciative insights into love.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , Summer 2009 , pp. 389 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2009

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References

1 Bacon's treatment is highly complex. One premise of it is that the deepest human longing is for immortality. The sensed or anticipated thwarting of that longing directs us to try to leave behind “works” through which we will be remembered (indefinitely or for a very long time). But these works will not bring us pleasure, except the momentary pleasure of anticipation. Moreover, in setting up his discussion, Bacon had distinguished between two fundamental forms of the desire for continued being: the form that desire takes when embodied in a separate individual (and in the case of human beings, an individual aware of its separateness) and the form that desire takes or has when a being is primarily an integral part of a larger whole. And clearly, one's continued life, through works and others' use of them, corresponds to the latter, and, therefore, it does not satisfy the individual as such, but absorbs something of the individual once he has disintegrated. Bacon attempts to uncover the strongest root of the preoccupation with an “active good.” The exposure of the root or the true motive of the active life would cast doubt on the superiority of that life (to the life of conservation and perfection). Far from being persuasive, the six arguments Bacon uses for the superiority of the active life are in fact, to some extent, arguments against that life and for the life of more or less passive understanding. But to what extent? Some help in understanding the relation of understanding to the active good is provided in the section in which Bacon considers the two kinds of passive individual good: preserving (or maintaining) and perfective (or improving). Bacon says the good of “perfecting is the highest; for to preserve a thing in its existing state is the less, to raise the same to a higher nature is the greater… . For the assumption or approach of man to the Divine or Angelical nature is the perfection of his form.” But here Bacon issues a stern warning: “[T]he false and preposterous imitation of which is the very plague and stormy whirlwind of human life, which carries off and destroys everything” (emphasis added). The idea of a false and unattainable good is in fact the worst evil of human life. Bacon explains: “Those who are sick, and find no remedy” try to “get away from themselves and from the disease that is within them.” “So is it in ambition,” Bacon delivers his open indictment of the active life, “when men possessed by a false idea of exalting their nature obtain nothing else but an eminence and exaltation of place” (when “men upon the instinct of an advancement formal and essential are carried by a blind ambition to seek an advancement merely local”). Bacon is suggesting, I think, by speaking of “blind” ambition that the active life is an unself-aware and doomed attempt to attain healthy and perpetual preservation. Later in Book 7 of De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bacon finishes the opening statement of his discussion of the proper approach to the cultivation of the mind that allows for good living by quoting an aphorism of Hippocrates: “That they who are sick and feel no pain are sick in their mind” and “need medicine not to assuage the disease, but to awake the sense.” Bacon is suggesting that one would have to have correctly identified our fundamental illnesses in order to be able properly to rank the various kinds of goods which are remedies for those illnesses. Only then will men be able to “procure serenity, as they destroy not magnanimity.”

2 See, above all, the last chapter of Faulkner, Robert's Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993)Google Scholar, “The Foundations of the Project.”

3 For a different continuation of these introductory reflections, see my “The Human Good and the Problem of Bacon's Intention,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy (Summer 2008). See also S. Minkov's “Bacon's Modernity: the Relation between Science, Religion, and Philosophy”: http://www.metanexus.net/conferences2005/pdf/minkov.pdf.

4 See Hassing, Richard, ed., Final Causality in Nature and Human Affairs (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

5 Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

6 Consider, for example, Hume's statement on Hobbes and Locke in his essay “Of Self-Love”: they “maintained the selfish system of morals” but “lived irreproachable lives.” The culmination of modern thought in this respect may be Heidegger who is notoriously silent about love, though as in the case of Spinoza, efforts have been made to show that love is fundamental to Heidegger, in his case by virtue of its absence (see, for example, Agamben, Giorgio's “The Passion of Facticity: Heidegger and the Problem of Love,” in The Ancients and the Moderns, ed. Lilly, Reginald [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996], 211–20)Google Scholar.

7 There are few thematic discussions of Bacon's view of eros. Among the impressive exceptions are: Pesic, Peter, “Desire, Science, and Polity: Francis Bacon's Account of Eros,” Interpretation 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999)Google Scholar; see also also chap. 5 in Pesic, 's Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)Google Scholar, and Briggs, John C.'s Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 239–40 and the related discussion of the Phaedrus on 178–89.

8 According to Gaukroger, Stephen, in turning to natural science, Bacon was armed with ideas from the fields of law and rhetoric (Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 44–67)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Plato Phaedo 96a6–100d8; Aristotle Metaphysics 987b1–2; Xenophon Memorabilia 1.i.12–16. On this issue, see Strauss, 's “The Problem of Socrates,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Pangle, T. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Strauss suggests that “[t]he political is indeed not the highest, but it is the first, because it is the most urgent.” “It is related to philosophy as continence is related to virtue proper. It is the foundation, the indispensable condition.” Strauss suggests that Socrates' exclusive concern with “human and political things” is a mere appearance created by the “popular presentation” (133). In fact, he never stopped investigating what each of the beings is (Xenophon Memorabilia 4. 6.1, 1. 6.14, as well as 1. 1.14 and 4. 7.5–7; cf. Xenophon Symposium 6.6–7). Nevertheless, political philosophy is the foundation of philosophy proper. In the passage in question Strauss provides the richest account of this issue that I know of: “The human or political things are indeed the clue to all things, to the whole of nature, since [1] they are the link or bond between the highest and the lowest, or [2] since man is a microcosm, or [3] since the human or political things and their corollaries are the form in which the highest principles first come to sight, or [4] since the false estimate of human things is a fundamental and primary error. Philosophy is primarily political philosophy because [5] philosophy is the ascent from the most obvious, the most massive, the most urgent, to what is highest in dignity. Philosophy is primarily political philosophy because [6] political philosophy is required for protecting the inner sanctum of philosophy.”

10 This famous “relief of man's estate” paragraph has other pregnant reflections about the Socratic turn and the relation between theory and practice. See also “The Refutation of the Philosophers,” in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, ed. and trans. B. Farrington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 103–33; Richard Kennington, “Final Causality and Modern Natural Right” (an unpublished paper), 18; Weinberger, Jerry, Science, Faith, and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 185–90Google Scholar.

11 Bacon, Francis: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics), ed. Vickers, B. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; “Of Tribute” is found on 22–51 and the New Atlantis on 457–89.

12 Love is a “motion”—that is, even in this early work, one can already discern the makings of the natural-scientific account of the phenomenon.

13 Except for a sentence at the beginning of his speech, Joabin always refers to the Bensalemites as “they,” not “we,” and to Bensalem as “there.” He is a wise man of a different rank and shows some detachment from his regime.

14 Weinberger, Jerry, “Science and Rule in Bacon's Utopia: An Introduction to the Reading of the New Atlantis, ” American Political Science Review 70, no. 3 (September 1976): 875, 881CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Compare More's Utopia: premarital intercourse is punished very severely, and a first offense of adultery is punished by “the strictest form of slavery,” the second by death (Utopia, ed. G. Logan and R. Adams [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univesity Press, 2003], 80). References in text are to this edition.

16 But cf. the Song of Songs.

17 Whether Bacon himself may understand “erotic-moral-religious” desires as reactive is to be considered below.

18 And won't bodily defects necessarily emerge with age? Concerning the impracticable character of the Bensalemite arrangements, consider what follows.

19 Weinberger, “Science,” 882.

20 See paragraph 10 of the preface to the Great Instauration, according to which dialectics is quite appropriate as a method of investigation in matters of civil discourse and those arts that are based on discourse and opinions, as well as Novum Organum, 2.2; cf. Great Instauration, paragraph 2, and Novum Organum, 1.82.

21 In line with this interpretation of Odysseus's character, Bacon's amanuensis Hobbes's translation of the proem of the Odyssey speaks of Odysseus's knowing the “fashions,” rather than the minds, of many men (see The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth [Oxford, 1962], 10: 305).

22 Plato's Phaedrus, 232a: “[N]onlovers, being masters of themselves, choose what is best instead of reputation among human beings.”

23 Rousseau, who considered Bacon “perhaps the greatest philosopher,” held a similar view: “And what is true love itself if it is not chimera, lie, and illusion? We love the image we make for ourselves far more than we love the object to which we apply it. If we saw what we love exactly as it is, there would be no more love on earth. When we stop loving, the person we loved remains the same as before, but we no longer see her the same way. The magic veil drops, and love disappears” (Rousseau, Emile, trans. A. Bloom [New York: Basic Books, 1979], bk. 4, 329). Rousseau, however, draws there different conclusions from the illusory character of love: he assigns the imagination a greater role so that it can sustain the illusion.

24 See also the first paragraph of Valerius Terminus, in Bacon's Works, 3: 217.

25 Compare White, Howard, Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 202–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 To be sure, for Bacon the search for “the form of a Lion, of an oak, of gold; nay, of water, of air” is ultimately a “vain pursuit,” as distinguished from the search for “the forms of sense, of voluntary motion, of vegetation, of colours, of gravity and levity, of density, of tenuity, of heat, of cold, and of all other natures and qualities, which, like an alphabet, are not many, and of which the essences, upheld by matter, of all creatures do consist” (Advancement of Learning, book 2, chap. 7.5). See also Novum Organum, 1.66, 2.2, 1.58, I.88.

27 “The principle of the conservation of energy is by no means enough to enable us to compute beforehand the course of a physical event in all its details, since it leaves infinitely many possibilities open. There is yet another much more inclusive law, the so-called principle of least action. It strikes us most surprisingly that an entirely adequate formulation of this law gives every unbiased person the impression that nature is governed by a reasonable personal will” (Planck, Max, Religion und Naturwissenschaft, 7th ed. [Leipzig, 1938], 11)Google Scholar.

28 See the last paragraph of the section that follows.

29 “Proteus, or Matter,” in Wisdom of the Ancients; the Latin is found at Bacon's Works, 6: 652; cf. Novum Organum, 1.22, 102, 103, 118.

30 Oxford Francis Bacon, 6: 201. See also: “[A] person who philosophizes according to the sense alone may assert the eternity of matter but deny the eternity of the world as we see it; and this was the opinion of the most ancient wisdom, and of the one who comes nearest to it, Democritus… . These philosophies could not rise to any of these [religious] dogmas. For they abhor creation out of nothing and suppose that this schematism was fashioned after many circuitous processes and efforts of matter; and they do not worry about it being the best possible schematism, since they claim that it is perishable and variable. In these things, therefore, we must depend on faith and its firmaments” (The Oxford Francis Bacon, 6, 251–53).

31 The reasons I adduce are different from Kennington's who straightforwardly says that Bacon benefits from a rhetorical “biblical sanction” for his project (“Bacon's Reform of Nature,” in Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason, ed. John C. McCarthy [Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1998], 45); in an unpublished paper, however, Kennington says that “[t]he function of the secularized doctrine of charity … is to deny the truth of the Fall.” (“Bacon's Concept of Mastery of Nature,” 5).

32 Strauss, Leo, “Notes on Lucretius,” in Strauss, , Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 85Google Scholar.

33 Strauss, to Voegelin, April 15, 1949, in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, trans. and ed. Emberley, P. and Cooper, Barry (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 62Google Scholar. Lucretius resembles in this respect “the scientifically slanted aspect of Nietzsche” (ibid.)

34 To be sure, Bacon says in “Of Atheism,” that “they that deny a God destroy man's nobility,” but he also states in “Of Superstition” (which follows immediately upon “Of Atheism”), that “atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though Religion were not.” In fact, by saying that superstition is worse than atheism, Bacon turns “Of Superstition,” with its long list of the defects of superstition, into a catalogue of atheism's advantages. Bacon did not lament the demise of Christianity; he anticipated it, in part because he doubted the way Christianity is supposed to ennoble man: by giving man confidence and thus raising him above his ordinary frailty. Bacon suggests at the end of “Of Atheism” that Roman civil religion is much better than Christianity whose relationship to magnanimity (or, say, pride) is, to say the least, much more complicated. In general, Bacon is interested in an established church for its social utility, as long as a sufficient degree of doctrinal harmony could be preserved. Bacon practiced what Howard White calls “provisional Anglicanism,” provisional since it is on the way to the civil religion of the New Atlantis. “Provisional Anglicanism” provides political quiet, the separation of philosophy from theology, the restraint of excess, and an aesthetically pleasing popular and ceremonial religion. Definitive civil religion, on the other hand, would be universal, subordinate to a scientific fraternity, tending to make men into sheep, led by a scientist-shepherd, and pleasant to all men at all times (White, Peace, 237). Social stability is more important than the defense of all but the basic doctrinal elements of Christianity. “Religion is the chief band of society.” If religion does not lead to peace, it is not doing its job. And if it is not doing its job, it is not worth preserving.

35 Timothy Paterson, “The Politics of Baconian Science: An Analysis of Bacon's ‘New Atlantis’” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Government, Yale University), 33.

36 Nichols, James Jr., Epicurean Political Philosophy: The “De rerum natura” of Lucretius (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 167–76Google Scholar.

37 See Bacon's Filum Labyrinthi, section 6: “Since the Christian faith, the greatest number of wits have been employed, and the greatest helps and rewards have been converted upon divinity”; this was prepared by previous absorption of philosophy in “moral philosophy, which was as the heathen divinity” (The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, Heath, 14 volumes. New York: Garrett Press [1857–1874], 3: 499); see also Novum Organum, 1.65: the “unwholesome mixture of things human and divine,” as well as Novum Organum, 1.79; the problem already with Plato's physics is “natural theology,” Novum Organum, 1.96.

38 See the final chapter of Faulkner's Bacon and the Project of Progress.

39 Cf. Weinberger, Science, 184: “Human beings are moved to knowledge because their response to need generates the need for justice and the moral virtues, but these are not always consistent.”

40 De Augmentis, book 2, ch. 13. Consider also Advancement of Learning, epistle dedicatory, paragraph 2; ibid., book 2, chap. 12.9; De Augmentis, book 5, ch. 5; cf. “Of Truth”: truth reduces “the minds of a number of men [to] poor shrunken things”; last paragraph of Filum Labyrinthi, Bacon's Works, 3: 504. See also Anderson, F. H., The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 128–29Google Scholar, 149. Consider also Strauss, with respect to Spinoza: “The interest in self-preservation is interest in self-determination. I preserve my being, I continue in being myself, to the extent that I am essentially determined by my being, to the extent that I am active… . It is, therefore, essential to the active element in us that it be enduring, eternal. This eternal, active element is mind” (Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair [New York: Schocken Books, 1965], 218).

41 On this question, see Plato Republic 353d, Charmides 167c–169b; Aristotle De Anima 3.4ff.; Bacon, Novum Organum, 2. 2; Descartes, Meditationes, 2 (cf. 6); Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 1, chap. 2, “Of Laws of Nature”; Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, part 4, section 6, “Of Personal Identity”; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 117 n and A 381; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 178; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sections 16 and 17; Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 240, 250, 263, 265; Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 8; Seth Benardete, The Argument of the Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 294 n. 3.

42 See note 34 above.