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The Politics of Life Extension in Francis Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2015
Abstract
The extension of human life is one of the central goals that Francis Bacon posits for science, and this goal shapes his political thought significantly. Bacon's interest in life extension appears throughout his corpus, but the Wisdom of the Ancients contains his most extensive treatment of its political and philosophical consequences. Here, I interpret a series of myths in the Wisdom of the Ancients and argue, first, that through them Bacon presents key political strategies for promoting life extension and tending to its hazards; and, second, as he does so, he sketches a new portrait of philosophy, which directs some of its energies to understanding what makes longer life worth living. My reading addresses a profound and neglected subject at the heart of Bacon's politico-scientific project, and advances the growing literature on Bacon that turns to the Wisdom of the Ancients to explain unexamined goals of his science.
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References
1 Bacon, Francis, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Weinberger, Jerry (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2001), 56Google Scholar.
2 Bacon, Francis, History of Life and Death, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, James, Ellis, Robert, and Heath, Douglas, vol. 10 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 9Google Scholar.
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4 Bacon, Francis, De Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, vol. 4 (London: Longman, 1858), 383Google Scholar.
5 Machiavelli may be the possible exception here. When he refers to the “malignity of fortune” he seems to be referring to mortality itself (see Machiavelli, , The Prince, trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 27 and 109)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Since he is interested in conquering fortune, one suspects that he may also be introducing the possibility that humans can conquer mortality. At the same time, Machiavelli appears to be focused primarily on instructing his readers on how to set up lasting posthumous legacies as a method of conquering fortune, rather than conquering death itself (see The Prince, 21–25 and 58–60).
6 See “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Frame, Donald M. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 56–68 Google Scholar.
7 Bacon, History of Life and Death, 11.
8 All references to Francis Bacon's On the Wisdom of the Ancients are to Heidi Studer's forthcoming translation and are cited in parentheses by section title or chapter number in Roman numerals. Both the original Latin and an alternative translation of the text appear in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, vols. 12–13 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, n.d.)Google Scholar.
9 Paterson, Faulkner, Minkov, and White all emphasize that the desire for immortality or continuance lies at the core of Bacon's thought. See Paterson, Timothy, “Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” Interpretation 16, no. 3 (1989): 427–33Google Scholar; Faulkner, Robert, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993)Google Scholar, 93, 127, and 129; Minkov, Svetozar, Francis Bacon's “Inquiry Touching Human Nature”: Virtue, Philosophy, and the Relief of Man's Estate (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 127Google Scholar; White, Howard B., Peace among the Willows (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Paterson provides a helpful survey of the instances that “indicate the intensity and pervasiveness” of Bacon's concern with the prospects of immortality or continuance (“Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” 432–33).
10 See Faulkner, Project of Progress, 62–79; Kennington, Richard, “Bacon's Reform of Nature,” in On Modern Origins, ed. Kraus, Pamela and Hunt, Frank (Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 1–15 Google Scholar; Clarke, Michelle Tolman, “Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar's Tree: Francis Bacon's Criticism of Machiavellian Imperialism,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2008): 367–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Box, Ian, “Bacon's Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Francis Bacon, ed. Peltonen, Markku (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 260–82Google Scholar.
11 This is particularly true of Faulkner, although Paterson takes up similar lines of thought as well. See Faulkner, Project of Progress, 96, 276; Paterson, “Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” 435.
12 See Wisdom of the Ancients XI, XXII, and XXV, for example.
13 See Advancement of Learning, 174–91; and Bacon, , “Of Fame,” in Essays (London: Everyman, 1999), 152–53Google Scholar.
14 See Paterson, “Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” 432–43; White, Peace among the Willows, 234–38; Lampert, Laurence, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 52–63 Google Scholar; Pesic, Peter, Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 31–38 Google Scholar; McKnight, Stephen A., The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 122Google Scholar; Minkov, Francis Bacon's “Inquiry,” 125–35.
15 For example, see Gregg Easterbrook, “What Happens When We All Live to 100?,” The Atlantic, October 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/what-happens-when-we-all-live-to-100/379338/.
16 One of the key difficulties for clarifying Bacon's life-extension project is to grasp his aim. As Paterson notes, Bacon often mentions the longing for immortality and the longing for continuance in the same phrase, implying that he is concerned with both the desire for longer life and the desire for endless life (Paterson, “Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” 434). Desires, of course, are not the same thing as their objects, so to speak of a longing for immortality or continuance is not to imply that one sets one's sights on either immortality or longer life. Although Bacon speaks of both desires, his life-extension project is aimed predominantly at elongating life. At the same time, Bacon does not foreclose the possibility of immortality simply, and a few remarks he makes indicate that he thinks it is possible. I find Paterson's suggestion plausible that Bacon may have had in mind an “asymptotic possibility” such that as science affords humans ever-longer life, the human lifespan will begin to approach immortality (ibid.). In general, Bacon's life-extension project shares the open-endedness of his scientific project: he does not determine the limits of his project because he cannot foresee the end (see Great Instauration). Nonetheless, since his immediate goal is life lengthening (and not immortality), life extension is the focus of this paper. I will comment on instances where Bacon's remarks indicate that he entertains the possibility of immortality, and touch on the implications that this has for his philosophy.
17 The fables were also immensely popular in his time. They were published in sixty different versions, and in multiple languages by the end of the seventeenth century (Rhodri Lewis, “Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Uses of Myth,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 61, no. 250 [2010]: 364). Their popular acclaim indicates their importance for our understanding of the themes and questions that Bacon introduced to his broad readership.
18 For a detailed account of the original sources that inspired the Wisdom of the Ancients, see Jardine, Lisa, Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 179–92Google Scholar.
19 The most valuable discussions of the character and structure of the fables are Paterson's (“Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” 427–33), Jardine's (Discovery, 179–92), and Studer's (“Grapes Ill-Trodden: Francis Bacon and the Wisdom of the Ancients” [PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2003], 16–32). Paterson makes the case for the philosophical (as opposed to the merely literary) character of the text. Studer and Jardine respectively discuss the pedagogical and rhetorical strategies that Bacon employs.
20 Apollodorus, The Library, ed. and trans. Sir James G. Frazer (London: Heinemann, 1921), 2:19.
21 Siculus, Diodorus, Library of History, trans. Oldfather, C. H., vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 423–25Google Scholar.
22 Thucydides 2.35–46, in The Landmark Thucydides, trans. Crawley, Richard, ed. Strassler, Robert B. (New York: Free Press, 1998), 111–18Google Scholar.
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24 I am indebted to Heidi Studer, whose meticulous literal translation helped me recognize the significance of these phrases.
25 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 55.
26 It may be the case that in Tithonus, Bacon has Plato's Cephalus in mind, since, as Studer points out in her translation, Cephalus is Aurora's other husband (XV, note 119). In the same way that Cephalus's comments on old age and pleasures at the outset of Plato's Republic pave the way for the night's deeper conversation about the best way to live, so too does Tithonus's protophilosophic voice lead to a deeper account of philosophy, which appears at the end of the book in Orpheus's songs.
27 Studer, Heidi, “Strange Fire at the Altar of the Lord,” Review of Politics 65, no. 2 (2003): 233–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 See “Proserpina, or Spirit,” where Bacon explores the relation between ether and earth through the story of Proserpina's abduction to the lower world (XIX). There, Bacon writes, “To us it is certainly ascertained, from many figures of the Ancients, that they did not hold the conservation, and to a certain point the restoration of natural bodies as a thing to be despaired of, but rather as a thing abstruse and out of the way.”
29 Bacon, New Organon, 76–77.
30 Aeschylus, , Prometheus Bound, ed. and trans. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar, lines 252 and 695.
31 Svetozar Minkov makes valuable comments on Bacon's recommendation of a new kind of fortitude in his recent work, Francis Bacon's “Inquiry,” 49–57.
32 See Plato, Republic, trans. Bloom, Allan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 427d–445bGoogle Scholar; Apology of Socrates, trans. West, Thomas G. and West, Grace Starry (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1984), 39c–42aGoogle Scholar; Phaedo, trans. Brann, Eva, Kalkavage, Peter, and Salem, Eric (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998), 95a–107d Google Scholar.
33 Paterson notes the significance of Bacon's claim in “Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” 433.
34 In order to grasp Bacon's teaching on philosophy's error, the reader is required to sort through a number of puzzling discrepancies between the initial telling of the fable and his subsequent interpretation of it. For instance, in the initial presentation of the story, Bacon says that Orpheus looks back and fails to restore his wife to life on account of his impatience out of “love and care.” In the interpretive section, however, Bacon says that Orpheus failed to restore his wife to life, and hence failed at natural philosophy, on account of his curiosity and haste. Similarly, in the original fable, he says that Orpheus sings the songs of civil philosophy out of melancholy (so the city is in accord incidentally, because Orpheus is sad and pouting); in the interpretation, Bacon suggests that this masks a longing for fame—Orpheus's real motivation for civil philosophy. These kinds of discrepancies pose a major challenge for interpretation, and “Orpheus” is replete with them—more than any other fable (Studer, “Grapes Ill-Trodden,” 125). Generally, I read Bacon's interpretive section as his attempt to clarify what in the fable is an obscure appearance. The space limitations here, however, prevent me from offering a detailed analysis of each of these discrepancies.
35 Bacon, History of Life and Death, 12.
36 Studer, “Grapes Ill-Trodden,” 139; and Paterson, “Bacon's Myth of Orpheus,” 436.
37 Plato, Phaedo 97c–100a.
38 Bacon, History of Life and Death, 12.
39 See note 16.
40 As is the case with “Orpheus,” in “Sirens,” the discrepancies between the original telling and the interpretation are numerous and complex. For instance, whereas in the fable itself Bacon says that the remedy of the Sirens is a “double mode and class,” in the interpretation he says that there are three remedies. Again, sorting through each and every discrepancy is a far longer work than I can undertake here. For the purposes of this essay, I turn primarily to the interpretative section, which clarifies what is obscured in the fable.
41 Studer makes a similar point in “Strange Fire,” 43.
42 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 55.
43 The question is complicated for several reasons. First, Bacon creates a compounded ambiguity about the relation between philosophy and religion. In the fable he tells us that there is “a double mode and class of remedy for the Sirens: one by Ulysses, the other by Orpheus.” He then describes three solutions (two from Ulysses and one from Orpheus), and in the commentary, he tells that there are three solutions, two from philosophy and one from religion. He does not say which is which. This has led Lampert to conclude that Orpheus represents a novel kind of philosophic religion (Nietzsche and Modern Times, 63). I read Orpheus as a representative of philosophy who has begun to meditate upon divine things, since Bacon says elsewhere that philosophy leads to religious questions (Essays, 42), and because I think that Orpheus's songs are a continuation of his philosophic activities in the eleventh fable.
44 Bacon, “Of Atheism,” in Essays, 42. As cited in Farrington, Francis Bacon, 185. See also Heidi Studer, “Strange Fire at the Altar of the Lord,” for a full account of how Baconian philosophy leads to a new view of providence.