Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy
Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.
– Montaigne (1533-1592)
Philosophers, whether they admit it or not, always have a persona. Plato taught philosophy made one fit to be a king; Diogenes of Sinope taught philosophy made one fit to be a slave. For centuries, philosophy primarily concerned itself with practical, moral, legal, political, and theological issues. Natural philosophy — what we would today call science — remained a speculative, peripheral, individualistic domain of inquiry. It therefore is not an accident that the rise of modern philosophy coincides with the rise of modern science. Stephen Gaukroger argues that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) extended the quasi-moral standing of other realms of inquiry to natural philosophy, not only changing the role and place of science, but the very persona of a philosopher.
European governments in the sixteenth century began a long process of centralization and increased social discipline, a development which functioned as a catalyst for the self-examination found in the humanism of the age, along with its emphasis on civic virtue. Theoretical sensibilities were shaped by a legal-rhetorical tradition establishing a background for argument, persuasion, and discovery; law was the paradigm case of knowledge for Renaissance rhetorical writers. Rhetoric taught how to organize one’s thoughts: how to navigate within a comprehensive body of thought, how to investigate particular cases using general models, how to recognize where appropriate evidence may be found. From Machiavelli (1469-1527) forward, sound learning was increasingly seen as a foundation for sound government.
Humanists gained a sense of their responsibilities as humanists from the professional self-image generated by their legal personae. This contributed to the eclecticism of early modern scientific thought. Eclectics, indifferent and impartial, exemplified gentlemanly behavior. Avoiding fanaticism, eclectic thinkers remained self-critical, continuously aiming at self-reform; behaving virtuously and acting virtuously were the same thing for the humanists. Bacon extended this activist ethic to natural philosophy, changing the natural philosopher from an individual seeker to a public professional.
Sixteenth-century humanism had a second consequence: the historicization of knowledge. And the conception of knowledge as inextricably embedded in cultural conditions, often a feature of Pyrrhonism, led not to pessimism, but to optimism. For if the scope of human knowledge depends upon cultural conditions, then what is possible to achieve can indeed be widened, provided we alter the cultural conditions. Bacon looked at the centralized states of his time and envisioned possibilities that did not exist for ancient and medieval men. One could avoid the exclusivity of the guilds, and the esoteric university system, through public administration and public reform. Organizing natural philosophy around public practice would facilitate the realization of opportunities for innovation, the proper following up of empirical results, the stimulation of fresh efforts, and the building of a cumulative storehouse of knowledge.
While learning has traditionally been defended as something valuable for its own sake, Bacon wasn’t interested in truth per se, but informative truth. Aristotle, for example, conceived change in terms of the termini of directed processes, an explanatory approach that didn’t respect contingencies such as initial conditions and the “violent motions” external to any principles in play. Bacon changed what counted as relevant, focusing on beginnings: how to establish setup points operating as gateways to knowledge. Emphasis was no longer strictly placed upon the directed activity of nature, but upon the directed activity of the experimenter, who begins situationally with the available states-of-affairs he has carefully classified and/or prepared for organized manipulation.
A historicized model of knowledge makes one alert to the possibility of being trapped by one’s circumstances. Under such relativism, students of nature no longer needed to believe in the homogeneity of error. Bacon took the assumptions of his humanist predecessors precisely in this direction, developing what D.C. Stove might call a “nosology of thought.” We can go wrong by polluting our information train with endless types of cognitive bias. Given the sophistication of ancient and medieval thought, we can certainly say it was idiot-proofed; Bacon sought something better, methods and procedures that are savant-proofed. Bacon even distrusted ready assent to clear ideas. He recommended removing individuality from research and development completely, thereby transforming the entire process into impersonal, institutional machinery. The business of the state thus took precedence over contemplative detachment. Wonder, once linked with reverence of the divine, became characteristic of a stupefied ignoramus who cannot use novelties to open new paths to knowledge. Curiosity, once a vice of the idle, became a public virtue, as curiosity is active and probing. One must come to material well-prepared if one is to benefit from it.
Bacon retained an active, Renaissance conception nature, which suggests we know things when we can make or produce things. Bacon innovated by stripping all cosmological significance from productive activity, desacralizing natural powers and scrapping neo-Platonic hierarchies. An impartial legal attitude, when imported into natural philosophy, means that empirically-based procedures ought to replace textually-based procedures. What counts as a possible explanation is therefore redefined as a result. The humanist celebration of style is downplayed, along with the veneration of history and literature. In substitution, a neutral approach is recommended that measures, quantifies, segments, schedules, and obeys guidelines. Against the hairsplitting of the schoolmen, a distinction between demonstration and discovery is sharpened. Thinking through the application of our ideas will demand structural specificity as to what is combining and separating as spatial configurations and arrangements change. All possible natural entities are placed horizontally on the same ontological plane, an implicit reductionism that disallows the sustained employment of ad hoc principles applied to arbitrary domains to protect preconceived views. This changes what counts as plausibility. And, against occultists, who use fantasy more than imagination, Bacon stipulates ways to avoid constructing nothing out of nothing, through data collection and experimental observation. At the time, such advice was not common sense, given the prevalence of astrology, alchemy, and various artes magicae practiced among the learned.
Francis Bacon eventually became a symbol of the Enlightenment, earning a range of haters from William Blake to Joseph de Maistre, who found science, reform, and industry all having a net destructive effect upon man and the world he inhabits. While today, we strangely call such a suspicion of progress “progressive,” in Bacon’s time, there was no doctrine that could even be called progressive, whether it genuinely represented progress or not. So Bacon’s genius resides in teaching us what to wish for in natural philosophy. Sometimes scientism is criticized not for its vices, but for its virtues: its noble, active spirit of mastery and command. Rather than revering the world as something finished, as if we have reached the summit, Bacon pulls us away from such servile self-satisfaction by reminding us we haven’t even scratched the surface.
