Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

132 FRANCIS BACON AND MAN’S TWO-FACED KINGDOM
living matter and so forth—in the way we observe in men like Boyle or Hooke
and a host of minor virtuosi is a legitimate goal of the inquiring mind bypasses
the blunt question as to Bacon’s direct influence on Western science. Those
thinkers and their changing relation with their mathematical counterparts
established the rise of a solid experimental tradition whose ultimate source we
find in the then prevalent interpretation of the Lord Chancellor’s writings. 12 The
fusion of the mathematical tradition with the Baconian was to become a
fascinating and decisive chapter in the history of Western thought, but it took
place with different rhythms and priorities in each science as well as in each
country. To date, however, this is the best answer that we possess as regards the
significance of Baconian ideas amongst methodologically minded scientists. As
to philosophy proper and the intrinsic merits of, say, Bacon’s seminal insights on
method or induction (questions intriguingly absent from the concerns of the early
Baconians), the only significant exception to the chorus of universal denigration
seems to be the study systematically undertaken by L. Jonathan Cohen. From his
interpretations there emerges, amongst other findings, the unexpected notion of a
Baconian as against a Pascalian conception of probability, and the general and
radical revision of Bacon’s ideas in the context of scientific methodology. In fine,
a new philosophical setting for re-evaluation and study is beginning to take
shape. 13
Bacon’s main starting-point is expressly announced in the very title of his
overambitious Instattratio Magna and of its second (and only completed) part:
the Novum Organum. 14 That is, Bacon places himself, as a thinker, under the
aegis of beneficent and radical innovation. Now, it would be utterly naive to
presuppose that categories of innovation and novelty have been coextensive
throughout history. On the contrary, men have devised different techniques when
dealing with new ideas or objects whenever it was felt that the accepted fabric of
meanings was unable to account for or assimilate a challenging novum. In
Bacon’s case most scholars agree that a particular kind of utopianism was the
driving force that acted behind his philosophical endeavours. Nevertheless, there
are many brands of utopianism and Bacon’s cognitive project of a new
instauratio blends together some of the most recondite meanings of early modern
Utopian thought. First of all, that thought does not recognize or think itself as
revolutionary in our sense of the term, and therefore it does not inscribe itself in
a linear conception of history, contrary to what Bacon’s most vocal admirers
were to assume in the eighteenth century. 15 The living roots of Bacon’s
utopianism, as manifested by his frequent use of the concept of instauration, are
simultaneously religious, ritual, civil and ‘technological’. Instaurare is nothing
less than ‘restoring’ man’s power over Nature as he wielded it before the Fall;
instaurare, furthermore, means to channel the pathos of novelty towards
epistemic and political goals that bear the traces of spiritual edification and
societal initiation (as in the phrase instauratio imperii to be found in the tract
Temporis Partus Masculus, drafted c. 1603); and, lastly, instaurare strikes a
technological chord because Bacon makes his own the architectural topos which