Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 135
sometimes articulated in interrogative form—which abound in the perhaps better
known reflections of the humanists. Let us quickly review some of them.
Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) pithily writes that ‘man knows as far as he can
make’, 22 posing thereby a pragmatic criterion for knowledge and certainty which
others were to exploit in various forms. Cardanus (1501–76) establishes that only
in mathematics is there certainty, because the intellect itself produces or brings
forth the entities it operates with. 23 Leonardo (1452–1519) states that human
science is a second creation. 24 The sceptic Francisco Sanches (1552–1623), in
Quod Nihil Scitur (1581), uses this topos to castigate human reason, since only
God can know what he has made. 25 Bruno (1548–1600) rejects the primacy of
contemplation and argues that, where there is the power to make and to produce
something, there is also the certainty of that something being known. 26
Paracelsus (1493–1541) clearly argues that Nature has to be artificially brought
to the point where she discloses herself to man’s enquiring gaze. 27 Even less
known figures are eager to stress that it is homo faber only who wields the sole
and true weapons enabling him to enter into Nature’s mysteries. For example, the
sixteenth-century Italian engineer Giuseppe Ceredi expresses the notion that
modelling ‘Nature as if it become mechanical in the construction of the world
and of all the forms of things’ would enable the natural philosopher, by proper
and voluntary manipulation, to attain ‘to the perfection of art and to the stable
production of the effects that is expected’. 28 Now, this tradition of thought goes
back to classical Antiquity, and identifies objects of knowledge and objects of
construction in various fields and degrees. For example, this is done in
mathematics, craftsmanship, theology, astronomy and other disciplines, and later
on this topos helped people to rethink the essence and role of human art, which,
in view of the fertility of man’s inventiveness, could no longer be perceived as a
simple mimesis or imitation of Nature. 29 Several labels can be aptly applied to
this particular cast of the human mind when reflecting on the problem of
knowledge: the ‘ergetic ideal’ is a very accurate appellation; 30 the verum ipsum
factum principle echoes a historically consecrated formula (by Giambattista Vico
in the eighteenth century); and the name ‘maker’s knowledge’ reminds us that
images of science, ideals of thought and abstract speculations on the cognitive
powers of man are grounded on and ultimately lead to a handful of historically
and socially given archetypes: man as beholder, man as user, man as maker. 31 For
these reasons, Bacon’s definition of philosophy and its ‘productive’ appendix
turns out to be slightly less original than it appeared at first sight (or rather, at
second sight, for at first sight it could well be taken for a trivial utilitarian tag).
True, it must have seemed so to Bacon’s contemporaries, accustomed as they
were to a ‘verbal’ kind of culture which Bacon so directly attacks. Likewise, the
famous dictum ‘Knowledge is power’ appears in a different light now: knowledge
is that manipulatory power (potentia) which serves as its own guarantee. 32
Thus far what we might term Bacon’s implicit or tacit starting-point in
epistemological matters. He is the (unexpected?) representative of an established
but almost hidden gnoseological tradition. His driving force seems to be the