Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 143
component: the Form is real, internal and with reference to the Universe as any
genuine rule of action should be. No wonder, then, that ‘in this sense truth and
utility are the very same things’ (in hoc genere ipsissimae res sunt veritas et
utilitas: Nov. Org. I, 124). This is a far cry from any utilitarian and, qua
utilitarian, reductionist credo, for truth, in Bacon’s ideal, may be ‘useful’ but is
always conceived as a result or spring of an axiologically neutral manipulation
(uti, utilitas). Thus, it does not convey the evaluative tenor associated with
utilitarianism in its historical forms. 50 It goes without saying that the reception of
all these doctrines was entirely biased in favour of utilitarian and pragmatic
considerations, so that, paradoxically, the ferocious satire of Jonathan Swift
against the inventors of Lagado was not the brainchild of the writer’s deranged
imagination: the promises of real ‘usefulness’, both by the Royal Society and by
its sister association, the Académie des Sciences, were soon sorely
disappointed. 51 In sum, Bacon’s notion of truth detaches itself from the
theoretically inclined spirit of the greatest part of Western philosophical
discourse and recaptures that subterranean current of thought to which allusion
was made at the outset: maker’s knowledge versus beholder’s or user’s. To
engage actively in the processes of Nature mirrors the systematically held
conviction not only that such an engagement is legitimate—a conviction which
in its turn corresponds to a certain image of Nature qua object of human
construction or fabrication 52 —but also that only from such an active engagement
can truth emerge. Theoretically speaking, Bacon’s epistemology is impeccably
gradualist, as L.Jonathan Cohen remarks, 53 but it ceases to be so from the
moment we reflect that each pronouncement, each general statement, each axioma
has to be truth-producing at any level if we are genuinely after manipulative
success. It hardly needs to be pointed out that all this remains an ideal, for Bacon
does not even attempt to teach us how precisely we can manipulate those
corpuscles he postulates as existing in each body in order to achieve this or that
‘effect’. His recipes in Novum Organum or in other places (e.g. in III, 240) seem
the imaginative or fantastic projection of a magus’ mentality. But this would be,
I think, a rather jejune line of criticism for a philosophically minded hermeneutic
to take. Knowledge, we saw, operates with ideas as much as with ideals. If
indeed Bacon failed on that particular account, the crucial point to remember is
that the tradition he bequeathed to Western philosophy, in the hands of other
philosophers and scientists less prone to such visionary flights of fancy,
succeeded where he only sowed the seeds of its desiderata. That is, after all, a
tradition that, for better or worse, our world appears to have made its own in its
utilitarian, scientistic and technocratic versions.
In his indictment against the philosophers of the past, Bacon wrote in the
Preface to De Interpretatione Naturae that they did not even teach man ‘what to
wish’. This criticism backfires dangerously when we consider that the realm of
desires, that is, of values and priorities, is by no means dependent on nor results
from any theoretically informed epistemology, no matter how brilliant its merits
or how eloquent its proponents. Bacon’s world, if we judge by the scattered