New Atlantis and The Great Instauration (eBook)

Francis Bacon (Autor)

Jerry Weinberger (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 2. Auflage
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-119-09801-0 (ISBN)

Infos

This richly annotated second edition of the now-classic pairing of Bacon's masterpieces, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration features the addition of other works by Bacon, including 'The Idols of the Mind,' Of Unity in Religion' and 'Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,' as well a Summary of the each work and Questions for the reader. S

• Includes works new to the second edition, including 'The Idols of the Mind,' 'Of Unity in Religion,' and 'Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates'
• Updates the layout of the previous edition with a more generous interior design, making this work more student-friendly and easier to navigate in the classroom
• Each work is introduced and subsequently discussed, revealing the importance of Bacon's work to his contemporaries as well as to modern readers
• Includes a comprehensive introduction and annotations throughout the text; as well as an appendix of Principal Dates in the Life of Sir Francis Bacon; a selected bibliography; and synopses and questions to accompany each work

Jerry Weinberger is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. He received his B.A. from The University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has won the MSU Teacher-Scholar Award, fellowships from the Earhart Foundation and the Institute for Educational Affairs, and has twice been a Senior Research Fellow of the NEH. He is Director of the LeFrak Forum and Co-Director of the Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy. Among his books are Science, Faith and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age (1985); Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh: A New Edition and Interpretive Essay (1996); and Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought (2005). A resident of Washington, DC, he is a regular contributor to City Journal, the nation's premier urban-policy magazine.

Inhalt

Preface: Why a Second Edition? Vii

Acknowledgments ix

Note on the Texts xi

Principal Dates in the Life of Sir Francis Bacon Introduction to the Second Edition xv

The Great Instauration 1

Prooemium 2

Epistle Dedicatory 5

Preface 8

The Plan of the Work 19

The Idols of the Mind 35

Synopsis and Questions 56

New Atlantis 61

Of Unity in Religion 113

Synopsis and Questions 118

Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates 121

Synopsis and Questions 130

On Bacon's New Atlantis 133

Bibliography 159

Textauszug

Introduction to the Second Edition

Along with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Descartes, Francis Bacon was one of the founders of modern thought. These thinkers coupled realistic politics with a new science of nature in order to transform the age-old view of humanity's place in the world. They contended that once the efforts of the human intellect were directed from traditional concerns to new ones—from contemplation to action, from the account of what people ought to do to what they actually do, and from metaphysics to the scientific method for discovering natural causes—the harsh inconveniences of nature and political life would be relieved and overcome. No longer to be revered or endured, the realms of nature and society would become the objects of human control.

Bacon called his version of this project the “Great Instauration,” an ambiguous term that means at once great restoration and great founding. But he left no doubt that he was engaged in something altogether new: His restoration—his reform of the ways and means of human reason—would in fact be a founding because its aim would be “to lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power,” in order to “command nature in action.”1 Bacon did not, however, think his instauration would be quick or easy. It would surely provoke opposition from political, theological, and academic interests with something to lose in a new intellectual order. But for Bacon, the larger problem was that the impediments to the power of reason are deeply rooted in the character of reason itself. In his famous doctrine of the “Idols of the Mind,” he outlined four categories of defects that infect and mislead human reason.

First, reason seeks more order in the world than actually exists and it gets fooled into thinking that impossible things exist. Second, reason tends to become obsessed with one cause that it thinks explains everything. Third, words fool reason, as if all words refer to something real. Finally, reason has been seduced by a long history of fruitless and quarrelsome philosophical speculation. Bacon has an especial dislike for the baleful influence, still active at his time, of Plato and Aristotle. Their dogmatic preference for contemplation over action reflected contempt for the practical arts, a contempt much more harmful than noble. For it merely served to hide the real courses of nature from view, so that from Aristotle one hears “the voice of dialectics more often than the voice of nature” and in Plato one sees that “he infected and corrupted natural studies by his theology as much as Aristotle did by his dialectic.”2

For Bacon, these defects of reason had first to be exposed and rooted out as far as possible before reason's true powers could be unleashed. Then, an entirely new science, based on careful induction and especially experimentation, could discover the latent actions of nature and bend them to human purposes. Human life needs tools for action, but from the ancient wisdom we got nothing but theological and metaphysical claptrap. Moreover, the ancients applied this intellectual junk to practical and political affairs, especially after Socrates, who was famous for having brought philosophy down from the heavens. But the ancients' concern for practical affairs was in fact impractical and served merely to fuel violent controversies about justice and the best regime, controversies that are inevitable when we are faced by material scarcity and a cosmos that is hostile to our wills and indifferent to our needs.

For Bacon, reason directed by new means and ends would endow human beings with powers over nature unimaginable by his contemporaries. He wasn't restrained in what he predicted. Bacon's new science would put nature on the rack: it gives up its secrets “when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.”3 When the latent actions and structures of nature are then genuinely understood, he argued, the dreams of the alchemists really will come true: it will be possible to transform something not gold into the real McCoy.4 And so it is: with atomic science it is possible today to turn mercury into gold, and that's no different in principle from turning oil into polyester cloth for a suit of clothes. Bacon did not blush at taking aim even at the corruptibility and mortality of the human body, the conquest of which he called the “noblest work” of natural philosophy.5 Bacon's project was thus far more than a mere reformation of human reason and even more than the founding of a new intellectual or political order. For every founding prior to his own had been limited by something beyond the powers of the founder, whether it be nature, fortune, or God. With Bacon's project we encounter an altogether new horizon, one that forces a reconsideration of the words: “In the beginning...”

The Great Instauration and New Atlantis

It is fashionable now to have doubts about modern science and technology and to acknowledge that their blessings can be mixed. But even so, we entertain such thoughts from within a world already transformed, mostly for the better, by them: In our everyday lives we interact constantly with their products to the point of taking them for granted. Imagine if you will, what life must have been like before the discovery of anaesthesia or when women had lots of babies because so many newborns died. In making the case for his Great Instauration, Bacon could only conjecture about the future powers of modern science and technology. A quick look at the plan laid out in his 1620 The Great Instauration shows that Bacon knew perfectly well that his project would be a matter of generations and far beyond his powers to effect. The plan describes six parts, most of which are vastly incomplete. The first part was to be a survey of the knowledge presently available and of forms of knowledge that have so far been omitted and need to be developed. Bacon tells us that this first part is “wanting,” but that “some account” of the matter can be found in the second book of his (1605) Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human. The second part was to present the art of interpreting nature, by which Bacon means the discovery of the latent motions and structures of natural phenomena. That part is Novum organum, which follows The Great Instauration in the 1620 volume. But it is but a “summary digested into aphorisms” and is in fact largely incomplete.6 The third part was to be a natural history cataloging all the phenomena of nature. In the 1620 volume, Bacon provides not that history but rather a list of one hundred and thirty different histories to be written on natural phenomena such as winds, comets, seas, gems and stones, the human heart and pulse, and so on (although he did write the history of winds, a history of life and death, and a history of dense and rare). The fourth part was to be a demonstration of how the new art of interpreting nature would be applied to those natural histories, but of this part we have but a few fragments. The fifth part would be a temporary collection of conclusions derived by Bacon from his ordinary reasoning, later to be tested by the new art of interpreting nature. Again, we have just a preface. The sixth part would consist of the complete philosophy set out by the plan. Of this, of course, nothing exists and Bacon himself comments that it is a “thing both above my strength and beyond my hopes.”7

So what can we learn about our time from Sir Francis Bacon? Not all that much about natural science and technology as we know them. But that said, Bacon thought seriously about what it would mean for humankind to possess the power over nature he envisioned and we now have. He knew that the scientific transformation of the world would have extraordinary moral and political consequences and that it would pose new problems in place of old ones: In a world to be conquered rather than endured, what moral and political principles will guide the human energies released by the activity of conquest? And in a world freed from God's providence—a world in which we literally choose our own destiny—will anything limit the objects of our choice? And what are the best means for overcoming the resistance of those who would stand to lose with the passing of the old world, or of those too timid to welcome wholeheartedly a new and unknown one? Bacon's teaching about modern science is ultimately about human relations during and after the conquest of nature. Thus the core of his teaching about science is to be found not so much in his account of scientific investigation, but rather in his moral and political thought.

Of part six of his plan, Bacon says that if it were to exist, it would describe the ends of science, where “human Knowledge and human Power, do really meet in one”; and of such a picture Bacon says not that it is beyond his powers and so impossible for him to provide but rather that, given “the present condition of things and men's minds,” it “cannot easily be conceived or imagined.”8 This means, of course, that with difficulty such a picture can be conceived or imagined and is not beyond Bacon's strength and hope. By 1624 Bacon had written in his New Atlantis just such a picture of a society formed by and dedicated to natural science and the technological conquest of nature....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.3.2016
• Reihe/Serie: Crofts Classics
• Reihe/Serie: Crofts Classics
• Reihe/Serie: Crofts Classics
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Geschichte der Philosophie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• Schlagworte: British history • Cultural Studies • Early Modern British History • Empiricism • Geschichte • Geschichte der britischen Frühmoderne • Geschichte der britischen Frühmoderne • History • James I • Kulturwissenschaften • <p>Sir Francis Bacon • Modern Thought • Political Philosophy & Theory • Political Science • Politik • Politikwissenschaft • Politische Philosophie u. Politiktheorie • religion</p> • Renaissance literature • Scientific Revolution • seventeenth-century philosophy • Western Culture • Westliche Kultur
• ISBN-10: 1-119-09801-7 / 1119098017
• ISBN-13: 978-1-119-09801-0 / 9781119098010