The Baconian Ideal: Understanding and Experimental Science (1)

Francis Bacon looks around him at the state of the sciences and the intellectual world; he sees there (he is, moreover, unaware of or misunderstands the work of the great scientists of his time, notably Galileo) a fixity, a stagnation, and at the same time a complacency in itself, which are precursor symptoms of the end; and he seeks how science can once again become susceptible to progress and growing life. What does he especially criticize about the sciences of his time? “Their premature and hasty reduction into arts and methods; this done, science progresses very little or not at all. […] As long as science scatters itself into aphorisms and observations, it can grow and grow; once enclosed in its methods, it can be polished and roughened for use, but no longer increase in mass.”[1] The “methods” are therefore only more or less artificial processes of exposition, which freeze the sciences in their current state; science only has its free pace when, according to Bacon’s own procedure in the Novum organum, it expresses itself more freely and without a preconceived plan. Bacon fears fixity so much that he is even afraid of certainty. “In speculations,” he says, “if one begins with certainty, one will end with doubt; if one begins with doubt and endures it patiently for a time, one will end with certainty.”[2] This is, in appearance, Descartes’ methodical doubt, in reality something opposite; for Descartes really “begins” with the certainty implied by doubt itself, that of the Cogito, and this certainty generates other certainties; in Bacon, certainty is not the beginning, but the end that closes all research.

Bacon’s criticisms all derive from this: criticism of the humanists who see in the sciences only a theme for literary development; criticism of the scholastics who, “enclosing their souls in Aristotle like their bodies in their cells,” have solidified dogmas (rigor dogmatum); criticism of all those for whom science is something already done, a thing of the past; criticism of specialists who, renouncing first philosophy, confine themselves to their discipline and have the illusion that their favorite science contains everything, like those Pythagorean geometers, those Kabbalists who, with Robert Fludd, saw numbers everywhere. Everything that classifies, everything that fixes is bad.

Hence the distrust of the very instrument of classification, the intellect or understanding; left to itself (permissus sibi), the intellect can only produce distinction upon distinction, as we see in the disputes of the “intellectualists” where the tenuousness of matter only allows a sterile exercise of the mind[3].