Thinking & Doing... with Mr. Bacon

In "The Mastery of Nature," Francis Bacon deals with several issues regarding our approaches to having power over nature and understanding nature (which he calls Human Power and Human Knowledge). By power he means our ability to generate and superinduce new nature on a given body, or to physically transform concrete bodies. By knowledge he means our attempts to discover the form, or "nature-engendering nature," of bodies; that is, the Latent or underlying process(es) at work causing things to manifest in their actual material forms.
The term "nature-engendering nature" is rather interesting. I take this to mean the natural law or process that causes bodies to possess a specific nature in the first place. A specific nature leading to the generation of specific natures! This language of Bacon's rather resembles the cyclical notions present in Aristotle's Physics.

Bacon also references the four causes, namely: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final (or the end), and agrees that "true knowledge is knowledge by causes." He does not regard any of these as particularly useful, however, except form. The final, he says, corrupts all sciences except those dealing with human action (I presume because the idea of action toward an end leads inevitably to anthropomorphism). The efficient and material are only shallowly true when taken, as they almost always are, in isolation from latent processes leading to an object's form. He also cautions us to remember that form does not give existence. He believes that just such an error has lead to the tendency of philosophy to deal with the eternal law, by which all individually formed bodies abide, as a foundation for action as well as knowledge.

Bacon believes that a dichotomy between science and philosophy exists with good reason, and that one must inform the other. He indicates, however, that the roots from which our current science and thought have stemmed were ill-informed in the first place. He accuses modern humanity of attempting to act and think based on grand and ambitious abstractions before taking the time to understand local and practical aspects of reality.

It would be "safer" to begin and raise the sciences from the ground up, perhaps to devote our abilities to dissecting our own ecosystem before we try to understand the mechanics of nuclear fission. I must say that I agree with this position. A fundamental issue with humanity seems to be that our abilities have far, far, far exceeded our needs.

Bacon seems to find a great danger in our tendency to act upon nature that we do not understand. With regard to the "latent process" he mentions, Bacon places its manifestation outside the realm of our senses, rather than simply observable in step-by-step interactions of bodies, and pins it as dependent upon infinitely multitudinous and infinitely minute factors. He acknowledges the complexity of even the most seemingly simple processes and interchanges. The problem then is that we have rashly allowed our human power over nature, and the extent to which we utilize it, to surpass our human knowledge of the very actions we are performing, as well as their consequences. We believe that our understanding is very vast, but do not recognize the level of mystery still present on a local scale. The fact that environmental/ecological science is such a new field speaks volumes of this error. We have philosophized and theorized and formulated our way back in time, forward in time, into the tiniest sub-atomic particle, and out to the farthest reaches of the physical universe; yet, how well do we understand the actual impact that driving an actual car 100 miles has in our actual environment? Or using an actual pesticide? Or an actual oil spill?

Though he never explicitly states it as such, Bacon seems to be criticizing human ambition with regard to science. We fail to recognize the importance of understanding, in a practical way, the innumerable and subtle factors at play in a body, or system, before we set about changing it around.

To deal with these issues, Bacon suggests the allotting of speculation on forms, which are eternal and immutable, to philosophy, rather than the sciences (and to be called metaphysics), and these insights should inform our knowledge; and to the sciences, he allots the matters of specific, ordinary course (calling it physics), with these insights informing our power, or actions.

The significance of this division is as follows:
Rather than great laws that affect celestial bodies and other such non-direct matters, science should focus its attention on practical aspects of reality. Science informs what we are able to do, and should thus investigate our involvement with the real world around us, and should deal with matters of certainty, rather than of abstraction. This helps avoid the danger of advancing our ability beyond our capacity to grasp the implications of that ability. Science deals with real, active processes at work in individual bodies that take forms, but not the forms themselves.

Philosophy, being in a sense the science of knowing, informs what we understand of the essence of the world around us and our place in it. It deals with forms themselves, which are essential and unchanging.


...mm, so: I think that Bacon actually has some very wise and relevant points, buried beneath all this mumbo-jumbo rhetoric! (Why he doesn't say what he means in somewhat more plain language, I shall never understand...)

In essence, I believe Bacon's point to be that our abilities have exceeded our needs to the point of being dangerous. The piece's being titled "The Mastery of Nature" seems almost ironic, as he spends the greater part of it dumping on the way in which we've gone about understanding and acting on nature thus far. True mastery requires a reliable and practical comprehension of the world around us, and the power we have should never become detached from what we know. The two are necessarily interdependent, lest chaos ensue!

With this interpretation, I agree with a lot of what Bacon says. Whaddayall think?