Why Are We Studying Bacon and Hume

WHY WE STUDY BACON AND HUME IN POETICS

Abstract: My over-arching argument concerning the role of Bacon & Hume in our study of creative writing theory and history is this (the argument is Foucauldian in that I am placing certain historical events in a psycho-sociological context to argue that the truths espoused in our culture have been created not discovered): We believe science because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that science’s method of discerning what is true and false is infallible, or if not infallible at least far superior to any other method. This indoctrination, which achieved its foothold around 1800, has controlled the nature of art ever since: artists and writers since 1800 have either joined science or have attempted to subvert it. We either shape our art to exploit the superior status of empiricism, or we attempt to subvert empiricism by exploring a radical subjectivity or a postmodern position that calls into question all claims for truth. I’ve chosen Bacon and Hume to study in this context because Bacon in the 16th century invented, or at least inspired, modernism’s scientific method and I want to highlight the sociological reasons for his ‘instauration,’ and I’ve chosen Hume because he was the philosopher who most clearly and definitively articulated empiricism’s flaw, which, it is widely acknowledged, has not been successfully rebutted.

Bacon’s Novum Organum (“a new method, or tool”) is the text in intellectual history that inaugurates the inquiry into human knowledge that marks a new period in Western thought, a turn from ontology (remember Adams’s schema?), in which it was believed that the world constituted an unproblematic set of existences, a set of categories of static qualities such as size, shape, and (later) genus, species etc., to epistemology—in which it was hoped that by turning our attention to how we come to know things we can establish a body of knowledge more certain than was provided by either ancient texts or the Christian faith.

I want to elaborate on the sociological intentions of this turn to epistemology to highlight its function as a useful epistemology, as opposed to a true one.

Five factors that caused Bacon to write Novum Organum, 1621

--humanism, a new sense of man’s possibilities (“What a piece of work is man,” Hamlet, 1600), brought on to a large extent by new technologies (telescope, compass, gunpowder) and an explosion of knowledge gathering;

--exasperation with church’s hypocrisies (clergy selling “salvation” packets), an exasperation climaxing in 1517 with the Martin Luther’s Reformation. The church no longer seen as center of authority—man himself could appeal directly to God;

--brutal living conditions: plagues, short life expectancy, frustration with inability to improve conditions;

--new cosmological findings, which cast doubt on old ways of thinking and spawned a determination not to be fooled again;

--world explorations, exposing cultural relativism as well as imposing economic and social disruptions in Europe.

1 According to Bacon, empiricism would affirm man as a knowledge gathering force free from institutional corruption; it would ground knowledge in certainty; it would improve human conditions; and it would release man from the confines of his fallible perceptions. A timeline of significant occurrences toward the end of the Middle Ages gives us some indication of the historical conditions that would impel him to pursue these ends. I’ve culled from that timeline a few events highlighting my point, such as the flurry of simultaneous constructions of cathedrals and universities. (What might this trend signify? The church is threatened at a time when institutionalized learning is expanding. Even though that learning was within church orthodoxy, it represented a threat to the church because it was rationalist rather than faith-based. Sensing a threat, the church builds monoliths to consolidate its social and political position and thus propagate its dogma and conserve its power.) I’ve included in this list some events concerning economic developments.

1000: --widespread fear of the end of the world and the last judgement 1100: decline of Islamic science (due to beginning of Islamic fundamentalism) and subsequent passing on of Islamic cosmological observations to the West (Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 sending many Greeks to Europe, who took with them their classical texts of Homer, Plato, and the Roman philosophers, texts that once disseminated by way of the printing press, invented in 1447, served as a boost to the spirit of the Renaissance, democratizing learning and sparking interest in new, non- scholastic ways of thinking, free of intellectual hair-splitting that concerns itself almost exclusively with proofs of God’s existence.)

1119: Bologna University founded 1120: full development of Scholastic Philosophy 1123: --founding of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital 1150: Medical faculty @ Bologna University 1173: first authenticated influenza epidemics 1194: Erection of present Chartres Chathedral 1202: --Leonardo introduces Arabic numerals in Europe --the first court jesters at European courts 1203: Siena University founded 1204: --Vicenza University founded 1212: --Rheims Cathedral built 1214: Roger Bacon, greatest scientist of his time, born (dies 1294) 1217: Salamanca University founded 1220: --Salisbury Cathedral begun (30 yrs to build) --Burgos Cathedral begins 1224: founding of Naples University 1227: building of Toledo Cathedral 1229: founding of Toulouse University 1230: leprosy imported to Europe by the crusaders 1271: Marco Polo goes to China 1289: --founding of Montpelier University 1290: --Lisbon University founded 1303: Rome University founded 1305: Edward I standardizes the yard and the acre 1309: founding of Orleans University 1314: completion of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London 1322: the Pope forbids the use of counterpoint in church music 1326: founding of Oriel College, oxford, and Clare College, Cambridge

2 1327: the great fire of Munich 1332: bubonic plague originates in India 1337: William Merlee of Oxford attempts first scientific weather forecasts 1338: founding of Pisa University 1339: founding of Grenoble University 1340: founding of Queen’s College, Oxford 1347: Black Death devastates Europe 1349: Black Death kills a third of population in England 1347-1351: 75 million people die of the Black Death 1354: the mechanical clock at Strasbourg Cathedral 1365: founding of Vienna University 1386: Heidelberg University founded 1388: Cologne University founded 1402: Seville cathedral begun 1409: Leipzig University founded 1411: St. Andrews University founded 1426: Louvain University founded 1427: Lincoln College, Oxford, founded 1431: Universities of Caen and Poitiers founded 1434: Joao Diaz, Portugese explorer, founds Cape Bojador 1437: All Souls’ College, Oxford, founded 1440: Platonic Academy, Florence, founded 1441: --Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, founded --Port. navigators find the first Negroes near Cape Blanc, western Africa, and start slave trade again 1445: Port. navigator Diniz Diaz doscovers Cape Verde 1450: Gutenberg prints the “Constance Mass Bood” 1479: Copenhagen University founded 1480: --da Vinci invents parachute --Magellan born 1483: King John II of Portugal refuses to finance Columbus’s voyage 1484:--Port. navigator Diego Cam discovers mouth of the Congo River --Durer’s “Self Portrait” 1489: the symbols + and – come into use 1490: --da Vinci observes capillary action of liquids in small-bore tubes 1492: --profession of book publisher emerge: type founder, printer, and seller --first terrestrial globe constructed by Nuremberg geographer Martin Behaim --Columbus financed by Ferdinand & Isabella of Spain, sails from Palos, Spain, discovers Watling Island in the Bahamas Oct. 12, Cuba Oct. 18, Haiti Dec. 6; Santa Maria wrecked off haiti Dec 25 1493: --Columbus returns to Palos, leaves Spain on second voyage 1494: --Luca di Pacioli “discovers” algebra, including study of problems of cubic equations 1495:-- syphillis epidemic spreads from Naples all over Europe thru Fr. soldiers 1497: --Columbus returns from 2nd voyage after over 2 1/2 yrs --Vasco da Gama rounds Cape of good Hope, having left Lisbon on a voyage to India, discovers sea route to India the following year and arrives on Malabar coast --severe famine in Florence 1498: --Da Vinci, numerous scientific and technical drawings 1499: Amerigo Vespucci and Alonso de Ojeda leave Spain on voyage of discovery to S.

3 America 1499: University of Oxford institutes degrees in music 1500: --1st commercial colleges founded in Venice 1501: --swift development of book printing and typography; since 1445 more than 1,000 printing offices prodecued approx. 35,000 books with approx. 10 million copies 1510: --American coast discovered up to Charleston 1512: --Copernicus proposes that the earth and other planets turn around the sun --pineapples arrive in Europe 1517: --Martin Luther, in protest against sale of indulgences, posts his 95 theses on door of Palast Church in Wittenberg, Oct 31, beginning of Reformation in Germany; in his Leipzig Disputation with Johann Eck, Luther questions the infallibility of papal decisions --coffee in Europe for the first time (1st Starbucks opens, in London, just one block from another one that was already there, giving rise to the phenomenon known as Starbucks infinity, which posits that there has always been, and there always will be, a Starbucks) 1518: --license to import 4,000 slaves to Span. American colonies granted to Lorens de Gomonot 1519: --Magellan, Port. navigator in the service of Spain, leaves Europe (Sept. 20) to circumnavigate the globe --Domenico de Pineda explores Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Ver Cruz 1525: --Durer compiles first Ger. manual on geometry 1528: --severe outbreaks of plague in England --Paracelsus, 1st manual of surgery 1533: --Henry VIII secretly marries Anne Boleyn; Thomas Crammer becomes Archbishop of Canterbury, declares marriage between Henry and Catherine of Aragon void and marriage with Anne Boleyn lawful; Anne crowned queen; Henry is excommunicated by pope; Queen Elizabeth I born, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn --Pizarro executes the Inca of Peru 1534: 1st lunatic asylums (w/out medical attn) 1534: Jacques Cartier on his first voyage to N. America, sights coast of Labrador 1538: Mercator uses the name America for 1st time, also N. America 1540: Thomas Cromwell executed, for defying Henry VIII 1549: court jesters (dwarfs, cripples) appear in Europe 1550: --trigonometric tables, G. D. Rhaeticus 1557: flu epidemic all over Europe 1559: Realdo Colombo describes position and posture of human embryo 1560: --1st scientific society founded at Napels by Giambattista della Porta --tobacco plant imported to Western Europe by jean Nicot 1561: FRANCIS BACON born 1563: --general outbreak of plague in Europe kills over 20,000 people in London 1564: --Galileo born --Shakespeare born 1565: --Bernardino Telesio publishes “De rerum natura,” foreshadowing empirical methods of science 1567: estimated 2 million Indians die in S. America of typhoid fever 1568: Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s, London, invents bottled beer 1569: --Mercator: “Cosmographia,” and map of the world for navigational use --40,000 inhabitants of Lisbon die in carbuncular fever epidemic

4 1573: Francis Drake sees Pacific Ocean for 1st time 1575: --outbreaks of plague in Sicily, spreading thru Italy up to Milan --Tycho Brahe constructs an observatory @ Uransiborg for Frederick II, Denmark 1576: Francois Viete introduces decimal fractions 1577: Francis Drake embarks on voyage around the world via Cape Horn 1580: --Drake returns to England from circumnavigation 1581: --Galileo discovers isochronous property of the pendulum 1583: --Eng. expeditions to Mesopotamia, India, and Persian gulf led by merchants 1585: John Davis discovers Davis Strait between Canada & Greenland 1590: Galileo’s “De Motu” describes experiments on dropping bodies, challenging Aristotle’s science 1592: plague kills 15,000 people in London 1595: --Eng. army finally abandons bow as weapon of war 1596: Galileo invents thermometer 1599: outbreak of plague in Spain 1600: --Shakespeare writes Hamlet, arguably 1st “modern” literature (uncertainty becomes primary theme) --Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler work together @ Prague 1601: --Tycho Brahe dies --many Ger. brothels closed to stop spread of v.d. 1602: Galileo investigates laws of gravitation and oscillation 1603: heavy outbreak of plague in England 1608: --Galileo constructs astronomical telescope 1610: --the Stationers’ Co. begins to send a copy of every book printed in England to Bodleian Library, Oxford 1615: Galileo faces the Inquisition for 1st time 1616: Galileo prohibited by Catholic Church from further scientific work 1619: --1st slave from Africa arrives in Virginia --William Harvey announces at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, his discovery of the circulation of the blood 1620: --Edmund Gunter: “Canon triangulorum,” treatise on logarithms --density of population in Germ. per sq. mile: 35; at time of J. Caesar, appr. 6; c. 1900 approx. 160; 1950 approx. 280 --Francis Bacon, “Instauratio magna: novum organum scientarium” 1626: Bacon dies

5 Why is the turn to epistemology in the 16th century important to us writers now?

Why this turn in the history of knowledge is important for us as writers is that it opened up a set of issues that the world’s intellectual community of thinkers and writers today is still, you might say, plagued by. The questions concern the larger philosophical issues of what knowledge is, which are important for the intellectual community at large of course, but perhaps especially for us writers because this issue directly affects our status as contributors to our culture’s consciousness and conscience. As Anzel Adams says in the introduction to his anthology of creative writing theory, the embrace of empiricism as the epistemology that yields the most certainty relegates us writers to the margins of our culture; by our not engaging in the empiricist methodology, at least as directly as scientists do, it is assumed that our texts are products not of the careful quantifiable observations and recordings of phenomena, but rather of subjective and therefore relatively valueless ruminations.

Not that we mind that relegation—without the judgment of its value, that is—for it is only in the margins that we can freely engage in the modes of thinking and expressing that compelled us to be writers in the first place, and perhaps only from the margins can we offer those insights and expressions without censure, as we feel we must if we are to offer and express them at all. But we would do well to know what we are up against by speaking from the margin. We should want to be aware of our role in our culture and our compromised status as knowledge purveyors, perhaps in order to make more informed choices about how to write and what to write about. As writers and intellectuals, we want to represent ourselves as informed and thoughtful thinkers, knowledgeable about the central issues of our culture and of the larger issues that the intellectual community of which we are a part concerns itself with.

Bacon is the thinker who originally constructed the mode of inquiry that has come to be the dominant epistemology in our culture, the one that has relegated us to marginal status. Bacon marks the beginning of what some philosophers call ‘the rise of the technocrats.’ Though the following schema is an oversimplification, for our purposes we can see that literature responded, and continues to do so, in one of two ways:

1) with realism, almost as scientists ourselves, reporting on our culture and our “human condition,” by way of close observation, borrowing from the epistemological clout of science, acting as a kind of ‘scientist of the culture,’ or ‘scientist of human behavior,’ (the French novelist Zola announced this as his poetic, and this mode comprises a great deal of contemporary fiction—John Updike comes to mind—and some poetry, as in the modernist movement known as ‘imagism’—prescriptions to ‘show don’t tell’ we could argue are in this mode, empiricist-based.)

or 2) with anti-realism, either by a) protesting the technocracy of the age by exalting or celebrating the human imagination and the spirit of humanity, with Romantic expressivism (this mode comprises most of contemporary poetry), OR by b) calling into question empiricist epistemology by presenting hyper-subjective points of view, “representations of consciousness” that imply a philosophical ‘perspectivism,’ which posits that all knowledge originates from an idiosyncratic perspective (“the modern novel” represents this response: William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust)

6 If the latter approach is taken to a certain extreme, the mode may become postmodern, which would represent a third response (Borges, Umberto Eco, Pynchon, Paul Auster in fiction; Charles Simic, James Tate, Dean Young, Robert Haas in poetry), though a postmodern response may also take the form of self-referential language play, ala Wittgenstein and Derrida (John Ashbery, the contemporary ‘language poets’ Charles Bernstein, Jorie Graham)—we’ll discuss Wittgenstein and Derrida after Hume.

Bacon represents the beginning of the rise of the technocrats that I’m arguing is problematic for writers in the modern era (post-1600), and by presenting here some socio-psychological factors that might have influenced his project I’m offering a kind of Foucauldian critique of Bacon’s project, historicizing it and claiming that these factors were more influential to the project than the project is true. In other words, this argument is that Bacon’s method is more a self-serving tool than it is a tool for gaining truth. (One observation that supports this claim is that he made references to the medieval notion of essence, even though we’ve come to adopt the scientific method with absolutely no adherence to that notion: he assumed that his study of a phenomenon, such as heat, would yield an “essence” of that phenomenon; modern science, by contrast, only concerns itself with correlations among phenomena—if Bacon’s method yields unmediated truth, then it was an awfully funny path that got him there, relying as it does on a Platonic notion that could not be more antithetical to modern science’s empiricism.)

David Hume So we’re studying Bacon to expose the roots of the epistemology that has relegated us writers to a marginal status as knowledge-purveyors (and I’m arguing that that epistemology was more sociologically derived than it is epistemologically sound). And we’re studying Bacon to give us an historical understanding of Hume, who is the philosopher who is most useful to us in our critique of this epistemology. In Bacon we see the birth of empiricism and in Hume we see its “death.” I put death in quotes because although Hume killed it, no doubt, our culture at large still worships its corpse, partly because we admire the power that science appears to give us, providing us with a focused and predictable knowledge of natural phenomena, a knowledge that in turn gives us the power to create cool gadgets that not only amuse us but also function as powerful reinforcements of the epistemology from which they spring, by appearing to record or measure reality. And partly because it’s a convincing and seductive epistemology in its own right; as Hume instructs us, no understanding of empiricism’s flaw will detract from its function as a tool for our everyday understanding of the world and of our own role in it. Knowing that empiricism is flawed is not going to make me hesitate taking one step in front of another out of a fear that instead of solid ground I may be stepping into an abyss, and it is upon that very habitual pseudo-certainty that our faith in science and technology is founded. This may seem like a hyperbolic claim, but I contend that it’s that same pseudo-certainty impelling us to take each next step with confidence that keeps us from fully comprehending the environmental crisis we’re in. As many students have remarked in this class in the past, habitual environmental exploitation dies hard primarily because our experiences have not yielded any compelling evidence to kill it and behave otherwise.

Our low status as knowledge-purveyors notwithstanding, we contemporary writers do respond to these epistemological concerns, usually implicitly but often explicitly. In fact, we could argue that this epistemological crisis creates the most salient characteristic of every writer’s work. We can categorize with ease, I would argue, all contemporary writers into one of those three categories above. Their responses are various, but broadly considered they’re very discernable,

7 and by studying the roots of the debate I hope to help you gain clarity about what your own response is in your own writing, or what you want that response to be.