To talk about the circle of thinkers who have influenced our worldview, we can start with Bacon.
Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam (1561 — 1626), can be called the father of modern science, or, more precisely, of its mode of reasoning. In Russia under the ‘new order’ Bacon was called ‘the founder of English materialism’, but this is rather a simplification. Bacon endorses Democritus with his indestructible atoms, speaks of self-developing matter, but when asked about the source of the world order he sometimes answers uncertainly: ‘either matter or the act of creation, I do not know exactly’, sometimes clearly deciding the question in favour of a deity.
Bacon laid the foundations of experimental science and a worldview based solely on experience, and everything that is not confirmed by experience is excluded. In this respect he is more than contemporary, both in the good (what we call the scientific method of enquiry was proposed by Bacon) and in the bad (in the Baconian system of studying nature there was no place for man). His views determined the direction of the mental development of Europeans for several centuries.
Let’s talk about him in more detail. When considering Bacon’s views, I will refer to the generalisations of his philosophy made in the XIX century by Kuno Fischer. [1]
Bacon views things from the side of a ‘mode of action,’ not a ‘purpose.’ He pushes the thought of purpose as far away as possible, beyond the mind, though he does not abandon it altogether. ‘Metaphysics, invading the domain of science, produces great devastation, so let it confine itself to its own domain.’ At the same time, the essence of metaphysics, its difference from mere physics Bacon expresses clearly: ‘Physics assumes in nature only simple existence, motion and natural necessity, while metaphysics assumes, in addition, the intention and idea’. [2]
Positivism, preached in the early 19th century by Comte, can be called a direct descendant of Baconianism. Positivism despises metaphysics, or to put it more precisely, is not interested in it. This at the same time both impoverishes the mind and frees it from the temptation to build metaphysics on ‘purely scientific foundations’. The positivist does not believe in anything, without being carried away by religious constructions of a negative character, active godlessness, preaching materialism. Such is Bacon; he simply does not exercise his mind in the metaphysical field.
But ‘science without thought’ is rather a spin-off of Baconianism. Bacon, as the preface to a collection of his works published in Russia before 1917 says, ‘endeavoured to put at the disposal of mankind a new instrument of power and dominion over the world’; his main idea is ‘to transform the sciences in order to subdue nature’. For the sake of this he discards all previous philosophy as a powerless doctrine, influencing only the inner life of the philosopher, whereas philosophy should ‘transform the world.’ In this he is the forerunner of Soviet ‘official titanism’, as Peter Struve called the struggle of the ‘new order’ with nature, if I am not mistaken, and of the entire Euro-American world in the 20th century.
Bacon vehemently attacks the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. He often speaks with disgust of ancient philosophy in general (with the exception of Democritus). His attacks on the ancient authors are reminiscent of Lenin: ‘Aristotle’s codswallop and Plato’s pompousness’; ‘Plato … wanted to subordinate nature to human thoughts, and Aristotle to subordinate thoughts to words’. The philosophers of that time were already addicted to arguments and chatter, and began to neglect the serious study of truth’; “Greek wisdom responded with a teaching tone and divorced endless verbiage, an occupation highly reprehensible for the study of truth” ….
Whence this hatred? Bacon himself tells us that ancient philosophy was worthless because it had no practical application:
‘Of all the signs which enable us to judge these doctrines, the most undoubted and the most conspicuous is the benefit they bring; for the benefit and the deed serve as a kind of testimony and guarantee of the theories’ faithfulness. How did these philosophical speculations of the Greeks and their applications in the private sciences bear fruit? In this whole period of many centuries, hardly a single experience can be cited which has the aim of improving the human condition, an experience to which we would really owe all these speculations and philosophical dogmas. [3]
And in another place about the same thing:
‘The religious principle that faith must be accompanied by deeds must also be applied to philosophy. The latter should be judged by the fruit it bears, and, if it is fruitless, rejected, especially when, instead of the olives and bunches of grapes which we rightly expect from it, it produces, through disputes and arguments, only briars and thistles’. [4]
According to Bacon, what is the use of ‘beginnings of things’, ‘extreme frontiers’, when ‘true usefulness… can only arise from the knowledge of middle truths’? It’s possible to go ‘down to atoms’: ‘to such conclusions which, assuming even that they are thorough, play almost no part in the improvement of human existence.’ In short, philosophy must be utilitarian. But this is probably not the whole truth.
Ancient philosophy was in no small, if not most of its part concerned with the gathering of the soul, the good of the soul. To a lost man this attention to the soul must seem an obnoxious moralism, and Bacon was a man quite lost when it did not concern his scientific interests. In this also he is quite modern.
‘So much the more reason for scientists to blush with shame,’ we find in Bacon, ’if, being by their occupations like light-winged angels, by their passions they resemble serpents, crawling over the earth and carrying their souls along unworthy paths, like a mirror, but a tarnished mirror’. [5]
He may not have been a serpent, but the type of the modern scholar, often without a definite moral face, was quite embodied in him. I do not mean to say that Bacon was not a moral man and therefore did not think well. Maybe he was, but we are now talking about his thinking. Bacon’s attitude to the inner, to the soul (as unimportant) corresponds in his philosophy to the expulsion of man and humanity from science. And I am not even talking about morality, but about the ‘inclination of the soul’. Bacon’s ‘inclination of the soul’ contradicts all collectedness, all concentration on the inner centre.
‘His writings, like his life,’ says Kuno Fischer, ’make the same impression on us: it is as if for this man there is nothing heavy to bear or to do. <…> David Hume was right not to find in Bacon’s character that mental fortitude which we call the power of moral resistance. We know of no philosopher more elastic than Bacon.’
This elasticity helped him to rise and brought him down from the height he had attained.
‘Bacon knew very well,’ continues Fisher, ’that the bribery of the courts is one of the greatest evils that can afflict the state; yet he tolerated the crown and officials interfering in the proceedings and disposing of the judges in their favour, or in favour of their clients: However, Bacon himself did something that he should never have tolerated in his right view of things: he allowed himself to be bribed and sold his judicial decisions. In this unlawful way he is said to have amassed a large booty: his opponents valued it at 100,000 pounds. This greed had its basis not in a filthy lust for money, but in a carefree and frivolous love of luxury’.
It is amusing that the officials of the ideal state, fictionalised by Bacon in The New Atlantis, respond to the offer of additional remuneration with mild reproach: ‘Double pay? Why? We have already been rewarded for our labour!’
The expression scientia potentia est [6] attributed to Bacon, based on an actual statement of his: scientia et potentia humana in idem coincidunt, [7] could be recast: scientia non est conscientia. [8] Centuries later, when scientia lost its moral foundations, this is what it came to. Science is separate, and conscience, with few exceptions, is separate. As for Bacon — he was only the first on this path.
Speaking of mental concentration: Bacon’s advice to a scientist, which one would like to call careerist’s advice, is characteristic. However, Bacon does not shy away from this word, calling the new field of knowledge ‘the science of paving the way in life’. Let’s dwell a little on this advice.
First of all, he must make his mind ‘flexible, adaptable to means and circumstances, free from all rigidity and sluggishness’. Having achieved this flexibility, the scholar should ‘weigh and estimate all things according to the greater or lesser influence they may have on his happiness.’ Bacon advises further:
‘let us not let ourselves be carried away by magnanimity and high spirits to undertakings beyond our strength, and let us not, so to speak, row against the tide.’
Having learnt ‘not to row against the tide’,
‘one should… look carefully around oneself to see on which side the passage opens or closes, and familiarise oneself with all the conveniences and difficulties, so as not to suffer in vain on an impassable path. With the help of such precaution we will protect ourselves from failures, we will not linger too long on one thing, we will earn ourselves the reputation of clever people, we will offend fewer people’. [9]
A philosophy of ‘moderation and neatness,’ isn’t it? On top of that, Bacon advises ‘not to undertake anything which requires much time.’ Strange to hear this from a revolutionary in thought. Bacon was indeed a very ‘flexible’ man.
Let us move from man to thought.
There are distortions of thought, says Bacon, depending not on the nature of things, but on the nature of man. These he calls ‘ghosts,’ or, as sometimes translated, ‘idols.’ Freed from these ghosts-the conventions and errors of thought-«reason can judge only by induction and its legitimate forms.’
Firstly, he calls for the rejection of authority — idola theatri. Let’s listen to Kuno Fischer:
‘What will come out of our contemplation of things at the exclusion of all historically authorised systems and lore (idola theatri)? …Being independent of authority, our contemplation turns into our own perception, which does not accept or repeat on faith what others say or recognise as true, but asserts with conviction what it has learned and perceived for itself’.
Purely speculatively, it would be good not to take anything on faith. But in everyday life, the scientist takes much of his mental baggage on faith. If he succeeds, he ‘self-knows and perceives’ a measly bit of knowledge. Everything else is a matter of faith. The rejection of authority in the life of a real rather than a fictitious scientist may be a one-time or occasionally repeated act. This is how a religious worldview is rejected (by the majority); it is how former authorities are rejected in times of changing dominant views. But it is a rare, if not a one-time act, as stated above. Throughout most of his life and in relation to most things, the scientist shows faith, not doubt — although there are certainly exceptions.
The other kind of ‘idols’ is idola fori. In speaking of ‘idols of the forum,’ Bacon is referring to the power of language over judgement. Kuno Fischer again:
‘We think we firmly know their <things> meaning, because we have signs for them, which we pass off as their meaning. These signs of things are their names and words, with which we get acquainted earlier than with the nature of things themselves: by means of them people communicate their ideas of things to each other. Accustomed from childhood to put words in place of things, to be understood by everyone through these words, we unwittingly take words for things, signs of things for things themselves, nominal value for real value. Words are like a walking coin with which the representations of things in social intercourse are given and received: they are like money in trade, they constitute not a real and natural, but a conditional price of things, established by the circumstances of human intercourse. We must beware lest we mistake this market price for a thing; for the thing itself it constitutes a completely external and extrinsic definition’.
Here Bacon’s criticism is perfectly valid. ‘Thinking in words’ is the real scourge of humanitarian knowledge as it appears in post-Soviet Russia. Words collide with each other and fly apart, whole buildings are created out of words, but such a ‘thinker’ does not make a single step into the depth of the subject under study. One can cite examples of this kind of ‘scholarship’ endlessly. [10]
The third kind of idols are the idols of the race (human) or tribe (idola tribus). These are precisely the forms of thought innate to man, which exist before all observation and experience. ‘The mind of man,’ says Bacon, ’resembling a mirror, breaking the rays coming from objects, and adding its own nature to the nature of things, distorts, so to speak, distorts and disfigures all the images reflected by it. [11]
The observer distorts what he observed. Man is constantly ‘attaching his own properties to the nature of things and putting his own imprint on them’. Hence, the observer should be eliminated from observation as much as possible. From the point of view of ‘method’ this is faultless. On the other hand, it is the basis of the rupture between science and everything human, the beginning of the road to inhuman science, and, moreover, the cause of the defectiveness of the sciences of man, even their absence for a long time. Human nature limits thought, hence the need to exclude this nature from thinking, to learn to think inhumanely.
The study of man began at the very end of the age of mechanistic understanding of the world — and became mechanistic too. The ‘man’ studied by science was animated by the motor of ‘sex’ or ‘social relations’… Psychology became a late child and not quite successful; the same can be said of anthropology. We shall see what comes next.
A fourth kind of ‘idols,’ idola specus, ‘idols of the cave,’ adjoins the ‘idols of the tribe.’ Bacon speaks of them: The ghosts of
‘caves belong to the individual man, for, besides the deviations peculiar to human nature in general, each man possesses as it were a creche, an individual cave, breaking and distorting the natural light as a consequence of various causes, viz: the peculiar nature peculiar to each person, upbringing, conversation, reading, society, the influence of persons to be wondered at and worshipped, and finally, the variety of impressions produced by the same objects, depending on whether they meet a mind preoccupied and already vividly affected by other objects, or a mind calm and alert; so that, due to the extreme inequality, changeability, and irregularity of the natural structure of the human mind seen in different persons, its original manifestations are almost entirely the product of chance’. [12]
In other words: personality limits a person. In order to eliminate its distorting influence, to achieve accuracy of opinions and their expression, science must free itself from everything personal, to become impersonal. The reverse side of this depersonalisation is the same as mentioned above. Science has freed itself from man.
The scientist, freed from the power of ‘idols’, assumes such an obligation, in the words of Kuno Fischer: ‘to renounce all notions which he derives not from the nature of things, but from his own. As a programme, fine, but this is the kind of thinking that doesn’t happen. The facts themselves are a scattering of isolated events; only speculation, that is, the activity of reason and imagination, unites them. ‘No natural philosophy,’ says Russian biologist Alexander Lyubishchev, ’can avoid a priori postulates which have to be taken on faith’.
As the only way of cognition Bacon proposes induction, i.e. inference from the particular to the general, but not a simple one, known long before him, but subordinated to the ‘correct method.’
‘To make three reviews of all known cases of manifestation of a certain property in different objects: a review of positive cases, a review of negative cases (i.e. a review of objects similar to the first, in which, however, the property under investigation is absent), and a review of cases in which the property under investigation is manifested in different degrees, and from this to make a generalisation’. [13]
The main difference of ‘correct’ induction is its attention to negative cases that do not confirm our assumptions. A correct ‘induction’ is one that is confirmed by all cases, not just some. A possible question is: are all cases consistently reproduced under equality of circumstances? No. Human life abounds with such non-reproducible cases; it is itself a non-reproducible case. One cannot, in the course of correct, methodical experience, mix grief, fame, intelligence and talent, mistakes and unapologetic misdemeanours — and end up with The Brothers Karamazov. Yet another reason why ‘correct’ cognition ignores the individual, explaining him — when it has occasion to do so — in a way that is unconvincing to anyone.
Bacon gives a win-win, in his opinion, example of a temple and the offerings of those saved by the patron god adorning its walls:
‘The human mind, by nature, is more vividly and strongly affected by positive and active opinions than by inactive and negative ones, although, according to common sense, it should obey both equally. But under the influence of a completely opposite disposition, it is enough for a phenomenon to occur occasionally, so that the mind receives a stronger impression in this respect than it would have received in the opposite sense, if the phenomenon had deceived its expectation, or if the opposite had happened more often, which is the source of all superstition and credulity. Therefore, the answer of the man who, looking at the portraits hung in the temple of people who made a vow in the midst of danger and fulfilled it after being rescued from a shipwreck, when asked the question: ‘Well, do you now recognise Neptune as the god?’ was very clever: ‘Of course! But where are the portraits of those people who also made a vow, but nevertheless perished’? The same should be said about all such superstitions as dreams of astrology, mysterious forces, omens, and other such fictions’. [14]
And concludes: if we knew the number of negative cases, we would not pray in this temple. But this is the favourite example of atheists. Any religion can be destroyed in this way (which is why atheists love this way of reasoning). But you don’t have to be a non-believer to express such thoughts. A deist like Rousseau also considers prayer in the true sense (as a request to the deity) useless, because the course of things is predetermined — one can only ‘rise in thought and contemplate the divine majesty’.
And any knowledge about man is destroyed by this method (say, inspiration happens and has certain signs, but in most cases these signs are false, and the ‘inspired’ are ordinary fools or schoolboys, than the existence of inspiration is not refuted). A possible question, however, is: how probative are the negative examples? Are there no other causes behind them, as yet unknown to us? What if there is more than one cause behind every effect? Not to mention the fact that gods, as we understand them, are beings who are alive, intelligent, and have free will, i.e., who do not respond to all requests.
Speaking of Bacon’s attitude to religion, it should be noted that he is, at any rate, not a dogmatic atheist. His speeches are rather those of a deist:
‘I am more ready to believe all the fables of Legend, Talmud and Alcoran than to agree that the great machine of the universe, in which I see such an eternal order, works by itself, without any participation of any reason. That is why God has never resorted to miracles to edify atheists, since his very actions served as visible and continuous proof of his existence for them. Superficial philosophy may incline some to atheism, but a deeper worldview leads to the knowledge of God’. [15]
This ‘knowledge of God,’ however, is banished from science, as is all metaphysics. Only the mechanical motions of matter can be ‘cognised’; spirit and purpose are put beyond cognition. This can be interpreted in two ways. Both honest positivism, which makes no metaphysical assumptions, and militant materialism, which is ready to believe in the most marvellous things as long as they exclude God, can emerge from this division. This is how it turned out later.
In general, Bacon has many thoughts on religion, and not only where the reader expects to find them.
‘It was not at all the pure and faultless science, the holy gift of nature, which by its light assisted Adam in assigning a name to every object, <…> it was not at all the science which was the cause and occasion of his fall, but the arrogant and proud attempt of this science to become the judge of good and evil, with the object of rebelling against God and prescribing laws for itself. This was the cause and occasion of his temptation’. [16]
Deity, says Bacon a little further on, is happy to play hide-and-seek with us:
‘It is as if the divine nature took pleasure in the innocent play of children who hide themselves only to be found after a long search, and as if she wished, in virtue of her condescension and consideration for men, that the human soul would play the same game with her.’ [17]
And continues:
‘The Saviour Himself says to us: ‘You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.’’ With these words, he invites us to leaf through two books so as not to fall into error. One consists of Holy Scripture, which reveals God’s will, and the other of writings, which testifies to his power. The latter book serves as the key to the former, and has the advantage of not only opening the mind, making it capable of comprehending the true spirit of Scripture according to the general laws of the mind and the rules of speech, but also of developing faith and plunging us into deeper reflection on the power of God, the marks of which are particularly imprinted on his works’. [18]
Such thoughts do not speak of inner religiosity and remind us rather of Lomonosov with his ‘meditations on God’s majesty on the occasion of the great northern lights’, but still denounce the habit of thinking about the divine. And the following passage also speaks of attention to God ‘within’ our lives:
‘… Though the counsels and definitions of God are so obscure as to be unworthy of the animal man, though they are often hidden to the eyes even of him who, from the tabernacle, endeavours to discern them, yet it has pleased the divine wisdom, both to strengthen the faithful and to confound those who walk, so to speak, without God in this world, to write them in larger letters, and to make them so plain that every man, in the words of the prophet, ‘may read them in haste: ‘ that is, that men who are quite sensual and voluptuous, who lightly transgress the divine commands, and never stop to think on them, may be compelled to recognise them even in the midst of their dissipated and idle lives. Such are the belated and sudden retributions, the swift and unexpected conversions, the divine counsels, which, after long and tortuous deviations are suddenly discovered, not only by bringing comfort to the soul of the faithful, but by convincing and defeating the consciences of the wicked.’ [19]
He expresses the same thing in other pages succinctly:
‘The purposes of Providence are accomplished by evasions and detours, so that what appears to us to be accomplished is quite unlike what really happens.’ [20]
His remark on Epicurus’ atheism is profound:
‘Epicurus undoubtedly not only speaks in impious language, but in my opinion is simply delusional, claiming that ‘it is better to believe in the fable of the gods than to assume fate’: as if there could exist in the world something like an island, separated from the great chain of beings. But Epicurus, as it is evident from his own words, adapted and subordinated his natural philosophy to his morality, not wishing to allow any opinion that could sadden and disquiet the soul and disturb the moral tranquillity, the idea of which Democritus conveyed to him. That is why, more addicted to lulling the soul with sweet imaginings than capable of bearing the truth, he completely shook off the yoke, and rejected the necessity of fate as well as the fear of the gods’. [21]
I confess, and it seems to me too, that in recognising the gods, we must also recognise fate, whether as an independent force, or as an equivalent of the divine will….
And another thing is very important and true; it is still the case:
‘The existence of God dare to deny only those people who find his non-existence advantageous for themselves; that atheism is more on their lips than in their hearts is proved by the fact that the godless are so fond of talking about their opinion: it is as if they are trying to rely on the approval of others in order to secure themselves in it. There are even those among them who wish to gain followers and preach their opinions with no less enthusiasm and fanaticism than heresenal leaders; in short, atheism has its own missionaries, just as religion does; Moreover, it has its martyrs, who are more willing to endure the most horrible execution than to abandon their conviction. If they were truly convinced of the non-existence of God, they would be finished with this denial, and there would be nothing to argue about; why get so excited about a negative opinion?’ [22]
This is hardly a mere ‘manner of expression,’ the verbal embellishments peculiar to the time. If not an inner religiosity (which is difficult to judge from the outside), Bacon’s habit of thinking about religious subjects is unmistakable. Moreover — since we are talking about Bacon’s ‘materialism’ or, on the contrary, religiosity (which are usually opposite things), he quite seriously considers the scientific study of the spirit world:
‘Quite different is the study of the nature of angels and spirits, the cognition of which is neither impossible nor forbidden, a cognition to which, more often than not, the very affinity of the nature of these spirits with the human soul opens the way. <…> Prohibiting the study of the nature of demons in theology is as unwise as the study of poisons in physics or vices in morality’. [23]
By giving up ‘thinking in words’ and turning to experience and correct conclusions based on experience, the scientist can understand ‘the real nature of the world.’ This and related expressions are repeated incessantly by Bacon: ‘the real nature of the actual world’, ‘a faithful copy of the world’, ‘a copy of the universe, and a copy of the universe as it really is, and not as it appears to one man or another at the instigation of his own mind alone’ ….
This belief in the transparency, the cognisability of the ‘real world’ is the new faith preached by Bacon. It excludes doubt and has no rational basis. However, this faith — to use a word which, it seems, the Baconian era had not yet known — is antinomian. On the one hand, it requires doubting everything that man knew (or seemed to know) about nature before. On the other hand, it excludes doubts about the correctness of interpretations of the signs given by nature, provided that the ‘correct method’ is followed.
And the belief that every sign given by nature can be unambiguously interpreted by our minds, and that this interpretation will be the only correct one, is no better than the blood of St Januarius boiling in a vial on certain days, which so angered Nietzsche. Worse: these interpretations can be victoriously successful in small things and crushingly false in big things.
In vain, Kuno Fischer speaks of ‘doubt’ as the root of the Baconian method: ‘In contrast to idols and prejudices, wherever they come from, science begins with doubt and perfect ignorance. Doubt forms the starting point of science, not its goal; the goal is reliable and thorough knowledge.’
Doubt is allowed by Bacon briefly, only to break the link with the previous culture, then abolished. Induction is proclaimed to be the sure pointer of truths. Whereas on the path of inductive reasoning each following generalisation is not entirely necessary: it is chosen from several probable ones. Ernest Radloff, in an article on induction, says:
‘Inductive conclusions easily lead to errors, of which the most common ones arise from the multiplicity of causes and from the confusion of the temporal order with the causal order. In inductive research we are always dealing with consequences for which we must find causes; finding them is called an explanation of the phenomenon, but a known consequence can be caused by a whole range of different causes; the talent of the inductive researcher lies in the fact that he gradually selects only the one that is actually possible from the multitude of logical possibilities. For human limited cognition, of course, different causes can produce the same phenomenon; but a full and adequate cognition is able to see in this phenomenon the signs indicating its origin from only one possible cause. The temporal alternation of phenomena always serves as an indication of a possible causal connection, but not every alternation of phenomena, even if correctly repeated, must necessarily be understood as a causal connection. Very often we conclude post hoc — ergo propter hoc, in this way all superstitions have arisen, but here is the correct indication for inductive inference’. [24]
As we see, it is not a question of creating a ‘faithful copy of the world’, but an image of it, the authenticity of which can be verified only partially. This is not a mystery; but forgetting this rule, the scientist comes to believe that, unlike priests and philosophers, ‘Truth’ is available to him.
And is ‘reliable’ and uncontaminated by ‘human’ cognition possible at all? Before science lie the ideas that we have learnt together with our language (language is a means of thinking and expression at the same time), so there is no ‘ignorance’. A known idea of things is already inherent in language. This idea has to be overcome for the sake of more and more precise formulations, but it is impossible to overcome it completely. Further, before ‘cognition’ we already have an established mental life (see Wolfgang Pauli’s words below). And finally, no one begins a physical experience without at least a vague idea of what he is doing and what kind of result he expects to obtain. This is why Bacon’s ideas are so appealingly fruitful, because they are incomplete truths.
There is no window through which to ‘look inside nature.’ The facts are incoherent and, strictly speaking, mysterious; only reason and imagination put them together. Physicist W. Pauli in the middle of the 20th century defined ‘physical knowledge as the meeting of internal psychological images and external facts’. [25] I think that already ‘fact’ is half a phenomenon of our inner life, the fruit of selection, evaluation and some interpretation.
As for ‘experience’, it clarifies only those things that are repeatable in the laboratory. In any broad worldview, facts serve only as supports for theories. There are always enough ‘facts’ to support another theory, and it is through these questionable ‘facts’ that scientific beliefs change over time. If there were indeed ‘foundationless thinking’, deducing ‘truths’ from ‘facts’ with the certainty of the multiplication table — there would be no development of science. The point is that between the ‘world’ outside the researcher and the ‘facts’ in his mind (and a ‘fact’ is not every phenomenon, but only noticed and interpreted) is a gap, a grey foggy area in which the mind and imagination rule. Selecting, combining, and interpreting facts is not automatic writing under the dictation of the ‘nature of things’, but creative labour.
Nikolai Strakhov quotes a curious statement by Claude Bernard, a French physiologist of the 19th century, about this very thing: the relationship between ‘experience’ and ‘ideas’. No truths magically follow from facts, according to Bernard. More than that: facts can be known and yet not evoke the slightest response in the minds of scientists. Induction is not a pointer to truth; truth is sought by the mind, using feeling and reasoning.
‘In the experimental method, as in everything else, the only real criterion is reason’ (p. 69). Bernard makes this assertion in contrast to the pure empiricists who think that we can learn and be guided by facts alone. ‘Fact in itself is nothing’ (p. 69). ‘In the search for truth, feeling always has the iniative.’ ‘In fact, the greatest truths are only the feeling of our mind’ (p. 36). ‘Just as in other human actions, feeling makes things happen by generating the idea that constitutes the motive for the action, so also in the method of experience, feeling is the initiator by means of the idea. Feeling alone directs the mind and constitutes the primum movens of science. Genius is the same as a subtle feeling that faithfully anticipates the laws of natural phenomena’ (p. 53). ‘The idea is the engine of all reasoning in science, as in everything else’ (p. 51).
‘If facts were necessary to give rise to ideas, then every new fact would have to give rise to a new idea. But there are facts that say nothing to the minds of the greatest number of people, while for others they are illuminating. It even happens that a fact or an observation remains before the scientist’s eyes for a long time without inspiring him with anything; then suddenly a ray of light appears, and the mind interprets the same fact in a completely different way than before and finds completely new relations for it. Then the new idea appears with lightning speed, like some sudden revelation, which clearly proves that in this case the discovery is based on the sense of things, not only personal, but even in a certain way connected with the state in which the subject is at a certain time‘ (p. 43)’ (p. 43).
More from the same book:
‘Every man,’ he says, ’at first sight makes up ideas about what he sees, and is inclined to interpret the phenomena of nature by preconception before he knows them by experience. This inclination is innate; the preconceived idea has always been and always will be the first impulse of the investigating spirit.’
‘Man is by nature a metaphysician.’ ‘The mode of action of the human mind never changes in essence. The metaphysician, the scholastic and the experimentalist act according to an a priori idea. The difference lies in the fact that the scholastic considers his idea to be the absolute truth, which he has found and from which he then deduces all consequences with the help of logic alone. The experimenter, who is more modest, puts, on the contrary, his ideas as a question, as a preconceived explanation of nature, from which he logically deduces consequences, comparing them every minute with reality by means of experience‘ (p. 34)’ (p. 34).
This is how the scientists of the 19th century were able to think!
The fallacy of vision to which Bacon succumbed is understandable. If pure speculation does not yield real, effective knowledge, then we must abandon speculation altogether. Shiny new truths often hide errors of this kind. All one-sidedness is triumphant at first. But in time the Baconian faith must inevitably produce new priests and high priests in the church of ‘facts,’ no less proud and limited than all the former; a new ‘scripture’ with a new blind trust in it, nay a more blind trust than was the case with the Christian church.
‘Not only religion,’ says Lyubishchev, ’but also science in the person of its distinguished representatives is no stranger to superstition, and … they often do not realise that the statements which they express as absolute truths are in their validity no better than those ridiculous dogmas which are exhibited by religions’. [26]
Bacon created a doctrine as narrow as it was fruitful (and the narrowness of the doctrine and its applied success are connected, it is enough to remember Marx, Freud, Darwin). He opened the way not only to the study of nature, but also to the explanation of spirit through dead things. Was he a ‘materialist’? In the precise sense of the word, no. He has no dogmatic militant atheism. He recognises metaphysics as a separate field of knowledge. But he is prepared to study the world only minus the spirit.
The flip side of the cult of experience preached by Bacon was the study of the validity of that experience, which was taken up in Bacon’s homeland. Surprisingly, the Baconian enthusiasm for truth-bearing ‘facts’ passed into the scepticism of Locke and Hume and later led to Kant, who showed the limits of ‘experience.’ This delayed for a long time the establishment of materialistic religion (or dogmatic philosophy) on British soil, though unfortunately, by the twentieth century, with the lowering of the general level, Britain too had come to a religiously understood materialism. But in a people inclined to faith, i.e. the French, Bacon early gave birth to a true-religious worldview that did not question the origin of its truths.
Further. Baconianism is wrong: science does not create ‘copies of the world’. Moreover, it does not have the tools to look beneath the surface of phenomena to find out ‘how things work’. All it can do is make plausible assumptions, working models. The more complex the questions it addresses, the fewer ‘ultimate truths’ it mines. Again I will quote Lyubishchev’s words:
‘The concept of truth necessarily includes some generalisation from facts, not the isolated facts themselves, and the criticism of the concept of ‘absolute truth’ is that none of the positions claiming to be eternal truth is ever simultaneously complete, reliable and exact, and exact sciences differ from inexact sciences not in that they are more reliable, but in that they know the measure of their inexactness’. [27]
Science is best at finding out not ‘what’ but ‘how’ things happen, and the understanding of that ‘how’ changes over time. A scientist on the path indicated by Bacon, over time, begins to believe that from the understanding of the way nature acts in this or that case, it is possible to compose a whole philosophy that explains not the way of action, but the ‘beginnings of things’ and ‘extreme frontiers’, in other words — begins to create a materialist metaphysics.
Over and above the ‘existence, movement and natural necessity’ accessible to the experimental study, the scientist begins to find ‘intention and idea’ in nature, begins to preach the ‘purposes of nature’ (necessarily to show the alienness of nature to man). I do not mean to say that there are no intentions, ideas and purposes in nature. It is highly probable that there are. But it is impossible to extract them from experiential observation alone. Not only does Bacon not propose to do so, but he explicitly states:
‘Principles extracted from private facts, in a certain order and with the aid of method, lead easily to new private facts’, [28]
and not to metaphysical constructions.
Incidentally, after the word ‘facts’ Bacon adds:
‘and thus keep the sciences awake.’
A thought-provoking remark. Has not sleep attacked the ‘sciences’ in our day? ‘Principles derived from private facts’ have ceased to lead to new private facts. The sciences are asleep. The convulsive activity of most of them does not concern itself with the discovery of new facts, but with the application of old ones, with purely engineering work. It is as if science had reached a barrier insurmountable to ‘order and method.’ Of course, this treading on the ground is obscured by the marvels of mass production surprising the consumer, but it is there.
Many of Bacon’s assertions are ambiguous, and we who have seen the twentieth century understand this better than people of the nineteenth century. Thus, he asserts:
‘Truly useful induction in discovery and in scientific proof makes a choice between observation and experiment, separating from the chosen mass, by proper exclusions and separations, the inconclusive facts; then, having established a sufficient number of statements, it stops at the confirmatory ones, and already holds on to them.’ [29]
Listen to this: the scientist is instructed to cut off the ‘inconclusive facts’, then ‘dwell on the confirming (facts)’ and stick to them. But this is a recipe for rigidly dogmatic thinking! Here is the answer to the question that Erwin Schrödinger once asked: why the Greek scientist did not (or did not necessarily) antagonise religion. On the one hand, his religion was not exclusive and demanding, i.e., it allowed for a variety of explanations of divine things. On the other hand, the difference between the modern scientist and the ancient scientist is that his science is total, i.e., it allows the study of only those things that are amenable to induction, repeated experimental observation, in a word, ‘method’ — and rejects everything else. Everything that is not amenable to induction and experimental investigation is recognised as either irrelevant or non-existent. Religion, the divine origin and man himself are gradually relegated to the realm of the non-existent, the ghostly, the ‘inconclusive facts’.
‘Beneficence,’ “might,” “power,” “dominion over nature,” are Bacon’s favourite words. One should not, he says, pursue science for the sake of anything other than the desire ‘to benefit and apply it to the necessities of life.’ ‘To call and awaken men,’ he says, is only ’to attack the very nature of things, to conquer its most impregnable fortresses, and to extend (so far as the grace of God will permit) the bounds of human power.’ He has no other purpose, says Bacon elsewhere, than to lay the foundations of ‘the happiness and greatness of man’… Or here is another: ‘If there be a man whose whole ambition consists in extending the power and might of the whole human race to the whole world, then such ambition (if only we can give it such a name) is the purest, the noblest, and the broadest’.
Bacon offered the widest possibilities, and he did it in an ingratiating voice, if not — mellifluous, and the crown of these possibilities — power over the world. You couldn’t help but follow him. The word ‘power’ is a magic word for a Western European, and we should note that. The path is a dangerous one and, one must think, largely travelled over the past centuries. ‘Dominion over nature’ has turned out to be largely, the further the more, the destruction of nature. The pursuit of ‘new comforts extracted from the sciences’ (also Bacon’s expression) proved to be endless, without any sensible limit… The end set by Bacon exceeded and surpassed human means. Three centuries of struggle with nature have shown that we are both insufficiently intelligent and insufficiently powerful to ‘rule the world’.
The programme he outlined had original vices whose shadow, monstrously magnified, has stretched to the present day. Bacon believes that we have the power ‘to receive representations of them [objects] which correspond to reality; for God would no doubt not allow us to pass off as a faithful copy of the world a mere dream of our imagination.’ Elsewhere he repeats, ‘to penetrate into the real nature of the actual nature of our world, so to speak, to take it apart.’ Since there is no window through which ‘real nature’ can be seen, and there is no mind that can comprehend what is seen — there is no question of a ‘faithful copy of the world’ or ‘representations of objects that correspond to reality.’ We make plausible assumptions supported by experience — and no more.
By turning science towards achieving power over nature, Bacon by necessity gave it a taste for working with matter and only matter, and over time, the inevitable materialism as metaphysics. Bacon himself said, ‘Study physics to the end, metaphysics will open up behind it.’ Alas, materialist metaphysics opened much earlier. And materialism is not only an unfruitful hypothesis, the meaning of which is primarily to ‘silence doubts about the absence of purposeful beginnings in nature’ (Lyubishchev), but also undermines human well-being. When in the West they say materialism just works, meaning material prosperity in the most godless countries, they forget to add that it also ‘works’ by subordinating people to material things, ultimately depriving human life of its positive content beyond the pursuit of new ‘comforts’.
By going after power — as the ‘teacher’ himself says, for the sake of human happiness and well-being — science has turned its back on man. These are the roots of the present state of affairs. Man was first (according to the Christian tradition) understood as the king of the earth, [30] and science honestly worked for him, and then — having rejected God, science rejected man, explaining him by the play of electric currents and instincts. Neither before nor after this rejection did science attempt to study man and the human; such an attempt was made by anthropology in the twentieth century, but born under the stars of Marx and Freud, it did not achieve much….
Baconianism (understood as the worship of that experiential knowledge which improves the convenience of life, and the putting of all that is not amenable to laboratory investigation ‘out of bounds’) could be tolerated only so long as it was balanced by other forces. When these forces ceased to operate, an extremely simplistic utilitarianism [31] with the principle of ‘the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people’ won. Baconianism has made its course to the end.
There is also a political or social side to Baconianism. Bacon offered his programme just before the collapse of the Stuarts (in the approach of which, as a bribed judge, he may be said to have personally participated). After the Revolution, Macaulay notes an unusual phenomenon in England: the transition of political revolutionariness to scientific revolutionariness. The compilation of republican programmes has tired minds. Monarchy seems firmly established…. Science is supplanting politics. I would suggest that here is the second source of English political equilibrium. The first is that of which Konst. Leontiev said: ‘England has democratised not in time, but in space’ (the outflow of the discontented to America). Minds of a certain mould find for themselves an occupation in which nothing constrains them. Greater freedom for scientific pursuits — but also a spirit of greater tolerance on both sides. Thus, in England, ‘realism’ and idealism lived side by side, relatively freely. This was fruitful for the culture and good for the state. We can say: since Bacon, the European world has been standing on several heterogeneous, if not directly hostile to each other. In Russia, this side of Western culture was poorly inculcated, the Russian man learnt science only in combination with the revolution. We were ruined by the belief in a single truth, which is not peculiar to the West. True, the balance of power in the West was relatively short-lived.
Like all revolutionaries, Bacon replaces one half-truth with another. Half-truths are valid as long as they’re new. So Bacon’s doctrine gained both disciples and successes. However, the half-truth always deviates from the ‘truth’ (even if it is unattainable), and the further it goes, the greater is this deviation. Bacon led cognition to the path of studying things, and on this path it achieved almost marvellous successes, but he also enslaved man to things. We see the final results of this enslavement. Mankind in material abundance, reminiscent of Bacon’s New Atlantis, but without a worldview, save for the hastily combined assumptions from the laboratory (‘matter is capable of self-development’, ‘the aimless wandering of evolution creates new organs and species’, ‘our minds are singular and exclusive in a meaningless universe’).
A fruitful middle line between dissolving the mind in external things and pure speculation, in external things uninterested, would have been to keep the mind philosophically alert on a par with the study of the external world. This middle line did not take place, almost unadulterated materialism won, moderated by forces alien to it (Christianity and later Romanticism), but the unfulfilled task is not cancelled, but only transferred to subsequent generations.
To us and our descendants.
[1] К. Fischer, Real Philosophy and its Century. Francis Bacon. St. Petersburg, 1870.saint
[2] The Great Instauration.
[3] The New Organon. Hereinafter in the edition:Bacon, Collected Works. St. Petersburg, 1874.
[4] Ibid.
[5] The Great Instauration.
[6] Knowledge is power.
[7] Human knowledge and power coincide at the same time.
[8] Knowledge is not conscience.
[9] The Great Instauration.
[10] Here is a recent one: ‘The aim of the study is to identify the mechanism of evaluation of a work of fine art as a visual artefact by the reader of an English-language art text. The functions of interpreting the visual image in the art text, its recoding to the verbal level are studied. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the phenomenon of evaluation is treated as a three-place predicate with three arguments, and the linguistic representation of different ways of presenting these arguments is proposed. Based on the results of analysing the factual material in English, the study of the ways of linguistic representation of evaluation or linguistic ways of its reflection is carried out. The obtained results showed uniformity in the representation of the subject of evaluation and diversification of the realisation of the second and third argument. The evaluation process is based on the attraction of certain linguistic means to describe the communicative-pragmatic situation in a fiction text’.
[11] The New Organon.
[12] Там же.
[13] Brockhaus-Efron Dictionary, article Induction.
[14] The New Organon.
[15] Moral and Political Essays.
[16] On the dignity and improvement of the sciences.
[17] Ibid.
[18] The Great Instauration.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Moral and Political Essays.
[23] The Great Instauration.
[24] Brockhaus-Efron’s Dictionary. Vol. XIII.
[25] Maria-Louise von Franz, Psyche and Matter. Мoscow, 2013.
[26] А. Lyubishchev, Science and Religion. St. Petersburg, 2000.
[27] Science and Religion.
[28] The New Organon.
[29] Ibid.
[30] The Holy Scriptures,’ says Bacon, “recognise man as the image of God, placing him directly after God”. This is a general Christian thought, not belonging to Bacon personally, but understood, no doubt, with the limitations of place and time: not just a man, but a Christian and a Western European. Out of this thought flowed the whole history of New Europe’s relations with the world, a ceaseless crusade against all non-European cultures and against nature. ‘Consumption’ and “intolerance” are equally based on this placing of the European Christian after God. How far this is from the pagan stoics who said that man on earth had a certain ‘service’ to perform, to look after the world… The new European does not ‘look after’ the world, he devours it.
[31] I say ‘simplified’ because, for example, such a pillar of utilitarianism as J. S. Mill stipulates that by ‘benefit’ he means ‘benefit in the broadest sense, based on the lasting well-being of man as a being capable of further development’, i.e. something more than the immediate benefits. We shall speak more about Mill later on.
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