Abstract
Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (published posthumously in 1627) occupies a paradoxical place in the history of seventeenth-century medicine and natural philosophy. It is the work where Bacon expounded, at his clearest and best, in vernacular and not in Latin, his views on the material appetites of nature, and did so not by writing in the abstract, but by describing and performing experiments aimed at disclosing the appetitive nature of matter. However, such an original model of experimental investigations on the appetites of matter was abandoned by the great majority of Bacon’s followers, especially those associated with the Royal Society, replaced with the more reassuring project to mechanise the natural forms and passions of matter. By doing so, man was restored as the proper subject of knowledge and appetite, whereas nature was left with its status of lifeless object of dispassionate study. In this paper I explore the theoretical and experimental strategies deployed by Bacon to investigate the appetites of matter. It will become apparent that a characteristic hermeneutical circle underlies Bacon’s natural philosophy, a circle that, depending on the chosen point of view, could be regarded at the time as either virtuous or vicious. On the one hand, Bacon was convinced that man’s self-knowledge rested on the knowledge that nature has of itself, since nature is first and foremost appetite and man’s essence is rooted in appetite. On the other hand, he was also convinced that knowledge of nature was based on knowledge of the self, since the best accounts concerning the nature of the appetites were to be found in the works of poets and historians (rather than in Renaissance systematisers of natural magic and natural philosophy). This is what Bacon meant by ‘georgics of the mind’: the understanding of the material appetites of nature cannot be separated from an ethical and political consideration of the mechanisms mediating knowledge and appetite in human societies.
I am indebted to Julian Smith-Newman for his comments and stylistic improvements. Translations from Bacon’s Latin works are mine.
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Notes
- 1.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 602: ‘It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception: for when one body is applied to another, there is a kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable, and to exclude or expel that which is ingrate: and whether the body be alterant or altered, evermore a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies would be alike one to another. And sometimes this perception, in some kind of bodies, is far more subtle than the sense; so that the sense is but a dull thing in comparison of it’. See also Bacon 1857–1874, I, 610.
- 2.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 385.
- 3.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 390.
- 4.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 385, 335, 337.
- 5.
- 6.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 335–336.
- 7.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 336. And he continues: ‘more than that, (according to the hard condition of the Israelites at the latter end) to gather the straw and stubble over all the fields to burn the brick withal’.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 377.
- 10.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 471–472.
- 11.
- 12.
Bacon 1857–1874, III, 26: “constat appetitum continuitatis etiam liquidis inesse, sed debilem. At contra in rebus solidis viget, et motui naturali sive gravitati praedominatur.”
- 13.
Bacon 2004, 382–416.
- 14.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 451.
- 15.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 459–460.
- 16.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 347.
- 17.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 353.
- 18.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 354–355.
- 19.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 451.
- 20.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 436.
- 21.
Here “mechanical” means “violent.”
- 22.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 342. See also ibid., 382.
- 23.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 342–343: “This motion upon pressure, and the reciprocal thereof, which is motion upon tensure, we use to call (by one common name) motion of liberty; which is, when any body, being forced to a preternatural extent or dimension, delivereth and restoreth itself to the natural.”
- 24.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 438.
- 25.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 451.
- 26.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 452.
- 27.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 586.
- 28.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 565.
- 29.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 380–381.
- 30.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 381.
- 31.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 381–382.
- 32.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 391.
- 33.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 416.
- 34.
Bacon 2000, 156.
- 35.
Bacon 1857–1874, VI, 646–648.
- 36.
Bacon 2000, 39.
- 37.
Bacon 2000, 39.
- 38.
Bacon 1857–1874, VII (Reading of the Statute of Uses), 417–418: “new laws are like the apothecaries’ drugs; though they remedy the disease, yet they trouble the body: and therefore they use to correct them with spices. So it is not possible to find a remedy for any mischief in the commonwealth, but it will beget some new mischief; and therefore they spice their laws with provisoes to correct and qualify them.”
- 39.
Bacon 2000, 145–150.
- 40.
Bacon 1985, 121.
- 41.
Bacon 1996b, 115–116.
- 42.
Bacon 1996b, 117.
- 43.
Bacon 1985, 121.
- 44.
Bacon 1985, 122.
- 45.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 567–568.
- 46.
- 47.
Bacon 1996a, 230–232. The same image is already in Cogitationes de natura rerum. See Bacon 1857–1874, III, 34: “Itaque tumultus fere omnis, et conflictus, et perturbatio, in confiniis tantum coeli et terrae locum habere videtur. Ut in rebus civilibus fit; in quibus illud frequenter usu venit, ut duorum regnorum fines continuis incursionibus et violentiis infestentur, dum interiores utriusque regni provinciae secura pace atque alta quiete fruuntur.”
- 48.
Bacon 1996a, 248.
- 49.
Bacon 1996a, 234. Both Francis Headlam’s 1858 translation (Bacon 1857–1874, V, 481) and Rees’ and Edwards’ rendition of impotentia as want or lack of power is a serious misunderstanding (besides contradicting the meaning of the whole passage).
- 50.
Bacon 1996a, 234.
- 51.
Bacon 1996a, 248–250.
- 52.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 568–571.
- 53.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 597.
- 54.
Bacon had no qualms in seeing his experimental investigations of appetites as a new form of natural magic. “For this writing of our Sylva Sylvarum is (to speak properly) non natural history, but a high kind of natural magic. For it is not a description only of nature, but a breaking of nature into great and strange works” (Bacon 1857–1874, II, 378).
- 55.
- 56.
Aubrey 1958, 130: “He had been physitian to the Lord Chancellour Bacon, whom he esteemed much for his witt and style, but would not allow him to be a great Philosopher. Said he to me, He writes Philosophy like a Lord Chancellor, speaking in derision; I have cured him.”
- 57.
See Martin 1992.
- 58.
Bacon 2004, 410–412.
- 59.
Bacon 1857–1874, II, 494.
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Giglioni, G. (2010). Mastering the Appetites of Matter. Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum . In: Wolfe, C.T., Gal, O. (eds) The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3686-5_8
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