"’Not for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, profit, fame, or power …’ Francis Bacon as Virtue Epistemologist"

AsPro Matthew Sharpe (Deakin University )

Outside of the continuing scholarly literature on his oeuvre, Francis Bacon has been widely reviled since 1945 as reducing knowledge to power, subordinating contemplative inquiry to instrumental and technical concerns, and for inventing a machine-like method which puts to violent death the long classical tradition which associated the love of wisdom with knowers’ own attempts to live well. This paper challenges these images, by reading Bacon in the light of recent analytic literature on virtue epistemology. Zagzebski and other “responsibilist” virtue epistemologists draw on Aristotle as a historical precedent for their attempts to appeal to intellectual virtues as necessary or sufficient conditions for knowing, despite their shared hesitations about Aristotle’s attempt to segregate the theoretical from the ethical virtues, seating them in a separate faculty for knowing changeless things above the hurly burly of the passions. Yet Bacon’s work, centring around his ambition to justify and champion a “great instauration” of a modern intellectual culture, is replete with highly astute (and still surprisingly relevant) psychological and philosophical analyses of the virtues and vices of inquirers’ minds, together with prescriptions for their ethical and epistemic reform. And Bacon’s famous account of the mind as “an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced” of characteristic “idols” (intellectually vicious, passion-shaped, propensities to generalise falsely) challenges Aristotle’s attempt to abstract the life of the mind, and the formation of our theoretical opinions, from the play of the affects. Francis Bacon in this way, we argue, belongs to a long tradition of thinkers which—predating what is called the “traditional” epistemological positions of today—argued both that the cultivation of certain virtues is necessary for the advancement of learning, and that, in turn, this learning can and should have benevolent, virtue-inducing effects on the characters of inquirers and their charges. Bacon’s novum organum, we will centrally argue, is best read not as a wholly impersonal method, able to be applied by virtuous and vicious inquirers alike, but as also enshrining a series of directive measures aiming to inculcate a specific profile of intellectual virtues in its devotees, primed to overcome the scholastic tradition’s excessive faith in speculative rationalism and to reground natural philosophy in new disciplines of observation and judgment. In making the argument, we will stress the humanistic breadth of Bacon’s vision of an ideal inquirer—at once analytic and continental, as we might say—whose studies should foster in her/him a mind “nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; … gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.