Thursday, November 25, 2010

Francis Bacon and Augustus Comte -- notes

One of the principles of Renaissance thought was the liberation of the human subject from the limitations of authority and tradition, of which the church was perhaps the most significant influence. Francis Bacon was one of the chief proponents of what was later understood as humanism. Fundamentally, Bacon’s thought was centred upon the idea that human ingenuity and discovery was a reflection of the will and grace of God. Indeed, the hand of God was working through human invention. Scientific progress is a reflection of a divine sense of the good; as such, it flourishes during times of peace (which Bacon incorrectly points out was extant at the time of his writing). To this end, in Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature as a Science Productive of Works he outlines the benefits conferred by three technologies which he considers to be representative for the triumph of human ingenuity over the natural processes which limit the human subject: printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Through a description of these inventions, Bacon seeks to establish the importance of the process of invention to human existence. Of cardinal significance is the notion that the acquisition of knowledge serves to improve one’s potential for acting well within world affairs, as “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of man’s lot are one and the same thing” (27).

Importantly, the development of the individual human subject is seen as key to the development of the body politic. Bacon suggests that scientific invention is among the most beneficial of human activities, “for the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race” (26). To a modern reader aware of the history and politics of European colonialism, it is difficult to avoid noting the political economy of this statement, which was written by a member of the English aristocracy who was then serving as a senior governmental bureaucrat at a time of colonial expansion. Of course, by stressing the importance of the compass, Bacon writes that England’s colonial enterprises were themselves reflections of the realisation of power through scientific processes. Through the acquisition of knowledge and the continuation of technological invention, mankind (to use Bacon’s notably gendered language) is able to expand the possibilities for action and self-realisation. In his Novum Organum, he writes that “knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced” (29). Much like Plato’s explanation of how leaders must understand the good in order to understand the earthly manifestation of forms, Bacon suggests that mankind will understand the truth only by avoiding what he terms the false idols of intellectual activity – Idols of the Tribe, in which perception is a human affair which “distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (29); Idols of the Cave, wherein Bacon adapts Plato’s Cave analogy to argue that an individual person’s traits and personality may distort an understanding of reality; Idols of the Market-place, which emerge from the relational dynamics inherent to human subjectivity, manifest in language: “Words plainly do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion, and lead men into innumerable empty controversies and fictions” (30); and Idols of the Theatre, the dogmas associated with established philosophy, “which have become established through tradition, credulity and neglect” (30). By means of the truth, mankind will master the self. Indeed, determined effort “devoted to sane and solid purposes could triumph over every obstacle” (28). Furthermore, “inventions come without force or disturbance ... while civil changes rarely proceed without uproar and violence” (26). On the Idols and on the Scientific Study of Nature invokes Augustine’s City of God in positing a fantastic and perfectly ordered geography of thought, with all of the various sciences operating in harmony.

In order to realise the benefits of scientific progress, Bacon calls for an examination of the methods of inquiry. Throughout most of late antiquity and the medieval period, intellectual activity first involved accepting the established authority and supplementing it with opinion. The philosophical tradition then allowed for knowledge to be produced by means of dialectics, which “look only for logical consistency” (25). Lastly, experiential data allowed for some intellectual discovery, but only by means of happenstance, not methodological rigour. To counter such trends, and to account for the fact that chance is a significant contributor to intellectual discovery, a rigorous method of scientific inquiry is required. Bacon proposed in On the Reformation of Education that the education systems then extant in Europe were insufficient for such a task. He complains that education can be seen to “have rather augmented the number of learned men than raised and rectifies the sciences themselves” (34), and furthermore that “this dedication of colleges and societies to the use only of professory learning has not only been inimical to the growth of the sciences, but has also been prejudicial to states and government” (35). Bacon thus suggests that universities be equipped with the latest laboratory and observational equipment, that universities across Europe need to network with each other to allow the sciences to flourish outside of geographical happenstance, that the salaries of Lecturers (those who research “Philosophy” and “Universality”) must be sufficient to allow the best minds to seek such a life pursuit, as lecturers “are as it were the keepers and guardians of the whole store and provision of learning” (35), and finally that logic and rhetoric, the two disciplines foundational to all intellectual activity, should be reserved for mature and sufficiently-developed minds. It is quite interesting to note retroactively that such complaints have often been levelled at universities, and the desire to reform education to the benefit of the liberated human subject has been rejuvenated in a time when corporate and business interests have proliferated, and arguably poisoned, the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge.

Humanism had become entrenched in European consciousness by the time Augustus Comte was writing about scientific progress in The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy. Comte believes that a historical overview is necessary, “for no idea can be properly understood apart from its history” (45). He then seeks to systematise the development of thought by stating “that each branch of our knowledge, passes in succession through three theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state”. As a consequence, three methods for the pursuit of knowledge come to the fore: the theological method, which situates all phenomena as originating with divine influence; the metaphysical method, in which “the supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions” which are themselves in turn the originators of all phenomena; and the positive method, which recognizes “the impossibility of of obtaining absolute truth” and therefore “endeavours ... to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena – that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness”. Comte demonstrates an interesting self-awareness when he describes “the need at every epoch of having some theory to connect the facts” (46). His thinking is an extension of Bacon’s idea that the knowledge of reality must in principle come from observed phenomena. Thus, “it is no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other”. However, in order to objectively navigate the near-infinite number of subjective understandings, observation of phenomena must be methodologically rigorous in order to properly understand both the self and the ‘truth’ that results from intellectual activity, for “it is experience alone which has enabled us to estimate our abilities rightly” (47).

It is to this end that he outlines the necessity of the positive philosophy, whose “fundamental character ... is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitute the goal of all our efforts; for we regard the search after what are called causes, whether first or final, as absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning” (48). In this capacity, he rejects the metaphysical and theological arguments around the interpretation and realisation of divine will. In reductionist terms, everything necessary for the understanding of a given phenomenon is present within the phenomenon itself. The remainder of the chapter sketches “what stage in the formation of that philosophy has now been reached and what remains to be done in order to constitute it fully” (49). He argues that the pursuit of knowledge was rendered contingent with positivism first among the most simple and general of disciplines, as “astronomical phenomena ... were the first to be subjected to positive theories”, followed by a succession of physical sciences increasingly proximal to the human subject. This process originated with Aristotelian thinking and has taken place “continuously and at an increasing rate”. Comte recognizes that positive theories have not been adapted to the study of all phenomena, and there remains a great deal of research to be accomplished and a “gap” which must be bridged, as positive theories must be utilized in order to understand the dynamics of “social physics” (50).

The important dynamic inherent to Comte’s thinking is the reduction of different systems of thought to the same process of knowledge production, for when “our fundamental conceptions [have] thus been rendered homogeneous, philosophy will be consituted finally in the positive state,” at which point all theological and metaphysical methodologies and systems of thought will be rendered obsolete.The individual disciplines of scientific inquiry become established when they have “developed far enough to admit of separate cultivation – that is to say, when it has arrived at a stage in which it is capable of constituting the sole pursuit of certain minds” (51). Indeed, positivism has developed rather continuously since Bacon, to the point where Comte wishes to prove that “direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion” (53), as the functioning of the brain is only observable from an objective position. Of course, Comte was not to live to see the developments in medical imaging technologies, which have indeed allowed the discipline of neuroscience to investigate the machinations of the brain in self-aware subjects. More provocatively, however, it is possible to interpret Comte’s statement that “interior observation gives rise to almost as many divergent opinions as there are so-called observers” (53) as prognosticating the development of psychoanalysis (which is of course one of the missing positive “social sciences”).

While Comte sates that the ancients were able to participate with significant contributions in numerous areas of scientific thought, due to the relatively immature state of their development, “it is ... impossible not to be struck by the great inconveniences which [the division into disciplines] produces.” He argues for the creation of an executive body given the task of providing an overview of the processes of each scientific discipline “to determine exactly the character of each science, to discover the relations and concatenation of the sciences, and to reduce, if possible, all their chief principles to the smallest number of common principles” (52). Scientists should be trained to have a general understanding of science before specializing. Furthermore, Comte calls for the creation of “a specific class on men, whose special and permanent function would consist in connecting each new special discovery with the general system”. To explain such a function, he emphasizes that understanding is essentially a singular discipline, and that the divisions of understanding into disciplines is an artificial principle which “by separating the difficulties, resolve[s] them more easily” (55). However, these distinctions can serve problematic when “questions arise which need to be treated by combining the points of view of several sciences”.

Comte states that positivism is the only ideological system which can be seen to be in ascent; the others have been in decline for centuries. This process will be completed once positivism has included the study of social phenomena, and furthermore that it is understood as a single and coherent theory which encompasses all of the disciplines of thought. When such has been accomplished, “the revolutionary crisis which harasses civilised people will then be at an end” (57). He concludes this section by stating that the endeavour to synthesize the various disciplines of human inquiry is not to reduce their variables to “one sole law”.  Fundamentally, the human mind is not able to realize perfection, which would be required for a valid and objective “sole law” for the understanding of all phenomena: “the resources of the human mind are too feeble, and the universe is too complicated, to admit of our ever attaining such scientific perfection”. In this context, it is interesting to note that Comte hints at the ‘holy grail’ of physics after Einstein, namely the unified field theory which seeks to harmonize theories of the macro universe (astronomy) with those concerned with the subatomic universe: “it seems to me that we could hope to arrive at it only by connecting all natural phenomena with the most general positive law with which we are acquainted – the law of gravitation – which already links all astronomical phenomena to some of the phenomena of terrestrial physics” (58). While dismissed by scholars and scientists of most disciplines, the quest for such unity remains at the heart of theoretical physics.

Borgman, Feenberg, and Heidegger: notes toward a possible dialogue

In order to examine the nature of existence within the framework of the multiple subjectivities produced by technology, Heidegger sought to essentialize the relationship between human subject and technology by means of an examination, in reductive terms, of that which is “not technological”. In the question concerning technology, Heidegger provided a framework for the understanding of technology as a means by which the production of meaning involves the ordering of reality into resources ordered and viewed as always-already on stand-by for their exploitation. While technology does indeed have the capacity for disclosure, ultimately Heidegger rejects technology as lacking the capacity for achieving the “good life” in which freedom of choice defines the subject.

         Borgmann responded to Heidegger’s negative critique of technology by means of trying to understand the capacity of technological processes to redefine the human subject. Fundamentally, he implicitly rejects Heidegger’s conception of a unified subject, which, will historically-determined, speaks with one pretechnological voice. To this end, he defines the subject in relation to that which objectivizes. Objects and practices can be seen as particular means of focus. “A focal practice is the resolute and regular dedication to a focal thing. ... [They] are at ease with the natural sciences.” focal things “are concrete, tangible, and deep, admitting of no functional equivalents; they have a tradition, structure, and rhythm of their own. They are unprocurable and finally beyond our control.” (307) focus is itself identified by means of an etymological investigation into the word as both hearth and "optical or geometric" instrument. "a focus gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them" (293-4). "to focus on something or to bring it into focus is to make it central, clear, and articulate> It is in the context of these historical and living senses of "focus" that I want to speak of focal things and practices." (294)

          It is here that Borgmann breaks with Heidegger, for he questions whether art is in fact the sole means (or focus) by which authentic disclosures can be realised. that humans look to their environment is entirely natural: "The wildernes is beyond the procurement of technology, and our response to it takes us past consumption. But it also teaches us to accept and appropriate technology" (296). Borgmann then looks at two such practices: competitive running, and the "culture of the table", in order to elaborate the notion that focal events can be mistakenly construed as "experiences in the subjective sense, events that have their real meaning in transporting a person into a certain mental or emotional state". Technology will then endeavour to more efficiently deliver and replace the state with itself, unless "we guard focal things in their depth and integrity". "To elaborate the context of focal events is to grant them their proper eloquence." (297)

          Technology comes to be realised as a process of subjective alienation due to the fact that by means of the storing of labour through time, the subject it divided against itself: satisfaction of desire and the realisation of satisfaction are rendered discontinuous. "I am a divided person; my achievement lies in the past, my enjoyment in the present." (297) Borgmann then describes the alienating experience of industrial food, which replaces the culture of the table. "eating in a focal setting differs sharply from the social and cultural anonymity of a fast-food outlet." (299). and yet, these small, seemingly mundane practices attain a degree of Benjaminian aura precisely due to their recontextualization within the technological apparatus of the modern era. “On the spur of the moment, we normally act out what has been nurtured in our daily practices as they have been shaped by the norms of our time.” (300).

         While ritual was the social means by which practices became tradition in ancient societies, for modern humans engaged in the technological process, what comes to be known as the device paradigm (in the next section) is defined: devices realize increasing efficiencies which realize states of satisfied desire. Heidegger’s critique here stands, for the creation and satisfaction of desires will itself become an autonomous and self-perpetuating process under the rule of technology. Borgmann: “If we are to challenge the rule of technology, we can only do so through the practice of engagement. ... without a practice an engaging action or event can momentarily light up our life, but it cannot order and orient it focally. Through a practice we are able to accomplish what remains unattainable through a series of individual decisions and acts.” (300)

         Borgmann posits that making “the technological universe hospitable to focal things turns out to be the heart of the reform of technology …. [for] only things that we experience as greater and other than ourselves can move us to judge and change technology in the first place” (302). And so we come to the redemptive potential inherent to technology in Borgmann’s thought. Fundamentally, what we can describe as the “good life” requires the application of our capacity for engaging with a self-defined subjective experience. engagement encompasses “the acquisition of skills, the fidelity to a daily discipline, the broadening of sensibility, the profound interaction of human beings, and the preservation and development of tradition” (304), and in the process “harmonize the variety among people but also within the life of one person”. 

         However, focal things can also subsume a person and take over the definition of the good life, which involves the mastery of the capacity to master a practice and thus a means of ordering and understanding. While not in itself either absolute or an absolution, “it is not finally decisive whether and how we succeed in securing an ordered and excellent life for worldlessly conceived subjects” (307), there remains the possibility that “a technological device or, more generally, a technological invention may someday address us as such a thing, one that, whatever its genesis, has taken on a character of its own, that challenges and fulfills us, that centres and illuminates our world?” At this point, Borgmann, surmises, technology would itself be able to “birth ... a focal thing or event”
>> 
“the reform of technology .... must be one of and not merely one within the device paradigm. ... A reform of the paradigm is ... the recognition and the restraint of the paradigm. To restrain the paradigm is to restrict it to its proper sphere. Its proper sphere is the background or periphery of focal things and practices. ... Reform must make room for focal things and practices.” (308) thus, the good inherent to a focal thing or pratice will result in ends which resonate with the means of their procural, hence the story of the environmentally-conscious runner on page 309. “To have a focal thing radiate transformatively into its environment is not to exact some kind of service from it but to grant it its proper eloquence.”
 <<
Borgmann therefore suggests that people should balance the political consequences of tehcnological enthrallment with the fact that “in one or another area of one’s life one should gratefully accept the disburdenment from daily and time-consuming chores and allow celebration and world citizenship to prosper in the time that has been gained.” (310). The good life involves a degree of social recognition for having mastered an area of focal practice, for being able to share the celebratory moments of life and success with loved ones, and “where we encounter our fellow human beings in the fullness of their capacities, and where we know ourselves to be equal to that world in depth and strength.” (310). mastery of knowledge is simply mastery “of the means rather than the ends of life. What is needed if we are to make the world truly and finally ours again is the recovery of a centre and a standpoint from which one can tell what matters in the world and what merely clutters it up. A focal concern is that centre of orientation.” (311)

         The other two articles serve to position Heidegger and Borgmann in relation to each other, and in doing so they alternatively come to agree with one thinker or the other. Thus, we can witness Dreyfus and Spinosa’s article argues in support of Heidegger’s critique of technology being “a more cogherent and credible answer than Borgmann’s” (315). They state that for Heidegger, technology is a process in which ordering increasingly supplants objects themselves, which are themselves merely a means for further ordering. Borgmann is in agreement, to the extent that “the object disappears precisely to the extent that the subject gains total control”. And yet, in gaining control “the post-modern subject is reduced to a ‘point of arbitrary desires’” (316-7). Thus, despite the displacement of objects, (hyper)reality remains determined by the satisfaction of desire: “Heidegger’s intuition is that treating everything as standing reserve or, as we might say, resources, makes possible endless disaggregation, redistridution, and reaggregation for its own sake.” Along with the object, Dreyfus argues that Heidegger eliminates subjectivity. Technology is thus “a new stage in the understanding of being.” (317) “Thanks to Nietzsche, Heidegger could sense that, when everything becomes standing reserve or resources, people and things will no longer be understood as having essences or identities or, for people, the goal of satisfying arbitrary desires”. the new subject gains meaning not through fixity, but rather through the process of connection. “Even desireing subjects have been sucked up as standing reserve.” (319)

         For Heidegger, “when a focal event such as a family meal is working to the point where it has its particular integrity, one feels extraordinarily in tune with all that is happening, a special graceful ease takes over, and events seem to unfold of their own momentum” (320). When a “thing is thinging”, says Heidegger, the divinities must be present; focal practices channel the divine by means of mortality. “So long as a people who regularly encounter a thing are socialized to respond to it appropriately, their practices are organized around the thing, and its solicitations are taken into account even when no one notices” (320). Dreyfus agrees with Borgman’s rejection of Heidegger’s pretechnological focal things to be “misleading and dispiriting” (321).

         Dreyfus argues that groups of people use technologies adaptively and in social congruence (given congruent sociability)., and furthermore that given a phenomenological concern, the fact that humans can choose to exercise from a variety of possibilities, and thus express their mortality, determines that people are “never wholly a resource” (322). “Neither equipment nor roles could be gathered, but the skills for treating ourselves as disaggregated skills and the world as a series of open possibilities are what are drawn together so that vaious dispersed skillful performances become possible. But if we focus on the skills for dispersing alone, then the dangerous seduction of technology is enhanced.”
 <<
         “Resistance to technological practices by cultivating focal practices is the primary solution Borgmann gives to saving ourselves from technological devastation. ... Heidegger’s view of technology allows him to find a positive relation to it, but only so long as we maintain skills for disclosing other kinds of worlds. Freeing us from having a total fixed identity so that we may experience ourselves as multiple identities disclosing multiple worlds is what Heidegger calls technology’s saving power.” (323). Thus Dreyfus and Spinosa can come to terms with the two authors: “as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only integrity we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to accept Heidegger’s and Borgmann’s criticism of technology and still have Heidegger’s genuinely positive relationship to technological things.” (324)
>> 
Feenberg opens his article with the condemnation of Hedegger as an institutional force. . Such, however, is not a rejection of Heidegger, but rather a circumscription of meaning as plurality which is otherwise obscured by Heideggerian thought as having been furnished with an institutional status. And yet he can agree with Heidegger that “ Technology is a cultural form through which everything in the modern world becomes available for control. Technology thus violates both humanity and nature at a far deeper level than war and environmental destruction. To this culture of control corresponds an inflation of the subjectivity of the controller” (328)

          Feenberg states that “Heidegger’s critique of autonomous technology is not without merit” (329), and wonders whether “our specifically technological engagement with the world ... is merely an attitude or it it embedded in the actual design of modern technological devices?”. The former is contingent with the historical process itself, which contextualizes the production of meaning, while the latter Feenberg argues to be rather optimistic in its causal effectiveness. “Heidegger holds that the restructuring of social reality by technical action is inimical to a life rich in meaning.” (329). Feenberg states that for Borgmann, the logic of devices is to become increasingly efficient, which is defined by a replacement of expertise, resource gathering and exploitation, and social ritural by machine functionality. However, “the generalization of the device paradigm, its universal substitution for simpler ways, has a deadening effect. Where means and ends, contexts and commodities are strictly separated, life is drained of meaning. Individual involvement with nature and other human beings is reduced to a bare minimum, and possession and control become the highest values.” (330) 

[potential reading of Apple computers]

          Feenberg argues that Borgman “offers a more understandable response to invasive technology than anything in Heidegger”, as the former “[bounds] the technical sphere to restore the centrality of meaning” (330). for Borgmann, the modern human subject mediated by the computer becomes “disposable experiences that can be turned on and off like water from a faucet. The person as a focal thing has become a commodity delivered by a device”(331). Feenberg rejects Borgmann’s conception of computer-mediated communication for being naive and incomplete, for it rejects the possibilities for the development of human subjectivities enabled by communication otherwise impossible. “Borgmann’s critique of technology pursues the larger conenctions and social implications masked by the device paradigm. To this extent it is genuinely dereifying. But insofar as it fails to incorporate these hidden social dimensions into the concept of technology itself, it remains still partially caught in the very way of thinking it criticizes.” (332)

          Feenberg argues that Heidegger “is demanding that we recognize fully our own unsurpassable belonging to a world in which meaning guides the rituals that crystallize around things.” (333). “The fourfold refers to no particular system of practices and things, but reminds us of what all such systems have in common insofar as all human lives are rooted in enacted meaning of some sort” (333). “Is the gathering thing a node in a network? ... The notion o the thing as a gathering that discloses a world can be seen as a correective to the overemphasis on the role of Dasein in disclosure in [Being and Time]. There, world was defined not as “all that is”, nor as an object of knowledge, but as the realm of everyday practice.” (334) Feenberg thus posits Heidegger’s thought as circumscribed by its objectivist (managerial) nature.


(discussion of Schindler’s list as an unethical film)

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 4


talking on james street north, episode 4 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 3


talking on james street north, episode 3 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Monday, November 15, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 2


talking on james street north, episode 2 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Sunday, November 14, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 1


talking on james street north, episode 1 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Monday, November 01, 2010

Francis Bacon and Augustus Comte -- notes

One of the principles of Renaissance thought was the liberation of the human subject from the limitations of authority and tradition, of which the church was perhaps the most significant influence. Francis Bacon was one of the chief proponents of what was later understood as humanism. Fundamentally, Bacon’s thought was centred upon the idea that human ingenuity and discovery was a reflection of the will and grace of God. Indeed, the hand of God was working through human invention. Scientific progress is a reflection of a divine sense of the good; as such, it flourishes during times of peace (which Bacon incorrectly points out was extant at the time of his writing). To this end, in Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature as a Science Productive of Works he outlines the benefits conferred by three technologies which he considers to be representative for the triumph of human ingenuity over the natural processes which limit the human subject: printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Through a description of these inventions, Bacon seeks to establish the importance of the process of invention to human existence. Of cardinal significance is the notion that the acquisition of knowledge serves to improve one’s potential for acting well within world affairs, as “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of man’s lot are one and the same thing” (27).

Importantly, the development of the individual human subject is seen as key to the development of the body politic. Bacon suggests that scientific invention is among the most beneficial of human activities, “for the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race” (26). To a modern reader aware of the history and politics of European colonialism, it is difficult to avoid noting the political economy of this statement, which was written by a member of the English aristocracy who was then serving as a senior governmental bureaucrat at a time of colonial expansion. Of course, by stressing the importance of the compass, Bacon writes that England’s colonial enterprises were themselves reflections of the realisation of power through scientific processes. Through the acquisition of knowledge and the continuation of technological invention, mankind (to use Bacon’s notably gendered language) is able to expand the possibilities for action and self-realisation. In his Novum Organum, he writes that “knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced” (29). Much like Plato’s explanation of how leaders must understand the good in order to understand the earthly manifestation of forms, Bacon suggests that mankind will understand the truth only by avoiding what he terms the false idols of intellectual activity – Idols of the Tribe, in which perception is a human affair which “distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (29); Idols of the Cave, wherein Bacon adapts Plato’s Cave analogy to argue that an individual person’s traits and personality may distort an understanding of reality; Idols of the Market-place, which emerge from the relational dynamics inherent to human subjectivity, manifest in language: “Words plainly do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion, and lead men into innumerable empty controversies and fictions” (30); and Idols of the Theatre, the dogmas associated with established philosophy, “which have become established through tradition, credulity and neglect” (30). By means of the truth, mankind will master the self. Indeed, determined effort “devoted to sane and solid purposes could triumph over every obstacle” (28). Furthermore, “inventions come without force or disturbance ... while civil changes rarely proceed without uproar and violence” (26). On the Idols and on the Scientific Study of Nature invokes Augustine’s City of God in positing a fantastic and perfectly ordered geography of thought, with all of the various sciences operating in harmony.

In order to realise the benefits of scientific progress, Bacon calls for an examination of the methods of inquiry. Throughout most of late antiquity and the medieval period, intellectual activity first involved accepting the established authority and supplementing it with opinion. The philosophical tradition then allowed for knowledge to be produced by means of dialectics, which “look only for logical consistency” (25). Lastly, experiential data allowed for some intellectual discovery, but only by means of happenstance, not methodological rigour. To counter such trends, and to account for the fact that chance is a significant contributor to intellectual discovery, a rigorous method of scientific inquiry is required. Bacon proposed in On the Reformation of Education that the education systems then extant in Europe were insufficient for such a task. He complains that education can be seen to “have rather augmented the number of learned men than raised and rectifies the sciences themselves” (34), and furthermore that “this dedication of colleges and societies to the use only of professory learning has not only been inimical to the growth of the sciences, but has also been prejudicial to states and government” (35). Bacon thus suggests that universities be equipped with the latest laboratory and observational equipment, that universities across Europe need to network with each other to allow the sciences to flourish outside of geographical happenstance, that the salaries of Lecturers (those who research “Philosophy” and “Universality”) must be sufficient to allow the best minds to seek such a life pursuit, as lecturers “are as it were the keepers and guardians of the whole store and provision of learning” (35), and finally that logic and rhetoric, the two disciplines foundational to all intellectual activity, should be reserved for mature and sufficiently-developed minds. It is quite interesting to note retroactively that such complaints have often been levelled at universities, and the desire to reform education to the benefit of the liberated human subject has been rejuvenated in a time when corporate and business interests have proliferated, and arguably poisoned, the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge.

Humanism had become entrenched in European consciousness by the time Augustus Comte was writing about scientific progress in The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy. Comte believes that a historical overview is necessary, “for no idea can be properly understood apart from its history” (45). He then seeks to systematise the development of thought by stating “that each branch of our knowledge, passes in succession through three theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state”. As a consequence, three methods for the pursuit of knowledge come to the fore: the theological method, which situates all phenomena as originating with divine influence; the metaphysical method, in which “the supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions” which are themselves in turn the originators of all phenomena; and the positive method, which recognizes “the impossibility of of obtaining absolute truth” and therefore “endeavours ... to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena – that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness”. Comte demonstrates an interesting self-awareness when he describes “the need at every epoch of having some theory to connect the facts” (46). His thinking is an extension of Bacon’s idea that the knowledge of reality must in principle come from observed phenomena. Thus, “it is no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other”. However, in order to objectively navigate the near-infinite number of subjective understandings, observation of phenomena must be methodologically rigorous in order to properly understand both the self and the ‘truth’ that results from intellectual activity, for “it is experience alone which has enabled us to estimate our abilities rightly” (47).

It is to this end that he outlines the necessity of the positive philosophy, whose “fundamental character ... is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitute the goal of all our efforts; for we regard the search after what are called causes, whether first or final, as absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning” (48). In this capacity, he rejects the metaphysical and theological arguments around the interpretation and realisation of divine will. In reductionist terms, everything necessary for the understanding of a given phenomenon is present within the phenomenon itself. The remainder of the chapter sketches “what stage in the formation of that philosophy has now been reached and what remains to be done in order to constitute it fully” (49). He argues that the pursuit of knowledge was rendered contingent with positivism first among the most simple and general of disciplines, as “astronomical phenomena ... were the first to be subjected to positive theories”, followed by a succession of physical sciences increasingly proximal to the human subject. This process originated with Aristotelian thinking and has taken place “continuously and at an increasing rate”. Comte recognizes that positive theories have not been adapted to the study of all phenomena, and there remains a great deal of research to be accomplished and a “gap” which must be bridged, as positive theories must be utilized in order to understand the dynamics of “social physics” (50).

The important dynamic inherent to Comte’s thinking is the reduction of different systems of thought to the same process of knowledge production, for when “our fundamental conceptions [have] thus been rendered homogeneous, philosophy will be consituted finally in the positive state,” at which point all theological and metaphysical methodologies and systems of thought will be rendered obsolete.The individual disciplines of scientific inquiry become established when they have “developed far enough to admit of separate cultivation – that is to say, when it has arrived at a stage in which it is capable of constituting the sole pursuit of certain minds” (51). Indeed, positivism has developed rather continuously since Bacon, to the point where Comte wishes to prove that “direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion” (53), as the functioning of the brain is only observable from an objective position. Of course, Comte was not to live to see the developments in medical imaging technologies, which have indeed allowed the discipline of neuroscience to investigate the machinations of the brain in self-aware subjects. More provocatively, however, it is possible to interpret Comte’s statement that “interior observation gives rise to almost as many divergent opinions as there are so-called observers” (53) as prognosticating the development of psychoanalysis (which is of course one of the missing positive “social sciences”).

While Comte sates that the ancients were able to participate with significant contributions in numerous areas of scientific thought, due to the relatively immature state of their development, “it is ... impossible not to be struck by the great inconveniences which [the division into disciplines] produces.” He argues for the creation of an executive body given the task of providing an overview of the processes of each scientific discipline “to determine exactly the character of each science, to discover the relations and concatenation of the sciences, and to reduce, if possible, all their chief principles to the smallest number of common principles” (52). Scientists should be trained to have a general understanding of science before specializing. Furthermore, Comte calls for the creation of “a specific class on men, whose special and permanent function would consist in connecting each new special discovery with the general system”. To explain such a function, he emphasizes that understanding is essentially a singular discipline, and that the divisions of understanding into disciplines is an artificial principle which “by separating the difficulties, resolve[s] them more easily” (55). However, these distinctions can serve problematic when “questions arise which need to be treated by combining the points of view of several sciences”.

Comte states that positivism is the only ideological system which can be seen to be in ascent; the others have been in decline for centuries. This process will be completed once positivism has included the study of social phenomena, and furthermore that it is understood as a single and coherent theory which encompasses all of the disciplines of thought. When such has been accomplished, “the revolutionary crisis which harasses civilised people will then be at an end” (57). He concludes this section by stating that the endeavour to synthesize the various disciplines of human inquiry is not to reduce their variables to “one sole law”.  Fundamentally, the human mind is not able to realize perfection, which would be required for a valid and objective “sole law” for the understanding of all phenomena: “the resources of the human mind are too feeble, and the universe is too complicated, to admit of our ever attaining such scientific perfection”. In this context, it is interesting to note that Comte hints at the ‘holy grail’ of physics after Einstein, namely the unified field theory which seeks to harmonize theories of the macro universe (astronomy) with those concerned with the subatomic universe: “it seems to me that we could hope to arrive at it only by connecting all natural phenomena with the most general positive law with which we are acquainted – the law of gravitation – which already links all astronomical phenomena to some of the phenomena of terrestrial physics” (58). While dismissed by scholars and scientists of most disciplines, the quest for such unity remains at the heart of theoretical physics.


Notes

1.  A few decades after the Bacon’s death, the French monarch Louis XIV deployed the coincidental                existence of the human subject and the state as the philosophical – and indeed procedural – basis for his        reign.

2.  It can as a consequence be deduced that this line of reasoning will result in Heisenberg’s uncertainty              principle one hundred years later.