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The Need for
Bacon's Philosophy Works in This Complicated World
We live in interesting times. We, meaning those of us living in
the United States of America near the close of the twentieth century,
are a part of the most technologically advanced civilization the
world has ever know as well as the biggest economy in the world
to date. Because of our country's wealth and power, it attracts
immigrants from many other nations. Furthermore, because of advances
in communications technology, meaning especially television and
the Internet, we are exposed to different lifestyles and experiences
from all over the world. And these experiences are not just passively
presented to us for our viewing pleasure-there are forces actively
engaged in controlling how we think, feel and behave for their
own economic or political benefit. This is essentially what Francis
Bacon considered the tendency of his age to look to the past for
all that was good and profitable to be excessive, and played a
crucial role of revolution in human thought and modern conception
of information. In late sixteenth
century, society in Western was in a similar situation with modern
society, if on a smaller scale. They were at the crossroads of
trade routes where cultures mixed and economies flourished. This
is the time and place where enormous philosophers, scientists
emerged. Bacon first came to dislike Aristotle's method, Aristotle's
philosophy being for Bacon "only strong for disputations and contentions,
but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life
of man…" He attempted to reorient man's thinking from discursive
speculation to focused research, from Scholastic disputation to
the concrete improvement of man's actual physical state in the
world in his time. Bacon's conviction of his appointment to a
high calling led him eventually to plan a revolution in human
thought, and the most specific focus of the revolution was an
effort to overthrow the entrenched Scholastic philosophy of the
times. Bacon tried to
do nothing less than give his age a new philosophy. Having become
convinced that science in his day was not really science at all,
but disputation of concepts that had not been informed by the
materials facts of actual things, Bacon made it his objective
to bring men into more intimate confrontation with the stuff of
the world, with the actual concrete phenomena with which man was
surrounded. Bacon accused the Scholastic philosophers of spinning
"cowebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and
work, but of no substance or profit," of withdrawing "themselves
too much form the contemplation of nature, and the observation
of experience," and of tumbling "up and down in their own reason
and conceits." Rather than spiders that spin complex webs for
their own profits only, Bacon would have his people work as bees,
producing useful creations for all. Bacon was convinced
that man could come to be sovereign over nature and use nature's
resources for his greater delight in life if he could only the
right approach to the study of the world. That approach was not
the deductive, syllogistic approach of the logic of Aristotle
and his disciples, the Schoolman, but rather it was the inductive
method of arriving at a truth only after having collected numerous
pieces of evidence, only after empirical observation, the analysis
of collected materials, and continuing examination of data through
observation and experiment. Bacon's scietific
philosophy was an adaptation, which enabled humans to better function
in an increasingly difficult, that is, more complex and more competitive,
environment. Instead of having to base their beliefs and behavior
and social institutions and such on some revelation received form
the gods in times long past which could not be questioned, humans
could then base at least part of their lives on knowledge based
on observations of the world around them and themselves, which
may not have been infallible, but at least could be modified and
improved upon as their knowledge of themselves and the world grew.
What about our
world today? We have near-instant access to information about
all sorts of experiences from all over the world-stock quotes
from Japan every fifteen minutes, the latest armed conflict in
the Middle East, soccer scores from Europe. Not only that, but
people (including us) can transport themselves bodily to practically
anywhere in the world, at least to the inhabited parts. So, we
are in this mixture of people and information. We are all practically
citizens of the whole world. And to complicate thing further,
technology is getting more complex as it enables us to do more
and more different things. And, the world population is increasing
very rapidly. We are continually pushed and pulled by issues,
which affect the way we live our lives. Do we ship our trash to
Third-World nations, or cut back on our consumption or design
something to reproccess the trash? Do we welcome new immigrants,
or put up razor-wire fences on our borders? Do we invest our Holiday
bonus checks or give it to a charity to feed many starving mouths
overseas? The answer to these
problems is to get people to think for themselves. But people
can not be taught this en masse. The instruction has to be tailored
to the individual. What each person needs is a Francis Bacon,
or someone, to talk with them personally about the great issues
confronting human beings, where they can't hide by agreeing with
everybody else or by not raising their hand and being overlooked,
to teach them to ask questions by asking them questions. This
is how people learn how to human beings, by interacting meaningfully
with other human beings, not from machine-like processes. This
may be an inefficient process, but it's the one humans are most
likely to respond to. So, there is a great deal of suffering in the world because people don't know how to address the world with reason. It is possible to help people towards enlightenment, but it is difficult. Maybe with the new communications technology, it will become easier to have these face-to-face meetings, which do create good thinkers. But the time being, we must learn to accept the world as it is and people as they are, not blame people for what was probably beyond their control. |
