Bacon & Dregs

[alice wellintown]

Bacon's struggle to overcome intellectual blockades and the dogmatic
slumber of his age and of earlier periods had to be fought on many
fronts. Very early on he criticized not only Plato, Aristotle and the
Aristotelians, but also humanists and Renaissance scholars such as
Paracelsus and Bernardino Telesio.

Although Aristotle provided specific axioms for every scientific
discipline, what Bacon found lacking in the Greek philosopher's work
was a master principle or general theory of science, which could be
applied to all branches of natural history and philosophy (Klein
2003a). For Bacon, Aristotle's cosmology, as well as his theory of
science, had become obsolete and consequently so too had many of the
medieval thinkers who followed his lead. He does not repudiate
Aristotle completely, but he opposes the humanistic interpretation of
him, with its emphasis on syllogism and dialectics (scientia operativa
versus textual hermeneutics) and the metaphysical treatment of natural
philosophy in favor of natural forms (or nature's effects as
structured modes of action, not artifacts), the stages of which
correspond—in the shape of a pyramid of knowledge—to the structural
order of nature itself.


 Bacon began to struggle with tradition as early as 1603. In Valerius
Terminus (1603?) he already repudiates any mixture of natural
philosophy and divinity; he provides an outline of his new method and
determines that the end of knowledge was “a discovery of all
operations and possibilities of operations from immortality (if it
were possible) to the meanest mechanical practice” (Bacon III [1887],
222). He opposes Aristotelian anticipatio naturae, which favored the
inquiry of causes to satisfy the mind instead of those “as will direct
him and give him light to new experiences and inventions” (Bacon III
[1887], 232).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/#NatStrTra

It may surprize some to learn that Bacon's great obstacle was
Aristitole ands how Arisitole was adopted, but we when we remember
that Aristotle stressed that only that which was already known could
be learned, that is, that the growth of learning, of knowledge
involved simply bringing together, a synthesis, of the universal truth
of reason and the particular of sense. Growth of knowledge belonged to
"becoming", that is, to change, and is thus inferior to what is known,
to knowledge that, through reflexivity, that is the manipulation of
this in syllogistics or demonstration.

So, as Aristotle struggled against the Dregs, now Bacon must struggle,
and the Ancient Dregs include Aristotle and his fellow travelers.

Demonstration of the old truths is the stuff of school boys in a lab.
Bacon would fly out inot the unknown and probe the mysteries of
Nature, unlock her secrets.

But is Bacon good? Sure tastes great. Not good for your hyertension.
Low dosium, Turkey Bacon, anyone?





On 8/22/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Slavery is a poor example. Too easily mangled by a sophist's rhetoric, too
> terribly tangled in the web of history. A sophomore can make a eat pie out
> of Greeks without reading them by turning on the slavery switch.
>
>
> Still, there seems to be a side to this idea, to this argument, even if no
> one has got its back. I hesitate to identify it. It is common enough. The
> stuff that someone as un-lettered as me might absorb sitting in on an
> introduction to philosophy course, or pick up in one of those popular
> online courses, like the philosophy of science, or the history of ideas in
> the west, or, probably where I got it from, by reading what looks cool in
> the discarded books and magazines bin at the public library.
>
> Of course, so western, so limited by its just coming from the west, that
> is, and it is doubtful....if anything ever really does come just from the
> west, but still...if we are gonna get Spengler out,  we might bite
> into crispy, salty, yummy...Bacon.
>
>  Like Newton, Tesla, Adam Smith, Malthus,  the list seems
> endless....Marx....Bacon struggled and suffered from the mixture of the
> ancient foolishness, religion and irrational ideas, and the modern ideas,
> some of them foolish and irrational too. So that to read him we must wade
> through mud and murky waters before we get to the fountain that sprang for
> us. It shot up, we read, from his use of induction, but it was his
> adventurous spirit, and this is, so the story goes, Captured in his
> famous aphorism, "knowledge is power", and this, this idea, and the spirit
> that set out gain to knowledge, not from the ancient sages or holy books,
> but from his pragmatic rejection of the past in favor of the mystery, of
> the unknown, of the yet to be discovered world, and so, and now we may need
> a more focused course, on American Pragmatism, say, Bacon tastes best with
> American philosophy...and, as history would have it, the Americans, those
> pragmatists, are linked, by a strange blood sausage, to Bacon, by Emerson.
>
> Emerson looked East, yes, but in a narcissistic self reliant rugged
> individualistic turn, he made Bacon a dish for the pragmatists.
>
>
>
>
> On Thursday, August 22, 2013, Bekah wrote:
>
>> My point is that these days we are horrified.  Two hundred years ago our
>> US ancestors kept slaves legally - and in the minds of some it was the
>> morally right thing to do.  Whether or not the US should legalize slavery
>> has never been seriously debated since the 13th Amendment in 1864.
>>
>> Also,  your point may be one of the types of things Pinker is criticized
>> for - he tends to use percentages rather than actual numbers.
>>
>> Bekah
>>
>>
>>
>> On Aug 22, 2013, at 11:35 AM, Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > If I recall correctly there are more slaves today than there were two
>> hundred years ago, and I'm not talkin' bout Industrial Slaves either
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
>> > wrote:
>> > But today we are horrified by slavery anywhere.  Today we abhor many
>> things that centuries ago,  or decades for that matter,  were taken as a
>> matter of course -  lynchings for example,  but also direct warfare
>> between
>> major powers,  capital punishment (in most of the western world, anyway),
>>  the abuse of women, children, ethnic minorities, gays,  - even of
>> animals.
>> >
>> > Steven Pinker's book,  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence
>> > Has
>> Declined [2011],  is flawed in many respects,  but he makes some
>> interesting points.
>> >
>> > That said,   I'm not taking a side here because I think capitalism and
>> elements of fascism play into the equation.  Otoh,  the devastation of
>> Hiroshima and the atrocities of the Holocaust had an impact.
>> >
>> > Bekah
>> >
>> >
>> > On Aug 22, 2013, at 8:59 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > > Yes . Very reasonable points about our collective abilities. But my
>> argument is that we often ascribe to ourselves as individuals what we
>> only
>> have as part of a system. The gap between the wisdom of moderns and the
>> wisdom of the ancients still seems more self congratulatory than
>> substantive.  The young girls that make shirts in nasty and dangerous
>> factories in Pakistan seem little different than slaves. As far as the
>> status of women, this freedom has not been extended to other cultures
>> colonized by the Euro and patriarchal powers in the same way as to the
>> wives and daughters and mothers of the democracies. The link between
>> "our"
>> purportedly enlightened and technically advanced system and crude forms
>> of
>> exploitation that rival any in history is shown in the factory conditions
>> of people making parts for Apple products.
>> > >
>> > > I am not saying people used to be wiser. I am arguing for realistic
>> humility in claims to advancement, because so much of the history of that
>> advancement has been directly at the expense of  militarily and
>> culturally
>> vulnerable cultures. In these kinds of advancements there is as much
>> injury
>> and loss as advance.
>> > >
>> > > We inherit through the written word and technology a tremendous
>> inheritance of potential wisdom and possibility, but we also inherit some
>> really destructive habits and colonialist historic patterns that are
>> built
>> around treating the biosphere and its inhabitants as a can of materials
>> to
>> be mined, used and discarded.  What I see is more of a runaway train than
>> a
>> wise, sustainable  and advanced modern culture. We are generating
>> powerful
>> warnings and solutions but so far they are not really slowing the
>> destructive juggernaut. I hope I am wrong and that what we are going
>> through now will as you also hope enable and compel the changes that are
>> needed.  I am just really saying that some humility is in order and is
>> part
>> of the needed change.
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > On Aug 21, 2013, at 12:05 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>> > >
>> > >> I am loathe to take issue with you Joseph, I agree in so many ways,
>> but there are a couple of points I want to add to color your choler with.
>> First, the "we" thing. As regards your examples of things we can and
>> cannot
>> do, "we" can build computers and cell phones and such. I can't make the
>> entire product, you can't, and neither can he or she, but they can, and
>> we
>> can do things they cannot. I've worked making the batteries for tech
>> devices in the past, for example, which is something Bill Gates couldn't
>> do. Among the things we can't do are making an axe from chert and wood;
>> using the entire carcass of an animal we have killed with a bow and
>> arrow,
>> or atlatl, or snare we likewise could not have made; we couldn't build a
>> castle of stone that can stand for a year, much less for 500 or a 1000
>> years. We no longer have the skills to live in the ways that the people
>> among whom the wisdom traditions evolved did; still, as you say, we could
>> certainly learn skills from them. Could we learn to keep slaves as they
>> did? To demean and disempower women as they did? To leave the weak to
>> suffer and die as they did? Well, obviously "we" can, but could you?
>> Could
>> I?
>> > >>
>> > >> Permaculture, peak oil communities, intentional communities, etc.,
>> are all good starts t
>