Figuring Science: Revisiting Nature in Bacon's "Novum Organum."

PHYSICS; NOVUM Organum (Book : Bacon); BACON, Francis, 1561-1626; NATURE; UTILITARIANISM

This article presents a critical analysis of the book "Novum Organum" by Francis Bacon, examining the conception of Bacon's place in the history of ideas. The human sciences often trace the victimization of nature back to Bacon, whose renovation of natural philosophy and the procedures of scientific method gave rise to his commonplace moniker as the father of modern science, a moniker from which has been inferred his fathering of the modern technological abuse of nature. The question of nature has never been far from pointed consideration when it comes to the text of Bacon's philosophico-scientific thought. It has become the case in this regard that nature—its meaning in, function for, and figural relation to Bacon's scientific program—has been received according to certain orthodoxies that do more to conceal the stakes with which it is invested by Bacon than to reveal them. Bacon's major contribution to the history of ideas is considered to be the rhetoric of utilitarianism. What should be emphasized in the discussion of nature is Bacon's insistence on a sort of double relation to nature. It is not incorrect to suggest that Bacon's utilitarianism emerges out of, and reciprocally implies, a conception of nature in relation to which man can be conceived as a sort of invader, indeed, a conquering general as he himself sometimes put it.