§39. Sordid Arts
Works on magic, books of secrets, medical compendia, and industrial handbooks were the first bestsellers of print. A profound literature of technical treatises emerges, beginning in the latter fifteenth century, including works by Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Cellini, Alberti, Ghiberti, Paladio, Durer, and Agricola.
Interest quickened in the mathematical and technical works of antiquity, with new translations of Euclid, Archimedes, Heron, and others. The readership for these works included artisan masters who wanted to understand points touching their art. Traditional works of natural history—on stones, plants, animals, and so on—accentuated the strange and marvelous, with information drawn uncritically from literary sources. Such writings were curiosities for scholars, not intended to guide anyone's experience with nature. In the sixteenth century the accent shifts to favor information that people can use. Hence the new value of careful description and accurate plates.Sixteenth-century technical authors express their desire for knowledge grounded in observation and experiment, without pointless subtlety or rhetorical evasion. Such texts are not amusements. Readers want to move from words to operations, and want texts that stand the test, repaying their patience to master them. These authors discarded Aristotle's syllogistic, and reversed the scholars' indifference to mechanical problems, blurring antiquity's sharp line between natural philosophy and technics. These become Bacon's themes at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
There had by then been some centuries of discontent with Aristotelianism, including a revived Pyrrhonism, and humanist efforts to change the subject, but no one with Bacon's learning, prestige, and elegant pen cast so glancing a light on the deficiency of natural philosophy or offered a well-reasoned alternative.
He diverts this philosophy from contemplative episteme, to the operative, instrumental knowledge in works such as those by Alberti, Agricola, and others. The results and methods of these works do not resemble what Aristotle taught the learned to expect in the science of nature, but they have their own ancient pedigree in the tradition of Democritus, whom Bacon esteems over Aristotle. “The natural philosophy of Democritus... seemeth to me... more real and better inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato.”121In New Organon, Bacon writes of “an opinion or conceit, which though of long standing is vain and hurtful”; namely,
that the dignity of the human mind is impaired by long and close intercourse with experiments and particulars, subject to sense and bound in matter; especially as they are laborious to search, ignoble to meditate, harsh to deliver, illiberal to practice, infinite in number, and minute in subtlety. So that it has come at length to this, that the true way is not merely deserted, but shut out and stopped up; experience being, I do not say abandoned or badly managed, but rejected with disdain.122
Plato and Aristotle canonized this contempt for technical experience. Plato separates technical intelligence from the superior nous or intellectual mind, is unimpressed by the artisans’ attention and invention, and indifferent to technical work as an expression of intelligence. Technics make no progress, each art being a fixed system of forms, and tools whose function is to produce them. He ignores the contribution of technics to theory, as if we might have pure geometry without ever having surveyed land or measured materials, even reversing the genesis to make technics depend on theory. “All the great arts require idle speculation and natural philosophy.”123
Given his social rank, Plato presumably had no hands-on experience with technical operations. Everything he says about techne is formulated from the point of view of an inexperienced onlooker describing operations he has never tried and therefore cannot understand.
It is difficult to perceive skilled action when you cannot do it yourself. You need the experience of your own hands merely to see what is happening. Plato’s view of techne is the misunderstanding we should expect from someone oblivious to the deficiency his lack of experience imposes on what he can apprehend.He allows that technical work is more than habitual routine. The skill consists in knowing when to use different routines, knowing the favorable moment and suitable manner. That sounds intelligent, but Plato manages to turn it to techne’s bad report. To miss the right moment would ruin the work, so the artisan can never look up. He is chained to the work with no independence, his mind like his eyes always looking down—to the earth, to the material, to the servile necessity of labor—the downcast posture corresponding to the spiritual lowliness of the work and its so-called knowledge, which makes the life and mind of an artisan the very opposite of Plato's ideal:
I can't conceive of any subject making the soul look upward except one concerned with that which is, and that which is is invisible. If anyone attempts to learn something about sensible things, whether by gaping upward or squinting downward, I'd claim—since there's no knowledge of such things—that he never learns anything.124
He contrasts philosophy with all banausic activities, the word “banausic” coming from banausoi, a derogatory term for people who work with their hands:
Why is it that banausia and working with one's hands is a matter of reproach? Shall we not say that it is because that part which is by nature the best in a man is weak, with the result that it is unable to rule the beasts within him, but serves them, and can learn nothing but the means of flattering them?125
Aristotle sounds the same animus:
We think the manual workers are like certain lifeless things which act indeed, but act without knowing what they do, as fire burns—but while the lifeless things perform each of their functions by a natural tendency, the laborers perform them through habit.126
The arts are contemptible and the artisans a debased form of humanity. Aristotle wants to revoke their citizenship.
“The virtue of a citizen... will belong only to those individuals who are released from occupations which provide the necessities for life.” He seems to find it unimaginable that the arts would interest any self-respecting man with leisure to study philosophy. Artisans know nothing worth knowing. If you do not need the technical knowledge to make a living, it is worthless. This philosophical evaluation of techne was translated and confirmed by prestigious Roman authors like Cicero. “Wage labor is sordid and unworthy of a free man, for wages are the price of labor and not of some art; craft labor is sordid, as is the business of retailing.” Also Seneca. “The common arts, the sordid arts, are... those practiced by manual laborers, who spend all their time earning their living. There is no beauty in such occupations, which bear little resemblance to the Good.”127Bacon wants natural philosophy to be a scientia operativa, a productive science of works. That entails a revision of the word scientia and the expectations associated with the best, most philosophical knowledge. It is certainly not what Aristotle had in mind for episteme, and to Bacon’s time that was the paradigm scientia. It is not merely that Aristotelian science cannot operate— as if, like the alchemists, Aristotle tried and failed. Aristotle does not want to operate. The less operational or suggestive of application, the better, purer, wiser, and more philosophical the science. That is the evaluation and expectation of natural-philosophical science that Bacon overturns.
Surveying the England he knew uniquely as a former Lord Chancellor, he is impressed by progress in the industrial arts. They are “continually thriving and growing,” seeming to have in them “a breath of life, at first rude, then convenient, afterwards adorned, and at all times advancing.” So different from the vaunted scientia, stuck where Aristotle left it! Like the exemplary progress of the industrial arts, science too must be known by its works.
It is by their witness, and not “by logic or even observation, that truth is revealed and established.” Whence, Bacon says, “it follows that the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.” He fairly concludes that “truth, therefore, and utility, are perfectly identical” (ipsissimae res sunt veritas et utilitas).128Critics have jumped on this passage. Is it pragmatism, positivism, utilitarianism? Gradgrind’s industrial instrumentalism? Technocratic rationalism? Like a figure in a bad dream, Bacon has many faces. The terminology of the passage derives from a medieval debate on the relationship between the arts faculty (teaching logic and natural philosophy) and the faculty of medicine. According to a learned Renaissance mot, “Where the natural philosopher finishes, there begins the physician” (ubi desinitphysicus, ibi medicus incipit). Natural philosophers seek veritas, physicians seek utilitas. Bacon wants to overcome the opposition of the faculties and reinstate continuity between these two moments of empirical natural knowledge. The more widely Bacon’s methods are institutionalized, the sooner we attain knowledge of nature as it is rather than as we imagine it.129
People currently imagine more than they know. But if we could make Bacon’s methods as authoritative in logic as Aristotle used to be, we can overthrow the idols that have obstructed the progress of civilization, and begin to command nature rather than be commanded by it. At this point only, in a future Bacon challenged his age to believe in, the most effective, efficient way to operate would be the one known as such in natural philosophy. Only after disciplined experiments sweep away the errors that have delayed our maturity can it finally be said that veritas and utilitas are the same, that is, come to the same thing in theory and practice. Philosophers will be physicians and physicians philosophers. Knowing the truth and knowing what to do form one body.
In Bacon's day, however, they were not the same at all, which is why natural philosophy needs a new instauration.Forgetting the past is a signature theme in Bacon. “What remains to be done is more important than what has been done.” Success in the endeavor is a hope, a fond expectation, not inevitable, certainly not a “law of progress” as in Comte or Spencer. The course of history is not onward and upward. Democritus was a greater philosopher than Aristotle. Time has its ebb and flow, science its seasons. For all the hope Bacon invests in operative science, it is not reserved to our later experience to understand that technology has more than one face. In an essay on the Daedalus legend, Bacon describes an abominable man of genius, exemplifying the ambiguity of technology. The works of Daedalus are excellent and admirable in respect of art, but pernicious in their motives and ends. “Certainly human life is much indebted to them [technical arts], for very many things which concern both the furniture of religion and the ornament of the state and the culture of life in general, are drawn from their store. And yet out of the same fountain come instruments of lust, and also instruments of death.”130