Bacon, Language, and λόγος

In sixty-sixth aphorism of Bacon’s New Organon, “forms” are placed into the category of “meaningless summaries of observations” (LXVI). It is to be assumed that these “meaningless summaries of observations” are constituted by the Greeks; also, any post-Greek science is assumed Greek in its foundations (LXXI). The idea of a “summary” is typically a linguistic reference; thus, it is of no surprise that the supposed errors of these “meaningless summaries of observations” seem to be inevitably imbedded into the ambiguities of the language of the time (a good example would be LX). Assuming that thinking is conditioned by language (LIX), current reason qua philosophy and science is presented by the text as “sophistic and unproductive.” With this proposed linguistic limitation, we are now faced with questions about the λόγος and the role of dialectic in general.

The “illusions of the marketplace,” (which are essentially linguistically constituted illusions) are “names without things” and names with poor definitions (the latter seems to be rooted in those “meaningless summaries of observations”). The method by which “things” are uncovered is that of observation (LX) and interpretation (I).’ “Names without things” then follow to be imagined and not observed (LX). Bacon’s text presents words as being contingent to the subjectivity of man’s everydayness (LIX). The present-at-hand properties that are experientially the most apparent quantitatively (LX) are masked in the same way.

On a side note, we enlightened (and undoubtedly post-Kantian) contemporaries could easily ask: “what about the thing in-itself (or nature in-itself)?” In the text, the “thing in-itself” is posited as a brute fact of “nature” (XLVIII) which is interpreted through observation of nature’s order, which can be done by either fact or inference (I).

In opposition to the Greek’s harmony of nature and the λόγος, Bacon's text presents language as being experientially subjective. The failure of the dialectic is attributed to, not only the limitations imposed by the subjective experiences of the interlocutors (XXIX), but by the “fundamental organization” of the interlocutors' minds (XXX). These “idols of the tribe” include: the supposition of a greater order (XLV), an unwillingness to rethink one’s intellectual position (XLVI), favoring those things which take the mind “by storm” (XLVII), being unable to set epistemological boundaries for things like infinity and the universe (XLVIII), the influences of emotions upon intellectual position (XLIX), the limited powers of the senses (L), and the mode of impression which carries thinkers off to abstraction, forms, etc. (LI). Another objection to dialectic is shown in the critique of Aristotle: if one has already decided upon a position, one’s position must first be challenged or questioned dialectically before it can be refuted (LXIII).

-C. M. Bodayle