In the year of our Lord 1492, King Fernando II of Aragon decreed that the Pillars of Hercules be added to the Spanish coat of arms. Since antiquity, these two Mediterranean promontories were thought to mark the extremity of the western world. Below his newly reformed standard ran the slogan Non plus ultra: “Spain is everything and there is nothing further beyond the Pillars of Hercules.” Later that same year, Fernando decided also to sponsor an Italian sailor named Cristoforo Colombo who was attempting to discover a new westerly trading route with the East. But what Colombo’s explorations revealed instead was an entirely unknown territory. In light of this new knowledge, the king was forced to update his marketing. The sign of the times now read, Plus ultra: “Spain is everything and it stretches further beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”
On the engraved title page of Francis Bacon’s 1620 New Organon, or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature, a Spanish galleon is depicted sailing through the Pillars of Hercules, underneath of which reads—“Many will pass through and knowledge will be the greater.” What Columbus had effected in the material world, Bacon hoped for in the intellect; and what Columbus did by chance, Bacon sought by design. The New Organon (Greek for “tool” or “instrument”) was part of a larger project Bacon had conceived to rethink what science is and what it could be. And Columbus’ New World would be the ground in which these new tools would be put to work to bear new fruits.
Modernity (meaning literally, “to be with it in a new way”) it could be said began with the discovery of America. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that it should end here as well. But what was this “new way” that has now become old?
Centuries before these novelties were brought forth, a renaissance, or “rebirth,” in thinking had already begun when the philosophic and literary works of ancient Greece and Rome were rediscovered. But what I have been calling the “bourgeois mindset” that particularly characterizes the modern world is generally credited to the writings of another Italian explorer Niccolò Machiavelli. He too would discover a new territory—one of the mind, what he called the realm of “effectual truth”: knowledge of what works, rather than of why things work. The goal of philosophy, he asserts, ought not be sterile metaphysical meditations about idealized virtues or hidden essences, but the discovery of what causes have the greatest effects. Machiavelli saw this primarily in political terms; his successors Bacon and René Descartes made it scientific—which in an ironic twist of fortuna turned the rebirth of the ancients against itself.
For the ancients, the end of philosophy was to know; these new modern men saw it as a means in order to do. The primary use of knowledge should, in Bacon’s words, be to “relieve Man’s estate,” in Descartes’ “to master nature”: to make life more safe and comfortable; to live longer and in better health; to make nature work for us rather than against us. According to Bacon, philosophy should not seek how to live according to nature, but how to “generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures” upon it. (2.1) Philo-sophia, “the love of wisdom,” was to be replaced by scientia, “knowledge, know-how, expertise.”
This vision of a new role for thought in the world is the “thesis” of the Dialectic of Modernity, and that which gave rise to that new type of human being identified by Rousseau—
Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, [the modern individual] will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of those men of our day: an Englishmen, a Frenchman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing.
The simplest way to sum up the bourgeois is by saying that it is synonymous with the “businessman”: those who value quantity over quality, security over adventure, the material over the spiritual, who see money as the primary sign of something’s worth. While it is true that these characteristics are nothing new—the petty shopkeep and miserly oligarch are as old as time—modernity, however, was the first age to give these figures society’s highest honors.
“While poorly taught or badly intentioned adversaries made open war upon it,” the preliminary discourse to l’Encyclopédie proclaims “philosophy was forced to take refuge, so to speak, in the works of a few great men.” It then concludes, “yet silently in the shadows they prepared from afar the light which gradually, by imperceptible degrees, would illuminate the world.” Spearheaded by two of Rousseau’s good friends—Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert—the discourse was a manifesto of sorts outlining what could be called the West’s first “youth movement.” The goal of this self-proclaimed “conspiracy” was to enact the new vision of philosophy put forth by those “few great men”—Machiavelli, Bacon, and Descartes. We today refer to this slowly dawning illumination as the Enlightenment.
Descartes, younger than Bacon by about a generation, was the Wozniak to his Jobs. While Bacon is generally credited as progenitor of the scientific method, he was more visionary and salesman than scientist. It is Descartes who gave these new practices their content, specifically modern science’s grounding in mathematics and its application in technology. The most important aspect, and that which contributed most directly to the rise of the bourgeois, was the Enlightenment’s focus on epistemology. From the Greek epistēmē meaning “knowledge” and -logy, “the study of,” it is the attempt to precisely delineate what qualifies as knowledge. The Enlighteners’ answer: only that which can be measured and put to good use.
Novus ordo secolorum—“A new order of the ages” has arrived, the Great Seal of the United States boldly announces on the back of its foundational currency, the one dollar bill. With Columbus’ discovery of this new world, the boundaries of the possible had been forever breached. From now on, the only to thing fear was fear itself. It is thus no accident that Bacon’s Great Instauration, or “great renewal,” in which the New Organon appears, is preceded by a dedicatory epistle to King James—the namesake of America’s first English colony Jamestown. Nor is it surprising to find the hand of John Locke helping to author the constitution of the early Carolina colonies. America, as Bacon foresaw, would be the land in which the “fruits and works” of modern science would show forth its true capacity—the home of the brave bourgeois who would master this unknown territory and bring nature back under human dominion.
This great plan was disrupted, however, with the 1750 publication of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and eventual break eight years later with his Enlightenment compatriots. Rousseau’s questioning of both the efficacy and morality of this schema was the first attack based not on ancient dogma, but upon the premises on which the modern world were built. And it was these questions that would give rise to the “antithesis” of the Dialectic of Modernity—the bohemian, or artist—that gave the modern world its fantastically creative tension. As these two opposing ideals battled for supremacy over the soul of the West, our civilization was driven to seek further and further into unknown territories—from the farthest reaches of outer space to the inner depths of the human psyche. But with the reconciliation of these two ideals in the Bobo, the engine of modernity has been short-circuited.
In my next post, I shall explore the origins of this opposing force to give a fuller picture of where we are historically and the alternatives available to us today. For as Bacon’s secretary Thomas Hobbes declared, Knowledge is power!