Francis Bacon and Modernity (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 665 principle of giving the philosopher the benefit of the doubt in an attempt to present his position as one that is logically coherent and makes sense. This principle is almost always used for writing introductory expositions, but it may in fact be quite misapplied when used to approach a philosopher with the goal of understanding what he actually does say in historical context. Among Cartesian scholars, the approach of making the philosopher make sense has attained almost party platform status as the defense of reason in Descartes. He must be allowed to proceed. Gueroult is the champion in this arena. The goal of and rules for saving (or for destroying) a philosopher or a philosophical position in effect define a great analytical game. I appreciate the virtuoso performances of some of the best players, for example, Hiram Caton's argument that Descartes is a monistic materialist. Where does Cottingham stand? About halfway through his book, on the point of remarking that if you do take the demon or the restriction to immediately perceived intuitive certainty seriously, then you may be caught in the crucible of doubt, Cottingham abandons the defense. But he does not go on the attack, either. Nor does he, even in his illuminating "trialistic" outline of Cartesian ontology (129-3o), construct or reconstruct a preferred Cartesian position. Instead, he tries as best he can to show what Descartes intended to say, to illustrate what is implied by what Descartes does say, and to show both the advantages and disadvantages of Descartes's actual position. In this Cottingham neither takes sides nor promotes his own metaphysics: this is what it is to be an historian of philosophy. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University Charles Whitney. FrancisBacon andModernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. x + 234. $18.5o. Was Bacon a reformer, a revolutionary, or neither? As Whitney points out, the instauratio which Bacon advocated could be taken as either a restoration or a new beginning. These interpretations are developed in turn. First, Baconian restoration is presented as reform, and, subsequently, Baconian innovation as revolution; but the inadequacies of both approaches are so emphasized that Bacon emerges as possessed of a 'modern' self-consciousness, and as incipiently aware of the relativity of his text, somewhat like his twentieth-century readers. Bacon did indeed see his projected Great Instauration as a fulfilment of God's purposes and as a restoration of that condition of humanity forfeited by the double fall into sin and ignorance; and Whitney is right to reject Hans Blumenberg's view that the religious advocacy of instauratio was superficial and inessential. He is justified too in rejecting Robert Nisbet's dismissal of Bacon as relatively unimportant in the history of belief in progress. But the continuity between aspects of Bacon's thought and the traditions of Christianity need not make even these aspects reformist rather than revolutionary; the kind of fulfilment and restoration which Bacon envisaged involved, after all, just as radical a program for the study of nature as Bacon's millenarian contemporaries envisaged for society--and with a not dissimilar religious basis. The 666 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:4 OCTOBER 1988 pursuit of the associations of Bacon's text here is sometimes far-fetched but often illuminating. Cumulative intellectual progress, however, was certainly part of Bacon's design; indeed in one of his more intriguing passages (92-94) Whitney shows how in The AdvancementofLearning Bacon misquotes Jeremiah as favoring an autonomous attitude to past authorities, which would free the present for discovery. But by this stage Whitney's text has explicitly abandoned the (effectively) reformist tradition of Northrop Frye, with its stress on the displacement of significant images from the past, so as to emphasize Bacon's radical pursuit of novelty. For Bacon can be seen as Rousseau saw him, dependent on the strength of his own genius alone, a guide of humanity, himself lacking guides. Bacon did not, of course, disown all debts to the past, as Whitney's earlier chapters show. (Nor, surely, do his debts undermine his innovatory proposals.) But Whitney now stresses Bacon's uncompromising goal in the ImtauratioMagna of certain knowledge of natural law...