The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke

9 - Science, Virtue, and the Birth of Modernity: Or, On the Techno-Theo-Logic of Modern Neuroscience

sCienCe, Virtue, anD tHe BirtH of MoDernity or, on tHe teCHno-tHeo-LoGiC of MoDern neurosCienCe Jeffrey P. Bishop it ShoULD Not Be SURPRISING to US thAt the figures of the early modern period that shaped the new science were also the figures that shaped our political philosophies. Both the rationalists and the empiricists shaped this early modern philosophy of both our political and scientific practices. Politics and science seem always to have gone together. In analyzing René Descartes’ political philosophy and epistemology, Catherine Pickstock notes that the second part of the Discourse on Method begins with the metaphor of the city. Descartes appeals to analogies “of architecture , city-planning, and governmental structure to describe his method for the composition and organization of knowledge.”1 Pickstock goes on to describe the way in which the ordering of knowledge mimics a city that is defended from chaos. This citadel of one person, alone, ordering knowledge is the paradigm of knowing for Descartes. formal consistency is more important than embodied and communal goods. Moreover, by appeal to the work of several Cartesians scholars, Thomas hibbs has drawn our attention to the univocity of language and homogeneity of method used by Cartesian science.2 The universal mathesis allows one not only 9 Science, Virtue, and the Birth of Modernity 161 to know geometry but also to order all knowledge according to the same measure, including political and moral goods. Thomas Hobbes attempts to deploy the univocal geometry of Descartes to build the new city. Hobbes, a geometrician and friend of Descartes, was also secretary to the Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon. According to Hobbes, the geometer king would make the space of the city to cohere in a manner similar to the axioms of geometry. Within the geometric mathesis of the city, a person might withstand the violence of the state of nature, where life “is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”3 It seems to me that it was Hobbes’ motif of survival against the state of nature that would take a more Victorian and romantic turn in Darwin’s natural selection, such that Hobbesian political philosophy helped to shape Darwinian biology. John Locke, a physician, thought of himself as a natural philosopher (that is to say, a scientist), yet we think of him as a political philosopher. For instance as a scientist, we find him speaking of primary qualities in An Essay concerning Human Understanding, which are properties or powers inherent in objects. Reason and liberty are powers, properties, of human being.4 And in the Second Treatise of Government, he states that men band together in society “for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates,” which he calls “by the general Name, Property.”5 In both his natural philosophy and his political philosophy, much hangs on the ideas of properties and powers. Properties adhere closely to the essence of things, including humankind. As he notes, “man . . . hath by Nature a Power . . . to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate.”6 Life is a property of human being; liberty is a property of human being. Still, for me, the one figure we have not dealt with is someone who predates all of these figures—namely, Francis Bacon, the father of modern empiricism. Bacon was also a political operative his entire life.7 I want to draw our attention to Bacon not because he gives us a new inductive science , a new empirical science, though surely this is true. I shall argue that the stance he takes to nature transforms early modern philosophy into techno-science even before robust technological innovation had begun. In other words, rather than his being the father of the new, inductive method for the acquisition of new knowledge, it was instead the stance that he took to nature that transformed science. This form of techno-science— knowledge that can do things—comes to shape the recent research into things like moral formation, all with an eye to controlling human virtue and vice. In short, I shall conclude with Heidegger that modern science is 162 Jeffrey P. Bishop really techno-science, knowledge that does technological work. It seems that human beings become the raw material for a better, more moral polis. Bacon on Knowledge of Physics and Metaphysics Before getting to Francis Bacon, I need, with the assistance of Simon Oliver, to provide some background. In a thoroughgoing historical and conceptual analysis...