Puerta del cielo (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 293 and public virtue can be developed, thereby enabling modern man to steer clear of self-destruction and "the gods' revenge." Prof. Weinberger ends his study of the Advancement where Bacon concludes, though hinting that he may have another project in the works to pursue this theme to Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, for all of whom the project of modernity is seen to entail inherently political issues not truly controllable by the kinds of scientific and technical principles toward which modernity has been striving. The argument is detailed , moves from classical Greek and Roman sources to Bacon's own text and back, and introduces a novel set of interpretive categories which themselves require study (perhaps they were developed out of earlier suggestions by Leo Strauss in his 1964 The CityandMan). But a first reading already suggests a number of lines of inquiry opening in Bacon's political work, and its ties with his more renowned work in natural philosophy . Prof. Weinberger does not relate his argument to recent studies of Bacon's logic, theory of nature, philosophy of science, or jurisprudence; so it is difficult to see, for example, to what extent Bacon's "enigmatical method" is akin to Plato's notion of the "second-best" method in Meno, Ramus's dialectical logic, Montaigne's "word in a corner ," or such more recent versions of that phrase as are found in the works of Strauss. Since quite a lot of Weinberger's case about the ironic of the Advancement hinges on what can be gleaned from what Bacon does not say, it would have been helpful to compare Bacon to his near contemporaries on the revival of Plato's approach to hypothesis as a response to the cr/se pyrrhon/enne, which slammed the door on claims that we could proceed toward knowledge by way of the "first-best" method of direct and immediate intuition of apodictic first principles. Along the same lines, it is not clear whether Prof. Weinberger understands Bacon's reference to "the secret science" as a reference to those insights which Plato and Montaigne both maintained cannot be verbalized, or as referring to the Hermetic tradition which has been explored so fruitfully by Frances Yates and others. The variety and strength of each of these three studies, differing significantly in topic and philosophical import as they do, suggests that a vigorous renewal of Bacon research is under way. Future work will benefit from study of each of them; a brief review of all three shows both provocative new directions and no early synthesis of Bacon's many-faceted and lifelong undertaking to found learning more solidly, benefit the human race and avoid the social and personal madnesses he associated with all species of dogmatism. CRAIG WALTON University of Nevada, Las Vegas Abraham Cohen de Herrera. Puerta del c/do. Edici6n, Estudios y Notas de Kenneth Krabbenhoft. Madrid: Fundaci6n Universitaria, Espafiola, 1987. Pp. 269. Paper, NP. Abraham Cohen de Herrera, t 570?-1635, was the most philosophical expositor of the Lurianic Kabbala. In this work, his masterpiece, he undertook (as the editor, Krabben- ~94 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:2 APRIL I990 holt, puts it) "no less a task than the reconciliation of the Kabbala of his time with pagan Platonism and Neo-Platonism, with Renaissance hermeticism and gnosticism and with Christian theology" (1l). The work was published in a Hebrew abridgement in 1655, and in a Latin rendition of the Hebrew in 1677 in the Kabbala Denudata. The latter version made the work well known among the general European philosophical, theological and theosophical audiences from the late seventeenth century to the era of the German idealists, and it is probably the waythe non-Jewish world got its best understanding of what the new Kabbalistic theory of Isaac Luria was all about. Thinkers from Leibniz to Schelling knew Herrera's presentation. He was reviled in nineteenth-century Jewish studies of the Kabbala for mixing general philosophy and Kabbala together. Some attacked him for being too philosophical; some for being too irrational in taking the Kabbalistic ideas seriously. Spinoza scholars for over fifty years have wondered whether Spinoza got part of his theory from...