CHAPTER
12
Christiane Frey
The sun, the moon, the loadstone, the elephant, quicksilver, the letter ‘S’: such things, Bacon tells us in the second book of his Novum Organum, are not “like others,” but only sui similes – similar only to themselves (Bacon 2004: II, xxviii).1 Bacon calls them “monadic instances” and distinguishes them from instantiae conformes, which can be subsumed under general categories. The monadic instances are as unique as they are singular – or rather, as Bacon makes clear, they appear to be so. For ultimately, every such “irregularity or singularity” may be found to derive from an, as yet unidentified, commonality. Singularities are not monstrosities; they do not simply fall out of the order of things.2 If they can be “reckoned among nature’s miracles,” their ultimate “purpose” (usus) is heuristic: namely to challenge the natural philosopher to refine both his powers of subsumption and the acuity of his perception. For “the miracle may consist in the end only in fine differences, an unusual gradation, or an unusual concourse, and not in the species itself” (II, xxviii). Singularity, in other words, is for Bacon not so much a property of things, an ontological category of what is unique or exceptional in itself, as an effect certain things make on the observer at a certain point in time. It exists only in the subjunctive, in the “may” of what “may consist in the end” not in an irreducible exceptionality – “in the species itself” – but in a simple, if unusual, gradation or concourse of properties.
Bacon’s construal of singularity as the merely heuristically unique of what is “as if” without genus invites us to focus on singularity independent of the question of its subsumability. This perspective is adopted here. At issue are the singularia in what one might call an extra-logical sense: the singulars that can be described while the attempt to subsume them is held in abeyance—that have yet to be categorized or logically subordinated as so many “singularities” or “particularities.”3 The relationship of these singulars or particulars to the general, while never simply absent, is thus not the main concern of such an inquiry. Rather, my project is to inquire about the quality of singulars, about the history of their character – and in so doing to pursue a line of inquiry first set out by Michel Serres in Hermès II (Serres 1972).4 The focus is less on the dynamic that obtains between singularities and generalities than on what one might call the development of their physiognomy: less on the respect accorded to singularia than on the aspect they assume.
Why such a project would do well to begin with Francis Bacon’s best-known work, his Novum Organum (1620), seems obvious. Bacon has long been characterized as the great advocate of particulars, and he is still seen by many as the father of modern empiricism. In saying this, however, we already encounter a difficulty that needs to be addressed at the outset. Without a doubt, Francis Bacon stands at the threshold of what will, in retrospect, appear as the great rehabilitation of singularities in the history of knowledge. But to view him as an empiricist, as someone who was primarily concerned with observing and gathering particular instances, is a misapprehension. Bacon’s method is clearly not a simple empiricism. Typically, scholars have tried to do justice to this complexity by describing his method as a kind of mediation between the particular and the general, as an “alliance between the experimental and rational” (Hacking 1983: 248).5 While this is certainly an improvement over the older view, it has the disadvantage that the two terms Bacon is said to mediate between remain abstract. The assumption is that both sides of the opposition, the “singular things” on the one hand and the laws or axioms on the other, the singularia and the generalia, remain what they are in the process of Bacon’s “mediation” between them. Indeed, if we grasp them as the mere terms of a relation – and this is how the logical opposition between the particular and the general forces us to think of them – then there is no alternative but to take them as constants. But doing so risks missing a key effect of Bacon’s method: namely that what might appear at first as a mediation is, in fact, a process from which neither term, but the singularities in particular, emerges unchanged.6
The goal of the following is thus to show that the effect of Bacon’s “new organon,” the experimental method as he envisions it, is not just the acquisition of new scientific knowledge, but the production of a new kind or quality of singulars or particulars. It is an effect we can observe, as will be seen in what follows, both on the level of Bacon’s argumentation and of the language in which it is framed: the metaphors and narrative schemes Bacon relies on to describe the revolutionary effect of his new method.
Two deficiencies
At a central point in the first book of his Novum Organum, Bacon clarifies his proposal for a new scientific method by means of a telling comparison. This is the oft-cited Aphorism XCV, which, given its significance for the remarks that follow, is quoted here in its entirety, both in the original Latin and in translation. As often as this passage has been read in the past, it still repays – as we will see in a moment – close attention:
Qui tractaverunt Scientias, aut Empirici, aut Dogmatici fuerunt. Empirici, formicae more, congerunt tantum & utuntur; Rationales, aranearum more, telas ex se conficiunt; Apis vero ratio media est, quae materiam ex floribus horti & agri elicit, sed tamen eam propria facultate vertit & digerit. Neque absimile Philosophiae verum opificium est; quod nec Mentis viribus tantum aut praecipue nititur, neque ex Historia Naturali & Mechanicis Experimentis praebitam materiam, in Memoria integram, sed in Intellectu mutatam & subactam reponit. Itaque ex harum facultatum (Experimentalis scilicet, & Rationalis) arctiore & sanctiore foedere (quod adhuc factum non est) bene sperandum est.7
Those who have dealt with the sciences have either been empirics or dogmatists. The empirics, in the manner of the ant, only store up and use things; the rationalists, in the manner of spiders, spin webs from their own entrails; but the bee takes the middle path: it collects its material from the flowers of field and garden, but its special gift is to convert and digest it. The true job of philosophy is not much different, for it depends not only or mainly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the material gathered from natural history and mechanical experiments and store it unaltered in the memory but lays it up in the intellect changed and elaborated. Therefore, from a closer and purer alliance (not so far achieved) of these two faculties (the experimental and the rational) we should have good hopes. (I, xcv)
As already indicated, Bacon does not argue that knowledge should be based solely on the observation of particular instances. Instead, what he envisions seems to be a kind of marriage or mediation – a bringing together of the particular and the general, experience and abstraction, collection and theory building. The urge to collect, the passage seems to suggest, is put under the tutelage of reason, which tames the unruly individual things with its axioms. Conversely, reason’s tendency to speculative flight is grounded, as it were, by submitting it to the need for data. The product is then sweet honey. Bacon’s tone here is more euphoric than in perhaps any of his other aphorisms: if scientists would only pursue this “closer and purer alliance” of empiricism and reflection and emulate the ways of the bee, then bene sperandum est, then nothing will block the path of scientific progress.
But despite this seductive image of a golden mean, on closer analysis it is not entirely clear how we are to understand what Bacon is proposing. The middle way he has in mind lies between two equally deficient modes of generating knowledge – that of the ants and that of the spiders. Neither of these unsightly insects stands high in the esteem of the age. Indeed, Bacon’s intent is not simply to fault the ant-like empiricists and the spider-like rationalists for being one-sided, or to suggest that overcoming their faults could be achieved by combining the two approaches. As is well known, Bacon’s critique goes deeper.8 It concerns what he sees as the (postlapsarian) condition of human understanding – a fundamental limitation in man’s access to knowledge.
Hence, what Bacon faults the empiricists for is not just that they do nothing but collect particulars, nor that they neglect to use reason in ordering and interpreting them, but that they unthinkingly assume they can even rely on their senses. One would expect those who have made it their business to focus on and collect particulars to be able to observe them. But for Bacon, the senses are unreliable and the source of grave errors: “by far the greatest hindrance and distortion (aberratio) of the human intellect stems from the dullness, inadequacy and unreliability of the senses” (I, l). It is not just that the senses can deceive and make things appear differently than they are, but that they are notoriously “weak” and easy to distract from what is essential. By essential, Bacon does not mean the general truths of the philosophers, but the things of the natural world itself and which cannot always be directly perceived. Phenomena such as “ordinary air,” for example, are not readily available to the senses. The tendency to focus on what can be directly perceived rather than on what is essential – to confuse important with unimportant particulars – cannot be remedied by “instruments for amplifying and sharpening the senses.” Instead of providing a corrective, such instruments merely compound the deficiency of the senses, which are “prone to error” (I, l). Not just general truths, but the particulars of nature themselves are thus initially beyond the reach of human knowledge. In his postlapsarian state, man is simply incapable of discerning particulars and assessing their relative importance on the basis of what he thinks he has observed. He thus errs on the most basic level of his striving for knowledge: the sensory perception of individual things in nature.
As little as the senses can be trusted, the faculty of understanding is no less a source of error: “The human intellect is carried away to abstraction,” Bacon warns, for it rushes pell-mell to general conclusions with insufficient cause. Instead of grasping things “in flux,” it pretends (fingit) that they are “fixed” and unchanging. It sees generalities everywhere and fools itself that these “fictions of the … mind” have brought it closer to natural truth (I, li). Instead of “dissecting” nature, it pursues general concepts; instead of observing matter (materia) and its “pure act,” it builds castles in the air. For “the human intellect is constitutionally prone to supposing that there is more order and equality in things than it actually finds. For though there are many things monadic in nature and quite unlike anything else (natura … plena imparitatis), the intellect nevertheless counterfeits parallels, correspondences and relatives which do not exist” (I, xlv). The mind thus tends to find rules and order where there are none: where it sees parallels, connections, and correspondences, nature offers in fact diversities and heterogeneities. The faculty of thought from which one might hope to impose order on myriad particulars of nature is no more trustworthy than the knowledge of those particulars themselves.9
How then, one wonders, is the scientist, with his all-too-human and all-too-deficient equipment, to gain knowledge from the combination of two defective faculties? If he isn’t even able to perceive the particulars that really matter, what good will it do him to analyze them? And if he is unfit to draw reliable general conclusions, how useful can his collection of particulars be to him? As we know from Aristotelian dialectic: whatever follows from an initial error can only compound it.
The way of the bee
This question becomes all the more urgent when we turn our attention to the figurative mode of expression in the above-quoted passage, which opens up even further the abyss between the two false ways of the spiders and ants, both depicted as unworthy nuisances, and the glorious way of the noble bee. Bacon’s insect allegory can draw on a cultural treasury of established topoi to emphasize this contrast. The ant is often dismissed as a stupidly industrious insect – Seneca characterizes its activity as a “busy idleness” – that collects, as Horace has it, “quodcumque,” anything and everything.10 Figuratively, it can then come to stand for anyone who merely accumulates material indiscriminately – ignorant peasants or small-minded philosophers alike.11 For its part, the spider is seen as a base worm that spins webs out of its own entrails – and does so to catch nothing but “vilia animalia.”12 Its figurative application to the philosopher dates to at least the thirteenth century: like the spider, the logician or scholastic philosopher spins arguments out of his own mind that bear on nothing but trifles and useless sophismata.13 The bee, by contrast, is commonly seen as a literally “wonderful” if not “divine” species.14 The qualities attributed to this miraculous creature set it apart – particularly from the vile ants and spiders.15 Already in Pliny’s classification of insects, “the chief place belongs to the bees,” (1983: 439). For instead of spinning insidious webs, the bee produces “that sweetest and most refined and most health-giving of juices” (sucumque dulcissimum atque subtilissimum ac saluberrimum) (438–39).16
It thus comes as no surprise that as an allegorical figure, the bee can represent a nobler personage than the small-minded philosopher or logician: namely the poet. Like the bee, the poet brings together selected materials to create something new and original – hence the notion of the “florilegium.” “The analogy of the poet … with the bee, who gathers from blossoms to create its honey, is one of the oldest, if not the oldest of images for the poet.”17 Among the most often cited sources for this simile is Seneca’s 84th letter to Lucilius, in which he recommends the bee as a model for men of letters such as Lucilius and himself:
We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading…. [T]hen, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, … we should so blend those various libations into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, is nevertheless clearly a different thing from that whence it came. This is what we see nature doing in our own bodies without any effort on our part…. So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature – we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged…. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power.
Seneca (1920) 25118
The bee resembles the poet on two levels: it elects its nutrition with care; and it transforms what it collects into a superior product. Whether the bee is capable of doing this because of its miraculous breath or other secret qualities of its digestive organs remains as mysterious as the creative process of composing poetry.19 This, too, supports the analogy with the poet, still in use in Bacon’s time.
In taking up connotations commonly associated with the three insects, Bacon himself could be said to operate, as it were, like a bee. He does not merely collect and reproduce the established figurative values, but transforms them into something different: for now the bee stands not for the poet but the scientist, in Bacon’s terminology: the true philosopher of nature. It is the scientist who produces something new from carefully selected materials. He is thus placed on a distinctly higher level – one that puts him at a still greater distance from the “ants” and “spiders.”20 If we follow the threads of Bacon’s allegory more closely, we can see that even while it relies on the established tropes, it widens the gap between the bee and its two inferior cousins through a variety of means.
For one, Bacon uses different verbs to describe the activity of collection in ants and in bees. What the ants do is congerere: to “collect”, but also to “heap up”; the cognate congeries is a “heap”, “pile”, “mass”, or even “chaos. ” The ants, in Bacon’s imaginary, are thus less collectors than greedy hoarders. Bacon’s bees, by contrast, operate selectively from the start. The squalid earth in which the ants rummage about is contrasted with the fresh and beautiful flowers from which the bees collect their bounty. And the “collection” the bees engage in is of a very different nature: Bacon calls it an elicere – a luring forth or bringing out. Elicere can also mean to ascertain or investigate. Synonyms in Latin include demere and excerpere, to “take out”, to “sample”, or to “pick out” – the basic structure of the “example,” something “taken out” of a larger whole that shows its properties.21 These are all actions that follow on a prior act of deliberation and selection.22
Nor is the bee’s production described in the same terms as the spider’s. The bee’s production is a digere – a word commonly translated as a “digesting,” overlooking the more important literal sense of “separating,” “dissolving,” “dividing into parts.” Strictly speaking, “digere” is to analyze;23 only when “carried over” into the figurative realm – in a kind of reverse metaphorization – does digere come to mean to “digest.” Synonyms of digere include detrahere, deducere, purgare (i.e. forms of purification, or in ordinem redigere: to array, to record and organize in an orderly fashion). The abstract senses carry still more refined connotations: “to clarify,” “to explain,” or even – in the sense of the analogy with the poet – to read with care or to compose poetry.24 The activity of a poet who does not merely imitate but internalizes what he reads in order to bring forth something one of a kind can still be figured in the sixteenth century as a kind of digere; in this way too he is like a bee, who produces something exquisite by means of digestion.25 Now, when Bacon compares the scientist to a bee, all of these semantic registers are in play: the scientist, like the poet, is involved in bringing about something new; at the same time, the production of this miraculous sucus is achieved through a process of clarification and purification. This is reflected in Bacon’s understanding – the details of which we still need to examine more closely – that classifying and recording in lists represent a process that purifies the mind and thereby produces something that was not there before.
The figurative expressions Bacon employs thus make one thing overly clear: the bee does not simply unite the positive qualities of the ants (the ability to observe and to collect) with the positive qualities of the spiders (the ability to produce something). Instead, the bee collects very differently from the ants and processes very differently from the spiders. To speak of a “middle way” here misses the mark – particularly if what is meant by that term is some kind of synthesis or balance between two extremes.
Science as prosthesis
It is with added urgency, then, that we return to the question posed above: if the new method is not – despite Bacon’s stated intent – an “alliance” between empiricism and rationalism, what is it then? Behind Bacon’s conciliatory rhetoric of the middle way lies not a harmonious marriage but what can only be described as the emergence of a third term with its own qualities – qualities it shares with neither of the other terms and which, therefore, cannot be derived from them. In this sense, Bacon’s “ratio … media” is precisely not a middle way, but the introduction of something new: a new medium in the sense of a means. If the human faculties are unable on their own to recover from the epistemic fall into error, then they will need some sort of artifice – a kind of crutch or lever – that they can use to pull themselves up.26 This is precisely the function Bacon attributes to the novum organum, the new tool. Aristotle had compared the hand, the organon of the body, to the understanding as the organon of the soul (1998: 269 [Problemata Physica 955b]). Extending this analogy still further, Bacon calls for a third, new organon – one at once more dependable than the body with its distractible senses, while also providing greater leverage than the understanding with its fallible abstractions.
In the second book of his Novum Organum, Bacon demonstrates how such a new organon might function, using as his example the phenomenon of heat. The inquiry he envisions would proceed in three stages. First one compiles a “table of existence and presence” (II, xi), then a “table of divergence, or of closely related absences” (II, xii), and finally a “table of degrees or table of comparison” (II, xiii). The three tables are compiled in succession and then compared with one another. With this procedure, the immanent form we call “heat” will emerge by noting where heat is present but not necessarily visible or perceptible and by eliminating cases in which one seems to perceive heat when it is not, in fact, present (II, xii). Only at the very end does one arrive by elimination at a definitive list of instances of heat (II, xiii). From this deliberately laborious procedure – which would earn the derision of later scientists such as Justus von Liebig (1863) – we discover that the form we refer to as heat is “motion”: “Heat is an expansive motion … that tends to rise upwards” (II, xx).27 Bacon arrives at this definition on the basis of the fact – which he shows only fragmentarily – that once all the lists have been compiled, what is left are instances of heat in which motion is present, whereas the instances without motion, even if they first appeared to be kinds of heat, have all been eliminated.
Contrary to what has frequently been suggested, the use of physical experiments is not central to this method. In the course of his tabulations, Bacon does sometimes recommend experiments, such as holding a magnifying glass against the sunlight to investigate its warmth. But the experiment is in fact only one part of a comprehensive procedure in which writing is the essential technical feature (see e.g. Jardine 1990). Everything has to be painstakingly noted down and ordered in lists. The method, as Bacon acknowledges, is demanding and labor-intensive, but not complicated. Indeed, he sees it as idiot-proof: it assumes no particular talent on the part of the naturalist. It is, Bacon says on occasion, a “machine of induction.” The metaphor of the machine suggests not only that Bacon’s procedure takes on mechanical characteristics. It shows as well that it is not a “middle way,” but a learnable technique – a newly developed method of intervention. It is a kind of new prosthesis man needs if he has any hope of attaining certain knowledge.
Two things must be kept in mind to understand the function of this new prosthetic organon. First, the organon is not, as one might think, a kind of prolegomenon, a corrective applied initially to overcome man’s postlapsarian faults that can then be left behind once the process of gaining knowledge is put on firmer ground. Rather, the technique of discovery – for example, of the form we refer to with the word “heat” – requires a continual purification of the mind. For “when left to its own devices, the mind is not even capable of asking the right questions” (Kim 2008: 190). What is called for is both a preparation for the scientific procedure (the concern of Book I) as well as constant practice and exercise (as modeled in Book II). The exercises “fortify the intellect against custom” (II, xix); at the same time, they are themselves the tools the natural philosopher should use to carry out his inquiry in the ongoing endeavor to overcome his shortcomings.
Secondly, this organon cannot be entirely explained by means of what we are accustomed to call induction. Induction implies a procedure of scientific discovery that begins with observation and gradually rises to the level of general conclusions. It is true that Bacon himself frequently describes his method in these terms. We can also imagine within this model that the process can be repeated, passing from particular to general and back, and from here to new generalities – “zigzagging,” as it were, “between the universal and the particular” (Daston and Park 1998: 224). This, too, accords with many of Bacon’s explicit statements. At several junctures he describes how the scientific method should pass from particulars to axioms and from these to new particulars. But while these statements accord well with what I have been calling Bacon’s “rhetoric of mediation,” they do not, in fact, accurately characterize the process Bacon demonstrates. An “induction” would necessarily depend on the senses as natural sources of trustworthy observation prior to the corrective of the kind of computational system Bacon models with his series of tables. And it would also set out from or begin with particulars. The concept of induction only makes sense – and can only be distinguished from deduction – on the basis of this origin and this order: particulars first, generalities to follow. But in the method Bacon models for us, the beginning or the origin is, as it were, eclipsed. And this eclipse of the beginning of the process is, in fact, essential for its functioning.28 Since nature cannot supply the mind with reliable “naked particulars” by means of the senses, it would make no sense to begin with the (allegedly observable) “instances” as the first building blocks of knowledge.
Instead, what Bacon suggests – one has to start somewhere – is to set out with what is, in fact, a chaotic list of observations and opinions in no particular order, “however disparate the materials may be” (II, xi) – that is, with what one thinks one knows. Hence, the first list arbitrarily includes not just observable instances of heat, but also general statements about the nature of warmth as well as what seems to be at the opposite remove from concrete data, namely possible causes. This is not an oversight. Contrary to what one might expect – and to our all-too-common image of Bacon – he does not begin by collecting particulars onto the blank slate of the new method. Rather, as has been recently pointed out (Kim 2008: 184–196), Bacon acknowledges the need to take previous opinion into account. He proceeds in the Novum Organum along the lines he had previously explained in De Augmentis:
With regard to the dogmas of the ancient philosophers, … it will not be amiss to look upon them somewhat more modestly … [But i]n the meantime it will be good to peruse the several differing systems of philosophy, like different glosses of nature.
Bacon (1848) 358–359; see also 368–369
Hence, the process sets out from everyday experiences and from unproven opinions from the tradition of natural philosophy. This procedure is similar to Aristotle’s collection of legomena, of widely accepted opinions (Kim 2008: 189). In Bacon, these opinions are then rejected or substantiated by means of the list procedure and of experiments.
The process by which knowledge is generated thus always entails an ongoing correction of the apparatus on which it depends. Rather than a passage from given particulars to discovered generalities, it is a technique of submitting both the observations of an unpracticed eye and the opinions of a prematurely conclusive mind to an acid test – a test that will for the first time produce those particulars and axioms that are needed for the knowledge of natural truth.29 The problem of how the combination of two deficiencies can provide a sure method of science is thus not solved but made to disappear. The method begins with neither of the two deficient faculties of the mind. It constitutes a third instance, a new and artificial means of generating knowledge. It is neither a middle way nor a complement; neither is it synthesis. Rather, the new organon is an ongoing invention of prostheses.
Changing singularities
The result is that singulars (as well as axioms) do not remain what they were. They do not emerge from the “acid test” of the new method unchanged. But what exactly is the effect of this process on their character? I would like now to try to arrive at a more exact description of the new particulars that are supplied by the novum organum.
At no point does Bacon actually say that, under the influence of his procedure, the particularia have changed their character. But the language he uses to describe the “nature” his method reveals tells another story. Let us recall the bee: unlike the ant, she collects not just anything, quodcumque, but a specific kind of thing, the flower’s pollen and the nectar from which she makes honey. Already at the level of collection, the bee exercises a kind of discrimination, an appreciation for nature’s smallest and most subtle instances. In a jab at speculative dialectic, Bacon writes that “axioms formed by argumentation cannot be good at all for the discovery of new results, because the subtlety of nature far surpasses the subtlety of argumentation” (I, xxiv). The old opposition between the lowly particulars and the noble laws of nature are reversed: not just the human mind, not just its axioms are subtle, but nature is too; indeed, in its particularity nature is finer than any universal axiom. In short: those who rush to arrive at general laws err not just because they do not collect enough particulars before proceeding, but because the particulars they collect are too coarse. Hence, Bacon’s singularia are different or are made to be different in that they are more subtle, smaller and finer.30
They are also, as it were, more alive. Again, the metaphor of the bee is telling: bees concern themselves not, as do the ants, with the inert material of the earth, but with living and fertile blossoms. They never “settle even on dead flowers, let alone dead bodies,” Pliny observes (1983: 445). Analogously, Bacon’s new particularities are – figuratively speaking – alive and fruitful. When it engages in abstract thought, Bacon remarks critically, the human mind “pretends that things which are in flux are unchanging” (I, li). Therefore, the natural philosopher should rather “study matter” in its “structural change,” its “motion” and its “pure act.” Bacon’s particulars are thus in constant motion; indeed, they exist in the mode of this “pure act.” The forms that Bacon’s method reveals, once they have been discovered, do not take on a value of their own – they are not the form of “truth” in the sense of Plato’s ideas – but have their value only in their reference to the living movement of things. Bacon’s singularities are thus teaming, unpredictable, and subject to constant change. That the particular is subject to change while the general remains constant is of course nothing new. But this alterability of the accidental had traditionally been associated with death: particulars were transient and mortal, the general was eternal. Bacon stands this imagery on its head by attributing life to the particulars precisely in their inconstancy.
And finally, the particulars – as odd as this may sound – become more singular. Because the understanding tends to impute to nature “a greater order … than it finds” (I, xlv), it continually misses the diversity of nature or the “richness of being” (Feyerabend 1999). The corollary is that “there are many things in nature which are unique and full of disparities.” Nature, in other words, consists of dissimilar things that the senses cannot perceive and of those “remote and heterogeneous instances” the understanding will not be bothered to seek out (I, xlvii, see also xlvi). Accordingly, the novum organum is in large measure a means of gaining the time needed for the senses to perceive the diversity of nature’s singular forms. The elaborate notation techniques Bacon describes in the second book of the Novum Organum are in part designed to detect the countless things that do not fit into general laws, to track them down in their singularity. This does not mean, of course, that these heterogeneities may not eventually, when knowledge has made sufficient progress, find their place in the great order of things (see e.g. Daston and Park 1998: 227–228). In the meantime, however, they remain unsubjected to general laws. And the new method, as we have seen, is in essence an ongoing process, a work in progress, a procedure whose time is always, as it were, a meantime.31 In this time of the organum, the particulars show themselves in a singularity that is more than simply a task for the understanding’s work of abstraction.
That the things of knowledge take on a new aspect under the influence of the novum organum is not to say that the organon constructs them or that it produces something that does not belong to nature. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that in the new organon, artifice and nature coincide. Kuhn is certainly right when he observes that Bacon’s experimental method “constrains nature, exhibiting it under conditions which it could never have attained without the forceful intervention of man” (Kuhn 1976: 12).32 But the artificial production of new singularia does not detract from their naturalness. If they are, in Blumenberg’s happy phrase, “coaxed” (abgelistet) from nature with great art (2013: 38), and if they allow for the production of something new and artificial, they are still particularities of nature.
Conclusion
Singularia, then, do not just enter into different relations with generalities; they can also undergo a change in character. This does not just mean that the objects of knowledge change or that “facts” have a history. Rather, it means that the singularia or particularia – even though the concept of the singular would not seem to admit of degrees – can be at times more or less singular: more or less heterogeneous, more or less constant or changing, more or less alive, larger or smaller, coarser or more subtle. These differences result from the way in which the production of knowledge is figured and narratively framed. Bacon’s “subtle” and “protean” particulars are “concealed” and must be “lured” out of their hiding places. Science is what “drives” these singularities from their concealment – causing them to emerge anew. In Bacon, the singularia take on not just a new value in the hierarchy of knowledge, but in accordance with the logic of Bacon’s figural language, a new physiognomy as well.
Endnotes
*I thank David Martyn and Alice Christensen for their help in preparing the English-language version of this text.
1Citations of the Novum Organum are to Bacon (2004); the first number identifies the book, the second the aphorism. I have sometimes modified the translation.
2Indeed, even monstrosities in Bacon are not per se outside of the order of things. See Bacon (II, xxix).
3Hence, for the purposes of this chapter, I will not distinguish between these two terms.—The approach adopted here is related to and yet independent of the scholarly interest in “things” that has grown exponentially in recent years, in part in an endeavor to move beyond the opposition between materialism and idealism. For a particularly insightful essay on the topic – by an author perhaps not among the usual suspects – see Laruelle (2013).
4Serres’s formative work, of course, predates the recent interest in “things” by several decades; its potential to provide the discussion with greater historical and epistemological depth has yet to be adequately exploited. Useful for understanding Serres’s approach are the more programmatic statements in Serres (1972, 1980, 1990).
5Several scholars have argued for one form or another of such a mediation thesis. Rossi presented it in 1984; see also Engfer (1996) 33–54, or, from the perspective of social theory but with reference to Bacon, Hollis (1994) 67–93. As early as 1976, however, Seifert argued both that Bacon’s method is best understood as occupying a “middle ground” between empiricism and rationalism – and that this was anything but new at the time (Seifert 1976: 119).
6As should become clear in what follows, the change I have in mind is neither a new interest in the “monstrous” (Daston and Park 1998), nor a prehistory of objectivity; or in an emerging image of the “naked fact” (Daston 1991).
7In accordance with common practice, the early-modern Latin forms have been standardized.
8See e.g. Farrington (1964); Jardine (1974); Krohn (1987); Gaukroger (2001); Feyerabend (2009) 280–287; Groh (2010) 388–447; Bunia (2011). This list is limited to studies useful for a critical assessment of Bacon’s critique of knowledge acquisition. Most relevant to my purposes are the chapters on Bacon in Feyerabend’s posthumously published, German-language manuscript on the history of the philosophy of nature and Dieter Groh’s last study on divine world economy.
9Of course, Bacon’s critique of the human faculties of observing and understanding does not stop here. But this limited sketch should suffice in this context.
10In De tranquillitate animi XII.3 Seneca compares the course of those who fail to make a plan for their lives to “that of ants [qualis formicis] crawling among bushes …; many men lead a life similar to the way of the ants, which one may not unjustly call ‘busy idleness’ [inquietam inertiam],” Seneca (2006) 262–263. The idea that ants collect anything and everything is found in Horace’s Satires (1.1.33): “magni formica laboris ore trahit quodcumque potest atque addit acervo,” Horace (2005) 6. For further references, see “Ameise” in the Thesaurus Proverbiorum (1995) 102–105.
11See Fumaroli (2001) 216–218.
12See, for example, the chapter on “spiders” in the Physiologicus Theobaldi, as well as Saxus Grammaticus (471, 24), where we find the following commentary: “Nam araneam eum emulari dicebat, que, telarum figmentis … viscerum suorum egestione consertis, quid nisi scarrabeos putres et uilia prenderet animalia?” (He vies with the spider; for what else does a spider catch, when it … pours out its entrails to fashion figures with its webs, but rotting bugs and vile creatures?)
13As early as the twelfth century, the idea that Logicus aranee potest comparari is already common. See “Spinne” in the Thesaurus Proverbiorum (2010) 58–62; further references in Fumaroli (2001).
14See Virgil, Georgica 4.220–222, and Petronius, Satyricon 56.6.
15For a detailed analysis of the classical imagery associated with the bee and its reconfiguration in the Renaissance, with an abundance of classical and modern sources, see von Stackelberg (1956); on bees and the poetic imagination, see Hooley’s appendix (1997) 247–252, Fumaroli (2001), Bartsch (forthcoming 2015), as well as “Biene” in: Thesaurus Proverbiorum (1995) 472–478; Reallexikon (1954) 274–282; Emblemata (1996) 219–223.
16The Bible similarly praised the bee, despite its small size, as a creature whose labor has the sweetest yield (Sirach 11.3).
17See von Stackelberg (1956) 272.
18Translation slightly modified. The passage is quoted in research from von Stackelberg to Bartsch (note 15 above) to document the analogy of the poet and the bee.
19The passage continues: “It is not certain whether the juice which they obtain from the flowers forms at once into honey, or whether they change that which they have gathered into this delicious object by blending something therewith and by a certain property of their breath,” Seneca (1920) 251.
20That in Bacon’s mind the bee occupies less a middle position between the two other insects than a place of its own – Bacon’s rhetoric of the “middle way” notwithstanding – is suggested by other references to the bee in writings such as The Refutation of Philosophies in which he attributes to the bee “a faculty peculiar to herself,” Bacon (1964) 131. For further references to Bacon’s use of the bee simile, see Rossi (1984).
21On the rhetorical structure of sampling and exemplarity in the history of knowledge formations, see Martyn (2007). While I cannot pursue this line of inquiry here, the selective “elicere” of the bee could also be seen as occupying a kind of “middle ground” between the mere particulars and the law-giving “exampleless example” discussed by Peter Goodrich (in this volume).
22Other synonyms are excitare, prodere. See “elicio” in Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch (2007) 1183–1185.
23See “digero” in Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch (2007) 625–626.
24On “digestion” as a metaphor for literary imitation and reading in Roman literature, see also Bartsch (2015 forthcoming).
25On the continued popularity of this analogy in the early modern period, see Kilgour (1990) 104–107.
26That this instrument figures in Bacon’s system not as a new mix of what has come before but as something that has never before existed is made evident by the optimism Bacon attaches to it. For Bacon, what is at stake in the new organon is nothing less than a recovery of man’s lost paradise – including the lost paradise of his knowledge of nature – by man-made means, those of the “arts and sciences” (see II, lii). Blumenberg attributes an epochal significance to this development in a key chapter of The Legitimacy of the Modern World (1973) 191–200 – an assessment that Groh, to be sure, would reject (2010: 405–411).
27Bacon’s difficult concept of form deserves more detailed treatment than I can give it here.
28In Fleck’s terms: “No matter where or when we take up our work, we are … never at the beginning of the process of knowledge,” Fleck (1929) 425; translation mine.
29Hence, Bacon insists on the need for “heterogeneous instances” to “test axioms as in a fire” (I, xlvii).
30This is all the more interesting given that Serres’s work on the changing character of singular “things” has used a quite different set of metaphors to frame their historicity. In “Interférence objective: Ce qui est écrit sur la table rase,” Serres begins by focusing on the “chose solide”: “revenir aux choses : que sonst elles? Volumineux, solides, résistants, antitypique,” Serres (1972) 67–126, here 72, 77.
31To be sure, Bacon assumes throughout that science will be perfected when it has restored the kind of knowledge man possessed before the fall. But the method itself is clearly envisioned from within the temporal perspective of this “meantime” that it is designed to overcome. It is not always easy to grasp how Bacon envisions the future use of his method given his rhetoric of “overcoming” human deficiencies and of “restoration” of the lost holistic and unmediated vision of things. For particularly helpful commentary on this aspect of Bacon’s theory, see Groh (2010) 405–408.
32The significance of Bacon’s use of such metaphors as “pressure,” “trial,” or “inquisition” for the history of the modern self-understanding of the sciences has been explored by Blumenberg, e.g. (2013) 38–42. How we are to understand this “drive” for putting nature to a “test” and to torture is insightfully analyzed by Ronell (2005).
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