Francis Bacon rarely discusses the human good explicitly—the only obvious exception being a serpentine and difficult treatment in The Advancement of Learning (2.xx–xxii; or De Augmentis Scientiarum 7.1–3). That treatment, which at first seems to be a defense of the active life in the name of the common good, proves upon closer inspection to be a defense of the contemplative life in the name of the individual good.Footnote ¹ Yet this interpretation needs to be reconciled with Bacon's great efforts on behalf of the conquest of nature—a good, if it is one, that can hardly be called purely contemplative—for the sake of the relief of man's estate, a good that is certainly not merely individual. Moreover, an important step in Bacon's argument about the human good is the assertion that there is one universal appetite that fundamentally characterizes all beings (including stones!). Together with other similar claims, this attempt to understand humans by referring to a “low,” universal tendency has led scholars to argue that Bacon's “method,” his “critical epistemology” or materialism, leaves no room for understanding human life.Footnote ²

These two difficulties with my suggested interpretation of Bacon's chapters on the human good can further be seen as corresponding to the practical and the theoretical sides of Bacon's famous project. It may be reasonable, then, in trying to gain access to Bacon's ultimate judgments and their basis, to begin with the most obvious fact about him: his project to conquer nature for the relief of man's estate. And while that project may indeed be intertwined with a new understanding of science or philosophy, it must have been advanced in the light of his understanding of human life. At any rate, a project begun by a human being must have had a human motive.Footnote ³

In order to advance the examination of Bacon's thought on fundamental human questions, I offer as a case study the topic of love. I argue that while Bacon does not examine sympathetically the experience of falling in love, he also approaches the phenomenon of love with nonscientific or nonreductionist eyes. Having uncovered in this way what he thought was the confusion or illusion in the self-understanding of all human lovers, and having questioned thereby the genuineness or irreducibility of love, Bacon felt justified in seeking a scientific-cosmological explanation of love. This explanation, however, comes with its own difficulties, as I try to indicate in the final section below.

More broadly, I would suggest that there are perfectly realistic tendencies in Bacon's thought, that is, tendencies of engaging with the human world commonsensically, sympathetically, and from within, but also that there are extremist, homogenizingly scientific leanings in Bacon's approach. Whatever his initial motivation for the promotion of the project of progress—and I believe the initial motivation to have been of limited hopefulness—part of Bacon inclines toward restlessly throwing itself into the project and becoming bewitched with its promise. To the extent that he believes in the radical transformative power of the new science, Bacon is also ultimately affected by the new science and its premise that the distinctively human is reducible to, and negligible in the face of, universal, species-neutral, if hypothetical, principles.Footnote ⁴ The liberating promises of the new science pull Bacon's thought away from understanding this new science as a mere means and in the direction of seeing it as the path, obscure as that path may be, to genuine understanding and happiness (see the end of the section “Cosmological Eros” below).

The Order of Natural Science and Political Philosophy

In a chapter in his Spinoza's Book of Life,Footnote ⁵ Steven Smith discusses Spinoza's views on love, attempting to highlight the appreciation of eros in the thought of a modern thinker. He does this in response to the common and plausible view that most, if not all characteristically, modern philosophers are individualist and unerotic in their theories, even though one may exclude from this account theologians such as Hamann and, of course, romanticists.Footnote ⁶ Spinoza argues that “if any virtue could be conceived as prior [to the effort of self-preservation], the essence of a thing would have to be conceived as prior to itself, which is obviously absurd” (Ethics, Part 4, proposition 22 and corollary). Perhaps it is needless to mention Hobbes's doubts about the human capacity for self-sacrifice, for example; suffice it to recall his amusing description of war: “When armies fight, there is on one side, or both, a running away” (Leviathan, chap. 21). Francis Bacon himself says at one point, “Why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?” (“Of Revenge”). One might claim that, having become blinded or inattentive to, or disappointed with, love, friendship, and even natural sociality, these thinkers fail to understand the intrinsically social nature of human beings—as opposed to a sociality constructed by a mechanism such as Hume's “association of ideas” or Spinoza's “imitation of affects.” If they do not understand human beings, are we as moderns not in dire straits since we live in a world shaped by men of such distorted judgment? But did these men misunderstand human beings? Did they mistakenly consider love to be a delusion? We cannot plausibly hope to make a judgment of such gravity by looking at them as a group. This is an additional reason for examining Bacon's views on love and on the nature or character of what is deepest in us, whether it be love or not.Footnote ⁷

I will go through a number of Bacon's treatments of eros and passages bearing on his view of eros. While the career of love in Bacon's thought or writings is not one of progressively curmudgeonly disappointment, it consists nonetheless in a kind of debunking, disenchanting, or reducing of human love. Bacon begins, as a first dialectical step and not merely chronologically, with a somewhat praising presentation of human love and gradually moves to the natural-scientific understanding of eros as the universal natural motion of the atom found in all beings, animate or inanimate—a motion aiming at self-preservation. In other words, Bacon tends to begin by studying human affairs more or less on their own terms. He only turns to natural science once he has reached the conclusion that the human understanding of human experience is inadequate.Footnote ⁸ To put this last point another way, Bacon found Socrates' famous “second sailing”—his concentration on the human things as the key to all thingsFootnote ⁹—to be inadequate and believed a kind of “first sailing”—a more or less direct access to nature, if not to its ultimate reaches—to have been more promising, especially as represented, if with some qualifications, by Democritus (Advancement of Learning, book 1, chap. 5.11).Footnote ¹⁰ But Democritus, about whose thought Nietzsche thought that it was free of all mythic elements, is known to have had a gentle but significant smile on his face; and the smile is traditionally interpreted as a sign of his overcoming irrational fears and superstitions. Yet, as Bacon knew, one cannot refute and thus truly dispel irrrational human fears and superstitions unless one sees them for what they are—as something other than atoms or assemblages of atoms. So an investigation into the human things as wholes perceived by human beings was essential for Democritus, and it was essential for Bacon. That is why Bacon “interlopes” or “interposes” his “moral and political writings” (The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, the Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients) “in the order of the Instauration,” his project for reforming the sciences (letter to Fr. Fulgentio, Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, Works, 15: 533). To sum up, Bacon is only able to say that human love as ordinarily understood and experienced is an illusion after he has studied it more or less on its own terms.

The Baconian Texts on Love

I will first present another portion of the Baconian drama or masque Of Tribute, where there is a thematic discussion, and ebullient praise, of love as pure happiness, independent of the need to remedy deficiencies – a kind of love that is not, as such, an antidote against evils. It may surprise some readers that I do not begin with the more well-known, thematically related pieces in Bacon's Essays, “Of Marriage and Single Life,” “Of Love,” and “Of Friendship.” But the speech on love in “Of Tribute” is Bacon's first known treatment on love. Moreover, and more important, the Essays are sometimes explicitly debunking or cynical of love, marriage, and even friendship, other than a utilitarian kind of philosophic friendship. And, as I suggested, Bacon does not want his very starting point of investigation into these lofty human hopes and experiences to be cynical.

After attending to “Of Tribute,” I explore passages in the New Atlantis that highlight a certain moral ambiguity of love and its darker side, its relation to painful needs, as well as its connection to things sacred. I turn next to two of Bacon's Essays in which there is a direct disparagement of the human phenomenon of love. Following this presentation, I move to a fable in the Wisdom of the Ancients: “Dionysus, or Desire,” which shows the problematic character of eros while also revealing its cosmological dimension. This prepares the argument for a consideration of the fable of “Cupid, or the Atom,” once again from the Wisdom of the Ancients, where love is said to be “the natural motion of the atom.” I also rely on On Principles and Origins, which similarly treats of a cosmological eros. Raising a question about the ultimate consistency of Bacon's thought, I conclude by engaging in a speculation about the relations between Bacon's understanding of eros, his scientific-technological project, his view on death, and his conception of the deepest urge behind philosophizing.

Of Tribute

“Of Tribute” is a masque penned by Bacon in 1597 and performed in Queen Elizabeth's court. It is a drama that features four speeches of praise. The objects of praise are fortitude, love, knowledge, and Queen Elizabeth herself. One of the speeches, attributed to someone known only as C., is a praise of love as “the happiest state of mind, the highest elevation of mind, … the noblest affection.”Footnote ¹¹ The praise of love is given from the point of view of its beneficial effects on the intellect. The other virtues are “mediocrities: they are laws of the mind, they restrain it, they limit it—they raise it not, they amplify it not.” The virtues, to be sure, “polish the mind, they make it without blemish, they give it an excellent form, but commonly they take off much of the natural greatness” (ibid.). It is not at this point clear what is meant by love. With this awareness, C. proceeds to make a general statement about the passions: they “make the mind heroical, give it vigour to exceed itself and to fascinate and bind others.” Even more generally, “it is motion, therefore, that animateth all things,” and since “the affections are the motions of the mind, the virtues pray in aid of the affections.”Footnote ¹² C. says that the affection of “admiration and wondering is the life of Prudence” or philosophy, “modesty is the life of Temperance” or moderation, and “indignation is the life of Fortitude” or magnanimity. “Therefore,” he concludes this part of his speech, “among affections will I seek happiness and height of mind” (ibid.). All the while, C. recognizes that happiness is a matter of the mind and consists in the mind's best possible condition or the highest and clearest kind of awareness.

So are affections, passions, and desires all good, and can we not make a judgment on them since they are the ultimate driving forces in life? According to C., the answer is no. Next C. asks himself, “But why do I dissemble? Why do I alter and invert the true steps of my thoughts, as if the worthiness of the affections [were] a good pinnacle or seamark, seen long before a man discovereth the shore?” It turns out, all the other “affections” are “but sufferings of nature.” That is, they are passions, negative, reactive: “[T]hey seek ransoms and rescues from that which is evil.” They do not enjoy a “union with that which is good” but “seek to expel that which is contrary, not to attract that which is agreeable.” So passions such as fear, grief, bashfulness (“a thraldom to every man's conceit and countenance”), pity, desire of revenge—all these are “endeavour[s] to keep the main stock of nature, to preserve her from loss and diminution.” On the other hand, love, or the condition in which it can put us, is “not a good by comparison, but a true good; it is not an ease of pain, but a true purchase of pleasure.” C. makes it very clear that he believes in such a condition of pure pleasure, pure happiness. “As it springeth not out of ill, so it is not intermixed with ill” (ibid.). There is a good which is not essentially a drug against evils. One becomes perfectly immune to the hits of fortune, but this is just an incidental effect of the goodness of love. Love conquers all: “When two souls are joined in one, when one hath another to divide his fortune withal, no force can depress him” (ibid., 30).

This speech is preceded by another speech by someone known only as B. B. had praised fortitude, or strength of soul and mind, as the solution to the human problem, the problem of happiness; it is a particular kind of praise, sharply distinguished from a denial of the grievous character of life's vicissitudes. But now C., the praiser of the perfect condition of love, raises this objection to B., whose thought resembles that of Bacon himself. He says, as it were, “Your response to life's difficulties is indeed strong and impressive, but is this happiness?” “It giveth no feeling. It leaveth [the mind] empty.” In fact, as far as happiness goes, is not the happiness of those who are in the grip of “barbarous customs and false superstitious,” however frail that happiness is, “more easily and effectually” procured? Is philosophic courage preferable to cowardly evasions and immersions (ibid.)?

C. then goes through the lives of contemplation and ambition and shows how they point to the perfection of love. In the sequel, he has no trouble showing that love is intimately connected with the “inward and deep affection bred in the mind” of “perpetuating himself.” And he goes through a number of other activities and desires and explains how they are satisfied in love. Finally, C. ends with “Non deus ut perhibent amor est, sed amorosus et error [Love is not a god, as is claimed, but the lover himself and an error]” (ibid., 33). C., then, believes that there is a perfect condition for human beings, but denies that it has anything to do with a god or, more precisely, that it is a god. In this he is in agreement with Bacon himself who in the fable “Cupid, or the Atom” in the Wisdom of the Ancients clearly says that love (amor) is the “natural motion of the atom”; that is, it is not a god. There is a complication, however, to which I will come in due course.

The speech I have just presented is found in Of Tribute. Of Tribute is a drama that features four speeches of praise. The objects of praise are fortitude, love, knowledge, and Queen Elizabeth. The structure and content of the work suggest that the first three speeches are somewhat inadequate. They also suggest that the first three characters in the play—B., C., and D., who present their speeches in that order—do not quite represent Bacon's own views. But is Bacon then, not B., but A., the final speaker, the praiser of Elizabeth? I do not think that this makes perfect sense. One cannot simply say that “Gloriana,” “good Queen Bess,” is better than, say, fortitude or any other virtue. What makes more sense is that Elizabeth had all these virtues and more, and thus the praise of each of them is inadequate. But the characters of B., C., and D. all acknowledge that the respective virtue they praise is not the one thing needful. They argue that the virtue or affection they praise is the ground of the other necessary or good things in life. Does Elizabeth have some extra quality, perhaps some virtue or affection, that allows her to unify harmoniously in herself fortitude, love, knowledge, and so on? Or does A. want to claim that it is not some virtue or affection that makes Elizabeth great? But what then does? Unless some unstated virtue is the ground of A.'s praise of Elizabeth—perhaps something like moderation, something like what justice does in Plato's Republic—it does not make sense to say that A.'s speech altogether supersedes the first three speeches. Yet the fourth and last speech still serves the rhetorical purpose of casting enough of a shadow on the first three so that we do not take them seriously or as Bacon's own. Thus we see that even very early Bacon, while steeped in the language of love's high hopes, took a somewhat dim view of the reasonableness of those hopes. The spectators in court will have seen, of course, the praise of love more innocently than a reader who has had the chance to ponder the speech.

It is unclear, then, that Bacon himself thinks that there is such a perfect human condition, let alone that love provides it. Remember that, strikingly, he has C. conclude with a Latin saying the meaning of which C. must not have been conscious of, that love is an “error.” Eros becomes error. (In fact, in Mantuanus's Eclogues, Bacon's source for the saying, “amorosus” [lover] is “amaror” [bitterness].) Love, to be sure, yearns for such a perfect condition, perhaps more clearly and explicitly than anything else we experience. But there are many kinds of love. That Bacon's three kinds of love differ from both Plato's and Spinoza's already tells us something: his are nuptial, friendly, and wanton (“Of Love”). Unlike the case of Plato and Spinoza, there is no ladder of love here. Love at its highest intensity is “wanton.”

The New Atlantis on Desire

I now turn to the New Atlantis, a remarkably imaginative work that shows the greatest attractions of a super-technological society called Bensalem—attractions both to the citizens and to the scientific elite—as well as the greatest dangers, primarily for the citizens. It is a story of the seduction of a European crew into embracing the Bensalemite way of life. It is also a work that subtly shows Bacon's doubts about the possibility of genuine satisfaction through love. For this reason, I attend to this more delicate or respectful treatment before discussing the works in which Bacon spells out more explicitly his cynical view of love.

In the New Atlantis, the question of eros is approached in two related episodes. First, we have an account of a fertility festival that is the only described event that the European narrator has not attended. The festival, or Feast of Tirsan, encourages reproduction since Bensalem's population is “affected”—either negatively affected or “affected” as in “desired.” There is likely a problem of underpopulation, likely related to the comforts and activities afforded by great technological progress. The simplest clue to the core meaning of the feast is the name for the most fertile man: Tirsan, which means “timid.” Why would the most fertile and most hightly decorated ordinary citizen be “timid”? The answer, I suspect, can be found by observing the way eros is channeled. Fertility is the highest form of state-sponsored chastity. This will become clearer in the commentary on the feast by Bensalem's smartest citizen-stranger (see next paragraph). Generally, the feast seems to be an aspect of Bensalem's civil religion designed to keep most people happy and devoted to the regime. Bacon envisages science, which likely does not understand eros in a traditional way at all, as catering to the traditional consciousness of the ordinary citizen, not as directly transforming the way people see meaning in their lives. This is also indicated by the prominent role of the king. The king is otherwise not very prominent, not even a figurehead: at the end of the work, the chief scientist repeals the fundamental law of secrecy, apparently without any consultation with the king. Even within the feast, there are signs of the primacy of science: a childless descendant of a Tirsan can share pride of place with Tirsan, so long as that descendant is a scientist. But from the point of view of the ordinary citizen, the king is still the highest authority.

The second scene relevant to eros in the New Atlantis is the more general, one-on-one, and hence deeper, discussion of marital customs between the inquiring European narrator and a local named Joabin. Joabin is a Jew who combines practical and theoretical savvy and is somewhat detached from the regime he is describing (476–78).Footnote ¹³ Joabin says that, according to the Bensalemites, chastity, which is regarded by the Bensalemites as the core of or even all of virtue, is made possible only when marriage is the only sexual outlet and when it is treated primarily as a means of producing children. Joabin then raises a possible European objection to this view: prostitution and in general infidelity are necessary “to avoid greater evils, as advouteries [adulteries], deflowering of virgins, unnatural lust, and the like” (ibid.). The implicit European presupposition is that lust is so powerful a part of human nature that one must make concessions to it rather than repress it. We cannot attain perfect chastity, let alone virginity, so we have to settle for minor indiscretions lest we suffer monstrous deviations. Joabin says the Bensalemites find this a “preposterous wisdom” and that they compare it to Lot's offer from the Bible. Joabin's or Bensalem's presupposition is the opposite: “[U]nlawful lust [is] like a furnace, that if you stop the flames altogether it will quench, but if you give it any vent, it will rage” (ibid.). Weinberger has argued that the European sailors' arrival indicates that sexual lust may indeed be repressed or gradually subdued and replaced by enjoyment of comforts. The visitors, at any rate, uncharacteristically do not dare make any sexual requests upon their arrival.Footnote ¹⁴ One would still need a most repressive system, of course—law enforcement that benefits from the cutting-edge technology of Salomon's house.Footnote ¹⁵

But then Joabin reveals another Bensalemite institution, the pools of Adam and Eve. The reasoning behind this institution points in another direction. While it appears initially that Joabin or Bensalem is far more moralistic than the Europeans he tactlessly attacks, the pools of Adam and Eve show an amoral or antimoral reasoning. The institution is a modification of a practice outlined in More's Utopia (and originally in Plato's Laws) “where the married couple are permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked” (ibid. 478). In Utopia, the reasoning is stated this way: “Not all people are so wise as to concern themselves solely with character; and even the wise appreciate the gifts of the body as a supplement to the virtues of the mind” (Utopia, 81). “This they dislike,” Joabin says. “[B]ut because of many hidden defects in men and women's bodies, they have a more civil way; for they have near every town a couple of pools (which they call Adam and Eve's pools), where it is permitted to one of the friends of the man, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them severally bathe naked.” First, this passage suggests more explicitly that marriage is in great part about sex, which, to be sure, may sound trivial to us but it certainly would not sound trivial, for example, to a seventeenth-century European.Footnote ¹⁶ It recognizes the demands of lust and tries to make sure they are satisfied in marriage. The passage also suggests that the Bensalemites have gotten over their shame of their naked bodies, no matter the defects. Their innocence has been restored. Hence the name: Adam and Eve's pools. Eros is an animal sensuality that can be tamed. There is nothing mysterious about it, nothing to be ashamed of, just something to channel in the best way. Put another way, eros is a passion—reactive, passive, mechanistic. It is not a positive affection or an erotic-moral-religious desire.Footnote ¹⁷ Consistent with this pragmatic approach, Joabin speaks of “virginity” when he only means marital fidelity, and he goes along with the narrator speaking of “righteousness” when what Joabin means is good management. Is it righteous, for example, to be faithful to your wife only if she does not have hidden bodily defects?Footnote ¹⁸

But why does the arrangement make use of friends rather than allow for a frank and mutual review of the prospective spouses themselves? Joabin reports: “[F]or they think it a scorn to give a refusal after so familiar knowledge” (ibid., 478). It may, indeed, be better to be rejected by the friend of someone you hope to marry rather than by the object of your hope itself. This way, you may retain the idea that the potential spouse might have liked you.

But more is at stake in this modification of the Utopian practice. Would this institution achieve its end? Does it not presuppose a taming of eros already? As Weinberger asks, what if the emissaries liked what they saw too much? Does not this institution “exacerbate the possibilities of adultery and cuckoldry”?Footnote ¹⁹ Joabin or Bacon may be calling attention throughout to the moral-religious aspects of erotic desire, which are at least preserved in the case of the otherwise failing European practice. Europeans, for all their faults, would still shudder at the matter-of-fact examination by someone else of one's nude future bride. The Europeans sense or believe that sex is more than just something for which to find an outlet; they at least want to believe that it mysteriously points upward and that their marital arrangements, and hence also their affairs, cannot be understood as prudent means for a sexual release but only as a longing for something more. They would rather have a practical disaster than abandon the moral standard that permits nakedness to be judged and sensed as shameful, and which allows for cupidity not to be removed but transformed: non auferatur cupiditas sed mutetur (Augustine, Sermo Denis 14).

The problem with the Bensalemite solution might be understood in this way. If the goal of marriage is sexual satisfaction, why should marriage be so important? And if it is procreation, why should marriage be monogamous? One effect of the Bensalemite arrangements is greater fidelity or chastity. But why are chastity and fidelity important? Are they important in themselves or as means to satisfaction and procreation? While the practices appear righteous, they are deeply at odds with Christian morality. First, the proper response to nakedness, according to Christianity, is shame. But Bensalem makes officially mandated nakedness acceptable for the sake of a rational social goal: the protection of marriage. Second, no Christian who understood his or her faith could, for a moment, accept what is implied in calling the area where the bodies are examined “Adam and Eve's pools.” No return to harmless innocence is possible by human means alone. Third, Bensalem assumes that human beings are not fundamentally sinful, that natural lust is a fine thing and it needs to be given a proper outlet.

Bensalem's solution—a modest allowance for sexuality—is not adequate for eliminating marital problems. Is it really possible that Bensalem has made marriage such an exciting thing, no longer a “dull thing” as in Europe (477), so that no one would look for brothels or engage in other infidelities? Might not the Europeans be right that lust when vented continues to rage, though wrong about lust being quenched if it is stopped altogether? Joabin's account silently intimates the problem of law enforcement. Joabin seems to conceal the degree to which marital happiness is forced or enforced in Bensalem. Greatly improved technological means of detection and punishment may play a larger role in the protection of marriage than Joabin acknowledges. Or perhaps the scientific elite slip something into the nutrition of the Bensalemites that makes them both less frisky (more sheep-like) and more fertile. Tirsan, the most fertile Bensalemite, is fearful. Before he got married, he must have been checked for hidden defects, including impotence and infertility, by a friendly scientist.

The Morality of Love in the Essays

While the New Atlantis treats eros as highly problematic and intimates that the traditional, as well as the Bensalemite, accommodations of it are just as defective, Bacon critiques love more openly and directly in the Essays. He does this through a nonscientific, dialectical examination of certain human types.Footnote ²⁰ This examination occurs in the context of a work whose general drift is toward a realistic psychology and the promotion of self-advancement, a subtle criticism of hereditary monarchy, an encouragement of economic growth at the expense of the reactionary clergy and nobility, an endorsement of colonialism, and a profound reflection on the human situation.

That Bacon sees chastity and married life, and therewith eros, as connected with morality and the question and questionableness of convention or opinion is shown by a passage in the essay “Of Marriage and Single Life.” In this essay Bacon says that “chaste women are often proud and froward, as presuming upon the merit of their chastity.” Chastity, in traditional Europe, is mistakenly seen as something to be proud of, something which women have earned, thereby making them deserving of rewards other than chastity itself. “Chastity and obedience” may be desirable in a wife, but Bacon ultimately questions whether a wise man should marry: “A young man not yet; an elder man not at all,” quoting Thales.

The more significant observation concerns “grave natures” or serious men. They are more susceptible to convention: “[L]ed by custom,” they are “constant” or loyal and “loving husbands.” Bacon's example of such conventionalism is Odysseus.Footnote ²¹ Bacon switches to Latin and says, “[V]etulam suam praetulit immortalitati.” Odysseus preferred his old wife to immortality. Why? Judging from the preceding train of thought, he did so on account of custom or convention, that is, in accord with what is generally and openly regarded as admirable. Odysseus thus ignored immortality which, as is the open secret of Bacon's thought, is the real though perhaps unattainable object of all our longings (Advancement of Learning, book 1, chap. 8.5). More precisely, the man in love needs to be singled out by someone in order to feel special and worthy; he is unable to evaluate himself correctly.Footnote ²² Thus, chastity is born of and fosters (false) pride—in fact, all pride is unfounded according to Bacon; loyalty is conventional and distracts us from pursuing our own true good. As Bacon puts it a couple of essays later, “it is impossible to love and to be wise” (“Of Love”; an old expression found in Plutarch's Agesilaus and more recently in Erasmus), or as Heraclitus has it, “dry light is ever the best” (“Of Friendship”; Novum Organum, 1.49).Footnote ²³

In “Of Love” Bacon says that “amongst all the great and worthy persons whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent, there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love.” But love's incompatibility with wisdom has its more precise root in the way in which love “braves the nature and value of things.” Contrary to C.'s assertion that love is not based on weakness or sickness, Bacon now says that “this passion hath its floods in the very times of weakness, which are great prosperity and great adversity.” Love, as such, is “the child of folly.” This is not to deny that “there is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself toward many, and maketh men become humane and charitable.”Footnote ²⁴

Desire in Wisdom of the Ancients

The first logical stage of Bacon's reflections on love is not, therefore, a mechanistic account of the passions, but an analysis of the morality, opinions, affections, and beliefs associated with the passions. I would like now to glance briefly at the fable of “Dionysus, or Desire” from the Wisdom of the Ancients, a fable about which Bacon says, “there is nothing better in moral philosophy.” I will return to the Wisdom of the Ancients in a section below. Arguably, the thirty-one fables of that work contain, in enigmatic form, Bacon's deepest reflections on the new science, religion, rhetoric, ancient philosophy, and human nature and its situation in general.

In turning to “Dionysus,” I mean to confirm that Bacon regards the Bensalemite solution as impossible because human desire is ultimately for the infinite or eternal. Bacon asserts that human desires can neither be suppressed—“the passions seem sometime to be laid asleep and extinguished, but no trust can be placed in them … give them matter and occasion, they rise up again” and it is even true that “every passion flourishes and acquires vigor by being resisted and forbidden”—nor can they be satisfied. An apparently satisfied dominating passion is “cruel, savage, and pitiless toward everything that stands in its way.” Satisfying a passion may lead to “an endless course of conquest. For [passion] never rests satisfied with what it has, but goes on and on with infinite insatiable appetite panting after new triumphs.” Or, as Bacon says in the essay “Of Nature in Men,” “let not a man trust his victory over his nature too far; for nature will lay buried a great time, and yet revive, upon the occasion or temptation.” One can drive out nature, but it always comes back.

Bacon then disagrees with both the Bensalemite and the European ways of handling lust: ultimately, one can neither satisfy it nor hope for its salvific transformation. One cannot tame it by demystifying it nor defuse it by setting it loose. Still, in “Dionysus,” Bacon mentions two other possibilities. First, he considers disgust, despair, and insanity, where violent desires desist. This possibility, however, is more the fulfillment of our worst fears than a solution. Second, he considers the rule of virtue, in the sense of right reason and strength of soul. Interestingly, Bacon says that Jupiter, representing this reasonable disposition toward the passions, may be confused with Dionysus who represents “some lurking passion or hidden lust.” What drives us to insanity—this longing for infinity, eternity, indefinite self-preservation—may, indeed, be rationally or soberly pursued, though this pursuit may appear as madness. The mad, unself-conscious pursuit of indefinite self-preservation may appear as the most reasonable thing.

Cosmological Eros

While love is “the child of folly,” it is ultimately derivative from the fundamental phenomenon. Bacon is a monist, or believes he ought to be a monist, and everything in his thought is in principle traceable to one principle. A statement of Bacon's ontology can be found in his own words, in a work devoted to the meaning of Cupid or eros, the fundamental phenomenon or principle: “The principle of things is one in substance, a principle fixed and invariable, but the diversity of entities is deduced from the different magnitudes, shapes, and positions of the same principle” (De principiis atque originibus, in The Oxford Francis Bacon, 6: 211; Advancement of Learning, book 2, chap. 7.6).

So Bacon seems finally to release eros from its moral chains and recover it as a cosmological principle.Footnote ²⁵ To understand this idea further, let us consider the fable “Cupid, or the Atom” from the Wisdom of the Ancients (later expanded as De principiis atque originibus). This fable follows three moral fables in the work; in general, moral considerations in this comprehensive work precede natural-scientific or theoretical considerations. In this fable there are two Cupids or loves: the older or first “god” and the later or newer one. The older is “the natural motion of the atom.” The new one becomes possible only when the human species has been temporarily constituted, “upheld by matter” and made possible by more fundamental qualities.Footnote ²⁶

“[T]he allegory [then] deflects, and is transferred to manners,” that is, to morality. At this point, Bacon has almost nothing to say about this transference. It is the burden of Bacon's works which I began to consider in the above to show how human eros plays out in the conventional world human beings live in. Here in “Cupid,” Bacon only indicates that the new eros is distinctively human, but it is ultimately derivative from the ancient eros. In what way? Everything aims at self-preservation, which is the root of all eros and, in a sense, of all things. In the case of beings aware of their perishability, this propensity is modified. Human eros is ultimately directed toward immortality: “immortality or continuance” is “whereunto man's nature doth most aspire” (Advancement of Learning, book 1, chap. 7.6; Valerius Terminus, Works, 3: 229–30). To put it another way, even after one has liberated oneself from the conventional pursuit of immortality through love, the natural, more mechanical concern with eternal self-preservation remains.

Does this represent, then, Bacon's ladder of love? After all, married life pales in comparison to “great works” and now we see literal, bodily immortality emerging as the peak of aspiration. The situation, however, is complicated by the fact that Bacon apparently thought that immortality was impossible. One sign of this impossibility is that there has been little or no progress in this regard in Bensalem, and the Bensalemite scientists have been at it—in the Baconian, scientific way—for more than a thousand years.

What, then, according to Bacon, is the core of happiness? Is the peak missing, and is Bacon's wisdom tragic? Or is it progress in understanding and the accompanying pleasures that is the highest possible peak of genuine happiness, as suggested elsewhere in the Wisdom of the Ancients by the fact that Cupid is associated with philosophy? But what does that have to do with the natural motion of the atom? One thing is clear. The fundamental phenomenon, according to Bacon, is a kind of eros—the principle of self-preservation, or, more precisely though anachronistically, the conservation of energy, or the principle of least action.Footnote ²⁷ Though I will offer a tentative suggestion below,Footnote ²⁸ I believe this monism of Bacon leads him to intractable difficulties concerning the coherence of the human self. That is why, when Bacon treats “substance or nature of the soul or mind,” he posits a dualism. There is a soul that is “exempt from the laws of matter,” springs from the “breath of God,” and may have to be “transferred to religion for determination and definition.” There is also a “sensible or produced” soul that is a “corporeal substance, attenuated by and made invisible by heat” (Advancement of Learning, book 2, chap. 11.1; De Augmentis, book 4, chap. 3).

One cannot go behind or beyond this phenomenon: “For nothing has corrupted philosophy as much as this inquiry about Cupid's parents… . Therefore, a philosopher should always be telling himself that Cupid has no parents” (De principiis, 199, 201). In an important fable earlier in the Wisdom of the Ancients, called “Pan, or Nature,” Bacon says that “In the Panic terrors there is set forth a very wise doctrine; for by the nature of things all living creatures are endued with a certain fear and dread, the office of which is to preserve their life and essence, and avoid or repel approaching mischief” (Bacon's Works, 6: 712; in this fable, Pan, the whole or nature, is married to Echo. Bacon finds this apt since “true philosophy … echoes most faithfully the voice of the world itself,” ibid., 714). There is, then, an aspiration in nature of this sort, and this insight, whatever it is based on, is more fundamental than the question of whether “the nature of things is free, as in species, or disturbed, as in monsters, or confined, as in experiments” (Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 6, Phaenomena Universi, 9). This is not to say that nature's aspirations are always fulfilled. Moreover, the character of this eros will always remain somewhat obscure. “For it is necessary, that he who would know the passions and processes of matter, should comprehend the sum of things, and those which have been, and which are, and the future besides.” But “it is not permitted (or possible) to extend cognition to parts and to singular things.”Footnote ²⁹ Cupid is “truly an egg hatched by Night, for knowledge of him (all that may be had) procceeds by exclusions and negatives.”Footnote ³⁰

Eros, the Highest Good, and the Conquest of Nature

Finally, I would like to relate Bacon's discussion of eros to the political side of his project for the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate, as well as to Bacon's understanding of the nature and attractiveness of the philosophic life.

Bacon is well known for saying that the new movement he helps launch is “governed” by charity and compassion (Great Instauration, preface), but it suffices to read his Essays once to see that Baconian, realistic psychology is incompatible with having charity as one's most important consideration. As Richard Kennington has argued, Bacon puts a Christian garb on his project for different reasons. What reasons?Footnote ³¹

Bacon's teaching, on love and other things, is very similar to that of Lucretius. “Love” as pure eros (the old eros) is, needless to say, not a delusion, but love as accompanied by the human hopes for overcoming mortality is an error and a delusion (De Rerum Natura 4.1183–84). Philosophy or genuine science transforms “the pain stemming from the divination that the lovable is not sempiternal or that the sempiternal is not lovable,” a pain that is the ground of the anxious unhappiness of all nonphilosophers, into certainty. “One may therefore say that philosophy is productive of the deepest pain.”Footnote ³² Now, Lucretius is able to elicit consolation for himself from the “utterly hopeless truth, without a trace of aestheticism or sentimentality.”Footnote ³³ But most people cannot take this bittersweet pill. “In every age natural philosophy has had a troublesome and hard to deal with adversary—namely, superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion” (Novum Organum, 1.89).Footnote ³⁴ Lucretianism has no defense against a religion that combines a philosophic account of the world (of sorts) with the capacity to calm human fear and dread, to give hope. And as a result, “Religion is the thing that [now] has most power over men's minds” (ibid.). Bacon's project is an attempt to correct this difficulty in Lucretius.Footnote ³⁵ Lucretius already anticipates this, however: technology will only lead to more devastating wars and in general will be used more foolishly than wisely. There is no political solution to human misery.Footnote ³⁶ Bacon's answer to this objection, I believe, would have been that Christianity stands in the way of Lucretius's only possible solution because Christianity had misled the philosophically inclined.Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, Christianity brought about the ultimate exacerbation of fear.

Bacon does believe in the promise of science in manipulating human beings and in partially satisfying them. But ultimately, one cannot give the affections what they are after. A dissatisfaction with the human condition fuels them and will always fuel them. One can try to satisfy them while trying to curb them, even to excise them, always unsuccessfully, as is shown in Bensalem. But is there not another path at least for some? There is, and this brings me to the second subject of this section.

This path points to the wisdom of serenity and tranquility (Novum Organum, 1.124: what is “worthier and loftier” than “utility and works” is “the contemplation of truth,” which produces “serene tranquility”). This is the path of philosophy where the fundamental motions and longings of the human soul are understood and a kind of serene freedom is made possible. The philosophical enterprise is broader than Bacon's civilizational project since it includes the moral and political reflections that make that project possible, in part by allowing Bacon to view it as permitted (see Filum Labyrinthi, section 7, Bacon's Works, 3: 499–502; Advancement of Learning, book 1, chap. 6). More important, the nonpolitical dimension of the project is directed to “echo[ing] most faithfully the voice of the world itself.” One element of the “conquest” of nature is an attempt to understand things as they are, not as we believe or wish them to be.Footnote ³⁸

Yet is Bacon's intention to “build in the human understanding a true model of the world” (Novum Organum, 1.124) consistent with his discovery that we are compounds driven to preserve ourselves? To understand how Bacon thinks his natural science and the results of that science would leave room for philosophy or the need for self-knowledge, we need to understand how the desire for knowledge, for being aware of our situation, is derivative from or at least consistent with the natural motion of the atom. The difficulty here is not that Bacon is a materialist—he is not (see Novum Organum, 2.8)—but with understanding the relation of the lifeworld to the fundamental phenomenon, principle, or law.

One argument Bacon makes is that knowledge is eminently useful, especially for our self-preservation and the prolongation of life. But is philosophy, according to Bacon, the process of acquisition of practically useful knowledge? For all his strictures against the ancients, Bacon has higher hopes or expectations from contemplation than, say, Xenophon and probably than Plato and Aristotle.Footnote ³⁹ The more fundamental argument, however, is that mindedness or awareness makes a human being whole. The self-knowing and world-discovering self acquires a sharper definition and determination. In this way, knowledge preserves or, rather, recovers the self: “He who remembers or recollects, thinks; similarly, he who imagines, thinks; just as he who reasons, thinks; in fine the spirit, whether prompted by sense or left to itself, whether in the functions of the intellect, or of the will and affections, dances to the measure of thought.”Footnote ⁴⁰ A confused person is, all other things being equal, blurrier, more dissolved, closer to death than a clear-sighted person.Footnote ⁴¹ This is not to deny that, as Bacon says in an essay on death he never published, we all “die daily.” But the reinterpretation of self-preservation just offered appears to have a liberating, if still ambiguous, effect on one's posture toward death. In any event, as in the case of the classical philosophers, Bacon's treatment of love is intimately connected to his treatment of death and to his understanding of philosophy.