Francis Bacon’s Common Notion

Abstract

To what extent can scientific method and the history of scientific shed light on the formation of concepts? On their definition and the difficulties associated with arriving at these definitions? These questions are central to Francis Bacon's entire corpus, with continued relevance for today's theory, especially in its ecological, assemblaged, and other posthuman varieties.1 For Bacon's philosophy of Nature depends on principles that derive directly from the of his moment in ways that are fairly obvious, although this same claim can be stated somewhat more subtly, or in a more genealogical way, by saying that Bacon's account of Nature and of his reformed method tends to decompose, to re-organize, and to redefine several components of philosophical in general that are coming to have an important dimension in his period. That is, his work can be said to refract existing ideas in order to reveal their internal composition, but it also politicizes (as in polarize or catalyze) broader philosophical ideas by endowing them with a new application or new set of meanings. Approached in this way, Bacon's method reveals to us less a prior existing domain of political thought than the conceptual ingredients that are necessary to that domain and that Bacon also finds operating in natural bodies.2 These ingredients include:1. the more general relationship between parts and wholes, plurality and unity, and the problems of scale and ontology these imply;2. the definition of a body as a provisional unity formed out of collected particulars, and thus also the nature of its internal organization;3. the nature of collecting as a philosophical activity, one that is simultaneously mental and physical, intellectual and manipulative, speculative and operational;4. the nature of action and force as principles that determine the characteristic of natural and bodies alike, and thus also the nature of formal ideas in Bacon's method, a famous and explicit problem for him.All four problems structure Bacon's account of authentic philosophical knowledge as well as the way he seems to regard ideas. Looking closely at Bacon's method thus sheds considerable light not only on how his natural philosophy implies a philosophy, and vice versa, but also on the prior problem of defining philosophy itself-a meta-philosophical concern, as it were, that runs throughout all of Bacon's work. His Instauration can be described quite simply as one of the first and richest inquiries into the identities of philosophy, science, politics, theology, history, and fiction as distinct domains of human thought, and the ways in which they interact with one another around a set of shared ideas and problems. Since this argument remains far too large to demonstrate in a single essay, I will be concentrating on relationships between the first three domains, as these are articulated in Bacon's Novum Organum (1620).3In light of the theme of this journal's special issue, I propose to look closely at the way Bacon treats the problems of commonness and of collectivity: my guiding question will be whether these ideas are complementary to one another or whether they are in tension, and my hypothesis is that commons and collectivities do not go together as we might expect. The Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has sharply posed a version of the problem: should community and commonality be understood as a question of shared qualities, i.e., of participation, coincidence, agreement, and the possession of an array of attributes, positively defined? Or is communitas and commonality the result of an alienating gesture: a giving away of the proper, a donation of self that renders the common only as the effect of a subtraction, a seam, or a scar? The particular form of commonality I will be focusing on is Bacon's idea of a notion in general and how it is made-we would say concept, but Bacon himself does not use the term, which the Oxford English Dictionary helpfully dates for us only as of the middle of the seventeenth century. …