Bacon's Empire of Mankind

Part 2: Totalizing Partial Systems

Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical Interior with Large Factory (1917)

Picking up from where we left off…

We have two eerily similar pictures of the future. One was written in terza rima by a poet, philosopher, statesman, and soldier who lived at the height of the Middle Ages. The other has been revealed to us through magazine articles, popular books, essays, lectures, etc. by philosophers, computer scientists, and tech capitalists since the digital revolution attained irresistible momentum in the 1980s. Dante’s Paradise treats of the superlunary eternity which awaits the virtuous Christian at the expiration of his life on Earth; the TESCREAL set promises at utopia where we live forever, think inconceivable thoughts and revel in indescribable pleasures, transcend the limitations of human biology (and perhaps physicality itself) and dwell forever (possibly longer) among the stars.¹ Dante believes heaven is a present reality, while the tech utopians are no less convinced that their perfect future already exists and merely waits for us to lay down the rails of causality that will deliver the present unto it.

Such an unbridgeable gulf separates the Scholastic worldview of Dante from the scientific materialism of the Singularity futurists that there’s little point in tallying up the points on which they disagree. What we can say about them both is that each is, or is embedded within, a totalizing system. The Christian mystic and the twenty-first century singulatarian can speak with evangelical assuredness about worlds of things of which none us have any empirical knowledge on the basis that their participation in their respective conceptual frameworks seems to give definition and efficacy to the unseen existences they augur.

For understanding where both sides are coming from, Lukács is particularly instructive. In his Theory of the Novel he describes the lived world of the ancient Greeks as a rounded and closed world, integrated and comprehensible. “The mind’s attitude within such a home,” he writes, “is a passively visionary acceptance of ready-made, ever-present meaning.” Their world-narrative was one whose constituent elements—nature, morality, metaphysics, the state, the self, etc.—fit neatly together like the pieces of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

Lukács argues that after the fall of Greek civilization, its integrated weltanschauung resurfaced—for a time and after a fashion—in the late medieval synthesis of Christianity with pagan philosophy (namely that of Aristotle). The passage is worth quoting at length for the sake of appreciating the admixture of mysticism and rationalism which we find in the Divine Comedy:

In Giotto and Dante, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Pisano, St. Thomas and St. Francis, the world became round once more, a totality capable of being taken in at a glance; the chasm lost the threat inherent in its actual depth; its whole darkness, without forfeiting any of its sombrely gleaming power, became pure surface and could thus be fitted easily into a closed unity of colours; the cry for redemption became a dissonance in the perfect rhythmic system of the world and thereby rendered possible a new equilibrium no less perfect than that of the Greeks: an equilibrium of mutually inadequate, heterogeneous intensities. The redeemed world, although incomprehensible and forever unattainable, was in this way brought near and given visible form. The Last judgement became a present reality, just another element in the harmony of the spheres, which was thought to be already established; its true nature, whereby it transforms the world into a wound of Philoctetus that only the Paraclete can heal, was forgotten. A new and paradoxical Greece came into being: aesthetics became metaphysics once more.

There is no incompatibility between the mystical and rational in Dante’s world-system. The Inconceivable, the indivisible and irregular remainder with which every epistemological scheme must reckon, is safely and even fruitfully situated within the god-concept and Christian theology, where it becomes the dark waters (or blinding light) concealing the bedrock from which the plenary edifice of reason, nature, aesthetics, practical reason, and life in society rises.

Lukács later called this an instance of a “partial system:” a noetic framework professing to coherently map out all the interconnected workings of existence, but which comes up against an Outside whose frontiers it cannot enter. “In such systems,” he says, “the ‘ultimate’ problems of human existence persist in an irrationality incommensurable with human understanding.”

But it is different when the system’s partiality is recognized, and the irrational Outside with which it abuts is accepted as such. In Scholasticism, the historically contingent and arbitrary particulars of Christian belief function as a schema (in the Kantian sense) by which the empirically knowable can hold congress with the Outside. The irrationality which can never be abstracted out of the total situation is recast as the provenance of a higher rationality, anthropomorphized as and/or attributed to a transcendent entity metaphorically understood as an architect, a king, a father, a shepherd, a geometer, a transcendent observer and occasional interloper, etc. In this way, as Lukács brilliantly analogizes, certain elements of reality which lie in irretrievable obscurity can be splashed as black paint onto the canvas of human understanding. (We could also compare them to imaginary numbers: ungraspable, but expressed in a form the representation of which is capable of being handled.)

The discursive and dogmatic character of this framework served it well in its capacity as the ideological underpinning of a quietly developing civilization whose arbiters were interested in preserving and naturalizing the status quo of a ternary society.² Scholasticism was a monastic garden whose cultivators were in the business of categorizing, explaining, and justifying social and natural phenomena—not in quantifying, experimenting with, or controlling them.

That’s not to say the medieval church was uninterested in or incapable of social control. Far from it. But its greatest and most fecund thinkers were literally cloistered monks devoted to the architectonic perfection of an ideology grounded on ancient texts believed to disclose divine truths and factual histories. Insofar as the medieval knowledge-worker enjoyed an oligopoly over the production of texts and access to them, his yield reflected and catered to the interests of himself and people like him, who understood contemplation and argumentation to be the vehicles towards truth. The monastic knowledge-worker was a theologian, a moralist, a logician, a scrivener, and possibly a mathematician, natural philosopher, legal scholar, or even an engineer, but he was nothing like a specialized technocrat. There was as yet no hole for that shape of peg.

Lukács points out that “the organic unities of pre-capitalist societies organised their metabolism largely in independence of each other.” Though the Church promulgated a totalizing narrative of the world under which all society operated (though many, perhaps a majority, no doubt labored under an incomplete or distorted “folk” version of the official doctrine), the technical barriers against centralized regulation and want of a methodology precluded the rational coordination of the social organism.³

Few totalizing systems such as the philosophy of the Scholastics are equipped to withstand an aggravated reassessment (let alone the incontrovertible falsification) of their priors and postulates. Even before Galileo was brought to trial in a premodern test of the Streisand Effect, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham had already brought about a cleavage of the synthesis from within. The polemical hurricanes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation made skeptics of battered laymen who came to agree with both parties’ claims that the other was full of crap. Moreover, with the slow but inexorable rise of the bourgeoisie (upon whom Protestant ethics behaved as a force multiplier), the emergence of the centralized nation-state, and the ability of practical-minded, forward-thinking, educated laymen to compose and circulate texts via the printing press, the social context in which Scholastic views and practices could make sense passed away.

Francis Bacon was prophetic. Sixty-seven years before Newton published his world-changing Principia, Bacon’s Novum Organum took aim against the moribund but still-kicking Aristotelean tradition (“axioms determined upon in argument can never assist in the discovery of new effects”) and expounded a philosophy of disciplined empiricism (“it is better to dissect than abstract nature”) whose final aim was the technological improvement of the human condition.⁴ The Scholastics, he maintained, were mistaken in their methods and conclusions (“Aristotle’s physics are mere logical terms”), but not in their confidence that there existed a systematic and intelligible order of the world (“those laws and regulations of simple action which arrange and constitute any simple nature, such as heat, light, weight, in every species of matter, and in a susceptible subject”) which the natural philosopher could hope to discern. And by way of this discernment, Bacon contended that human beings can “endeavor to renew and enlarge the power and empire of mankind in general over the universe,” after which “must necessarily follow an improvement of their estate.”⁵

Newton played the Christ to Bacon’s John the Baptist.⁶ With the publication of the Principia, the scientific revolution truly began. In spite of himself, Newton developed a world-picture in which the active participation (and subsequently the existence) of a deity was an extraneous proposition. More importantly, he pioneered the mathematical conception of objects and events. The Aristotelians, preoccupied with qualities and categorical hierarchies, spoke of the natural “desire” of the four elements to arrange themselves in their appropriate places relative to each other, and attributed planetary motions to an unseen Prime Mover, whose existence the Philosopher arrived at through an exercise of reasoning from principles; Newton elegantly reduced the tendency of objects to fall to the ground and the revolutions of the planets to separate occurrences of a singular phenomenon contingent on the measurable quantities of mass, acceleration, and distance. The success of his theory of universal gravitation, his work in optics, and his pioneering application of calculus insinuated that all things might be effectively subjected to quantification, prediction, manipulation, and subordination.

Lukács again:

It is anything but a mere chance that at the very beginning of the development of modern philosophy the ideal of knowledge took the form of universal mathematics: it was an attempt to establish a rational system of relations which comprehends the totality of the formal possibilities, proportions and relations of a rationalised existence with the aid of which every phenomenon—independently of its real and material distinctiveness—could be subjected to an exact calculus.

This is the modern ideal of knowledge at its most uncompromising and therefore at its most characteristic…the basis of this universal calculus can be nothing other than the certainty that only a reality cocooned by such concepts can truly be controlled by us.

Lukács gets ahead of us: here he’s talking about the rationalization of production and of social relations under the capitalist system of organization. But it’s all the same, really. Taylorism, Fordism, the logistic apparatuses governing dispersed supply chains, the intense regulation of the Amazon distribution center, and the meticulous operations of planning, testing, and marketing employed by the culture industry are merely extensions of the empirical sciences’ technical methods into the fields of political economy and management. The conceptual grids of scientific materialism and of advanced capitalism, interlocked, constitute a mesh as dense and inescapable as the Christian framework in which the medieval mind was immured. Without any proclamations, creeds, or catechisms, they make hard-nosed positivists of us all.

Scientific materialism and capitalist rationalism are each of them totalizing systems, and in their interlocked union they form an apparently coherent whole. One provides a concise, unified, and (evidently) complete accounting of nature while delimiting the metaphysical situation by way of omission; the other encompasses all matters of practical reason. But neither individually nor in their amalgam do they possess the self-conscious partiality of Dante’s Christianity. They do not admit of an Outside, nor can they make ontologically sound claims for values that aren’t included in their universes of discourse. Postmodernism, as a school of academic thought, merely elucidates of the cast of mind that ineluctably follows from the plasticizing of extant concepts that have lost their grounding in the absolute, and from the atomized, artificially mediated, and spectacular mode of modern life. To treat anything lying outside the respective purviews of economic rationalism or the empirical sciences as though it were nonarbitrary has become an expression of sentimental naïveté, unseriousness, cloudy-eyed reactionism, or a specious, fragmentary, and secularized religiosity.

The material world is made of matter and energy, and the only objects, events, qualities, or properties that exist in any meaningful sense are those that can be measured and manipulated. Production and consumption comprise the whole breadth of human activity, and the ways in which the individual operates in or upon the marketplace are the only substantial measure of a life. Nothing escapes the austere calculus of economic utility. In the new ontology, metadata, demographic intersections, and patterns of consumption and use replace the soul as the real essence of a person.

There is no longer an acknowledged Outside. The system cannot admit of its partiality. The introduction or recognition of exogenous terms in the calculus “erodes and dissolves the whole system” (Lukács).

Whitehead, who was just as concerned with reification as Lukács, summarizes the problems of a worldview that is simultaneously all-encompassing and parsimoniously restrictive:

The advantage of confining attention to a definite group of abstractions, is that you confine your thoughts to clear-cut definite things, with clear-cut definite relations. Accordingly, if you have a logical head, you can deduce a variety of conclusions respecting the relationships between these abstract entities…

The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions, however well-founded, is that, by the nature of the case, you have abstracted from the remainder of things. In so far as the excluded things are important in your experience, your modes of thought are not fitted to deal with them.

To take an example: going by the calculations employed by economists and neoliberal apologists to prove that life in a modern, affluent nation is qualitatively superior to any previous epoch and we should all count our lucky stars to be alive at this moment in history, the epidemic rates of anxiety and depression (and perhaps also the low birth rates) in developed nations seem to suggest some kind of rounding error. It just doesn’t make sense. The problem can only be the boneheaded refusal of the population (poorly educated, surely, and susceptible to malignant propaganda) to calibrate their perceptions to the airtight and impeccable data.

Notwithstanding the elements of backwardness and brutality for which medieval Europe is popularly regarded as a historical boondocks, the world in which Dante lived was one of immanent and absolute meaning. The myriad uncontrollable and imperfectly understood phenomena that intersected with and regulated the tempo of human life provided the central god-concept with considerably ample gaps in which it could reside, and from which it could to enter into and harmonize all fields of activity by drafting them into a comprehensive narrative of a sacred history, a moral and (supra-)rational universe, and nonarbitrary purpose. The centuries-long processes of demystifying and sterilizing the cosmos, carving out a position where humanity holds a historically unprecedented dominion over natural forces and cycles, and the subsumption of all culture and social relations into the rational machinery of capitalism have shrouded us in a world-narrative in which a humanity made alien to itself is the measure of all things in a universe it understands to be objectively meaningless and transcendentally barren.

Even in such an intellectual paradigm as this, and in the midst of the way of life which simultaneously engenders and authenticates it, it remains possible to dream of heaven, and to proclaim its imminent reality in terms native to modernity’s universe of discourse.

1. “TESCREAL:” transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. Each of these “-isms” is individually distinct and can be examined separately, but they’re so frequently adjoined that the consideration of one without reference to the rest has become increasingly bootless.

2. Western Europe was not alone in this.

3. For that matter, it wasn’t always the case that parishes and bishoprics operated in lockstep with each other or Rome.

4. A great little passage on the problems of the Scholastics and their hangups:

Some men become attached to particular sciences and contemplations, either from supposing themselves the authors and inventors of them, or from having bestowed the greatest pains upon such subjects, and thus become most habituated to them. If men of this description apply themselves to philosophy and contemplations of a universal nature, they wrest and corrupt them by their preconceived fancies, of which Aristotle affords us a single instance, who made his natural philosophy completely subservient to his logic, and thus rendered it little more than useless and disputatious. The chemists, again, have formed a fanciful philosophy with the most confined views, from a few experiments of the furnace. Gilbert, too, having employed himself most assiduously in the consideration of the magnet, immediately established a system of philosophy to coincide with his favorite pursuit.

5. In speaking of “renewing” humanity’s power over nature, Bacon alludes to the biblical Fall and the expulsion from Eden. This isn’t decorative rhetoric on his part. Even the father of empiricism was a product of his time.

6. Blasphemous!