Culture of Accidents by Michael Witmore

Author:Michael Witmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804779913
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Disaggregated Forms and the Conditions of Their Discovery

A range of interpretive approaches has already been offered to explain Bacon’s method of induction and its terminus: knowledge of the Forms, or formae, that govern natural processes in unalterable, lawlike fashion. For example, Bacon’s Forms have been related to the formae substantiales of late Scholastic philosophy — formal elements that imparted, by a kind of internal efficient agency, certain attributes to bodies. 19 We also know that the operative power ascribed to the Forms, their ability to transform a given particular into a desired one, allows them to do the kind of work that alchemical and hermetic philosophers wanted to accomplish by other means.20 These philosophical traditions thus seem to have influenced Bacon more than one might expect given his frequent criticisms of past approaches.21 Certain legal modes of thought can also be adduced to explain Bacon’s philosophical procedures of induction; for example, the process of finding axioms in induction has been compared to the determination of legal principles in caselaw reasoning.22 Studies like these have helped us to understand the historical sources of Bacon’s thought. In the analysis below, however, I will be less interested in identifying the origins of Bacon’s ideas than in explaining how his doctrine of the Forms allows the metaphysical determinants of natural processes to be revealed in unusual situations. It is this aspect of Bacon’s doctrine, I will argue, that allows accidents to reveal — not an absence of regularity, as they did for Aristotle — but a hidden regularity that is concealed in the normal course of nature.

Bacon’s inductive method has two strands, the one metaphysical and ideal, the other provisional and practical. As Lisa Jardine has pointed out, Bacon’s natural philosophy aims at two distinct kinds of results: first, the fruits promised by the continued use of the Novum organum (knowledge of the formae) and second, benefits that will accrue more immediately with the aid of something called Experientia Literata, or “learned experience.”23 Learned experience is the more epistemologically modest approach to acquiring knowledge, on par with the kinds of probable knowledge (in the sense of “believable”) that were being theorized in England during the seventeenth century.24 Because knowledge of the formae would have to wait until an exhaustive collection of natural particulars had been completed, this more ad hoc approach aimed at discovering reliable conditions of operation within a limited but testable array of circumstances. Jardine describes this process as an improvisation of new experiments from old ones without the advantage of more general “axioms” from which new experiments or works could be devised. While the knowledge gained from this kind of experience would have limited application, it might serve as a down payment on the more globally applicable kind of knowledge that would come at the later stages of Bacon’s instauration.

With Experientia Literata, one’s knowledge and ability to act is still limited by the particular array of circumstances that he or she has already encountered in the world. The organon, on the

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