Haunted Modernity: Francis Bacon’s Ghost Ship
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Houghton Library, Harvard University.
The image at the left is from the title page of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, published in 1620. Known in English as New Organon, the work sets forth Bacon’s proposal for a new natural philosophy. The title itself signals the desire for an epistemological rupture. The New Organon is a reference to the Organon, a collective name for six of Aristotle’s works on logic. Bacon declared that existing intellectual traditions, especially Aristotelian logic, impeded the attainment of true knowledge. In their place, he proposed an inductive method that relied only on the observation and reasoning of the natural philosopher. The Baconian method was supposed to be forward-looking and unfettered by the past, and that imperative is most memorably captured in the title page’s lavish engraving. The ship in the foreground is sailing beyond the two mythical Pillars of Hercules—a Greco-Roman symbol for the edge of the known world—while a smaller ship in the background lags behind, remaining in familiar and unpromising waters.
Like the symbolic flagship, Baconian empiricism was supposed to take the natural philosopher beyond the limits of prior inquiries and into the unknown. However, Bacon’s methodology was neither as consistent nor as novel as he claimed. His thought experiments contained presuppositions about natural phenomena that were not purely inductive. His reasoning was sometimes little more than banal observation and conjecture. Why, then, do we still hear about Baconian empiricism or the Baconian method? In a sobering assessment of Bacon’s life and legacy, postcolonial writer Jatinder K. Bajaj has shown that sympathetic authors since the seventeenth century have celebrated Francis Bacon as a prophetic figure whose crowning achievement was his bold call to action. In the genealogy of triumphal scientific modernity, Bacon became one of the revered ancestors who ushered the world from darkness into light.
Scientific enlightenment as the story of modernity is a compelling way to understand the past five-hundred years. Versions appear in bestselling books, acclaimed TV series, and K-12 school curricula. It is the received wisdom that students often bring to college survey courses in the history of science. It is an understandable position to take, so our challenge in the classroom is to offer something more complex, cautious, and indeterminate. If science, medicine, and technology are human undertakings, then they cannot exist outside the structures, hierarchies, and inequities that humans create and sustain.
One pedagogical strategy is to play with scientific metaphors such as Bacon’s ship, offering our own subversive reading. The nautical metaphor is certainly a powerful one, but in a literal sense, ships of knowledge were quite sinister. As Bacon was writing, fleets of European origin were sailing across oceans to explore, exploit, and dominate. Early modern scientific knowledges enabled, justified, and reaped benefits from the spread of imperialism and its attendant power and violence. Military technologies bolstered state power and its colonial extensions. Scientific explanations reified “othering” of non-Europeans. Exploitative economies built on genocide and slavery brought funding to scientific endeavors of all types. While these descriptions may sound hyperbolic, they are most assuredly not. From classic studies like Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980) to more recent analyses such as Terence Keel’s Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (2018), scholarship in the history of science and related fields has shown the complicity of scientific knowledges and technological creations in the horrors and hegemonic structures of modernity.
It is relatively easy to dismiss the bluster of Bacon’s writing. Yet, we cannot simply scuttle his ship and be done with it. We are dealing with a ghost ship, a reminder that the modernity we seek to understand is profoundly haunted. The concept of haunted modernity comes from the work of sociologist Avery Gordon, published in her landmark book Ghostly Matters (2008). What is the nature of such haunting? Gordon writes, “It is not a case of dead or missing persons sui generis, but of the ghost as a social figure . . . It is a case of modernity’s violence and wounds, and a case of the haunting reminder of the complex social relations in which we live.”
What does a haunted modernity mean for the history of science? A perennial accusation against historians of science is that we cultivate distrust of scientific expertise, an argument that is especially potent in our contemporary political climate. That is not the case. Taking a cue from Gordon, we call attention to the ghosts. Early modern European empiricism was bound up with alarming inequities and exercises of power. Its technoscientific descendants have carried those wounds and inflicted their own. Hauntings are there to be heeded—not ignored—as humanity responds to virulent pandemic, accelerating climate change, and other crises of postmodernity.
Christopher Fite is a Doctoral Candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.