Education and the Enlightenment
Part 1: The Liberal Arts and the Legacy of Francis Bacon
With the Enlightenment came a supposedly renewed focus on reason, humanism, science, and education. Thanks to Francis Bacon, mechanics became the master science (supplanting philosophy and theology) and mastery over nature became the ultimate goal. With Bacon’s program developing and growing over the centuries, it is no wonder that the STEM fields (i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) dominate today's thinking, and the idea that the classical liberal arts tradition is "not useful" is now in vogue: it doesn't generate revenue, and it's not seen as hard science. It seems to me, however, that this focus on the empirical sciences decreases creativity, creates more problems than it solves, and fails to allow education to be ordered to its proper end. This is not even to mention the fact that the very term “science” has been hijacked to mean merely the empirical sciences.
In modern parlance, the implication to using “science” in this manner is that science means only the study of what can be empirically verified; science has become a kind of worldview; science is seen to be somehow involved in, and ordered toward, changing the world. This perfectly sums up what I would like to call the “Baconian project,” to which I will move shortly. Now lest some protest that it seems as though I bite the hand that feeds me since modern science is good and necessary, I wholeheartedly agree. A decade hence my wife underwent an emergency C-section when giving birth to our first child; without modern science and medicine, there’s a decent chance that both mother and daughter would have died. However, what cannot be lost is the need for the empirical sciences to occupy their rightful place in modern education, and no more.
As Catholics, we must stay dedicated to educating the whole person, and not just creating cogs to be plugged into the machine that is the modern western capitalistic state. Modern research universities are so fragmented and specialized, education is no longer truly education (in the classical sense of the word). If we are to make any headway at all in modernity, we need to confront the culture left over by the Baconian project and educate students in a way that sees nature not as something to be dominated, but something that instead needs to inform us.
Education as classically conceived among all the ancient thinkers was inherently unified and ordered—Francis Bacon played an absolutely pivotal role in tearing down this way of thinking about education. I would here like to make one simple argument: that modern education has been fragmented, thanks in large part to Francis Bacon, and that to make a recovery, we must do all in our power to make sure that our method of education is unified and teleologically ordered.
When I was studying for my master’s degree quite some time ago, Dr. Reinhard Hutter visited our campus and lectured to the graduate students. A portion of that lecture was published online at First Things, to which he gave the title, “Polytechnic Utiliversity: Putting the Universal back in University” (you can find it here if you’d like to read it yourself). While my own thoughts today are not directed specifically at the University setting, I believe his thoughts can appropriately begin this discussion. Introducing his theme, Dr. Hutter states:
“All academic disciplines in the late-modern research university have become servile arts, and the university an accidental agglomeration of advanced research competencies gathered in one facility for the sake of managerial and logistical convenience. The ideal of a liberal education that carries its end in its very practice has been supplanted…”
Although speaking of the deformation of higher education, specifically of such institutions as the University with which he himself was associated, I believe it is safe to say that his thoughts apply to the modern educational mindset of the West as a whole. It is no surprise, then, that he dubs the university to which his newly coined moniker applies the “Baconian University.”
Francis Bacon was born in London, in 1561, and was educated at Trinity College in Cambridge. He followed in his father’s footsteps in the practice of law, and eventually became an influential member of the English Parliament. Though given a thorough training in Aristotelian philosophy, he came to loathe it; his feelings for Catholicism were similar, evidenced by his public call in parliament for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots (a plea which was very quickly carried out). In 1620, he published The Great Instauration, which was his greatest effort to sketch out the methods of a new way of questioning nature. The Great Instauration, or the “Great Restoration,” contains the Novum Organum, the “New Instrument” of the sciences—and as those of you with a modicum of Latin training may be able to tell, Bacon’s aim was to refashion science and learning.
In the letter of dedication, in which he dedicates the work to King James I, he writes: “I shall, perhaps, before my death have rendered the age a light unto posterity, by kindling this new torch amid the darkness of philosophy… [and] at length, after so many ages, philosophy and the sciences may no longer be unsettled and speculative, but fixed on the sold foundation of a varied and well considered experience.” Bacon considers his method a novum, a new thing, which had never yet been seen in all the ages of wisdom and science.
Typical of the Enlightenment thinkers who would come after him, Bacon saw his current age as that age in which true knowledge and maturity had come to the human race. The age of the Greeks was but the childhood of knowledge, as he says, and implied is the realization that man has finally grown up. We’ve all heard the phrase “knowledge is power,” and in a way we can trace this line of thinking at least as far back as Bacon who insisted that “these two objects, human knowledge and power, are really the same.” What is the goal of this knowledge, this power? We must “use all our efforts,” he says, “to make the course of art outstrip nature.” Art meaning here, of course, not the fine arts, but anything that is made by man, manufactured, and invented—in a word, technology. This is the key to understanding the Baconian project, and I would argue the entire method of scientific endeavors down to our present day: to make technology triumph over nature, to dominate nature.
This then is the new goal, the new end toward which the genius of mankind must be directed. Bacon set down the direction for this new science in stating that “the real and legitimate goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” Would anyone doubt that is the case today? What could be a better way of judging our progress as a race than to marvel at the latest iPhone, or self-driving car, or social media platform? In the new method, knowledge is subordinated to power: human knowledge gains insight into how nature currently stands, and human power will then be able to change nature, and dictate new natures.
It is clear how different all this is from the way Aristotle viewed the world, and the manner the Christian tradition will view nature after him. In the first lines of the Nicomachean Ethics we read Aristotle’s own view of art and its ends: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” The goal of art and the sciences—of technology—for Bacon is the mastery over nature; the goal for Aristotle and the classical tradition is the attainment of that which is good.
The Baconian project is one in which science and technology are increasingly looked to as the means by which mankind will advance, liberating itself from the dictates of nature. No longer is human knowledge ordered to the good, as understood by Aristotle, but to the practical and the useful. When mastery over nature replaces the end to which man is destined, it is no wonder that we find ourselves in the position we do today, where science, technology, engineering and mathematics are held up as those fields of research which will be our salvation.
[Part 2 is already available for paid subscribers]