Hi and welcome back to the new Thinkery. If you're hearing my voice, that means that David is not with us today. I don't know, do we have- He passed on to a better place. Yeah, has passed on.
Where's that Chipotle? Yeah. Raising Kane's Spratcheka. Yeah, I was going to say you two are just in sort of Fatjoke here.
But we don't really have that much time or much space, I guess, for Fatjoke because we have a lot to get to. We have two guests today, Nathan Deneen of Rochester Institute of Technology, right? All right. And Martin Yaffe of University of North Texas.
Great. You were going to introduce that more formally though, correct? Well, that's fine. I was just going to introduce Patrick Deneen's second cousin here and I think we're good to go.
I think that's all we need to know. Right? The lesser Deneen. Does that really- that's kind of- thankfully there's like no preuse though.
Nobody will ever eclipse my fame, minimal as it is. But you must be, you know, seeding constantly that everyone will always think of you as the other Deneen. Right. It just really gets under my skin.
Now I'm quite fine with it. I'm happy to be a nobody. And Martin, are there any more famous Yaffeies or camping? I'm thinking, I mean, it is a rather common name of people of my tribe.
I mean, I'm just going to put it that way. But it's hard to say. Hard to say. Hard to say.
Very good. I mean, I'm descended from, I'm told Moses Mendelzone. I mean, people like that. Yeah.
Yeah. Holy smokes. My brother looked at our answers. Of course, these are hard to find for European Jews.
I mean, so a lot is conjectural. Yeah. I think I might have you beat Martin. Deneen actually means descendant of the dark one.
So, let that be. Wow. I'll try to reserve my evil arts. And Greg is descended from his grave by many intersecting lines.
That's a southern way. But let's get into it. We're here to discuss a recently published but not recently written book, The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon with special attention to the principles of foreign policy by Lawrence Burns, which the two of you have edited. This was, you know, Burns was a teacher at St.
John's College. And Martin, you knew him personally, though. Nathan, you didn't know him. You're just piggybacking on this.
But a couple, I have a couple anecdotes about his dissertation that maybe he could get us started. One, he told me, so I once asked him, I was like, why, why, if you're going right about the political philosophy of Francis Bacon, why special attention to the principles of foreign policy? And he was important, but also that he was writing on the committee on international relations and he wouldn't let him switch to social thought. So he had to really emphasize and beat that with a hammer.
But he also told me that when he first showed his dissertation to Strauss, who was a kind of inadvertent primary advisor, he did it officially right under Hans Morgan, though. But Strauss had a heavy hand in this, as you can see. He had a deep influence. But he told me when he first gave it to Strauss, he handed it back and said, think about it a little more.
Which is, he told me he was angry, but then he sat around thinking about it more. He's right. I should think about it a bit more, which shows you that sometimes good advising doesn't take that much work. Just sort of telling somebody the one hard facts.
But I don't know, there's a lot to discuss here, even as regards to preliminary about Burns's life, what this work mattered for him about your reasons for publishing. So I'll let you guys just jump into whatever you see, let's go. Martin and Nathan. So Nathan, I'll tell you anecdote about what you, I thought you just stumbled in on the dissertation in the Chicago library.
But it turns out from our last podcast, some of you mentioned it to you. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah.
I work at the intersection of political theory and international relations. And I had been teaching Francis Bacon for the longest time. And I just wrapped up a study on the balance of power in ancient Greece. And so I thought, you know, I'll write on a modern now.
And Bacon seems like he has quite a bit to say, both in terms of foreign policy, but you know, in terms of just applying natural philosophy to two politics, right? He really wanted to bring into being this human empire. And what does that mean in the context of international politics? I was interested.
And I mentioned what I had planned to a colleague of mine, Sean Sutton. Oh, I love Sean. So I said, hi. I will.
Yeah. And he said, well, that's it's already been done. Francis Bacon and foreign policy has already been done. I was like, really?
Who wrote on it? Well, Lawrence Burns. I was like, wow, okay, I need to get ahold of it. And I had reached out to Gisilla Burns.
And she told me that Martin had a copy and that I should get in touch with him. So I had actually ordered it from the University of Chicago. It was on its way. But then in the meantime, I learned that Martin had it.
And then he just sent me the PDF files of the whole thing, photocopied right from the dissertation. And I thought, okay, well, this is great. So I just started reading through it. And then eventually Martin asked me if I went to come on board and help edit the book with him.
And I thought we'd write the forward together. But he just said, well, why you have it? He did. He said enough job.
Yeah, I thought so. Yeah, I was wondering how to do it since I just thought it was an overwhelming task. I had a grad student here there to help me with some clerical things. But and I still think Bacon is somewhat overwhelming.
And maybe we can get into that as well as what I think he has to leave out of his considering considerations. So I mean, with that, why don't we go to our interviewers questions. Let me just one small point before I jump into the meat and potatoes of bacon. This is our friends at Political Animal Press.
We should we should plug them, right? Then they do some did they do some book that I should actually told Alex, I actually meant to tell you once you think about this a little bit before you did it. But you had this sort of dog and pony show that you did on the symposium that you published with him, isn't that right? Yeah, fine works at Political Animal Press.
Thank you for reminding me otherwise. Yeah. These are our friends, right? Yeah.
Yeah, Lewis Woski would have put a horse head in my bed or something like that. Exactly. Which I have to say, hats off to them because they're willing to publish something that's been available, you know, digitally or in some form or another for a long time, but edited and an important work. And I'll connect it to what you just said, more and about how overwhelming bacon's works are.
I mean, you know, aside from his scientific works, you know, the organism beast on its own and then the unpublished scientific works like the Stovis of Arm. And then you have his wisdom of the ancients, his essays, which are really difficult and condensed. And then you have letters and all sorts of, you know, various, de Valerius terminus, which burns, you know, even when I talked to him late in life, he would always go back to it and how important it was to sort of be very much more open statement of bacon's views. It's a lot.
And I have to say, for especially for anywhere, but for doctoral dissertation, he really is able to manage the size of this of the various aspects of its of bacon's rhetoric and to move from one to the other for clarification without it feeling like he's doing violence. And I don't know, the countless hours he probably spent in the library, working over bacon in the clarity he achieved in front of his is extremely impressive. And you read, you know, some of his writings, he published a chapter of this, right, the last chapter in as an article and interpretation, I believe, it's in the volume of the collection of essays I edited. And it's very clear and very, and you don't always realize how much thought and care has gone into it because the expression, the style of expression is so simple and direct and just a testament to it.
So yeah, I don't know what you guys, what your impressions were reading it, but that was certainly my takeaway. Yeah, Lawrence. I mean, understate is maybe the word. I mean, he's always where possible one syllable words and so on.
So I was gentle, I suppose would be the way to express what how he talked. As we said in the front matter, I was in the middle of coediting a fester for him, I'm not expected to and keep this next point in or not my coeditors know this was my stupid idea to make it a surprise for him. He never knew that the fester was in the making. So in any case, I'm pleased with that best trip if you know what's the name of it, Martin.
The companionship books. And we were limited to X number of essays and we had to tell a couple of very women and people story, stories go with editing volumes as some of you may as if you don't know, you find out when you go. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I thought someone should take up the burden of this book. And it would be a time. I mean, I just sort of left it, the side of my plate. And so Nathan, when you got in touch with me, you were surprised it was me.
You were going to get in touch with it and that's Giza that kind of and I was surprised too, but very grateful by the way. Yeah, I mean, certainly I was surprised it was you studied with you as an undergraduate. And so it was fun to reconnect. And I should mention that I also know Lewis Lawski at political animal press.
We were graduate students together. So I think the project overall was nice in terms of reconnecting with some people I had enjoyed having conversations with. But in terms of Burns's writing style, I think it really reads in a way that I think he's leading you through an argument. And he sets up the problem of social science in his day and age and really in terms of international relations and how realism had somehow missed the boat in terms of really understanding how a practitioner has talked about politics.
So really misunderstood the orientation of political life. So how he sets it up, I think is a fantastic beginning. So maybe this is a good place to sort of maybe you can give us one of you can give us a kind of overview of the book in general because, you know, the title is interesting, the Global Philosophy of France is Baking with Special Intentions of the Principles of Foreign Policy. We've already talked about a little bit, but you know, one isn't inclined if one is studying international relations of foreign policy to look to the works of Baking.
I mean, one looks to Baking if one wants to understand, you know, teenage love or what to do if your uncle kills your father and marries your mother in order any other Shakespeare plays. And so maybe you can just like, what is the threat of what does, how would you describe in these schools of our thought, realism, liberalism, these kinds of things that you fit into these conventional or contemporary conventional, so I do. It should be clear. I'm on an eighth of this is an ongoing joke.
We made this joke with Robert Faulkner and he looked at us like we were insane because he thought we're actually people. He's not taking Shakespeare the same. So I just want to be clear that's an ongoing joke that we have. We know Baking is takes about the same person week, week.
So anyway, so it's not a likely person to turn to if one wants to understand foreign policy. So why you would turn to me, we were touched a little bit, but also what is foreign policy teaching that he follows some camps, you sort of alluded to this in the book, I think. Well, this is more Nathan's Baving Week and Nathan you've had some practice doing this for our last podcast where we launched a book. I'm wondering if you can maybe make some statements and I have a couple of hand and not can statements to follow up.
Okay. Yeah, I think in terms of, I would say he's hard to down in many ways he's Machiavellian, right? And so we could certainly put him in the camp of liberalism. I mean, sorry, in written in terms of realism, right?
But in terms of his humanitarianism, we might want to associate him more with liberalism. I mean, in the end, he champions peaceful remedies in such a way that he wants to bring about peace, right? So war is not an end unto itself, right? War is a means to an end, which is peace.
But then peace is also a means for eventually bringing into being a scientific society. And it is through the context of peace that he hopes that science can flourish. And then eventually the humanity, I mean, this is grandiose, right? This is in terms of being a humanitarian.
He really hopes that humanity can unite as one force and then sort of like Elle Sowaidi's Western strategy, if you think about it, he wanted to conquer Sicily, Italy, and then Carthage and bring it all back to conquer the Peloponnese. In a similar way, they can once do unite all of humanity and have humanity conquer nature. Right? And so if you put these things, these, wow, he's a realist and a humanitarian at the same time.
And I think it's difficult to pigeonhole him. I think we'd have to really think about how the moderns have co-opted charity and think about its use. You know, I can't, well, I'll leave it at that. Martin, you want to jump in here?
Well, I was going to say about the book itself. It sort of begins where a perplexed beginner like myself would begin. I mean, maybe you've heard this anecdote. My first week or so at the University College, Toronto, where I didn't know what I was getting into.
And I didn't know what to major in. I ended up majoring in something that I didn't even call it that in those days on honors course. You know, Toronto was the last Victorian university, I think, on the continent when I was still there. It's since abolished all those old ways, stuff, what more, they call me in ways.
But I asked a fellow student, well, what are you majoring in? Oh, English. Oh, honors English. Okay.
Well, what do you read? And she showed me one of the essays that Francis Bacon I can only remember, which I recall, it looked a lot like English, but I couldn't make head or tail of it. I said, okay, thank you. And I went on to think about something else.
Burns gently gets us in, is by saying, look, here are the three tensions or difficulties or contradictions that are sort of manifest when you start to read Bacon. Is the Immacia of Alien or not? Is he, does he defer to Plato and Aristotle? I mean, his understanding of what the theory of what philosophy, what science is, he seems to be doing that then again, not.
And finally, you could ask, is he a Christian or what is his stance, his status with regard to Christianity? Is he sincere about this? And so since he answers all these questions in a way, turn out to be yes and no, how do you get into this? And Burns is really wonderful and saying, well, let me sort of start with two things that really turn out to be more familiar.
That is to say, Machiavelli statements about what Machiavelli, well, what is the, what is the, what's the lead in to, to, let's just say, supplementing what the, what Plato and Aristotle say about political life? Well, but for number one, a scholarship, a scholarly study of human beings, I'm sort of dodging the question of foreign relations at the moment, because I'm just interested in getting at how he gets into the philosophic need of what Bacon's subtle but complicated position is scholarship is in disrepute. So Bacon's argument, say to the King James, and this is the advancement of learning. This is how to bring philosophy, if you like, scholarship in general, on the one hand, and practical life closer together.
And what that then means is the ancient, tell you what's good, but in order to connect what's good for how to realize effectively, efficiently, how to bring up the good and the real world, in effect, Machiavelli teaches what these things are, teaches us to go to these things. So going, negotiating that problem, Nathan, I hope you'll jump in because you made a nice summary of the various chapters, and I'm still bogged down in chapter one, trying to sell out this difficulty. For me, I guess I'll just end my present point. For me, it was getting into the philosophic issue, not being that familiar with the international IR issue, particularly at all.
And I just found that gently Burns was sort of going through what he went through, you might say, as a learner, starting out from the viewpoint of basically having read the basic, most familiar political philosophical texts and wondering why Bacon didn't seem to fit neatly into any of the categories, Machiavellian or not, classical or not, Christian or not. And so he sort of took us through the tensions in each case, starting with foreign policy or Bacon's the same on foreign policy. Go ahead, you say something, I'll have something more to say in a second. Okay, I think in terms of the ambiguities with regard to Aristotle and Plato and Machiavellian Christianity, those ambiguities are there because that's how he writes with regard to various audiences in mind, having various audiences in mind, more than anything else, he wanted to be respectable.
So he can talk about the just causes of war and seem as if he's fitting into the just war tradition, but deep down, he's challenging it. He doesn't think that once you go to war for the sake of religion, he doesn't think one should topple a tyranny. He thinks deep down in terms of foreign policy, the foreign policy should be wise. And in terms of being wise, that ultimately is oriented to how one extends one's empire.
Right. And so that is the key. He's focused on external relations. So if we look at the subtitle with special attention to the principles of foreign policy, I think we see that Brent's helps us really to focus on something that is key to Bacon's philosophy in general, and that is the external, right?
That matters so much for, I think, Brent's interpretation that he takes it all the way through in the appendix. He talks about applying Machiavelli to physics. And it's a nice little section where basically what happens in natural philosophy with Bacon is you remove any concern with the essence of things, right? What you are basically interested in is exterior relations and matter in motion.
And so forms get reinterpreted and in Bacon. So we're not dealing with platonic forms, though. He uses that language. He'll use metaphysics too.
But in the end, these both serve a physical understanding of things focused on the external and in the forms as Bacon reinterprets them, these are laws of action, laws, emotions, things like that. And he felt that we could have a fixed understanding of change. So he goes from politics to natural philosophy. And for me, I think how Burns captures that is quite intriguing because we think of the socratic turn, right?
The second selling. Remy Broglie refers to this as the socratic revolution, the turn away from the study of nature things to the human things. But then with Bacon, I guess it was enough on whether or not Socrates actually, I mean, with regard to Socrates, you could question whether or not he actually turned away from the study of nature things. Maybe he just spoke a bit differently if we follow Xenophon.
Or at least one interpretation of Xenophon. But with Bacon, I think Bacon was doing something very similar. He was talking about human things, but also had natural philosophy in mind whenever he was speaking about them. At least Burns points to that in several sections.
And in a sense, we could see Bacon as a counter-revolution. But if we speak of a socratic revolution, Bacon is a counter-revolution trying to bring the study of the nature of things back into the purview of philosophy. And I think deep down his human philosophy, he makes a distinction between human and natural philosophy, but I don't think it holds up. I think in the end, the human philosophy is reducible to natural philosophy, to laws of motion.
Because as Burns eloquently points out, even morality is treated in physical terms. Yeah, let me suggest, I was thinking, is there a single term that flows through all this discussion, behavior, I think. If you could reduce foreign policy to dealing with the behavior of other nations, or the behavior of acquiring and then maintaining empire, chapters two and three. And then what kind of populace would you have to have in order to acquire and maintain?
What behavioral attributes would you know? Again, I'm consciously thinking of the terms of contemporary social science, which is just that. So it really spells out this project. Can you reduce morality and even religion to that?
I think when he comes to talking about Christianity, it's very interesting, very tongue-in-cheek, I think. But something he can say about Christian teaching, where he makes the contrast with Islam, with Islam, you have an imposed law and debate is not allowed. Argument is not allowed. The thing about Christianity is that argument is allowed, that is, once you separate off religion from physics, Christian teaching from physics.
And you mentioned Nathan, you haven't made a tolerant Christianity, not a world-conquering Christianity. So you keep the Christian teaching very simple. You recognize there's going to be diversity of Christian sects. And as he says at one point, you never talk to, outside of a small scholarly clique about you never debate Christian teaching in detail.
The quoting Solomon, you're going to end up being slandered if you do that. I'm paraphrasing the quotation from Solomon that he uses there, what is Calumniate in the verb, which can mean a lot of things. And then finally, so the slide into behavioral physics, if we could call it that, that's been going on for a long time. And gently, it's going to come, I'm going to talk about this.
There's a very interesting remark along these lines. It says on page 125 in chapter 6 about this attempt to reduce everything down from international issues. But the real, this connects it to the restoration of the first, by the way, it's interesting. I had never thought this connection until you were speaking just now, Nathan.
But how much that is part of the modern stories is, speaking back behind Plato and Aristotle. And you usually associate this with figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger, or even Rousseau going back to Socrates. But you see it even with Bacon going back behind this, seeing something wrong with the logic of the ancients, but not necessarily with the goal, at least of the priests of Craddock's or something like that. But he says this on the top of the one, they can aim that a true universality, the goal of philosophy from its first inception.
And among these primary motions of abstract physics, we find that the five central motions are none other than those appetites or desires that constitute the divisions of morality. So he seemed to have seen, or conceived at least the possibility that there are certain motions in physics that while distinctively human do have a sort of broader sort of, you know, there's a reducibility, a possible reducibility there. There's also maybe this ambition, you know, so Bacon's often thought of as a sort of grand visionary thinker, which he is. But he also has such powerful arguments.
Like here, you're like, oh, no, this has actually extremely worked out, right? And one of the ways it's worked out, maybe this is jumping too far ahead and we want to talk more about Machiavelli and the classics, but maybe I can throw this out here, something to work up towards. You also get the sense that he sees that the political problem doesn't mean of a kind of solution, that the highest good contemplation is not simply at odds with moral principles, like duty, right? Or even lower principles, like usefulness and pleasure and comfort, right?
That actually, you can satisfy all of these at once through a certain kind of scientific lorry or something like that that has a kind of trickle down effect. You can call this trickle down economics or something like that. But I don't know where you guys want to go with that. I just, I got a sense, I'll put it like this.
Burns really does show you that reduction of morality in politics, internationalist, is all the way down through morality to physics. He shows you very carefully and that works. And I don't think I ever really appreciated how granularly they can have worked out these visionary projects. Do without what you will.
No. Well, go ahead. Yeah, in terms of, I think what Burns is very helpful at doing is, and you get this in the scholarship on bacon, did he prefer light over fruits or contemplation over utility? And I think Burns gives the most satisfactory response.
And I think you touched upon it, Alex. And I think for, for Burns, and whenever he interprets bacon, you have to keep in mind that bacon had these twin objects in mind, right? The unification of human power and human knowledge, right? These are the twin goals.
And in order to realize that you have to recognize how theory no longer is just simply observing the natural course of things, right? Bacon lays out nature in three manners or three conditions. The ordinary course of nature, we are born into this world. We die, right?
So you see certain patterns that are just, we would recognize them as the norm. And then you have nature and it's wondering course and then nature vexed. And what we realize is that bacon's not so much interested in the ordinary course of nature. In fact, he really wanted to apply science to such a degree that we could be practically immortal.
He was very much for the prolonging of life. And so in order to overcome this first understanding of nature and its ordinary course, you'd have to understand nature wandering, but also nature vexed and see what you could discern about the simple motions from this. And you would really have to get nature to reveal itself. And in its ordinary course, it doesn't.
And herself. And in order to do that, you would have to apply experimentation, please control the experiments and all that. And that's how we arrive at knowledge, right? But knowledge now, the acquiring of knowledge blends theory and practice.
You no longer simply have a life of the mind, but you have a theory that is very much involved in getting its hands dirty, not simply observing. Yeah, but this knowledge ultimately is a thing subliminal. I mean, it's beneath the threshold of what your eyes and mind eyes can see without instruments to help it out and a theorizing that will adjust to this. So, I mean, what are the, I mean, I puzzled over this for a while, what are these simple things?
Well, they turn out to be simple motions. So everything is in movement. And in a way, nothing is fixed. But of course, what Bacon is looking for are patterns that are more or less fixed or that something goes from call it A to B.
But it's all transitional. I mean, the difficulty say, I mean, there's a comparison here with ancient atomism. But the problem is how do you, if the atoms are inert and they're somehow flowing through a medium, that's nothing. I mean, Arizona point, how can you go through a medium?
That's a vacuum. I mean, it's either, but, but so if everything is flowing, then what you need is to try is to map and track basically beginnings and endings of flows or maybe positive. I think you end up positing. Well, this is a beginning and this is an ending.
But if you can accumulate enough of these things, then you can start a big sort of box of kinds of movements, but motions, including a spontaneous rotation, magnetism. And then what you're doing then is constructing a manifest nature from the subliminal movements. I mean, that's the project anyway. Yeah, which is very Machiavellian, right?
That first aphorism from the second book of the new organ number, he talks about super inducing new natures on these latent structures and using latent processes, which he then says if you do that from bottom up, that'd be magic, basically a real magic. It sounds a lot like chapter six of the print sources. If you find a people dispersed, you can just put any form you wish on the matter. So then the question is where is the the theoretical?
I mean, when bacon keeps insisting that knowing is as or really more important. So what you're knowing is what you've been doing. I'm doing those things, intracting those things. So it's something like knowledge of management of some sort of, I mean, to use that corporate management.
I mean, you're pulling together, you're either viewing or because you can enter because you can then come to the point with enough accumulations that you can intervene in the motions and redirect them to more convenient motion. You don't like the weather. Well, let's investigate those motions that go into weather and see if we can deflect this nasty weather. Again, now you need a whole army of people to do it.
So here's an incentive for peace rather than war where you can work the old armies into the new. Here's a reason for the elevation of the common person, not to be surfed anymore, at least not on the farms, but not to overwhelm the nobility because these are going to be the literate people who can appreciate better what this project is going to be. So you still need them. So you need something like a balance of power favoring nobility rather than favoring the vulgar as they say.
Does this mean nobility are more manipulable? Well, what is the status of this knowledge? I mean, we know only what we make. I mean, that seems to be the premise here.
Is that inherently satisfying? And here's something from the new organan where a bacon is talking about the seventh day of creation where God looks at what he's made, what he's done. And very sad. So it sounds as if that God is the model here, the biblical God.
Now, I discovered it was just extraordinarily familiar with the biblical text in the Hebrew and as we got it. And I just wonder whether he is including in this, the fact that God is also anticipating what's to be made of here. This is Bacon's construction because Burns is a way of summarizing what theory is theorizing is that the best theorizing will be the best anticipation of the future patterns of things. Bacon has a nasty word for anticipations where he talks about the common sense understanding of things nature in the first way that you mentioned.
That is a lion's and oak trees and things like that. And that just in the new organan, these are anticipations, but their status as knowledge is not firm. It's to go to the underlying patterns. Forms are laws of nature, meaning just that the patterns of behavior, that's all it needs.
One question is how does Bacon anticipate that the investigation into these will result in fixed, permanent laws of nature, probably induction as it shows up in contemporary epistemology, not necessarily deep, but just to point that out. But assuming that you have a finite list of motions, you could in principle do that. Is it, among the satisfying moral activities of human beings ending at the perfect of good, as he calls it at one point, the philosophy or science is included in that, is it satisfying enough just to know what you've made? I mean, you and I teach classes, isn't it empirically the case in classes today?
People are still wondering about the big questions or they're extending what they know from their technical specialties as if you could then go from these technical specialties to solve the unsolved riddles of things. Can you do it differently, stated? Can you do it without mind? Mind doesn't show up as such.
Mind is just another kind of body, very simple and nearly invisible power motions of particles or something that are the movements of mind. Have we dealt with mind adequately? Yeah, I mean, he has this interesting discussion of spirits as possibly irreducible, though. He thinks it's not to argue that it is reducible.
Let me just read two short passages that I think helped to tie up this discussion a little bit and then let's go further into this. Of course, because I think this might help with finding it. He says the following about contemplation is on page 119. Apparently, they can conceive the contemplation or wisdom as the highest perfection of man, so much like the agents, but it was not like that of the agents, contemplation of the eternal unchanging pattern of self-sufficient excellence, or rather contemplation of the most far-seeing practice or action.
The theory which just goes knowledge of all possible operations. In short, it was that contemplation productive of the most long-range practice. There's a perfect coincidence about the desire for contemplation and the desire for fruits. This coincidence he describes on page 120 really powerfully.
This is one of my favorite passages of what I've read. It would appear that bacon envisages a complete coincidence of private and social good on the highest level, not just in incidental ways or low ways, but the highest level. Ambition, in the highest sense, the ambition of the founder of the empire of man over nature, and here he emphasizes, who is that founder because he is the first discover of the cosmological truth, becomes the same time the performance of the highest of all duties. The ambition of the founder of the grandest of all empires is the highest form of the active or extensive good.
It is realized by means of the perfective good. So you're perfecting yourself, but you're also active and helping others. And then he goes a little further and he says, the lowest of the bacon's, the quaternion of the good, the conservative good, or the good of enjoyment is to fill through that pure delight which men have in fame, honor, and the subjection of other men's minds. Such delight, which depends necessarily on the thoughts and words of others.
So this is one of the questions you ask about mind more, and I have a second question to add to that is, how does glory fit into this? I find it strange to think of a contemplative mind who sees everything being reduced to this basic form or what have you, and desiring glory among other sort of concatenations of these forms. I don't know, so it's strange, sometimes I read bacon and it seems clear to me, he wants to maintain the idols, as he puts it, the natural understanding of the ancient understanding, because that's just necessary for how human beings actually live their lives, on the one hand. On the other hand, that's strictly speaking all false, from the perspective of this reductive physics.
So I guess I'm asking, we have mind, we have glory, but how does this not just culminate in idols, for the scientific mind, for the scientific seeker of glory? I'm not sure I can avoid the nihilism there. In the New Argonne, when he's talking about the extirpating, he used it to the term extirpating, and I think when he uses a word, that's the Latin word, he's very precise about extirpating as they get rid of the stem, which implies that we're talking about the idols, that you can't get rid of the roots. So these idols are embedded in human nature, that we can't help being anthropocentric to use that term.
And I mean, is philosophical reflection then simply reflection on our fate in that sense of the word? I mean, we can't do anything else. The behavioral movements of things, which are us, draw us this way. But if I could add, I think, you know, in terms of the idols of the mind, yeah, some are innate, some are required too.
And you can, at least in terms of being aware of the idols, you could correct and be, you recognize that the mind specifically in terms of idols of the tribe, the mind is prone to seeing more regularity in nature than there actually is. So if you're aware of that, then you could bracket it. And the key, I think what Bacon is doing here is he's trying to get the so-called sons of science used to distrusting natural human human understanding, right? And so this is where the method comes into play.
And so once you are aware of the idols, you do your best to get rid of the ones that you could acquire, those that are innate, you recognize that this might not actually lead you to, to not to might be in the way. And so the corrective then would be to apply this method. And once you are aware of the idols, then you could, according to Bacon, approach the divine ideas. So he separates the idols of the mind from divine ideas.
And in a sense, he thinks that we could arrive at those through the method. So I guess he's pretty hopeful, right? His method can get at these copies if that's what they are of the divine mind. I think that he's very ironic, I think, about these divine ideas.
I mean, they're not what you read and not other than platonic dialogues. I think they're the laws of nature. I think that's exactly, yeah. The impred, the signature and impression made on things is they're created, something like that in Ephraus and 23s where he says, highly ironic because it's really this ambiguity that allows the theologically minded in the old-fashioned sense to go.
Now, what, but in this connection, what is puzzled me is when he talks about Plato and Aristotle, he says, well, and I understand the Aristotle criticism, the Aristotle critique is Aristotle limited philosophy or science to logic, by which he means dialectics, which means, and I think Bacon says it rather than as to how you can refute another person's argument. It's the spoken observation that the life of the philosophy is it would seem with Aristotle. I noticed in Aristotle when you look at his doctrine of the four causes, force is not anywhere part of that, those four doctors. You don't see forces, you feel.
So I thought that description of Aristotle by Bacon is very far-seeing. I mean, I think he's seen deeply into Aristotle as a contemplator, as a pure philosopher, you might say, I haven't yet figured out what he means by saying that Plato's fault is philosophizing was limited by theology. I find it that the only thing I can come up with is if it's a reference to the education of the guardians of the preliminary education of them in the Republic, it means that it's geared to justice, the question of justice. But of course, it's geared in a discussion that is willing to pursue the idea of justice apart from the realization of justice.
Let's put it that way. So that must be what's unsatisfactory about it. I could switch a little bit to more narrowly political questions. Nathan had mentioned at one point that part of the foreign policy of Bacon is to sort of make the world hospitable for the flourishing of science.
And so I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit more about that. What are the political conditions that are most conducive to science? And one might be inclined to think that I'll just mention my father was in the military in the 1990s, and when we finally got the internet, he said, we've been on that for years. So there's this way in which, well, I guess, what's relation between war technology, the flourishing of science, but just what are the best political preconditions for it?
And I don't know if you want to touch on the new Atlantis in this breath or not, but. Yeah, that would do it. Yeah, go ahead, Nathan. You've thought about this a lot more than...
Okay. Well, I think you're right to raise the question in terms of... I think this is what you're getting at. You could not war the conditions of war.
Also, you know, propel science to be innovative and to flourish and to bring about these new creations. And I don't know if Bacon rejects that. I think that's not the type of world he wants, it seems. And I think this might be owing to his use of Christianity.
And I think, ultimately, he's for liberal naturalization, like Machiavelli was. This will help the empire grow. So whenever Bacon is talking about regimes, he's talking... Well, I mean, he's not a risk to tell you, right?
He talks about empire as sort of the regime. And the key then is to expand it. And this ties into some things that Alex had mentioned, the true greatness of kingdoms. And this is where glory comes in.
I think for Bacon's understanding of the good, which burned the lays out nicely, glory is... I don't know, Martin, maybe you might know better than me, but I think glory or Alex, you could jump in on a trip or a Greg. Glory seems to be in terms of the layout of the good, right? You have the good of the individual and the good of the community, right?
The good of the community, he calls duty, the good of the individual, he calls virtue self-good. And the individual good then is broken down into passive and active. Active good is higher than passive. Good is the actual ability to expand, right?
Self-magnifying. This ties into sort of this expansionism that is behind the spirit of empire. And so in terms of the individual that aspires to magnify himself or so, this then would suggest that there's something to that, right? There's something that is ennobling maybe.
And then, but you don't really see glory come into the picture until you look at the passive good. And it's the passive good where you have what is he called the conservative good and the perfective good, the perfective good is aligned with contemplation, but then it's the lowest type of good where glory is probably the highest expression of the conservative good. I might be getting that wrong, but if that's the case, he seems to, he places it at the bottom, but he recognizes that human beings are in a way driven by this recognition, this enjoyment of being recognized. And in many ways, I think this might be going too far off, but I think in many ways, whenever you could then couple that with the highest level of the perfective good contemplation, being oriented towards utility, but also acquiring light as well theory so that you could expand yourself further and this then would redound to the collective good, right?
One would do one's duty to humanity, right? And actually bringing into being a human and part now, if one were able to do that, right? And then Bacon says, this person should receive the highest honors, right? He talks about two types of honors, divine and heroic, divine really only go to the scientific type, heroic pertains to the political type.
And then he talks about ambition. And whenever he ranks the ambitions, he says, there's the ambition of founding regime, it's kind of vulgar. And then there's the ambition of expanding one's empire over other countries, and it's a little bit better. One of those wholesome type of ambition is the bringing into being of this empire of man over nature, right?
And in order to do that, you have to have an open society, right? You have to have liberal naturalization because if you're all going to be part of this human empire, you have to be singing the same song in a sense, right? You have to have the same goal and what is that goal? What unites all of humanity?
Another war, but not against each other, but a war against nature. And so that is the goal, the conquest of nature. And so in a sense, you have the conquest this war on nature is seen in terms of a peaceful remedy with regard to uniting humanity. But his science, I would say, is very well, it's weaponized, right?
It has this militaristic aspect to it. Yeah, mastering nature, war on nature doesn't sound very specific. Yeah. Yeah.
And you can actually, you can start seeing, try the point is that when we're going to teach Machiavellian and bacon, you go from the re-before tuna, the conquest of nature, which is put in as cultivating the truth and charity. It sounds so much nicer. And then you start looking at sort of ecological issues and, you know, mining issues, you're like, no, it's not, it's not just charitable. It's quite violent, actually.
And it comes at real sort of violence to the natural beauty of the visible ones. So as to get this sort of stuff that's buried in there. It's being a Machiavellian bacon and this idea of like a global project. And he wanted the sort of interesting sort of unintended heritage.
I mean, he calls it this in the book, right? We need to reassess this project. One point, which I found myself on the thinking about is that, okay, you get this sort of kind of maybe global quasi-liberal natural science projects, however you want to put it. And the problem is, is this is meant to overcome the problem of like feuding principalities and the kind of violence that the bacon doesn't want to see.
The problem is, is at the same time as you're trying to leave that, you're also inventing this incredibly powerful natural science. And the question is, is what happens when people reject that order? And say, no, I want to go back to the feuding principalities. I don't want to conquer, you know, France or something like that.
And also Poland and then maybe we can move through, you know, Africa into the US or something like that. And suddenly you get the Machiavellian world, but with a really powerful natural science. And when you look at that and people can and have found that to be an attractive possibility, you read something like younger's total mobilization or something like that. And you're like, oh, this is what a synthesis of bikonian science with the Machiavellian politics actually looks like.
And we've been trying to avoid that ever since the world of war. Two, I guess maybe this is a question we can end on is, is how do we assess the conquest of nature? What do you think Barnes was trying to have us think about? In calling for this reassessment, what are the issues that he saw that maybe bikon hadn't worked out sufficiently or we can just see clearer now or to fulfill his project.
We need to make a pivot. You know, what are the issues that are on the table now? You know, way Burns's book ends the way the new Atlantis ends. If you remember the ending, we have this description of this perfectly peaceful, you've settled in society.
That's what it is. That's it's a monarchy in title. I mean, there's a king there. There's an official religion, but it's tolerant because on the island before Christians started, there were Jews and presumably Hindus and so on.
It's somewhere in the Pacific Indian Ocean region. We're not sure where Ben Salem is. I mean, it's a fable. It's mythical, but it's there.
And then we're given the narrator of what's really kind of an elaborate ships diary, which is what the new Atlantis looks like reads like. He's given this private tour of the, you know, behind the gates of the sign of the huge think tank and research apparatus. As at least one other scholars pointed out, there's every conceivable technological investigation going on there, including things like submarines and image projection, other movies or internet, whatever. It's all there.
It doesn't make it and call it the new thinkery. I mean, he loved attaching new to everything. The one thing missing is no political science. I mean, there's no way to teach statesmanship, I mean, to use that expression.
And at the end of this tour, the one character who's said to have political wisdom, there's no indication how he got it. Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, you have these 12 merchants, as they're called, who go on false flag expeditions to Europe. It's industrial and scientific espionage is in many ways, but it is so they come back. So presumably one of them has come back with a book of Aristotle and play.
I mean, it's possible that Joe, then is one of these merchants, it's conceivable. I'll make a quick plug for your book. Try locking the Jewish question. I don't know if you're familiar with it.
Oh, but I'm more than right. Rooded excellent book on the merchant of Venice and in there he has a chapter on Joe Ben. So yeah. I, I really left that chapter open with really the same question here.
What is the new Atlanta? What is the island poised to do that? What's the, why are they sending out somebody who's going to report on Ben Salem? That's hidden really from the rest of the world.
No, the rest of the world doesn't know it. The sailors who ended up there from either Spain, I mean, they started out from Peru. It turns out that it's when you put two and two together, the espionage capabilities of Ben Salem were perfectly able to track that ship and the weather control capabilities were perfectly able to concoct this storm that for nine months kept that ship away from China, which is where I was going. And then I would argue it seems bring them to wherever Ben Salem is.
So if, if, if whether warfare and so on is, is part of at least the means whereby Ben Salem is announcing itself to the world, what is it going to, and how much is the one who announced? So the, the narrator will go on C-SPAN and read his book maybe or something. And others, do they have the kind of peaceful aims, peaceful, or the, you know, the colonization of high tech science and, and, and so living as the last man as Nietzsche would put it, I mean, is that the end goal of the new Atlantis or because it doesn't say, might they have one of nefarious Machiavellian true greatness in mind. Yeah.
I mean, so with that connection to another course of adware, you, so it seems like they've manufactured the storm that brings them in, right? And all that. But one account won't give it. I can't remember if it was Burns or maybe I read this in Kennington, but what account won't you give is, okay, there was this, there was once this great wave that destroyed everything, not Ben Salem, but great way that destroyed everything.
And now it seems like sailing has gotten to the point they discovered the new world and perhaps now they need to make some overtures. So it's a more peaceful view or perhaps they're trying to conquer things that go well, they'll destroy the rest of the world with a wave again, maybe. It's not clear. But so that makes me wonder whether the original destruction was actually caused by a Ben Salem, which would suggest further that this is again, a much more Machiavellian city than it seems like on its surface, right?
But I don't know, I think we're at about an hour. I don't know. Do you have any parting thoughts or final pitches to get, listen to this by the book. I think this is, I'll say this, not many, not many books on bacon or any, I think are really approachable by intelligent non-experts, we'll say, or even people like, right, unintelligent non-experts.
But I think this is a book that if one is willing to sort of work through the distinctions and sort of pay attention to it, he walks you through the steps. I think if you're interested in the political philosophy of bacon, this is a great place to start. Can you explain to folks at home Alex what a book is? It's like a podcast where you use your eyes to hear it.
You're used to them, you're mostly pictures of them. That's right. I'm worried about animals. Nathan, why don't you take the last word?
Oh, I thought you guys are wrapping up. Okay. Sorry. I think just the point of one thing.
And you get this with Burns's article and the edited volume that you put together, Alex and his Francis Bacon on the conquest of nature, but also here at the end of the dissertation, he says further recon, Burns says further reconsideration of the project for a conquest of nature would seem to be an order. And in a way, he's always laughing at this, especially when I see this here and in the article, because in a way, he's mimicking Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon will, in the advancement of learning, will say, oh, things are sufficient here, but they're deficient here, right? And the deficient ones, of course, they need further reconsideration.
But the sufficient ones at times are just simply going to be tossed out. And what Burns is doing is thinking, well, maybe Bacon's hopes, his aspirations, his ambitions rather, are, well, maybe they got the better of his thinking. And why not? Like what you were pointing to, Greg, why not envision many neo-Atlantic regimes just duking it out?
There's going to be an earth that is no more, right? And so, and that's the real question, I think we face. And I think what you were getting at Martin as well is where does Bacon stand? In terms of statesmanship with regard to advancing science, did he really think that's just this transfer of knowledge to other regimes?
Because the narrative of the New Atlantis, the European narrator at the very end, he's caused to go publicizes to the world. And so is everyone simply just going to flock to Ben Salem to learn about the science that they perfected? I mean, in the labs, we hear that they can mix things and already they know what's going to come into being. There's no chance anymore.
And so all that needs to happen is the world needs to be educated. And this is very utopian, right? But nonetheless, I think these are the aspirations attached to his humanitarian science. I mean, he has a sense he wanted to bring in to being a humanitarian world holder and one wonders, does that have a place for politics?
Well, with all that, I got to go. I've got an appointment at the Adam and Eve pools, but he's going to check out my wife. Oh, no. Political philosophy, for instance, speaking of special attention to the principles of foreign policy by Lawrence Burns, edited by our two guests today, Martin Yaffe and Nathan Janine and published by political animal press, the good folks there.
And thanks for joining us. It was a really stimulating conversation. I mean, I'll just say in a number of episodes on bacon and reading this and talking with you guys has all sorts of gears turning about the New Atlantis, the New Oregon on, etc. It's a really stimulating book.
And I think this was a stimulating conversation. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks for.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.
Thanks. Thank you. Thanks.