Bacon’s ideas on motion rested on an appetitive and acquisitive consideration of life in which nature was identified with a tendency to preserve order, virtue with the unceasing effort to expand the boundaries of life, and government with the art of maintaining and balancing power (reason of state). A remarkable outcome of this view was the opinion that, in a universe ruled by the principle of self-preservation, life appeared to be constitutively vulnerable, being always exposed to episodes of aggression and violence that originated in its own environs. In the teleological framework of Aristotelian metaphysics, by contrast, life was an indication of perfection, for it signalled the fulfilment of potentialities brimming with energy and knowledge. To be alive, for both Plato and Aristotle, meant to attain a higher degree of ontological perfection. For Bacon, to be alive meant to counter a deeper and stronger tendency to rest. Compared to Aristotelian and Platonic ideals of life as self-fuelling activity, Bacon shifted the emphasis away from the notion of spontaneous self-organization towards that of reactivity. From this point of view, he rightfully belongs to the early modern history of conatus, understanding by conatus the struggle to remain in existence and expand the scope and power of one’s being. By elaborating an original theory of conative motions, Bacon adopted and reinterpreted some of the most controversial issues of Renaissance philosophy concerning both nature and politics (above all from Bernardino Telesio and Niccolò Machiavelli), and bequeathed them to a number of seventeenth-century philosophers eager to explore new ways of addressing life’s puzzling tangle of desires, power and knowledge.
Francis Bacon and the Theologico-political Reconfiguration of Desire in the Early Modern Period
Giglioni, G.
2016-01-01
Abstract
Bacon’s ideas on motion rested on an appetitive and acquisitive consideration of life in which nature was identified with a tendency to preserve order, virtue with the unceasing effort to expand the boundaries of life, and government with the art of maintaining and balancing power (reason of state). A remarkable outcome of this view was the opinion that, in a universe ruled by the principle of self-preservation, life appeared to be constitutively vulnerable, being always exposed to episodes of aggression and violence that originated in its own environs. In the teleological framework of Aristotelian metaphysics, by contrast, life was an indication of perfection, for it signalled the fulfilment of potentialities brimming with energy and knowledge. To be alive, for both Plato and Aristotle, meant to attain a higher degree of ontological perfection. For Bacon, to be alive meant to counter a deeper and stronger tendency to rest. Compared to Aristotelian and Platonic ideals of life as self-fuelling activity, Bacon shifted the emphasis away from the notion of spontaneous self-organization towards that of reactivity. From this point of view, he rightfully belongs to the early modern history of conatus, understanding by conatus the struggle to remain in existence and expand the scope and power of one’s being. By elaborating an original theory of conative motions, Bacon adopted and reinterpreted some of the most controversial issues of Renaissance philosophy concerning both nature and politics (above all from Bernardino Telesio and Niccolò Machiavelli), and bequeathed them to a number of seventeenth-century philosophers eager to explore new ways of addressing life’s puzzling tangle of desires, power and knowledge.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
