Gernot Böhme: The End of the Baconian Age

For anyone looking for a little more in explanation of one of the claims in my recent Böhme translation, a rough English version of the opening page and half of B's The End of the Baconian Age (Am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters, 1993):

The Baconian Faith, The Baconian Programme

We are in the habit of giving names to eras only once we are bidding them farewell. It is only then that a particular characteristic of the age becomes noticeable as a fully-fledged characteristic mark - in the past we hardly noticed it at all because we took it as an unquestionable given of our existence in the world. If today we have reason to call the age of modern science the Baconian era, this is because a given of our existence has vanished - the basic conviction that scientific and technological progress amount to the same thing as human progress. In its time this basic conviction came into the world through Francis Bacon. We might call it the opening of the age of modern science.

The belief that techno-scientific progress was the same thing as human progress was not a given of the age that preceded Bacon: the notion of progress was quite foreign to antiquity, while in the Christian Middle Ages human progress was to be found on the path of religious salvation; it was certainly not what men and women looked to worldly sciences to provide. Bacon himself was highly conscious of the fact that his conviction was by no means something he could assume ordinary people shared. His entire output as a writer was a single propaganda campaign in support of this his guiding idea. In particular his object was to convince political authority - England's reigning queen and then its king - of the "dignity and progress of the sciences" - to persuade them, in short, to give science their financial and institutional backing. His programme of large-scale renewal (instauratio magna) was shaped by a notion that had been voiced by many - the call for the religious reformation that had been set in motion to be expanded into a general reformation of the entire world. What distinguished Bacon from the other reformers - those whose names are writ large in the figures of Cromwell and Comenius - was that he set his hopes for human progress on the development of science and technology rather than on political revolution or educational reforms. As he put it in the justly famous Aphorism 129 of the first volume of his Novum Organon:

"For the benefits of discoveries may extend to the whole race of man, civil benefits only to particular places; the latter last not beyond a few ages, the former through all time. Moreover, the reformation of a state in civil matters is seldom brought in without violence and confusion; but discoveries carry blessings with them, and confer benefits without causing harm or sorrow to any."

Here we find the consisest answer to the question what the Baconian programme consisted in - in short, in organising science into an enterprise devoted specifically to new inventions and in forming science into a social institution capable of transforming its discoveries for the benefit of humanity at large. . .