Francis Bacon's Very Political Life

As I expect to be posting more regularly on Francis Bacon in his relation to Christianity and modernity, I am reposting this reflection on Perez Zagorin's account of his life in chapter two of his 1998 book, Francis Bacon, the chapter entitled, "Bacon's Two Lives."


Lytton Strachey's question, "Who has ever explained Francis Bacon?," still hangs over Bacon scholarship (Elizabeth and Essex, A Tragic History. Butler Press, 2007; p.9). Perez Zagorin identified the puzzle at the very outset of his book, a study of Bacon's life and thought entitled simply Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998) :

Francis Bacon lived two separate but interconnected lives. One was the meditative, reserved life of a philosopher, scientific inquirer, and writer of genius, a thinker of soaring ambition and vast range whose project for the reconstruction of philosophy contained a new vision of science and its place in society. The other was the troubled insecure life of a courtier, professional lawyer, politician, royal servant, adviser, and minister to two sovereigns, Elizabeth I and James I, who from early youth to old age never ceased his quest for high position and the favor of the great (p.3).

He could have practiced law, a profession for which he trained at Gray's Inn. Indeed, many suggested that he solve his financial difficulties by pursuing that option, but he simply refused. He could have sought an academic position, but that would not have satisfied him. He desired political office. Though he combined both scientist and politician in his soul, he was fundamentally a man of politics.

On the political side of Bacon's life and character, the puzzle has two aspects. On the one hand, Zagorin tells us that Bacon's political ambitions,

...absorbed a large part of his time and energy, pitting himself against rivals in a continual competition for office and power, diverting him from pursuing some of his most cherished intellectual goals, and forcing him to leave his main philosophical enterprise fragmentary and unfinished (ibid.).

This unceasing quest for ever higher political office raises the question, why would someone so committed to the benefit of the human race through a radical reorientation of the intellect, as Bacon was, concern himself so obsessively with political climbing for the whole of his adult life? While public service is honorable and requires people of ability and integrity for it to be done well, there were many others who were highly qualified to take up that task, whereas Bacon alone had the insight and learning to carry on what he called "the great instauration of man over the universe."

In Of The Interpretation of Nature Proemium, Bacon justifies his tireless pursuit of political power by the ability it would give him to support co-ordinated, publicly useful scientific inquiry with the requisite human and financial resources. He had in mind something like the National Science Foundation, or, better yet, Salomon's House as he describes it in New Atlantis. Thus, Bacon reconciles his two seemly incompatible and personally consuming goals, the scientific and the political, by interpreting the political enterprise in terms of the scientific one. Zagorin, by accepting this explanation, comes across like a woman who believes the sweetly spoken but not entirely plausible stories of her cheating husband (or vice versa; pp. 57f.). He produces no evidence that Bacon actually used what power he had at any given point to give significant support to the work of science as he was planning it out.

Bacon's explanation is unconvincing especially coming from a man who calculated his actions as carefully as he did. It was surely true that he could use the power of his political office to support his scientific project, but the effort that such a plan required was disproportionate to anything he could reasonably hope to obtain. The likelihood of his success not only in achieving a sufficiently powerful position in government, but also in holding that position long enough to accomplish his goals, and then also in actually using it to advance his grand project by arranging the cooperation of whoever else was necessary was uncertain at best, and unpromising at worst. As it turned out, he did not become Lord Chancellor until 1618 at the age of sixty, just eight years before his death, a position he held for only three years before his scandalous downfall. As a plan, it's comparable to betting your nest egg at the dog track. It is an unbaconian reliance on fortune.

Given his extraordinary learning and eloquence, it would have been a more efficient use of Bacon's time with a more promising outcome if he had pursued his projects from a position of academic and literary prominence, and used his powerful persuasive abilities to enlist the great in his cause. But Bacon had no interest in a life so far removed from the direct exercise of political power and its attendant honors. Zagorin himself notes that, "Bacon was irresistibly attracted to politics and would never willingly retire into a private existence" (p.4). Indeed, he never did. Even after he was deposed from power as a result of the bribery scandal, instead of turning his full attention to writing and publishing for a more lasting legacy, he continued to beg and claw for power, even if only the right to take his seat in the House of Lords.

(Bacon himself gives us reason not to take him at his word on this public spirited justification for his political ambition. Bacon scholars are remarkably credulous when it comes to Bacon's public affirmations of traditional morality and notions of virtue. But that is another investigation.)

The second aspect of the puzzle of Bacon's politics is the great difficulty he had in accomplishing his goals. He was frequently passed over, and accomplished what ranks he did only by constantly "asserviling" himself, as he lamented near the end of his life. His difficulties were not for lack of talent and intelligence, however. Zagorin's judgment is that people generally saw through his deceits and were repelled by them, earning him distrust rather than influence. Bacon was a great admirer of Machiavelli, but seemed to lack the virtu to be a successful Machiavellian. He was a notorious dissembler and manager of his own image for political purposes. "I had rather know than be known" (Promus of Formularies and Elegancies in Works XIV:13). Zagorin is also very clear on this point.

The subjects of secrecy, esoteric communication, and the techniques of managing people also came into his works. In his personal relationships with the great and powerful whose favor he desired, his preferred methods were dissimulation, subservience, and flattery... (p.14).

Like an orphan who is radically alone and vulnerable in a hostile world, Bacon saw only rivals (like Coke) and instruments (like Essex, the queen herself, and later the king). Zagorin sees this. Bacon, he says, "...regarded other persons purely as means he could exploit to attain his own ends. His object was to aggrandize himself by craft, flattery, and displaying himself in the best possible light" (p.20). One suspects that those who were neither obstacles nor of any use him politically, he used in some other way.

Zagorin identifies Bacon's two contradictory lives, but in fact he had three lives. Whereas his political life compromised his philosophic life, his sexual life compromised his political one. Zagorin spends more than two pages of his short biographical chapter exploring this issue. If Bacon wanted the safest path to high office, then--like Elizabeth, his queen--it would have been prudent of him to commit himself to chastity. He did not.

These contradictions are puzzling only if one accepts Bacon as a genuine philosophical philanthropist with an inscrutable political fixation. On the contrary, it is more reasonable to interpret his scientific project in light of his political ambitions. By this I mean not his politics narrowly conceived (Solomon, Martin, Leary?), but his highest political ambition. He did after all express his philosophic project in strikingly and consistently political language.

Zagorin sets aside his knowledge of Bacon's political obsessions, however, when he turns to consider him as a philosopher. "It is evident that in Bacon's mind the project of developing a philosophy capable of multiplying knowledge and discovery by a true interpretation of nature was his highest, most cherished aim and that to this enterprise other intellectual pursuits were secondary" (p.27). This does not account for his distracting political ambitions, however. If the philosopher is, as Plato says, the one who leaves the cave to pursue the truth, and who would rather remain above, disengaged from the city's concerns, especially the daily concerns, to pursue an understanding of the truth without distraction, then Bacon was no philosopher. He was obsessed with the cave, in particular with it's honors and privileges. He could not even enjoy a graceful retirement in quiet writing and study.

Bacon is tragic figure. He was a man of soaring personal ambition of the sort that would naturally benefit the human race, and indeed has. But he allowed himself to be distracted from his highest goals and most lasting glories by lesser and incompatible accomplishments and pleasures.