What is the Light Enlightenment?
The Light Enlightenment is a response to neo-reactionary “Dark Enlightenment” ideas promoted by Curtis Yarvin. When I heard about the Dark Enlightenment, I thought, it needs what Wodehouse called Sweetness and Light.
And Bacon. Francis Bacon, the philosopher and statesman. Nietzsche called him “the first realist in the grand sense”; writers of the French Enlightenment spoke of him in superlatives: Voltaire called him “the father of the experimental philosophy,” Denis Diderot declared that the Encyclopédie “owe[s] most to the Chancellor Bacon,” and d’Alembert praised him as “the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers.” I have a book, Francis Bacon and the Heroic Archetype, which aims to restore his place in the Western canon.
During the pandemic, I noticed something interesting. It was the 400th anniversary of two revolutions from top-down to bottom-up approaches, in politics and science. Our calendar, the Gregorain Calendar, is actually a 400-year calendar, that’s how long it takes for one full leap-year cycle. The year 1620 marks a striking convergence of intellectual and political transformation. In that year Francis Bacon published the Novum Organum, announcing a new instrument of knowledge grounded in experience rather than inherited authority, while across the Atlantic the Mayflower Compact articulated a radically new principle of political legitimacy: government arising from mutual consent, rather than divine right or dynastic inheritance. The parallel is not superficial. Both documents enact a decisive shift from top-down to bottom-up authority, from paternal command to collective process, from legitimacy grounded in precedent to legitimacy grounded in procedure. Bacon’s overthrow of Aristotelian deduction and the colonists’ eventual rejection of imposed sovereignty belong to the same deep cultural movement.
In De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bacon makes a remark that has often been dismissed as a cryptographic curiosity. In fact, it articulates a far deeper principle: meaning can be conveyed by any medium, provided it admits of a stable twofold difference:
Neither is it a small matter these cypher-characters have, and may perform: for by this art a way is opened, whereby a man may express and signify the intentions of his mind, at any distance of place, by objects which may be presented to the eye, and accommodated to the ear: provided those objects be capable of a twofold difference only.
Bacon’s insight is not about letters or secrecy, but about encoding itself. Meaning does not inhere in symbols, sounds, or marks as such; it resides in difference, presence and absence, high and low, light and dark, sound and silence. Once this abstraction is made, content becomes independent of its material carrier, a separation that lies at the heart of digital representation.
Novum Organum, 1620
Bacon anticipates the central intuition behind modern computing and information theory; his bi-literal cipher is the first binary system of encoding information. Long before binary arithmetic, symbolic logic, or formal machines, he identifies the minimal condition under which information can exist at all: consistent, repeatable distinction. It is in this sense, as a metaphysician of information, that Bacon stands at the beginning of the intellectual trajectory leading to modern computing.
We are still far from knowing even half enough about Lord Bacon—the first realist in the grand sense—to know everything he did, everything he willed, and everything that went on in the depths of his soul… Let the critics go to hell!
Freidrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Boon or bane: Bacon’s legacy in retrospect
What I have been able to do is to give it, as I hope, a not contemptible start. The destiny of the human race will supply the issue, and that issue will perhaps be such as men in the present state of their fortunes and their understandings cannot easily grasp or measure. For what is at stake is not merely a mental satisfaction, but the very reality of man’s wellbeing, and all his power of action.
—Novum Organum
The world we inhabit, for better and for worse, bears the imprint of Bacon’s intervention; any attempt to recover him as a heroic, world-renewing figure must confront the ambivalence of his legacy. The triumph of consciousness over inherited ignorance, so central to Bacon’s self-understanding and to the heroic archetype itself, did not unfold without cost. The methods he helped inaugurate proved extraordinarily powerful; but power, once unleashed, does not remain tethered to the intentions of its originator. In hindsight, Bacon’s vision stands at the threshold of modernity’s great promise, as well as its great anxiety: that the conquest of nature through knowledge might liberate humanity, or might instead estrange us from meaning, restraint, and wisdom.
East and West
I have a pet theory about the East and West being like the earth's right and left brain hemispheres. I started thinking along these lines after noticing that languages like Mandarin and Japanese are pictorial. It was the West's role to conquer and subdue the earth, so we have favored a more left-brain paradigm; Western religion has emphasized belief and worship, in contrast to the East, where experience is more of a focus or goal. The left brain/right brain idea fell out of favor, but has returned in modified form, particularly in the work of Iain McGilchrist.
Our intellectual paradigm has been distorted by colonialism, particularly the Civilizing Mission of British colonialism. This has resulted in a false dichotomy between the "rational" West and the "superstitious" East. It's interesting to note that the tools which enabled the West to conquer the earth, gunpowder, moveable type, and the magnetic compass, were actually invented earlier in China.
Link to publisher’s site:
https://wipfandstock.com/9798385278770/francis-bacon-and-the-heroic-archetype/
On the Knowledge of God
Are we made in the image and likeness of God? Maybe so, but it’s worth noting some important differences. We are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and we are generally driven by self-interest, whereas God has none. God doesn’t have to eat or pay the rent; God has everything and needs nothing.
The idea of a Messianic Age is derived from passages describing a time when knowledge of God will become universal and human nature—specifically the heart—will improve, leading to a condition of world peace. This is plausible because knowlege of God is experiential, and brings a kind of fulfillment that is transformative in nature. It can help reduce self-interest to manageable proportions.
For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.
—Habbakuk 2:14
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
—Jeremiah 31:34
And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh: That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
—Ezekiel 11:19-20
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
—Isaiah 2:4
Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.
—Hosea 4:1
For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
—Hosea 6:6
God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek God.
—Psalms 14:2 (also 53:2)
The humble shall see this, and be glad: and your heart shall live that seek God.
—Psalms 69:32
There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.
—Romans 3:11
Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.
—Proverbs 2:5
Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame.
—I Corinthians 15:34
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
—Hosea 4:6
Blessed are the solitary and elect, for you will find the kingdom. For you are from it, and to it you will return.
—Gospel of Thomas
Reverence is knowledge of God, and one who has come to know God, filled with all good things, has thoughts that are divine and not like those of the multitude. This is why those who are in knowledge do not please the multitude, nor does the multitude please them. They appear to be mad, and they bring ridicule on themselves. They are hated and scorned, and perhaps they may even be murdered.
—Corpus Hermeticum
He professeth to have the knowledge of God: and he calleth himself the child of the Lord. He was made to reprove our thoughts. He is grievous unto us even to behold: for his life is not like other men’s, his ways are of another fashion. We are esteemed of him as counterfeits: he abstaineth from our ways as from filthiness: he pronounceth the end of the just to be blessed, and maketh his boast that God is his father. Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him.
—Wisdom of Solomon 2:13-17
Realisation is real religion, all the rest is only preparation — hearing lectures, or reading books, or reasoning is merely preparing the ground; it is not religion. Intellectual assent and intellectual dissent are not religion.
—Vivekananda