Bacon and the politics of the prudential imagination

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2006 by Todd Butler

In book 7 of his De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Francis Bacon conducts a sustained inquiry into the practice of government, arguing, approximately midway through, that images of friendship and family can be examined not as models for institutional structures or policies "but as to the framing and predisposing of the minds of particular persons towards the preservation of those bonds of society." (1) The distinction between the arrangement of institutions and the framing of human minds may be a subtle point, but it is also an important one, especially for scholars studying the seventeenth century. Theories centering on some of the period's major issues of governance have become increasingly complicated in recent years, with the original Whig debate over the role of institutions in engendering the Civil War now just as often turning to more nuanced attempts at describing how king and citizenry could simultaneously clash and compromise on issues that had the potential to rend the fabric of both church and state. (2) For example, Kevin Sharpe, certainly no stranger to such historiographical debate, has recently proclaimed the need to "move from politics conceived (anachronistically) as the business of institutions, bureaucracies and officers to the broader politics of discourse and symbols, anxieties and aspirations, myths and memories." (3)

Bacon's suggestion that authority can often be understood through a focus on the mental dispositions of political actors provides an occasion for just such a rethinking, one that shifts our focus toward both individual and institutional action. In this essay, I want to argue that Bacon's faculty psychology and, in particular, his analysis of the imagination provides an ideal model for refocusing our attention on the methods by which early modern power was constituted. While critical readings of Bacon have often--though not always--concluded that Bacon remained fundamentally hostile to the imagination, a careful examination of his philosophical and political writings reveals that Bacon maintained a much more nuanced view, one simultaneously suspicious of and fascinated by the powers of this mental faculty. (4) Indeed, Bacon's interest in the imagination held more than just an intellectual appeal, for in its mediatory role between reason and the passions the imagination becomes a key pathway for either the subversion or support of political authority. More than simply a mental go-between, the imagination in Bacon's analysis becomes key to the effort of any individual--subject or monarch--to wield power, for through the imagination's power to transform image into belief and belief into action, desire might be transformed into obedience. In this sense politics becomes less about Bacon's specific relationship to royal authority and more about his assessment of a mental mechanism that when properly restrained offered significant power to all who could master its workings. (5) The result is a more prudential understanding of the imagination, one that draws upon the creative license accorded to "fancy" in the period yet binds that power to the pursuit of practical political objectives in which desire may shape one's actions but not control them. Far from being an object of scientific curiosity or even antipathy, the imagination provides a paradigm in which we may read early modern politics through the dynamics of thought, representation, and action.

Understanding the political implications of Bacon's views on the imagination necessarily demands an understanding of the model Bacon developed to explain the unseen workings of the human mind. As first described in his Descriptio Globi Intellectualis (1612, published 1653) and later in the more familiar De Augmentis, Bacon's psychological model analyzes human thought as the interaction between three distinct mental faculties: memory, imagination, and reason. In both works the basic operation of the mind remains the same. Physical data from the senses are first stored in the memory, creating an unorganized storehouse of raw information grounded in experience. Sorting and categorizing this information becomes reason's primary task, and in performing this work, the human mind comes to specific conclusions about actions, opinions, and belief. As the province of abstract thought, however, reason does not have direct access to sensory data. Instead, it must rely upon the imagination for its connection to the senses; through its image-making powers the imagination transforms this raw sensory data into intelligible images for reason to evaluate and categorize. After this process is complete, the imagination communicates reason's decisions to the will and affections through a similar process, presenting in a comprehensible visual form the abstract decisions reason has reached. (6)

Recognizing both the mental and physical nature of human action, Bacon describes the intellect and the will as "twins by birth" that alternately create and implement the mind's conclusions regarding sensory evidence (DAL 4:405). What binds these twins and mediates between them is the imagination, for as Bacon explains "voluntary motion is ever preceded and incited by imagination; so that imagination is as a common instrument to both" sense and reason (DAL 4:406). When properly functioning, Bacon contends, the imagination presents to reason images of the truth and to the will images of goodness, thus matching the receiving faculty's capacity with the most appropriate object. Imagination thus becomes a crucial mechanism for the transmission of authority; it is the pathway by which human desires are brought to heel.