ENG 695

Spring 2007

Week 15 Session Guide

Bacon

Semester Review

Bacon and Rhetoric

(from Brian Vickers, "Bacon and Rhetoric," The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. M. Peltonen, 1996, 200-231)

See the Four Intellectual Arts in the context of Bacon's Classification of All Knowledge

B sees rhetoric as an important part of his new scheme of knowledge. Along with logic, rhetoric conveys information and discoveries from the new modes of inquiry, but it also has a practical, moral dimension.  It should serve to move people to virtue, very much in the classical way.  The good will prevail if nothing interferes with it--B's presupposition, echoing Aristotle.

Rhetoric working in the human sphere--begins with model of faculty psychology

(Bacon uses Aristotle De anima as main source)

The mind is the rational Soul

In "thinking" (one function of the soul): Role of imagination is crucial in thinking: it poses images to the rational judgment. "The soul never thinks without an image" (Vickers 213)

In "local movement" (another function of the soul): accompanied by imagination or appetite to achieve some end (the understanding causes imagination to produce images; the appetite desires either real or apparent good).

In humans, conflicts arise when a principle of reason and an appetite run counter to one another; this is only possible in beings with a sense of time--able to evaluate the future good in relation to the present perceived good.

Thus psychology and ethics are inextricably linked.

Relevance to rhetoric in Bacon's system: B. used these "psychological models of the mind in order to describe both the way in which rhetoric functions and its fundamentally ethical nature" (Vickers 214).

Human mental faculties are divided into two kinds: one revolving around understanding and reason (the "wits"), the other the will or appetite.  The imagination is the intermediary between them.  (quote, p. 215) 

When passions disturb the reason, eloquence supports the imagination in upholding reason. (221) When a present good is presented to the imagination and hence to the understanding, the understanding judges whether it will be prosecuted. If the good is a false good, the understanding has to decide between following that or delaying gratification to follow a higher good. Bacon sees eloquence as aiding imagination in presenting the real good to the understanding; so the understanding can choose to move the will toward this good.  (quote 221)

Rhetoric thus plays a crucial ethical role in working through the imagination to affect the understanding and control the will.

B's description of rhetoric: "Applying reason to imagination for the better moving of the will" includes a "cooperation" between the reason and imagination (an older sense of "applying") for the morally better moving of the will.  This is not apparent without an understanding of faculty psychology and the positive, ethical role Bacon reserves for rhetoric.