Revolutionary Reform

Whitney on Bacon again: “Reform invites analogy and multiple levels of meaning as it variously connects old and new; it exposes the poverty of brute facts by, for one thing, fixing knowledge in a hierarchy of literary kinds or genres. Reformative visions in history grow in part out of biblical exegesis, which distinguishes literal and figurative meanings, and out of classical contexts in which the word mimesis signifies at once imitation of traditional models and imitation of reality. With Bacon, revolution reduces and unmasks; it is not dialectical but, like many other ‘bourgeois’ concepts of revolution, seeks direct encounter with ‘things as they are’ and plain, denotative language for this encounter . . . .

“Bacon the reformer masters the subtleties of metaphor and allegory in The Wisdom of the Ancients , the iconography of the New Atlantis , his rich legal and philosophical rhetoric, and in his views on nature’s laws, which clearly depend on mechanical metaphors or models; in many ways his scientific method itself is a kind of reform or fulfillment of rhetorical ideals and practices . . . At the same time, however, Baconian discovery is revolutionary in that it aims to grasp a fully present reality unmediated by models. Bacon’s metaphorical discourse of reform draws much from the older ideas of the world united by a chain of correspondences and similitudes that make all things potentially symbols and likenesses of all other things. But his aspirations toward what he conceives to be the precise language of revolution help formulate emerging views that dissolve, as do those of Descartes and the Port-Royal logicians, likeness into identity and difference.”

This is of interest not only for its portrayal of the paradox of modernity – innovation (revolution) that must be developed and elaborated in traditional categories (reform) – but also for highlighting the cetrality of shifts in understandings of symbol and figure at the birth of modernity. Near the center of modern culture are semiotic innovations, perhaps related to shifts in sacramental theology.