Self-conservation and conservation of the whole. The ?double nature of good? in Francis Bacon?s motion theory

SILVIA MANZO

Francis Bacon and the materiality of appetites

Springer, Series ?International Archives of the History of Ideas?

Lugar: Dordrecht; Año: 2012;

The aim of this paper is to focus on the appetite of conservation in Bacon?s theory of motions which lies at the core of his natural philosophy. The introductory sections will give a survey of Bacon?s classification of universal appetites, showing the correlations between natural and moral philosophy. The following sections will deal with appetites in motion theory and with the meanings that conservation assumes inside it. At the same time, those sections will track some sources which might have played as backdrop for Bacon?s ideas. Throughout his views on conservation, several traces of Stoicism, Telesio?s natural philosophy, natural law tradition and late Scholasticism, among others, may be recognized.  In them Bacon assumes two kinds of conservation: self-conservation and conservation of the whole. The appetite of conservation of the whole gains emphasis and overshadows the appetite of self- conservation. In motion theory, the supremacy of the conservation of the whole is best disclosed through the motion of matter?s resistance to annihilation, whereas self-conservation displays in different kinds of motion. Bacon?s approach develops inside a peculiar metaphysics of matter and motion where the conservation of natural bodies follows teleological patterns shared by nature and man: the conservation of the whole is the highest goal both in moral and in natural philosophy. I will suggest that Bacon seems to believe that different objects of reality, like nature and man, are ruled by common patterns and organized in similar ways, to the extent that they constitute correlated orders not reductible to each other: there is not priority of the natural order over the moral order, neither of the moral order over the natural order. At the more general level both of them are expressions of the same kind of legality imposed by God to them