5 - Francis Bacon and the discovering subject

Summary

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your Teacher.

William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”

At the beginning of the New Atlantis, Spanish explorers sail from Peru into a “part of the South Sea that was utterly unknown” and discover land (215). What they find there, however, is not the technologically inferior “Indians” who greeted Columbus and who could be made to signify both the emptiness and the otherness of the New World, but a nation of discoverers who already know Columbus and enshrine him in their gallery of “principal inventors” (246). They find, in other words, a nation which has already attained, from its vantage point of secrecy, the epistemic mastery over the “utterly unknown” for which the voyage of discovery is a metaphor. This recursion within the voyage out, the encounter with the discovering subject himself in the position which the discourse of discovery insists belongs to the New World or Nature or the Other, exemplifies with peculiar clarity the phenomenon I have been tracing: the tendency for the discourse of discovery to construct other minds as undiscovered countries whose secrecy is in an equal ratio to the discoverer's will to penetrate the unknown. More explicitly than the secret affinity between Harman and the vagrants, the conflation of discovered world and discovering minds in Francis Bacon's Utopian text makes clear that the discourse of discovery, at least in the instances with which we are concerned, is not merely a rehearsal of an alienated, masterful relationship between the discovering subject and his world, a formulation that takes for granted that the structure of discovery is fully achieved, stable, and self-evident.