Manipulating matter and its appetites: Francis Bacon on causation and the creation of preternatural

This paper shows how Bacon is on the one hand still anchored to the idea of contingency as an intrinsic and ontological trait of natural phenomena, though he provides a signifcatively different explanation than the one of Scholastic-Aristotelianism and, on the other, how his focus on the notion of “pretergeneration” (i.e., nature’s spontaneous generation of monsters and errors), functional to his philosophical agenda, aimed at mastering nature through art, represents a strong detachment from the Aristotelian idea that science only concerns phenomena happening necessarily for the most part. Pretergeneration, this paper shows, is understood by Bacon as a result of the Fall. For Bacon, matter, as well as humans, started to behave in such a way as to follow not only the general good but also individual the one. It is this particular feature that renders possible the deviations from the usual course of nature. Interestingly, Bacon does not see a direct contradiction between the idea of the existence of eternal laws of nature, imposed by God at the moment of the creation, and the fact that matter, either through pretergeneration or manipulation, can eventually deviate from such laws. Indeed, Bacon identifes the Fall as the moment when the possibility for “alternative things,” that is, contingent deviations from the laws of nature, can take place. As a result, matter can be “seduced” – that is, driven away by the course, it would otherwise follow through human manipulation – in order to create new objects. At the same time, external conditions can determine spontaneous deviations from the natural course. Contingency, in this view, is therefore seen as both the result of human manipulation and an intrinsic character of nature.