Francis Bacon’s Fables of Life Extension

A great deal of scientific research today is devoted to helping people live longer, healthier lives. But, as cross-disciplinary researcher Natalie Elliot writes, that wasn’t always a central concern of scholars. She writes that Francis Bacon, a key figure in the development of the scientific method, broke from previous thinkers in advocating for research to lengthen human lives—and perhaps even achieve immortality.

Elliot writes that, prior to the scientific revolution that Bacon helped set in motion, thinkers from Plato to sixteenth-century French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne viewed mortality as a constant of life that could be overcome only by leaving a legacy behind after death. Montaigne distilled a common idea when he wrote that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.”

In his 1609 book Wisdom of the Ancients, Bacon retold thirty-three classical myths as a means of investigating political, scientific, and philosophical questions. Elliot considers how these stories captured his ideas about the importance of life extension.

One place Bacon reflected on the problem of death is the story of Memnon. In the classical version of this story, Memnon is a noble youth who dies gloriously in battle, and Jupiter sends birds to sing mourning songs for him. In Bacon’s version, Memnon’s death is not an honorable sacrifice but a tragic mistake, costing the young man the potential for greatness he might have achieved had he lived a long life.

In other places, Bacon considered what that potential looks like. In his version of the story of Memnon’s father, Tithonus, the older man is granted immortality but becomes so old and unhappy that Jupiter turns him into a cicada to end his misery. In his discussion of the fable, Bacon argued that it’s a mistake to view the goal of extending life as prolonging hedonistic pleasures, which become less and less satisfying over time. Instead, the purpose should be the pursuit of greater knowledge, which can provide insatiable pleasure. For Bacon, Elliot writes, one goal of prolonging life was to give individuals more time to perfect technologies and create art, leading to more deeply joyful life for humanity as a whole.

In another of the fables, Orpheus is unable to use his music to save his wife from the realm of death because he looks back at her too soon. He then plays a second, mournful song that harmonizes nature. For Bacon, the songs represent, respectively, science and political philosophy. The lessons here are that scientific research could succeed in extending life if its practitioners remain patient. Political concerns are a secondary, inferior alternative to scientific inquiry, focused on reaching immortality through “merit and name” rather than the actual extension of life.

In contrast to Socrates’s belief that natural philosophy cannot help understand the human good, Elliot writes, Bacon views science as having the potential to erase human sorrows, create lives that are happy and long—perhaps even unending—and give rise to intellectual and artistic sources of joy that, unlike sensual pleasures, can never be exhausted.

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