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Listen to the full lecture here: halkyon.substack.com/p/esoter...
In this lecture I delve into Faustian man, Aristotelian causality and Bacon’s destruction thereof, Goethe’s appreciation of America, the paranoia that comes with attempts at total control, as well as a call for a New Athens based on Plato’s dialogue Critias.
Francis Bacons’s New Atlantis is a most astounding utopian fable. Published shortly after his death by his former chaplain William Rawley Bacon here lays out the blueprint for the Royal Society - and in fact for the British Empire with its vast spy network. Not only that though. The New Atlantis, albeit unfinished, is a deeply significant fable for it aims to speak into existence total control over nature. Building on King Solomon’s supposed omniscience Bacon envisions an island (England?) where nature in all its causes and effects has been decoded and can now be controlled at will for the sake of technically enhancing human life and indeed for the sake of repairing creation which is implicitly understood as deficient and in need of repair.