On Idols

Embrace your 'life-enhancing' idols, identify with them, expand on them, build from them, but identify also their weaknesses, modify them, compensate for them -- and always strive to be better than your idols at what they did/do best, and at what you are striving to do best. Evolve from them -- and be/become better.

At the same time, beware of false idols, bad idols, pathological idols, sociopathic idols... With these idols, clear the rose-petals out of your eyes -- quickly -- and dump them equally quickly before they dump you...and/or harm befalls you...you land in jail, in a hospital, or in the morgue. Don't chase false idols -- regardless of how much 'charisma' they may have. The world is full of false idols. View them as 'Trojan Viruses'-- dgb, Aug 2nd, 2008, modified Aug 3rd, 2008.

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These comments are modifications of comments on 'idols' that have been made before me ('Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Den, Idols of the Marketplace, Idols of the Theatre' -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626); 'Twilight of the Idols', 1888, Nietzsche; 'Kill your idols before they kill you.' -- Allen Ginsberg (or so I am told), 'Don't follow leaders.' -- Bob Dylan (Subterranean Homesick Blues); 'Kill your idols.' -- Bob Dylan t-shirt...

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Baconian Philosophy

(Francis) Bacon did not propose an actual philosophy, but rather a method of developing philosophy. He wrote that, whilst philosophy at the time used the deductive syllogism to interpret nature, the philosopher should instead proceed through inductive reasoning from fact to axiom to law. Before beginning this induction, the inquirer is to free his mind from certain false notions or tendencies which distort the truth. These are called "Idols"[12] (idola), and are of four kinds: "Idols of the Tribe" (idola tribus), which are common to the race; "Idols of the Den" (idola specus), which are peculiar to the individual; "Idols of the Marketplace" (idola fori), coming from the misuse of language; and "Idols of the Theatre" (idola theatri), which result from an abuse of authority. The end of induction is the discovery of forms, the ways in which natural phenomena occur, the causes from which they proceed.

Derived through use of his methods, Bacon explicates his somewhat fragmentary ethical system in the seventh and eighth books of his De augmentis scientiarum (1623). He distinguishes between duty to the community, an ethical matter, and duty to God, a religious matter. Bacon claimed that any [1] moral action is the action of the human will, which is governed by belief and spurred on by the passions; [2] good habit is what aids men in directing their will toward the good; [3]no universal rules can be made, as both situations and men's characters differ.

Regarding faith, in De augmentis, he writes that "the more discordant, therefore, and incredible, the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith." He writes in "The Essays: Of Atheism" that "a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion."

Bacon contrasted the new approach of the development of science with that of the Middle Ages. He said:

"Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world."

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