ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Art of Resting: Bacon, Experiments, and the Limits of Human Control

• In Event: The Science and Medicine of Habits II: Habits, The Body and Health

English Abstract

As a biological process essential to health, sleep—like breathing or digestion—is involuntary. Yet, in his Letter to Henry Saville (1595), Bacon observes that respiration can be voluntarily controlled, as divers do when practising apnea. Free respiration, he adds, is also necessary for falling asleep (Sylva Sylvarum, 1626). While Bacon offers nothing original on sleep in his Essays (1597–1625- even in his essay “Of Regiment of Health”), he develops an experimental approach to sleep in Sylva Sylvarum and in the History of Life and Death (1623). He explores the connections between sleep and other physiological processes such as respiration, assimilation, digestion, and emotional reactions. The question of how sleep relates to exercise and affect is central to his attempt to restrain “the spirit’s motion” and make it “less predatory” (History of Life and Death, I, 74). He also investigates how environmental factors—especially natural sounds—may induce sleep (Sylva, VIII). But to what extent can bodily functions be mastered, the “spirit” rendered less predatory, and the “consumption of vital powers” suppressed? Contrasting Bacon’s reflections on sleep in the Sylva with the fable of Proteus in Sapientia Veterum (1609), this paper argues that sleep marks a limit to experimental control. Both a condition of health and a boundary of inquiry, sleep reveals the tension between human efforts to regulate bodily functions and the natural resistance of matter—an ambivalence at the heart of Bacon’s philosophy of life.

Author

• CRIGNON Elise CLAIRE, Université de Lorraine Archives Henri Poincaré