"Nature Still": Second Nature in Bacon and Pope

Abstract: Recent scholarship under the heading "distributed cognition" advances the thesis that human thinking extends beyond the confines of the skull to incorporate tools, technologies, and the built environment. This scholarship defines itself in opposition to the classical view of intellection descending from Descartes, according to which the mind exists prior to mediating technologies and environmental scaffolding and exercises executive function over these subordinates. This essay argues that Francis Bacon and Alexander Pope embrace similarly technical and infrastructural views of human thought, and challenges the tendency to equate distributed cognition with distributed agency. While New Materialism, Actor Network Theory, and other Latour-adjacent projects have challenged historical divisions of subject and object, those versions of distributed agency ignore important distinctions between things and persons and overlook the specifically "second natured" competencies that Bacon and Pope help to see. Long assumed to belong to the classical picture of cognition, Bacon and Pope challenge the long-standing opposition of natural and artificial through an account of "second nature," according to which historically accumulated cultural practices extend from and exist on a continuum with bare human nature, and the material world. By drawing on recent accounts of "second nature" in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, I explain how second nature is "Nature still, but Nature methodized."