The Philosophy of the Bees

As yesterday's post may have indicated, I've lately been thinking about blogging as an activity generally. Doing so feels a bit like meta-cognition (thinking about thinking), a form of reflection first introduced to me by an intense third-grade teacher many years ago. As with thinking about thinking, however, thinking about blogging can produce some interesting results.

One such result reminded me of a passage encountered in an intellectual history reader last year. Written by Francis Bacon (1561-1626), it goes something like this:

"Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of  experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use: the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely of chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it; but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested." -Francis Bacon (quoted from Franklin Le Van Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 4th edition, p. 288)

The passage quoted above is sometimes said to describe "the philosophy of the bees," by which a thinker takes in information and converts it by reason into something new (and perhaps sweet). Such a thinker neither gathers things for the sake of gathering them, nor weaves webs based upon thought alone. For Bacon, the bee represented a balanced approach, a "middle course" for developing knowledge that brought together data and reasoning into a process whose end product would benefit from the strengths of both. In the words of the track coach Bill Bowerman, such an approach might be thought to possess "hybrid vigor."

Regardless of how you describe it, the philosophy of the bees could have important ramifications for blogging, among other things. In my humble opinion, a good blog tends to abide by such a philosophy, in that it gathers information, digests it, and turns it into something new and interesting. Merely gathering, or thoughtlessly parroting the words of others, seems less natural; perhaps more importantly, it also lacks the greatest thing I think a blogger can contribute, namely, their unique voice and perspective. Perhaps a good blog does both. Something to consider anyway.

Happy Sunday, friends :)

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