ABSTRACT
Francis Bacon serves Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adomo as a historical figure, as an eloquent spokesman for the dialectic of enlightenment. The rhetorical figure they employ, the exemplum, in Greek paradeigma, is treated in Aristotle's Rhetoric as a device of persuasion. This chapter focuses on this rhetorical figure, considering not only the ways in which the rhetoric of example functions in Francis Bacon's work itself but also how Bacon's work can serve as an example for a totalizing early-modern program of domination. Science, says Bacon, is a monster like the Sphinx, having sharp and hooked talons, because science fastens upon the mind and holds it, because wise men's words are "like goads" and "like nailes driven farre in." Bacon's philosophical writings, his disquisitions on antiquity, on nature, on his own scientific program, use metaphors and exempla that serve to naturalize torture.
