some good lines from Biagioli

A few good lines from Mario Bagioli’s Galileo, Courtier (and there are many more than these).

First, from page 76:

“People who bet on fighting cocks do not seek revenge in case their bird is killed. Similarly, although Cardinals Barberini and Gonzaga took sides in the dispute on floating bodies at the table of Cosimo II, they did not pursue Galileo or his opponent, the philosopher Papazzoni, once the game was over.”

All in all, the book is a fabulous “flat ontology” placing scientific discovery and court politics on the same footing, in a way that will not be at all scandalous to those who have already read Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern.

The easy “critical” response to such books is to assume that, if they don’t privilege objective scientific truth over power games, then they must be doing the reverse, and saying that “everything is just a power game.” But power games are just as vulnerable to hidden real actors as these real actors are to existing political networks. Latour emphasizes that Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s scientific work and his lobbying efforts at the Ministry are part of one story, not two, and the same is equally true of Biagioli’s Galileo. A dualistic ontology of truth and power is a bad idea, whether we say that one is reducible to the other or say instead that the two combine to form a hazy middle ground. Instead, there are simply trillions of actors, all of them acting, whether through physical force, political force, or some utterly different kind. In this sense, the maxim of “speaking the truth to power” is based on a fairly primitive ontology, and implies rather smugly that one’s opponents are merely “speaking power against the truth.”

As Biagioli tells the story, mathematics had a lower status than philosophy in the universities of the time. And Copernicus was still given credibility only as a “mathematician” whose model was useful for depicting the motion of the planets, not as a “philosopher” of the Aristotelian sort who could actually explain the causes of that motion. Given this hierarchy within the universities, mathematics could only hope to triumph in the Court life of the era. By shifting the scene of debate to Court, was Galileo making some sort of “regrettably necessary” concession to contaminating political factors? No. Instead, the Court of Cosimo de Medici was transformed into a scientific instrument just as potent as the telescope.

There is no reason to decide a priori that an objective nature provides all the reality and a human culture provides all the distortion. Why such an abysmal gap between world on one side and humans on the other? Why the assumption that the relation between Grand Duke Cosimo and science is so utterly different in kind from that between Jupiter and its moons? I say this not because the Jupiter-moon relation is constructed by humans, but because Duke Cosimo’s actions are just as “natural” as the actions of Jupiter, and without saying that Duke Cosimo is natural only if we reduce him to neurons and even smaller things. The nature of things need not be found only at the level of tiny little particles described by physics.

Social constructionism merely enacts the opposite fallacy of scientific naturalism. The latter says that there is an objective world and any deviations from it are the result of contamination by irrationality and power games. The former simply reverses this to say that human power is everything and nature nothing. It is better, instead, to say that there are countless different sorts of objects, all of them acting on each other through different sorts of forces. There are individual entities, not a grand sphere of nature outside humans, and a second grand sphere of power inside human life.

One redeeming feature of the scientific naturalist option, however, is that at least it allows for some grain of reality that is not determined by the current power relations between things. The problem with social constructionism is less a political one than an ontological one, since it freezes things into their current status by claiming they are nothing more than the forces and struggles that shaped them, and this makes it impossible to see how change could ever occur. (As Aristotle noted in the Metaphysics against the infamous Megarian claim that someone is a house builder only if currently building a house.)

For my graduate student readers, I also include the following nugget from Biagioli’s “Acknowledgments” section to show that even eventual Harvard professors don’t always have an easy road to the Ph.D.:

“This research topic emerged early during my graduate career. Graduate school is an inherently bittersweet memory, and I want to thank my fellow students… for making it exciting or, more frequently, just bearable.”

Notice both the “bittersweet” part, and also the fact that it is his fellow students who are thanked for making it bearable. Relations even with goodhearted professors can be highly stressful when it feels that your life and career are dependent on them. And it is widely believed, including by me, that the majority of learning in graduate school comes from your fellow graduate students. This is the way things usually work, and almost everyone endures these things as graduate students. The key is not to become angry or bitter about it. It will be over soon enough, and other problems will replace those of being a graduate student.

One last point about this book… It was published in 1993, but is still exciting for many people. That’s an extremely good sign. 16 years is a pretty long time in intellectual life, enough for an entire generational cycle to occur. The 65-year-olds of that era are now in their eighties, and the 25-year-olds of that year (like me) are now in our forties.

Many books are published, then get a few reviews during the several years that it takes for reviews of new books to be published, but then fashions change and those books are left behind. For a book from 1993 to be still relevant is a nice achievement. I happen to be of the opinion that all books are mortal. I can’t see even Shakespeare and Plato being read in 100,000 years if anything like human beings still exist, because the changes in our species and the vast accumulations of additional experience will have been too drastic, and humans or (more likely) their post-human successors will be standing on a different plane. It’s not a question of immortality but, to use Martin Hägglund’s favorite alternative– survival.

Shooting for 15 or 20 years for the survival of your book is a good, achievable aim. Maybe it will survive even longer, but the fact that only a few people write books that last for a millennium or more is no good excuse to write something that can’t last for three or four decades.

I say this because it’s a good practical maxim for writing. Look at what you are writing. Can you imagine it being read, not millennia from now (that’s too heroically abstract a goal), but in 2025 or 2030? Because if it can, then that means you’ve already taken the trouble to write something that stands a bit above the accidental fashions of the moment. And if it’s good enough to survive until 2030, then –who knows?– maybe it’s good enough to survive until 2100, and maybe further. This is a good practical method for trying to separate yourself from the transient fashions of the day.