Beach Haven

​OLD GARIOT
By Honoré de Balzac
PF Collier & Son Company, 1917, 268 pages
Review by Michael Beach
 
This is a French romance novel. It was written in the mid-nineteenth century and set in the early part of that same century. Translations alternately title it Old Gariot or Father Gariot. I’ve noted in past reviews how this is not my preferred genre of work, yet I have been reviewing them as part of working my way through a 20-volume set of the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction series. Many of the authors in this series are names I have vague recollection of, but really don’t know any works by many, and only some works by a few of the featured authors. Balzac is one of the former.
 
The main character grows old after a successful life. He becomes a widower. His two daughters marry. He invests all his money into these daughters and their respective husbands. Little by little his own circumstances deteriorate. His daughters and sons-in-law also distance themselves from him over time. Things begin to turn as the marriages both become loveless. The young women begin to have affairs, as do their respective husbands. Gariot lodges in boarding house as does a young man who courts one of his daughters. The two of them work together to become more connected to her. Gariot helps the illicit lovers become a couple as he helps his daughter extract herself from her marriage. Her sister becomes jealous of this successful life change and begins to reconnect with her father as well. In the end he dies happy having gotten to be more connected with both his girls.
 
Like other French novels of the period I’ve read, these sort of stories bother me. They are not explicit in terms of character physical sexual interaction, but they do seem to spurn happy marriage and put extra-marital attraction as a preferred, and even normal, route. Marriages in this case were more like business arrangements and impropriety a norm. I’m sure there were, and still are, sectors in society where this is the case, yet there has been, and is, an element of societal shame associated with the behavior. Balzac displays none of that. Not only does the story seem to support these attitudes, but pretty much all the characters act and speak in a way that would put doubt in the idea of love, marriage and fidelity. 

LEVIATHAN AND THE AIR-PUMP
HOBBES, BOYLE, AND THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
By Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer
Princeton University Press, 1985, 391 pages
Review by Michael Beach

This history covers an important time in the history of scientific thought. Many scholars consider the 17th century as the ‘scientific revolution’. Many famous discoveries took place around this time. The history under review here speaks to a major debate of the time. Represented by Robert Boyle were those who believed in experimentation as the basis of knowledge production. Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, questioned experimentation, preferring philosophical debate as the basis for coming to understanding. Boyle argued that we should believe our eyes, yet so much of experimentation is ‘managed’ that even today debate over knowledge construction versus knowledge discovery continues.
 
The reading claims that “many aspects of the programme that he (Boyle) recommended continue to characterize modern scientific activity and philosophies of scientific method” (p. 341).  Yet the pump experiments varied in both makeup and outcome. Theories also varied from pump to pump and outcome to outcome. Did facts created by experiments explain the various theories, or did the various theories serve to explain the facts noted in the experiments? When one interprets facts, are they interpreting whether something is a fact, or are they interpreting the meaning of the fact itself?
 
There also seems to be an interesting power balance issue. Hobbes had a connection with the king. You’d think that would have caused his arguments to carry more weight. Yet Hobbes was not accepted into The Royal Society (a prominent British scientific association). The authors offered a long set of examples of speculation by others as to why that was.  Some of the arguments surrounded Hobbes’ personality, yet Shapin and Schaffer show how some accepted members were perhaps more surly than Hobbes.
 
It may have come down to the fact that Boyle had members of The Royal Society act as witnesses to his air-pump experiments and even sign affidavits to the effect. At the same time Hobbes questioned the need for repeated experiments, or at times any experiments. By questioning the intellectual approach of the use of ingenuity (p. 130), which for Hobbes and his detractors was understood to be a slant, he put himself at odds with what amounted to be much of the collective thought leadership at the time. Reliance on the mechanical ‘tricks’, as he put it, was to denote something less than true philosophy.
 
Hobbes wrote a treatise on knowledge and science published in 1651 which he titled Leviathan. Aside from Hobbes’ negative portrait of experimentalists, most members of the Society looked at Hobbes as too dogmatic, including this publishing.
 
Whatever one believes to be the ultimate issue, the authors clearly state, “The rationalistic production of knowledge threatened that involved in the Royal Society’s experimentalism” (p. 139). Hobbes made an interesting assertion that many would still argue today. He depicted Boyle’s experiments as being based on his own assumptions about the nature of air. Likewise, it’s clear that Hobbes also had preconceived ideas. In fact, both Boyle and Hobbes came to what today would be thought of as false conclusions about what was happening inside the vacuum created by the pump. One could argue Boyle pre-decided the outcome of the experiments, the matters of fact, based on his ideas around the nature of air. Likewise, Hobbes essentially argued to ignore the experiments since the interpretation of the outcome was not proven, only conjectured. Yet Hobbes put more stock in his own ideas without any consideration of any matters of fact. As I see it both were socially constructing their perceptions pre- and post-experimentation.