Four years ago, Michel Serres left us. Cybernetics, communication, religions, history of science, art, mathematics, bodies, symbols, languages, oceans, mountaineering, Tintin, everything interested the philosopher, but it was the persistence of violence that obsessed him. He had received terrible lessons from an early age: Spanish war at 6 years old; Blitzkrieg, defeat and debacle at age 9; at 14, the Liberation and the settling of scores, the discovery of the death camps, then the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These last two tragedies, in particular, marked with a hot iron his adolescent soul. They came to symbolize for him the greatest tear in history, the indelible mark of an authentic conceptual disruption that philosophy had to think head-on: “Hiroshima remains the sole object of my philosophy” , will he go so far as to say in Clarifications (Champs/Flammarion, 1994). For the man of the nuclear age differs radically from those who preceded him in that he must lucidly consider the possibility of bringing about the apocalypse to which faith in progress had blinded him: ” The question now is, he said, to master mastery, and no longer nature” (The distribution. Hermes IV, Editions de Minuit, 1977).
“Mastering the mastery”: vast program, as the other would say. The emergence of the Galilean approach in the 17th century allowed us to consider ourselves, Descartes helping, as beings ofunnatural. Not in the sense that we would be opposed to nature, where we would be against nature, but where we participate in a different essence: we would be metaphysically others. Casually, this cut was a discreet but decisive switch, which guided the rest of the story. The world has become dissociated: on the one hand, nature, the decor of our lives, bursting with available resources, and which can be apprehended solely from a physico-mathematical angle; on the other, man, returned to himself, to the solitude of his reason and his affects.
But we ended up understanding that this separation is not as clear as we imagined. Nature reacts to our actions, and proves to be porous, not infinite, fragile: climate, reduction of living spaces, collapse of biodiversity, soil, water and air pollution, deforestation, all the indicators are alarming and all the disturbing projections. We are now aware that we nibble more and more greedily on the earthly fruit that bears us, and we hardly know how to stop this bad tendency. So we sense that this very future that we anticipate implicitly our actions could turn out to be radically different, and deep down we fear it.
How do we know what we do will do?
Some blame science for this situation, pretending to confuse science with what it makes possible. In short, it would be necessary to liquidate the spirit of science for the sole reason of a bad use of the world. Admittedly, the intoxications of hubris have led us to believe that we are “above nature”, even though the latter reminds us that we are an integral part of it, that our essence is not so transcendent. But that said, is it by renouncing scientific advances that we will repair the damage done? Is it with Aristotle’s physics that we will stabilize the climate? With the biology of Pliny the Elder that we will preserve biodiversity?
Rather than abandoning the idea of rationality, it is better to refound it so that it can no longer serve as an alibi for all kinds of domination. But how to do it ? In his book The Nightmare of Prometheus. Science and its limits (PUF, 2023), Giuseppe Longo, mathematician and epistemologist, suggests several things: that the sciences give themselves their limits; that they cross the partition that separates them from philosophy to reinvest the question of meaning; that they do not delegate to algorithms the interpretation of the course of events; that they no longer push us to transform nature without knowing the consequences of our actions on it. There remains a major difficulty: even when we know what we are doing, how do we know what what we are doing will do? And also what will do what we have not done?
* Etienne Klein is a physicist, research director at the CEA and philosopher of science