Abstract
The essay draws on Michel Serres’ writings on education in order to derive from them a general theory. Though the polyglot philosopher never presented his philosophy of education as a formal system, it was a lifelong concern that he addressed from the perspectives of mathematics and physics; literature and myth; art and aesthetics; justice and the law. Ever elusive in his prose style, Serres was a magnetic and infectious educator who, ironically, and perhaps understandably, did not gain the sort of following enjoyed by other French philosophers with whom he cuts such a contrast. The essay assesses the Serresian pedagogy in three key areas: the mutual translatability of the pedagogies of the humanities and arts versus those of the social and hard sciences; the urgent need for an environmental ethics of education; and the permeation of effective instruction by aesthetics.
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Notes
Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent citations are from the work of Michel Serres.
See Atkinson and Flanagan (2024), n.p.: “For Serres, knowledge is always unfinished and emergent, and he consequently foregrounds the importance of attending to the minor movements, background events, the hum of coenaesthesia, randomness, noise and the multiplicity of the sensuous.”.
See Morris. (2022, p. 369): “As a philosopher of science […] Serres’ interests mirror those of theoretical physicists, information theorists and cyberneticists. Serres’ (1992) turning to the poet Lucretius, emphasizes the importance of the eco-sphere, not the human ego: ‘De Rerum Natura is a treatise on physics. In general, the subsequent commentary of both critics and translators has refused to consider it as such, avoiding the nature of things… It cuts Lucretius off from the world; the scholiast abhors the world’.” My emphasis.
In “Serres’ Science,” John Weaver summarizes Serres’ views on the extreme dangers of contemporary science, 2022, p. 355: “The danger in science is thinking that its goal is to eliminate noise because noise is uncertain, chaotic, and irrational. This mode of thinking is a dangerous weapon. it becomes an irrational death machine. This dangerous science has created a humanity that is ‘the most invasive species’ on earth (Serres 2012 p. 107).”.
As Michalinos Zembylas notes, 2002, p. 486: “Serres introduces Hermes, the Greek god, his main character and alter ego, the messenger who travels across space and time, making unpredictable and unexpected connections between object, persons and events. Hermes is mediation, translation, multiplicity, communication.”.
(Serres 1974, p. 9): “We know about things only by way of the systems of transformation of the units that comprise them. Those systems are at least four. Deduction, in the logical-mathematical area. Induction, in the experimental field. Production, in practical domains. Translation in the space of texts.” (“Nous ne connaissons les choses que par les systèmes de transformation des ensembles qui les comprennent. Au minimum, ces systèmes sont quatre. La déduction, dans l’aire logico-mathématique. L’induction, dans le champ expérimental. La production, dans !es domaines de pratique. La traduction dans l’espace des textes.”).
(Serres 1974, p. 11): “D’où l’interét d’examiner l’opération de traduire. Non pas de la définir dans l’abstrait, mais de la faire fonctionner au plus large et dans le champs les plus divers. A l’intérieur du savoir canonique et de son histoire, le long des rapports de l’encyclopédie et des philosophies, du côté des beaux-arts et des textes qui disent le travail exploité. Il ne s’agit plus d’explication, mais d’application.”.
See Brown 2002, p. 6: “Now the notion that Turner—an artist—somehow ‘anticipates’ developments in physics and engineering is an audacious one, and we will turn in a moment to see how this kind of claim fits with Serres’ approach to the relation between science and culture.”.
See (Serres 2012, pp. 75–76): “[O]ur old sciences rested on the analysis that separates and cuts up, on the cutting up that separates subjects from their objects. Hate? difficult, global and connected, the life and Earth sciences presuppose communications, interferences, translations, distributions and passages. Love?” See 1975, p. 65, cited in (Serres 1982, pp). xxxvi-xxxvii: “Little by little written or spoken language becomes an energy like any other, and narrative becomes a trivial motor. Hence we find repeated translation of cardinal categories: difference, closure, supplement, and so forth all the way through to dissemination, a concept precisely foreseen by the second principle of thermodynamics.”.
The cited lines are preceded by the following, (Serres 1995b, p. 32): “Mastery and possession: these are the master words launched by Descartes at the dawn of the scientific and technological age, when our Western reason went off to conquer the universe. We dominate and appropriate it: such is the shared philosophy underlying industrial enterprise as well as so-called disinterested science, which are indistinguishable in this respect.”.
The chapters have subsections whose titles and forms include “hymns,” “meditations on our ways of knowing” and other imaginative titles that weave together portraits of scientific heroes such as Empedocles and Ettore Majorana with assessments of the epistemological prospect of healing from the catastrophic twentieth century—the Holocaust, the development of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the despoiling of the biosphere.
Academics are asked to consider the pathology of language manifest in such “oxymoronic” expressions as “social hierarchy,” “national identity” and “sustainable development” (Serres 2012, p. 189), whose seeming purpose is to keep nature at a distance and ease the intellectual anxiety of the users.
This is seen maximally in the “masterpiece” The masterpiece is that rare work in which no residual exists between the artisanal manufacture of the work and its higher intellectual-spiritual realization: “every chef d’oeuvre recounts the begetting of its own art” (Serres 1997, p. 64).
Serres recorded a video lecture on Carpaccio in Venice in 1978. See L’Archipel Carpaccio, https://www.canal-u.tv/video/cerimes/l_archipel_carpaccio.12260.
See (Serres 1990, 123–124): “One could rewrite the history of painting starting from the place it occupies in the general function of communication. It is said that one goes from figurative to abstract, that such is its evolution. It doesn’t make much sense. Painting always seeks to explore its own limits. At times it is immersed in the aleatory, the stochastic, the exploded, in its closest limit, that is the temptation of the noise of the world; at times instead in the graphic, the purely linear, that is the boundary of the opposite extreme. Painting’s is not the history of time but more simply of space. And how could it be otherwise?”.
See (Serres 1995b, p. 116): “Basic time is a tatter, a patchwork or a mosaic, it is a distribution, through which, at times, redundancy passes. A multiplicity marks and shows some redundancy, it becomes spatial when this repetition increases.”.
See discussion of “morality” in (Serres 2018, pp. 214-218, 220).
References
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Peterson, T.E. The Integrative, Ethical and Aesthetic Pedagogy of Michel Serres. Stud Philos Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-024-09938-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-024-09938-3