HERMES Literature, Science, Philosophy HERMES LITERA TURE, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY by MICHEL SERRES Edited by Josue V. Harari & David F. Bell THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS , BALTIMORE & LONDON This book has been brought to publication with the generous as­ sistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Copyright © 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Permissions are listed on page 157, which constitutes a continuation of the co pyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Serres, Michel. Hermes: literature, science, philosophy. Includes index. Contents: The apparition of Hermes, Don Juan­ Knowledge in the classical age-Michelet, the soup -Language and space, from Oedipus to Zola-[etc.] 1. Harari, Josue V. II. Bell, David F. III. Title. PQ2679.E679A2 1981 844' .914 81-47601 ISBN 0-8018-2454-0 AACR2 ..... .......... Contents Editors' Note VIl INTRODUCTION: Journala plusieurs voies by Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell lX I. LITERATURE & SCIENCE 1. The Apparition of Hermes: Dam Juan 3 2. Knowledge in the Classical Age: La Fontaine and Descartes 15 3. Michelet: The Soup 29 4. Language and Space: From Oedipus to Zola 39 5. Turner Translates Carnot 54 II. PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE 6. Platonic Dialogue 65 7. The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics 71 8. Mathematics and Philosophy: What Thales Saw. 84 9. Lucretius: Science and Religion 98 10. The Origin of Geometry 125 POSTFACE: Dynamics from Leibniz to Lucretius by lIya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers 135 Name Index 159 Subject Index 163 v ..... .......... Editors' Note Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy is conceived as a first step in the publication of Michel Serres's works. In order to help familiarize Ameri­ can readers with Serres's original mode of thinking and writing, we have opted for a book that would include a selection of his most representative and most readable essays. Hermes illustrates the full range of Serres's diverse and complex interests as well as the coherence of purpose in his thinking; it does not attempt to establish the kind of progression, con­ tinuity (in the narrow sense of the word), and unity that readers might expect from the anthologized work of an author. But Hermes should make abundantly clear how Serres's writing is interdisciplinary at all levels, tracing themes across the domains of literature, philosophy, science, and painting, borrowing their various techniques, and trans­ lating them into an original view of the world of knowledge. Our introductory remarks follow these same lines. We do not wish to claim that Hermes resolves in any definitive manner questions that have never before been formulated. Nor do we intend to follow step by step the progression or development of Serres's thought, precisely because the idea of linear progress and development is fundamentally antithetical to his method of thinking. Serres's work is not to be understood as a systematic enumeration of new directions of knowledge or research; it assumes instead the form of an excursion or expedition (randonnee-the connotations of impetuosity and chance contained in the French term are important) with necessary pauses at certain crossroads. We shall explore one series of such pauses; Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers will analyze another in their important essay that appears in the postface. A remark concerning the "language" of the present volume is in order. We would like to thank the friends who translated many of the essays: Susan Willey (chapter 1), Suzanne Guerlac (chapter 3), Marilyn Sides (chapters 5 and 6), Mark Anderson (chapters 7 and 8), and Lawrence Schehr (chapter 9 and the postface). In translating the other essays in the book and revising the above translations we have elected to choose in- vii viii / Editors' Note telligible English renderings, perhaps at the cost of sacrificing some of Serres's unusual syntax and stylistic effects. But the reader familiar with contemporary critical writing knows that the French language allows stylistic and syntactic "aberrations" that cannot always be produced or reproduced in English. This book has benefited from the continuous advice of Wilda Anderson, Martine Bell, and William Sisler. Our most sincere appreciation goes to them for their support. � �� Introduction Journal a plusieurs voies by Josue V. Harari & David F. Bell There is no royal road to learning. -Euclid In 1966, Richard Feynman, the distinguished professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, who had just been awarded the Nobel prize the year before, gave a lecture to the American Association of Teachers of Physics. The subject of his lecture was "What Is Science?" Undoubtedly when a paper boasts such a title and is delivered by a Nobel prize-winner there is an underlying expectation that the world will finally hear the answers to some, if not all, of the outstanding questions con­ cerning the nature of science and scientific inquiry. One would naturally expect Feynman to offer the most serious remarks, arguments, and demonstrations couched in the most difficult terminology in order to present a tableau of the different conceptions of science, past and present, and to conclude with his own conception of the field. But this was not at all the case! Feynman spoke of his childhood and explained, among other things, how his father taught him the rules of logic and of set theory by playing with old bathroom tiles of various colors. But let us listen to him as he tells how he discovered an application of one of the most difficult principles of analytic geometry-the problem of inter­ section : When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics ....I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. ix x / Josue v. Harari & David F. Bell You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me. I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was ex­ plaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up, that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line. A deep principle of analytic geometry! ... She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc. -I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection 'Jas! It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. ! There would be much to say concerning the profundity of this style of thought. A few remarks, however, will suffice here to establish the context of Serres's own style of work. Serres also chooses to recount mythical anecdotes -such as those the ancient Greeks used to exchange ; he chooses to speak playfully of fictions, to participate in the conversations of La Fontaine's animals, to share in the festive meals of country and city rats, to listen to the nightingale's or the grasshopper's song or to the arguments of the wolf and the lamb. Elsewhere he tells fantastic tales about locomotives or about extraordinary journeys as in Jules Verne, Stevenson, or the Adventures of Tin tin -after all, is Tintin not the greatest modern anthropologist, the chateau of Moulinsart the center of the world, and the opera singer Castafiore the illustration of parasited communication and intercepted messages?2 In Serres's work, the discrete charms of knowledge go hand in hand with anecdotes and memories, stories and myths, tales and encounters ­ and all of this belongs to the realm of literature. Instead of inflicting upon the reader the customary pensum of the scientist or philosopher, Serres chats about literature! Intellectual con game of a scientific philosopher? Again, as it was for Feynman, the answer is decidedly no. Literature represents for Serres a Jo urnal itplusie urs voies, the personal log-book of a 1 Richard P. Feynman, "What Is Science?," The Physics Te acher 7, no. 6 (1969):314-15. 2 La Fontaine's Fables are discussed in Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980) and in the essay "La Fontaine and Descartes: Knowledge in the Classical Age" included in this volume; the locomotive is a reference to Serres's discussion of Zola's La BNe humaine in his Fe ux et s�l5naux de brume: Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1975); the extraordinary journeys are of course the subject of his Jouvences: Sur Jules Ve rne (Paris: Minuit, 1974); and Madame Castafiore is the central character of Les Blj'oux de la Castafiore (which belongs to the cycle of The Adventures o/Tintin) that is the subject of Serres's essay "Rires: Les Bijoux distraits ou la cantatrice sauve" in He rmes II:L Interference (Paris: Minuit, 1972). xi / Journal a plusieurs voies poet-philosopher of science who speaks with many voices and journeys across many paths (journal and journey do share the same root), all of which lead to sophia-wisdom and knowledge. We shall attempt to outline the routes to this knowledge in the pages that follow by focusing on certain themes- stories, anecdotes, tales, etc.