The magazine Zadig (no 2 June 2019) published a conversation with Serres. This was conducted shortly before his death. He discusses everything from his childhood, his time at Stanford University to the election of Macron as President of France and the fire at Notre Dame. A couple of quotations stood out for me:

… you are not a philosopher if you are not a mathematician, a physicist, a biologist, a sociologist—in short, if you are not ready to immediately launch into solving a problem when one arises. From this point of view, I am hardly original. There is no philosopher worthy of the name who hasn’t done that. We find a complete encyclopaedia in Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Leibniz… The work of philosophy is to cover everything—the rest is commentary. We must acquire a precise but global view, like a general practitioner. This is Pascal’s thinking: to know something about everything, rather than a lot about one thing.

…. for centuries, the philosopher has aimed to create new ways of being together: Plato’s ideal city, Aristotle’sAthenaion politeia – the “constitution of the Athenians” – Leibniz’s idea of ​​a peaceful Europe… Until the 19th century, we witnessed a proliferation of these attempts. The utopian socialists, for whom I have so much admiration, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier …{Now} Philosophy is completely silent. It’s our fault.

History is unpredictable, that’s even its very definition. …The only thing I can anticipate now is the extreme danger of the situation we find ourselves in, from the planet’s point of view. And I don’t see any solution whatsoever emerging, because everything is dominated by economics, starting with politics, and it is economics that destroys everything. I’m not really optimistic.

Published as Conversation Avec Michel Serres (2024), Zadig/Autrement.