Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn

2. THE NATURAL CONTRACT AND THE ARCHIMEDEAN WORLDVIEW

The Natural Contract and Archimedean Worldview 23 The Natural Contract and the Archimedean Worldview 23 2 The na -tura -l Contra -ct and the a -rchimedea -n Worldview The Natural Contract In The Natural Contract, Michel Serres makes a case for the juridical nature of knowledge in the natural sciences. “The sciences proceed by contracts. Scientific certainty and truth depend, in fact, as much on such judgments as such judgments do on them.”1 How does this occur? The claim is that science engages in a dialectics or dialogue that results in a contract between scientists and the world of things, a synthesis of human verdicts and the realm of objects.2 This arises, according to Serres, from a fundamental situation in which two subjects find themselves in violent contradiction with one another yet bound by a legal contract that affirms that their war is a legal state in the theater of war that defines nature. The social contract guarantees that the combatants share a common language, that of the contract, and oppose a common enemy, which is anything, any noise, that would jam or shut 24 Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn 24 Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn down their voices.3 Through the centuries, the violence of the combatants escalates, as the means for destroying one another becomes technologically more sophisticated and more devastating. But each time the combatants contradict one another, their confrontation results in a new synthesis, an objective state of violence. The final state of the dialectic comes into view when their violence is finally “unleashed against the world,” and not merely against other combatants . The effect of technological advancements in warfare, according to Serres, is to unleash violence that goes beyond two combatants (individuals or nations). So powerful are their weapons that rather than destroying one or the other, they destroy Earth, which has served as the theater of their warfare. The destruction of Earth, the destruction of the very the theater of war, thereby puts an end to history, such that history is stopping, stopping in the face of nature.4 In this new and possibly final theater of dialectics, war has been declared on things, and Earth is the victim. Thus, for Serres, this objective violence against Earth is the violence that must now be the focus of our ethical concerns. What were once merely subjective conflicts between individuals or states have become objective war against Earth, evidence that the dialectic of violence returns eternally, and conflict or war is in fact not merely the motor of history, but has ontological status, that it is a newly discovered structure of nature and amounts to a new naturalism. Seemingly without limit or rule, war now appears to be an effect or force of nature, on par with that Hobbesian war of all against all before the social contract was put into place.5 Serres imagines the battle against nature as one in which two human combatants are sinking into quicksand, yet fail to heed the very Earth on which their contradictions take place. This dialectical account, dramatic and appealing, nonetheless calls for some scrutiny, from the point of view of ontology and ethics as well as from the point of view of the natural sciences . There is no doubt that Earth is our immediate environment, both for humans and for nonhuman living creatures, however broadly one is able to define that. Likewise, it is possible that, as Serres proclaims, “I am also an agent with a remote chance of having effects on a global scale measurable by the physical sciences” and that “collectively, we have powerful and weighty effects on the entire world of all the natural sciences.”6 Nevertheless, we might ask if any of this matters from the point of view of nature, Earth, the solar system, or the universe? Or might it not be the The Natural Contract and Archimedean Worldview 25 The Natural Contract and the Archimedean Worldview 25 case that environmental destruction is an issue of supreme importance only for humankind and that nature and the cosmos beyond have their own resources and orientations that are not those of humans? Quite possibly the claim that, collectively, humans have become as powerful as nature can be understood as a reflection of Arendt’s focus on the Archimedean viewpoint of modern and contemporary mathematical natural science. Arendt’s position is that the recent desire of humankind to...