Abstract

This paper examines the concept of equilibrium in the work of Michel Serres. It starts with analysis of Serres’s philosophy of nature and, in particular, of the Lucretian cosmology he adumbrates in his 1977 text The Birth of Physics. By beginning here, we can see that his fundamental account of the material world is framed in terms of equilibrium or, rather, as a series of different equilibria that are dynamic, internally nested and reactive to each other in complex ways. In this respect, Serres’s philosophy of nature resonates with work in contemporary Earth System Science that models the planet as a complex, adaptive system trending towards homeostatic regulation. But crucially, Serres goes further by extracting from this modelling important insights into human values. That is to say, he suggests that necessary and urgent questions about what sort of people we must be and what sort of social order we must pursue can be addressed through the prism of the concept of equilibrium. At the time of the Anthropocene, when planetary stability itself seems to be at stake, with potentially catastrophic implications for present and future life on earth, Serres’s work thus shows itself to be timely and apposite across a range of disciplinary applications.