This Day in Philosophy — 1 September: Serres and Cavell

Some coincidences in the calendar mean something.

Michel Serres was born in Agen, France, on 1 September 1930. Four years earlier, on 1 September 1926, Stanley Cavell was born in Atlanta.

The two worked in traditions far apart. Serres came out of French thought, Cavell out of American analytic philosophy. They barely read one another.

But they did the same work: opening philosophy's border with something that came from outside it.

Michel Serres: the sailor philosopher#

Serres took an unusual route. He entered the naval academy first, served in the French navy, and only then moved to the École normale supérieure.

That biographical detail explains his thought. Serres never stayed inside a single discipline; he moved among mathematics, physics, biology, mythology, literature and the history of religion.

His own concept says it: Hermes — the messenger god who crosses borders and carries communication. Serres's early five-volume series bears that name.

The central claim is that knowledge cannot be divided into separate boxes. Reading Lucretius's poem of atoms and reading fluid dynamics are not disconnected activities; both are ways the same world is grasped.

Serres's method is therefore to draw parallels: he sees a connection between a Roman poem and modern thermodynamics, between a Zola novel and the theory of entropy.

The method drew criticism — the connections were called arbitrary. But Serres's defence was consistent: the walls between disciplines are institutional, not natural.

The Natural Contract (Le Contrat naturel, 1990) is the work most often cited today. Its thesis: Rousseau's social contract was among human beings; we now need a contract with nature as well. Nature must become a subject of law.

That book laid the philosophical ground of the climate argument thirty years before it arrived.

Serres was elected to the Académie française in 1990 and died in 2019.

Stanley Cavell: the philosopher of the ordinary#

Cavell's route was winding too. He trained in music and considered becoming a composer before turning to philosophy. He taught at Harvard for many years.

His starting point was the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. But Cavell carried that tradition to unexpected places.

His central problem is scepticism — though not in the familiar form.

Classical scepticism asks: do I know the external world exists? Cavell's interest shifts elsewhere: scepticism about other minds.

How do I know that another person is in pain? Cavell's answer is surprising: this is not a problem of knowledge. Scepticism is not a puzzle to be solved but a part of the human condition.

From this he develops the concept of acknowledgment. Not "knowing" another's pain but responding to it. The real problem is not a deficit of knowledge but indifference.

What makes Cavell distinctive is that he looked for this thought outside philosophical texts.

He was among the first major analytic philosophers to take film seriously. In Pursuits of Happiness he reads the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and 1940s — the genre he calls "the comedy of remarriage" — as texts in moral philosophy. In these films couples separate and come together again; for Cavell that is the drama of mutual recognition and of choosing, once more, to live together.

He wrote on Shakespeare, reading King Lear as the tragedy of a refusal to acknowledge. He made Emerson and Thoreau readable again as the unregarded founders of American philosophy.

Cavell died in 2018.

What they share#

Both opened philosophy onto its outside.

Serres did it through science and myth: physics and poetry describe the same world.

Cavell did it through art and ordinary life: a Hollywood comedy can be a moral text as serious as Kant.

Both met the same objection: is this philosophy?

And both gave the same answer — the question is wrong. Philosophy's boundary lies not where philosophers draw it but where thinking goes.

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Each day in this column we take up an event from the history of philosophy that falls on today's date.