MICHEL SERRES: UNA FILOSOFIA
NATURALE DELLA STORIA, ALLE SOGLIE
DELL’OMINESCENZA

Gaspare Polizzi

In my essay I intend to touch on the problem of the relationship between nature and culture from the point of view of the natural philosophy of history of Michel Serres. Serres asked himself the question “Qu’est-ce que l’humain?”, providing answers that are part of a new philosophy of history that takes into account three major removals: the oblivion of ethnology and prehistory, the forgetting of the environment and its centrality in human affairs, blindness in the face of evolutionary biology. Serres coined the term “hominescence”, which uses an inchoate suffix indicating growth towards a different and superior state, to treasure the Grand Récit, which tells human and natural history and looks to the near future, beyond the limits of Homo sapiens and to think about the new global relationship between man and the world. The new relationship requires a “natural contract” which must be entered into between men and Biogea. The intense effort of Serres, in over eighty volumes, to proceed to a complex and plural synthesis of human and natural sciences, to an encyclopaedic and dynamic mapping of the mobile places of a new era of communication, which since 1968 has been placed under the sign of Hermes, messenger and intermediary, is configured as a global philosophy of history and nature that requires to tighten new bonds of a “natural contract” with Biogea, testifying an acute sensitivity expressed in a powerful and human religion of love for everything that exists.