Hermes:

...We are submerged to our neck, to our eyes, to our hair, in a furiously raging ocean...

...Well, I want to grab hold of my leaky wicker basket, and convert some of that thunderous cosmic howl into three cheers to Messrs...

...What we are not used to, at least on this side of the Atlantic, is hermeneutics in the hands of philosophers of science (like Serres), Hermes standing at the crossroads of the late Lord Snow's two cultures - and making connections where Immanuel Kant set up embargoes...

...finally though, their mystical physics strikes him as reductionistic...

...You say you can't fathom esoteric information theory...

...Breathtaking...

...A towering intellectual eminence on the continent, he's not widely known here...

...My circulation is much the better for it...

...It's nature as matrix of unpredictable births, the original meaning of physis recouped, and life no longer a strange cosmic anomaly...

...1 question whether Serres's advocacy of Epicurean ataraxia rather than something a bit more lusty is the proper response to a prolifically messaged cosmos (I'm for the latter, I think...

...Had it ever occurred to you to ask that question...

...Serres, for this wonderfully turbulent book...

...We are the voice of this hurricane, this thermal howl...

...It's called hermeneutics, the art of interpretation...

...Catholic neoscholastics always suspected as much...

...Descartes's Discourse on Method, says Serres in an extraordinary rereading of La Fontaine's fable of the wolf and the lamb, "is a science of war...

...Serres's style, playful, anecdotal, limned with myth and story, is not the heavy-going we expect of the philosopher...

...Had Montaigne sharply mused in the no-man's-land between the exact sciences and the humanities, he might have written these essays...

...This book is meant to remedy that deficiency, and does so handily...

...I mean, who believed Whitehead when he claimed Wordsworth, not Isaac Newton, provided a completer insight into nature and who today at NIH or MIT buys the "new physics" and homeopathic medicine of neo-Taoist California holists...

...I see that the state of things consists of islands sown in archipelagoes on the noisy, poorly-understood disorder of the sea . . ." Thermodynamic's entropic sea, that is...

...In whose interest is it to lay down a law of history [signifying fixity, redundancy, closure] if not in the interest of whoever wishes to stop time...

...a sheaf of times...

...And ourselves...

...Yes, the book is full of surprises, incongruous conjunctions - which are just the man's service: to make the circulation, communication, flow between hitherto disjoined, closed bodies of knowledge, regional pockets of order and disorder...

...Nature's fundamental way is illegal, she thrives on chancy instability and turbulence...

...It is grasped as myth, it becomes myth...

...To be or to know from now on will be translated by: see the islands, rare or fortunate, the work of chance or necessity...

...Its purpose is also genuinely philosophic: "to see on a large scale, to be in full possession of a multiple, and sometimes connected, intellection.'' The essays often begin innocently enough, for instance, with a contrast between two painters, George Garrard's 1789 drawing of a brewer's dockside warehouse and Turner's painting of a tugboat in 1844, the two scenes graphically evoked as the trained eye of Gom-brich might do it - but before you're through you've gotten a sensible understanding of the metamorphosis wrought by the industrial revolution on our imaginations of both matter and mind, a stunning exposition of the whole seismic shift from classical mechanics to thermodynamics, and an appreciation of how the arts and sciences link up, address common cultural themes, and together construct the space and time we live in...

...Yet I seem to recognize as my own the thermodynamic "sea" upon which Serres sails upstream, against the entropic tide...

...What is an organism in such a mul-tiverse...

...Of course it is in the best interests of whoever pursues power in economics, politics, or philosophy to close off genesis .. . The law is a theft...

...Against-the backdrop of information theory physics, literature itself becomes a kind of physics, an energy transformer reconnecting, revitalizing what the logos of science separates and diffuses...

...The medium is the message...

...No, the whole deterministic image, argues Serres, has ideological roots...

...If you doubt that, Isabelle Stengers and Nobel laureate Ilya Priogogine provide a useful "postface" to this book which will bring you up to date, to the curious implication too that Lucretius's hymn to Venus, as Serres argues, was closer to the truth of things than Newton, and maybe even than Einstein...

...Nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world: we are drifting together toward the noise and black depths of the universe . . . Knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of time...

...A barrier," answers Serres, "of braided links that leaks like a wicker basket but can still function like a dam...

...No, it hadn't to me either...

...Well then, let Serres translate it for you into the imbalancing act of Moliere's Don Juan...

...Harari and Bell, and of course the crystalline Mr...

...But answering it leads a wayward Serres to conclude his provocative essay, "The Origin of Language," with this: "It is no longer necessary to maintain the distinction between introspective knowledge, or 'deep' knowledge, and objective knowledge...

...It allows his verbal twists and tropes to reflect the plural spaces, wild topography, of an essentially unfinished, multi-leveled, open system reality...

...In all these samples, this crossroads Hermes lets you see that "the science in question is diffused along paths that belong to myth...

...Well for one besides myself, biologist Stephen Jay Gould almost believes the holists...

...Sorry, Max Weber's "iron cage," Rudolph Bultmann's "modern scientific outlook," are half-truths, special limit cases...

...We expect theologians and literary critics, lately sociologists, to be able at it...

...All times converge in this temporal knot...

...Above all, pluralistic rather than uniformitarian...

...So again, watch Serres insist, against modern critics, that Lucretius's De Rerum Natura indeed is physics after all, but a physics tuned to different political exigencies than those that drive the modern West to an arms race...

...He confesses himself a "New York holist" one in need of more attention to the reality of differentiation and conflict...

...This is not the cosmos of Laplace's deterministic dream of homogeneous space where a single scientific or universal law charts passage among the military atomic ranks, lines, chains, and sequences...

...Enter Michel Serres, interdisciplinary wizard and professor of the history of science at the Sorbonne - a New York holist's dream...

...why don't we hear it, he asks, the deafening noise of thermal chaos, the great cosmic engine's roar...

...The point is to find the straits, the passages between - which is what knowing in this complex world is about...

...The editors' introduction, which maps the coordinates of Serres's thinking and elucidates his hermetic anti-method, is very helpful - both before and after reading the essays themselves...

...Or try Serres on Zola's reinsertion of myth into genetics in the epic of the Rougon-Macquart family, a replay for the nineteenth century of what Homer did for his time in the Odyssey...

...Agreed...

...In contrast to the cosmology of classical mechanics anyway, this fiery matter, without hard edges, chancy, vibratory, aleatory, is the stuff of literature...

...The author of a now classic critique of Leibniz's totalistic systematizing, Serres's choice of the unsystematic literary form of essay is deliberate...

...David Toolan Hermes, tutelary god of commerce, music, and theft, protector of boundaries and guide of travelers through harrowing terrain (his statue in ancient Greece stood at crossroads), famous for ingenuity and inventiveness - Michel Serres impersonates him brilliantly...