To fully understand Michel Serres’ Le Contrat Naturel requires a fairly deep dive into his engagement with the limits of Western Metaphysics. The following essay attempts to unpack that engagement. I start with a long elaboration of the Enlightenment understanding of time, nature, and experience. While these issues are there in The Natural Contract (and the rest of Serres’ work), a reading of this work can be greatly assisted by a reasonably thorough elaboration of these issues.

(For anyone interested in a direct discussion by Serres of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, see the sections of The Incandescent on ‘The Black Box’.)

Having some academic background on these issues, that is where I shall begin.

The Division of Labour as Natural Law

In the second chapter of the first book of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith describes a kind of natural contract among greyhounds on the hunt:

Two greyhounds, in running down the same hare, have sometimes the appearance of acting in some sort of concert. Each turns towards his companion, or endeavors to intercept her [the hare] when his companion turns her towards himself. This, however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental concurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular time. [1]

To deny that this is a contract only emphasizes that it is, in effect, a kind of ‘natural contract’ driven by the natural inclinations (‘their passions’) of the greyhounds to kill rabbits. The ‘accident’ is not their passions but ‘that particular time’ where they find themselves chasing the same object. Recognizing that they are more likely to be successful working together, they form a kind of temporary contract where their instinctual passions coordinate themselves into a collaborative chase.

We have just encountered Serres’ understanding of time, motion, and order. A composition of time emerges from the accidental coincidence of instinctual motions that find a temporary contract with each other.

We have also encountered Modernity’s implicit contract with nature in this single scene. The seemingly chaotic motions of the world are governed by underlying laws — here the passions of the greyhounds that improvise a kind of contract with each other to catch the hare.

This is very much an Enlightenment view of nature that sees all appearances as the expression of natural laws. These laws could be cosmological (Newton’s Principia). They could be specific to things and captured in classifications (Linneaus’ Oeconomia naturae). Or they could be cultural and local (Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws).

The Enlightenment’s mission was to discover these essential natures wherever it looked [3].

Necessary to this vision, the Enlightenment changed the word ‘nature’ to mean precisely this play of appearance and underlying discoverable laws. We see this in Samuel Johnson’ entry in his Dictionary. He offers thirteen definitions in the second edition of 1773 (up from eleven in 1755), including these:

The regular course of things.

The compass of natural existence.

The state or operation of the material world.

Sort; species

Physics; the science which teaches the qualities of things.

‘Nature’ is clearly a term doing a lot of work in the British eighteenth-century. The common thread in Johnson’s definitions: nature is composed of things, and things are ‘sorts’ or ‘species’ governed by their own courses, operations, and inherent qualities. These essences are just waiting to be discovered by human reason and, in the case of Adam Smith’s division of labour, set free of artificial interference. [4]

The Wealth of Nations is nothing less than a treatise on human nature, so prevalent in the Enlightenment. [5]

Narrowing of Experience

Let’s rewind this scene of the greyhounds to the beginning of Smith’s chapter. The greyhounds’ passion-driven behavior is offered as a contrast to ‘human nature’, which is driven by a different natural law: ‘the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’. Humans, unlike greyhounds, consciously form contracts in the exercise of their nature:

It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. (I.ii)

What is Smith getting at? He is after something pivotal for how we conceive of ourselves as Modern individuals.

This propensity for exchange is a propensity to narrow our experience to only our own interests. More than this, it can be quite dangerous to society as a whole to have a broader view than just what matters to us. The ‘division of labour’, which is what The Wealth of Nations sets out to naturalize, is human nature pursuing its own realization:

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. (I.ii.1) [5]

The fundamental logic is so familiar that its consequences can remain hidden to us as Modern Individuals. ‘Wisdom’ is actually denigrated here because its view is too ‘extensive’ and focused too much on ‘general opulence’ and ‘extensive utility’.

Rather, human nature, when left to its own natural propensity — its instincts — eschews the broader vision and narrows itself to the pursuit of individual interests.

Our natural inclination, in other words, is and should be myopic and self-centered. We are not much different than the greyhounds moving instinctually toward the frightened hare.

The difference, however, is crucial. It comes down to how we experience our inclinations.

For Smith, and for ‘political economy’ from here on out, we have to reconnect with our inherit ‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ in order to make the world a more prosperous place. Human nature has been suppressed by artificial laws and customs that restrain our instincts for personal wealth accumulation.

By pursuing our own financial interest something magical and ‘invisible’ happens on a global scale:

He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it…. he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which is no part of his intention. (IV.ii.9)

The atomized individual is free to pursue his own interest with a narrowed vision and an equally narrowed capacity for experience. To try to experience more and to envision more is to break nature’s laws. Serres addresses this invisible hand directly in L’Incandescent:

The invisibility of this hand, which I have already talked about, allows everyone to refuse all responsibility; no one has the brain or arm that moves it. (The Incandescent, Randolf Burks trans., 170)

We must ‘cultivate our gardens’ as Voltaire’s Candide said. ‘Stick to your knitting’ or ‘mind your own business’ are our modern phrases.

Western Metaphysics and Experience

To understand the works of Michel Serres, it is important to understand that he was trying to find a way out of and beyond this myopic view of Modern experience that is systematically narrowed as its self-realization.

At times, this expansion of experience can come off as a new Epicureanism and a kind of moral recommendation.

In Le Contrat Naturel (1990), the stakes were much larger. His target was the inability for this narrowed experience to see what we were doing to the planet. The invisible hand is not just the cumulative effects of wealth creation and progress. It is the parasitic pollution that we cannot see but is nonetheless accumulating in the oceans and the atmosphere.

The passive laws of nature turn out to be not so passive. The Earth is showing itself to be anything but a passive receptacle for our byproducts. [6]

To get beyond this requires nothing less than overcoming the history of Western Metaphysics, which has driven the narrowing of experience to be purely local and self-involved.

Everything is moving

Breaking experience free from this narrowing focus requires a fundamental change in perspective: the deeper we stare into any thing at all, the more we realize that the movement of information and energy is fundamental. Parasitism, contracts, pollution, collaboration — i.e., how we compose space and time — are all part of the play of information and energy.

This seems abstract and potentially nihilistic. But his point must be understood as radically as it is intended. When properly understood, it is completely contrary to nihilism.

Nihilism can only arise from a sense of disappointed expectations. Western Metaphysics has taught us that order is original, and disorder is, therefore, a disruption of the fundamental order that nature has ordained.

Example: We will pick this up later, but Newton’s famous equation F=MA arises from this need to find order behind the apparent chaotic motions of the cosmos. The apple that falls from the tree and the orbiting moons of Jupiter are both following a fundamental law of motion that is the same on small scales (the apple) and large (orbiting moons and planets).

The implication for Enlightenment knowledge: there should be something firm and foundational at the bottom of our staring into nature and its things. When reality proves otherwise, we have to adjust our ways of thinking and speaking. [7]

A few examples are in order.

Sex and Gender

During the 2024 Paris Olympics, identifying the sex of an athlete became a bit of a controversy. Official policy is to identify the essence of one’s sex as one’s “sex chromosomes.” But these chromosomes are just one piece — an important one for sure — of how gender traits are expressed in the body.

Our sex chromosomes are tied into other motions, including how the genes residing on those chromosomes produce proteins, which leads to the production of hormones. We tend to think of this as following a ‘normal’ process, which leads to male characteristics (XY chromosomes with the SRY gene residing on the Y chromosome responsible for producing male characteristics) and to female characteristics (where the lack of the SRY gene leads to female characteristics. Of course, we should be wary of identifying the essence of anything by its lack of something found in its opposite).

Other factors influence how the expression of this process is accepted into the culture, which can lead to stress, anxiety or much worse if the process doesn’t go as it ‘normally’ is supposed to.

Sex and gender are not things. They aren’t even processes.

To call them processes hides the radical understanding that they are just communicating motions that work in more or less coordinated ways across chromosomes, genes, proteins, cells, and institutions like restrooms and sports.

The word ‘process’ carries with it a value judgement of normalization and therefore monstrous deviation from nature. To demand that they always be ‘normal’ is going to lead to problems, especially when we legislate using nature’s essences, not motions. [8]

Speaking

What is a vowel?

The common answer is a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y.

No. Those are the symbols that we use to name myriad sounds that we can make by passing air over our vocal cords and moving our tongues into different positions in our mouths.

Vowels are motions of air whose frequencies are shaped by the placement of our tongues and the evolutionary position of the larynx. Words are formed by the changing of the frequencies as air passes through the respiratory system and into the atmosphere — which itself must be conducive to transmission of these frequencies.

Consonants interrupt or restrict the smooth flow of air of the vowels to change the frequencies of the sound waves emanating from our vocal cords and mouth shape.

How long did it take for the larynx to align with the respiratory system to emit vowel-like sounds? How long did it take for the tongue to develop the neurological and physiological capacity to interrupt the flow of air? How long before this capacity started to form phonemes? How long before phonemes became words? How long before words become sentences? How long before sentences begin to negotiate exchanges and obligations? How long before this becomes the codification of laws?

Speech is not a thing that shows up in an instant. It is a very long and fraught history of motions working out their natural contracts.

Life

Some people think that you can stare into a woman’s womb and see the beginning of life in the beating of a heart.

This is, on the face of it, absurd. It is a retrospective justification of what they already believe.

Remove the fetus from the womb, and it will not survive without a surrogate womb. A more radical proposition: remove the heart of the fetus, and it will cease to beat, immediately.

Such a view of life explicitly denies life to things without hearts. Is a plant not living? Catch the bacteria that causes meningitis, and I’m sure you’ll admit that another living thing, that lacks a heart, has parasitically taken over your life.

How long did it take for self-replicating capacity of RNA molecules to find a home in protocells? How long before this became stable through the evolution of DNA? How long before protocols join together to become multicellular organisms? How long before cells start to become stable homes for genetic processes where proteins can specialize? How long before this specialization becomes coordination? How long before this coordination becomes stable enough to reproduce somewhat reliably?

Life is an assembly of motions that happens, but is not a thing. It has been 4 billion years in the making and did not spring fully baked once romanticized hearts started to beat.

Covering this narrative, Serres writes in Rameaux (translated as Branches):

How should we define life? By this narrative of new and contingent events that are unpredictable before they occur but formatted as a semi-necessary chain when drawn descending toward us. (109)

Nature

Let’s broaden our perspective even further and return to our discussion of nature.

All of these things — sex/gender, speech, and life — generally fall into the category of nature. By this I mean they fit a category of things that exist outside of the human capacity to create them, yet we believe, in faith, that they have an essential logic that we can understand, identify, and nail down definitively.

Words and Things

The Enlightenment obsessed about how the mind would be able to discover these essences. Establishing a correspondence between our concepts (ideas and words) and the essential things of nature (e.g., gold, human beings, sex, sounds, rotating planets) was considered to be true knowledge.

John Locke (1632-1704), for instance, distinguishes two types of Essence: nominal Essence and real Essence. He offers gold as an example:

the nominal Essence of Gold, is that complex Idea the word Gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a Body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed. But the real Essence is the constitution of the insensible parts of that Body, on which those qualities, and all the other Properties of Gold depend. How far these two are different, though they are both called Essence, is obvious, at first sight, to discover. (Treatise of Human Understanding, III.IV.2)

This is a remarkably clear articulation of the Enlightenment’s understanding of the relationship between ideas, words and things. The Enlightenment imagines a world of parallel essences. Objects in nature (e.g., Gold) have real Essences embodied in ‘qualities’ and ‘properties’.

Our minds create Ideas that ‘represent’ nominal Essences. Ideas are represented by words.

We are at the heart of Western Metaphysics as the coordination of parallel Essences.

Here is the crux of the matter for Western Metaphysical nihilism. To deal with these parallel essences, our use of words becomes a crucial concern:

By the Philosophical Use of Words, I mean such an use of them, as may serve to convey the precise Notions of Things, and to express, in general Propositions, certain and undoubted Truths, which the Mind may rest upon, and be satisfied with, in its search after true Knowledge. (Locke, Treatise of Human Understanding, III.IX.3)

Knowledge is defined as a correspondence between our words (nominal Essences) and reality (real Essences). True Knowledge is expressed as ‘general Propositions’ — i.e., definitive, unambiguous, literal statements about a real Essence.

It all seems so simple and intuitive, but that is only because it is our inheritance that is over three centuries old.

The fish cannot see the water it swims in. Serres wants us to see the water.

Reality is starting to tell us that it isn’t structured this way, but our ‘philosophical use of words’ — exemplified today by science and law — isn’t budging.

Scientific Faith and the Problem of Motion

This vision of ‘true Knowledge’ as ‘general Propositions’ requires a profound and continuous act of faith: 1) we must believe that nature is made up of things with real Essences, and 2) that human cognition can capture these real Essences in words and ideas as ‘general Propositions’’.

This scientific faith finds is clearest expression in Albert Einstein’s proclamation against Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, ‘I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.’

To be sure, this faith is a response to the nihilism implicitly introduced into human cognition when Copernicus put everything in motion.

Copernicus and Kepler are key figures for Serres, and we need to understand why.

Imperfect Motion

Once the Earth was seen to have a double rotation — around the Sun and around its own axis — human knowledge became far more difficult to justify. What appears to be true — the Earth is stable and everything rotates around us — is, in fact, an illusion.

At least three consequences are essential for our purposes.

First, with respect to our experience of the world around us, illusion is our starting point. Our belief that there is a stable truth discernible behind or within the illusions is our scientific act of faith. This act of faith necessarily includes the nihilistic possibility that the cosmos is only chaotic and vertiginous motion.

Second, after Copernicus and Galileo (whose telescopic observations tilted things in Copernicus’ favor), knowledge would require a fundamental distrust of our senses. Nihilism is seeping its way into our very bodily and cognitive processes.

Third, motion becomes both the source of our illusions and the possibility of seeing through them to a stable reality. This is possible only if all motions can be seen as the illusory expressions of a more fundamental truth that is discoverable.

For instance, Copernicus himself kept at bay the nihilistic consequences of the Earth’s double rotation (around the Sun and around its own axis) by assuming that the Earth and the Sun are perfect spheres and therefore rotate with perfect uniformity. He also assumed that the Sun was at the center of the cosmos and not moving. These assumptions were not based on observations but are acts of faith in God, who has made motion geometrically uniform, intelligible and guaranteed that the cosmos won’t fly apart.

Time and motion are linked, through an act of faith, and remain fundamental features of the cosmos.

Kepler and Cassini would chip away at this act of faith. Orbits are elliptical (not perfectly circular) and axial rotation of a spherical planet causes it to become an oval (an imperfect circle). In these observations, Kepler and Cassini would reintroduce new nihilistic problems that Newton would set out to solve. (Locke would visit Cassini in 1677 in his Paris observatory to see for himself the moons of Jupiter and the separation of the rings of Saturn.)

Before we get to Newton, we need to work through another pivotal figure for Serres, René Descartes.

Math and Method

The Enlightenment turned to ‘methods’ that would correct the necessary errors of our perception.

Descartes, in Meditation 3, gives us a prime example of this approach to knowledge when he compares the Sun we see to the Sun we’ve measured. The latter is knowledge, while the former is illusion.

… I find within myself two distinct ideas of the sun. One idea is drawn, as it were, from the senses. Now it is this idea which, of all those that I take to be derived from outside me, is most in need of examination. By this idea the sun appears to me to be quite small. But there is another idea, one derived from astronomical reasoning…. Through this idea the sun is shown to be several times larger than the earth. Both ideas surely cannot resemble the same sun existing outside me; and reason convinces me that the idea that seems to have emanated from the sun itself from so close is the one that very least resembles the sun. (Meditation 3, 39, Roger Ariew trans.)

What the Sun appears to be through only our sight is an illusion that must be corrected with ‘astronomical reasoning.’

In the hands of Descartes, reason is beginning to be a self-contained, self-sufficient human capacity whose fundamental task is to discern reality from illusion. More than this, illusion is the starting point of experience because our senses deceive us. We thus start with illusion and have to see through it to the truth hidden behind the scenes using our rational cogito.

This requires methodical reasoning that can move step-by-step from the illusion to expose realities that are hidden from us.

Of course, this requires an act of scientific faith — that there is a uniform reality behind the illusions we experience and that the mind has a method to turn illusions into truths. The full title of his most famous work says it all: Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637).

We can now move to Newton.

F=MA

In the 1686 preface to Principia, Newton lays out with remarkable clarity that the fundamental problem of science (i.e., “natural philosophy” at the time) is to understand how motion works. He places his faith in mathematics:

And therefore our present work sets forth mathematical principles of natural philosophy. For the basic problem [lit. whole difficulty] of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces. (I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman trans.)

Mathematics started to make its move to the center of these methods because it allowed for the expression of real Essences in more or less simple algebraic and geometric formulas.

Newton’s innovation, as should be clear in what I’ve just cited, is to make motion into a source of order and not chaos. From Copernicus to Galileo to Kepler to Cassini, it was no longer possible to ignore the primacy of motion as a pervasive feature of the cosmos.

If it is no longer deniable that everything is moving in ways that defy easy predictability — which was the fundamental problem of Astronomy — and if the history of human knowledge from Parmenides forward has assumed that motion is illusory and reality is ‘at rest’, how are we to stave off nihilism?

Newton took one of the options paths through this nihilistic problem: he turns his attention to discovering stable and eternal ‘forces’ that act within nature on the objects of nature.

We can be tempted, at this point, to see Newton as offering a vision of change and motion as fundamental metaphysical properties of the cosmos. He is not. Rather, he is taking chaotic motion as ‘the basic problem’ and seeking to eliminate the chaos by finding ‘the forces of nature’ (mathematically expressed in fixed formulas) that exist prior to the motions themselves.

If motions can be tamed by math, then the universe is not chaotic.

This is a profound act of faith, and it is this act of faith that Serres calls into question, as we’ll see.

Newton’s famous equation F=MA is an expression of the scientific faith that the motions we see are not only pure chaos. All motions are governed by this mechanical law such that the force (F) of any given object is equal to its mass (M) multiplied by the rate of its acceleration (A). For F and M to have any kind of relationship, A is required, but A has a dimension of time that is absolute and completely uniform. A is the change in speed over time, and time is not a variable, nor an output. In this equation, it is a given.

Time (and space) exist as eternal stabilities outside of the equation.

Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration. (Principia, Cohen and Whitman trans., page 408)

In a universe where everything is in motion, there is a great deal of comfort in assuming that motions are governed by a discoverable and mathematical universal law — i.e., it is applicable throughout the universe, at all times and in all places.

In other words, if everything is in motion, then we gain some semblance of cognitive control if we assume that the motions we see are governed by stable and eternal laws (Locke’s real Essences) that we can discover and represent (Locke’s nominal Essences).

More than this is at stake, however. We are seeing, in the brief history that I have just traced, the modern understanding of ‘nature’ come into existence. Its function is to be the passive expressions of fundamental and eternal laws that humans learn to understand, and manipulate, with math.

Today we build bridges, send satellites into orbit, and create vaccines based on this fundamental view of nature. These are the works of ‘culture,’ which gets its agency and its meaning from its separation from ‘nature.’ Our only expectation of nature — our contract with it — is that it uphold its end of the bargain: its laws never change, and we can continue to discover them the deeper we look into things.

The deeper we look, the more we discover, and the more our ‘culture’ gains power to turn this knowledge into power over nature.

This is the substance of the natural contract that already implicitly exists. It is part of the history of science:

Sadi Carnot discovered what would become the second law of thermodynamics when he was trying to make steam engines run more efficiently.

Einstein discovered relativity when he was working on clock-synchronization techn0logies spanning a nationalized landscape for the Swiss Patent Office.

Quantum physics yields quantum computing.

Neuroscience yields artificial intelligence.

Genetic sequencing yields CRSPR.

Nature as Contractual Motions

The Natural Contract traces the reality of this existing contract and argues that we need to change its terms — from parasitic to symbiotic. Along the way, Serres will weave together his other works — earlier works and those yet to be written. [n]

My intention in what remains of this essay is not to fully summarize The Natural Contract. These are not ‘reading notes’ for a graduate seminar. My purpose is to look at how Serres’ reworks the Western Metaphysical notion of nature through the figure (i.e., the pattern) of the contract.

What we’ll find is that he also completely reworks the Western Metaphysical concept of time because he restores motion and change to metaphysical realities without reducing them to expressions of nature’s laws.

Nothing less is at stake than expanding our capacity for experience to see our global and cosmological entanglements.

Kanon

Serres uses the term contract to represent ‘a collection of bonds, whose network canonizes relations’ (46). What does this mean? It is crucial to understand because Serres’ notion of time is contained within this statement.

Much hinges on the term ‘canonizes’. It comes from the Greek kanon (κανών), which means a rule, a measure, or a standard. As such, a kanon establishes a comparison. A kanon cannot exist unless an explicit or implicit comparison is made where one thing, or set of things, is used to measure the value of other similar things.

A canonized saint is a standardization of human faith against which other humans can be compared and measured.

The New Testament kanon is the collection of post-messianic works that have been selected from among myriad possibilities to represent the standard of Christian faith.

The literary kanon, derived directly from the New Testament kanon, represents the standard works of World Literature by which all other literary works can be judged.

Because a kanon establishes a comparative relationship between like things, it establishes a contract, whether formally signed or not.

For Serres, the other terms of this sentence are equally important: bonds, collections, networks. These relations can be thought of as different modes of canonization and therefore contracts. A contract emerges whenever different motions are relying on each other as do Smith’s hare-chasing greyhounds.

For example, Newton’s F=MA can be understood as a set of motions in contractual collaboration with each other.

Let’s take each in turn.

First contract: F, M, =, and A are all in contractual agreement with each other in nature. If an object with a stable mass (M) falls from a tower, it will accelerate at a known rate (A). The result of these two motions (M is in fact a motion as Einstein would show in his famous equation) is a new relation between them, force (F). The fact that these relations are reliable indicates that some form of a contract exists.

Second contract: The universe is intelligible to human cognition. F=MA is not itself a real Essence but a nominal Essence, as Locke, who knew Newton, might have said. These motions form a kind of contract between human cognition and nature: our mental motions that create ideas and words as nominal Essences are good enough to capture real Essences.

Third contract: We can use symbols to communicate this formula. Newton writes the equation at the end of the seventeenth century, and it is still taught using the exact same symbols in introductory physics classes today. This can only happen if the symbols F, M, =, and A can be written down millions of times in millions of contexts (ink and paper, chalk and chalkboards, PowerPoint slides, blog posts) and retain their stable meaning over time.

Fourth contract: An apple falls from a tree and hits Newton on the head. This local motion he assumes to be governed by a universal law applicable outside of the isolated scene. This is but a local instance of a contractual law of motion that is globally applicable because the universe is one big contract where F=MA will always be true no matter where we are in the cosmos.

Fifth contract: When we add up these contracts, we find a contract between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ that assumes nature will remain universally predictable to culture. This contract with nature allows culture to assume that the apple will always fall from the tree at the same rate of A and thus produce a predictable F so long as I know its M. It is a short step to use this law of gravity to figure out how to build a rocket powerful enough to overcome gravity and exit the Earth’s atmosphere.

As this discussion hopefully shows, a contract is radically much more than humans agreeing to do things in a quid pro quo arrangement only with other humans. The pattern of relatively reliable agreements can be found throughout the cosmos.

There is no reason for us to artificially limit contracts to only a human function.

Time

This leads us to the complexity of Serres’ understanding of time.

Time happens as a result of any given complex dance of communicating motions that rely on each other — i.e., that canonize a contractual relationship. Once again, the harder we stare into anything, the more we’ll be led away from the thing we are staring into so as to experience higher and lower levels of communicating motions.

This is no mere academic concern. The question of time, and how we compose time, is the central question of The Natural Contract.

Before us is an anguishing question, whose principle component is time, especially a long-term time that is all the longer when the system is considered globally. Mixing the waters of the oceans requires a cycle estimated at five thousand years.

We are proposing only short-term answers or solutions, because we live with immediate reckonings, upon which most of our power depends. (30)

We must remember that Le Contrat Naturel was published in French in 1990, so it is a work of the late 1980’s. The English translation by Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson came out from the University of Michigan Press in 1995. The situation has only grown more urgent as the long-term perspective that was possible 35 years ago seems shrunken into an emergency status.

‘How are we to succeed in a long-term enterprise with short-term means?’ Is this question the same today as it was 35 years ago?

No and yes.

No: it seems that our long-term runway has become far too short due to inaction. Time is compressing.

Yes: time is still the operative question. Our composition of time remains our fundamental challenge to dealing with the scale of global warming that we face today. As we will see, this we is precisely the crux of the matter. It is a we that we do not see or experience trapped as we are in a set of apparatuses that blind us to the global nature of existence today.

For Serres, a reimagining of our already existing natural contract would require us to see the global nature of our entanglement in the world. In other words, extending our understanding of this existing contract between nature and culture requires a new defintion of nature: ‘today nature is defined as a set of relations whose network unifies the whole Earth’ (46).

We are entangled in this global network of relations.

War, Peace

Fight with Cudgels

Serres starts The Natural Contract with Francisco Goya’s painting of two men fighting in what appears to be a bog or quicksand. While they pummel each other, they don’t recognize the landscape that is in the process of ending their conflict by swallowing both of them whole.

At the macro-level of the scene, there are at least three contractual motions at play in this painting.

First contract: there is a kind of social contract between the two fighters at war with each other. War is a contract just as peace is a contract. ‘Attentive to each other’s tactics, each answers blow for blow, counterattacking and dodging’ (1). The games of war and combat are played according to implicitly or explicitly agreed upon rules — i.e., a contract.

Second contract: the implied spectators look on the scene, perhaps taking sides and placing wagers. All that they see is ‘the bond of combat, so heated that it inflames the audience, enthralled to the point of joining in with its cries and coins’ (1-2).

Third motion: ‘But aren’t we forgetting the world of things themselves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh?’ This world of things is not just enveloping the two combatants. We, the spectators placing our bets, are equally ignorant of the sand, water, and mud. ‘In what quicksand are we, active adversaries and sick voyeurs, floundering side by side’ (3).

Nature, here, provides the stage on which human contracts play out. Is nature in Goya’s painting violating this contract by swallowing the combatants whole as we look on with hope that our wagers pay off?

Achilles and Xanthus

Serres follows Goya’s painting with the battle between Achilles and the river Xanthus in Iliad Book 21 (‘The River’). In that book, Achilles is mercilessly slaughtering Tojans. He is driven by vengeance: the Trojans have killed Patroclus, whose bond with Achilles ran deep.

As bodies pile up and are flung into the river Xanthus, the river says enough already:

‘My lovely streams have been clogged up with corpses.
I cannot freely pour my waters down
into the shining sea, because the bodies
choke me, yet you keep killing even more,
annihilating everyone. Come on,
leader of troops, stop now! This is too much.’
(Iliad, 21, 288-93; Emily Wilson trans.)

The temporal distance between Goya’s modern painting (created between 1820 and 1823) and the account of this scene in the Trojan War, attributed to Homer (ca. 700 BCE) , is instructive.

In the Goya painting, nature is the seemingly passive stage on which the combat unfolds. Our attention goes to the combatants and we might only later see that they are fighting in quicksand. (Some interpretations have argued that they are just standing in tall grass, not sinking.) Nature may be passively absorbing them as their fight continues. As a modern work of art, nature provides the stage on which humanity is the only real actor.

In Iliad 21, Achilles is only one actor among many. Ancient Greece had no concept of an opposition between humanity and nature. Everything acts with intention. Gods intervene. The river Xanthus rises up, speaks, and gives courage to Asteropeus as he tries to defeat Achilles. Spears have desires and intentions: ‘The weapon sailed right past him and fixed itself in earth, although it longed to sate itself on flesh’ (223-5). Arguably, the main human in the scene, Achilles, has the least amount of agency. He is only playing out his ordained destiny: ‘It is not ordained that you should be defeated by a river’ (391-2).

In both scenes, the world has power and fights back. ‘In the days of the Iliad and Goya, the world wasn’t considered fragile; on the contrary, it was threatening, and it triumphed over men, over those who won battles, and over wars themselves’ (11).

Since then, we have crossed a threshold into another relationship with the world — a relationship that hinges upon the historical distinction between nature and culture.

Enlightenment

This threshold had a couple of steps. The first was the Enlightenment. The second, as we’ll see in the second section of the book (‘Natural Contract’), was the moment in the twentieth century when humanity was no longer primarily involved in agricultural production.

Since the Enlightenment, we have lived in an implicit contract with nature that it remain in the background and serve only as the stage for humanity’s heroic actions.

Take away the world around the battles, keep only conflicts or debates, thick with humanity and purified of things, and you obtain stage theater, most of our narratives and philosophies, history, and all of social science: the interesting spectacle they call cultural. Does anyone say where the master and slave fight it out? (3)

Nature as mere theater is not a metaphor. The fact that we call the different regions of both World Wars ‘theaters’ should give us pause so as to understand the passive role of nature in our social contracts.

We

Serres is not prone to making arguments. He does not string together a series of propositions and seek to defend them with impeccable logic. Paragraphs do not build on each other in a systematic way.

However, if there is a central argument in The Natural Contract it is this: that humanity has become a heavy physical presence spanning the globe, and our experience must own up to this reality. The idea of a ‘natural contract’ is designed to bring about this new mode of experience.

Until the era of satellite images, this global physical weight was invisible.

The Earth needs only to be observed by satellite, at night, for these great dense spots to be recognized. Japan, the Northeast American megalopolis from Baltimore to Montreal, the city that is Europe, an enormous herd of monsters that Paris seems to watch over like a shepherd from afar, and the broken rim of the Dragons: Korea, Formosa, Hong Kong, Singapore … When it is unevenly distributed, skyrocketing demographic growth becomes concentrated and stuck together in giant units, colossal banks of humanity as powerful as oceans, deserts, or icecaps, themselves stockpiles of ice, heat, dryness, or water; these immense units feed on themselves, advance and weigh upon the planet, for worse and for better. (16-17)

In this situation, humanity ‘is a being-everywhere’ while we continue to think of ourselves as only ‘being-there,’ i.e., a purely local entity with no visible or material global ties to this ‘growing beyond Leviathan’ (18).

This collective physical presence has itself become a natural force: ‘Finally we have reached such sizes that we exist physically…. The hard, hot architecture of megalopolises is equal to many a desert, to groups of springs, wells, lakes — far greater streams than the river of Achilles, shifting sands so much larger than Goya’s quicksand — or to an ocean, or a rigid and mobile tectonic plate. At least we exist on a natural scale’ (19).

Pollution and Networks

Let’s make this into a practical matter.

How should I dispose of this now-empty plastic water bottle I am holding?

I am not an isolated individual making this choice in the abstract. Around the world in millions of instances, this exact same choice is being made right now.

Kant’s categorical imperative — that I should only do what I wish others would do in the same situation — has become a material reality because we live in a global network where the bottle I hold now will end up somewhere else that I will never see or experience.

When it comes to how I dispose of this object, I am not alone in my action. I am part of what Serres called a world object’ — an object that spans the globe with its space, time, speed, or energy (15).

Natural Contract

In the second section called ‘Natural Contract’, Serres makes one of his fundamental intellectual moves. He takes the limited model of the social contract and generalizes it so that a contract becomes a much larger concept that can absorb many more relationships than the more isolated social or legal contract can handle.

In doing so, he can expand our vision and experience of how things are related well beyond human-to-human interactions.

From now on I mean by natural contract above all the precisely metaphysical recognition, by each collectivity, that it lives and works in the same global world as all the others; not only every political collectivity joined by a social contract but also every other kind of collectivity — military, commercial, religious, industrial, and so on — joined by a legal contract, and also the collection of experts joined by the scientific contract. 46

This is a difficult passage, but it is crucial to understanding all of Serres work. We should unpack it.

Let’s start with contracts.

Here we have a clear demonstration of contracts as a pattern woven throughout the world. Political collectivities — which are themselves communicating motions — are held together by explicit (Constitutions) or implicit (customs, traditions) contracts. Earlier in this section, Serres has already dealt with Thomas Paine’s Declaration of the Rights of Man as the foundation of modern politics. It was, despite itself, an exclusive contract: ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man had the merit of saying “every man” and the weakness of thinking “only men,” or men alone’ (37).

The political social contract is underwritten by legal contracts that create ‘every other kind of collectivity — military, commercial, religious, industrial.’ This includes, as Serres will cover in the third section, the contract that holds together the sciences as a collaborative enterprise.

If contracts are a pervasive pattern, then they begin to take on a metaphysical quality, which is why his use of metaphysics is so important to his argument.

For Serres, Western Metaphysics is not merely an abstract topic fit only for university classrooms teaching the history of philosophy. Western Metaphysics, as I outlined above, structures our experience with each other (‘culture’) and with the world (‘nature’). To offer a ‘natural contract’ as a metaphysics is to ask us to see ourselves in a much, much wider context. We are already in a contract with nature — one that encourages us to see our actions as isolated and individual. We remain blind — willfully so — to the networked quality of our actions.

I call the natural contract metaphysical because it goes beyond the ordinary limitations of various local specialties, physics in particular. It is as global as the social contract and in a way makes the social contract enter the world…. (46)

This is a very abstract and difficult passage to understand because Serres’ intervention is academic. He wants a new Philosopher of Science (31-2), and he wants a new mode of education in the academy that he calls ‘the new Sage’ or ‘Le Tiers-Instruit’ (94-5).

We can get some practical assistance from the American poet and essayist (and champion of bioregionalism), Gary Snyder, who made a strikingly similar claim at about the same time as Contrat Naturel came out.

We need to make a world-scale ‘Natural Contract’ with the oceans, the air, the birds in the sky. The challenge is to bring the whole victimized world of ‘common pool resources’ into the Mind of the Commons. As it stands now, any resource on earth that is not nailed down will be seen as fair game to the timber buyers or petroleum geologists from Osaka, Rotterdam, or Boston. (The Practices of the Wild, 1990, page 39)

To ‘practice the wild’ and embrace ‘the Mind of the Commons’ is substantially the same mode of experience that Serres argues for with terms like world-object and the global we. Both sets of concepts invite us to change our already existing contract with nature into something more symbiotic and up to date with how we actually live in the world.

This requires us to broaden and deepen our capacity for experience.

The Arrow of Time

The ‘Natural Contract’ section of the book contains a remarkable string of aphorisms that encapsulates Serres’ understanding of how Western Metaphysics has created a contractual relationship with nature. This implicit natural contract yielded a new understanding of historical time as a smooth flowing arrow.

He starts with the social contract ‘that we are said to have signed amongst ourselves, at least virtually’: ‘Strangely silent about the world, this contract, they say, made us leave the state of nature to form society’ (34). This narrative of the social contract sets up a linear history where humanity left behind ‘the state of nature’ to form political collectives (society). The state of nature is in the past, as the two major figures of the social contract made clear: Hobbes and Rousseau.

This linear flow of time, however, required other intellectual moves. Humanity ‘casts off’ from nature to live only within its own capacity for ‘reason.’ Thus is born a new basis for justice — ‘natural law.’

This can be a complex argument to understand, particularly if one is not thoroughly steeped in Enlightenment thinking. To draw the contrast, let’s look back at Achilles’ battle with Xanthus. We have already said that Homer has no concept of a distinction between culture and nature. Everything is acting with some level of intent in that scene, even the spears. The scene is completely controlled by the gods, who are making deals with each other and taking sides in the Trojan War. Achilles is merely playing out an episode within his already-ordained destiny.

There is no linear history here that would see nature as an original state out of which humanity uses its autonomous reason to create society. In fact, some have argued (most famously Eric Auerbach in Mimesis) that there is no past and no future in Homer — just a flat and eternal now where the past and the future (as fate) are fully present.

Let’s look at a passage in the Achilles v. Xanthus scene where this flat and eternal present is fully visible:

Intent to kill,
he [Achilles] leapt upon Asteropeus, son
of Pelegon, the son of Axius,
the broadly flowing river with deep eddies,
by noble Periboea, eldest daughter
of Acessamenus. The whirling river
mingled with her and she bore Pelegon,
whose son, Asteropeus, was the one
on whom Achilles pounced. Asteropeus
has climbed out of the river and now stood
holding two spears and Xanthus gave him courage. (21, 186-196)

From a modern reader’s perspective, the narrative moves quickly from Achilles leaping upon Asteropeus to the latter’s lineage and back again to the fight. It seems a bit jarring because we are operating within a different assumption about the relationship between literary narrative and the flow of time. We want this movement from the present fight to the lineage of Asteropeus to be a flashback or a memory. In other words, we want The Iliad to be a modern novel.

This is not a memory or a flashback.

Asteropeus’ lineage that ties him to Xanthus’ anger, and the granting of courage to Asteropeus, is not in the past. It is fully present. It is not ‘background’ information that helps us better understand the fight. It is part of the fight itself.

To return to Serres’ state of nature and social contracts, the Enlightenment brought with it a fundamentally different composition of time. Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’ created the past as a chronological distance from the present. It is this chronological distance that narrativizes history and makes us read Asteropeus’ lineage as background information or a narrator’s memory.

For the Enlightenment composition of historical time, ‘natural law’ and human ‘reason’ broke humanity free from that earlier state — at least in the ‘civilized’ countries. We have to remember that we are at the height of the global colonial enterprise where the distinction between savage and civilized is part of the enterprise and signals a temporal distinction where the savage is psychologically and chronologically closer to the original ‘state of nature.’ We also have to remember that the West is tied into the Biblical linear composition of time as sandwiched between Genesis and Apocalypse. Time in some sense has always been linear for the Judeo-Christian West.

This particular composition of time shows up in the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man,’ which definitively separated humanity from nature (and from Homer’s world controlled by gods). Nature became what Serres will call an ‘excluded third’ that begins to look like Goya’s quicksand — the theater stage on which the self-contained human drama can play out.

We now have arrived at a key pattern for Serres — the parasite.

Parasites

For Serres, this linear flow of time where the ‘state of nature’ is in the past and ‘society’ is the present that is open to a progressive future is inherently parasitic.

What is a parasite? It is a pattern that ‘routinely confuses use and abuse; it accords itself rights, which it exercises by harming its host, sometimes without any advantage to itself…’ (36)

Crucially, a parasite has no concept of reciprocal exchange. Time, for the parasite, flows only in one direction — toward the benefit of the parasite:

For parasitism, in fact, follows the simple arrow of a flow moving in one direction but not the other, in the exclusive interest of the parasite, which takes everything and gives back nothing along this one-way street. (36)

Justice moves in the opposite direction as it ‘seeks to bring flows into balance through exchange or contract; at least in principle, it denounces one-sided contracts, gifts without countergifts, and ultimately all abuses’ (36-7).

Again, let’s make this practical.

Pollution. Trash that doesn’t readily decompose into nutrients is inherently parasitic. We may recycle our plastics — or think that we are — but that merely slows down the accumulation of pollution, at least we hope it does. Recycling doesn’t give anything back; it just slows down, but does not end, the parasitic damage. Even more perspicuous, from the Serresian perspective, is that the ‘cycle’ maintains the separation of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’: we just try to contain our waste (largely unsuccessfully) within a self-contained cycle of production-consumption-recycling.

It doesn’t really work.

Homes. Most homes built in the world today are parasitic. On balance, they take in far more resources than they give back. Thermal images of heat loss readily show the second law of thermodynamics at work. The energy needed to heat the home gets generated through various methods — coal, wind, solar, natural gas — without the house giving anything back other than the entropy of the second law. We have regularly cleared forests to build homes without the homes giving anything back to the forests. This list could go on.

To be sure, parasitism is unavoidable. In fact, we can point to certain benefits of parasites. Our gut biomes function through the parasitic action of bacteria. Without these bacteria — which form a highly fragile contractual system with the rest of our physiology — we wouldn’t be able to properly digest food, nor would we be able to properly regulate the flow of glucose to the blood stream.

It should come as no surprise that parasitism is a way of understanding contractual motions and therefore time. It is also a way of envisioning justice within the natural contract. As always for Serres, time and justice are intimately related because they have to do with contractual motions.

Footnotes

[1] I’m using the version of The Wealth of Nations published by Liberty Fund

[2] This is exactly Kant’s answer to the question ‘Was its Aufklarung?’ Humanity is awakening from its self imposed immaturity.

[3] To be sure, Aristotle saw essences everywhere. Specifically he saw teleologies — i.e., terrestrial things have potentiality that leads them from an initial state to an activated one. This view of things, of course, lives on and was passed down to the Enlightenment through the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The differences, however, are significant with respect to how the Enlightenment used ‘nature’ to aggressively seek order in everything. See Lorraine Daston Against Nature: ‘Nature in its entirety was imagined as more coherent: a harmonious whole whose interlocking parts were in delicate equilibrium with one another’ (18). We should not lose the Judeo-Christian theological thread that is completely absent in the Aristotelian physics. The Enlightenment inherited a created cosmos that has no guarantee of order other than the faith in a promise from God.

[4] See Daston Against Nature for three of the ways the term ‘Nature’ has been discussed in the metaphysical thought of the West. She discusses ‘specific natures’ such as Linnaeus’ classifications; universal natural laws such as Newton’s gravity; and local natures such as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws.

[5] Treatises on human nature and human understanding were typical in the Enlightenment, of which Smith’s earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments is one. Smith just shifts the overarching subject to wealth accumulation that is maximized when human nature naturally divides itself into myopic specialties.

[6] We should be careful about a kind of Gaia hypothesis here. We need not see the Earth as taking revenge, which would be to anthropomorphize the Earth. At minimum, we should see that our Enlightenment inheritance of a passive nature made up of unchangeable laws is quite different than the reality we are, and should be, experiencing.

[7] Contemporary Physics seems to be having another Enlightenment moment with respect to black holes. Peter Galison’s film ‘Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know’ (available on Neflix) beautifully documents, among other stories, the final months of Stephen Hawking’s collaboration with three other Physicists to overcome the ‘information paradox’: the seemingly infinite gravitational power of black holes to actually (and counterintuitively) emit information visible at their edges. The pursuit of mathematical equations to explain this counter-intuition demonstrates this Physicists’ faith that the universe is made up of discoverable, eternal, and mathematical laws. ‘The Edge of All We Know’ offers black holes as limit experiences where the possibility that these laws are not eternal becomes the nihilistic horror for Physicists — their own metaphorical black hole that could destroy the fundamental assumption of the profession. This ‘edge’ is composed of a binary opposition between order and randomness. A close reading of Serres should lead us to question whether or not this binary is, in fact, necessary or just an artifact of Western Metaphysics that has to assume that order is present, original, and discoverable.

[8] Serres was not elaborating a philosophical system. Rather, he made extensive use of patterns — what Christopher Watkin has called his “figures of thought.” Their function is to break down historical and reified barriers that have become precious to Western Metaphysics. These patterns percolate throughout his work. For instance, Contrat Naturel (1990) reprises La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucréce (1977) and Le Parasite (1980). It prefigures Le Tiers-Instruit (1991), Les origins de la géométrie (1995), and Relire le relié (2019). Each of the arguments of those books appears briefly in Le Contrat Naturel.