A Crisis of Purpose: Panurgy in Michel Serres’ L’Incandescent
Access to the Universal
In the section titled “Conclusion on Panurgy” of L’Incandescent, Serres names the stakes of our incandescent time with unusual precision. What confronts us is not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of purpose.
We are entering a new phase in the assertion of human purpose whose scope we do not yet know how to manage. The resulting confusion arises from an unresolved relationship: that between the universality of human intelligence and the universality of the world in which that intelligence now intervenes.
Serres poses the question as a wager rather than a verdict:
For we don’t know whether our universality surpasses the Universe, pits itself against it or will bow before its power. Is there any danger for it, for them, for us, if we exceed our universe? But what does ‘to exceed’ mean here? (135)
The Pan sections of L’Incandescent inhabit this uncertainty. Have we reached a stage at which human intelligence operates on the same order as the universe itself—not merely describing its laws, but steering their operations? The evidence Serres points to is not epistemic mastery alone. It is practical capacity: the ability to manipulate natural processes, redirect flows of energy, reorganize matter, life, and time in accordance with human aims.
Such power is possible only if there exists what Serres calls an “open play between the universality of men and the universality of the world” (135). Intelligence must no longer remain local, instrumental, or confined to explanation. It becomes panurgic: capable of acting across domains, scales, and systems without a clear boundary marking where human purpose ends and the world’s own dynamics begin.
This is what Serres means by ‘access to the universal.’ It marks our evolving, incandescent moment in which human action is no longer local and isolated, but spreads rapidly and outruns the original intentions of our purposes.
The crisis, then, is not that we lack meaning. It is that we’ve invented technology that moves faster than our ethical purposes and moral orientation can handle.
What is Panurgy’s Wager?
Written in the early years of the twenty-first century, L’Incandescent inevitably reaches us through downstream echoes of what we now call artificial intelligence. Serres was writing before the fixation on AGI, but not before the world had become computational in its bones. Computational power already structured finance, logistics, communication, and time itself. The Y2K crisis—whether justified or theatrical—briefly made this visible. It revealed that we had converted time into a convention and embedded fallible calendars and clocks deep inside the infrastructure of modern life.
This is panurgy: the human capacity to absorb ever more of nature’s processes into human purposes. Computational power is not a rupture in this story, but its latest acceleration. Panurgy names the expanding ability of purpose to achieve effects at increasing speed and scale—to stretch local actions across systems, networks, and temporal horizons.
Serres treats this condition as liminal. We do not yet know what it yields, only that it places us somewhere unfamiliar. ‘Technology places us before the horizon of our universality’ (134). That placement is not a destination but a wager—‘we are only wagering that they are of the same order, as though equipotent’ (135). The they here is decisive: the universality of human intelligence and the universality of the world itself; are they cooperating competing, or something else?
What is this wager? It is the hope and the fear that we have discovered a power that gives us godlike control over the processes of nature. In this sense, our computational power is part of a long lineage that leads from primitive tools to thermonuclear bombs—all of which are efforts ‘to renew the face of the earth and change human destiny’ (134).
Every expansion of panurgic power begins as a wager made in action. How far will this spear fly, and will it strike with enough force? Can this stone be shaped to cut more cleanly? Can clocks be synchronized so trains do not collide? Can machines be built that execute any program we can imagine? Each step extends purpose further into the fabric of the world—testing whether intention can travel faster, farther, and with fewer unintended consequences.
What distinguishes our moment is not that we make such wagers, but that their scope has become planetary and their feedback loops nearly instantaneous. Purpose no longer advances cautiously into resistance; it propagates. And panurgy, in Serres’ sense, names the condition of living inside that wager without yet knowing what kind of orientation—moral, political, or existential—it demands.
Our Current Wager
Human experience now unfolds inside a wager that computational power will become intelligent, not merely procedural. Until recently, computation meant fixed rules transforming clearly defined inputs into predictable outputs—purchase orders and invoices, documents and web pages, spreadsheets and relational databases. These systems extended human purpose efficiently, but they remained instruments. They did exactly what we told them to do. Unintended consequences we called ‘bugs’—engineering flaws.
What now appears on the horizon is something else. The wager we are making—implicitly, collectively, and unevenly—is that computation may cross a threshold where it no longer merely executes human intention but reshapes it as it executes its algorithms. This is not yet a settled reality, but it already structures expectation, investment, and imagination. In this sense, AGI names both a technical achievement and an historical threshold at which we now find ourselves.
Serres describes this condition with stark clarity:
All thought, science, action, all hope is founded on this wager. The open play of connections between these two universals imposes technological intervention and cultural customs, languages and knowledge on us. (135)
He calls this an imposition, but what is being imposed on us? As human purpose gains speed and scale through computational technology, it brings with it realities and responsibilities that earlier societies attributed to fate, destiny, or the gods. Problems once framed as unavoidable—famine, disease, war, even aspects of evolution—are increasingly recast as technical, organizational, or moral failures.
This shift marks the return of a theodicy, transformed. Serres calls it an anthropodicy: a reckoning not with divine justice, but with human responsibility under conditions of unprecedented power. The question is no longer why God permits suffering, but why we do—given what we are increasingly capable of preventing, mitigating, or redirecting.
Humility, Purpose, Science
This power does not descend uniformly upon humanity. It passes through cultural customs, specific languages, institutions, and ways of knowing. The universal is always mediated in its application and spins off unintended consequences and accursed shares—a phrase Serres adapts from Georges Bataille.
As a result, some forms of life accumulate power while others are exposed to new forms of vulnerability and the return of fate. Serres will describe this as a renewed encounter with the tragic and with the problem of evil—not as metaphysical abstractions, but as consequences of uneven access to and application of panurgic power.
Two posts in particular delve into accursed shares and the modern tragic as unavoidable conditions of our new universality.
Accursed Shares and Violence without Human Scapegoats
How moral life today depends on individual refusals of violence that dissipate harm locally even as consequences propagate globally.
Serres on the Moral Problem of Humanity Driving Evolution
Exploring auto-evolution, violence, and the challenge of re-inventing moral orientation after the Neolithic age.
What once read as prophetic speculation now appears with growing clarity in the sciences themselves. When David Deutsch writes that ‘Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe,’ he arrives—by a different route—at the same wager Serres articulates in L’Incandescent. Intelligence is not merely adaptive; it is transformative. It allows matter and energy to be reorganized by our universal intelligence in ways otherwise unavailable to any other thing in the universe.
Crucially, this capacity is not given all at once. It evolves. It was not present with the emergence of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, and it is not fully present now. If intelligence evolves, then so does our capacity to assert purpose. This is what Serres calls hominescence: the ongoing transformation of the human under the pressures and possibilities of its own inventions.
The wager of panurgy, then, is not simply whether we can wield such power. It is whether we can learn to inhabit it with humility—recognizing that universality does not abolish mediation, and that purpose without orientation risks becoming a new form of fate, authored this time by us.