Wijsgerig Perspectief - Volume 65, Issue 4, 2025

This article explores Michel Serres’ ethics of noise in response to the common assertion that structuralist or anti-humanist thought lacks a normative basis. Rather than grounding ethics in the human subject — its nature, reason or rights — Serres locates normativity in the world’s own complexity: the flows of information and noise that sustain diversity across different levels of reality. Drawing on information theory, particularly the work of Léon Brillouin and Henri Atlan, Serres does not view noise as a threat to order, but rather as a condition of transformation and renewal. His concept of nested systems enables us to reinterpret contemporary ecological and political crises as conflicts between levels of organization, where higher systems exploit or exhaust the ‘noise’ of lower ones. By situating ethics in the maintenance of diversity and the protection of generative noise, Serres offers a framework for rethinking responsibility in the Anthropocene not as mastery over the world, but as a practice of preserving the conditions for its continued complexity.

The French philosopher of sciences Michel Serres uses the infamous Northwest Passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean as a metaphor for the connection between the humanities and the natural sciences. In this essay I discuss the meaning of this metaphor and Serres his own transdisciplinary work.

Apart from bringing the seemingly distant disciplines into close connection, Serres also uses the geography and the history of science of the Northwest Passage to illustrate the unpredictable and dynamic territory of transdisciplinarity. Many questions arise when one envisions the voyage Serres invites us to take. And many of these questions Serres answers by narrating what he calls the ‘Grand Narrative’ of the interconnected human and planetary evolution.

This essay follows Serres questioning of disciplinary boundaries, of what keeps these boundaries at place and of the role of philosophy in their overcoming. By weaving together different forms of knowledge and by bringing thought closer to the physical world, we will see how Serres prepares a philosophy which is meant to not only bridge the disciplinary divide but also brings science closer to society.

This essay explores the intersection of literature, science, and ethics through Michel Serres’s philosophy of “translation” and its application to Anjet Daanje’s novel Het lied van ooievaar en dromedaris (2022). Daanje’s ambitious work, composed of interwoven novellas enriched with scientific notes, poetry, and historical fragments, culminates in a chapter where a physicist conducts a self-experiment to grasp his comatose partner's experience. This raises profound questions: Can literature represent reality as science does? Can ethical decisions be informed by imaginative experimentation? Drawing on Serres’s analyses of Emile Zola and Virginia Woolf, the essay demonstrates how literature can correspond to scientific knowledge by revealing the structures of time. Zola’s “experimental novel” parallels 19th-century thermodynamics, while Woolf’s To the Lighthouse anticipates contemporary physics by depicting multiple temporalities. Through this lens, Daanje’s novel juxtaposes mechanical time with quantum time, illustrating how the interwovenness of time can illuminate medical-ethical dilemmas. The essay argues that Serres’s philosophy invites us to see literature not as a mere reflection but as a participant in knowledge production, enabling the dialogue between general scientific principles and singular human experience. Ultimately, imagination and narrative emerge as essential for understanding time, chaos, and the ethics of end-of-life decisions.