Dossier : Le groupe des Dix, des précurseurs de l'interdisciplinarité – Physics, philosophy and poetics at the end of the Groupe des Dix: Edgar Morin and Michel Serres on the nature of Nature

Abstract

This article argues that by the time of the Groupe des Dix’s dissolution in 1976, at least some of its members had departed significantly from the intellectual framework inherited from America’s Cybernetics Group. Focusing on two key publications of 1977, Edgar Morin’s La méthode, tome 1 : la nature de la nature and Michel Serres’s La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce. Fleuves et turbulences, I show how the group’s two most philosophically oriented thinkers both broke with the “paradigm of the artificial machine” characteristic of cybernetics, developing in its place a new understanding of Nature centred on the figure of the vortex and the concept of self-production. This renewed understanding of Nature in turn entails an attempt to re-think the foundations of the life, human and artificial sciences via an original articulation of physics, philosophy and poetics.