Michel Serres and Gregory Bateson: Implicit Dialogue about a Recognitive Epistemology of Nature

The connection between the works of Michel Serres and Gregory Bateson is provided by their joint interest in the nature of Nature. Reading Serres and Bateson together is thus not an academic exercise but contribution to a genuine intellectual dialogue that can help reconstruct thinking after the damages done by the mechanicity of “rationalism,” reaching its zenith today, with AI and transhumanism—clear justification for the current importance of anthropology, understood in the broadest possible sense, and the negativity of “critique,” plaguing since centuries any effort to move outside and beyond mechanical and instrumental rationalism. A joint analysis of their works is important as they were among the first to perceive the fundamental unity of our world as “Nature.” It is this recognition that made them among the first modern investigators of the unity of Nature and diagnosts of the ecological crisis.