DOCUMENTARY - M.Serres And His Love Of Ancient Greece And Its People (THIS IS A MUST WATCH)

This science-based group of films, are an award winning French documentary series from French philosopher and author Michel Serres and focuses on the wonders of ancient Greek knowledge from the sixth century up until the fourth century BC. Asked who about the authors he admires, he lists Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Pascal, Leibniz, La Fontaine, Balzac, Verne, and Zola.

In the documentary he says Greeks should stand proud, for their small sun-drenched country gave the world all the sciences. The very same sciences that might today be the pride of the Western world, are in fact a conception of the Greeks who created them through the clarity of their hearts and souls.

Wikipedia says he is the son of a barge man, who entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure ("rue d'Ulm") in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. Serres then spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968, and began teaching in Paris. As a child, he witnessed firsthand the violence and devastation of war. He currently serves as a Professor of French at Stanford University.

Over the years, Serres earned a reputation as a spell-binding lecturer and as the author of remarkably beautiful and enigmatic prose so reliant on the sonorities of French that it is considered practically untranslatable. He took as his subjects such diverse topics as the mythical Northwest Passage, the concept of the parasite, and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. More generally Serres is interested in developing a philosophy of science which does not rely on a metalanguage in which a single account of science is privileged and regarded as accurate. To do this he relies on the concept of translation between accounts rather than settling on one as authoritative. For this reason he relied on the figure of Hermes (in his earlier works) and angels (in more recent studies) as messengers who translate (or: map) back and forth between domains (i.e., between maps).

He notes that there is a collapse of knowledge in the world because man is not taught Latin or Greek, poetry or literature and leaves it to be understood that the teaching of these sciences is collapsing everywhere. For this he blames philosophers, who he underlines are guilty for missing the magnitude of the changes in the world.

Serres's love of the Greek and Roman classics as well as of particular French philosophers and novelists is more than apparent in this documentary, and we thank him for this documentary, watching it was a breath of fresh air. Enjoy!