“Therefore, just shut up!” That so much virtue has been attached to
this faulty reasoning will soon count as one of the strangest anthropo-
logical curiosities in recent times. Since there is an external reality, or
rather realities, to be internalized and unified, we understand perfectly
well that we have to take up the discussion again, and go on discussing
for a long time. Nothing must be allowed to interrupt the procedures
of assimilation before a solution has been found that will turn these
new propositions into full-fledged inhabitants of an extended collec-
tive. This requirement of common sense brooks no exceptions. Only
the myth of the Cave, with its improbable distinction into two houses,
one of which chatters away in ignorance while the other has knowl-
edge but does not speak, the two being connected by a narrow corri-
dor through which, by a miraculous and double conversion, minds
that are scientific enough to make things speak and political enough
to silence humans go back and forth—only this myth has succeeded
in making the separation between the two houses the main plot of
our intellectual dramas. To be sure, abandoning the separation would
bring about a dreadful catastrophe in the eyes of the epistemology po-
lice, since that would prevent Science from separating from the social
world in order to accede to nature and then prevent scientists from
coming back down to the world of ideas to save the social world from
its misery. But this tragedy that unleashes so many passions is a trag-
edy only for those who have sought to plunge the collective into the
Cave to begin with. Whose fault is it if Science is threatened by the
rise of the irrational? It is the fault of those who have invented this im-
plausible Constitution that makes the system so fragile that a grain of
sand would suffice to block it; it is not the fault of the era, which is
spilling out of this ill-conceived system on all sides—in any event, it is
not the fault of those of us who have pointed out the irremediable de-
fect in this Constitution.
Finally, the preceding chapters have allowed us to realize to what
extent the official philosophies of political ecology were mistaken in
their definition of procedures. In order to put an end to the diversity
of political passions, they retained the principal failing of the old Con-
stitution by requiring that the world we had in common be definedat
the outsetunder the auspices of a nature known by scientists whose
work remained hidden by thisNaturpolitik.Most political ecology, at
least in its theories, seeks not to change either its political philosophy
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