Cave obviously does not aim to separate the two housesfor good—oth-
erwise, facts would be mute and values would be impotent—but to
transform the distinction into an impossible task that must always be
started from scratch and that will turn attention away from all the oth-
ers. If he ever managed to finish his task, Sisyphus would not be any
further advanced.
Still, one cannot abandon an indispensable distinction under the
pretext that the task in question would be insurmountable: Does not
morality pride itself, after all, on maintaining its demands against all
the contrary testimony of reality? We have to go further and show
that this enterprise is not only impracticable but also deleterious. At
first glance, however, doing without it would seem to introduce as
frightful a confusion as if one were to conflate the Heaven of Ideas
with the simulacrum of the Cave. “So you want to combine facts and
values? Confuse scientific work with the search for moral founda-
tions? Pollute the fabrication of facts with the social imaginary? Allow
the fantasies of mad scientists to determine daily life?” If we could no
longer tell facts from values, could no longer distinguish nature as it is
from moral society as it should be in its indisputable search for free-
dom, don’t we have the distinct feeling that something essential would
be lost? All the dangers of relativism where knowledge and morality
are concerned would come back full force. We wouldn’t be able to tell
Dolly from her clones. No, such an important touchstone certainly
cannot be thrown out without good and imperious reasons.
Before exploring these reasons in the following section, let us add
one more clause to our set of specifications. As we know perfectly
well, it does no good to complain about the ineffectiveness of a parti-
tion without understanding that it must actually fulfill a function, just
as the Great Wall of China, though it never actually prevented inva-
sions, served the purposes of a whole series of emperors in many dif-
ferent ways.^10 We may well suspect that the purpose of a partition so
strongly rooted in good sense is not to describe anything at all. What
we see as a weakness in it comes from its principal function: to make
incomprehensiblethe fabrication of what must be,the progressive com-
position of the good common world, of thecosmos.Separating facts
from values without ever succeeding is the only way to ensure—thanks
to the power of “facts, nothing but facts”—the power of nature over
A NEW SEPARATION OF POWERS
101