in decision-making.” If the public has to know, it is in the mode of
informing, divulging, popularizing, vulgarizing.^26 The public is not
asked to go into the laboratory and become perplexed in its turn. If it
is told about institutions, the purpose is to lock it up in the prison
of its own social representations, the better to subjugate it with the
chains of naturalization and the ineluctable laws that are going to shut
its mouth. If anyone offers to hierarchize its values, it will be deprived
of all access to the details of the facts, to all the living fire of contro-
versy, to all the uncertainty of the collective. No, there is no question
about it, every unprejudiced mind that casts a glance on this profound
confusion that is called “society’s debates over science and technol-
ogy” can only conclude as I have: it must be possible to do a bit better
than this! Provided, nevertheless, that to the four requirements we
have just developed a dynamic is added that allows them to be better
understood.
A New Exteriority
More than this one meticulous chapter would be needed, as I am well
aware, to bring about the abandonment of the venerable distinction
between facts and values. Indeed, if people are so fond of this distinc-
tion, which is as awkward as it is absolute, it is because it seems at
least to guarantee a certain transcendence over the redoubtable imma-
nence of public life.^27 Even in recognizing that it is inapplicable, one
would like to preserve it against the supreme danger that would come
from doing without it: one could find oneself defenseless before the
reduction of all decisions within the narrow limits of the collective
confused with the Cave. Without the transcendence of nature, which
is indifferent to human passions, without the transcendence of moral
law, which is indifferent to the objections of reality, and without the
transcendence of the Sovereign, which is always capable of deciding,
there seems to be no further recourse against the arbitrariness of pub-
lic life, no court of appeals.
If one maintains the distinction between the common world and
the common good against all odds, it will be to hold on to this re-
serve that is going to make it possible to rise up in indignation, either
by taking from nature the courage to struggle against opinion, or by
turning to incontestable values in search of something with which to
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121