tive and alert enough. What is excluded by the power to put in order
at t 0 can come back to haunt the power to take into account at t+l—I
shall return to this dynamic in Chapter 5. Such is the feedback loop^30
of the expanding collective, a loop that makes it so very different from
a society endowed with its representations, in the midst of an inert
nature made up of essences whose list would be fixed once and for all,
expecting from moral values a salvation from on high so it can extri-
cate itself from mere matters of fact. All the transcendence one needs,
in practice, to escape from the straitjacket of immanence is found
there, on the outside, within reach.
In the new Constitution, what has been externalized canappealand
come back to knock at the door of the collective to demand that it be
taken into account—at the price, of course, of modifications in the list
of entities present, new negotiations, anda new definition of the outside.
The outside is no longer fixed, no longer inert; it is no longer either a
reserve or a court of appeal or a dumping ground, but it is what has
constituted the object of an explicit procedure of externalization.^31
In considering the succession of stages, we understand why the fact-
value distinction could not be of any use to us, and why we were right
to abandon it, at the price of a perhaps painful effort. All our require-
ments have the form of an imperative. In other words, theyallinvolve
the question of whatought tobe done. It is impossible to begin to ask
the moral questionafterthe states of the world have been defined. The
question of what ought to be, as we can see now, is not a moment in
the process; rather, it is coextensive with the entire process—whence
the imposture there would be in seeking to limit oneself to one stage
or another. Symmetrically, the famous question of the definition of
facts is not reduced to just one or two stages but is distributed through
all the stages. Perplexity counts as much for this question as the rele-
vance of those who are brought in to judge it, as the compatibility of
the new elements with the old, to end up with the act of institutional-
izing that provisionally finishes giving it an essence with clear bound-
aries. Whence the awkwardness that consisted in reducing the defini-
tion of facts to just one stage of the process.
If one wished at all costs to maintain the distinction between what
is and what ought to be, one could say that it is a matter of traversing
the whole set of stagestwice,by asking two distinct questions of the
A NEW SEPARATION OF POWERS
125