where, every day, people are fighting over the very question of the
good common world in which everyone—human and nonhuman—
wants to live. Nothing and no one must come in to simplify, shorten,
limit, or reduce the scope of this debate in advance by calmly asserting
that the argument bears only on “representations that humans make
of the world” and not on the very essence of the phenomena in ques-
tion. As long as we thought we were modern, we could claim to be ex-
hausting the diversity of opinions, thanks to the unified certainty of
the facts of nature: “The more Science we know,” we said, “the more
rapidly minds will agree and the less disorder we shall have.”
But who would still agree without further ado to link the notions of
external reality and unanimity? With this apolitical politics of public
life, it is hardly likely that anyone can unify such disparate groups as
those which affirm that the world is made up of atoms and those
which await salvation from a God who created the world six thousand
years ago; those which prefer to shoot down migrating birds rather
than belong to the European Union; those which want to develop gene
therapy to cure their children, against the advice of biologists, if nec-
essary; those which vote in Switzerland against the transformation of
their rapeseed fields into a laboratory annex; those which oppose cul-
tivating human embryos and those others, associations of victims of
Parkinson’s disease, which expect the same embryos to provide a cure.
None of these members of the collective wants to have an “opinion”
that is personal and disputable “about” an indisputable and universal
nature. They all want to decide about the common world in which
they live. Here ends the modernist parenthesis; here begins political
ecology.
The choice we have now is thus no longer the choice between en-
gaging or not in metaphysics, but between going back to the old meta-
physics of nature or practicing an experimental metaphysics that will
allow us to follow the way the problem of the apportionment between
the common world and private worlds—a problem that was supposed to
have been solved once and for all—can again open up, and as a resultfind
solutions other thanmononaturalism* and its disastrous consequence,
multiculturalism. We obviously do not wish to return to the meta-
physics of philosophers alone in their rooms (unless by that expres-
sion we mean those who, like myself, agree to write up an attentive ac-
count of what happens in the newly reunited houses!). After defining
POLITICS OF NATURE
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