the means:no entity—whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow,
pig, brood—agrees any longer to be treated “simply as a means” but
insists on being treated “always also as an end.” This in no way entails
extending human morality to the natural world, or projecting the law
extravagantly onto “mere brute beings,” or taking into account the
rights of objects “for themselves”; it is rather the simple consequence
of the disappearance of the notion of external nature. There is no
longer any space set aside where we can unload simple means in view
of ends that have been defined once and for all without proper proce-
dure. Inanimism* has disappeared along with the unanimism of the
old politics of nature.^45 It is not because they know what must be done
and not done that the moralists can contribute to the civic virtues,
then, but only because they know thateverything that will be done well
will necessarily be done badly,and as a result will have to bedone over
again right away.“No one knows what an environment can do,” “no
one knows what associations define humanity,” “no one can assume
the right to classify ends and means once and for all, the right to lay
down the boundary between necessity and freedom without discus-
sion”—such are theconcernsthat the moralists are going to introduce
into all the procedures of the collective.
This requirement to treat no entity simply as a means—which is
also found in expressions such as “renewable resource,” “sustainable
development,” and “principle of precaution” as well as in “pity” or
“simple respect”—is going to contribute in a decisive way to the tasks
of perplexity (no. 1), institution (no. 4), and totalization of the collec-
tive (no. 6), because it is going to make them, paradoxically,much more
difficultto accomplish without discussion.
By definition, the second house can fulfill its duties only if it treats a
certain number of entities as simple means, in the name of other enti-
ties to which it has decided to assign the role of higher ends (no. 4).
No classification is possible without this dismissal. Scientists, politi-
cians, and economists, equally obsessed, though for different reasons,
by the closing of the collective, are thus always in error in the eyes of
the moralists who are going to equip the entities that have been set
aside with theright to appealthat they can use when, in order to fulfill
the requirement of closure, they are driven out of the collective in the
name of their (provisional) insignificance. Let us recall the eight thou-
sand French highway fatalities—which became mere means for the au-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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