come attentive to the requirement of a unified ranking. We do not ask
the moralists to tell us in what order all these entities are going to be
arrayed—how would they know, on their own, outside the progressive
experience of the collective? In particular, we do not ask them to imi-
tate one science or another by pulling an unforeseen accommodation
out of a hat, nor do we ask them to give lessons to politicians by add-
ing a new compromise; we ask them rather to remind us that we have
to findoneorder and not two. “As long as you have not succeeded in
finding us the right combination,” they can say to scholars and politi-
cians alike, “there will not be abettercommon world.” Their require-
ment will be all the stronger in that, freed from the obligation to be
politically, scientifically, and economically reasonable, they know that
this task cannot be accomplished without treating certain entities “as
mere means.” They alone have the duty to require the impossible, to
be neither clever nor industrious.^48 What was a vice, a vain pronounce-
ment, a grotesque pretension to separation, when it remained far away
from the matters of concern, becomes a civic virtue once again, as
soon as moralists team up with researchers, politicians, and econo-
mizers to carry out their task of hierarchization. To collaborate with
them while holding firmly to their own requirements finally no longer
means tocompromise.Antigone begins to carry out legitimate moral
work only if she finds in her interlocutor a politician who is a little
more political than the sinister fool Creon...
To reinforce the frontier between the two principal powers (no. 5),
the moralists offer a contribution that is precisely the inverse of the
politicians’. Whereas the latter distinguished, in the classical manner
of political philosophy, between deliberation and decision, freedom
and necessity, the moralists remind us that, whatever the require-
ments of decision may be, it will again be necessary to deliberate by
crossing the frontier, but this time going in the other direction. In
other words, they keep the relation between the two houses from be-
ing a one-way street, and they oblige the procedure to form a loop
right away. They make it possible for a continuousshuttleto link the
two enclosures. Moreover, they make an important contribution to
consultation (no. 2) regarding the conditions of discussion, since they
make sure that each candidate to existence is evaluated by a jury cor-
responding to its own recalcitrant problem,notthrough indifferent
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
159