frightened of the dangers of cultural relativism have never had such a
nightmare. It is important, however, that the upper house not decide
too soon to eliminate them. Let us not forget that it no longer disposes
of the old razor that allowed it (without ever succeeding) to distin-
guish between statements of fact and judgments of value. (No, no, it is
not yet time to let the epistemology police, axe in hand, out of the
quarters to which they were confined.. .) The upper house must
not set up either an executioner’s block or a gallows: it must simply
smooth the way for the other house by proceeding to the second type
of inquiry, which I have called consultation.
Readers may have been bothered by this word; it has something of
the flavor of a rubber stamp, knee-jerk approval. And yet this second
task has the same originality and requires as much work as the pro-
duction of perplexity. Who is to judge the quality of the propositions
that crowd around the door of the collective? The modernist Consti-
tution was never able to settle that question, and that is why it always
stifled the democracy that it pretended to be arousing. By combining
the tasks of the two assemblies, by forgetting the sacred separation of
powers and substituting for it the aberrant distinction between facts
and values, between what is and what ought to be, the modernist Con-
stitution never had the courage to “motivate its decisions to reject,” as
they say in legal language, and it settled for an arbitrary elimination by
selecting the candidates according to their appearance alone, through
these little words not subject to appeal: “Rational! Irrational!” “Pri-
mary qualities! Secondary qualities!” The candidate entities, except
those which had the good luck to fall into the hands of scientists in lab
coats, never had the right, within the narrow framework of modern-
ism, to avail themselves of a council composedaccording to the specific
problemsthat they raised for the collective.
An assembly will be all the better to the extent that it succeeds in
detecting, for each proposition that is a candidate for existence, the
most competent jury to judge it that can satisfy the requirement of rel-
evance. Appearances notwithstanding, no task is more difficult than
this one for those who are accustomed to the facile ways of modern-
ism, for matters of concern reveal precisely the total or partial in-
competence of the juries that are usually convoked. If the word “con-
sultation” has such a bad reputation, it is precisely because people
think it is easy to convene the concerned parties. Now, there is noth-
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
169