standard would one judge the weakness of this norm? If it is by con-
trast with the definitive knowledge supplied by objective familiarity
with the nature of things, it goes without saying that mere collective
experience appears very slight. This is what Socrates relentlessly in-
sisted in the agora in Athens. We have become aware, however, that,
no matter how useful it may be, this standard can never become com-
mensurable with the tasks of the collective. The common world has to
be built on a life-size scale, in real time, without knowledge of causes
and consequences, in the middle of the agora, and with all those who
are its concerned parties.^14 Public life, as we have seen, cannot unfold
except on condition that every threat of salvation, every hope of sud-
den simplification, be withdrawn. By comparison with the blinding
clarity of the Heaven of Ideas, the notion of a successful experiment
may appear obscure, but by comparison to the total obscurity that
reigns in the hell of the Cave, the learning curve offers a certain light,
the only one we have, the only one we need in order to grope around
blindly in the company of people who cannot see very well.
It becomes easier to characterize the dynamics of the collective if
we agree to judge it by the yardstick of collective experimentation,
rather than by the yardstick—in principle a better one but in practice
inapplicable—of the Old Regime.
We come back first to the question of ecology itself, superficial or
deep, scientific or political, sophisticated or popular, which is at the
origin of this book. As I have often noted, we no longer have to define
once and for all the bonds that would regulate relations between hu-
mans and things. In particular, we no longer have to substitute for so-
called political and anthropocentric bonds an order of things, a natu-
ral hierarchy that would array entities by order of importance from
the greatest—Gaia, Mother Earth—to the smallest—a human being
whipped into a frenzy by hishubris.On the contrary, we can benefit
from the fundamental discovery of the ecology movement: no one
knows what an environment can do; no one can define in advance
what a human being is, detached from what makes him be.^15 No power
has been given by nature the right to decide on the relative importance
and the respective hierarchy of the entities that compose, at any given
moment, the common world. But what no one knows, anyone can ex-
periment with, so long as he or she agrees to take the path of testing,
while respecting the procedures that specifically avoid shortcuts.
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
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