Can we secularize the sciences as we have secularized religion and
make of exact knowledge an opinion that is respectable, to be sure, but
private? Must we imagine a State that would guarantee nothing other
than the freedom to practice the scientific rites freelywithout support-
ing a single one of them?As soon as it is formulated, the solution ap-
pears aberrant, since morality and religion have been successfully sec-
ularized only thanks to that assurance of an already-accomplished
unity that Science used to hand us on a platter. Agnostic in Science
and religion both, the secular Republic would be emptied of all sub-
stance. So far as the common world is concerned, it would rest on the
least interesting and most arbitrary of smallest denominators: the
king-self.
I have sought to explore a different solution. Instead of eliminating
the requirements that bear on the constitution of the facts by sending
them back to the private sphere, why not, on the contrary,lengthen the
listof these requirements? The seventeenth-century solution, the si-
multaneous invention of indisputablematters of factand of endless
discussion, ultimately did not offer sufficient guarantees for the con-
struction of the public order, thecosmos.The two most important
functions were lost: the capacity to debate the common world, and the
capacity to reach agreement by closing the discussion—the power to
take into account along with the power to put in order. Even though
no pontiff can now say “Scientia locuta est, causa judica est,” the loss of
authority turns out to be compensated a hundredfold by the possibil-
ity of exploring in common what agoodfact is, what alegitimatemem-
ber of the collective is. If we need less Science, we need to count
much more on the sciences; if we need fewer indisputable facts, we
need much more collective experimentation on what is essential and
what is accessory. Here, too, I am asking for just a tiny concession: that
the question of democracy be extended to nonhumans. But is this not
at bottom what the scientists have always most passionately wanted
to defend: to have absolute assurance that facts are not constructed
by mere human passions? They believed too quickly that they had
reached this goal by the short-cut ofmatters of factkept from the out-
set apart from all public discussion. Can one not obtain—more pain-
fully, more laboriously, to be sure—a quite superior guarantee if hu-
mans are no longer alone in elaborating their Republic, their common
thing?
CONCLUSION
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