on the other. In order to free the sciences from that politics, we have had to repoliticize
Science.
- It is surprising to see that, after a remarkable book on technology in Heidegger,
Michael Zimmerman (1994) approaches the philosophy of ecology without shaking up
the traditional political position of nature in the slightest. Many other examples of this
modernism could be found. - To be convinced of this, it suffices to reread one of the most influential thinkers
ecology can boast, Hans Jonas, to see to what extent he finally reappropriates an obliga-
tion that the proponents of “natural law” in earlier times would never have dared to
impose, because nature adds its formidable moral requirement to the power of causes:
“Thus, our showing up to now that Nature harbors values because it harbors ends and
is thus anything but value-free has not yet answered the question of whether we are at
pleasure or duty bound to join in her ‘value decisions’: whether, to put it paradoxically,
the values undeniably entertained by and for herself are indeed valuable (even whether
havingvalues as such is valuable!)—in which case alone assenting to them would be a
duty” ( Jonas 1984, 78). There are thus now two reasons instead of one to obey nature:
“In our counterdictum, the ‘ability’ means that of releasing causal effects into the
world, which then confront the ‘ought’ of our responsibility” (128). - Let us not confuse this with the critique of unspoiled nature, or “wilderness,” to
which the second section will be devoted. - Once again, as I know perfectly well, there are countless nuances among all the
thoughts that I am gathering together quite unjustly under the heading of philosophy
of ecology.* The urgency for me lies neither in fairness nor in erudition, but in the cre-
ation of a space entirely freed from the grasp of nature. From this necessarily partial
and even partisan viewpoint, the nuances disappear very quickly. However, from the
very first words—and it is easy to convince oneself of this—in the writings of those ex-
cellent authors whose work I have too hastily amalgamated, nature once again becomes
the source of all moral and scholarly demands. Jonas is not the only example; William
Cronon’s is even more striking. Cronon is the author of probably the best book there is
on the history of an environment (Cronon 1991). And yet he concludes the introduc-
tion to a book that brings together the most sophisticated American postmoderns with
a sentence that leaves the old nature completely intact: “Andyetthe rock remains, as
do the trees and the birds, the wind and the sky. They are first and foremost them-
selves,despitethe many meanings we discover in them. We may move them around and
impose our designs upon them. We may do our best to make them bend to our wills.
But in the endthey remain inscrutable, artifacts of a world that we did not make and
whose meaning for themselves we can never finally know....This silent rock, this na-
ture about which we argue so much, is also among the most important thingswe have
in common.That is why we care so much about it. It is, paradoxically, the uncommon
ground we cannot help but share” (Cronon 1996, 55–56, my italics). Six hundred pages
of deconstructionist criticism follow, letting nature play the role it has always played in
modernism: that of a worldalready common,indifferent to our disputes! - For the time being, we do not need a precise definition of modernism. It is
enough to know that the relation between Science and society offers, as I see it, the sur-
est way to distinguish between “moderns,” “premoderns,” “antimoderns,” and “post-
moderns”—on all these points, see Latour 1993. If the use of the adjective surprises,
NOTES TO PAGES 17–19
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