Facing Gaia: 8 Lectures On the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour

Author:Bruno Latour [Latour, Bruno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745684345
Amazon: 0745684343
Barnesnoble: 0745684343
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

People of Nature

Nature one

(epistemological) Nature two

(anthropological)

Deity Laws of nature Multiverse

Cosmogram Exterior Interior

Unified Multiple

Deanimated Animated

Indisputable Controversial

People Everyone Scientists

Ground Off the ground Attached to networks

Epoch Radical break Multiple temporality

*

What makes the people of Nature so incapable of situating themselves is that this people has constructed itself in reaction to another one, which, for its part, announces itself clearly as a particular people; however, as we continue to set up our translation tables, we’re going to notice that this other people does not necessarily know any better than the first where it resides. To continue in the same vein as the Game of Thrones, let’s call this one the people that calls itself Children of the Grand Design or the People of Creation. This will allow us to understand that the “conflict between Science and Religion” rather resembles the famous war between the Little-endians and the Big-endians in Gulliver’s Travels, even as it hides another much more important conflict, which is for its part directly political, over the occupation of the Earth. When one speaks of a “religious vision of the world” in “radical opposition” to a “strictly scientific vision” of that same world, one is appealing to another supreme authority that is not so different from the first column in table 5.1: it has the same characteristics, in fact, except that the first stubbornly overanimates what the second stubbornly deanimates.

We no longer have to be tripped up by the fact that the one is determined to call “God” what the other insists on calling “Nature,” since it is their attributes and those alone that must allow us to make these two supreme authorities comparable. Now the God that orders the religious view of the world bears a very close resemblance to the Nature that orders the scientific view of the world. Three of their features are in fact exactly the same: truth is external, universal, and as indisputable as it is indestructible. Even the question of the delimitation of the people is not very different, since the Children of the Grand Design are recruited by an explicit procedure – a form of conversion – that gives their people the more precise name of Church, just as diplomas, examinations, and the continual reduction of the number of the elect operate a selective triage for the people of Nature. In each case, “everyone,” at least in principle, is called to belong to the people in question, but in practice there are few thurifers.

Nor does the question of epoch allow us to differentiate them radically, for these two peoples share the idea that a radical break has occurred in a more or less recent past – a rupture that has propelled them into a totally new history called Light by one group, Enlightenment by the other. What matters is that both peoples locate themselves in the time that follows a radical break – Revelation or Revolution (we’ll come back to this crucial point in the next lecture). As for their relation to the ground, it

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