There are, they say, reasonable men, who yield only to the force of argument, and the remainder, who are unreasonable and submit blindly to force without understanding. I have never met anyone who did not scorn the unreasonable and who did not believe that this scorn epitomized virtue.

4.7.6 By believing the opposite, we allow certain lines of force and certain arguments to rule above the networks to which they properly belong. We create potency (1.5.1), and by so doing, we weaken all the others.

Demonstrations are always of force (3.1.8), and the lines of force are always a measure of reality, its only measure (1.1.4). We never bow to reason, but rather to force.

4.7.5 Since there are not two ways of knowing but only one, there are not, on the one hand, those who bow to the force of an argument, and, on the other, those who understand only violence.

Unless new relations of strength are established, they do not have too much or too little. Far from losing certainty, we finally discover what it was that led to the illusion of a knowledge beyond uncertainty.

The trials of strength are all whole and complete, exact precisely to the extent that this is possible. *They are not approximate.* Neither are they vague, conventional, or subjective.

The same people who establish degrees of knowledge are those who then despair of ever reaching the top: the same reductionists who are alternately drunk with power and crippled by impotence, arrogant and modest in turn.

Unless new relations of strength are established, they do not have too much or too little. Far from losing certainty, we finally discover what it was that led to the illusion of a knowledge beyond uncertainty.

4.7.4 As soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one. Complete knowledge is found in this world as soon as there are no more degrees' of knowledge.

The gnostics should not misunderstand: I am not trying to make their lives easier.

4.7.3.1 Those of us who wish to escort "the sciences" back to their proper habitat are more rationalist than most of the learned who want to extend them "en double." At least we know the cost of the work involved in multiplying those habitats.

Then we see an executive, a legislative, and a judiciary that for too long have eluded even the most elementary forms of democracy.

Politics is certainly still the best model for trials of weakness, and never more so than when we discover the researcher acting as spokesman for silent crowds of atoms, microbes, or stars.

Since the beginning epistemology has followed in the wake of the sciences, trying to be: PERI-, META-, PARA-, INFRA-, SUPRA-scientific. But this is beating around the bush.

I do not reproach those poorly conceived aggregates that we call "the sciences" for being too rational, but rather for not understanding the nature of their natures. Let us reduce them to the dimensions that they occupy and finally escape from magic.

Hot? Disorderly? Violent? Anthropomorphic? Anthropocentric? Interested? Wild? Mythical? No, these do not describe them either. Sparse and fragile, and above all sparse. Their particular sign? No distinguishing marks.

4.7.3 Are the "sciences" cold? Rigorous? Inhumane? Objective? Boring? Apolitical? Modern? These unattainable qualities have simply been attributed to them by their enemies who thereby hoped to stigmatize them (Interlude VI).

4.7.2 There is no such thing as superior knowledge and inferior knowledge. If we want to save these terms at all, we will have to say that some forms of knowledge are "higher" than others because the superior have raised themselves with the connivance of the inferior (4.4.0).

Not metaphysics, but infraphysics. As I have said, we will never be able to rise above unruly politicking (3.6.0).

But there is no knowledge
superior to that of the sciences because there is no scale of knowledge and, in the end, no knowledge at all. We should dissolve all the debates about "degrees of knowledge" into an inferior form of knowledge, the only form that we have.

We have always wanted to criticize science by claiming that an alternative is superior, by adding a court of appeal to the court of first instance, by asking God or the gods to puncture the pride of the learned and to reserve the secret of things for the humble and lowly.

The sciences have always been criticized in the name of superior forms of knowledge that are more intuitive, immediate, human, global, warm, cultivated, political, natural, popular, older, mythical, instinctive, spiritual, or cunning.

We will never do any better (1.2.1). We will never be able to go any faster. We will never see any more clearly.

We always learn in the same way, without short cuts, foresight, or ever leaving the networks that we build. We make each mistake as many times as is necessary to move from one point to another.

4.7.1 Since there are only ties of weakness, there are not two ways of learning—one academic, human, rational, or modern, and the other popular, natural, disorganized, or ancient. There is only one way.

I do not say this because I want to sink our only lifeboat. I say it
because I want to prevent shipwreck, or if it is already too late, to make it possible to survive the shipwreck.

The Copernican revolution was achieved by ignoring all the rest, and what is left is almost everything. We are left with magic—science and sorcery, future wars, and a certain amount of admirable knowledge obtained, in spite of us all, at the crossroads between anthromorphism and objectivity.

The idealists were right: we can only know insofar as we draw things to ourselves. They forgot to add that things have to be drawn together to topple us. Cruise missiles orbit around Leviathans and sooner or later fall back to produce spectacular spin-offs.

To do this means that we are weak, not strong. It means leaving without thought of return. Or if we do come back, it means that we come with empty hands; with no spoils, trophies, collections, articles, or theses. Can we honestly say that we have seen more people behaving in this way?

What about going off at a tangent and following things where they take us? Who can honestly say that there are now more people who would be interested in drifting along their way than there were in the past?