In his previous section [pp. 94-5] — The Instructed Third (Le Tiers-Instruit) — Serres defines current civilization's ideal Sage:

Today's Sage is a mixture of the Legislator of heroic times and the modern titleholder of rigorous knowledge; he knows how to weave together the truth of the sciences with with the peace of judgment; he blends together our Egyptian and Roman heritages, the source of our laws, with our Semitic and Greek legacies, givers of knowledge; he integrates quick and effective sciences into our slow and prudent laws. Young and old at the same time, the Sage is reaching maturity.

I call this Sage "le Tiers-Instruit," the Instructed Third, knowledge's troubadour: expert in formal or experimental knowledge, well-versed in the natural sciences of the inanimate and the living; at safe remove from the social sciences, with their critical rather than organic truths and their banal, commonplace information; preferring action to relations, direct human experience to surveys and documents, traveler in nature and society; lover of rivers, sands, winds, seas, and mountains; walker over the whole Earth; fascinated by different gestures as by diverse landscapes; solitary navigator of the Northwest Passage, those waters where scientific knowledge communicates, in rare and delicate ways, with the humanities; conversely versed in ancient languages, mythical traditions, and religions; free spirit and damned good fellow; sinking his roots into the deepest cultural compost, down to the tectonic plates buried furthest in the dark memory of flesh and verb; and thus archaic and contemporary, traditional and futuristic, humanist and scientist, fast and slow, green and seasoned, audacious and prudent; further removed from power than any possible legislator, and closer to the multitude's ignorance than any imaginable scientist; great, perhaps, but of the common people; empirical but exact, fine as silk, coarse as canvas; ceaselessly wandering across the span that separates hunger from surfeit, misery from wealth, shadow from light, mastery from servitude, home from abroad; knowing and valuing ignorance as much as the sciences, old wives' tales more than concepts, laws as well as non-law; monk and vagrant, alone and vagabonding, wandering but stable; finally, above all burning with love for Earth and humanitiy.

Finally, siding with bonds tied rather than soil tilled, fibered cordage rather than farmed roots, he begs a concluding, speculative question about the current conditions of modern human belonging.

This mixture demands a paradoxical rootedness in the global: not in a plot of earth, but on Earth, not in the group, but everywhere; the plant image hardly makes sense anymore. Since we left the ground, casting off powerfully for remote places, we have relied more on immaterial bonds than on roots. Could this then be the end of all forms of belonging?