Plato's Revenge Quotes

“We need to rediscover a sacred truth that neither conflicts with reason nor oppresses the individual and then to make that understanding the basis of a spiritualized politics. In other words, we need a nonsacerdotal, nonsectarian, nontheological, nontribal religious worldview that is compatible with science and that provides personal orientation, moral guidance, and a framework for public order without imposing dogmas that must be believed or priests who must be obeyed.47 The eventual outcome might be a kind of Confucianism, Taoism, or Stoicism for the postmechanical age.”
― Patrick Ophuls, Plato's Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology

“The task of science is therefore to find the metaphors that best stand for physical reality. Human understanding is thus a process of lifting ourselves by our metaphorical bootstraps: we use what we already know to get at what we do not know by analogy. So all of human culture is a concatenation of metaphors until we arrive at those grand metaphors, such as Newton’s clockwork universe, that shape whole eras. Bootstrapping being all but impossible in practice, however, we do not build the chain from the bottom up but from the top down. The image at the core of the grand metaphor governs the choice of metaphor and hence the process of understanding at lower levels. Contrary to the doctrines of empiricism, therefore, beyond the most basic (preconscious) levels of perception, our senses do not tell us what reality is: we instruct our senses in how to see the world. As Einstein noted, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”21 In”
― Patrick Ophuls, Plato's Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology

“Anthropology supports this bleak assessment of the human psyche. With few exceptions, there are no harmless people, and the savage mind, whatever its virtues, is often prey to unconscious forces and raw emotions (and is therefore the author of savage behavior). A review of the anthropological literature reveals three seemingly universal tendencies of the human mind: we are prone to superstition and magical thinking, we are predisposed to paranoia, and we project our own hostility onto others.4 In essence, says Melvin Konner, chronic fear pervades the psyche and drives human behavior.5 Although the last word has yet to be spoken, there seems to be an emerging scientific consensus: we humans are a volatile mix of animal, primal, and civil—a tangle of emotions and drives that all but guarantees inner and outer conflicts.”
― Patrick Ophuls, Plato's Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology

“Today there is a wide measure of agreement … that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. —Sir James Jeans1”
― Patrick Ophuls, Plato's Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology