William Ophuls: Plato’s RevengeCambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2011, ISBN 0-262-01590-0, Price $27.95(hardback), 5.375 x 8 + 208 pages, notes, index

J. Anthony Abbott & Joshua Rust

Published online: 16 March 2012# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

We moderns have fallen from mythopoetic grace, if Ophulsis correct. We are amoral, nihilistic, and disconnected fromthe world. Driven by rational self-interest, we are barelybound by the dictates of an increasingly complex and im-personal system of secular law. We are destroying bothourselves and the planet on the altar of our own ignoranceand greed. How did we get into this miserable state?

Ophuls finds a principle source of blame in the Enlighten-ment in general and in Hobbes in particular. Hobbes compel-lingly reimagined the self as a bundle of self-interested desires,the state as an insurance scheme that makes minimal coopera-tion possible, social norms as brute instruments of power, andthe world as a clockwork mechanism suitable only for exploi-tation. As the grip premodernism has on us loosens, we are leftwith raw, cold anthropocentrism, and disenchantment.

Ophuls considers this a perversion of the human enterprise,which should be a manifestation of beauty rather than arationalized impulse to acquire material wealth. Specifically,he contends that secular codes, modern governance, and lawimpel us to ignore the universal impulse towards a moreaesthetic society within naturally imposed limits. By invokingteleological “natural law,” or “nous”—an “intelligent orderingprinciple or force … in all forms of life” (39)—he makes thecase for a fundamental shift in political order in the first half ofPlato’s Revenge.

His evidence for nous is framed using metaphors fromecology, physics, and psychology. The metaphors from

ecology involve systems thinking, Gaian homeostasis, andclimax communities. Physics is characterized by thermody-namically imposed limits and chaos theory; psychologyrefers to our barbaric tendencies, potentially controlled byharnessing Jungian archetypes through the power ofmyth. Hispresentation of these metaphors as universally accepted con-cepts will immediately come under attack from serious schol-ars within each of these disciplines, with fundamental schismsrooted in tolerance for teleology, steady states, and universalcultural tendencies as natural conditions.

Ophuls is unlikely to be deterred by such critiques, rootedas he is in an idealistically driven (perhaps humanistic) projectwhere we are self-constituted byway of the pictures andmythswe bring to bear on ourselves. This position always leads usback to choice in self-determination. The question is if we willallow our future to be pushed more by material factors (needsdefined by limit-imposed crises) or aesthetic factors (desiresdefined in dialog regarding the good life). Obviously the latteris preferred, so readers expect a prescription.

Ophuls delivers the broad strokes given the followingassumptions. His antidote to disenchantment involves net-works of loosely affiliated city-states, built around a limited,Jeffersonian republican form of government. While heavoids demonizing capitalism, his Jeffersonian garden polityseems implicitly divorced frommarket pressures, evoking PeterKropotkin’s anarcho-communist project of the late nineteenthcentury (Kropotkin 1902 and 1926). Self-restrained citizens areguided less by legal prescriptions than by ecologically intuitive“reasons of the heart”. And the heart finds happiness, not inmonetary accretion, but in the pleasures of cooperation, friend-ship, and community. “Community” here might extend beyondnetworks of people, to include animals, ecosystems, and Gaiaherself. Ecological reason is particularly sensitive to “limits,” aword found in the opening paragraph and many times through-out the book. “From the systems point of view, the soundest

J. A. Abbott (*)Geography, Stetson University,Deland, FL 32723, USAe-mail: tabbott@stetson.edu

J. RustPhilosophy, Stetson University,Deland, FL 32723, USA

Hum Ecol (2012) 40:479–481DOI 10.1007/s10745-012-9474-7

and safest strategy is not control but cooperation—acceptinglimits and working within them to achieve reasonable humanobjectives rather than seeking domination and riches at theexpense of the system” (30). In his discussion of politicalsystems collapsing under the weight of pathological complex-ity, we are reminded of mature socio-ecological systems de-scribed in Resilience Thinking (Walker and Salt 2006).

Because the vast majority of people are unable to fathomthe complexity of sustained resource management and thusdepend upon stories or a mythological construct to codifyproper behavior for the good of all, Ophuls requires a noblelie, a mythology that articulates the mores of an aestheticcivilization (116). In short, we must reject the enlightenment’smechanistic disenchantment and re-spiritualize the universe.This mythos will originate through the guidance of an eliteclass of benevolent leaders schooled in liberal traditions toenrich the soul, as opposed to being indoctrinated for careers.

Readers ofPlato’s Revengemight be tempted to dismiss thelatter half of the text as utopic, in the pejorative sense. Indeed,his political proposals seem troubled by several contradic-tions. Technology and agriculture hastened our fall from grace(2), yet he makes agrarian villages the fundamental unit for hissociety. He asserts that our new society will demand a popu-lace that grasps the nuanced relativism of differing forms ofgovernance at various scales while asserting that two thirdsthe human population lacks the necessary capacity for abstractthought (115). In direct opposition to his central thesis, Ophulsacknowledges the need for an elite ruling class inspired by thedoctrines of Machiavelli and Hobbes as we move beyond thevillage scale of governance (183–184)!

If Ophuls’s vision of the good society seems implausible, orotherwise easily subject to parody, it’s because—he mightcharge—we are in the grip of a Cartesian picture: objects areeither part of a dead mechanistic universe or else, if we cansomehow resist an outright reduction of personhood to thescientific image, they are luminous. We wish to give Ophulsthe benefit of the doubt; the book serves as a beautifullywritten, albeit stark reminder that theworld could be otherwise.While there much in Ophuls’ book that merits critique, we willavoid simply confusing criticism and cynicism. While we arenot necessarily compelled by his evidence, we agree that ourcurrent socio-ecological trajectory is neither desirable norinevitable.

Accepting, for now, Ophuls’ meta-position, we neverthe-less worry about his master explanation. Was the Enlight-enment the root cause of our current psychological, social,and ecological malaise? If the Enlightenment is the problem,a reader might worry, why is it that the religious right ismore deeply associated with environmental foot-dragging?More importantly, by “Enlightenment” Ophuls appears tohave in mind primarily British thinkers, including mostprominently Hobbes, Newton, Mill, and Locke. The onereference made to Kant is trivial (82), which is too bad as

Kant would make an unexpected ally (at the expense, ofcourse, of his master explanation).

Kant is another thinker with a preoccupation with theidea of limits. But where Ophuls is concerned with the limitsand boundaries of self-organized systems “out there,” Kantis concerned with the limits of cognition or, to use PeterStrawson’s phrase, the “bounds of sense” (Strawson 1975).For Ophuls modern hubris is blind to the complexity of theworld, but in many ways Kant’s critique is more radical: heposits a priori, rather than a posteriori limits on what we canand cannot know.What Ophuls wishes to preserve lies outsideof these cognitive boundaries.

For example, a central plank in Ophuls’ argument is thatthe Enlightenment bequeathed us a mechanized word, de-void of teleology (and meaning). But in the Critique ofJudgment (Kant 1793/2001) Kant argues that both mechan-ical and teleological explanations are governed by “regula-tive” rather than “constitutive” principles. Regulativeprinciples are not ontological claims but modes of investi-gation. They are ideal types, which bring nature under theaspect of mechanism or of teleology. Kant’s notion of aregulative principle bears an obvious connection to Ophuls’notion of “mythos,” with the important caveat that suchprinciples are conditioned by the structural limitations ofour cognitive faculties, not culture.

Kant wants to put the brakes on speculative metaphysics,including the claim that the world is essentially mechanical.By drawing our attention to the limits of human cognition,this Enlightenment thinker leaves room for much of whatOphuls takes to be lost, including natural purposes. Thismight save Ophuls’ radical interpretation of the Gaia hy-pothesis, where the earth is in some non-metaphorical senseseen as alive (33–36). Kant himself thinks that the teleolog-ical principle even allows us to talk meaningfully (but notontologically) of the goal or purpose of nature as a whole.

Kant’s remarks about teleology are neither clear noruncontroversial. And much of the argument depends onKant’s doctrine of Transcendental Idealism, which is nearlytaboo in mainstream philosophical circles (Hanna 2011).But Kant gives us what Ophuls lacks: an argument. Merelywarning us about the ecological, political, and psychologicalconsequences of disenchantment does not falsify the mech-anistic world view. Kant’s arguments, then, might buttressOphuls’ call for epistemic modesty and moderation, if thelatter can overcome his prejudice against the Enlightenment(for some brief remarks about the applicability of Kant’sCritique of Judgment to ecological concerns see the con-cluding paragraph of Guyer 2008).

So what do we do with this book? Ultimately what wehave is a treatise to stimulate conversation about the properrole of governance by metaphorically riffing on Plato’sRepublic emphasizing the parable of the cave. Ophuls inter-pretations and assertions give readers ample space for

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discussion, which is fine for students, but policy crafters,experts, and philosopher kings will find little to illuminatethe path towards a politics of the sacred.

References

Guyer, P. (2008). Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response toHume. Princeton University Press. p. 254.

Hanna, R. (2011) Review of Inspirations from Kant: Essay. NotreDame Philosophical Reviews. 12.24.2011. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27862-inspirations-from-kant-essays/.

Kant, I. (1793/2001). Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans: PaulGuyer, Eric Matthews. Cambridge University Press.

Kropotkin, P. (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. WilliamHeinemann, London.

Kropotkin, P. (1926). The Conquest of Bread. Vanguard, New York.Strawson, P. (1975). The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason. RoutledgeWalker, B., and Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosys-

tems and People in a Changing World. Island Press, Washington DC.

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