Patrick Ophuls

“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