Robert Frodeman on Theodore Roszak (scholar)

“Roszak argues that our habits of abusing nature, as well as out patterns of overconsumption, betray a sickness of the soul rooted in our estrangement from the natural world. The roots of this sickness lie in modernism's account of a dead and purposeless universe. ...modern psychology made it irrational to care for the world. The result is we left ourselves with only a cultural or conventional basis for defining sanity, based upon the individual's adaptation to society.”

“Roszak makes a signal contribution to the environmental debate by turning us toward questions of psychology rather than science, and meaning rather than fact. But while raising the indispensable question of how sanely we have treated the Earth, Roszak overstates the degree of uncertainty surrounding the scientific assessment of environmental issues. There is... a fair degree of consensus concerning a number of environmental issues...”

“Missing from his account of science is Aristotle's sense of phronesis or practical wisdom. ...a conservative approach to questions of public concern... rooted in recognizing the fragility of community and the irreversibility of the historical process. It identifies our capacity to reason about social or political questions that are not susceptible to calculative reason. The ability to deliberate...and reach a consensus through the give-and-take of conversation—once understood as the epistimology appropriate to political debate. In ancient Greece, the polis provided the social space for deliberative dialogue among citizens.”

“The work of Ophuls contains one element of a larger environmental philosophy, and that if Roszak, another; what is missing is the marriage between these two perspectives.”