Winter 2018 405

BOOK REVIEWS
Svetozar Y. Minkov and Bernhardt L. Trout, eds. Mastery of Nature: Promises and
Prospects. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. xiii, 268 pages.

I write these lines in the last days of a summer that has set ferocious heat records
around the globe. At the same time, the government of the country in which I live
has responded to these events by withdrawing from climate change mitigation
agreements, gagging climate scientists, promoting carbon pollution, and canceling
NASA’s scientific monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions, acts that seem to have
provoked relatively little public anger at the national level. It is often said that the
brute fact of our capacity for destruction is nothing new, as many human societies
have despoiled and ruined ecological features of the regions in which they live.
Yet, before the modern era, these events could almost invariably be ascribed to
ignorance or desperation of one form or another; by contrast, the present situation
involves much of the populace engaging in a continuous and heavily rationalized
refusal to face facts when confronted by the prospect of nature generating dangerous
responses to certain human activities. It is easy to point to corrupt misinformation
on issues such as climate change, but that does not explain why so many affluent
Westerners are so keen to believe the deceptions. Is there something deep in the
value system of modern Western culture that makes it particularly hard to accept
that nature imposes limits? Are there irrationally Promethean aspects to the Re-
naissance and Enlightenment project of mastering nature that are now rebounding
upon us? What for that matter does it mean to “master nature,” and does modernity
truly represent a break with past ideals? How problematic is the assumption that
an increase in our power over nature must go alongside a growth in the wisdom
to manage it? This nest of questions and others related to them are the intellectual
touchstones for this collection of essays dealing with key thinkers’ contributions
on the ideal of mastery from ancient Greece to the present day.
Having initially grown out of the Mastery of Nature conference at MIT in 2016,
the book incorporates a preface by Ralph Lerner plus a context-giving introduction
by Daniel A. Doneson and the editors before getting onto the main business, the
essay collection itself. The compilation is thematically divided into three sections:
six chapters in the opening section on the project of mastery, three essays in the
second section dealing with the alternatives and anticipations of the mastery project
in antiquity, followed by a final extended section of seven chapters covering the
results and later criticisms of the project as well as efforts to correct it. Noting that
there is relatively little historical and philosophical examination of the mastery of
nature and that given “the vastness of the subject” the book “can only be a begin-
ning” (p. 4), the editors in their introduction nonetheless identify Machiavelli,
Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes as being among “the handful of thinkers who most
directly and comprehensively laid out the aims, as well as the attendant moral and

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political dispositions and forms, that are part and parcel of mastery of nature” (p.
2). Observing the continuing relevance of the question whether there is “a fixed
human nature” (p. 4) they go on to set the scene for the book’s more detailed schol-
arly examinations by pointing out that the mastery project, for all of its successes
in expanding human power, has not disposed of the most pressing philosophical
question of how we should live.
These reflections take us into the intertwined knots between politics and episte-
mology in the beginnings of modernity, and the collection duly opens with Harvey
C. Mansfield’s reading of Machiavelli’s significance, focusing especially on chapter
fifteen of The Prince. For Mansfield, an under-recognized but vital aspect of this
work is that Machiavelli “created the world of fact we now inhabit”—fact in the
sense of “pure matter, without potentiality” (p. 15), the sort of fact that modern
science tries to establish as core data and whose establishment then “frees sci-
ence from the inclinations and promises of previously so-called nature,” enabling
science to “develop its own imagination, now guided by mastery . . . to improve
human life” (p. 17). Machiavelli, he argues, goes a surprisingly long way toward
scientific determinism through his treatment of the complex relationship between
necessity, goodness, and effectual truth, and in the process prepares the ground for
the more familiar uses of fact found in Bacon and Hobbes. It is a large claim with
which to start the volume, and one hopes to see further development of it from the
author and others in future. Less surprisingly, Bacon is central to two chapters,
Svetozar Minkov’s immediately following essay on the conquest of nature in
“On the Wisdom of the Ancients” (chap. 2) and Jerry Weinberger’s comparison
of Francis Bacon and Benjamin Franklin’s perspectives on the mastery of nature
alongside their religious views (chap. 6). Despite the circumstances of the book’s
composition, these chapters dovetail quite well, particularly in touching upon the
relationship between knowledge, charity, and mastery of nature in Bacon’s thought.
Similarly, Devin Stauffer’s chapter on Hobbes’ view of nature (chap. 3), which does
not mention Machiavelli, is nonetheless quite compatible with the view of fact and
nature that Mansfield’s chapter ascribes to Hobbes via the Florentine philosopher’s
influence. By contrast, Stuart Warner’s essay on Descartes’ Discourse on Method
(chap. 4) and Diana Schaub’s examination of Montesquieu’s attitudes to commerce
and science are engaging and scholarly contributions but largely function as stand
alone chapters, and the extent to which the loose focus on mastery in these essays
will engage environmental ethicists is questionable.
This loose focus points to a wider matter insofar as the readers of Environmen-
tal Ethics are concerned, which is that while the issues of epistemology, science,
politics, and the mastery of nature are clearly relevant to the field, the essays in this
volume tend to hone in more on scholarly specifics in the history of ideas than to
broader questions about the value or devaluing of nonhuman nature. The relevance
of the issues examined in different chapters here thus varies significantly for envi-
ronmental philosophers, even while the high overall intellectual standard sustained
in the book ensures that the reader never runs short of new and thought-provoking
Winter 2018 BOOK REVIEWS 407

information. In the process, there are surprises along the way. In the second section,
for instance, all three chapters are strong, but while Robert C. Bartlett’s treatment
of contemplation in Plato and Aristotle (chap. 7) and Paul Ludwig’s chapter on
Lucretius (chap. 9) were absorbing, I was especially struck by Christopher Na-
don’s novel and studiously balanced discussion of Xenophon (chap. 8), in which,
contrary to the view of Leo Strauss, Xenophon does not fundamentally oppose the
conquest of nature, but holds rather that the “city must act as though the earth were
an enemy while also treating her, at least in speech, like a friend or benefactor” (p.
116). While this smallest section does not cover as much ground as one might be
ideal to give fuller overall historical balance, there is no denying the quality of the
ingredients, and whilst the broader consensus that Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius
were less than sympathetic to the notion of mastering nature, some readers might
be surprised at the extent to which the key questions are engaged, even if much of
the time this was implicit.
The book’s final section plays out with chapters on respectively Rousseau, Kant,
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, before the focus shifts somewhat to contemporary
science, concluding with Adam Schulman’s reflections on the extent to which modern
physics may increase not only human power but also human understanding (chap.
15) and Bernhardt Trout’s chapter on quantum mechanics and political philosophy
(chap. 16). Again, the extent of direct relevance for environmental concerns varies,
and so I focus on the most directly relevant chapters, especially as here I found
more surprises in order. Given his significance for much green thought, it is to be
expected that a reading of Rousseau in this area might yield important insights,
and Arthur Melzer’s contribution (chap. 10) does not disappoint. Melzer brings out
in concise and eloquent detail the paradoxical character of Rousseau’s thought, in
which a repudiation of external nature’s conquest is based upon arguments “that
the project conflicts with the healthy and happy life, both for communities and
individuals” (p. 139), and yet a different sort of repudiation of nature, a view that
humans are such that “one can produce the needed patriotic citizens only through a
conquest of human nature” (p. 153) is integral to the concept of republican political
community that Rousseau advances. More striking in the context of the collection
however, even given the recent efforts that have been made in Kantian environmental
ethics by Toby Svoboda and others, is the way in which Richard Velkley manages
to tease out a helpful environmental sensibility from Kant’s aesthetics (chap. 11).
Kant’s account of judgment, he argues, though in one sense highly anthropocentric
in its emphasis on the human faculties and the favorability of nature’s appearances
to human ends, nonetheless “emphasizes the inherent, permanent inscrutability of
those features” in a way that “banishes the hope of complete mastery of nature,”
recognizing that “purposiveness in nature is a permanent problem” and that living
beings are “structured in a way that baffles human comprehension” (p. 164). This
is a necessary and salutary impermanence for Kant, Velkley argues, for “one needs
the prospect of unfinished striving, so that there is always something to will and
always more hope” (p. 169). This chapter came as an enlightening surprise to this
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reviewer, at least from an environmental perspective, and in terms of its novelty it,
in my view, unexpectedly eclipsed the essays about the three other great German
thinkers here, where the insights were more familiar, as well as the reflections on
science in the final two chapters.
Summing up, this book is a high quality collection of essays, but one in which
the relevance to concerns in environmental philosophy is variable throughout. It
is clear that efforts were made to create some thematic unity among the different
essays, but I cannot help feel that an afterword of summary might also have helped
tie the pieces together better. In addition, though the book’s genesis necessarily
created its own selection issues and the editors are not at fault, to me the absence
of any extended discussion of John Locke in the opening section is quite unfortu-
nate, for as Neal Wood and other scholars have argued, Locke draws heavily on
Francis Bacon’s intellectual project for his hugely influential justification of private
ownership and maximized economic productivity, so it is here that we may see
the link from the Baconian project of mastery to the birth of capitalism, and thus
to concrete political actions in transforming nonhuman nature. In that regard, a
historical treatment of these themes without Locke resembles Hamlet without the
prince. But despite such quibbles there is plenty to appreciate here, and historians
of ideas especially will find the book highly stimulating.

Piers H. G. Stephens*

* Philosophy Department, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602; email: piers@uga.edu.