path: root/books/history/death-of-nature.md

[[!meta title="The Death of Nature"]]

## Topics

* Bohm's process physics.
* Ilya Prigogine new thermodynamics.

## Excerpts

    Between the sixteenth andseventeenth cerfturies the image of an or-
    ganic cosmos with a living female earth at its ceriter gave way to a
    mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and
    passive, to be dominated and controlled by hufuans. The Death efNature
    deals with the economic, cultural, and scientific changes through which
    this vast transformation came about. In seeking to understand how people
    conceptualized nature in the Scientific Revolution, I am asking not about
    unchanging essences, but about connections between social change and
    changing constructions of nattlre". Similarly. when women today attempt
    to change society's domination of nature, 1:\1~¥.,~e acting to overturn
    moder_n constructions of nature and women as culturally passive and
    subordinate.

    [...]

    Today's feminist and ecological consciousness can be used to examine the
    historical interconnections between women and nature that devel-
    oped as the modern scientific and economic world took form in the
    sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-a transformation that shaped
    and pervades today's mainstream values and perceptions.
    Feminist history in the broadest sense requires that we look at

    [...]

    My intent is instead to examine the
    values associated with the images of women and nature as they re-
    late to the formation of our modern world and their implications for
    'our lives today.

    In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma
    and its connections to science, technology, and the economy, we
    must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that,
    by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living or-
    ganism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women. The
    contributions of such founding "fathers" of modern science as
    Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes,
    and Isaac Newton must be reevaluated. The fate of other options,
    alternative philosophies, and social groups shaped by the organic
    world view and resistant to the growing exploitative mentality needs
    reappraisal. To understand why one road rather than the other was
    taken requires a broad synthesis of both the natural and cultural
    environments of Western society at the historical turning point.
    This book elaborates an ecological perspective that includes both

### Terminology

Nature, art, organic and mechanical:

    A distinction was commonly made
    between natura naturans, or nature creating, and natura naturata,
    the natural creation.

    Nature was contrasted with art (techne) and with artificially cre-
    ated things. It was personified as a female-being, e.g., Dame Na-
    ture; she was alternately a prudent lady, an empress, a mother, etc.
    The course of nature and the laws of nature were the actualization
    of her force. The state of nature was the state of mankind prior to
    social organization and prior to the state of grace. Nature spirits,
    nature deities, virgin nymphs, and elementals were thought to re-
    side in or be associated with natural objects.

    In both Western and non-Western cultures, nature was tradition-
    ally feminine.

    [...]

    In the early modern period, the term organic usually referred to
    the bodily organs, structures, and organization of living beings,
    while organicism was the doctrine that organic structure was the
    result of an inherent, adaptive property in matter. The word organi-
    cal, however, was also sometimes used to refer to a machine or an
    instrument. Thus a clock was sometimes called an "organical
    body," while som~ machines were said to operate by organical,
    rather than mechanical, action if the touch of a person was in-
    volved.

    Mechanical referred to the machine and tool trades; the manual
    operations of the handicrafts; inanimate machines that lacked spon-
    taneity, volition, and thought; and the mechanical sciences. 1

### Nature that nurtures and thats also uncontrollable, replaced by "the machine"

    NATURE AS NURTURE: CONTROLLING IMAGERY. Central to
    the organic theory was the identification of nature, especially the
    earth, with a nurturing mother: a kindly beneficent female who pro-
    vided for the needs of mankind in an ordered, planned universe. But
    another opposing image of nature as female was also prevalent:
    wild and uncontrollable nature that could render violence, storms,
    droughts, and general chaos. Both were identified with the female
    sex and were projections of human perceptions onto the external
    world. The metaphor of the earth as a nurturing mother was gradu-
    ally to vanish as a dominant image as the Scientific Revolution pro-
    ceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view. The second
    image, nature as disorder, called forth an important modern idea,
    that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those of mechanism and
    of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of
    the modern world. An organically oriented mentality in which fe-
    male principles played an important role was undermined and re-
    placed by a mechanically oriented mentality that either eliminated
    or used female principles in an exploitative manner. As Western
    culture became increasingly mechanized in the 1600s, the female
    earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine. 1

### Mining and the female body

    The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing
    mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of
    human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her en-
    trails for gold or mutilate her body, although commercial mining
    would soon require that. As long as the earth was considered to be
    alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical
    behavior to carry out destructive acts against it. For most tradition-
    al cultures, minerals and metals ripened in the uterus of the Earth
    Mother, mines were compared to her vagina, and metallurgy was
    the human hastening of the birth of the living metal in the artificial
    womb of the furnace-an abortion of the metal's natural growth
    cycle before its time. Miners offered propitiation to the deities of
    the soil and subterranean world, performed ceremonial sacrifices,
    · and observed strict cleanliness, sexual abstinence, and fasting be-
    fore violating the sacredness of the living earth by sinking a mine.
    Smiths assumed an awesome responsibility in precipitating the met-
    al's birth through smeltin,.g, fusing, and beating it with hammer and
    anvil; they were often accorded the status of shaman in tribal rit-
    uals and their tools were thought to hold special powers.

Is there a relation between torture (basanos), extraction of "truth" and
mining gold out of a mine? See discussions both on "The Counterrevolution"
and "Torture and Truth".

### Hidden norms: controlling images

    Controlling images operate as ethical restraints or as ethical sanc-
    tions-as subtle "oughts" or "ought-nots." Thus as the descriptive
    metaphors and images of nature change, a behavioral restraint can
    be changed into a sanction. Such a change in the image and de'-
    scription of nature was occurring during the course of the Scientific
    Revolution.

    It is important to recognize the normative import of descriptive
    statements about nature. Contemporary philosophers of language
    have critically reassessed the earlier positivist distinction between
    the "is" of science and the "ought" of society, arguing that descrip-
    tions and norms are not opposed to one another by linguistic sepa-
    ration into separate "is" and "ought" statements, but are contained
    within each other. Descriptive statements about the world can pre-
    suppose the normative; they are then ethic-laden.

    [...]

    The writer
    or culture may not be conscious of the ethical import yet may act in
    accordance with its dictates. The hidden norms may become con-
    scious or explicit when an alternative or contradiction presents it-
    self. Because language contains a culture within itself, when lan-
    guage changes, a culture is also changing in important way~~ By
    examining changes in descriptions of nature, we can then perceive
    something of the changes in cultural values. To be aware of the in-.

### Renaissance: hierarchical order

    The Renaissance view of nature and society was based on the or-
    ganic analogy between the human body, or microcosm, and the
    larger world, or macrocosm.

    [...]

    But while the pastoral tradition symbolized nature as a benevo-
    lent female, it contained the implication that nature when plowed
    and cultivated could be used as a commodity and manipulated as a
    resource. Nature, tamed and subdued, could be transformed into a
    garden to provide both material and spiritual food to enhance the
    comfort and soothe the anxieties of men distraught by the demands
    of the urban world and the stresses of the marketplace. It depended
    on a masculine perception of nature as a mother and bride whose
    primary function was to comfort; nurture, and provide for the well-
    being of the male. In pastoral imagery, both nature and women are
    subordinate and essentially passive. They nurture but do not control
    or exhibit disruptive passion. The pastoral mode, although it viewed
    nature as benevolent, was a model created as an antidote to the
    pressures of urbanization and mechanization. It represented a ful-
    fillment of human needs for nurture, but by conceiving of nature as
    passive, it nevertheless allowed for the possibility of its use and ma-
    nipulation. Unlike the dialectical image of nature as the active uni-
    ty of opposites in tension, the Arcadian image rendered nature pas-
    sive and manageable.

### Undressing

    An allegory (1160) by Alain of Lille, of the School of Chartres,
    portrays Natura, God's powerful but humble servant, as stricken
    with grief at the failure of man (in contrast to other species) to
    obey her laws. Owing to faulty supervision by Venus, human beings
    engage in adulterous sensual love. In aggressively penetrating the
    secrets of heaven, they tear Natura's undergarments, exposing her
    to the view of the vulgar. She complains that "by the unlawful as-
    saults of man alone the garments of my modesty suffer disgrace
    and division."

    [...]

    Such basic attitudes
    toward ·male-female roles in biological generation where the female
    and the earth are both passive receptors could easily become sanc-
    tions for exploitation as the organic context was transformed by the
    rise of commercial capitalism.

    [...]

    The macrocosm theory, as we have seen, likened the cosmos to
    the human body, soul, and spirit with male and female reproductive
    components. Similarly, the geocosm theory compared the earth to
    the living human body, with breath, blood, sweat, and elimination
    systems.

    [...]

    The earth's springs were akin to the human blood system; its oth-
    er various fluids were likened to the mucus, saliva, sweat, and other
    forins of lubrication in the human body, the earth being organized
    "'. .. much after the plan of our bodies, in which there are both
    veins and arteries, the former blood vessels, the latter air vessels ....
    So exactly alike is the resemblance to our bodies in nature's forma-
    tion of the earth, that our ancestors have spoken of veins [springs]
    of water." Just as the human body contained blood, marrow, mu-
    cus, saliva, tears, and lubricating fluids, so in the earth there were
    various fluids. Liquids that turned hard became metals, such as
    gold and silver; other fluids turned into stones, bitumens, and veins
    of sulfur. Like the human body, the earth gave forth sweat: "There
    is often a gathering of thin, scattered moisture like dew, which from
    many points flows into one spot. The dowsers call it sweat, because
    a kind of drop is either squeezed out by the pressure of the ground
    or raised by the heat."

    Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) enlarged the Greek analogy be-
    tween the waters of the earth and the ebb and flow of human blood
    through the veins and heart

    [...]

    A widely held alchemical belief was the growth of the baser met-
    als into gold in womblike matrices in the earth. The appearance of
    silver in lead ores or gold in silvery assays was evidence that this
    transformation was under way. Just as the child grew in the
    warmth of the female womb, so the growth of metals was fostered

### Matrix

    The earth in the Paracelsian philosophy was the mother or matrix
    giving birth to plants, animals, and men.

### Renaissance was diverse

    In general, the Renaissance view was that all things were permeat-
    ed by life, there being no adequate method by which to designate
    the inanimate from the animate.
    [...] but criteria by which to differentiate the living from
    the nonliving could not successfully be formulated. This was due
    not only to the vitalistic framework of the period but to striking
    similarities between them.

    [...]

    Popular Renaissance literature was filled with hundreds of im-
    ages associating nature, matter, and the earth with the female sex.

    [...]

    In the 1960s, the Native-American became a symbol in the ecol-
    ogy movement's search for alternatives to Western exploitative atti-
    tudes. The Indian animistic belief-system and reverence for the
    earth as a · mother were contrasted with the Judeo-Christian heri-
    tage of dominion over nature and with capitalist practices resulting
    in the "tragedy of the commons" (exploitation of resources avail-
    able for any person's or nation's use). But as will be seen, European
    culture was more complex and varied than this judgment allows. It
    ignores the Renaissance philosophy of the nurturing earth as well
    as those philosophies and social movements resistant to mainstream
    economic change.

### Mining as revealing the hidden secrets

    In his defense, the miner argued that the earth was not a real moth-
    er, but a wicked stepmother who hides and conceals the metals in
    her inner parts instead of making them available for human use.

    [...]

    In the old hermit's tale, we have a fascina,ting example·of the re:·
    lationship between images and values. The older view of nature as a
    kindly mother is challenged by the growing interests of the mining
    industry in Saxony, Bohemia, and the Harz Mountains, regions of
    newly found prosperity (Fig. 6). The miner, representing these
    newer commercial activities, transforms the irnage of the nurturing
    mother into that of a stepmother who wickedly conceals her bounty
    from the deserving and needy children. In the seventeenth century,
    the image will be seen to undergo yet another transformation, as
    natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) sets forth the need
    for prying into nature's nooks and crannies in searching out her se-
    crets for human improvement.

    -- 33