Review: Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution

Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Twentieth-century ecology emerged from the intellectual frame-work historically associated with an organic approach to nature and society. Employing the hierarchical variant of the organic model, ecologists in the early decades of this century used concepts such as "organic community," "mutual interdependence," and "evolution toward higher forms" on a hierarchical scale to provide an under-standing not only of the organization of bacterial colonies, grass-land climax vegetation, and bee and ant communities, but also of human tribal societies and the world economy. They stressed an evolution toward greater cooperation on a worldwide basis and argued that nature could provide the model for an ethic of human sharing, integration, and unity. But the emergence of fascist tyranny based on a centralized organismic model glorifying the father as absolute dictator undermined the evolutionary hierarchical component of their argument, and ecology turned in a mathematically reductionistic direction.

Post industrial info age charismatic autocratic disruptor

Millenarianism represented a preindustrial form of social revolution. It differed from the movements of the industrial revolution by preparing people, through revelation, to accept revolutionary change, as opposed to politicizing the working class. Signs in the heavens, prophets, and saviors would appear predicting the arrival of the millennium. For example, persisting since the Middle Ages was the prophecy that Frederick I (Barbaroso), King of Germany, would be resurrected; he had died in 1190 on the third crusade and was idealized as a savior of the poor who would bring with him a communal state. He would banish the Pope as Antichrist, and destroy his cohorts-the clergy, the wicked, and the rich, well-fed laity. Throughout the Middle Ages, prophets and written manifestos sustained revolutionary influences and the real hopes of the poor for a new social order.

England European

... By the end of the century, childbirth was passing into the hands of male doctors and "man-midwives."

While women's productive roles were decreasing under early capitalism, the beginning of a process that would ultimately transform them from an economic resource for their families' subsistence to a psychic resource for their husbands, the cultural role played by female symbols and principles was also changing. The female world soul, with its lower component, Natura, and the nurturing female earth had begun to lose plausibility in a world increasingly influenced by mining technology essential to commercial capitalism. The older organic order of nature and society was breaking up as the new mercantile activities threatened the ideology of natural stratification in society.

Symbolic of these changes were the midwife and the witch. From the perspective of the male, the witch was a symbol of disorder in nature and society, both of which must be brought under control. The midwife symbolized female incompetence in her own natural sphere, reproduction, correctable through a technology invented and controlled by men the forceps. But from a female perspective, witchcraft represented a form of power by which oppressed lower-class women could retaliate against social injustices, and a source of healing through the use of spirits and the regenerative powers of nature. For women, the midwife symbolized female control over the female reproductive function. But until medical training became available to women and licensing regulations were equalized for both women and men, women had no opportunity to compare the effectiveness of the older, shared traditions of midwifery as an art with the new medical science.

Descartes
moved the spirit out of matter in sensing a mechanized world

Similarly, his Principles of Philosophy (published in 1644) re-structured the cosmos as a mechanism, based on the motion of inert material corpuscles that transmitted motion consecutively from part to part through efficient causation. The force that produced the motion was not something vital, animate, or inherent in bodies, but a measure of the quantity of matter and the speed with which they moved. Motion was external to matter and was put into the universe at the moment of creation. It could be transferred among bodies, but its total amount was conserved from instant to instant by God. Change occurred through the rearrangement of inert corpuscles. The spiritus mundi of the Neoplatonists was translated into a subtle mechanical ether whose whirlpool circulations pushed the planets around, a sleight-of-hand not lost on subsequent critics such as Henry More and Henry Power.

The ghost got back into the machine, ushered in by the forgotten Leibniz-inspiring and Kabbalah-reading Anne Conway, an English philosopher whose work was in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists.

THE MONADS OF CONWAY, VAN HELMONT, AND LEIBNIZ.

By September, after Van Helmont's March 1696 arrival in Hanover, one finds in Leibniz's writings the first use of the term monad to characterize his concept of "individual substance." In long hours of conversation with Leibniz and the Electress Sophie, Van Helmont spoke about his own ideas, those of Anne Conway, and of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata, conversations which Leibniz found "very instructive," in contrast to Van Helmont's books, which were more enigmatic.

Prior to 1696, Leibniz had used the terms entelechie, formes substantielles, unité substantielle, point metaphysical, and forces primitives interchangeably to mean "individual substance." But in 1696, the disparate elements of his metaphysics coalesced when he began using the concept of the monad to represent an independent individual-a substance endowed with perception and activity-existing in a state of accommodation and consensus with other substances.

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