In her book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant examines the values we have associated with the images of women and nature throughout history, toward "the possibility of a new world view that could guide twenty-first-century citizens in an ecologically sustainable way of life," [p.xviii] one "based...on the full expression of both male and female talent and on the maintenance of environmental integrity. [p.xix] This new science, based on "the primacy of process",[p.xvii] follows from what we have learned from relativity, quantum theory, David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, and chaos theory.[p.xvii-xviii] Merchant shows, with direct historical reference to interaction and causal relationships between human and ecological factors,[p.43] how, by taking an "earth's eye view of history," a more complete picture of history emerges. [p.42]
"Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," she explains, "the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans. "[p.xvi] "In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma...we must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women." [p.xxi]
Merchant takes this approach to her study "Because language contains a culture within itself, when language changes, a culture is also changing in important ways. By examining changes in descriptions .of nature, we can then perceive something of the changes in cultural values. "[p.4] The images of earth as a "female mine" [p.40] "sanctioned the rape/commercial exploration of the earth." [p.41]
According to Merchant, the simultaneity of the women's liberation and the ecology movement, common to which is an egalitarian perspective,[p.xix] and a critical view of the market economy's modus operandi,[p.xx] has given us insight by which can help us examine the historical interconnections between women and nature. [p.xx] For instance, we can see that in 1500, the social structure in Europe still involved cooperative organic communities which emphasized the interdependence of the part to the whole. Nature was conceived by different images, always female (e.g. nurturing mother, wild and uncontrollable beast, wicked stepmother, etc.) which were used by society to support the activities of commercialization, industrialization, and the new technologies they gave rise to, which made mining, draining, deforestation, and assarting possible, and seemingly justifiable. [p.2]
These habits had developed gradually; the Greeks had used low level technologies and nature was popularly held to be sacred, and so damage was limited. The Romans were more pragmatic, and so their environmental impact was more intense,[p.3] but still relatively little compared with the damage done since the Scientific Revolution modernized the economy and spread the mechanical dominion metaphor.[p.3] Merchant explores literary images from Hooker, Shakespeare, Spencer, Milton, and others, as well as images presented in the art of Botticelli, Cranach, and others, to show how the passive/female association with nature is emphasized.[pp.6-9] Plato had thought the soul of the earth was female, the source of all motion. [p.IO] The Neoplatonist Plotinus, attempting to synthesize Plato with Christianity, divided the female soul into two components, attributing form or ideas to the father, matter to the mother.[p.lO] Aristotle, "while unifying matter and form in each individual being, associated activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness." [p.l3] Recalling this view in the middle ages, Christian thinkers viewed the masculine celestial sphere as actively bestowing life into the female earth.[p.l6] Outside the mainstream of western culture, the image of nature as "the unity of the opposites and the equality of male-female principles" [p.16] provided an alternative view of generation that was taken up by some alchemists. [p.19]
In these chapters, Merchant examines how the tension between peasant pressure for community control and the structure of landlord domination brought the manorial farm ecology to develop in such a way as to cause "significant changes in the ecosystem as a whole." [p.45] Technology, population growth, taxation, the plague, famines, and many other factors contributed to a complex interaction which showed up in similar ecological and economic patterns throughout Europe,[p.SO] and "led ultimately to the breakdown of the medieval agrarian economy and ecosystem. "[p.47] Capitalism, which focused landowners on increased yields, further contributed to the decreasing health the countryside. Merchant discusses the fate of the fenlands in England as an example of how capitalist modes of production accentuated human impact on the natural world. "The economy of the fenlands had been maintained by an ecological balance between human needs, animal grazing, crop yields, and soil fertility for hundreds of years of peasant tradition. Each peasant had free access to the common..."[p.58] Using Dutch technology, "The drainers destroyed this balance and threatened the means of support of the fen dwellers without supplying alternative employment. "[p.58] The effects of this process, which benefited the landlord and capitalists, was to impoverish the previous land-dwellers. In some cases, the peasants recovered their subsistence economy with 'earth-first' like tactics. A similar process can be seen in the use and demise of European forests. The effect was an environmental crisis which shows us that "today's environmental crisis is not new in kind, only in degree."[p.67]
***
In chapter four of her book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant argues that, while the so-called Scientific Revolution is most often seen by historians in its positive light, its more negative ecological consequences are only now coming to be recognized. Ecology, which has its roots in organicism,[p.lOO] is founded in the "premise that everything is connected to everything else and ...its emphasis on the primacy of interactive processes in nature" has revived holistic presuppositions about nature.[p.99] Such organisist notions involve "the idea that the cosmos is an organic entity, growing and developing from within, in an integrated unity of structure and function." [p.lOO] Early nineteenth century Romantics like Emerson and John Muir turned back to this way of looking at the world. The Renaissance cosmos shared some organisist presuppositions, such as the interconnected unity underlying the idea of the 'chain of being', but this system was hierarchical, linking inferiors to superiors.[p.100,106] Renaissance Neoplatonists held nature as the soul of the world,[p.l02] and, made the tripartite distinction between matter, spirit, and soul.[p.l08] Under the sponsorship of the wealthy Medeci family, Neoplatonic alchemists and natural magicians, based on the assumptions that matter is passive and nature is to manipulated,[p.109] attempted to bring about changes here on earth by appealing to celestial influences. [p.l02] Frances Bacon would assimilate these assumptions into his techniques for the control of nature, "free of the ethical strictures associated with the view of nature as a living being."[p.lll]
The more radical organic philosophies of Telesio, Campanella, and Giordano Bruno, who were all products of oppressive Spanish control of Naples,[p.llS] and thus gave voice to "a feeling of helplessness among the 'oppressed"' ,[p.117] unified soul and spirit into a single living active entity, yet distinct from matter. They asserted "change as the dialectical opposition of contraries,"[p.102] and an "affinity of nature" which "resulted [in] the bonding together of all things through mutual attraction or love."[p.l03] The earlier vitalist view of Paracelsus had reduced vital spirit and phenomenal matter to a monistic self-active unity, with matter and its activity unified.[p.102] His holistic cosmology was "based on the power of the imagination, as the link between body and spirit. [p.l19] Moved by the misery of the people, Paracelsus "advocated the freedom of ordinary people to study nature for themselves and believed in a self active natural world and individual liberty." [p.120] "Each natural organism developed in accordance with its own nature, while its motion benefited and maintained the harmony of the whole,"[p.113] wrote Telesio. Campanella thought that "we must admit that sense and feeling belong to all elements ...[and not] ignore the sense and feeling in other things because [we] consider it irrelevant with respect to [our] so called knowledge of entities." [p.l04] And "Bruno's dialectic stressed the unity rather than the struggle of opposites, anticipating idealist rather than materialist dialectics," [p.l14] and challenged the hierarchical conception when he "assigned no prime position to the human species and held that nature was everywhere uniform." [p.llS] After the English Civil War, the religious and political dimensions of mysticism, magic, vitalism, and pantheism were emphasized, ideas that "for some groups meant the seizing of common lands and the establishment of egalitarian communal societies,"[p.l23] and undermined the basis for the patriarchal family. [p.124] "Naturalism looked forward toward a more egalitarian society based on the leveling of hierarchies." [p.ll7]
The emerging mechanical philosophies, "based on the logic that knowledge of the world could be certain and consistent,"[p.l02] took some of the naturalist's assumptions seriously, and rejected others. It would "assimilate and transform ideas such as Campanella's and Bruno's manipulative magic into a philosophy of power over nature." [p.l17] "The primacy of organic process gave way to the stability of mathematical laws and identities. Force was external to matter rather than immanent within it...change was simply the rearrangement of particles as motion was transmitted from one part o another in a causal nexus. Because it viewed nature as dead and matter as passive, mechanism could function as a subtle sanction for the exploitation and manipulation of nature and its resources." [pp.l02-103] "Mechanism took over from the magical tradition the concept of the manipulation of matter but divested it oflife and vital action." [p.lll]
In time, Neoplatonist and mechanical philosophy achieved something of a synthesis in the managerial perspective of the science of ecology, which makes it difficult to view the organic and mechanistic philosophies as strict dichotomies.[p.l03] Rather, these two perspectives on nature remain in tension, "some assumptions were transformed and retained while others were criticized and rejected." [p.105]
In chapter five, Merchant examines how the disorderly and chaotic realm of feminine nature was systematically subdued and controlled. Discoveries of the 'new science', such as Copernicus' heleocentrism, and Galileo's telescopic observations, contributed to the fear that nature's order might breakdown. Writers such as Machiavelli and others saw both nature and society as wilderness, and argued that fortune could be mastered by aggression and taking advantage of others whenever possible.[pp.l30-131] Unruly nature was associated with "the dark side of woman",[p.l32] "nature and women are both perceived to be on a lower level than culture."[p.l44] This assumption of a nature/culture dichotomy was "used as a justification for keeping women in their place in the established hierarchical order or nature." [p.l44] "If a woman was presumptuous enough to rise above a man, she must be 'repressed and bridled.'"[p.l45] Thought to be imbued with greater sexual passion, to mature earlier in regard to sex, and to obtain more pleasure from sex than men, women were thought to be more easily seduced by the devil, and thus, the bodily corruption of the male was blamed on the lusts and temptations of the female. [p.l31-133] During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works of art and antifeminist tracks depicted women as disorderly and insolent, and were followed by two hundred years of witch trials.[p.134] Even "those who defended women against accusation and trial did so by utilizing the prevailing antifeminist arguments." [p.l41] And reactions to this widespread oppression took the form of feminism.
In chapter six, Merchant shows how the new economic and scientific order would effect
women's lives by contracting them into domesticity, encouraging their dependence on their husbands and their inability to support themselves as independent in the world. [pp.l49-152] Women lost their place in their traditional occupations, such as weaving, baking, brewing, and midwifery. [p.l52] Education was limited so to restrict access to medical training and licensing to men.[p.l52] Women protested that the new science of medical delivery was fraught with unnecessary violence, but their voices were ridiculed as "meddlesome" and discredited. [pp.l53- 154] "From a male perspective ...the midwife symbolized female incompetence in her own natural sphere, reproduction, correctable through a technology invented and controlled by men--the forceps...For women, the midwife symbolized female control over the female reproductive function." [p.l55] Loss of control over midwifery meant loss of control over their own reproductive functions. [p.l55] The use of science to keep women in their place was widespread, including the argument that the sperm was superior to the egg and thus primary in generation. "[S]cientific studies continue to generate 'evidence' to maintain outdated assumptions about the male-female hierarchy." [p.l63] But considering how easy it is for human beings to actively ignore what they do not want to see, it seems important to remember that what is 'evident' depends heavily on what is being looked for...
"Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," she explains, "the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans. "[p.xvi] "In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma...we must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women." [p.xxi]
Merchant takes this approach to her study "Because language contains a culture within itself, when language changes, a culture is also changing in important ways. By examining changes in descriptions .of nature, we can then perceive something of the changes in cultural values. "[p.4] The images of earth as a "female mine" [p.40] "sanctioned the rape/commercial exploration of the earth." [p.41]
According to Merchant, the simultaneity of the women's liberation and the ecology movement, common to which is an egalitarian perspective,[p.xix] and a critical view of the market economy's modus operandi,[p.xx] has given us insight by which can help us examine the historical interconnections between women and nature. [p.xx] For instance, we can see that in 1500, the social structure in Europe still involved cooperative organic communities which emphasized the interdependence of the part to the whole. Nature was conceived by different images, always female (e.g. nurturing mother, wild and uncontrollable beast, wicked stepmother, etc.) which were used by society to support the activities of commercialization, industrialization, and the new technologies they gave rise to, which made mining, draining, deforestation, and assarting possible, and seemingly justifiable. [p.2]
These habits had developed gradually; the Greeks had used low level technologies and nature was popularly held to be sacred, and so damage was limited. The Romans were more pragmatic, and so their environmental impact was more intense,[p.3] but still relatively little compared with the damage done since the Scientific Revolution modernized the economy and spread the mechanical dominion metaphor.[p.3] Merchant explores literary images from Hooker, Shakespeare, Spencer, Milton, and others, as well as images presented in the art of Botticelli, Cranach, and others, to show how the passive/female association with nature is emphasized.[pp.6-9] Plato had thought the soul of the earth was female, the source of all motion. [p.IO] The Neoplatonist Plotinus, attempting to synthesize Plato with Christianity, divided the female soul into two components, attributing form or ideas to the father, matter to the mother.[p.lO] Aristotle, "while unifying matter and form in each individual being, associated activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness." [p.l3] Recalling this view in the middle ages, Christian thinkers viewed the masculine celestial sphere as actively bestowing life into the female earth.[p.l6] Outside the mainstream of western culture, the image of nature as "the unity of the opposites and the equality of male-female principles" [p.16] provided an alternative view of generation that was taken up by some alchemists. [p.19]
In these chapters, Merchant examines how the tension between peasant pressure for community control and the structure of landlord domination brought the manorial farm ecology to develop in such a way as to cause "significant changes in the ecosystem as a whole." [p.45] Technology, population growth, taxation, the plague, famines, and many other factors contributed to a complex interaction which showed up in similar ecological and economic patterns throughout Europe,[p.SO] and "led ultimately to the breakdown of the medieval agrarian economy and ecosystem. "[p.47] Capitalism, which focused landowners on increased yields, further contributed to the decreasing health the countryside. Merchant discusses the fate of the fenlands in England as an example of how capitalist modes of production accentuated human impact on the natural world. "The economy of the fenlands had been maintained by an ecological balance between human needs, animal grazing, crop yields, and soil fertility for hundreds of years of peasant tradition. Each peasant had free access to the common..."[p.58] Using Dutch technology, "The drainers destroyed this balance and threatened the means of support of the fen dwellers without supplying alternative employment. "[p.58] The effects of this process, which benefited the landlord and capitalists, was to impoverish the previous land-dwellers. In some cases, the peasants recovered their subsistence economy with 'earth-first' like tactics. A similar process can be seen in the use and demise of European forests. The effect was an environmental crisis which shows us that "today's environmental crisis is not new in kind, only in degree."[p.67]
***
In chapter four of her book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant argues that, while the so-called Scientific Revolution is most often seen by historians in its positive light, its more negative ecological consequences are only now coming to be recognized. Ecology, which has its roots in organicism,[p.lOO] is founded in the "premise that everything is connected to everything else and ...its emphasis on the primacy of interactive processes in nature" has revived holistic presuppositions about nature.[p.99] Such organisist notions involve "the idea that the cosmos is an organic entity, growing and developing from within, in an integrated unity of structure and function." [p.lOO] Early nineteenth century Romantics like Emerson and John Muir turned back to this way of looking at the world. The Renaissance cosmos shared some organisist presuppositions, such as the interconnected unity underlying the idea of the 'chain of being', but this system was hierarchical, linking inferiors to superiors.[p.100,106] Renaissance Neoplatonists held nature as the soul of the world,[p.l02] and, made the tripartite distinction between matter, spirit, and soul.[p.l08] Under the sponsorship of the wealthy Medeci family, Neoplatonic alchemists and natural magicians, based on the assumptions that matter is passive and nature is to manipulated,[p.109] attempted to bring about changes here on earth by appealing to celestial influences. [p.l02] Frances Bacon would assimilate these assumptions into his techniques for the control of nature, "free of the ethical strictures associated with the view of nature as a living being."[p.lll]
The more radical organic philosophies of Telesio, Campanella, and Giordano Bruno, who were all products of oppressive Spanish control of Naples,[p.llS] and thus gave voice to "a feeling of helplessness among the 'oppressed"' ,[p.117] unified soul and spirit into a single living active entity, yet distinct from matter. They asserted "change as the dialectical opposition of contraries,"[p.102] and an "affinity of nature" which "resulted [in] the bonding together of all things through mutual attraction or love."[p.l03] The earlier vitalist view of Paracelsus had reduced vital spirit and phenomenal matter to a monistic self-active unity, with matter and its activity unified.[p.102] His holistic cosmology was "based on the power of the imagination, as the link between body and spirit. [p.l19] Moved by the misery of the people, Paracelsus "advocated the freedom of ordinary people to study nature for themselves and believed in a self active natural world and individual liberty." [p.120] "Each natural organism developed in accordance with its own nature, while its motion benefited and maintained the harmony of the whole,"[p.113] wrote Telesio. Campanella thought that "we must admit that sense and feeling belong to all elements ...[and not] ignore the sense and feeling in other things because [we] consider it irrelevant with respect to [our] so called knowledge of entities." [p.l04] And "Bruno's dialectic stressed the unity rather than the struggle of opposites, anticipating idealist rather than materialist dialectics," [p.l14] and challenged the hierarchical conception when he "assigned no prime position to the human species and held that nature was everywhere uniform." [p.llS] After the English Civil War, the religious and political dimensions of mysticism, magic, vitalism, and pantheism were emphasized, ideas that "for some groups meant the seizing of common lands and the establishment of egalitarian communal societies,"[p.l23] and undermined the basis for the patriarchal family. [p.124] "Naturalism looked forward toward a more egalitarian society based on the leveling of hierarchies." [p.ll7]
The emerging mechanical philosophies, "based on the logic that knowledge of the world could be certain and consistent,"[p.l02] took some of the naturalist's assumptions seriously, and rejected others. It would "assimilate and transform ideas such as Campanella's and Bruno's manipulative magic into a philosophy of power over nature." [p.l17] "The primacy of organic process gave way to the stability of mathematical laws and identities. Force was external to matter rather than immanent within it...change was simply the rearrangement of particles as motion was transmitted from one part o another in a causal nexus. Because it viewed nature as dead and matter as passive, mechanism could function as a subtle sanction for the exploitation and manipulation of nature and its resources." [pp.l02-103] "Mechanism took over from the magical tradition the concept of the manipulation of matter but divested it oflife and vital action." [p.lll]
In time, Neoplatonist and mechanical philosophy achieved something of a synthesis in the managerial perspective of the science of ecology, which makes it difficult to view the organic and mechanistic philosophies as strict dichotomies.[p.l03] Rather, these two perspectives on nature remain in tension, "some assumptions were transformed and retained while others were criticized and rejected." [p.105]
In chapter five, Merchant examines how the disorderly and chaotic realm of feminine nature was systematically subdued and controlled. Discoveries of the 'new science', such as Copernicus' heleocentrism, and Galileo's telescopic observations, contributed to the fear that nature's order might breakdown. Writers such as Machiavelli and others saw both nature and society as wilderness, and argued that fortune could be mastered by aggression and taking advantage of others whenever possible.[pp.l30-131] Unruly nature was associated with "the dark side of woman",[p.l32] "nature and women are both perceived to be on a lower level than culture."[p.l44] This assumption of a nature/culture dichotomy was "used as a justification for keeping women in their place in the established hierarchical order or nature." [p.l44] "If a woman was presumptuous enough to rise above a man, she must be 'repressed and bridled.'"[p.l45] Thought to be imbued with greater sexual passion, to mature earlier in regard to sex, and to obtain more pleasure from sex than men, women were thought to be more easily seduced by the devil, and thus, the bodily corruption of the male was blamed on the lusts and temptations of the female. [p.l31-133] During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works of art and antifeminist tracks depicted women as disorderly and insolent, and were followed by two hundred years of witch trials.[p.134] Even "those who defended women against accusation and trial did so by utilizing the prevailing antifeminist arguments." [p.l41] And reactions to this widespread oppression took the form of feminism.
In chapter six, Merchant shows how the new economic and scientific order would effect
women's lives by contracting them into domesticity, encouraging their dependence on their husbands and their inability to support themselves as independent in the world. [pp.l49-152] Women lost their place in their traditional occupations, such as weaving, baking, brewing, and midwifery. [p.l52] Education was limited so to restrict access to medical training and licensing to men.[p.l52] Women protested that the new science of medical delivery was fraught with unnecessary violence, but their voices were ridiculed as "meddlesome" and discredited. [pp.l53- 154] "From a male perspective ...the midwife symbolized female incompetence in her own natural sphere, reproduction, correctable through a technology invented and controlled by men--the forceps...For women, the midwife symbolized female control over the female reproductive function." [p.l55] Loss of control over midwifery meant loss of control over their own reproductive functions. [p.l55] The use of science to keep women in their place was widespread, including the argument that the sperm was superior to the egg and thus primary in generation. "[S]cientific studies continue to generate 'evidence' to maintain outdated assumptions about the male-female hierarchy." [p.l63] But considering how easy it is for human beings to actively ignore what they do not want to see, it seems important to remember that what is 'evident' depends heavily on what is being looked for...