CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE
-Animistic - all of nature, earth & sky is alive, animated; polytheism; vitalism
-Development & decay - nature as an organism going through life-cycle
-Divine Chaos - nature is an indifferent and awesome vast void that annihilates self-identity
-Power of creation & rebirth, regeneration; purposive
-Unpredictable bully - blind, mindless force causing random inconvenience and catastrophe (in contrast to order of the mind)
-Inanimate stuff - guided by mechanical laws; reducible to parts
-Controllable - to be subjugated to human will
-Divinely designed or created earthly hierarchy- the artifact of god - received by humankind with instructions (interpreted & followed, or not)
-stewardship
-multiply & subdue
-Provider - supply depot (full or depleted); source of riches if they can be extracted
-Artistic medium for human creation and/or interaction
-Paradise Lost:
Pagans' golden age of the past, or pre-existence of the soul
Jews & Christians - the time before the fall
Romantics - child / nature innocence
Freud - infant at the breast
-Wild Kingdom - the theatre for trophy, camcorder, life list
-Open-air gymnasium - emph. on sensual high of strenuous accomplishment, overcoming limits. (Formerly, adversary?)
-New Age Temple - for vision quests, drumming, aboriginal-like rituals facilitating self-esteem, rites of passage or sene of integrity
-Source of power, experienced through connection to it
-Gaia - earth a homeostatic & self-regulating living organism
-new version of life-cycle metaphor
-Biodiversity - living nature of contemporary Western biologist
-Homeostatic optimal equilibrium
-Chaotic, multiple equilibria
-Social construction: no nature except what we make of it; no objectivity, only cultural & psychological projection
ANCIENT WESTERN SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF
THE NATURE OF MATTER
•THALES OF MILETUS (B630 BC) World a single 'substance' - an organism
•OTHERS - A single-element (fire, air, water)
•ANAXAMANDER - An eternal and unchanging substance, differentiated
•HERACLITUS (5-6TH C BC)- The priniciple of becoming.
•PARMENIDES (5TH C) -A principle of being. he viewed change as impossible
•DEMOCRITUS (B460 BC) - Reconciled these opposed principles by supposing that being is manifested in some invariable substances, which can mix or separate and thus give rise to the observed changes.
Change not due to external mover, but to internal efficient causes
"Creation is the undesigned result of inevitable natural processes": emphasized "necessity"
•Epicurus (342?-270BC): not gods in the world, nor any unconscious thought on the part of nature itself
•Lucretius (96?-55BC) principles should be visibly demonstrated wIth a parallel from the world of the senses
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION:
Rediscovery of Greek idea that physical processes can be described mathematically
•Copernicus (1473-1543) - Earth revolves around the sun
•Paracelsus (1495-1541) - Looked at matter and spirit as unified into a single, active, vital substance. Humans were miniature replicas of the greater macrocosm, composed of soul and physical body, and uniting these, an astral spirit, represented by the faculty of imagination
•Galileo (1564-1642) - Emphasized observation and experimentation over the Church's rationalistic authority. Only "primary qualities," which can be characterized mathematically, correspond to material realities.
•Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) - Founded Royal Society, the first scientific society.
Formulated the inductive method
-technological control of nature the driving motivational force of science
She [Nature] is either free and follows her ordinary course of development as in the heavens, in the animal and vegetable creation, and in the general array of the universe; or she is driven out of her ordinary course by the perverseness, insolence, and forwardness of matter and violence of impediments, as in the case of monsters; or lastly, she is put in constraint, molded and made as it were new by art by the hand of man; as in things artificial. (de Augmentis)
•René Descartes (1596-1650) - Mechanistic view of world sometimes called 'Cartesian'
-metaphysical dualism (spirit or mind vs. matter)
-all physical structures, including bodies, are machines.
-reduced nutrition, sensation, and movement (Aristotle's three simpler grades of soul) to matter in motion
These [bodily] functions follow naturally in this machine entirely from the disposition of the organs - no more nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton, from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels. Wherefore it is not necessary, on their account, to conceive of any vegetative or sensitive soul or any other principle of movement and life than its blood and its spirits, agitated by the heat of the fire which burns continually in its heart and which is of no other nature than all those fires that occur in inanimate bodies. (Treatise of Man)
•Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) - All of nature a perfect machine, governed by mathematical laws: determinism. Invented differential calculus. Science united with religious quest; experimented in alchemy.
It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable movable particles, of such sizes and figures and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that these primative particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made in the first creation. (Optiks)
•Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827):
An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists - supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis - would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past would be present to its eyes.
(side note: quote by C.S. Lewis on the will to power: "Serious magical endeavor & serious scientific scientific endeavor are twins. . . born of the same impulse. . . how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is technique."
MECHANISTIC CONCEPTION OF LIFE
La Mettrie (1709-1751), Man a Machine: Materialistic account of soul - against Descartes, who had reserved an immaterial soul for humans.
•Mechanism vs Vitalism debate. Leibig vs Pasteur in 1860's: Did fermentation require whole living yeasts, or was it independent of that? 1897 Buchner showed the whole cell was not necessary - a starting point for the biochemical ("enzyme") understanding of life.
•T.H .Huxley (1825-1895): reduced cell further, to its material content: life identified with a single material entity - proteins.
•Jacques Loeb (1859-1924). 1911: The mechanistic conception of life. Original title: The control of life phenomenon. Founded large research program at Rockefeller Institute.
THE RATIONALISTIC, SCIENTIFIC-MATERIALIST METAPHYSICS
•Assumes separation of observer and observed. Observer is out of picture, assumed not to have effects on phenomenon under study. Makes unproblematic contribution to knowledge.
•Posits a domain of material reality that can be explained in terms of lawful regularities. Can be studied by decomposition and reduction.
•The rest of reality is assumed to be controlled by chance, accident, error, and is not amenable to objective scientific study
•Scientific models represent reality
•What is unrepresented is of no great importance
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
•Nature seen as profane.
•Nature can be radically rearranged without destroying its organic integrity, since it has none.
•Leads us to think we can manage events rather let nature take its course.
•Compartmentalization of knowledge.
•Ethical discourse is denigrated & ethical assumptions are obscured.
EXCEPTIONS: THEMES OF ORGANICISM AND HOLISM
IN WESTERN THOUGHT
•Aristotle: nature is the world of self-moving things; life explained by powers of the 'soul'
•St. Thomas Aquinas: purpose or end of the lower parts of nature serve the higher; the higher guide the lower toward common moral good
•Michele de Montaigne (1533-1592) - Humanist who resisted reductionism and over-confident explanations of nature: "We must bring more reverence and a greater recognition of our ignorance and weakness to our judgement of nature's infinite power. How many improbable things there are… about which we should at least preserve an open mind…. For to condemn them as impossible is rashly and presumptuously to pretend to a knowledge of the bounds of possibility." (fr. Measuring truth and error)
•Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) organicism - every part of the whole is an instance of the divine. Ultimate ethical value on the whole.
•Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) - Monadology: universe composed of series of spiritual or mental energy-laden and soulful units.
•Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) - Poet and scientist who examined the whole patterns of living processes, such as metamorphosis. Attemped to explore final causation (goal-direction) in scientific terms.
BREAKDOWN OF MECHANISTIC MATERIALISM IN PHYSICAL SCIENCES:
RELATIVITY AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
•James Maxwell (1831-1879) - theory of electromagnetism & concept of force field. Negative charges do not act like masses in Newtonian mechanics.
•Albert (1879-1955): Electromagnetic fields are physical entities in their own right, which can travel through empty space; not explained mechanically. His Special Theory of Relativity unified and completed classical physics (electrodynamics & mechanics). Showed convertibility of mass and energy. Undermined ideas of absolute space and time in Newtonian world view, showing space and time are on a 4-dimensional continuum. Undermined the detached observer: Different observers will order events differently in time if they move with different velocities relative to the observed events.
• in the 1920's Niels Bohr, de Broglie, Schrödinger, Pauli, Heisenberg: sorted through the paradoxes of atomic structure to arrive at the quantum theory. Sub atomic particles are nothing like solid atoms: they are very abstract entities that have a dual aspect, depending on how we look at them, they appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves.
RELIGIONS PROVIDE
Basic Values - things, qualities, principles held to be worthwhile
Worldview - beliefs about the world and an overall perspective in which to view them
Morals And Ethics - encourage (prescribe) and enjoin (proscribe) certain behaviors.
Ceremonies And Rituals - convey and reinforce values, beliefs, injunctions
Spirituality - supernatural forces that can arouse moving feelings and emotions and appeal to intuition.
CONCEPTS OF NATURE IN ECOLOGICAL SCIENCE
•Ernst Haeckel, 1873, coined the word "oekologie" from Gk. oikos "home" + ology, "study of"
•Frederic Clements, Amer. botanist - by 1910, 1916 formulated succession idea in which plant communities change like developing organism organism, climax concept; early 'relay floristics' hypothesis: one seral stage prepares way for next.
•Charles Elton - energetics: trophic levels, 1927; Substituted "mature ecosystem" for "climax," but like Clements, saw nature as tending toward order. More like an automated factory than a superorganism.
•E. Odum (1940-50's) - ecology within an economy of energy. A balanced homeostatic system, maintained through biol. diversity.
Characteristics of system homeostasis as successional stages progress:
CHAOS THEORY AND ECOLOGY
•Drury & Nisbet 1973 J. of the Arnold Arboretum, "Succession" - examined data from studies of old fields (secondary succession). Succession does not lead anywhere; change is without any determinable direction and goes on forever. No evidence of progressive development in nature (incr. in biomass; diversification of spp; no greater cohesiveness, no greater regulating of envt.) None of criteria Odum stated for mature ecosystems are fulfilled. Individualistic, site-specific, differential survival. No emergent collectivity or "organism."
•Pickett & White, eds. 1985, Ecology of natural disturbances and patch dynamics. Virtually all naturally occurring and man-disturbed ecosystems are mosaics of environmental conditions. Roots in population biology methology: individuals, no emergent qualities. Perturbations & random events (colonizations, fires, soil types, etc.) play larger role.