After the Death of Nature

Carolyn Merchant and the Future of Human-Nature Relations

Kenneth Worthy, Elizabeth Allison, Whitney Bauman, Kenneth Worthy, Elizabeth Allison, Whitney A. Bauman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351582902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para escritoras

Carolyn Merchant's foundational 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution established her as a pioneering researcher of human-nature relations. Her subsequent groundbreaking writing in a dozen books and over one hundred peer-reviewed articles have only fortified her position as one of the most influential scholars of the environment. This book examines and builds upon her decades-long legacy of innovative environmental thought and her critical responses to modern mechanistic and patriarchal conceptions of nature and women as well as her systematic taxonomies of environmental thought and action. Seventeen scholars and activists assess, praise, criticize, and extend Merchant's work to arrive at a better and more complete understanding of the human place in nature today and the potential for healthier and more just relations with nature and among people in the future. Their contributions offer personal observations of Merchant's influence on the teaching, research, and careers of other environmentalists.

PART I

Environmental Philosophy and Ethics and Ecofeminism

1

Before The Death of Nature

Carolyn Iltis, the Carolyn Merchant Few People Know

J. Baird Callicott

Why Feature the Work of Carolyn Iltis?: A Personal Introduction

I cannot distinctly remember the first time that I met Carolyn Merchant, but it must have been in the early 1980s. It was probably at the Second International Conference on Environmental History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, April 9–10, 1983. This I infer from an item on my CV, which indicates that I was in attendance to give a talk about “The Land Aesthetic.” And because it was an environmental-history conference, Carolyn was also a participant. Whether on that occasion or another, I have a faint memory of an exchange with her at some conference round about then.

Later in that decade, I met and married Frances Moore Lappé. Frankie and I had been acquainted in the 1950s through the Unitarian Church. Then there were so few Unitarians in the South that our geographical section was bounded by my hometown, Memphis, on the east, and hers, Fort Worth, on the west. Every summer our families gathered for a Unitarian summer conference at a camp near Ardmore, Oklahoma. I had no idea that the Francie Moore, whom I knew when we were teenagers, had grown up to be the author of Diet for a Small Planet. I suppose, however, that there’s only one Baird Callicott in the world and so did she. Frankie saw my name in the emerging environmental-humanities literature and looked me up. Our first marriages had by then ended; and we hit it off right away.

In the 1980s, Frankie ran an organization called Food and Development Policy (aka “Food First”) based in San Francisco. She lived in Oakland-for-all-practical-purposes-Berkeley in the East Bay. I lived in Stevens Point, Wisconsin and spent my summers and school recesses with her; and she would swing by and visit me on her speaking jaunts as a public intellectual. Our marriage was brief. Long-distance relationships with no end in sight are doomed. But during that time, Frankie and I invited Carolyn over for dinner. As we chatted, I told Carolyn that I had been a fan of hers since she was writing under the name Carolyn Iltis. She expressed vehement incredulity. But no, I protested, it was true. So when Ken Worthy invited me to contribute to this book celebrating Carolyn’s immense contribution to the environmental humanities, fondly remembering that moment, I proposed focusing on her early papers written under that name.

I was not a fellow specialist in the history of science. So Carolyn had every reason to doubt that I would have encountered work of hers on such abstruse topics as the vis viva controversy (more about that shortly) and Bernoulli’s springs (the coiled kind, not the hot kind). Her work between 1970 and 1977, when she was writing as Carolyn Iltis, was squarely in the history of science, to be sure, but it was also just as squarely in the history of philosophy—for Iltis had a way of connecting the arcane technical issues, on which she focused, with the metaphysical and ontological issues in which I was interested. In twentieth-century Anglo-American Analytic philosophy, “metaphysics” had practically lost all connection with its ancient Greek and early Modern antecedents.¹ And Anglo-American Analytic philosophy of science was largely if not exclusively focused on scientific epistemology. And thus the metaphysical and ontological implications of science—both Modern and post-Modern—were almost entirely neglected. (In the undead corpse of that tradition, they still are.) The great exception is The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay by E. A. Burtt (1924). I loved that book (and still do), but precisely because it does focus on the metaphysics and ontology of Modern physical science, it received but a sniffy reception in twentieth-century philosophy of science. My interest in Burtt’s work led me to take an interest in the work of Carolyn Iltis, who was doing what her contemporaries in the philosophy of science were not. To what else was I to turn? And it’s the work of Carolyn Iltis that laid the foundation for Carolyn Merchant’s own great work beginning with the publication of The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (hereafter TDN) in 1980 right through to the publication of Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control From Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution (Merchant 2016).

Let me mention in passing a bit more personal history with Carolyn. I was asked to review the manuscript for Autonomous Nature that Carolyn had submitted to Oxford University Press. I was very positive in my referee report to the OUP acquisitions editor—with whom I had also worked on my book Thinking Like a Planet (Callicott 2013a). But I was also very critical and suggested a number of changes, along with a rationale for each. When I saw Carolyn at a conference in Paris in June of 2016, she told me that she had guessed who had reviewed her manuscript for OUP and very generously said that my comments and suggestions had been very helpful. And she insisted that there were other reasons having to do with timing for her decision to publish Autonomous Nature with Routledge instead. I still have my doubts though.

These bookends (pun intended) on Carolyn’s literary corpus—so far! (one more is in the works)—epitomize, in my opinion, a return to natural philosophy, which was the first philosophy in the Western tradition going back to the Ionian Greeks of the sixth century BCE (Merchant 2018). I have made a plea for such a return in “A NeoPresocratic Manifesto” and in a forthcoming book titled Greek Natural Philosophy: The Presocratics and Their Importance for Environmental Philosophy (Callicott 2013b; Callicott, van Buren, and Brown 2018). The Second Scientific Revolution of the early twentieth century, including the advent of ecology, has upended the ontology and metaphysics that became established in the original Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.² Carolyn Iltis tells a fascinating story of how that—shall we say for short, “Newtonian”—metaphysics and ontology got established, for it was not without its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opponents, as Dr. Iltis recounts sometimes in mind-numbing detail. (Okay, numbing to my philosophical mind, maybe, but such detail is the bread and butter of history and history was Dr. Iltis’s academic discipline.)

The Nine Carolyn Iltis Papers, 1970–1977

(1) The first paper by Carolyn Iltis (1970), “D’Alembert and the Vis Viva Controversy,” was published in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. ³ It’s a straightforward history-of-science paper all about very technical questions—how to measure the “living force” and what nomenclature to use regarding what measurement—all embellished with some mathematical formulae. It is of minimal philosophical interest or significance, especially as D’Alembert entered the controversy in the middle of the eighteenth century after the much more philosophically interesting and significant metaphysical and ontological controversies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been, for all practical purposes, sorted out. While Iltis indicates what vis viva means—“living force”—she scarcely locates it in those larger issues in this, her first, publication.

(2) Reading them in chronological series, as I am doing now, my disappointment, from a philosophical point of view, in Iltis’s first paper is somewhat relieved by her second, “Leibniz and the Vis Viva Controversy,” published in Isis (Iltis 1971) With this paper, some of the themes with which we are familiar in The Death of Nature begin to emerge—in particular, the metaphysical and ontological differences between Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton.

Still, however, the discussion is very much down in the technical weeds; the math gets more complicated; and illustrative diagrams appear.⁴ For example, Leibniz’s “arguments with Descartes, beginning in 1686, were thus designed to establish the superiority of mv² over m |v | not mv” (p. 23).⁵ Lurking in the background, nonetheless, are bigger issues concerning such things as the role played by God in physics and “the essence of nature for Leibniz.” Of interest especially to me, Iltis makes reference to “Parmenides and the pluralists” (that would be Anaxagoras and Empedocles) as having anticipated something like the conservation-of-matter law in holding that “‘being’ could neither be created nor destroyed” (p. 27, emphasis added). Foreign to Greek natural philosophy, however, is the concept of creation. In Greek mythology, the divine forms and forces of Nature are given birth to, not created. The subsequent Greek philosophers followed suit. Thus Parmenides, the Pluralists, and the Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus who should also be included with the pluralists as agreeing with Parmenides) thought that Being is neither generated nor does it perish—see Callicott et al. (2018) for a full discussion of all these matters. And of interest to everyone, I should think, is the revelation of Iltis’s range as a historian of science, signified by this passing reference to the Greek natural philosophers.

Ultimately, though, the technical discussion in “Leibniz and the Vis Viva Controversy,” opens out onto an expansive metaphysical vista: “What is real in nature for Leibniz is primitive force or striving, and this was developed by him in succeeding years as the essence of the monad. Motion and extension, the essence of Nature for Descartes, are to Leibniz merely relations and not realities” (p. 33). In the midst of the killing of Nature by Descartes and Newton, Leibniz becomes Iltis’s and later Merchant’s heroic defender of living (and even organismic) Nature with his vis viva, his living force. In TDN (p. 283), for example, Merchant writes, “Leibniz’s dynamic vitalism was thus in direct opposition to the ‘death of nature.’”

I cannot entirely agree with Merchant’s reading of Leibniz in TDN, however—in particular, with her claim that his was a philosophy of “internal relations.” In Leibniz’s view, the living force is internal to the stuff of the world, to be sure; and all the stuff of the world has consciousness (however minimal in much of such stuff). But that very interiority makes relations among the monads external. That is, they are not mutually defining, such that one would not be what it is if not for its relations with others. Indeed, “They are impermeable,” as Merchant says in TDN, and quotes Leibniz’s famous declaration concerning his monads that “‘they have no windows through which anything can enter and depart’” (p. 283). But that’s beside my present point, which is that the groundwork for Merchant’s TDN was laid down by Iltis, in the midst of the technical minutiae dear to historians, as early as 1971.

(3) In “The Decline of Cartesianism in Mechanics: The Leibnizian–Cartesian Debates” the metaphysical and ontological issues are foregrounded, as Iltis (1973a) begins with a summary of Descartes’ “worldview”—a word that appears in the first sentence of the article indicating a comprehensive cognitive structure. Her outline of Descartes’s worldview was revelatory for me, as I believe it would be for most philosophers not specializing in Descartes and even for some of those of us who do.⁶ The distinction between philosophy and science became sedimented in the outlook of professional philosophers after the disciplination of philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century. And so Descartes’s “philosophy” (represented by the Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy) is familiar to all us philosophers, generally speaking, but his physics (contained in Parts II and III of his Principles of Philosophy) is not. Of course, there was no distinction between philosophy and science prior to the twentieth century and certainly not in the minds of Descartes, his contemporaries, and his immediate successors.

What now especially strikes me in the summary of Descartes’ natural philosophy that Iltis provides is how much it has in common with that of the Greek natural philosophers, including Aristotle, whose philosophy so greatly infected that of the Scholastics against whom Descartes cast his own. Like Parmenides, the other Eleatics (excepting the Atomists, whom I anomalously include among the Eleatics), and the qualitative pluralists, Descartes denied the existence of the void or empty space. Like Aristotle, Descartes thought that the sun and stars were composed of an unearthly “aether”—a concept common in Presocratic natural philosophy prior to Aristotle’s appropriation of it for his own celestial mechanics (p. 357). And like practically all the Presocratics, Descartes thought that the earth was at the center of a vortex motion that exerted a centripetal force, which of course Newton later characterized as the gravitational force. But also somewhat as in twenty-first century physics, Descartes represented palpable matter itself to be spun from “primitive matter” or aether (his continuous physical plenum). The continua of contemporary physics are now called “fields,” such as the ubiquitous Higgs field, recently confirmed with such fanfare, and the gravitational field, waves in which have recently been detected (O’Luanaigh 2013; Svitil et al. 2016). (The apparent action-at-a-distance force of gravity vexed Newton. Einstein’s reinterpretation of gravity as a field might have vexed him even more, but at least it salves the action-at-a-distance carbuncle on his mechanical worldview.)

Iltis’s title might give the impression that Leibniz and Descartes were the principals in a debate, as once were Descartes and Hobbes, but the debate actually took place between exponents of the two in the early eighteenth century. The lives of Descartes (who died in 1650) and Leibniz (who was born in 1646) barely overlapped. From the overview of the philosophical forest with which the essay begins, it quickly descends to the level of the historical trees and even the underbrush. Iltis first distinguishes the variations on the Cartesian theme by its individual champions, focusing on two in particular (Jean-Pierre Crousaz and Pierre Mazière) running on for several pages—complete with even more complicated mathematical equations. Then, quite methodically and at equal length, the discussion turns to the variations on the Leibnizian theme, focusing again on two in particular (those of Jean Bernoulli and Charles-Etienne Camus)—this section complete with yet more complicated diagrams. Next it turns back to the Cartesian counter attack (by Jacque Eugène de Louville and Jean Jacque Mairan). Then it all ends with a brief summary—and an ironic one, because it seems that the Cartesians wound up scoring points that ultimately supported the Newtonian worldview, not that of Descartes:

To the extent to which their mechanical points were valid the results became united with Newtonian or Leibnizian mechanics. Thus Mazière and Louville used aspects of the Cartesian worldview to make Newtonian points; Bernoulli and Camus strengthened Leibnizian concepts. However, Crousaz and Mairan, working within the traditional Cartesian framework, unsuccessfully attempted to retain a Cartesian kinematics. In this manner the Cartesian worldview declined in mechanics, for it could not produce a unique and adequate physics of the terrestrial world.

(p. 373)

(4) The next paper by Carolyn Iltis (1973b), “The Leibnizian–Newtonian Debates: Natural Philosophy and Social Psychology,” continues the widening and deepening of Iltis’s intellectual compass that began in her second paper—expanding herewith from mechanics to natural philosophy more generally and to the social psyc...