Material ecological changes and the organic social order’s collapse paralleled the cosmos’s mechanical transformation.
Evidence
As economic changes irrevocably altered the ecology of the farms, fens, and forests of Europe, as the organic hierarchical order was undermined by social mobility, and as the earth’s womb and communal resources became the basis for a market in money and property, so too the larger cosmos as a living organism was being transformed. As a projection of the self and society onto the celestial spheres, the macrocosm, like the human microcosm, was for most Renaissance philosophers a tightly knit unity of body, soul, and spirit, within which all things were arranged in a hierarchical order. To see how these elements were reordered and assimilated or radically rejected by an emerging mechanical framework is the task ahead. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 436
Categorization
- XREF: The macrocosm-microcosm homology echoes the earlier organic cosmology chapters of this same book (ch 4-9), connecting celestial projection to the female earth and body politic already traced. — connects to: Ecosystem disruption shaped feudalism’s fall and the rise of democracy and capitalism. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 335; Material ecological change undermined the organic social metaphor — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 337; The organic cosmos gave way to a mechanical order where power meant active intervention — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 758 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- The organic cosmos gave way to a mechanical order where power meant active intervention
#corroborates(0.92) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 758 - The organic-to-mechanistic shift reconstructed nature as dead and subordinate
#corroborates(0.88) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 51 - The mechanical worldview reduced environment from complex existence to mere material object
#corroborates(0.82) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 487 - Scientific quantification of nature parallels society’s reduction of humans to abstract labor power.
#expands(0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 583