Pre-modern natural inquiry combined technological exploitation with participatory understanding of nature

Evidence

Had there not been such a radical change since the sixteenth century in the fields of natural science, technology and labour that it was implausible to assume that one and the same epistemic interest might form the universal transcendental framework for a relationship with external nature? Had the seventeenth century not seen the beginning of the victorious progress of a particular form of technology, and a particular way of relating to external nature, with which a qualitatively different variant had coexisted? This variant had been different not because it was hidden behind a cultural mask, but because nature was seen in it as a technologically exploitable causal network, and at the same time as a process requiring to be understood and in which the investigators themselves were involved. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 607

Categorization

• QUESTION: Was there really a lost variant of natural inquiry that treated nature as both exploitable causal network and shared participatory process?
• SEED: Article angle: history of a suppressed alternative science that treats the investigator as inside the process being studied.
• XREF: connects to: Nature-copied invention forms the mythic root of Native science and technology — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 758; Ecology’s holistic presuppositions long predate the modern science of ecology — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 1078; Full understanding requires both scientific and indigenous ways of knowing — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 37 (+8 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Nature-copied invention forms the mythic root of Native science and technology — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 758; Ecology’s holistic presuppositions long predate the modern science of ecology — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 1078; Full understanding requires both scientific and indigenous ways of knowing — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 37 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The Scientific Revolution’s death of nature licensed nature’s manipulation #complicates (0.82) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 761
• European curiosity required mechanisms that rendered the world into objects #complicates (0.81)
• Bacon framed scientific method as the capture and enslavement of a female nature #complicates (0.76) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 676