The mechanical worldview reduced environment from complex existence to mere material object

Evidence

As I have been arguing, a fundamental category of modern thought shaping and reshaping our modernist existence is the mechanical view of the world, a view that not only distanced human life from the life surrounding the human and nonhuman environment but also created a sovereign reason that took away value from life. To ask such a question is to begin with the very concept of “environment” that was converted by the mechanical worldview from an otherwise complex form of existence—which encompassed as much cosmology and epistemology as the stones, the trees, and the air making up that environment—into a merely material object. Environment is all that surrounds the human agent, and makes that agent in the process, but the crisis within and challenge to the modern world consist precisely in the recognition of that which has been excluded from the very processes of thinking, that which is value-laden but has ceased to have value. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 487

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘environment’ in Hallaq’s sense as prior to its mechanical reduction.
• XREF: connects to: Technological transformation of physical nature erases the dimension of contradiction in lived reality — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 305; Physics’ pursuit of objectivity paradoxically de-materialized nature — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 575; The organic-to-mechanistic shift reconstructed nature as dead and subordinate — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 51 (+4 more)