The organic worldview persists underlying 20th-century ecology and process philosophy.
Evidence
Similarly, although the mechanistic analysis of reality has dominated the Western world since the seventeenth century, the organismic perspective has by no means disappeared. It has remained as an important underlying tension, surfacing in such variations as the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, American transcendentalism, the ideas of the German Naturphilosophen, the early philosophy of Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century vitalists, and the work of Wilhelm Reich. The basic tenets of the organic view of nature have reappeared in the twentieth century in the theory of holism of Jan Christiaan Smuts, the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the ecology movements of the 1930s and 1970s, alternative analyses in nuclear physics (the “bootstrap” model), and developmental theories in psychology. Some philosophers have argued that the two frameworks are fundamentally incommensurable. Although such a perception of the dichotomy is too extreme, as the fusions between the two perspectives discussed in previous chapters have shown, a reassessment of the values and constraints historically associated with the organic world view may be essential for a viable future. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1065
Categorization
- XREF: Names Whitehead, ecology movements, holism — the intellectual lineage the polyad’s eco-justice thread draws on. — connects to: Ian McHarg made ‘natural processes’ the central lexicon of postwar planning — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 702; Ecology’s holistic presuppositions long predate the modern science of ecology — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 1078; Environmentalism needs a worldview shift to relationality, not just policy fixes. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 1036 (+4 more)
- SEED: An essay could trace the Merchant taxonomy of organicism’s recurring appearances from Romanticism to 1970s ecology to today’s process and systems thought.
Broader Connections
- Ecology’s holistic presuppositions long predate the modern science of ecology
#corroborates(0.90) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1078 - The organic-to-mechanistic shift reconstructed nature as dead and subordinate
#expands(0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 51 - Process philosophy claims mind and nature share one substance of events
#expands(0.80) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 480 - Environmentalism needs a worldview shift to relationality, not just policy fixes.
#expands(0.75) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1036 - Organic and mechanical views of nature interpenetrate rather than oppose cleanly
#responds-to(0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 445 - Human culture and the natural environment form an interdependent dialectical system.
#complicates(0.70) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 251