Treating nature as a vegetable made it both manageable and non-atheistic

Evidence

The vegetative metaphor offered immense advantages for Latitudinarian philosophers such as More and Cudworth who wished to present a moderate rational philosophy of compromise between the excesses of the Civil War enthusiasts with their animistic philosophies of nature and Hobbesian materialists who viewed nature as composed of “dead, stupid matter” forming beings by blind and fortuitous motions. As a cosmoplastic vegetable, nature retained its fundamental organic character. It was alive yet not uncontrollable or unpredictable. The older conception of the world as an animal with sensation and self-activity implied the possibility of unaccountable, irrational actions—one could never be fully certain what an animal might do. Not only did animism imply atheism, but enthusiasm as well, and in both philosophies events could neither be predicted nor controlled. If, on the other hand, one denied sensation and all life to nature, the rest was mechanism—or lifeless matter in motion with atheistic implications. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 906

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch32’s claim that organic cosmology restricted power while mechanism licensed exploitation — this shows the middle vegetable position being engineered specifically to retain human management of nature. — connects to: Vitalist religion equated knowing nature’s secrets with knowing God’s works — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 529; Animist vitalism functioned as an ethic restraining exploitation of nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 158; Mechanism removed the moral barrier that had made controlling nature seem impious — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 419 (+6 more)
• SEED: A theologically-economical compromise — keeping an entity alive enough to be managed yet dead enough to be controlled — maps provocatively onto how states today grant ‘life’ to ecosystems or corporations only insofar as they are governable.

Broader Connections

• Mechanism removed the moral barrier that had made controlling nature seem impious #corroborates (0.92) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 419
• Nature-domination’s roots precede the Enlightenment in earlier rationalism and Christianity. #expands (0.80) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 287
• Nature’s qualities are historical, not fixed, under human mastery #expands (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 825
• Animist vitalism functioned as an ethic restraining exploitation of nature #qualifies (0.78) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 158
• Man is both plant and animal, joining vegetative and sensitive nature #responds-to (0.78)
• Monotheism’s disenchantment of nature enabled scientific exploration and atheism #qualifies (0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 561
• Modernity preserved the opposition to nature while discarding the afterlife #complicates (0.72) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 387