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IN THE SHADOW OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: FROM MOTHER

EARTH TO FATHERLAND
by Maria Soledad Iriart

CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. ECOFEMINISM
3. THE DEATH OF NATURE AND THE RISE OF SCIENCE
4. THE MASCULINE RE-BIRTH OF HUMANS AND RATIONALISM
5. CONCLUSION
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. INTRODUCTION
This dissertation examines some ecofeminist critiques of modern
conceptions of nature. It focuses on the re-evaluation of the
nature conception within western thought, following the emergence
of science in the Enlightenment period. It looks at the analysis
that some ecofeminist critics have elaborated in relation to the
work of two of the “founding fathers” of modern science, Francis
Bacon and Rene Descartes, to understand how they re-conceptualised
nature and re-associated it with the new conception of women. The
focus is on the Enlightenment era because the ideas, then
constructed, brought about intellectual, political and economical
revolutions that are now considered to be the foundations of our
modern western society, economy, politics and beliefs. These have
been constructed in a way that is so disengaged from nature that a
fatal destruction of nature and a deterioration of social
relations have been allowed. Whilst the analysis will be
concentrated in the area of science and its epistemology of
rationalism, it is recognised that they do not exist in a vacuum
and are relevant and inter-connected to other topics, such as
religion, economy, politics, etc.

The analysis will use the ecological feminist critiques elaborated

in the last few decades by theorists, such as, K. Warren, V. Shiva
or M. Mies, and contemporary postmodern approaches, to reject and
deconstruct these and any other discourses attempting to establish
an absolute ground for knowledge and therefore a breeding ground

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for patterns of domination. I aim to show that underlying these

conceptions of woman and nature there are dualistic constructions
that have proved to be most destructive to life and our
relationships with nature and other humans. This dissertation
supports the ending of ‘all universal ideologies based on a
universal concept of human beings and their relation to nature and
other human beings’ because they have been deconstructed as being
eurocentric, egocentric, androcentric and materialist (Mies &
Shiva: 1993: 11). People on the streets, the academic world, the
green movement, indigenous peoples and even some novel scientists
are criticising western environmentally destructive policies. It
is not argued here that the ideology of science and modernity are
solely responsible for the current environmental crises or the
nature of patriarchal domination, as their roots go way back in
history, but it will be argued that they did allow for the
unprecedented acceleration of abusive practices which have now
escalated into a holocaust against creation. Vandana Shiva
described the current situation in these disturbing terms:

"The earth is rapidly dying: her forests are dying, her soils are dying, her
water is dying and her air is dying" (1989:xv).

It is this situation of destruction, which these ideologies have

caused, that has compelled me, and many others, to look for
alternative approaches to life. In order to effect life-enhancing
change one must first reach some understanding of what it is that
needs changing in the dynamics of western culture. Gandhi was once
asked ‘what do you think about western civilization?’ to which he
replied ‘I think it would be a very good idea’.

The Enlightenment period was an age of fundamental and influential

thinking. It has been ‘generally agreed that this period was
marked by an important and continuos trend of thought which
effected a revolutionary change in the outlook of Europe’ (Cobban,
1960: 28). However, the only revolution that materialised for
women, animals or nature was that their already oppressed
positions were to be ever further entrenched The philosophical,
political, economical and moral thoughts of that time are
considered to have founded the dualistic structure of modern
societies, where Man is understood not only as disengaged from
nature but antagonistic and superior to it. Here, it is argued
that this conceptual framework is based on key concept of
rationalised patriarchal anthropocentric domination. The most
notorious changes that this period effected upon western society
were the birth of capitalism, the formation of modern democratic
states, religious reformations, new trends of philosophical
thought and the rise of science and technology. Although all these

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changes have affected our modern relation with nature, this

dissertation is only focussing in the effects that science
produced, as this is the discipline in charge of understanding and
working with nature.

Scientific knowledge, as well as economic development and material

gain were central and sacred to the Enlightenment Age. The
Enlightenment project, guided by science, development and progress
gave the “green light” for environmental destruction, not just in
the already "man-aged" European countryside, but into the “virgin”
lands that colonialist were conquering all around the world. Man
was no longer part of nature and the earth became a natural
resource to plunder. In the contemporary view, through the
questioning and deconstruction of science and development as
universal projects, the Enlightenment is beginning to be
understood as a process that destroys life and life-enhancing
attitudes.

It must be observed that the term "nature" that is used in this

dissertation encompasses all life, from animals to trees to rocks
and humans. The whole theme of this dissertation is to urge a
return to seeing the circle of life instead of the Enlightenment
dualistic structure, with humans at the zenith of creation. When
such terms as "nature and women" are deployed it is absolutely not
meant to suggest any sort of dualistic difference but are merely
there for grammatical convenience, and it is not meant, in any
way, to suggest some hierarchical anthropocentrism. This
dissertation is written with a view to reforming the detachment of
the human being into a sense of belonging be celebrating the fact
we humans are animals and part of nature.

The first chapter will introduce ecological feminist ideas that

have been used to examine the different transformations, which the
conception of nature bore during the scientific revolution in the
Enlightenment. This chapter is based on the work of Karen J.
Warren (1996), where she has produced a magnificent brief
introduction to ecofeminism. It will describe the ecofeminist main
critique of modernity as a tradition based on patterns of
patriarchal domination of women, colonised people, animals and
nature. Patriarchal domination was not invented, but
intellectually rationalised, during the Enlightenment. In this
chapter, the direction of the dissertation will be determined, as
a study of the historical and causal formation of the conceptual
structure created during the Enlightenment, specifically the
relationship between the modern concepts of nature and women
within the scientific discourse. There will also be some

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discussion of the relationship between ecofeminism and

postmodernism in respect to their critiques of the Enlightenment.

The second chapter is the critical analysis of the changes

effected upon the notion of nature, and our relationship to it,
due to the rise of science in the Enlightenment. The focus is on
the gender association of nature and women, through the work of
Carolyn Merchant who proclaimed in the title of her book what had
occurred in the scientific revolution - The Death of Nature
(1980). This book looks at the transformation of an organic view
of nature to a mechanistic one. Her argument will be examined in
relation to the work of Francis Bacon, one of the founders of
natural science, through Susan Hekman’s study of his writings. The
main dualism under scrutiny here is the nature/culture one.

The third chapter focuses in the epistemology of science:

rationalism, with special attention to the work of René Descartes
who played a crucial role in its formation. Descartes is seen as
the father of modern philosophy and his mechanistic approach to
life gave rise to Cartesian philosophy. His approach is analysed
in psychoanalytical terms through the work of Susan Bordo who
correlates his attempts to separate the mind and body with the
child and mother separation during the Oedipal identity formation.
She refers to this process as the masculine re-birth of humans.
Here some other dualisms will enter the discussion, such as
object/subject, mind/body, and reason/emotion.

2. ECOFEMINISM
This chapter aims to describe the theoretical framework that this
dissertation employs to analyse the changes to modern societies
and to their relationship with nature that the Enlightenment
brought through the development of natural science. This chapter
is based on the work of Karen J. Warren (1996: ix-xxvi) because
she is the author of one of the best overviews of ecofeminism.
Ecofeminism is a new movement born out of the high interest given,
in the last few decades, to both feminism and
ecological/environmental movements (ibid.: ix). Feminists are
interested in why women are treated as inferior to men, and why
they have only been partially included in the sphere of culture.
Environmentalists are interested in why nature is treated as
inferior to culture and why humanity has not commonly been
included within the definitions of nature. Both movements seek
liberation so ecofeminists by connecting them together are aiming
to construct new practices based on a model of non-domination. It
is argued that there can not be real women’s liberation or
ecological solutions within modern industrial capitalist society
because its ‘basic socio-economic relations and its underlying

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values’ are founded on patterns of domination and exploitation,

therefore the best way to achieve a real positive change is
‘uniting the demand’ of all those oppressed by this system
(Ruether, 1975: 204 in ibid.: ix).

There is not only one monolithic ecofeminism, but a multiplicity

of positions, because as Warren points out, when different
feminist perspectives: liberal, Marxist, radical, socialist, etc.
are combined with different environmental philosophies, a
diversity of viewpoints about the relation existing between the
different kinds of dominations, to women, indigenous peoples,
animals, our environment and the rest (ibid.: x). These viewpoints
form a variety of proposed positions identified as ecofeminist.
They will hold different understandings of the roots, the tactics,
and solutions to, the present environmental and social problems
they challenge. ‘What one takes to be a genuine ecofeminist
philosophical position will depend largely on how one
conceptualises both feminism and ecological feminism’ (Warren,
1996:x).

However, Warren highlights an ecofeminist common ground where the

notions that a crucial connection between women and nature is
recognised as well as the domination to which both have been
subjected (1996: x). Whilst these connections may be the site of
its common ground, it also provides the main area for discussion,
in relation to the nature of this link. Here, in this
dissertation, the ecofeminist inquiry is directed to the critical
period in history of the Enlightenment. This type of inquiry is,
in Salleh's terms, characterised by the causal claim ‘that the
current global environmental and social crisis is a predictable
outcome of patriarchal culture’ (1988: 138, n.1 in Warren, 1996:
xi).

Many ecofeminists argue that ‘the historical and causal links

between the domination of women and of nature are located in
conceptual structures of domination and in the way women and
nature have been conceptualized, particularly in the western
intellectual tradition’ (Warren, 1996: xi). A conceptual structure
or framework is defined by Warren as the ‘socially constructed set
of basic beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions that shape
and reflect how one views oneself and the others’ and she
described the one used by modern industrial societies as
oppressive and patriarchal in that ‘it explains, justifies,
[rationalises] and maintains’ relationships of domination and the
subordination of women and nature (1996: xii).

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Plumwood (1993 in ibid.: xi), among others, uses the structural

idea of ‘value dualisms’ to establish the conceptual source which
different western social models throughout history have used to
persistently dominate, specially women and nature. She argues that
the western intellectual tradition has founded its conceptual
framework on a structure of value dualisms and her book focuses
specifically in the rationalistic tradition and its reason/emotion
dichotomy. Value dualisms, as described by Warren, are
‘disjunctive pairs’, where the relationship between ‘each side’ of
the pair is ‘oppositional and exclusive’ rather than
‘complementary and inclusive’ (1996: xi). Moreover, a ‘value
hierarchy’ has been established in each value dualism, so that a
higher value is granted to one aspect of the dualism, in
opposition to the other aspect, which is associated with lower
status (ibid.: xi). Some examples highlighted by Warren of ‘these
hierarchically organized value dualisms’ are: culture/nature,
reason/emotion, man/woman, mind/body, human/animal (ibid.: xii).
This structural theory of value dualism argues that in western
history, nature, emotion, woman, body, and animal have been
regarded as oppositional and inferior to their respective
disjunctive pair, culture, reason, man, mind and humanity and
therefore the only history that western societies can tell is one
of domination and oppression (ibid.: xii). On this basis, Warren
argues that, Western tradition has been founded on oppressive
conceptual frameworks that are common to all ‘social “ism of
domination”’ such as sexism, racism, speciesism, anthropocentrism
(ibid.: xii). These oppressive conceptual frameworks are
characterised by notions of power, relationships of domination and
a inner logic that explain and sanction oppression, it is like ‘a
structure of argumentation which justify subordination on the
grounds that superiority justifies subordination’ (ibid.: xii). As
the next chapter will show the modern nature/culture dualism has
been historically constructed through the role it played in the
development of science during the Enlightenment. Following on from
that it will be showed how this dualism is linked to rationalism,
an episteme that privileges reason and subordinates emotions. The
conceptual value dualisms hidden in this philosophy will be
studied through the metaphors and symbols used to express the
supremacy of culture over nature and of man over woman.

Susan Hekman has highlighted the relationship between the

contemporary intellectual debate of postmodernism and that of
ecofeminism because both movements ‘question the foundationalism
and absolutism of modernism and propose instead a non-dualistic,
non-unitary approach to knowledge’ (1990: 1). They both challenge
the epistemology of the Enlightenment as misconceived, and aim to
construct a new way of coming to terms with humanity, ‘human

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knowledge and its acquisition’ (ibid.: 1). The search for new
epistemologies dismisses any ‘attempt to find an absolute
grounding for knowledge’ (ibid.: 4). This is the rejection of the
great narratives, which has been expressed through two main
rejections: that of the dualistic structure underlying modern
thought and that of the scientific model of knowledge, developed
in the Enlightenment, as ‘the only paradigm of knowledge’ (ibid.:
4). Until recently, natural science has been considered as
representing the paradigm of true knowledge, perpetuating thus,
its epistemological superiority over any other discipline of
study, but postmoderns, ecofeminists and others, are objecting to
this hegemony. They challenge ‘this hierarchical view of
knowledge’ by focusing on ‘the interpretative [and constructive
nature] of all human knowledge’ (ibid.: 4). However, the
ecofeminist’s (and feminist’s) objection refers more specifically
to the gender bias that modern western epistemology, best
developed in the area of science, upholds. In this sense, Hekman
explains that rationalism is regarded as ‘a specifically masculine
mode of thought’ and the scientific claim that truth can only be
achieved by ‘rational, abstract and universalistic’ thought is
fundamentally regarded as a ‘masculine definition of truth’
(ibid.: 5). The rejection of the dualisms also relates to the
gender bias that this structure sustains, because behind each of
the dualisms on which the Enlightenment arguments are based there
is a ‘fundamental dualism’: male/female (ibid.: 5). All dualism,
such as culture/nature, rational/emotional or mind/body, contain a
privileged element, always associated with the male and a
devaluated one linked with the female (ibid.: 5). It is then
possible to say, in a simplified way, that ‘the feminist critique
extends the postmodernist critique of rationalism by revealing its
gender character’ (ibid.:5). In this way, the conceptual
nature/culture dualism is, in this dissertation, analysed in
relation to its gendered association of nature with the conception
of women and female and culture with the conception of men and
male. Hekman concludes that both movements, (eco)feminism and
postmodernism, seek the epistemological dissolution of ‘the
hierarchical dualism of the Enlightenment thought’, and its
replacement by an epistemology that accept ‘that there is not one
(masculine) truth but, rather, many truths, none of which is
privileged’ (ibid.: 8, 9).

3. THE DEATH OF NATURE AND THE RISE OF SCIENCE

This dissertation focuses on science because it is one of the most
powerful forces in modernity . Scientific practices and
assumptions have heavily influenced much of our current thinking
and relations. It has determined, and still does, many of our

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cultural and intellectual assumptions as well as our potential for

technological control of our environment (Outram, 1995: 47).

During the Enlightenment, when science -as a discipline- was born,

the term science did not exist. The word 'science' was not
introduced in English until the 1830s. The discourse of science,
as a practice and inquiry of nature was first developed within
other intellectual disciplines under the heading of 'Natural
Philosophy', and not yet as a separated defined body of knowledge:
Science (Outram, 1995: 48-9).

The religious Reformation and concretely its emphasis on

individual interpretation, had created, within the intellectual
world of the seventeenth Century, a ‘serious problem of the source
of certainty and authority’ in knowledge (Merchant, 1980: 194).
Martin Luther (1483-1546) gave to everyone freedom of conscience
to choose their own religious truth but this presented, to the
intellectuals of the Enlightenment, the task of having to search
for a new criteria which would measure standards of truth (ibid.:
194). It was a time of anxiety and insecurity (Bordo, 1986: 440).
Europe was emerging from the dens of the Dark Ages and the
medieval era, when the church and superstition dominated life
(Mason, 1993: 35). The religious crisis of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries altered the assumptions of the old
conceptual structure so much, that, an intellectual vacancy was
formed and a space for the discussion of science forged. Science
had to discuss such large issues as the relationship of man and
nature, the possibilities of knowing the external world and the
best way to organise that knowledge (Outram, 1995: 48). Natural
philosophers saw nature as an expression of God's ordering hand,
but an order that obeys natural laws that men could acknowledge
(Kramnik, 1995: xii). The task was to find the method that would
enable them to know nature: science. But gradually this discipline
separated itself from the theological context. Science embodied
the central Enlightenment value of rationality by developing a
practice which claimed to be based in an 'objective thinking,
without emotions, prejudice or superstition and without reference
to non-verifiable statements' (Outram, 1995: 48). Science has been
regarded since the Enlightenment ‘as the highest expression of
man’s rationality’ (Hekman, 1990:107)

The dichotomy of culture/nature and the association of man with

culture and woman with nature have been manifested since the early
stages of western thought (Hekman, 1990: 111). This association is
not an isolated phenomenon, but closely related the identification
of woman as emotional and irrational and therefore ‘barred from
the realm of knowledge in general’ and from the realm of science

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in particular (Hekman, 1990: 107). The dichotomy between nature

and culture, like others, is not unique to the Enlightenment
thought, but an ancient one, which has been traced back to the
birth of agriculture. However it does not imply that this
association is a universal and essential condition of humanity. As
this study will explain it has to be understood as an historical
phenomenon, a product of particular social forces. Especially
strong in the West has been the gender association of nature with
women and culture with men as its hierarchical relationship. Some
scholars, (Plumwood, 1993; Griffing, 1978; Nietzsche, 1964 in
ibid.: 111) have traced the nature/culture dichotomy, its gender
association and, its uneven relation to the Greeks, and argue that
since then this trait has not only continued but strengthened. The
rise of modern science effected a change in the conceptualisation
of nature that not only reinforced the connection between woman
and nature and separation of the man, which already existed, but
radically altered it. It is important to look at the change of
meaning that the Enlightenment effected in the association between
woman and nature, to understand its implications in contemporary
society. Carolyn Merchant, studied these conceptual changes
thorough the analysis of the metaphorical connections between
woman and nature in the language of the Scientific Revolution of
the Enlightenment.

Merchant argues in her book The Death of Nature (1980) that in the
earlier Judeo-Christian doctrine, which had ruled over Europe for
over a thousand years, there already existed domination over
nature and women, but the emergence of scientific rationality was
the final twist that released the full destructive potential of
Western patriarchal culture. The development of modern science
allowed that the already existing Judeo-Christian desire to
recover man’s lost dominion over the universe, materialised,
specially over nature (ibid.: 170). Although nature, in the
western tradition, has traditionally been described feminine, her
characterizations have changed along history and more dramatically
with the birth of science (Hekman, 1990: 113). Before the
Enlightenment, nature was feared as a wild, mysterious spirit of a
temptress but also revered as a nurturing mother; it was
conceptualised as both alive and female, and in this way
associated to women (ibid.: 113). ‘This two sided image generated
opposing attitudes towards nature’: on one hand, nature seen as a
source of life forged a cultural attitude of respect which
constrained her abusive exploitation, and on the other hand, the
image of nature as a wild force cultivated a social ‘desire to
tame her excesses, to control her power’ (ibid.: 113).
Nevertheless, the most influential characteristic of this double
image is its organic quality, because it was constructed by, from

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and through experiencing nature itself (ibid.: 114).

In the early modern period, the competitive practices of the new

commercialism, the religious wars and the growing stress on
individualism caused a break-up of the old order that had ruled
western Europe. This was a period of challenging the old ideas and
organisation structures and of articulating new ones, therefore
‘also a period of uncertainty and anxiety’ (Merchant, 1980: 125).
The construction of a new modern scientific system of organisation
required the disintegration of the previous understanding of the
cosmos as an organism. The re-construction of the ‘cosmos, society
and the self’, which shaped the new understanding of them, was
achieved ‘in terms of a new metaphor –the machine’ (ibid.: 192).
The conception of nature as a female organism to be both feared
and loved, gradually changed, and a new mechanical conception of
nature emerged. The change from the organic conception of nature
was carried out through an excessive emphasis given to the wild
side of nature, with no mention of a nurturing Mother Earth, which
brought about the dispassionate desire to control nature. This
conceptual construction rejected the vitalistic and animistic
ideas of nature enhanced in the Renaissance, on the basis of their
association with change, uncertainty and unpredictability, while
those ideas related to the passivity and manipulability of nature
were welcomed (ibid.: 195). ‘The removal of animistic, organic
assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature’
(ibid.: 193). The organic chaotic view of nature was progressively
‘transformed into a mechanistically conceived universe’ that could
be understood by human's rationality and therefore should be
controlled by scientists (Hekman, 1990: 114). The universe became
a colder, more impersonal place, governed not by divine
arrangement and intercession but by precisely mathematically
expressed physical laws. The death of nature as a living and
growing organism permitted the ability of rationality to
understand the now machine-like nature. Rational knowledge of the
external world would allow men to manipulate and dominate the
wildness of the now dead nature in order to apparently favour
these new super-humans who now, thanks to their rationality, can
stand beyond nature. This is the rise of modern science that by
the end of the eighteenth Century had established itself as the
new order.

"It is impossible to imagine the heights to which we may be carried

in a hundred years, the power of man over matter […]. All diseases
may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of
old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the
antediluvian standard" (Franklin, 1780 in Kramnick, 1995: 74).

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Although the pre-modern image of an untamed wild nature promoted a

desire for control, it differed from the desire generated in the
modern era because the former image still regarded nature as an
organism and therefore as a source of life to which humans were
linked, while the later mechanistic view sees nature as ‘passive
and subject to domination’ (Hekman, 1990:114). This conception of
nature had a clear effect in women who were seen as closer to
nature than men because of their physiological functions of
reproduction, nurturing and childbearing. In this way, women and
their social roles were now 'naturally' placed within the realm of
nature and therefore in a lower level than men and culture
(Merchant, 1980: 144). This is the establishment of the new
natural order which will rule western Europe and expand to much of
the world through the colonial expansion. The new conception of
nature, and of women, fostered by the rise of science, was to have
major implications in the development of modernity and especially
in the conceptualisation of the relationship between the man of
culture and the natural world he sought to dominate; the
nature/culture dichotomy. The logic of domination is built into
science- our current day global crises are not there through the
abuse of science but are embedded in the methodology itself.

Susan J. Hekman explains, in Gender and Knowledge (1990: 114-7),

the new modern attitude developed in the Enlightenment towards
nature through the work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). She analyses
his writing because 'his language, style, nuance and metaphor
become a mirror reflecting his [middle] class perspective'
(Merchant, 1980: 165). Hekman argues Bacon wanted to “establish a
'New Philosophy' that would inaugurate the 'Masculine Birth of
Time'” (Bacon, 1964: 92 in Hekman, 1990: 114). It should be noted
that Bacon, as Lord Chancellor, had, for three years, presided
over Britain's witch-hunting courts (Mason, 1993: 227) and so,
from an ecofeminist perspective, it comes as no surprise that
after putting women on "the rack" he moved onto nature itself.
Hekman points out from his writings, first, that he defined
nature as a machine’ and science as the tool with which its
mechanism ‘must be exposed and understood’ (1990: 115). Similarly,
Merchant argues that his writings are the use of 'the power of
language as political instrument in reducing nature to a resource
for economic production' (1980: 165). Secondly, that through the
use of sexual metaphors, he does not only identify nature as
female and science and the scientists as male, but establishes a
relation of domination between the two. Some examples are: ‘Nature
herself, in great part, nay, in her best part, is despised by
man’; ‘Nature must be taken by the fore lock, being bold behind’;
‘I am come in very truth to lead you to Nature with all her
children to bind her to your service and make her your slave’

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(Bacon 1964: 120; 130; 62 in Hekman, 1990: 115). These metaphors

generate a gendered association of the scientist or knower subject
as male and of nature or known object as female, as well as a
hierarchical relationship between the two where the male is active
and superior and the female passive and inferior. Bacon's
conceptualisation of the union to nature swings from a rape of
nature to a legal marriage, but basic to both is the key feature
of modern science, to dominate and constrain nature, to dissect
her by hand and mind and to penetrate her hidden secrets (Hekman,
1990:115-6):

This scientific method of study is based on the interrogation of

nature, not through abstract notions as the Greeks had enquired,
but through empirical experimentation where nature is forced out
of her natural state to create something new and artificial
(Merchant, 1980: 172). The new scientific agenda of Bacon was to
shift the primary focus of scientific attention away from
contemplatively perceived truth to the goal of mastery over nature
(Tiles, 1987: 227). Natural knowledge was now to be sought and
valued to the extent that it conferred the ability to dominate and
control, an expression and fulfillment of a distinctively human
potential. 'Nature takes orders from man and works under his
authority' (Bacon, 1870: 343 in Merchant, 1980: 171).. Man-made
experimental situations and dissections were to be the new source
of knowledge rather than one of observation of naturally occurring
phenomenon. Through his engagement and interference with the
natural world Man would be able to exhibit his superiority - a
pitiful indication, not of Man's power but of his neurosis. Bacon
transformed the magical tradition which saw nature as a teacher
and which induced constraints against penetrating, too deeply,
into her secrets into a philosophy which considered nature a slave
and which sustained sanctions in language that justified her
exploitation for human good. This new image of nature legitimated
the exploitation, mastery and domination of 'natural resources'
(Merchant, 1980: 189). And so here Bacon takes biblical dominion
one step further - now, it was not only permissible to subdue
nature but desirable (Mason, 1993: 37). This sanctioning of the
pursuit of personal and national gain as well as the old biblical
pursuit of power and dominion over, in Bacon's words the 'universe
of things', was music to the ears of the colonial powers and
subsequent industrialists (ibid.: 37).

This conceptualization of nature did not only construct a new

characterization of the female that required control, but also
formed a new conception of the male: ‘the man of science […], who
must prove his virility by penetrating the secrets of nature'
(Hekman, 1990: 116). The new definition of manhood is constructed

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in opposition and superiority to everything female: he is master,

active and instrumental; she is slave, passive and futile
(ibid.:116). These new conceptions of nature, women and men
profoundly changed the treatment of nature and of women in modern
science and by extension in society, economy, politics. But above
all, what fundamentally differentiates these gendered concepts, is
that while the male is rational and capable of repressing
feelings, the female is emotional and devoid of reason. The
scientist and science are divorced from feelings and matched
exclusively with reason. This emerging mechanical philosophy
created a male world because all the qualities associated with the
female, nurturing, mystery, intuition, emotions and so on were
effectively removed from our conceptual understanding.
'Reinforcing the mechanical view of nature that was developing in
the natural science was the rise of Cartesian rationalism in
philosophy' which will be explored in more detail over the next
chapter (Hekman, 1990:117).

4. THE MASCULINE RE-BIRTH OF HUMANS AND RATIONALISM

Bacon had formulated a new and easily secularized concept of
mastering nature, which could survive the ever-decreasing cultural
impact of religion. At about the time of his death another man, a
French philosopher named René Descartes (1596-1650), stepped into
the picture. In this dissertation Bacon could be labeled "the
rapist", as he advocated the probing into and uncovering of
nature's secrets whereas Descartes is "the murderer" - and,
indeed, the "decapitator". He constructed a mechanical philosophy
that ultimately presented a solution to the problem of certainty,
social stability and individual responsibility' (Merchant, 1980:
194). Descartes solution was to sever any connection between man
and nature and to place an absolute gap between them. He cut
humanity loose from the rest of nature by reclassifying other
living things as insensible, soulless machines. Everything that
consisted of matter was governed by mechanistic principles.

He was able to escape the unpalatable and heretical view that man,
too, is a machine by incorporating the Christian dogmatic view
that humans alone had a soul, which he identified with
consciousness. Influenced by the ancient Greek philosophers, and
the Christian context of the time, he devised criteria for truth
and certainty in scientific rational knowledge, an episteme 'based
on clarity, dispassion and detachment' (Bordo, 1986: 440). He
presupposed that the free and unconditional will and intellect of
God created a body of eternal truths, which were intelligible and
accessible to the human intellect, solving thus the problem of
certainty (Merchant, 1980: 203). This was the death of mystery.
Descartes argued that ideas as clear and distinct as geometrical

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figures or mathematical models of the world were the basis to find

out the universal true essence behind the mysterious appearance of
nature. Because clear and distinct ideas can be formed in the mind
it was argued that rational knowledge holds the key to truth and
certainty.

Merchant explains, how with this new mechanistic view, Descartes

pretended ‘to describe the entire universe - the human body, the
physical surrounding and the larger cosmos’ (1980: 204). In
Principia Philosophiae, he reconstructed the whole cosmos in the
form of a lifeless machine combusted not by its own vitality but
by an external divine force, in his treatise L'Homme, the human
body is analysed in terms of this new machine metaphor, as it was
the physical world in the mechanical treatise of Le Monde
(Merchant, 1980: 204). This argumentation conceptualises mind and
rationality as superior to everything, in the sense that they show
to be capable of understanding the whole universe, and therefore
not only capable but on the right to control it. All the spiritual
mysteries ‘were effectively removed from nature’ and all the
emotions and mysticism from the body (ibid.: 204). The death of
nature was finally declared and it gave way to the new dominant
philosophic and scientific culture as Francis Bacon had already
proclaimed the masculine birth of an era with no limits or
restrictions:

"No qualities are known which are so occult and no effects of

sympathy and antipathy so marvelous and strange, and finally nothing
else in nature so rare (provided it proceeds entirely from purely
material causes lacking in thought or free will) for which the
reason cannot be given by means of the same principle" (Descartes,
Principia Philosophiae: vol., part 4, p.309, as seen in Merchant,
1980: 205).

Descartes presented a charter of freedom for the new scientists by

blowing away any remaining hesitation, timidity or remorse they
may have had after joining Bacon's invitation to ‘lay hold and
capture her’ (1964:130 in Hekman, 1990: 115). An example of this
is the rapid rise in the practice of experimenting on live animals
that took place in the late seventeenth century as carried out by
self-professed Cartesians and mechanists (Mason, 1996: 36).
Animals were, after all, nothing but machines. Descartes decreed
that ‘the reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that
they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts’ and he
dismissed the cries, screams and yelps of the dogs he tortured as
no more than the mechanical reaction of clock-like automata
(Masson, 1996: 33). Descartes, the founder of rationalism, saw no
mystery in the universe or cruelty in the animal laboratory. The
wisdom and knowledge of the primal old, earth based, animistic

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religions, that, by means of quiet subterfuge and subversion, had

only just barely managed to survive, after century, upon century,
of masculine mono-theistic persecution was finally killed off by
the scalpel of Descartes - mother nature was decapitated and the
only people present to hear the screams had become deaf.

Even though Descartes is credited as being one of the fathers of

modern science the vast majority of his work, except for some pure
mathematics and geometry, was rubbished by his contemporaries and
later scientists. Voltaire described Newton as ‘the destroyer of
the Cartesian system’ (1733 in Kramnick, 1995: 56) as, one by one,
Descartes findings were dismissed. So why then does his legacy,
his methodology, still live on? It is argued here that the
dispassionate method that he advocated was so eagerly accepted, by
the pioneers of modernity, not because of its effectiveness in
reaching accurate results but because of its suitability in the
continuance of Bacon's proposal to subdue nature without any sense
of remorse.

‘I think therefore I am’ is the epigram that he is best remembered

for, indeed, it is the epitome of Descartes' subject-centred,
mechanistic philosophy. Unlike the organic individual who felt as
a microcosm within the macrocosm, he identified the rational
knowing subject with the source of all possible certainty, and by
extension, turned that which is not a subject into an external
object, a machine. In this way, Descartes placed the so pursued
certainty, which was meant to bring security to the modern
epistemology, firmly within man himself, who became the self-
conscious guarantor of all knowledge (Hekman, 1990: 62). The
subjective mind detached itself from the objective world and
started to understand itself as an inner space, separated from the
body and the external world, but, ‘at the same time, capable of
objectivation and examination’ (Bordo, 1986: 443). However, this
objectification of the world is not more than a conceptual
construction, as it is the subjectification of the mind (Rogers,
1996: 4). The world was effectively objectified by devoiding it of
mysterious, organic and sensuous forces that the intellect would
not be able to understand. 'The world became an it. The subject
became an I' (Rogers, 1996: 4). Bordo metaphorically describes the
conceptual framework constructed during the Enlightenment with a
masculine cultural re-birth of hu-mans, who emerged as decisively
separated entities and no longer continuous with the external
world (1986: 451). This is not a ‘biological category’ of
masculinity or of birth, but a epistemological position, where
that which lacks - mind, subjectivity, rationality - is not only
categorised as 'feminine' but dismissed (1986: 451). She parallels
this conceptual separation of the mind from the body with the

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separation that the child effects from the mother during the
Oedipal crisis at the time when his/her identity is formed. This
parallelism helps to understand the gender aspects of this
conceptual construction. In this 'psychological birth', while the
mind of the subject becomes the source that shape his/her
identity, its body and the object world around, representing the
mother, becomes distant and unfamiliar (ibid.: 444). 'The modern
project of growing up is a project of learning to deal with the
fact that mother and child are no longer one', that nature and
humans are not part of each other (ibid.: 451). The scientific
revolution is, in psychoanalytical terms, a period of self-induced
self-consciousness; as the images of cosmic unity breakdown,
anxieties about the distance between the self and the world grow.
Bordo argues that the modern way to deal with this separation is
one where the pain of losing the mother is concealed by
constructing a self that denies her, all she represents and its
dependency on her (ibid.: 451). This is a form of separation that
appears to the subject as consciously chosen and which therefore
offers the child the possibility of mastering and controlling the
one, with which the self had once shared its soul, body and nature
(ibid.: 452). Keller puts it in terms of the (male) child
achieving his final security by the identification with the father
(culture) -an identification involving simultaneously a denial of
the mother (nature) and a transformation of guilt and fear into
aggression (1982: 35). Indeed, this process can be mirrored in
the life of Descartes, himself, who committed acts of extreme
violence towards animals, in the name of science, whilst living
the life, as charted by Voltaire, of a lonely, homeless,
friendless exile (Voltaire, 1733 in Kramnick, 1995: 57). For
Descartes the embodiment of the self and its embeddedness in
nature represented an epistemological threat because such a
condition did not offer the possibility to distinguish and
separate between the inner occurrence and the external event, like
the child with the mother. Descartes re-constructed the symbiotic
relationship of the self with nature and with its body and re-
defined them in opposition to each other through the human/nature
and mind/body dualism where some interaction may occur but never a
re-union. This ‘mutual exclusion […] made possible the
conceptualization of complete intellectual transcendence of the
body’ and ‘established the utter diremption –detachment,
dislocation- of the natural world from the realm of the human’
(Bordo, 1986: 450). From now on, the value of nature (and
everything else 'out there') is given in relation to the superior
realm of humanity, never by its intrinsic qualities (ibid.: 450).
These words are mirrored in the words of Stephen Clark where he
states that '[t]hose who attempt the Cartesian epoch
(disconnecting our primitive belief that the world outside us

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really exists) will find that in eliminating world, and friends

and body they have also lost themselves' (1984: 46).

The masculine discourse of scientific knowledge is placed at the

disposal of the subject to reveal the relationship between the
objects in the external world, which is devoid of mind and
thought. This model of knowledge rejects both the body's forms of
knowing, its sensual and emotional responses, and the integration
of the subject with the object, either spiritually or personally
(Bordo, 1986: 450). These forms of knowing are not only devalued
but attributed to women and associated with the conceptual female.
Scientific study is based on ‘measurements rather than sympathy’
(ibid.: 450). The subject, cut off from the ‘female universe’,
rejects the ‘feminine’ elements previously included in the
conception of knowledge, such as merging with the known object,
bodily identification, emotional attachment (ibid.: 451). This
masculine construction of knowledge relies ‘on a clear and
distinct determination of the boundaries between the self and the
world’ (ibid.: 451). Evelyn Fox Keller expresses the same idea:

"The scientific mind is set apart from what is to be known, that is,
from nature, and its autonomy -and hence the reciprocal autonomy of
the object- is guaranteed (or so it has had traditionally been
assumed) by setting apart its modes of knowing from those in which
that dichotomy is threatened. In this process, the characterisation
of both the scientific mind and its modes of knowing as masculine
are indeed significant. Masculine here connotes, as it often does,
autonomy, separation, and distance. It connotes a radical rejection
of any commingling of subject and object, which are, it now appears,
quite consistently identified as male and female" (1985: 79).

Cartesian objectivism denies the ‘feminine sensuous’ part that

constitutes both the external world and knowledge itself. It
orders the world scientifically by constructing it as separated
from the subject, leading towards objective realism. Its
epistemological egoism relies on the representation of rationalism
as the superior, universal and certain episteme and it leads to
subjective idealism (Rogers: 1996: 4). At this point the
idealist/realist dualism is formed and everything is either
transformed into objects, including animals, or otherwise,
‘situated outside discourse. Discourse is no longer a creative
constituent of being’ (Rogers: 1996: 4).

The subject transcended this world of matter, and used scientific

knowledge as the tool for detached study, manipulation and
control. From now on ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no
obstacles’ and the subject, surrounded by a world of material at
his disposal, has no limits (Adorno and Horkeimer, 1944: 4).
However, this position which separates objects and subjects, body

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and mind, human and nature, is a constructed discourse that can be

reconfigured. The contemporary postmodern argument challenges
Descartes theory that there is only one, true method to acquire
objective knowledge, and defends an understanding of knowledge as
plural, heterogeneous and mutating (Hekman, 1990: 63). It has also
been argued that knowledge is not acquired through the artificial
separation of the knowing subject from the object, ‘but, rather,
that knowledge, along with subjects and objects, is constituted
collectively through forms of discourse’ (Hekman, 1990: 63).

Alfred Cobban (1960) suggests, that even from this detached

position, life destructive problems, such as the devastation of
the rain forest are regarded as harmful and injurious crimes
triggering within us strong feelings, due to their inseparable
relation to pain, suffering and death (1960: 11). These
instinctive feelings should not only be recognised but also
regarded as determining factors to identify our major problems.
The problem is that within rationalism these reactions are
regarded as mere emotional responses of low value.

There is a clear tension between the feelings towards cruel and

destructive acts and the rational justification under which they
take place but under rationalism it is always the latter that
takes precedence. A forest becomes a natural resource, a cow
becomes a beef-burger, a starving child becomes an unfortunate
casualty of economic mismanagement and an Indian woman who stands
up and says "no" to the building of a dam, that will destroy her
community, becomes a hysterical luddite. The point of discussion
here is that all atrocities can be rationalised, once concepts
such as love and compassion have been shelved. It seems that
emotional values are not worthy enough to be taken into the
account of decision making, as if our actions have to be carried
out without paying attention to our feelings. The Enlightenment
has been considered as a period which effected an ethical
revolution of moral and humane tendencies, resulting from the new
rational and empirical appreciation of relevant facts: a
systematic and rational theory that assesses whether the pain,
suffering and death resulting from processes of society are
actually necessary in the interest of some higher end. Due to the
work of the empirical utilitarian thinkers in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries some compassionate institutions were founded
to cut down cruelty within society. These moves were to a great
extent the result of a disposition to feel disapproval of acts of
cruelty, however these feelings, within rationalism, should always
be tamed by reason. Abusive practices, once rationalised, could
actually be sanctioned. It is in this sense that rationalism can
be employed to justify life destructive activities while denying

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the emotions attached to them and so the real legacy of the

Enlightenment is not the condemnation of cruelty but the
justification of it. Anna Kaplan, in her studies into
postcolonialism, identifies the very articulation of Universal
rights as an eighteenth century western concept which merely
perpetuated imperialism (1997: 156). In this sense, it is argued
here, that The Holocaust, a mass slaughter of people in the heart
of Europe, was an inevitable legacy of the Enlightenment that
Bacon, Descartes and other philosophers had helped to form. Adorno
and Horkeimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment lamented that ‘the
fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’ and argued
that science, rather than being a discipline constructed to
improve human conditions and relations ‘proved to contain the
seeds of a new form of dehumanization’ (1944: 2 & Jay, 1984: 38).
Under the dualistic framework that the Enlightenment perpetuated,
Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and "Other" dissidents represented the
most drastic image of otherness, opposition and difference within
the human western world and therefore they had to be ‘rationally’
annihilated (Jay, 1984: 39). However The Holocaust, it is argued
here, represents only one aspect of the many modern crises and it
should paralleled with other forms of systematic atrocities
towards other non-western humans and other non-humans beings,
which are still taking place.

5. CONCLUSION
The previous chapters have attempted to explain how the
oppositional and hierarchical relation between nature and culture
and the association of woman with nature formed during the
Enlightenment, with the rise of modern science, is no more than
another man’s constructed conception of himself, his environment
and his relation with it, and therefore it can, and should, be
changed. The modern conception of the nature/culture dualism is
not a universal nor essential one, as it is neither the
association of the male with culture and the female with nature;
they are historically specific and artificially composed. This
view has been expressed by MacCormack & Strathern (1980) who
explained that the confrontation between nature and culture and
the link between woman and nature are not immutable dogmas
determining the relations of society, but historical and cultural
associations constructed by white-middleclass-male-westeners to
gain global control over nature, women, animals and non-westerns,
and rationalism has been the means by which their devaluation and
subordination has been justified. The feminist contemporary
argument believes that ‘both the rape of nature and the domination
of women’ can only be overcome by eradicating ‘the objectification
inherent in the masculine epistemology of the modern era’ (Hekman,
1990: 117). Here is where the stage for the connection between

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women's liberation movement and ecology movement is set, and from

where ecofeminism rises.

Ecofeminist critiques of science have referred to this discipline

as a ‘masculinist project’* and as a ‘reductionist’ enterprise
because by presenting itself as a universal, value-free and
objective episteme, it has consequently ‘displaced all other
beliefs and knowledge systems’ which are life sustainable and aim
for constructive behavioral practice (Mellor*, 1997: 118 & Shiva,
1989:15). Masculinist science claims to produce disembodied
knowledge capable of reflecting and explaining all aspects of
nature, but, as Mellor explains, this is ‘a metaphor’ that
perpetuates the hierarchical assumption in western culture that
humans, by their condition of rational beings, are master
interpreters of a subordinated natural world (1997: 119). In fact,
the assumption that science is the best and most faithful
translator of nature' language, imposes an artificial limit to the
development of knowledge, already confined to the realm of reason
(ibid.: 119).

"Modern reductionist science, like development, turns out to be a

patriarchal project, which has excluded women as experts, and has
simultaneously excluded ecological and holistic ways of knowing
which understand and respect nature's processes and
interconnectedness as science" (Shiva, 1989: 14-15).

Fundamentally, reductionist science is a self-defeating project

because by claiming universal control of knowledge and the
superiority of scientific knowledge, it only achieves a
reductionist frame of mind that denies alternative ways of
knowing. Scientific knowledge rejects all embodied ways of knowing
by devaluing our body experiences, all feelings and emotions, the
power of the imagination and intuition and privileges the
exclusive use of reason.

As Merchant explained, during the Enlightenment period, the

previous organic view of nature to which pre-modern humans
believed to belong was re-constructed into the conceptual
understanding of nature as a machine at the disposition of the Man
of Reason. But I would like to finally conclude highlighting the
global effects that this conceptual replacement has effected not
only on the environment but also on social relations. Violence
against nature, a major characteristic of our times, has been
systematically and profitably executed by destroying its integrity
with life and specially with humans, but also violence has been
enforced against humans, specially women and tribal people, by
excluding them from their position of 'knowers' and their culture
from the realm of knowledge (Shiva, 1989: 22). The organic image

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of nature sustained social and environmental relationships based

on the integration of similitude and the complementation of
differences, while the mechanical view of nature, promotes
relationship of domination based on the assumption that
differences verify disconnection and hierarchy. Shiva argues that
the modern way of understanding nature, science, does not only
‘reduce the capacity of humans to know nature both by excluding
other knowers and other ways of knowing’ but also reduces ‘the
capacity of nature to creatively regenerate and renew itself by
manipulating it as inert and fragmented matter’ (1989: 22)

In Ecofeminism (1993), a book written by Maria Mies and Vandana

Shiva, the direct relationship between reductionist science,
colonization, patriarchy and capitalism is explained. In
accordance with Bordo’s psychoanalytical study, they have related
the violence of western science toward nature with the conceptual
representation of man above and separate of his embeddedness in
nature, negating their symbiotic relationship with Mother-earth:

"In order to be able to do violence to Mother Earth and other sister

beings on earth, homo-scientificus had to set himself apart from, or
rather above, nature [...]. The modern scientist is the man who
presumably creates nature as well as himself out of his brain power.
He is the new god, the culture hero of European civilisation".
(ibid.: 47).

The new description of humans as separate and autonomous beings

upholds that the wonder of humanity can only be fully conquered by
‘processes of emancipation and processes of liberation’ from
nature (ibid.: 47). And this view settled the ground for the
systematic abusive practices that followed the Enlightenment:
oppressive forms of colonialism, destructive ways of
industrialism, endless consumerism and so on.

It is the duty of current critics, such as ecofeminist or

postmodernist, to construct an alternative conceptual framework
which, is not based on value dualisms, as these only encourage
patterns of domination, but also one which does not impose a
universal or essential understanding of the world. In our
postmodern era we aim for an understanding of the self and the
world in terms of mutating constructions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor & Horkeimer, Max (1997) Dialectic of the

Enlightenment (1944) London: Verso

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Bordo, Susan (1986) ‘The Cartesian Masculinisation of the

Thought’. Signs, Vol.11: 439-56.
Clark, Stephen R. C. (1984) The Nature of the Beast Oxford: Oxford
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Cobban, Alfred (1960) In Search of Humanity: The Role of the
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Franklin, Benjamin (1780) 'Letter to Joseph Priestley' in
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Giddens, Anthony (1996) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An
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Voltaire, Francois-Marie (1733) 'On Bacon and Newton' in Kramnick,

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WEBSITES:
Plumwood, Val (1996) 'Environmental Ethics and the Master
Subject': www.cep.unt.edu/Comment/Plumwood.html
Rogers, Karl (1996) 'Ecological Politics Since The Death of God':
www.lancs.ac.uk/users/philosophy/mave/kr_2.html

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