Mechanicism
Jorge Riechmann
According to the prevailing view in Western culture, plants are barely living beings, more akin to inanimate objects than to animals. In contrast, for indigenous peoples, there is no doubt that they are living subjects from whom we can learn and to whom we owe reciprocity and gratitude: examples of this are the wonderful books by Robin Wall Kimmerer (both a university professor of botany and a Potawatomi indigenous activist) Braiding Sweetgrass (2021) and Gathering Moss (2023). Now, the most advanced Western science is rediscovering that the vision of those “savage” Amerindians is the most accurate one, as shown, for example, by Stefano Mancuso’s work on sensitivity and intelligence in the plant world (Mancuso and Viola, 2015).
How could we have been so mistaken about the nature of plants and other living beings? Anthropocentrism is one reason, but another very important reason can be found in a basic feature of the dominant worldview in the West: its mechanicism, which holds that nature is, in its essence, a great machine. Since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the mechanistic view of nature started spreading throughout the world: let us briefly see how we got there.
In Greco-Roman antiquity, as for indigenous peoples such as the Potawatomi, nature (physis) is alive (a good introduction to non-Western worldviews in Callicott, 2017). From Anaximander to Plato, the origin of the universe is compared to the formation and birth of a living being. Reverberating:
the echoes of the primordial Mediterranean: its inveterate veneration of Mother Earth, a land that literally acts as a mother and also has to be inseminated. In [Greco-Roman] myths and rites, there is a clear concern for the fertility of human beings and the earth. Agriculture, livestock care, and the formation of herds of goats and sheep keep men close to the land, whether tilled or not, reminding them of its fertility (Glacken, 1996, p. 49).
Here we have a living and fertile nature as an experience derived from birth, from labour: nature is what is born. But then comes – with Christianity, especially in Europe from the 12th to the 14th centuries – the idea of contingency, so well explained by Ivan Illich (2019, p. 108 ff.): everything that exists could not have existed and is a pure gift from God, sustained by his will alone. Nature rests in God’s hands – ah, but then these hands are withdrawn…
Carloyn Merchant (2020) convincingly argues that, with such an elevation of nature, the conditions are created for it, once removed from the hands of God, to lose what was its most essential feature: its status as something alive. This brings us to the Europe of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, where the mechanistic paradigm gradually gained predominance. A world of vital and living forces “gave way to an inert mechanistic system that supported the new capitalist tendencies of modern society” (Merchant, 2020, p. xix).
The comparison of the universe to a clock gained ground from the 13th century onwards (perhaps the pioneer was Oresme, who formulated it in his critique of Aristotle’s treatise On the Heavens) (Naredo, 1996, p. 21). In 1605, Kepler also uses the clock metaphor: “My intention is to show that the celestial machine is more comparable to the mechanism of a clock than to a divine organism”. Similarly, Descartes declares: “I recognise no difference between machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature composes by itself”. Newton takes it a step further, formulating the universal physical laws that govern the motion of inert bodies, and “nature comes to be regarded as a perfect machine. The universe, for Newton, was a Great Clock, and God, the Great Clockmaker” (Herrero, 2021, p. 67).
From the idea—in Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham—of nature as a continuous and contingent divine creation, we move on to the world of dead matter of the European Enlightenment (La Mettrie and the Marquis de Sade):
The [idea of] contingency creates the conditions by which, when the moment of contingency’s decline arrives, nature will lose not only its relationship with God – which had been clearly and explicitly conferred upon in the High Middle Ages – but also a characteristic that was unrelated to Christianity: its vitality. Modern science presupposes a nature that is not alive. (…) Once the universe has been taken out of God’s hands, it can be placed in the hands of men, but this could not have happened without nature first having been placed in God’s hands (Illich, 2019, p. 114).
With Fritjof Capra, we could identify the roots of today’s dominant paradigm (productivism/consumerism/extractivism) mainly in these two:
One is mechanistic science, the science of the 17th century developed by Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton and their contemporaries. The other is the patriarchal system of values, which, of course, stems from much older patriarchal attitudes, patterns of behaviour and beliefs. And the two are closely intertwined (Capra and Steindl-Rast, 1994, p. 97; see also de Castro, 2019).
The concept of nature that prevails in the West, a nature external to human beings, always passive and conceived in an instrumental way (as a means to human ends), tragically misleads us, because today:
Biologists point to principles intrinsic to life that categorically depart from even the most complex of machines. Living organisms cannot be broken down, like a computer, into hardware and software. The biophysical composition of a neuron is intrinsically linked to its computations: information does not exist separately from its material construction (Lent, 2021).
In this way, as Lent points out, systems thinkers have shown the fabric of life to be an autopoietic system similar to a growing fractal, from the simplest cellular organisation to the global view of life on Earth. Thus:
Everything in the natural world is more dynamic than static, and biological phenomena cannot be predicted with precision: instead of fixed laws, we need to investigate the underlying organisational principles of nature. This new conception of life leads us to recognise the intrinsic interdependence of all living systems, including human beings. It offers us the basis for a sustainable future in which technology is used not to conquer nature or to reorganise it, but to harmonise with it, thus making our lives more flourishing and meaningful (Lent, 2021).
A word of caution is in order here: although we sometimes identify mechanicism and reductionism (for example, Vandana Shiva in Mies and Shiva, 2015, p. 73 ff.), I would argue that analytical reduction as such is not the problem, but rather the failure to return from there to higher levels of organisation and the disregard for the existence of emergent properties (and above all, the instrumentalising and objectifying view of nature, of course). That is why we insist on the need for systemic thinking (Meadows, 2022).
In any case, and somewhat surprisingly, when Western science, since the late 19th century, started finding its way out of mechanism in a series of far-reaching epistemic breaks (thermodynamics, which in the second half of the 20th century became open-system thermodynamics, also called dissipative structures; the theory of relativity; quantum mechanics; ecology; systems theory…), mechanicism nevertheless became entrenched in some disciplines that still constitute the true pillars of the dominant culture today: I am referring above all to neoclassical marginalism in economics and molecular biology in the life sciences. And although I have written “surprisingly”, in reality the surprise should not be great, given the deep affinity between mechanicism and capitalism: a world of inert objects is more easily converted into a world of commodities. Today, a non-mechanistic philosophy is particularly necessary in those two fields, economics and biology. Valuable examples of the former include José Manuel Naredo’s eco-integrative economic approach (1996, pp. 463 ff.) (see Ecological Economics), and for the latter, Denis Noble’s proposal of “active Darwinism”, which is astutely studied by Fran Navarro (2024) (from this author, see Symbiosis, Philosophy of Biology and Plant Agency).
The eco-theologian Thomas Berry, often summoned by “neo-animist” schools of thought, suggests that we must conceive of “the universe as a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects” (Wall Kimmerer, 2021, p. 72). We should not see the wild pine or the raven as a what, but as a who. And we can agree with Yayo Herrero’s suggestion:
We need a science – natural and specially, social – that thinks about nature from within, without trying to dominate it, but rather allying with it. Earth sciences capable of slowing down the excesses committed by science itself. In Tarashea Nesbit’s novel The Wives of Los Alamos, one of the husbands who works clandestinely to obtain the atomic bomb in the dusty desert wonders: Shouldn’t we succeed in failing? (Herrero, 2021, p. 74).
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