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The Dread of Nature’s Lifeless Physical Energy
From scientific explanation to a dark pantheistic evaluation
In the late Stone Age and Neolithic periods, early cultural humans likely perceived all of nature as alive, as though material things such as mountains, lakes, and the stars in the sky were living bodies animated by unseen spirits, just as our minds seem to direct our bodies’ actions.
Eventually, scientists came along and “disenchanted” nature with the “iron cage” of Reason, as Max Weber put it. This is to say not just that modernity “killed God,” as Friedrich Nietzsche said, but that science saw through nature’s spirit.
Scientists reduced the gods, woodland sprites, and ancestral spirits to physical energy. Energy is the capacity for doing work by applying force on something to make it move. According to The Physics Hypertextbook, energy is:
- “a scalar quantity”
- an abstraction that “can’t always be perceived”
- something that’s “given meaning through calculation”
- “a central concept in science”
Energy comes in various forms, such as mechanical, thermal, radiational, gravitational, and strong nuclear. Energy is supposed to be strictly physical in that it’s objective and measurable, not…
