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The Fear of Nature’s Impersonal Physicality
And the confused talk of nature’s lawfulness
Prehistoric animists used to attribute life forces to everything, so all energy was conceived of as being mentally driven, perhaps because those early humans didn’t view themselves as separate from their environment.
If the dichotomy between subject and object wasn’t in play in understanding experience, the introspected self would have seemed to merge with its surroundings, animating all events in just the way that the mind seems to animate its body. Or perhaps early animists just opted for the most intuitive explanation of nature, based on their self-experience.
In any case, spurred by the scientific revolution, “modern” thinkers regarded that conception of nature’s universal vitality as hopelessly naïve.
Yet these later philosophers and scientists typically subscribed to deism, so they applied the metaphor of how intelligent designers relate to their artifacts to the origin of the natural order. Scientists were supposedly in the business of finding “laws of nature” to explain the many regularities they discovered, and these laws still implied something like Aristotelian natural purposes, just as the laws of society are supposed to be normative, rules we should obey for the greater good of preserving civility.
