What lies beyond the "World Machine" Weltanschauung? How? Why? (etc.?)
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

http://phoenixandturtle.net/excerptmill/worldsou.htm

From World Soul to World Machine

By Clifford Stetner



I. INTRODUCTION



The triumph of the idea of the modern mechanical universe,
which was finally crowned by Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in
1687, accompanied a broader shift in cultural and individual
phenomenology and ideology. By the seventeenth century, most European
intellectuals had begun to think of nature in mechanistic and
technological terms, and Europeans in general began to experience the
world in which they lived as a machine, a giant clockworks made up of
dead matter responding deterministically to forces external to it.
This shift in cultural paradigms from medieval ideas of cosmology and
physics allowed for the emergence of agnosticism and atheism in Western
culture.



In order to illustrate the transformation in European thought
and experience during the period of the scientific revolution, Alexander
Koyre focuses upon the destruction of the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic "closed
world" and its replacement by the open, infinite universe of the modern
paradigm.



What has motivated the enormous amount of research done
recently around the scientific revolution has been a recognition that a
more fundamental change than merely an idea of cosmology took place
between the mediaeval and modern worlds, that the entire experience of
human existence changed. To live in a closed world is a different
experience from living in an infinite universe, and this difference
included all classes of people, not just those involved in the
scientific debate. Popular culture may have preserved remnants of the
ancient pantheism and naturalism past the seventeenth century, but not
much past it. (Koyre 23)



This change in the "experience of human existence" involved
more than the question of the limits or limitlessness of the physical
universe. There were few elements of medieval European life that did
not undergo some degree of redefinition during this period. In
addition to the remnants of ancient pantheism preserved in the popular
tradition, Renaissance Europe inherited Judeo-Christian, Platonic (and
Neoplatonic), and Aristotelian cosmologies. While Christian theology
is not pantheistic, it had assimilated Neoplatonic mystical theology,
and Aristotelian scholasticism during the Middle Ages and appropriated: