The scientific revolution, to many, is thought to be the catalyst of scientific progress of Western civilization. It is a break from the intellectual past… a renaissance of thought and process.

However, this push towards experimental science is also a push away from contextualized observation, what Aaron Hanlon calls “anecdata”in his piece “Margaret Cavendish’s Anthropocene Worlds”. Today, this separation has become so far that it is almost impossible to comprehend a scientific world that includes anything remotely comparable to anecdata. This distancing of contextualization and anthropomorphizing information to better understand a concept can be seen on a national scale within the U.S. and globally. It is an erasure of knowledge… to a scale of sometimes the progress of entire civilizations is thought of as obsolete, nonexistent.

Indigenous populations have understood the patterns and utilization of natural phenomena ranging from herd migratory patterns to weather cycles for thousands of years. It feels as though the move towards experimental science belittles the success and understanding created through the observational and experimental science undertook by these groups. There is a field of thought dedicated in part to calling out this erasure of knowledge that is called Ecofeminism. I learned about Ecofeminism in a Philosophy in the Environment course I took last year, and it has been in the back of my mind ever since.

While reading Hanon’s piece on Cavendish, there were countless overlaps with Ecofeminist principles, such as the dualism brought up between Female and Male, thus also Nature and Reason. An extensive explanation of dualism in the context of science and ecofeminism can be seen in Val Plumwood’s “Feminism and the Mastery of Nature”, specifically the chapter titled “Dualism: the logic of colonisation”. Cavendish brought up this dualism in her perception of the “bear men” trying to use exclusively reason to understand a natural being, even though their very logic starkly separates these two tropes. Ecofeminism pieces often allude to anecdata as a way to observe the natural world in a way that avoids setting up dualisms based from logics of oppression. Reading Cavendish’s anecdata about flint sparks was the first time I was exposed to true examples of how this type of information can be used for scientific progress and understanding.

How different would the world look today if there was societal acceptance of non-patriarchal ideals? If information garnered by indigenous peoples was immediately respected and accepted? If female and femme ideas were respected and encouraged as much as their male and masculine counterparts? Maybe this inherent blindness and lack of acceptance towards traditionally female dualistic experience is why it felt so strange to learn that novels (narrative, femme) emerged at the same time as experimental science (reason, masc). In reality, experimental science and novels weren’t started so far apart. Both wanted to depend on an immediate reality that was both possible and inherently very plausible. Both wanted to use non-romantic ideals to pay closer attention to the phenomena in smaller, personal experiences via the use of empiricism: using the senses to know; using what is experienced in a moment to find meaning in the unknown or misunderstood corners of life.