Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics

Introduction: Environmental Hermeneutics

1 Friedrich Nietzsche famously stated: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”1 Perhaps this could be slightly rephrased: no facts go uninterpreted. There are simply no bare facts, at least if a fact is to be meaningful. Every fact has meaning only in relation to other facts, to context, and to the human understanding itself. In other words, at the heart of every confrontation of concept and perception is the issue of hermeneutics: the art and science of interpretation. The present volume uncovers some of the ways that interpretation takes place in the human relationship to the environment. This collection brings together essays on the questions that hermeneutics raises for environmental philosophy. In the public sphere, much of the focus on “the environment” is concerned with discovering scientific facts and then reporting how policy can act on these facts. On its face, philosophical hermeneutics might appear to be an unrelated enterprise. But this volume follows Nietzsche in arguing that even the facts of the sciences are given meaning by how humans interpret them. Of course this does not mean that there are no facts, or that all facts must come from scientific discourse. Rather, one point of agreement among the essays presented here is the need for mediation—the mediation that grounds the interpretive task of connecting fact and meaning through a number of different structures and forms. This has practical implications, not simply intellectual ones. Ostensibly bare facts are contextualized by a variety of individual and social relations, and responsive actions emerge as a matter of consequence. For example, the science of the human body may seem to be only a collection of factual data, but what someone Introduction Environmental Hermeneutics David Utsler, Forrest Clingerman, Martin Drenthen, and Brian Treanor 2 D. Utsler, F. Clingerman, M. Drenthen, and B. Treanor does with that data (or the ignorance of the data) in terms of habits, behaviors, and practices all reflect interpretations that involve value and meaning. Already then we can see how philosophical hermeneutics recommends itself to the topic of the environment: philosophical hermeneutics offers a unique reflection on the human mediation of the meaning of environments, and, equally, hermeneutics assists in understanding the practical implications of our encounters with the world. Defining the Place of Environmental Hermeneutics Throughout this volume, the term “hermeneutics” balances between a broad and a narrow meaning—both meanings are often operative in the individual essays collected here. To explain, it is helpful to be reminded of the place of philosophical hermeneutics as a tradition within philosophy. In a narrow sense, the present volume is interested in the specific tradition of discourse called “philosophical hermeneutics”—a modern dialogue over the nature of interpretation that begins with Schleiermacher and is carried into contemporary philosophy through figures such as Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, and Ricoeur.2 This school of thought emerged from more general concerns with how to understand texts—before the modern era, most theorizing about the task of interpretation was concerned with the proper understanding of the Biblical text (Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine might thus be considered the ancient ancestor of philosophical hermeneutics). From this background, the historical trajectory of modern philosophical hermeneutics can be explained simply: it is an investigation that began with a narrow concern around understanding the authorial intent of written texts, and gradually moved toward the recognition of the inevitable interpretation of our historical, factical existence itself. But hermeneutics has a broader sense as well, which is sometimes also employed here: Hermeneutics is commonly defined as the reflection on the “art and science of interpretation,” not simply of written texts, but as a form of thinking itself. Most broadly, the question of interpretation is not merely asking about a technique for discerning a single meaning or finding one interpretation that is the right one. Nor is it concerned simply with the imposition of meaning on an object by a subject, making any interpretation possible and, therefore, acceptable. As Robert Mugerauer noted in his 1995 book, Introduction 3 Interpreting Environments, hermeneutics is a matter of “finding the valid criteria for polysemy within the fluid variety of possibilities.”3 This statement also reveals an inherent critical element in hermeneutics . Not all interpretations are valid; but there is more than just one valid interpretation possible, and interpretation is a structurally open project that never comes to final closure. Hermeneutics aims at opening all...