Widok Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism PK XIV/1 2012

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(1)Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis No 3425. Barbara Tuchańska University of Łódź. Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1 Wrocław 2012. 1. Introduction My reflections focus on the question “Has the culturalist understanding of nature been decided?”, though I try to find out not whether it has been decided, but what it may mean and what arguments support it. The belief that the culturalist understanding of nature has been accepted may have stemmed from a philosophical approach which appears in the humanities in the “post-humanist paradigm” and is by no means common. My impression is that when we look at humans as well as nature and culture from the perspective of this paradigm, which is critical of the earlier “constructivist-interpretative paradigm”, i.e. through structuralism, postmodernism, feminist philosophy or humanities, the problem of gender or reflection on human sexuality and corporeality, what we notice in 20th century humanist reflection is, first of all, the ongoing process of naturalisation (of humans) consisting in indicating the cultural and historical character of a number of phenomena traditionally approached metaphysically (theologically) or naturalistically1. When “the modernisation process is complete and nature is gone for good”, what we have is postmodernism. “It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable second ‘nature’”2. In 1 “The denaturalisation process reached its apogee in concerted efforts to identify – like explorers searching out undiscovered countries, chemists seeking new elements or biologists hunting up the last undescribed mega fauna – the specific historical provenances of core aspects of human psychological and social life: romantic and parental love, concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality, the idea of ‘man’ and of childhood, the modern sense of selfhood, not to mention our very ability to think about a multitude of specific concepts and ideas” (J. Gottschall, Literature, Science, and New Humanities, New York 2008, p. 4). 2 F. Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham 1991, p. ix.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 1. 2014-06-25 15:08:17.

(2) 2. Barbara Tuchańska. such a perspective, criticism of denaturalisation, anthropomorphisation, sociologisation, discoursivisation, textualisation etc. may seem interesting, refreshing and popular, and even necessary for us to be able to develop a more objective, neutral or broader point of view. However, when we look at human beings through analytical epistemology or philosophy and science, philosophy and mind, or philosophical anthropology, though not necessarily from their point of view, it seems that approaches naturalising humans and the world of culture, i.e. concepts drawing on the theory of evolution, genetics, neurophysiology and cognitive psychology, information theory etc. are numerous and at least just as influential. Of both we can say that insofar as they are built on the basis of substantialist ontology (ontology of beings) and inside the opposition between the subject and object of cognition, they are characterised by objectification of the subject itself, which they treat as an object, i.e. similarly to objects of nature or culture. In denaturalising approaches emphasis may of course be put on the fundamental distinction between the human subject and the natural objects, but both approaches lack a possibility of thematising human subjectivity and human action in a way that is non-objectifying. That is why they cannot undertake non-objectifying self-reflection; they are built by an “external observer” incapable of settling the dispute between them, because he or she sees their objects and not the approaches themselves. The dispute between the naturalist and culturalist approaches to the human being may of course be insoluble for fundamental reasons, but it is worth trying to find a perspective from which we will be able to see something more than just denaturalised culture or – on the contrary – culture reduced to natural phenomena and processes. For me such a perspective is offered by hermeneutic culturalism, which I will outline in part three of the article.. 2. Nature and culture The culture-nature opposition may be regarded, I think, as a contemporary successor of the juxtaposition of the soul and the body, mental and corporeal substance or the earlier distinction between the ideal, divine element in humans and the material element. They are not fully equivalent in terms of their scope, but they all refer ultimately to human beings and try to separate what is from what is not natural in them. In some respects, the body-soul opposition was less radical than the nature-culture opposition despite Descartes’ reckless proposition that there was no influence between the mental and the corporeal substance, because the body and the soul had common origins in the divine act of creation. Nature and culture do not have common origins or common grounds. As a result, the abolition of the opposition requires either (theist) metaphysics or a reduction of one to the Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 2. 2014-06-25 15:08:17.

(3) . Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 3. other, or a philosophical system introducing major modifications into the categories of modern philosophy. The nature-culture opposition carries with it an important difficulty associated with reflections from the perspective I have adopted here. I can define objectively neither culture nor nature, for reasons that will become clear in the next part of the article. In this part I will use the understanding of the concepts of culture and nature or related concepts that prevail in the approaches taken into account.. 2.1. Naturalisation of culture The assumptions of the concepts in which culture becomes naturalised include two fundamental convictions. According to the first of these, human beings are first (in the ontological and genetic order or, at least, in the logical order) natural beings and only then cultural beings. First they are subordinated to objective laws of nature and then to culture as a normative system regulating human thinking and human action. The second assumption relates to the environment in which humans live. It is also primarily natural, produced by natural processes, and only then does it become cultural, created and transformed by human beings in the course of their cultural activity. These assumptions become the basis for the emergentist position or the propagation of ontological or epistemological reductionism3. According to ontological reductionism, the cultural is an epiphenomenon, i.e. it can be (unreservedly) reduced to the natural. The other reductionism does not resolve the ontological question and is limited to a programme of explanatory reduction (partial or total) of culture to nature4. In both reductionisms nature is more primal than culture, and explanation is asymmetrical in the sense that cultural phenomena are explained by showing their sources in nature and their dependence on natural phenomena, but these are not explained by indicating the cultural factors determining them. Natural phenomena are assumed to be what natural sciences show them to be, while natural sciences – that they expand knowledge under the (cause and effect) impact of nature on researchers. We need not to look long for examples of such a position – it is to be found in ethology and sociobiology, in analytical philosophy and evolutionist cultural anthropology. When it comes to naturalist-causal explanations of cultural phenomena, we can ask, following Jerzy Kmita: 3 A difficulty faced by the advocates of emergentist positions is to find a language for their discourse that will enable them to describe nature and culture in terms characteristic of them and, at the same time, allow them to express the ontological and genetic relation between the two. I will not deal with this difficulty here. 4 I will not delve into the question of whether we can accept such a programme without assuming ontological reductionism, for it is not relevant, although I am inclined to answer in the negative, if such a position at the same time assumes a realistic understanding of explanation itself.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 3. 2014-06-25 15:08:17.

(4) 4. Barbara Tuchańska. Why should we try to figure out the physical-causal relation between objective reference of a “word” and its (for example) assertive utterance, why should we try to figure out how to find such a relation between putting a crown on someone’s head in specific circumstances and the fact that this person has become king, when it is far simpler and probably more convincing to say that between the fact of the crown being placed on someone’s head in specific circumstances and the fact that this someone has become king there is a symbolic-cultural relation based on respect shown by a given cultural community to a relevant symbolic-cultural directive, and that between a “word” and its objective reference there is a specific, namely internal-semantic, variety of the symbolic-cultural relation5.. I fully agree with Kmita that referring in explanations of cultural behaviour to symbolic–cultural relations is far simpler and more convincing. However, this is not so for naturalist reductionists, who believe that cultural phenomena are either individual intentional acts or epiphenomena reducible entirely to mental phenomena or demanding explanation in psychological, biological or even physical categories. The advocates of naturalist reductionism should remember, however, that natural science cognition, placed within the epistemological opposition between the subject and the object, has some significant limitations, which are not visible to natural sciences themselves, because they have the “ontological horizon which it is impossible to them, as science, to transcend”6. Their world cannot be “the whole of what exists”; the world of physics does not include the physicist (as the “calculator”, not as a physical body) and physics, just like biology does not include itself, for “it is not itself what it studies”7. With all due respect or even admiration for natural sciences, it is worth bearing in mind that it is impossible to try to attempt either to (explanatorily) reduce the whole culture to nature, or to reduce some specific cultural phenomenon to natural phenomena, an attempt that would not deprive this phenomenon of its cultural character. This is linked to another, fundamental shortcoming of the naturalist project to reduce ourselves to the world of biological organisms. For in naturalist reductionism it is impossible to understand that “our presence in nature has ceased to be an obvious given of nature itself, not requiring explanation”8. It is not the fact that we are feeling and sensitive subjects that distinguishes us among living creatures, but the fact that we can be objects for ourselves, that is, be capable of splitting our consciousness so that it becomes its own observer; so that we not only have an understanding attitude towards the world but so that we have an understanding attitude towards that understanding; that we not only know that we are in the world but that we are the ones who know that we know, or rather, that we are conscious of being a consciousness9. 5 . J. Kmita, Jak słowa łączą się ze światem. Studium krytyczne neopragmatyzmu, Poznań 1995, p. 221. 6 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, Bloomsbury Academic 2004, p. 448. 7 Ibidem. 8 L. Kołakowski, The Presence of Myth, University Of Chicago Press 2001, 115. 9 Ibidem.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 4. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(5) Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 5. What is more, Even if we did know precisely who we are in nature, we would be unable to cease knowing that we do know – and this state of duality is enough to prevent our being completely integrated into the order of nature with which we identify in reflection but not in reflecting upon reflecting10.. Our own consciousness appears to us as radically different from what is natural or animal. “By the very fact that it arises, the consciousness of being in the world makes consciousness inexplicable by reference to the world”11. We could say that being-in-nature and being-in-nature-knowing-that-we-are-in-nature are two fundamentally different ontological situations. The former is for us the situation of a stone or biological organism – they are in nature. The latter is only a human situation and is in fact even more complicated than the term I have chosen suggests, because it contains an element of self-awareness. In order to take it into account, we should say that we are-in-nature-knowing-that-we-know-that-we-are-in-nature.. If humanity does not let itself be captured as natural, for it must be perceived through the difference from what is natural – recognisable by humans – then humans “must either shoulder its absoluteness, that is, accept that it explains nature in relation to itself and not the other way round, or seek self-placement through a relation to the prenatural and prehistorical reality of myth”12. This second method of self-placement is the traditional metaphysical-theological project, which I will not discuss here. The first appears in the nature culturalisation project.. 2.2. Culturalisation of nature We are dealing with the culturalisation of nature in those concepts in which culture or society with its cultural practice are treated as a stable, though not necessarily absolute and unchangeable ontological foundation of reality, and nature – as its correlate, i.e. as nature that is always and inevitably “humanised”. The reductionist version of culturalism is a mirror image of the previous position. It includes, for example, such social constructivism that regards nature but not social reality as our construct13. In social constructivism, the social is treated as the substance, as material from which reality, including natural reality, is made14. 10 . Ibidem. Ibidem, p. 116. 12 Ibidem. 13 See B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge 1993 [1991], pp. 34–37, 51–55, 94–95; H.M.Collins, S. Yearley, “Epistemological Chicken”, [in:] Science as Practice and Culture, ed. A. Pickering, Chicago 1992, p. 308. 14 See B. Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford 2005, pp. 91–92. 11 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 5. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(6) 6. Barbara Tuchańska. It can, however, also have an “epistemic”, Kantian version – nature as a system is a product of our cognition. Such constructivism seems to be one that Andrzej Zybertowicz supports as well, given his answer to the question why we understand nature better than we understand society: We understand “nature” better than society and people, because it is constructed in accordance with our cognitive and practical patterns, in accordance with the concepts and models formulated by scholars and in accordance with technical means at our disposal. [...] “Nature” is to a far greater extent a product of our thinking than society and individuals. [...] obviously, what we see as nature is not entirely our product. Constructivism is not idealism, it does not assume ex nihilo creation. [...] Our knowledge and action co-create the world15.. Regarding nature as a product our human cultural (cognitive) activity makes it possible to overcome the experiencing and understanding of nature as different from us, as alien and indifferent or opposing us, attitudes the emergence of which is an inevitable consequence of separating our consciousness from nature and juxtaposing the two. For if we (co-)create nature, we know it and understand it as the creator understands his or her own work. However, explaining nature by self-reference puts humanity in danger of usurping the privilege of the absolute16, and the more we stress that nature is our product, the more conflicted we will be with our sensual experience, which teaches us that nature is self-contained and independent from us. In order to retain this conviction without falling into naturalist reductionism, we need to build up another position, for instance the one proposed by Bruno Latour.. 2.3. Latour’s ontology of nature-cultures In Latour’s ontology we are dealing with a search for human self-placement similar to some extent to the relativisation to “prenatural and prehistorical reality of myth” indicated by Kołakowski. Although Latour does not reveal any mythical reality that would be primary with regard to both empirical realities, i.e. nature and culture, he wants to avoid both dogmatic reductionisms. He wants to abandon the world of the modernist philosophy and science, and consider a process, a passing, in which: The world of meaning and the world of being are one and the same world, that of translation, substitution, delegation, passing. [...] That world ceased to be modern when we replaced all essences with the mediators, delegates and translators that gave them [essences – B.T.] meaning17.. In the modernist (modern) world natural facts, social order (authority) and scientific discourse are separated and stable. They are regarded as spheres of reality 15 A. Zybertowicz, Przemoc i poznanie. Studium z nie-klasycznej socjologii wiedzy, Toruń 1995, pp. 343–344. 16 See L. Kołakowski, op. cit., p. 117. 17 B. Latour, We Have Never…, p. 129.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 6. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(7) Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 7. separated from one another, while everything is, in fact, a dynamic hybrid having simultaneously a natural, social (political) and scientific aspect. Thus Latour bases his ontological tale on the assumption that we need to: (a) symmetrically explain truth and falsehood, (b) study simultaneously and in the same manner the production of people and things (the principle of generalised symmetry) and (c) symmetrically treat people and things as actants which are specific events in the network of translation, mediation and alliances18. The relations between actants are a “test of strength”, a struggle. Humans act and nature resists human production, which is why it cannot be solipsistically reduced to human representation or constructivistically – to a human product. Nature and culture are not, according to Latour, realities understood substantialistically, distinguished from one another by the fact that nature is characterised by universality, while culture – by particularism and relativism. Both cultures and natures are at the same time universal and particular, and Latour combines them into nature-cultures, i.e. treats them symmetrically as equal and affecting one another19. For this reason he believes that the approach he is building is not “humanistic”, it does not place humans in the centre, it does not single them out, but treats them equally with things, as something that works. In addition, Latour is convinced that his ontology is not burdened with the sin of “particular universalism”, it is not being built from the point of view of the Western society. Latour finds such a perspective in some currents of cultural anthropology, for example in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ thought20. Such universalism is a characteristic of a society, usually Western society. It defines Nature as a general system of reference, within which are situated other societies. In fact, in this case we are dealing with “arrogant universalism”. According to Latour, only his symmetrical anthropology can notice the contradiction in the treatment of “our” society as composed of people and other societies as belonging to non-human nature, hidden in Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology. Only in symmetrical anthropology “all the collectives similarly constitute natures and cultures; only the scale of mobilisation varies”21. It is true that Latour’s ontology makes it possible to recognise the weaknesses of asymmetrical reductionisms (naturalism or sociologism), that it avoids essentialising and reification of the spheres of reality distinguished by reductionism and, as a result, is much more interesting and convincing. However, insofar as it is an ontology of nature-cultures, it is built with an objectivist attitude, that is, it treats both non-human and human constituents of the natural-cultural reality as 18 . See ibidem, p. 103. See ibidem, p. 104. 20 This perspective is in fact an expression of ethnocentrism adopted by many cultural collectives for the purpose of self-indentification and self-judgement; See W.J. Burszta, Antropologia kultury. Tematy, teorie, interpretacje, Poznań 1998, pp. 13–15. 21 B. Latour, We Have Never…, p. 105–106. 19 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 7. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(8) 8. Barbara Tuchańska. objects. Owing to this objectivist attitude, it lacks an integral “mechanism” of self-critical reference to its own prejudgements and constant control of them in the course of dialogue with other perspectives, a mechanism that is part of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Latour’s project raises another serious doubt. It is by no means certain whether in order to talk about nature-cultures consisting of hybrids a sufficient language is one which is also a hybrid, or whether we really need to unify two languages – one we use to talk about humans, their agency and cultural reality, and one we use to talk about things, cause-effect relations and nature. It cannot be replaced by either a purely formal language referring to one, for example structural aspect of humans and things, or superficial unification with which we are dealing in the case of the language of press releases. The vocabulary in which Latour builds his ontology cannot be said to constitute such a totality of well-integrated languages of natural and humanistic disciplines. When we look at it more closely, we will easily see that Latour talks about hybrids, using the language of press releases, and that he uses the language of a humanist, when he talks about texts, discourses, translations and persuasions, attributing human activity to things. Thus it is by no means certain that any of the propositions concerning explanation of cultural reality, that is the naturalist proposition of reduction and Latour’s proposition of unified explanation, are feasible today. This does not mean that they are not feasible at all, but that perhaps we should look for a completely different way. For me, hermeneutic culturalism provides it.. 3. Hermeneutic culturalism Its starting point is phenomenological, i.e. it refers to the experience of a philosophising subject, and at the same time ontological, because this experience itself is not – contrary to what Edmund Husserl says – the basic method of contact between the subject and the world, but one of the forms of human being-in-theworld. The ontological content of hermeneutic culturalism derives from Martin Heidegger’s ontology of being, but is not limited to it, while the hermeneutic content – from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics.. 3.1. Ontological premises of hermeneutic culturalism Heidegger’s ontology of being seems to be a promising ontological concept in the light of the collapse of various forms of essentialism today. If what is natural is not pre-given to us, as all antirealists and sociological constructivists claim; if the essence of society cannot be discovered in the social structures or dependencies,. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 8. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(9) Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 9. as sociologists from symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists to Anthony Giddens tell us; if we reject the possibility of justifying essentialism by reference to a supernatural being; if the transcedentalist or phenomenological programme is not likely to succeed; what profit is there in maintaining the metaphysical belief that entities are what they are by virtue of their essences? If indeed things do not possess essence prior to their being, if they have features, structures and relations within it and not apart from it, what they are cannot be grasped independently of analysing their ways of being as experienced by us22. Thus Heidegger’s ontology focuses on the being of beings and not – as traditional metaphysics – on beings or abstract being as such. Its starting point as well as axis of reality is human Dasein. It can, therefore, be described as a version of anthropomorphism. When considering human being, Heidegger emphasises human self-desing and self-constitution. What distinguishes humans is reference to themselves and their own being. As Heidegger formulates it “in some way Dasein understands itself in its being and to some degree it does so explicitly” and it “always understands itself in terms of (aus) its existence, in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself”23. Only human beings can refer to themselves and understand themselves. Only human beings can understand themselves either on the basis of their own being, possibility of being themselves, that is in the right way, or on the basis of other beings and their influences, that is in the wrong way. Only human beings can refer both to the world and to their own reference to the world, only they can be conscious of having consciousness. Regarding human self-reference as inalienably understanding, Heidegger gives his ontology a hermeneutic character. Hermeneutic understanding is not added to human being as some possible, though not necessary, human operation, it is the content of the very human being. Understanding self-reference occurs in the course of being-in-the-world, and the world is a system of references (senses) and as such is a cultural and not natural reality. Being in the world understood in this way and understanding reference in the course of this being to oneself are the basis of human culturality. They make humans (as humans) irreducibly cultural creatures, projecting themselves and constituting themselves in the universe of senses. In other words, from the point of view of hermeneutic ontology, the problem of humanity is not a metaphysical issue, a question about ideal humanity existing by itself, about the essence of humanity or about human nature, that is something that on the ontological plane precedes actual human beings and “expects” fulfilment. Nor is it either a biological question of the generic nature manifesting itself in the various specimens of the human species. It is an existential question. Humanity is the content of our own being, constantly 22 . See J.E. McGuire, B. Tuchańska, Science Unfettered. A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology, Athens 2000, p. 93. 23 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2008, pp. 32–33.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 9. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(10) 10. Barbara Tuchańska. projected and constituted in the course of our going beyond being, beyond who we have already become and beyond what has already been established. Heidegger’s existentialist ontology requires some significant modifications that will make it possible to reject the existentialist anthropocentrism of Heidegger’s ontology, place human beings in a really existing collective and make the question of humanity an ontological-ethical question, for – as Stefan Amsterdamski rightly says – the notion of humanity “is not a zoological but a moral notion”24. Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein is existentialist anthropocentrism in the sense that Heidegger places Dasein, which is always “mine”, in the centre of a network of practical references, in which all things are for-something and only Dasein is not for anything25. What is more, its task is to “restore a sense of being to humans” and humans – to the “truth of being”26. However, Heidegger’s ontological assumption about the primacy of being over entity may become a starting point, but not in order to build an existentialist and anthropocentric ontology, and place in its centre “heroic nihilism”, a Promethean programme of authentic constituting of one’s being, i.e. projecting oneself in the perspective of death. My hermeneutic culturalism neither is existentialist nor is it an anthropocentrism, at least on the ontological plane. It is an ontology describing what is and constituting the basis of ontic studies and not an ontology which shows humans the meaning of life, for it expresses the experience of nothingness and the voice of conscience revealing the “authentic dimension of time”27. Indicating what distinguishes humans among other beings and what makes human being different from other ways of beings is, as Heidegger would have it, possible and necessary, but, contrary to Heidegger’s thinking, it does not have to lead to humans being accorded the central spot in the universe of meanings. When considering human being ontologically, we can approach its structure differently, namely not as a unidirectional reference of Dasein to other beings and, most importantly, to itself, but as mutual referencing that occurs between people, between human collectives and individuals participating in them, as well as between people and things. It does not have to be, as Heidegger would have it, that beings different from the human Dasein acquire their ontological status of tools, objects or other people thanks to the fact that Dasein refers to them in a specific manner (worried or concernful) and constitutes their being. We can “decentralise” Dasein and decide that the structure of being of all beings, both human beings and all other entities, is their mutual referencing and interacting, and that each being is always situational, it happens in a specific context created by other entities28. 24 . S. Amsterdamski, “Tertium non datur?”, [in:] idem, Tertium non datur? Szkice i polemiki, Warsaw 1994, p. 25. 25 See M. Heidegger, op. cit., pp. 114, 132. 26 J. Tischner, Myślenie według wartości, Kraków 2002, p. 117. 27 Ibidem, p. 131. 28 See J.E. McGuire, B. Tuchańska, op. cit., pp. 96–103.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 10. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(11) . Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 11. What is more, we can go against Heidegger and say that what constitutes an inalienable ontological prerequisite of being is not only meanings but also values, because they are not ontic features of things but what gives all ways of existing a normative dimension, especially ethical dimension29. Defining values as ontological structures of being, we can understand our own being as well as that of other entities as imbued with values, our actions as structured by values, thanks to which they include judgements as their components, while they themselves can be judged, because they are referred to normative systems. Such description of the structure of being makes it possible to approach nature and culture in a symmetrical manner. Both are – ultimately – a function, a correlate of mutual referencing of various beings and – in particular – our own self-referencing. The boundary between them is not a fixed demarcation line, given to humans by absolute being or by nature itself. Naturality and culturality are two sides of being, equally constituting themselves in the course of existence of two mutually referencing beings. From the point of view of such hermeneutic ontology, the fact that we are “conscious of being consciousness” is not a state that may though does not have to happen to human beings, but a uniquely human and irremovable ontological situation. The Heidegger-Gadamer philosophy itself is founded on this situation, because its goal is not an objectivist description of human and non-human being, but expression of our own self-understanding, expansion of our horizon, participation in going beyond who we are here and now towards whom we can be. Insofar as my hermeneutic culturalism based on hermeneutic ontology is an expression of the experience of the modern subject (modern European), it can take into account the fact that this subject appears to itself as an object of influences, both natural and cultural, as well as a subject of influences. Experience shows the modern subject that not only does it understand itself as a natural and cultural being, smoothly passing from non-objectifying self-consciousness to objectifying self-representation as an organism, physical body etc., but also treats itself the same in practical action, it influences itself both culturally and naturally. 29 The lack of axiological dimension in Heidegger’s ontology has been pointed out by many thinkers, including R.J. Bernstein (“Heidegger’s Silence: Ethos and Technology”, [in:] idem, The New Constellation. The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity, Cambridge 1993, pp. 79–141), J. Taminiaux (Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, Albany 1991, pp. 124, 129–137), J. Tischner (op. cit., pp. 121–122), L.A. Vogel (The Fragile “We”. Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, Evanston 1994, pp. 59–67, 84, 100). Justifying Heidegger, we have to add that – as William Richardson rightly claims – Heidegger considers his ontology to be more fundamental than ethics; the question what is man in his infinity lies, in his opinion, “deeper down” than ethical questions, the concept of guilt has an ontological not ethical meaning, and the traditional ethical reflections are to be found in the sphere of ontic reflections, because they refer to norms and values manifesting themselves in the factual sphere (see idem, “Heidegger and the Quest of Freedom”, Theological Studies 28, 1967, p. 297; also L.A.Vogel, op. cit., pp. 84, 100).. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 11. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(12) 12. Barbara Tuchańska. This duality of our self-reference, both in cognition and in action, means that the correlate of our social and historical cultural practice is both what is regarded as cultural and treated as cultural in humans and their environment, and what is regarded as natural and treated as natural in humans and their environment. To put it briefly, it is not only social-historical reality, cultural reality that is co-created in each moment of human social-historical activity, what is also co-created is nature. Thus hermeneutic culturalism rejects the possibility of reducing culture to nature and avoids treating nature as a product of a stable culture. It relativises both to our practice, thanks to which both are dynamic and influence each other. Such ontology is not and cannot be objectivist, because we are ourselves inside the cultural practice and cannot be outside it, thus we cannot get to know it from outside either. However, hermeneutic culturalism can point to a place in our practical activity, in which objectivism is the right cognitive attitude. In order to show this place, I need to present the epistemological assumptions of hermeneutic culturalism.. 3.2. Epistemological assumptions of hermeneutic culturalism On the epistemological plane, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is an anthropocentric position, since Gadamer assumes that each perspective in which understanding is built is inevitably human, that we cannot adopt any other, non-human position. However, this is a unique anthropocentrism, because hermeneutics is anti-dogmatic. It rejects the existence of absolute and intuitively given or possible to be discovered foundations of all cognition, though it assumes that understanding is not a “presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us”30, but is entangled in the hermeneutic circle. All understanding, i.e. also each cognitive activity, is presuppositional, is based on fore-structures, that is on fore-conception, fore-having of understandable references and fore-sight, which places what has been taken as fore-having within structures worked out in understanding31. Placing understanding in the hermeneutic circle means both that it is impossible to problematise the fore-structures of our own understanding without going beyond its horizon, because they determine it, and that it is impossible to go beyond all historical horizons towards some universal horizon of understanding, that is one which is not defined historically, linguistically, socially and culturally, which is, ultimately, all-human if not suprahuman. However, anthropocentricity does not mean that hermeneutics is a subjectivist position. Hermeneutics is secured against subjectivism, which is a source of difficulties in the phenomenological approach, by two ideas of key importance, 30 31 . M. Heidegger, op. cit., p. 192. See ibidem, pp. 191–192.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 12. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(13) Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 13. namely the idea of universal linguisticality of all being and the notion of tradition. Thanks to its placement in language and tradition, experience, which is a starting point for philosophising, is not purely subjective; rather, it is a collective experience, which no individual produces on his or her own. An individual may contribute to it, but accepts its results in the socialisation process. When in acts of self-consciousness we discover ourselves as social beings shaped by others, we acquire a perspective, from which we cannot return to the point of view of pure individual self-consciousness, because this discovery removes all possibilities of “proving” that our consciousness is autonomous, that it is not shaped socially, that it is not a “reproduction” or modification of other consciousnesses. Insofar as we recognise that our placement is local – in the sense that we understand in some language that we are shaped by a specific tradition, specific socialising influences, historical community etc. – hermeneutics expresses an antiobjectivist attitude. Not only can we not adopt a non-human point of view, but our point of view is a specific and, moreover, changing perspective. The rejection of the belief in the presence of an objective thinking perspective (“point of view” of pure Reason) and the awareness of the multiplicity of philosophical perspectives mean that hermeneutic philosophy cannot be monological, like any objectifying philosophy and, in particular, dogmatic philosophy, but must be dialogical, engaged in the understanding of other perspectives and ready to accept their influence. Its characteristic cognitive attitude is openness to other thinking perspectives, for only thanks to openness is it possible to understand and interpret from within our own horizon what is within other horizons. Openness is a prerequisite of readiness to search in other perspectives, for example in an interpreted text, for their own truth. Finding this truth enables us to expand our own horizon and thus, in a way, transcend it. It is possible thanks to the fact that, as Gadamer stresses, a “shading of verbal worldview”, which determines each horizon, “potentially contains every other within it, i.e. each worldview can be extended into every other”32. In particular, transcending one’s horizon means that when we interpret a strange text, we manage to reveal and control our own prejudice and fore-structures of understanding, usually accepted silently, that they either are confirmed, when the interpreted text ceases to appear as strange, incomprehensible, when it speaks to the interpreter, reveals its truth to the interpreter and changes him or her, or they must be changed when they do not allow us to overcome the strangeness of the text. Openness and the desire to expand one’s horizon mean, on the other hand, that the essential value of philosophising in hermeneutics is non-objectifying self-reflection. Hermeneutic philosophers are conscious of the fact that their philosophising is human, that it is – as both Heidegger and Gadamer argue – a component of human way of being, which is singled out by the very possibility of asking about 32 . H.-G. Gadamer, op. cit., p. 445.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 13. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(14) 14. Barbara Tuchańska. its own being. They are also aware that their philosophising is defined historically, linguistically, socially, because they themselves are inalienably in history, in language and in the cultural community. What is more, hermeneutic philosophers are able to recognise that the existence of points of view, concepts, interpretations and traditions that are different from their own determines the possibility of modifying their own position. Thanks to these assumptions, hermeneutic culturalism is not in danger of the universalist illusion, in its particular or in its global version. It is protected against particular universalism by the consciousness of the fact that although we cannot understand ourselves and the world from a position different from our own, this itself does not make it a unique, privileged point of view. On the other hand, it is protected against global universalism by a lack of any guarantee that these chance horizons and the understanding achieved in them will combine to create a cohesive totality of human understanding. Nor is hermeneutic culturalism in danger of the absolutist illusion, not only because of its historical (self-)consciousness, but also because, according to Gadamer, imperfection is an inevitable feature of understanding. Understanding never achieves knowledge that would be absolute truth. When excluding absolutism, which may characterise dogmatic philosophy, hermeneutic philosophy does not, however, exclude intersubjectivism, the possibility of reaching an agreement with other traditions and transcending each specific, temporary form of one’s own point of view, one’s own knowledge and (self-)understanding. Thanks to this, fuller knowledge, though still only partial, “may be achieved only by collective effort of many human individuals, holding a conversation with each other in the course of history”33. A historical sequence of interpretations, which arises thanks to collective efforts, does not, of course, lead to the ultimate interpretation of tradition and does not reveal the object to which this tradition refers, in its ontological totality, because a sequence of interpretations cannot be infinite. When we have a multiplicity of interpretations, coexisting or succeeding one another, only “intersubjective agreement on the usefulness of the interpretations and their assumptions” can be a “measure” of interpretative success or may even be the the only indicator of the truth of an interpretation34. Moreover, involvement of understanding in history means that – contrary to what Hegel says – it cannot achieve ultimate self-knowledge, because the interpreter cannot arrive at full understanding of himself or herself, of the language and hermeneutic situation in which the interpretation is made, or his or her history or history in general35. This limitation of self-understanding applies equally to 33 A.. Bronk, Rozumienie, dzieje, język. Filozoficzna hermeneutyka H.-G. Gadamera, Lublin 1982, p. 211. 34 See D.C. Hoy, The Critical Circle. Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley 1982, p. 115. 35 H.-G. Gadmer, op. cit., pp. 227-228.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 14. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(15) . Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 15. individual human beings and to specific human collectives. No individual and no collective can achieve the ultimate hermeneutic understanding of themselves. This limitation concerns equally hermeneutic self-consciousness and objectifying self-knowledge, which is why hermeneutic culturalism is not in danger of the illusion of objectivism. We cannot apprehend ourselves fully in objectifying cognition. Situationality of understanding means that we cannot objectify the hermeneutic situation, because we are in it, or our being, because we are it, or even the world, because our being is being-in-the-world. In other words, we cannot achieve fully objectified self-understanding, because we would have to cease being ourselves in order to become the objects of our own objectifying cognitive project36. It is also worth adding that, paradoxically, our objectifying self-reference, treating ourselves as objects of cognition and influence, is the best confirmation of the non-objectifying attitude adopted in hermeneutic ontology. It allows us to treat objectifying understanding as a form of our self-understanding, while from every objectifying point of view an attempt at non-objectifying understanding of oneself must be regarded as an aberration, as unfeasible, internally contradictory or senseless.. 3.3. Scientific cognition from the point of view of hermeneutic culturalism Hermeneutics enables us to understand that objectifying scientific knowledge (truth) “is relative to a particular world orientation and cannot at all claim to be the whole”37. As we know, “the sun has not ceased to set for us, even though the Copernican explanation of the universe has become part of our knowledge”; “to our vision, the setting of the sun is a reality”, just as the Copernican theory is a reality to our intellect. Both these images, popular visual image and intellectual scientific image, can be simultaneously real for us, because both equally “belong” to language. “[W]hat really opens up the whole of our world orientation is language, and in this whole of language appearances retain their legitimacy just as much as does science”38. Unlike for all objectivistically inclined philosophies, for hermeneutic culturalism scientific cognition does not constitute the only or even privileged access to reality (in itself). It does not provide access to reality in-itself, distinguished from the reality-for-us or one concealed beyond it, because such a distinction cannot be formulated in the hermeneutic ontology of being, which does not mean 36 See ibidem and J.C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. A Reading of Truth and Method, New Haven 1985, pp. 11–12. 37 H.-G. Gadamer, op. cit., pp. 446. 38 Ibidem.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 15. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(16) 16. Barbara Tuchańska. that we cannot say, drawing on this ontology, that beings appear to us what they are in their presence-at-hand or in their objectivity, which reveals itself to scientific cognition. In other words, we cannot say of any relationship between people and entities that in it entities are entities-in-themselves and in all others they are changed, distorted; that something is added to them or that they are deprived of something; that in them they are captured one-sidedly, superficially, emotionally, not objectively, judgementally, only empirically, only theoretically or only instrumentally, that they are imagined or idealised and not presented realistically etc. In every situation of understanding entities appear (manifest themselves) equally partially and in a determined way, and, importantly, they appear to us as what they can appear. Of course, insofar as we can subject our own experience to an objectifying analysis, we can imagine, describe theoretically and even practically model entities that appear to creatures equipped, for instance, with different sense organs. However, even then we reach neither things in-themselves nor things-experienced-by-other-creatures, because they remain correlates of our own ideas of these creatures. Hermeneutic culturalism allows us to understand what the objectifying approach to nature and culture is based on and why in objectifying cognition there emerges naturalist or culturalist reductionism. The objectifying attitude of research practice, both in natural sciences and in the humanities (including social, economic, political sciences etc.) is founded – entirely symmetrically – on a simplifying, even idealising, abstracting from, respectively, what is (understood as) cultural and what is (understood as) natural. Naturalism is not able to capture humans, their products and their environment as cultural, it can either reject or disregard the cultural nature of humans, their works and their environment, or it can regard them as reducible to what is natural. Consequently, in neither of these situations can nature be regarded as a product of culture. Objectifying humanities are in an analogous situation. They are unable to capture nature as separated from humans, so they must remain within what is cultural or try to assign to nature the status of a cultural, social and historical product. Both types of sciences of course have a right to perform such operations, a right guaranteed by the scholarly traditions in which their projects of objectyfying thematisation of reality have been constituted. However, this right comes up against a significant limitation. If what has been omitted idealisingly from research is not taken into account in projected applications of knowledge, this leads to practical failures, because in the sphere of practical action nature is cultural and culture is natural. We can interpret and explain the action of “putting a crown on somebody’s head” in terms of symbolic rituals of monarchies, but if, having this knowledge, we want to formulate a programme of creating or restoring monarchy, we had better note that the crown is put on the head by holding it over the crowned individual and lowering it, and not by, for example, throwing it next to the future king or stepping on it, for in neiPrace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 16. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(17) . Nature and culture in hermeneutic culturalism. 17. ther of such situations will gravity cooperate with us, and in a “physical-causal” manner it will prevent the coronation. Just as necessary is the taking into account of the artificial contamination – caused by us – of the substances from which we want to make something in a chemical reaction, for if we ignore this, perhaps unimportant, contribution of culture to nature, the consequences may be catastrophic for us.. 4. Conclusion I think that in contemporary philosophy the culturalist understanding of nature has not been decided yet and, judging from the prestige still enjoyed by science and by reference to science when philosophical questions are to be solved, it will remain undecided for a long time. All the more so given the fact that referring to science leads to a conviction (which, in fact, may be only a blissful illusion) that an issue has just been resolved in the only proper manner. Fortunately, we still have this part of philosophy which does not yield to the scientistic ideology and is free from the obligation to treat nature as a reality that is genetically primal and ontologically fundamental, and natural sciences as the only source of all wisdom. To the question, which can be asked in this philosophy and also in these human sciences that adopt a culturalist approach to nature: should nature be treated culturalistically, I will reply as follows. Culturalist treatment of nature seems to be an unavoidable component of non-objectifying and, at the same time, non-idealising concept of ourselves. Thus we can replace this question with another one, namely – should we build a non-objectfying and non-idealising concept of ourselves or, less normatively, what are the merits of such a concept. Let us begin with the idealising of ourselves by our radical removal from nature in a manner that was once attempted by Descartes. It seems that this may bring, as was the case with Descartes, interesting speculative results, but will neither provide us even with some degree of full self-knowledge, nor will be possible to maintain, if we want to pass from speculation to action. I think that this is not worth defending, which of course does not mean that we have to abandon all symbolic-cultural explanations. Radical naturalisation leaves us with questions which cannot be considered after it has been completed, i.e., to put it as succinctly as possible, with questions about senses and values. We will probably be able to live without resolving them, but what kind of life that would be... What remains then is the question about the merits of a non-objectifying approach to ourselves. I think that the main merits of non-objectifying self-understanding in the version I have presented have already been demonstrated or, in fact, have demonstrated themselves. It is consistent with its own ontological assumptions concerning what human life is. Thanks to self-reflection it does not require any external point of view to explain itself and – much more importantly Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 17. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

(18) 18. Barbara Tuchańska. – to critically address its own prejudice or even question it. Given its openness, it is possible to recognise the existence of many (objectifying) positions referring to nature and culture, from those naturalising culture, through those separating the two and abstracting from the one to which they cannot refer, to those culturalising nature. It allows us to treat them as equal, mutually referring to each other, complementing each other or even necessary, without getting involved in solving ongoing disputes. Finally, it allows us to draw on them in the reconstruction of ourselves. It may not seem much and yet it is so much.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Tuchanska eng-korekta.indd 18. 2014-06-25 15:08:18.

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