The Hermeneutics of Ecological Limitation: Ecophilosophy Beyond Environmentalism

by Chad A. Haag

Although the term “environmentalism” has become so universalized as to be meaningless, ecophilosophy remains one of the most under-explored territories within all of philosophy. Haag argues, however, that the two are fundamentally incompatible by demonstrating that mainstream environmentalism cannot challenge the industrial system because it is simply an extension of fossil fuels and Modern Technology. Contrary to Zizek’s and Gadamer’s tendency to contrast ecological closure with the radical openness of linguistic interpretation, Haag argues that ecology must instead be understood as the most primordial horizon of hermeneutical interpretation, since a subject’s ecological context provides the standard of meaning for higher order memes, objects, systems, and mythologies to emerge. Haag examines the most controversial forbidden thinkers on the topic, such as Julius Evola, Pentti Linkola, Varg Vikernes, Michael Ruppert, Ted Kaczynski, John Zerzan, and John Michael Greer, in addition to mainstream environmentalists like David Klass, Greta Thunberg, and Ana Kasparian in order to move the discussion of ecology beyond the environmentalist limits imposed by the media and academic industry.

Genres: Philosophy, Ecology

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 29, 2019

Reviews

[Manuel Gabbert · Rating 1 out of 5]

The title of this book tricked me into thinking it was actually a philosophical work. The main thesis is weak as a straw (modernity is bad, people are stupidly reliant on fosil fuel and not capable of living in harmony with nature) and most of the book is complaining about leftists, democrats, consumerism or liberals anyway (Aparently they are all the same thing). I cannot recomend it to anyone actually interested in philosophy on ecology.

[Brett Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's unclear to what led me to this book. But read it I did. The good parts are good and the bad parts are bad!

The author argues that leftists of all stripes are whistling past the environmental graveyard: the real game in town is ecology. Environmentalism is stupid because it's all cosmetic fixes that don't have anything to do with fundamentally changing individual, fossil-fuel driven consumptive behavior. This is fine, I think, except his paragons of virtue in this regard end up being Petti Linkola and Ted Kacsinski LOL. Anyway, he spends a good deal of the first chapter pissing on leftists, academics, suburbanites, etc. Basically, unless you're off the grid and christ-like in your purity to the cause, you're part of the problem. His lazy self-disservicing habit of talking about xyz and then not citing any sources begins here and continues throughout. Interesting aside, this is the author: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/26/he-mo...

There's actual material here too! More specifically, ecological hermeneutics; that is, somatic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics depends on horizons and their interpenetrations, which create the rich set of meaning humans are accustomed to navigating in any number of modes. He takes Gadamer on insofar as being/understanding is a shared phenomenon. It is not completely subjective nor completely objective. He disagrees with Gadamer that being is only disclosed in language, what the author deems "linguistification." The author derives five layers of hermeneutical meaning: narrative/mythological, symbolic/numeric, objective/bodily, memeological/mentatic (don't ask me, ask the author), and somatic. By 'soma', the author means, vis-a-vis the ancient Greek, "a body which really exists in order to refer to the crucial resource which a subject depends upon for survival within a given ecological context." So for us modern degenerates - and 'the author' (as he continously refers to himself throughout) makes a sport of reminding us how foul 99.999% of us are - our soma is fossil fuels. From this the author overdetermines every crucial feature of our daily living. Everything we think say and do is basically programmed into our puny skulls by 'the System', which is a fossil-fuel soma/system.

I kid you not, he actually says at one point "In David Icke's 1994 classic Robots Rebellion"...I lol'd of course, as I have a soul. I mention this as David Icke is a big proponent of the System controlling everything. But this seems like a common theme of most of the thinkers Haag is fond of.

He actually sees through Zizek's mad Cartesion ego-musings correctly, seeing it as an all-too-human outcropping of a mind detached from any deeper ecological understanding. Zizek thinking "nature doesn't exist" after all. And he sort of comes around at the end again with the idea that meaning derived from left-brained linguistic meaning will not get us out of anything because, as mentioned in the first paragraph, this is the purview of your typical liberal academic egg-headed humanist-centered (instead of ecologically centered) leftist. The bugbear in the end - the real threat towards the environment - turns out to be technology/linguistification. I gather he has given up civilization making any progress on the environmental issue, so the idea is to at least save subjective humanity.

This book is fucking mad. Quite entertaining in screed form but also informative to a great degree. Not sure I'll read anything else of his but I wish him luck in his farming endeavors!