From Telos 152 (Fall 2010), Dimitri Ginev’s “The Erotic Attitude Toward Nature and Cognitive Existentialism.” Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
The article considers the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s project for a “new science” to the contemporary studies in hermeneutics of science. This project involves new criteria of epistemological rationality, non-traditional views of nature, and new empirical data models for verifying science’s hypothesis. In scrutinizing the idea of an “erotic attitude toward nature,” the article suggests an approach to revealing the interpretative fore-structure and the hermeneutic situation of the “dialogue with nature.” According to the principal argument, the chance for such a dialogue lies in science’s hermeneutic and self-critical potential. The only way of putting the dialogue with nature into effect is by actualizing alternative possibilities projected by readable technologies of scientific research. The essay makes the case for the claim that since the dialogue is necessarily involved in the reading that constitutes meaning within domains of research, then there is a non-eliminable political dimension that will be associated with the search for an “authentic normality” of nature’s entities. It suggests a broadening the scope of the critique of scientism, in opposing at the same the constructivist rejection of a “politics of nature.”
