Dissertation Construction 04

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Interconstituent Wilderness Lifeworlds

04

Understanding

My aim is understanding interconstituent wilderness lifeworlds. What is understanding? What does interconstituent signify? What are lifeworlds?

Understanding is an existentiale. That is, understanding is a fundamental ontological characteristic of existence. Understanding is rooted in standing in the sense of standing forth (verstehen) and it relates to being constant and holding status. To understand something in the sense of the act of understanding is to let it stand forth. Ver-stehen is "forth-standing". To understand is to let a thing be as it is taking its stand. When we understand something it is clarified in the sense of being clear to us. Again, it is to let it stand forth, to give it status, to grant it clearance. It is "a clear grasp of a thing as a whole, but no necessary reference to any preceding process of thought" (Inwood, 1999, p. 234, quoting a Dictionary of German Synonyms, 1977). Inwood goes on (in his VERY helpful Heidegger Dictionary) to interrelate comprehension and understanding. Understanding is more primordial than comprehension; "one can understand being without comprehending it, but one cannot comprehend it without understanding it" (p. 234). 

I don't have the text to support it at this very moment, but I seem to recall that understanding is related to what Aristotle called phronesis, practical wisdom. This is related directly to what I gave (from Bogost and from Harman via Lingis) as a kind of "carpentry". Borgmann (1984, p. 44) has been onto this for a long time. He gave a specific carpenterial example by calling upon the work of Sturt (The Wheelwright's Shop). The wheelwright (wagon craftsman) understands his lifeworld and the role that wood plays (its status) in that world. The wheelwright has "knack" for working with wood and as such he is attuned to it in such a way that it is not a cognitive knowledge but more as an embodied or somatic "grasp of a thing as a whole". Going Greek, he is phronetically involved with the physis as phusis directly at hand. Okay, back up a bit before we get too far down that rabbit hole.

Let's get after interconstituency. A constituent is: a component (American Heritage Dictionary). For public lands, constituents are the human element that compose those people that hold a stake in a place (stakeholders). Constituents serve as part of a whole. The whole is not just the social aspect of public lands. The whole in this sense is the lifeworld of people, places and things as it is shared across all those spheres. To get semiotic, it is the semiosphere (Lotman) and this coincides with what Heidegger called the Verweissungsganzheit or the referential totality. Borgmann (1984) has it as a "web of relations".

Note how the wheelwright acts as the phronemos with his knack for understanding the referential totality of his world in this extended passage from Borgmann (1984, p. 44) quoting Sturt:

"As people adjust to the land, the land discloses itself to the people. There is 'a close relationship between the tree-clad country-side and the English who dwelt there.'... What takes the wheelwright into 'sunny woodland solitudes,' 'into winter woods or along leafless hedgerows,' and 'across wet water-meadows in February' is the search for timber. But 'timber was far from being a prey, a helpless victim, to a machine,' Sturt says, and continues: 'Rather it would lend its subtle virtues to the man who knew how to humor it: with him, as with an understanding friend, it would co-operate.'"