Material hermeneutics as cultural learning: from relations to processes of relations

Abstract

What is the relation between material hermeneutics, bodies, perception and materials? In this article, I shall argue cultural learning processes tie them together. Three aspects of learning can be identified in cultural learning processes. First, all learning is tied to cultural practices. Second, all learning in cultural practice entangle humans’ ability to recognize a material world conceptually, and finally the boundaries of objects, the object we perceive, are set by shifting material-conceptual entanglements. All these aspects are important for material hermeneutics in a technoculture. Postphenomenology has expanded the connection between hermeneutics and phenomenology by focusing on studies of how perception, bodies, materials, the sensual realm and hermeneutics are entwined when we perceive the world through technologies. Following Don Ihde, hermeneutics expands beyond interpretation of texts in the humanities. We can interpret materials as for instance animal bones to make new sense of the Bible. New technologies have expanded material hermeneutics, when we can ‘look’ into bodies and ‘perceive’ below surfaces. Interpretation via such tools in a technoculture, both limit and extend our hermeneutic horizons in the humanities as well as in the natural sciences. Furthermore, from the perspective of cultural learning processes, material hermeneutics in the human and natural sciences depend on more than mediating instruments. Material hermeneutics also involve the material cultural environments of scientific apparatuses and the scientists’ processes of learning in cultural practice. This changes the focus from relations in postphenomenology to processes of relations.