Meaning and Material: Phenomenology, Complexity, Science and ‘Adjacent Possible’ Cities

Abstract

For most people, even today, phenomenology stands squarely on the human science side of a ‘two worlds’ divide between human science and physical science that has dominated the understanding of the sciences throughout the twentieth century. Phenomenology has been associated with human interpretation and with a hermeneutical method which has been seen as antithetical to the facticity and formal methods of the natural sciences. However, phenomenology’s relationship to science has always been more interesting and complex than this. There have been a few in the last century who have understood the role of practice and hermeneutics even in the hardest of the natural sciences, and today the ranks of those who question the division of science into two worlds—along with a metaphysics of different realms of meaning and material—is growing. At the same time, the essentially negative ‘post-modern’ critique of a dualist metaphysics is also being supplemented by a more positive and ‘constructive’ metaphysics which sees us creating our practical ‘worlds’ and knowledge hermeneutically in material and especially technical situations. This ‘technoconstructive’ view might be seen to be essentially about the way we construct human environments in which specific logics, functionalities and meanings are technically supported. It is a view, therefore, which may lead to an understanding of the way in which urban environments are ‘technoconstructions’ which support specific urban societies and economies. I review these issues and demonstrate how the Amsterdam of the seventeenth century could be seen as just such a ‘technoconstruction’. I also insert a subtext which problematises a common understanding of complexity science as just another set of formal methods, which unifies science by applying the same formal methods to both human and natural sciences, and I suggest instead that all science should be understood as material hermeneutics and ‘technoconstruction’.