ABSTRACT
For an environmental hermeneutics, “nature has independent existence that can be explained, but it is also influenced and understood in light of the observer’s perspective and experience”. As Forrest Clingermann clearly observes, the peculiarity of an environmental hermeneutics is that it cannot be reduced either to social constructivism or to scientism. The Anthropocene is the moment in which geological history and human history meet. Dutch philosopher Jos De Mul describes the process of differentiation and complexification in nature as a transition from the indexical level of a cell, to the iconic one of the animal, to the symbolic level of human beings and of some animals endowed with language, which is also the properly hermeneutic level. For R. Capurro, according to existential hermeneutics, a human inquirer is not an isolated system trying to reach others from her encapsulated mind/brain.
