ABSTRACT
Modern science, as Jean-Francois Lyotard points out in his preliminary probings toward a "postmodern" stance, recurs less and less to its traditional stratagems of legitimation. Lyotard is concerned primarily with new regressions into petit-bourgeois morality, based on behavioral restrictions and an economics of late capitalism rather than a desire to discover new communal definitions of plenitude. Probings for an "ecological" hermeneutic, of course, may be looked upon as just another critical fad, a cheap attempt to be carried by the foremost tide of fashionable idiom, to corner, with some luck, even a new market in the flourishing stock exchange of method and paradigm. Every approach to the "ecological paradigm" that overemphasizes the "self-regulating" powers of nature feeds upon the principle of hope. Abandoning this hope may well be the first, and certainly the most painful step toward a really "ecological" hermeneutics. It will also relate it back to some of the profounder aspects of deconstruction.
