I’m presently involved in a group that has the goal of fostering a more sustainable relationship between humankind and the planet, with special reference to the way agriculture is conducted and the way food and fibre production responds to demand, locally, nationally and internationally. In this post I want to reflect on how a meaning making perspective could inform the way we address the sustainability challenge in any walk of life.
The idea of a meaning making perspective emerged out of educational research I have been pursuing since the nineties, reported in several papers and my masters and doctoral theses (McKenzie, 1996, 2014). At the heart of meaning making theory sit two postulates – a reshaped conception of human understanding, and an affirmation of the role of growth in understanding in individual human becoming, in rising to fill one’s potential. The first asserts that growth in understanding is the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world (McKenzie, 2014, p. 2). The second proposes that the defining feature of humankind is the fulfilment it gains from growth in understanding (McKenzie, 2014, p. 11). Taken together, these propositions offer a way of reframing how we conceive and value ourselves and the world around us – how we divine our place in the world. (What would change in education, I ask in my thesis, if teachers taught and if curriculum was framed as though these propositions were accepted as credible hypotheses?) Today, as the harmful impacts of human activities on the environment are reported, more people are asking if there is something we can still do to reverse what sometimes feels like a slide into terminal planetary ecological malaise. Cultivating a meaning making perspective, or, using different language, aspiring to ‘hermeneutic consciousness’, a central idea within philosophical hermeneutic theory, could be a timely and promising response to twenty-first century environmental decline. As I reflected once:
"Making whole within making whole within making whole … Any assessment of my relationship with the world, of my ‘meaning’, must recognise within my deep identity a making-whole behaviour reminiscent of the healing processes in biological and ecological systems" (McKenzie, 1989).
While on face value growth in understanding is a cognitive achievement – I can now recognise the relationship between this and that in a way I didn’t see before – every occurrence of enlarged understanding brings me to a new state of awareness and being: it changes the way I conceive and experience myself, because I look both inwards and outwards from a more informed, robust standpoint. But awareness of self takes form against the backdrop of the world as we individually experience it. Indeed, richer understanding transforms me and my world. From a meaning making perspective, growth in individual understanding is an inherently relational process because self and world are inseparable. The welfare of humankind and the welfare of the planet are inextricably linked. Taking such a stance inevitably raises questions of first order importance for us. Meaning making is about living meaningful lives, where enlarged understanding or ‘making meaning’ (personal epistemology) and ‘finding meaning’ or self-realisation (personal ontology) occur ‘in the one crucible, realised in and through each other’ (McKenzie, 2016).
Meaning making theory sits in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, expressing similar concerns. In that tradition, the hermeneutic circle figures large. Hermeneutic consciousness is progressive attunement to the implications of the hermeneutic circle for our lives, and how we deal with that. The hermeneutic circle is simultaneously the route and journey to understanding. Making sense of something draws one into a cyclical or spiralling reasoning process (a hermeneutic circle). I approach a subject with an innate appreciation of the part/whole relationships in its constitution. I have an expectation that as I make sense of the particularities of the work, my conception of the whole takes clearer form. In turn, my enhanced conception of the whole gives me a stronger vantage point as I continue to interpret the nature and purpose of the parts. Describing the circle in this way acknowledges the effects of the disposition and expectations of the meaning maker in the process. We may well imagine how the oscillation between part dissecting and whole synthesising – hermeneutic circle thinking – plays out as an individual cultivates her/his ever-more-complex-comprehensive-and-coherent-sense-of-self-in-the-world consciousness over the course of a lifetime.
"We set ourselves the goal of continuously pushing back the frontiers of global understanding, of letting go of today's sense of everything as tomorrow's questions appear on the horizon. My noble calling is to progressively open myself to the mystery within and the mystery without" (McKenzie, 1997).
As I wrote to colleagues in our ecological agriculture organisation:
Becoming a more ecological agriculturist is at heart a quest for a more holistic understanding and appreciation of the interconnectedness of everything. It is the outcome of one’s choice to live a more meaningful, responsible, transformative life, expressed in the way we treat others and the world around us. A person’s farm or domestic garden says something about how that person views the world, about who she/he (‘zhe’) is. At the heart of the transformation of a farm business to greater ecological integrity is a continuing transformation of the farmer her/himself. The transformation is us!
We do well not to bite the hand that feeds us, nor soil our own nest, do we, world?
References
McKenzie, A. (1989). Photogenic angles – A personal reflection on creativity. Presentation at a seminar on Creativity, Centre for Human Aspects of Science and Technology, University of Sydney.
McKenzie, A. (1996). Improving the effectiveness of distance education for farmers, Unpublished masters thesis, University of Western Sydney, Richmond, NSW.
McKenzie, A. (1997). Muddy waters, the unknown, and the Welcome Stranger. Notes by Tony McKenzie for a workshop presented at the Women of the Land Gathering, C. B. Alexander Agricultural College, Tocal, Paterson NSW, 11 October 1997.
McKenzie, A. (2014). Meaning making: A university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century. Saarbrucken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. ISBN 978-3-659-52667-1. Available here.
McKenzie, A. (2016, 10 May). Lived hermeneutics: Teaching as if becoming rounded and grounded through growth in global understanding is the ultimate human goal [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1rSW4Dc.
Image: Behind the ballroom by Ralf Helbig – http://2510620.deviantart.com/art/Behind-the-ballroom-602624076 | Restrictions on use apply; see Creative Commons licence - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/