A juxtaposition of Aldo Leopold and Martin Heidegger: Community, the land, and time

The phenomenological concept of time articulated by Martin Heidegger in The Concept of Time and in Being and Time is used to disclose American environmentalism as a tradition anticipating the advent of a technological world ordered by a parametric conception of time and calling for the temporal modification of everyday life through engaged contact with the wild. The essays of conservationist Aldo Leopold, forerunner of contemporary environmental ethics, are chosen as representative of a tradition that includes Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. The three themes constituting Leopold's land philosophy---that we ought to conserve the land, that our historical roots in the wild may yet yield esthetic values, and that the land can be perceived as a community of neighbors---are interpreted in terms of Heidegger's concepts of the authentic future, past, and present, respectively.; Issues of interpretation, specifically which philosophical interpretation is appropriate to the land philosophy of Leopold and whether we can overcome linguistic and metaphysical obstacles to arrive at an understanding of Heidegger, are guiding concerns of the juxtaposition. These problems are unraveled by virtue of the juxtaposition's hermeneutic structure, which consists of three parts. Part I shows the evolution of the three themes in Leopold's essays leading up to their explicit formulation in A Sand County Almanac . Part II is a conceptual analysis of Heidegger's translated works beginning in the 1960s and returning to the 1920s guided by Leopold's three themes. Part III synthesizes and reinterprets Leopold's land philosophy in light of the result of Part II---Heidegger's early concept of primordial time---by showing that the unifying theme of the Almanac is a qualified concept of time bound up with a concept of a whole human life and articulated in opposition to the quantified time of civilized life. The dissertation concludes that the possibility of a juxtaposition of Leopold and Heidegger, in which each effectively elucidates the other, is grounded in their common heritage in philosophical Romanticism.