Ecological Hermeneutic Phenomenology: A Method to Explore the Ontic and Ontological Structures of Technologies in the World (original) (raw)
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Expanding hermeneutics to the world of technology
AI & SOCIETY, 2020
In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our "lifeworld". Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the "Ready-to-hand" (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the "Ready-to-hand" in Heidegger's sense of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life.
THE ONTOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY A Heideggerian Perspective
The question concerning technology lies at the heart of human existence. As such it must take a central place in philosophy today. This importance, however, is veiled by a historical interpretation of technology as instrumental. This instrumentalism is the result of an ambiguity in the Aristotelian legacy that arises from an understanding of reality rooted in a theory of the categories, on the one hand, and a theory of causality on the other. This has left us with an ambiguous understanding of human making split by the twofold structure of artistic and representational thinking. The former is characteristic of empirical knowledge, the latter epistemological knowledge. This thesis follows Heidegger in arguing that an integral understanding of technology can only be achieved through a creative retrieval of Aristotle's ontology that interweaves the question of causality and the question of the categories, which we have outlined below as the interplay between potentiality and actuality, between being and non-being, and between truth and untruth. While indebted to Aristotle, this involves an important re-thinking of the nature of ontology, for it is made possible by exposing the limits of Aristotle’s theory of time, which understands time as a succession of present instants, and moving towards the Heideggerian understanding of presencing as the opening of a horizon in which things perdure. Consequently, this is an ontology in which technology is tied to our notion of time just as much as to our notion of being. After establishing this temporal ontology as the basis for an understanding of technology, in a unique way we apply it to the particular case of 3D printing and come to see that this technology is indeed more than an instrument; it is an interweaving of the epistemic and the poetic, the rational and the artistic. Thus I accept the consensus in contemporary philosophy of technology that questions of technology must be understood in terms of their political and social implications. However, unlike many thinkers in this field I also argue that they can be fruitfully understood in terms of a temporal ontology. I call this temporal ontology of technology, hyperology.
Technology embodiment: the contribution of Heidegger's phenomenology
2011
The rapid evolution, expansion, and integration of technology into our everyday lives changes the way that we understand the relationship between technology and people. A dualistic relationship, with technology at one end and people at the other, no longer serves as a clear approach in understanding why and how we engage technology. As such, we must seek new forms of understanding as technology has become truly part and parcel of who we are, how we connect with our past, and how we shape our future. We use Heidegger's phenomenology for understanding the relationship between technology and people, investigating why and how people engage hedonic systems in the formation of embodied technology relationships. In this qualitative study we contribute to research on both hedonic systems and phenomenology, evidencing characteristics of how people constitute an embodied relationship with the technology that has become so pervasive in their lifeworld.
Heideggerian phenomenology, practical ontologies and the link between experience and practices
To appear in: Human Studies
Postphenomenologists and performativists criticize classical approaches to phenomenology for isolating subjects from socio-material relations. The purpose of this essay is to repudiate parts of their criticism by presenting a nuanced account of phenomenology thus making it evident that phenomenological theories have the potential for meshing with the performative idiom of contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS). However, phenomenology retains an apparent shortcoming in that its proponents typically focus on human-nonhuman relations that arise in localized contexts. For this reason, it seems to contrast with one of the most important assumptions behind practical ontologies: socio-practical significance extends beyond an agent’s immediate situatedness. Turning to Heidegger and his notion of ‘de-distancing’, the essay explores how localized phenomena that pertain to human experience connect with global practices (e.g. socio-material assemblages and networks) and, thus, the possibility of consilience between phenomenology and the performative idiom in STS.
Abstract: “Never has such a succession of non sequiturs played such an important role in the history of philosophy!” That is Andrew Feenberg’s (2005) opinion of Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophy of technology. He is seconded in his disproval by Don Ihde (2010) who rejects Heidegger’s “völkisch techno-romanticism” and “reactionary modernism”. Along with Peter-Paul Verbeek (2011), Ihde also berates Heidegger’s “externalist”, “high altitude”, “one size fits all” analysis of the “essence” of technology. And his view that Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is an apologia for inhumanity is echoed, inter alia, by Soren Riis (2011). Faced with assessments as damning as these, some readers will conclude that the days when Heidegger was a legitimate reference for the philosophy of technology are over. Others will be less rash and conclude that philosophy of technology readers would benefit from a fresh ‘close reading’ of Heidegger. First to see why and to what extent the views expressed above are ill-informed, reductive, self-defeating and largely groundless. Second to see how disturbingly oblivious their authors are to the limitations, compromises and risks posed by the “descriptivist”, “empiricist”, “bottom up” perspectives they oppose to Heidegger’s “top down perspective”. Finally, and above all, a patient re-reading of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology creates an opportunity to make the case that his estimation of the role of technology in degrading modern humanity’s ecological life support systems is as relevant today as ever and the solutions he proposes are altogether appropriate. Desirous to be of service to such a readership, this paper offers a summary of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. It focuses in particular on the enigmatic claim that technology is “supremely perilous” and for that very reason a source of “salvation”. Along the way it looks at the way the extra-technological aspects of his thought inform and condition his discourse on technology. Particular attention is paid to what Heidegger says about the Sacred, Ethics, “Ethology”, Art and how his views on these things are factored into what he says about technology. To conclude it considers whether a determination of technology that conforms to Heidegger’s thought is viable in practice and if it is would adopting it entail adjustments 21st century humanity could accept in principle. We also consider if it is acceptable and viable to NOT embrace Heidegger’s philosophy of technology.
This paper provides a phenomenological analysis of postphenomenological philosophy of technology. While acknowledging that the results of its analyses are to be recognized as original, insightful, and valuable, we will argue that in its execution of the empirical turn, postphenomenology forfeits a phenomenological dimension of questioning. By contrasting the postphenomenological method with Heidegger's understanding of phenomenology as developed in his early Freiburg lectures and in Being and Time, we will show how the postphenomenological method must be understood as mediation theory, which adheres to what Heidegger calls the theoretical attitude. This leaves undiscussed how mediation theory about ontic beings (i.e.,technologies) involves a specific ontological mode of relating to beings, whereas consideration of this mode is precisely the concern of phenomenology. This ontological dimension is important to consider, since we will argue that postphenomenology is unwittingly technically mediated in an ontological way. The upshot of this is that in its dismissal of Heidegger's questioning of technology as belonging to Bclassical philosophy of technology,^ postphenomenology implicitly adheres to what Heidegger calls technology as Enframing. We argue that postphenomenology overlooks its own adherence to the theoretical attitude and ultimately to Enframing, and we will conclude with calling for a phenomenological questioning of the dimension that postphenomenology presently leaves unthought, meaning that we will develop a plea for a rehabilitation of the ontological dimension in the philosophy of technology.
Back to the technologies themselves: phenomenological turn within postphenomenology
Phenomenology and The Cognitive Sciences, 2023
This paper revives phenomenological elements to have a better framework for addressing the implications of technologies on society. For this reason, we introduce the motto "back to the technologies themselves" to show how some phenomenological elements, which have not been highlighted in the philosophy of technology so far, can be fruitfully integrated within the postphenomenological analysis. In particular, we introduce the notion of technological intentionality in relation to the passive synthesis in Husserl's phenomenology. Although the notion of technological intentionality has already been coined in postphenomenology, it is "in tension" with the notion of technological mediation since there are still no clear differences between these two concepts and studies on how they relate one to another. The tension between mediation and intentionality arises because it seems intuitively reasonable to suggest that intentionality differs from mediation in a number of ways; however, these elements have not been clearly clarified in postphenomenology so far. To highlight what technological intentionality is and how it differs from mediation, we turn the motto "back to the things themselves" into "back to the technologies themselves," showing how the technologies have to be taken into consideration by themselves. More specifically, we use the concept of passive synthesis developed by Husserl, and we apply it to technologies to show their inner passive activity. The notion of the passive synthesis enables to demonstrate how technologies are able to connect to a wider (technological) environment without the subjects' activity. Consequently, we claim that technologies have their pole of action, and they passively act by themselves.
Heidegger's Aporetic Ontology of Technology
Inquiry, 2010
This paper investigates Heidegger’s ontology of technology in order to show that this ontology is aporetic. In Heidegger’s key technical essays, “The Question Concerning Technology” and its earlier versions “Ge-stell” and “The Danger”, enframing is described as the ontological basis of modern life. But the account of enframing is ambiguous. Sometimes it is described as totally binding and at other times it appears to allow for exceptions. This oscillation between, what we will call total enframing and partial enframing, is underscored in the work of two influential scholars of Heidegger’s later thought, Hubert Dreyfus and Iain Thomson. We show that like Heidegger, Dreyfus and Thomson unwittingly perpetuate this dilemma that ultimately covers up the aporetic structure of enframing.
Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2020
This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnics and technodiversity as a kind of “critical synthesis” of the philosophies of technology of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, arguably his most important interlocutors besides Gilbert Simondon, whose crucial influence will have to remain undiscussed here unfortunately. It argues that the cosmotechnics–technodiversity project – motivated foremost by the concern for the relentless destruction of planetary diversity in all its forms (biological, ecological, ethnic, psychological, sociological, cultural, etc.) engendered by a globalized “mono-technological” technosphere originating from Western technology – criticizes but also aims to do justice to both Heidegger’s ontological or onto-historical understanding of technology as a singular yet universalizing imperative or claim driving the development of concrete technologies [Gestell or enframing], and Stiegler’s organological understanding of technology as an evolutionary process of technical exteriorization or exosomatization fundamentally conditioning any ontological and cosmological opening of anthropos, i.e., of what Heidegger called Dasein. Hui’s plural cosmotechnics critically acknowledges yet pluralizes both perspectives, thus teaching a pluri-ontological and pluri-cosmological conditioning of technology as well as a pluri-technological conditioning of the ontological and the cosmological. Using terms derived from Peter Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Heidegger’s “ontokinetics,” it is shown that it thus gives due to both a “vertical,” Heideggerian or “spiritual” dimension and a “horizontal,” Stieglerian or “materialist” dimension to the question concerning technology. This new and original, cosmotechnical perspective on these two fundamental views on the question concerning technology allows Hui to engage philosophy of technology in the overdue debate with contemporary anthropology’s so-called ontological turn, increasingly urgent in today’s age of the Anthropocene.
Conference Presentation Comparative & International Education Society 2021
We cannot adequately understand the present without adequately understanding the world making and destroying powers of modern technology, overlooked in modern Western philosophy (Heidegger, 1977a; Hui, 2016). Suggested in the titles of two recent books – The Sixth Extinction (Kolbert, 2014) and The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2017), the material and ideological conditions of existence are changing, rapidly and disruptively (Hamilton, 2017; Nancy & Barrau, 2014). Most of us do not really understand all that is happening now, and how all this is shaping the ways our worlds are being reordered, i.e., social media, algorithms, cybernetics, the anthropocene (Hamilton,2017; Haraway, 2015; Steigler, 2018; Stengers, 2015). The unsettling technological advancements and the disordering of worlds since at least the "great acceleration" in the 1950s are part of an historical conjuncture of forces and events that need to be explained together (Grossberg, 2016; McNeill & Engelke, 2014). We live in a planetary technological condition today, yet technology continues to be understood as instruments for accomplishing rational human purposes (Ellul, 1964). In the early 1950s, Martin Heidegger argued that the emergence of cybernetics meant the “end of philosophy” and the beginning of a planetary domestication based on Western techno-scientific thought (Heidegger, 1977a, p. 377). Since the 1950s, the process of cybernetization has concretized in world-wide systems of technological mediation that operate within sensory and intelligent environments in the form of ubiquitous computing and pervasive media (Horl, 2013a). Reflected in the diverse debates on humanism and posthumanism, interrelated with the ontological turn in the sciences and humanities, we are living through a crisis/transformation in the humanist, anthropocentric ways we learned to understand ourselves and the world (Blaser,2010; Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018; Braidotti, 2019; Escobar, 2017; Ferrando, 2019, de Castro, 2014; Mignolo, 2011). The modern humanist paradigm of technics as an extension of instrumental reason has been succeeded by a wide variety of post-humanist philosophies of the relations between nature and technics, evolving around the present form of “technoecological rationality” (Hayles, 1999; Horl, 2018a; Hui, 2019a). The distinctions between artificial and natural, inorganic and organic, no longer hold as cybernetic machines acquire a kind of organicity (Hui, 2019; Pierce, 2013). The technique/nature opposition, constitutive of Enlightenment thought, has given way to a generalized techno-nature, exemplified in global warming and biotechnology (Lindberg, 2018, p. 95). Nature and technology and human beings are not separate entities, but ontologically intertwined in the production of particular modes of existence. We seem to be living in a homeless, disorienting technologically mediated world order that is changing who we are and how we live, evident in the COVID-19 pandemic -- an unchecked environmental consequence of modern urban development. The planetarization of media technology are subjugating populations in ways that are both environmental and technological -- techno-ecological. This sense of existence as environmentally mediated contributes to the proliferation of a generalized semantics of ecology and renewed analysis of the relations between individuals and their milieus (Simondon, 2012). The technoecological condition is the result of the technocapitalist form of power (Horl, 2013a, 2015; Peters, 2017). The Social Credit System in China for example, portends a future of political subjugation of populations within totalizing cyber-capitalist systems of surveillance. The nature of existence and our understanding of existence have changed, yet education largely continues to reproduce the modern cosmology (Olsen & Gershmam, 1989) The ontological turn represents the proliferation of post-disciplinary thinking reconceptualizing the nature of existence with post-dualist assumptions outside the individual subject-object-world metaphysics of modernity. There are many contradictory currents comprising this turn, but all of them can be divided between those oriented towards expanding powers of control (i.e., eco-modernism, transhumanism, technological singularity), and those recognizing the universal limits and geopolitics of conceptions and knowledges of reality (Asafy-Adjaye, 2015; Bostrom, 2008; Kurzweil, 2005; Pellizzoni, 2015; Reiter, 2018; Santos, 2018; Savransky, 2017). Along with post-dualist technosciences for mastering a singular, universal world reality, a post-dualist ontological pluralism has emerged in the modern knowledge disciplines, particularly in philosophical anthropology, post-phenomenology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Latour, 1991; Maldonado-Torres, 2002; de Castro, 2014). As the decolonial critique has argued, modernity is a political-ontological imposition of a singular world ontology, upon which modern techno-industrial-colonial worlds have been built (Escobar, 2017; Maldonado-Torres, 2002; Mignolo, 2012). Drawing on this pluriversal ontological turn, I adopt the concept of ontological politics to refer to how different ways of knowing and being participate in the cosmo-politics of world formations (Blaser, 2008; Escobar, 2017; Savransky, 2014; Skafish, 2020; Pellizzoni, 2015). I propose we consider the present as a contradictory and uncertain crisis and transformation of the modern cosmology and ask how education might be redesigned to critically address the technoecological conditions of existence (Hamilton, 2020). I am interpreting the end and transformation of the modern worldview and project from new materialist philosophies of technics and media ecologies (Guattari, 2000; Horl, 2013a; Hui, 2019a). From the philosophy of technology and media, I describe both Erich Horl and Yuk Hui’s interpretations of the technoecological conditions of the present (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2019a). I focus on Horl and Hui’s proposals for critically understanding, assessing, and intervening in the present conditions of existence -- “general ecology of thought” and “cosmotechnics” (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2016b). In the present technoecological condition, general ecology names a new field for critical analysis while cosmotechnics names a renewed relation between technics and humans and technics and nature (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2016a). Cosmotechnics unifies the moral order and the cosmic order through technical activities (Dunker, 2020). There are varied twentieth century sources underlying this recent ontological turn in the philosophy of technology and media, including philosophical cosmology, connecting cosmology with metaphysics (An, 2019; Deleuze, 1968; Jonas, 1966; Simondon, 2016; Spengler, 1932; Whitehead, 1929). I see all this thought first, as ways of renewing critical theory for the present technoecological condition and second, as pedagogical contributions to a critical post-human humanities (Braidotti, 2016; The Institute of Speculative & Critical Inquiry). I conclude by asking how a general ecology of thought might prepare education for the task of thinking beyond neo-cybernetic systems of control (Beniger, 1989)?