Abstract
Don Ihde has been writing about Edmund Husserl on phenomenology and Martin Heidegger on technology for decades. His explicit incorporation of John Dewey came somewhat later, but it now appears to play a fundamental role in his latest conception of postphenomenology. In this paper, I raise some preliminary questions about the implications of this move. What happens when a philosophy of technology becomes at least as Deweyan as it is phenomenological? Should we follow?
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Notes
- 1.
What Ihde objects to is that in Heidegger’s famous “Question of Technology,” all of our activities, the things we encounter and deal with, and even we ourselves are all too readily and generally characterized as occurring in a “world” where everything is set up and “enframed” as part of a stockpile of available materials and personnel – what Heidegger calls a “standing-reserve” (Bestand), always ready for technologically determined purposes. Enframing (Gestell), then, is the “essence” of whatever is technological. Ihde reads “essence” in its traditional sense of identifying the permanent and unchangeable character or set of properties of everything technological. However, as many others have pointed out, Heidegger himself denies this and argues that he means essence (Wesen) in a verbal sense of “essencing,” that is, of constituting the continuing occurrence of a predominant way that meaning is disclosed, such that everything tends to be understood by default as instrumentally useful (Heidegger, 1993, pp. 311–341). See also, Ruin, 2010, 183–94.
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The same can be said, of course, for computerized music. Moreover, Ihde finds that the same “heavy romantic overtones...in [Heidegger’s] nostalgic merging of art and technology” (Ihde, 2010, p. 76), in a way that makes the art object the primary example of a “good” technology by reminding us that after all, poiésis was also originally a techné.
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See, e.g., Scharff, 2006, pp. 139–142.
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Ihde, 2010, pp. 114–115; Ihde, 2016, pp. 26. At one point, it is made a mark in favor of taking even Husserl’s passing remarks about technologies seriously because “at least whenever Husserl began to need eyeglasses, his lifeworld became one mediated through an optical technology” (Ihde, 2016, p. 31).
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Ihde, 2016, pp. 50–51. This critique of Husserl’s neglect of the telescope first appeared in a journal article in 2011 (Ihde, 2016, p. 141), but as Ihde explains, its roots can be found in his working out the scheme of “human-technology relations” in Ihde, 1990, in the late 1980s (Ihde & Selinger, 2003, p. 134). An early version was also presented at the Husserl Circle meeting in Lima, Peru, in 2003 (Ihde, 2009, p. 81, n. 11).
- 9.
Letter to Georg Misch, 27 Nov. 1930, quoted in Sandmeyer, 2009, p. 169, author’s emphasis.
- 10.
Husserl, 1981, p. 196. In 1931, Husserl wrote to Alexander Pfänder that he had “reached the distressing conclusion that philosophically I have nothing to do with this Heideggerian profundity [about “historical life”], with this brilliant unscientific genius; that Heidegger’s criticism [of my phenomenology]...is based upon a gross misunderstanding; [and] that he may be involved in the formation of the kind of philosophical system which I have always considered my life’s work to make forever impossible” (Husserl, 1997, p. 482).
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See, e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 200, 212–13 (where perception is explicitly said to be “cultural”). What he says about perception here should be compared with what he is willing to say about it in PoP, where phenomenology is described as having “joined an extreme subjectivism with an extreme objectivism through its concept of the world,” and as revealing a “phenomenological world...[that is] inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity which establish their unity by the taking up [la reprise] into my past experiences my present experiences, or of the other person’s experience into my own” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, lxxxiv). Is this the voice of the author of VI?
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Interpretations of PoP that take their cue from VI’s self-criticisms are certainly not new. One of the earliest—and I think still basically correct—is Kwant, 1966, esp. Ch. 1.
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Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 212, emphasis added. Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of “perception” in VI still remains unclear to me. Does he in a certain sense still “start” with an understanding of it primarily in light of individuals and their embodiment and only then enrich this understanding by redescribing it by, so to speak, bringing back and thus including the cultural dimension that was always there, or does he now understand sensual and cultural perceptiveness from the beginning as equally essential aspects of being-in-the-world? His criticisms of Piaget and Eddington seem to accuse them of failing to do the latter.
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On the fact that the editor reinserted the first erased five words into the paragraph, see n. 1; this sentiment, however, is everywhere in this opening section. Also on the very first page, Merleau-Ponty introduces philosophy in a way that deprives its practitioners of the right to ever see themselves as moving on a linear, conceptualizing path toward success: “We see the things themselves, the world is what we see: formulae of this kind express a faith common to the natural man and the philosopher—the moment he opens his eyes: they refer to a deep-seated set of mute ‘opinions’ implicated in our lives. But what is strange about this faith is that if we seek to articulate it into theses or statements, if we ask ourselves what is this we, what seeing is, what thing or world is, we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 3, bold-face added). Merleau-Ponty’s italics point to “the matters” he wants to address, but it is through the consideration of what I put in bold-face that he does so.
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His critique proceeds as follows: After analyzing Husserl’s “fanciful” reconstruction of what Galileo must have “forgotten” about ordinary perception and its “distance” from the moon and stars in order to make room for his idealized and mathematized conception of these “objects” (Ihde, 2016, p. 51), Ihde argues that Husserl thus misses the real story, which is that Galileo’s use of the telescope actually “mediate[s] between science and the lifeworld, thus leaving Galileo in the lifeworld to begin with” (Ihde, 2016, p. 57). Instead, Husserl depicts Galileo as already being a mathematizing scientist from the beginning, i.e., an objective thinker who is then faced with the “problem” of explaining his “connection” with the lifeworld out of which he somehow came to think about the planets as scientific objects. So, although Ihde acknowledges that “Husserl’s lifeworld does contain” (albeit inadequate) discussions of both dimensions, he seems to assume that the truly phenomenological alternative is to start with TL’s distinction between the “bodily-sensory basis” of experience, which comes first, and “the [cultural] meaning-context within which it fits, “ which comes into consideration later (Ihde, 2016, p. 58, my emphasis).
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Ihde, 2016, p. 97, my emphasis. Hickman uses the same “inversion” image as Ihde in (Hickman, 2001, p. 20). To my knowledge, Dewey never considers the fact that “looking to the future” always involves “taking the past with you” in richer ways than one could ever make fully conscious. Forgetting this historical dimension is precisely what philosophers do when they convince themselves they have finally found the proper concepts to tell us how things “really” are and what is “really” valuable.
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Hickman cites and discusses this passage in (Hickman, 1990, pp. 59–60).
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As I argue elsewhere, this is how Comtean positivism has survived into our notion of a “developed” world, even after all the explicit, identifiable, and “disposable” concepts, theories, and models of its twentieth century incarnations have been “undercut and escaped” (Scharff, 2017).
- 24.
From a different angle, but equally without “nostalgia” or an amateur’s fear, see Polt (2015).
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Scharff, R.C. (2020). Postphenomenology, a Technology with a Shelf-Life? Ihde’s Move from Husserl toward Dewey. In: Miller, G., Shew, A. (eds) Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing Ihde. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35967-6_5
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