Phenomenology and the Empirical Turn

“we will argue that in its execution of the empirical turn, postphenomenology forfeits a phenomenological dimension of questioning”

“we will argue that postphenomenology is unwittingly technically mediated in an ontological way”

“in its dismissal of Heidegger’s questioning of technology as belonging to ‘classical philosophy of technology,’ postphenomenology implicitly adheres to what Heidegger calls technology as Enframing”

“Postphenomenology aims to empirically analyze how particular technologies as ‘the things themselves’ mediate the relation between humans and their world”

“This has given rise to numerous analyses and detailed descriptions of how human existence is deeply and polymorphously interwoven with artifacts”

“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 adherence leaves undiscussed how mediation theory about ontic beings (i.e., technologies) involves a specific ontological mode of relating to these beings, whereas consideration of this mode is precisely the concern of phenomenology”

Commentator’s Note: The motivation for postphenomenological critique, against and beyond Heidegger, is for me precisely because the “being” of his ontology is philosophical cover for fascist geist. So I’m wary of this reasoning.

“To understand postphenomenology as a method for studying technology, we can take Don Ihde’s work as point of departure”

“‘pragmatism + phenomenology = postphenomenology’”

“the phenomenological ‘principle of all principles’:

that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there. (Husserl 1983,p. 44)”

“Ihde adopts this maxim and accordingly defines phenomenology as ‘an examination of experience that deals with and is limited by whatever falls within the correlation of experienced-experiencing’ (Ihde 2012, p. 34)”

“The correlation of noema and noesis is called intentionality, and careful description and examination of intentionality shows how a conscious subject cannot be simply presupposed as a starting point, but is discovered from within the movements of experience”

“Technologies (the axe in this example) do not solely appear as pregiven quality-bearing objects for conscious reflection by a pre-given BI’ or subject, but are woven into the wider movements of experience. Postphenomenology calls this interweaving ‘technological mediation’ and studies it under the heading of ‘human-technology relations,’’ with the goal of ‘[discovering] structural features of those ambiguous relations’ (Ihde 1990, p. 75; see also Ihde 1993,p.71; Verbeek 2005,p.7)”

“Pragmatism is incorporated into postphenomenology to ward off the alleged essentialist thought present in classical phenomenology and philosophy of technology”

“postphenomenology is critical of accounts in which technology is reduced to a singular, overarching essence. Culprits that are often mentioned in this regard are Karl Jaspers, Jacques Ellul, and most of all Martin Heidegger”

“According to Ihde, postphenomenology is pragmatist insofar as it takes an ‘anti-essentialist’ position: ‘I claim, pragmatically, that there is no essence of technology’ (Ihde 2010, p. 119)”

“Instead of viewing technologies according to a fixed essence, their character is considered to be ‘multistable’ (2010, p. 126), meaning that a technology can assume various ‘stable’ identities which depend on the context in which it is used”

“Verbeek also adheres to this pragmatism: ‘‘[technologies] are only technologies in their concrete uses, and this means that one and the same artifact can have different identities in different use contexts’ (2005,p.118)”

“anti-essentialism means that the character of technologies is pragmatically defined, which is to say that it depends on use-context”

“we can define the postphenomenological method as the empirical inquiry into the structural ways in which particular technologies mediate experiential correlations and associated subject-object constitutions that appear in specific contexts of technology use”

Commentator’s Note: It’s been a while since I’ve read any postphenomenology, but returning to it via this survey, I still find it very compelling.

“What is the phenomenon in postphenomenology? It is technology understood as a human-technology relation”

“We have seen how the human-technology relation is understood as the site in which both objectivity and subjectivity are constituted (Section 2). This implies that objects and subjects are constituents, i.e., things that are constituted within the human-technology relation”

“For postphenomenology, therefore, constitution is always the mediated constitution of things (constituents) within the confines of the phenomenon understood as human-technology relation”

“How does pragmatism relate to this understanding of the phenomenon? In what follows, we will develop the argument that it relates on two levels: first, the ontic level where it concerns the content of the phenomenon. This level is explicitly addressed in the postphenomenological method. The second level is ontological and concerns the access to the phenomenon. This level remains implicit in postphenomenology and will be made explicit by our analysis and introduction of a phenomenological concept of technical mediation”

Commentator’s Note: We’ll see where they go with “access to the phenomenon,” but for me this was solved by Merleau-Ponty in 1945.

“postphenomenology denies the constituents in human-technology relations a stable, essential identity, and instead understands this identity in an anti-essentialist way, which is to say as multistable and dependent on use-context”

“Heidegger stands as a foundational example9 of classical and therefore inadequate philosophy of technology that is to be overcome by the introduction of pragmatism and the associated empirical turn”

“Ihde finds Heidegger’s analysis to be essentialist, which means that all technologies are reduced to the same essence of Enframing. As Ihde rhetorically asks: ‘do all technologies fall under this description? No.’ (Ihde 2010, p. 120)”

“Ihde concludes: ‘To attend to the ‘essence’ of technology, I argue, blinds Heidegger to the differing contexts and multidimensionalities of technologies that a pragmatic-phenomenological account can better bring forth’ (2010, p. 115)”

“Instead of reducing all oftechnology to the same essence or conditions of possibility, postphenomenology aims for a more appropriate depiction of technologies and therefore turns to empirical analysis of specific human-technology relations. Accordingly, essentialism and transcendentalism are countered with the empirical turn and are supplanted with multistability. This shows how content-pragmatism is grounded in adequacy of analysis”

“in what kind of experiential correlation is the postphenomenological researcher taken up when relying on content-pragmatism to provide an adequate depiction of the phenomenon? For an answer to these questions, we turn to Heidegger’s phenomenology.”

Commentator’s Note: This is a frustrating argument, especially given the clear and accurate presentation of the postphenomenological perspective to this point. The authors effectively argue, “to present a non-Heideggerian theory is to become caught up in the correlation.” But what the postphenomenologists are doing is much more phenomenological in the mode of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. We ought to be much more wary of Heidegger.

“first, for Heidegger, the phenomenon of phenomenology is not the object of a theory”

“Second, phenomenology cannot be understood to be a theoretical science”

“Heidegger makes the frequently quoted claim that ‘Phenomenology signifies primarily a methodological conception. This expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the how of that research’ (Heidegger 2008, p. 50)”

“Phenomenology holds that research about an object or domain of objectivity (a what) already involves a certain way of relating (a how)to this ‘what.’”

“Scientific inquiry is not interested in this ‘how,’ but rather operates on the assumption that objects are accessible to theoretical thinking (e.g. via objective theory and scientific method)”

Commentator’s Note: Perhaps the authors should do some reading in science and technology studies. Just read some Latour, even.

“The theoretical attitude designates a specific mode of access to a theme of research, thereby involving a specific relation between being and thinking. Attitude here means that the theme of research stands as an object (being) over against the theoretical viewpoint of the researcher (thinking)”

“In aiming for correct theoretical propositions about objects, the sciences adhere to the theoretical attitude. This attitude is taken as self-evident and is not questioned (unlike the scientific content of propositions made by way of this attitude)”

Commentator’s Note: This is simply false. The philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and active practitioners of science have come a long way from naive scientism. It may persist in some cohorts, but to characterize the whole of “the sciences” in this way is wrong.

“geneticists may study the structure and functions of (parts of) a genome, but do not ask how the genome appears as an object to experience and associated scientific theory”

Commentator’s Note: Laboratory Life (1979) is about this how.

“If the principle of phenomenology is to investigate the things themselves as they show themselves, and if the theme of phenomenology is the relation between being and thinking, then phenomenology cannot prejudge this theme to be the object as observed from a theoretical perspective. This latter maneuver would not access the theme as it shows itself, but rather according to a specific mode of appearance that belongs to the specific experiential correlation associated with the theoretical attitude”

Commentator’s Note: So I see their point, that postphenomenology is not doing Heideggerian phenomenology. But the genome example above is not helpful for their cause, because the genome does not “appear” to us as a phenomenon without the mediation of technology. This is the postphenomenological argument, that there are certain experiences that are only experienced as technologically mediated. Insofar as Heidegger is interested in the “as-structure” of experience (the phenomenon as always already “for me”), to speak of the appearing of the genome is necessarily to speak of its appearing through, and only through, technological instruments.

“the phenomenon is not only the content [Gehalt], but also the relation [Bezug] between being and thinking that one always already has to enact [Vollzug] in order for such content to appear”

“In other words, the phenomenon of phenomenology is not itself an (ontic) object or a being, since all objectivity already presumes and enacts a relation (ontologically) between being and thinking, and this relation is precisely the theme of phenomenology”

“we can observe that the postphenomenological understanding of the phenomenon is oriented towards what Heidegger called ‘knowledge of the objective order’. Even though the content of this order is reinterpreted to be multistable and context-dependent, this order itself is accessed as an object, i.e. something that is literally thrown-opposite (obiectum) to the perspective of a postphenomenological researcher”

“Whereas mediation theory is principally about the content of the phenomenon, Heidegger’s work indicates that phenomenology is not solely about the (ontic) content or ‘the what’, but simultaneously about the (ontological) relation between being and thinking or ‘the how’ that is already enacted in an encounter with such content”

Commentator’s Note: And to this I say, read Merleau-Ponty, not Heidegger. The former is so much better on the “lived relation” than the latter.

“Ihde reiterates what we can

now call his theoretically mediated critique of Heidegger’s essentialism and its inadequate ‘one size fits all’ approach: ‘I saw that for Heidegger, every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis’ (Ihde 2006,p.271,originalemphasis; cf. Section 3.2)”

“As a pragmatist and a rigorous phenomenologist, I realized this meant, simply, that such an analysis was useless, since it could not discriminate between the results of playing a musical instrument, also a technological mediation, and the process of genetic manipulation! (Ihde 2006, p.271, original emphasis)”

“Whereas postphenomenology explicitly takes account of technological mediation on the ontic level of human-technology relations, it overlooks its own technical mediation at an ontological level”

“Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of modern technology– Enframing – concerns what we have discussed in terms of the phenomenological concept of technical mediation, and can therefore neither be reduced to essentialism (Ihde) nor transcendentalism (Verbeek)”

“Ihde interprets Enframing as a genus and criticizes it because one cannot reduce the complexities of human-technology relations to an overarching essence”

“Verbeek interprets Enframing as a condition of possibility for modern technologies and finds that human-technology relations cannot be reduced to these conditions”

“postphenomenology dismisses Heidegger’s questioning of technology because it provides an insufficiently useful theory, and in so doing unwittingly affirms Enframing”

Commentator’s Note: Sure, I can agree with this argument. I think the postphenomenologists are more nuanced than this, but perhaps they were too quick to dismiss Enframing wholesale.

“Importantly, adherence to Enframing cannot be understood as a vilification. It is not wrong to develop a fruitful theory about technologies, mediations, multistabilities, etc. For Heidegger, Enframing does not denote some human failure and can therefore not be mobilized as a term of abuse. Although he regularly disparages modern technology, his questioning cannot be reduced to a value judgment”

Commentator’s Note: However, here the sympathy for Heidegger and softening of his views is too much. Heidegger disparages modern technology because he is motivated by a political project of Blut und Boden. In contemporaneous writings (Memorial Address, 1955), he writes “man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether” (47). He thanks his “homeland for all that it has given [him]” (43), argues that the “flourishing of any genuine work depend[s] upon its roots in a native soil” (47), and yearns for a “life-giving homeland in whose ground man may stand rooted, that is, be autocthonic” (48). I have, in the past, interpreted these lines too intellectually, too philosophically, reading this homeland as thought itself. And I certainly think Heidegger is stating as much. But with everything I have learned about Heidegger’s political project from recent scholarship, these lines read much differently, much more plainly, as the valorization of German nationalist spirit, the rooting of the human homeland in thought in the German homeland itself. What is frustrating is that Derrida made this exact argument in Of Spirit (1987), and yet Heidegger continued to be absolved of his political views for decades, and indeed continues to be absolved of these views.

“we plead for a rehabilitation of the ontological dimension in the questioning of technology”

Commentator’s Note: Why do you plead? What is the motive for this rehabilitation?

“a rehabilitation of the ontological dimension puts the topic of metaphysics and essentialism back on the agenda”

“Heidegger understood all making, designing, and willing of technologies to be anchored in the mode of revealing that belongs to technology as Enframing. He therefore himself turned towards an exploration of the possibility of a non-technical, non-willing, Bgelassen^ way of philosophical thinking”

“it opens the question about the relation between the ‘work’ of technology in the sense of Enframing and the notion of ‘work’ that Heidegger discusses in The Origin of the Work of Art”

“In the former, work is considered in terms of utility and function which adhere to the way of revealing of Enframing. In the latter, the creation of the work of art is considered in terms of establishing truth, which is to say as an ontological moment beyond mere adherence”

Commentator’s Note: So this is the first motive, but again, we ought to be wary of what Heidegger wants to “release” thought for, of which “truth” he wants our works to reveal.

“attention to the ontological dimension raises the question pertaining to the meaning and implications of the empirical in an empirical philosophy of technology”

“On the one hand, our paper shows that postphenomenology is susceptible to the critique that it is not sufficiently empirical, since it overlooks how its own method is technically mediated. On the other hand, we can adopt (but must also adapt) a postphenomenological line of inquiry and ask whether Heidegger takes sufficient consideration of concrete artifacts”

“The rehabilitation of the ontological dimension called for in this paper can be taken to move in a similar direction, but can be specifically oriented towards ecology”

“This topic is of interest because in a basic yet fundamental way, our present ecological situation can be understood as a fundamental ‘how’ of how things appear to us. Put bluntly, it raises the question whether the ‘gigantic gasoline station’ that Heidegger mentions in his discussion of Technology now appears to be encounter a limit insofar as it is leaking, which is to say that it is polluting the planet (cf. Zwier et al. 2015)”

Commentator’s Note: Ah, an ecological argument. I suspect there are political-ecological commitments here motivating the turn to Heidegger. But Heideggerian “releasement,” talk of “limits” (i.e. “planetary boundaries”) hints too much of the call for degrowth or eco-primitivism that can all too easily tip into eco-fascism. Relying on a fascist philosopher to support your political project is a risky move. Meanwhile, I become yet more of an ecomodernist, motivated by the international socialism of my politics, with the postphenomenologists useful allies. While the authors critique Ihde’s focus on utility, I in turn would argue, “what is the use of Heidegger for saving the planet?” Enframing is a powerful concept, and I don’t discard it. But when we ask, “what must be done?” I will look elsewhere.

“The question that follows from a rehabilitation of the ontological dimension in phenomenology of technology asks whether the relation between ecology and technology solely concerns the ontic (e.g., polluting vs ‘green’ artefacts) or whether it must also be contemplated in ontological terms”

“Zwier, J., Blok, V., Lemmens, P., Geerts, R. J. (2015). The ideal of a zero-waste humanity: philosphical reflections on the demand for a bio-based economy. Journal ofAgricultural and Environmental Ethics, 28(2), 353–374”