What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (review)

After an extended adolescence, the philosophy of technology has during the last decade or so begun to emerge as a mature discipline. As a result of early contributions by the first and second generations of Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, the later Heidegger, and Jacques Ellul, growth of the field tended to be stunted by various forms of essentialism, golden-age nostalgia, and reductionism, as well as abundant measures of gloom and doom regarding the putative "autonomy" of technology. It is thus a sign of considerable progress that writers such as Peter-Paul Verbeek are now bracketing those earlier views—critiquing and dismissing them as the "classical period" of the discipline—and moving on to offer solid and sunnier alternatives.

After an excellent introduction in which he lays out the structure and basic arguments of his presentation, Verbeek divides his book into three parts. The first, "Philosophy Beyond Things," provides an account of what was wrong with the "classical period" of the philosophy of technology as it was articulated in the work of Jaspers and the later Heidegger. The problem, as he sees it, is that those two philosophers missed the point: they were looking backward, attempting to understand technology "from its conditions of possibility, from what must be presupposed in order for it to be possible" (7). This led, among other things, to essentialist perspectives from which technology was treated as a thing, force, or world-historical epoch, and consequently to preoccupation with historical and metaphysical abstractions that failed to engage the tools and artifacts by means of which we engage the world and the world engages us. Verbeek admits that Heidegger made a good enough start in Being and Time, with its phenomenological analysis of actual tools and artifacts. Like a growing number of his colleagues, however, including Andrew Feenberg and Don Ihde, he thinks that the later Heidegger, especially after the "The Question Concerning Technology," sacrificed solid hermeneutical method for an overly transcendentalized account of "artifacts as manifestations of a sending of being" (95).

Verbeek's alternative is a call for philosophers to look not backward but forward, "starting from the technologies themselves and asking what role they play in our culture and daily lives" (8). Of course he is not the first to make this move. In part two, "Philosophy from Things," he summarizes and criticizes the work of three contemporary thinkers who have done just that (albeit in very different ways and to a greater or lesser extent): Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, and Albert Borgmann.

As a part of his discussion of work of these three philosophers, Verbeek makes it clear that he also wants to bracket the "classical period" of phenomenology. He acknowledges that his new, improved version is in many ways similar to Don Ihde's program of "postphenomenology." To his great credit, Ihde reconstructs the older phenomenology by means of various finely wrought tools, including analyses of gestalt figures and what he terms "microperceptions" and "macroperceptions." Perhaps most important, Ihde's constructivism insists on the "multistability" of tools and other artifacts, that is, their dependence on context.

Following Ihde, Verbeek thus rejects the claim of the old phenomenology that humans can engage "reality itself" (104), and he seeks to develop a reformed version that links up with what is good in existentialism. What he hopes to get in all this is a radical form of phenomenology "in which subject and object, or human beings and world, constitute each other . . . [and that] overcomes both the essentialism and the fascination with alienation that characterized classical phenomenology" (113). Put another way, his program would have two poles. It would be phenomenological/hermeneutical in the sense that it would explore "the ways in which human beings have access to their world by the roles that [artifacts] play in human experience" (119). And it would be existential in the sense that it...