Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (review)

The rumors of phenomenology's death have been greatly exaggerated. As postmodern and deconstructive thought have taken over continental philosophy, phenomenology, for many, has seemingly become passé. Those who consider it old hat, however, would do well to be reading Don Ihde and his cohorts.

Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde is a collection of twenty essays that celebrate and critique Ihde's oeuvre, using it as a starting point to discuss where phenomenology has been and where it is going. The book begins with a brief introduction summarizing Ihde's training, philosophy, and work thus far. The essays are then organized by topic; and while they are divided by the editor into seven parts, there are really three major subject areas into which the essays can be grouped: analyses of Ihde's corpus and his writing style, criticisms of Ihde's approach (particularly concerning his work on technology), and essays that take up the techniques and tools found in Ihde's work, appropriating them to explore new ideas and new subject matters. It is, perhaps, the theme of technology that is most present throughout—as is so often the case in Ihde's own writing. Thus do the gathered authors compare and contrast Ihde to Heidegger, contemplate technological conceptions of action and the body, and investigate the myriad questions concerning technology. Where there are disagreements with Ihde in the anthology, they are—right or wrong—overwhelmingly related to a perceived lack of the ethical in Ihde's work.

The book ends with a response by Ihde himself. Written with good humor and eschewing all pretentiousness and hubris, Ihde's conclusion briefly addresses each essay and either agrees with the stated criticisms or politely remains steadfast in opposition. Most importantly, confronted with the combined voices of the anthology's authors calling for more attention to ethical discourse, Ihde takes the opportunity to address this ever-present question and criticism of his corpus. Here, Ihde maintains that his work does not take up a position in most ethical debates due to his belief in the "multistability" of technologies. As the context within which any given technology appears is constantly changing, so do the values, purposes, and ethical imports of that technology change. It is thus never so simple as calling a technology good or bad. A phenomenologist, then, describes the appearings. Which is not to say that everything breaks down into a mindless relativism or that there is no room left for the discussion of values in phenomenology, but rather that Ihde sees his charge as one of description, one of, perhaps, laying a foundation for how we can later discuss what it means to say that something is good or bad. If a critic wants Ihde simply to claim that Monsanto is evil, then, or the latest iPhone is awesomely great, he or she has missed the point.

Such criticisms concerning Ihde's apparent lack of ethical discussion concerning technology are, perhaps, nothing new, even if the exchange proves interesting here. There are, to be sure, the inevitable redundancies in many of the collected essay's criticisms, most typically where ethics and Heidegger are concerned. The possible upside of this is that students who may be reading this book as an introductory supplement to Ihde's texts will recognize that this is a criticism that many thoughtful people share and hence one to consider carefully. For more advanced readers, though, the strongest point of the book is clearly to be found in those essays which offer new insights into Ihde's work and contribute something altogether new in (post)phenomenological studies—from Haraway's crittercams to Pinch's analysis of the Moog synthesizer. That being said, there are stand-out chapters on the question of ethics as well, such as Verbeek's investigation of the way in which things—inanimate things such as speed bumps and sofas—are in fact moral "agents."

Each essay in the book is clearly written and can be understood by those who have...