Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde

6. Normative Phenomenology: Reflections on Ihde’s Significant Nudging

89 6 Normative Phenomenology: Reflections on Ihde’s Significant Nudging Evan Selinger Introduction Don Ihde’s phenomenological-hermeneutic framework overcomes long-standing epistemic deficiencies. He contests untenable premises embedded in determinist outlooks and establishes a unique view of the lifeworld that avoids the excesses of utopian prognostics and dystopian diagnoses. Before the philosophy of technology established itself institutionally, he identified several unjustified presuppositions that had permitted theorists and policy makers : (1) to overestimate the causal power of technological activity or human agency, and (2) to overlook (or repress) the nuanced, diverse, and existentially significant interactions through which humans and technologies can coconstitute one another’s “identities.” Some critics maintain that Ihde’s oeuvre is hindered by a considerable flaw: his philosophy of technoscience putatively lacks normative sensitivity.1 This accusation is noteworthy, and it amounts to more than an indictment of Ihde’s division of academic labor. Because Ihde is viewed as privileging epistemic over normative inquiry, he is vulnerable to being characterized as neglecting the most important relations among science, technology, and philosophy . Whereas the more empirically oriented disciplines—anthropology, history, and sociology—can, in principle, explain how technologies function and how technical cultures are organized, philosophical resources appear to be best used when put to another purpose. Despite the diminished public role of the “intellectual,” philosophers present themselves regularly as “values experts,” that is, as qualified to judge the proper place of technoscience in both the public and private spheres. This principally is the case with respect 90 Evan Selinger to identifying the dangers stemming from technoscientific progress, particularly threats which citizens and corporations dismiss as lamentable but tolerable tradeoffs. While applied ethics—medical ethics, environmental ethics, and computer ethics—dominate this arena, phenomenology, in both its secular and theological forms, has made important contributions as well. In light of these considerations, it is illuminating to compare Ihde with normative phenomenologists such as Hubert Dreyfus and Albert Borgmann. In order to create a shared context through which this comparison can be made, it will be helpful to consider first the topics of situated analysis and phenomenological parity. Phenomenological Parity Ihde’s metaphilosophical views on normativity center around two themes: situated analysis and phenomenological parity. Influenced by Edmund Husserl’s injunction to “remember” the lifeworld origins of human activity—including the generation of conceptual thought—Ihde’s epistemological inquiries are always reflexively positioned: through analysis of intentional structures, he correlates noesis and noema and thereby establishes a necessary experiential link between criteria for knowing and an embodied subject who makes the acquisition of knowledge possible. According to Ihde, understanding the being of a phenomenon necessitates understanding the being of the interpreter who accounts for it. A brief précis of paradigmatic examples of situated analysis in Husserl and Ihde can crystallize this point further. When Husserl engages in “genetic” phenomenology to reconstruct the lost origin of geometry—ostensibly the mathematical analysis of all possible shapes of the world—he contends that our intuitions concerning the boundaries of clearly defined shapes emerged from a process of abstraction that is rooted in concrete lifeworld praxis. The carpenter’s practical need to produce particular kinds of items facilitated the microperceptual recognition of a set of features (e.g., points, angles, straight lines, and surfaces) that served as the historical basis for the macroperceptual identification of idealized shapes (e.g., rectangles, squares, triangles) outside of their initial pragmatic context of discovery. Similarly, when Ihde engages in “genetic” phenomenology to reconstruct the origin of the subject-object split that defined modern epistemology in both its empiricist and rationalist variants, he contends that lifeworld practices pertaining to the camera obscura facilitated the production of an “epistemology engine.” These practices captivated the philosophical imagination to such an extent that a variety of thinkers used analogical reasoning to conceptually abstract a model of subjectivity—the subject who could never be certain of transcending subjective experience—from the camera’s optical ability to invert images (BT 71–75). Normative Phenomenology 91 While this comparison illustrates clearly how the phenomenologist links theoretical claims, abstract intuitions, and lifeworld praxis, it fails to inform us explicitly about the phenomenological connection between lifeworld praxis and normative judgment. Such explicitness requires a discussion of phenomenological parity. Ihde contends that viable normative assessment must ontologically correlate with epistemic inquiry: “I do think there are normative dimensions in phenomenology, but...