Heidegger's Technologies

Postphenomenological Perspectives

Don Ihde

Publication Year: 2010

Heidegger is the only thinker of his generation whose philosophy of technology is still widely read today. In it, he made three basic claims. First, he asserted that the essence of technology is not technological--that technology is not a neutral instrumentality. Second, he claimed that there is a qualitative difference between modern and traditional technologies. Third and most interestingly, he claimed that technology is a metaphysical perspective, a paradigmatic view of the whole of nature. Although Martin Heidegger remains recognized as a founder of the philosophy of technology, in the last sixty years a whole new world of technologies has appeared-bio-, nano-, info-, and imaging. With technology, time moves fast. Does philosophical time move, too? How adequate is Heidegger's thinking now for understanding today's technological advances?After an extensive Introduction that places Heidegger within the thinking about technology typical of his time, the author, a prominent philosopher of technology, reexamines Heidegger's positions from multiple perspectives-historical, pragmatic, anti-Romantic and postphenomenological. His critiques invert Heidegger's essentialism and phenomenologically analyze Heidegger's favored and disfavored technologies. In conclusion, he undertakes a concrete analysis of the technologies Heidegger used to produce his writing and discovers heretofore undiscussed and ironic results. Overall, the book not only serves as an excellent introduction Heidegger's philosophy of technology and a corrective in outlining its limitations, it indicates a postphenomenological counter-strategy for technological analysis, one that would look at the production of technology in practice, based on observing its forms of embodied activity.

Published by: Fordham University Press

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Title Page, Copyright

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pp. ix-x

Acknowledgments

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pp. xi-xiv

Some of the essays in this book are reprinted, with modest revisions, from earlier publications: Chapter 1, ‘‘Heidegger’s Philosophy of Technology,’’ originally in my Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology, Vol. XXIV, Boston Series in the Philosophy of Science, Synthese Library, Vol. 130, copyright (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), pp. 103– 29, reprinted with the kind permission of Springer Science and Business...

Introduction: Situating Heidegger and the Philosophy of Technology

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pp. 1-27

This book is about, and in response to, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Heidegger is widely hailed as one of the major figures in the foundations of the philosophy of technology. And while it remains the case that in the early decades of the mid-twentieth century, he had a number of peers also interested in technology, particularly among European philosophers, if one judges by articles, books, and other publications...

1. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Technology

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pp. 28-55

Among the few philosophers to date to have taken technology seriously, it should be apparent that Martin Heidegger is a pioneer in this field. He was among the first to raise technology to a central concern for philosophy, and he was among the first to see in it a genuine ontological issue. This is the case in spite of the dominant and sometimes superficial interpretations of Heidegger that see in him only a negative attitude to...

2. The Historical-Ontological Priority of Technology Over Science

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pp. 56-73

The thesis I wish to explore in this essay is that there is a significant sense in which technology may be seen to be both ontologically and historically prior to science. There is, of course, an obvious and trivial sense in which this claim may be regarded as true. If technologies in the broadest and most concrete sense involve humans and their uses of tools and artifacts, then at the least one can say that technology in this sense is both universal and...

3. Deromanticizing Heidegger

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pp. 74-85

A century after his birth, two very contrary statements can be made concerning Martin Heidegger: First, in a significant sense, he is surely one of the most important founders of the philosophy of technology. His insights into the structures and functions of technology remain deep and suggestive. Second, we all also know that he joined the National Socialist GermanWorkers’ Party and remained with it through the war. His associations...

Interlude: The Earth Inherited

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pp. 86-90

We are now back to the beginning, the earth as we find it, heavily technologically textured, inherited from the previous generations of humans, all of whom left the Garden. I shall once again revert to a contemporary story. In this case the incident is an actual one, deliberately cast, for purposes relevant to the narrative, on one side in a ‘‘late Heideggerian’’ form...

4. Was Heidegger Prescient Concerning Technoscience?

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pp. 91-113

I had remembered the movie Being There, with Peter Sellers playing Jerzy Kosinski’s man of authenticity, as a deeply ironic and funny Heideggerian spoof in which the main character, an intellectually challenged gardener thrown out of his insular life into a world of high politics, became a sort of prophet-advisor to the president of the United States himself. The gardener would utter simple literalisms, such as ‘‘the soil must be tended if...

5. Heidegger’s Technologies: One Size Fits All

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pp. 114-127

In this chapter, I first revisit Heidegger’s reception and continuation of influence within the philosophy of technology, filling in several gaps left out in the introduction. Some three and a half decades since his death, while there is some evidence that Heidegger is virtually the only still strongly visible philosopher of technology of his generation, there is also...

6. Concluding Postphenomenological Postscript: Writing Technologies

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pp. 128-140

In the progression of chapters, the reader will have noted that I have taken several different critical perspectives upon Heidegger—antiromantic, pragmatically anti-essentialist, historical, and so on. But there remains a double task to conclude this assessment of Heidegger: on one side, I shall now suggest that Heidegger’s philosophy of technology—already seen to be highly dated—has only regional or limited relevance, particularly with.

E-ISBN-13: 9780823248889
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823233762
Print-ISBN-10: 0823233766

Page Count: 144
Publication Year: 2010