Husserl's Missing Technologies

Don Ihde

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823269624
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Husserl's Missing Technologies looks at the early-twentieth-century "classical" phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time, and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary "postphenomenology." Of central interest are his infrequent comments upon technologies and especially scientific instruments such as the telescope and microscope. Together with his analysis of Husserl, Don Ihde ventures through the recent history of technologies of science, reading and writing, and science praxis, calling for modifications to phenomenology by converging it with pragmatism. This fruitful hybridization emphasizes human–technology interrelationships, the role of embodiment and bodily skills, and the inherent multistability of technologies. In a radical argument, Ihde contends that philosophies, in the same way that various technologies contain an ever-shortening obsolescence, ought to have contingent use-lives.

1

Where Are Husserl’s Technologies?

As I begin the analysis of Husserl’s technologies, I now raise the stakes. It was noted previously that his references to technologies, by wide consensus of Husserl scholars, are sparse, and one can add, for the most part, these are mentioned in passing without serious or in-depth philosophical analysis. Thus I am calling these his “missing technologies.”

In what sense are technologies missing from Husserl? In a first, very ordinary sense, they are mostly missing from his writings. He infrequently refers to what today we would call technologies, and in this sense one has to conclude that they do not take up much reflective interest—indeed, much philosophical interest. This, in itself, is not unusual, since this would be true of most philosophers, and most philosophers of his time. And perhaps even more specifically in Husserl’s case, because his interests were those from the more abstract cognate disciplines—logic, mathematics, psychology, idealization, and consciousness.

And, if one asks, with what technologies would Husserl necessarily be familiar, the sense of minimalism would have to be raised even more. I do want to point out that Husserl was clearly very familiar with one optical technology—eyeglasses. Most photographs of Husserl show him wearing the old circular style of academic eyeglasses And, of course, he was familiar with the tool technologies used for reading and writing. And, he was clearly familiar with typewriters and the carbon copies used in conveying copies to colleagues and friends. He himself used a pen; he died well before word processing, and although he showed no antipathy to typewriters (whereas Heidegger did), he simply followed the then dominant practice of using a pen. His practice produced the some 40,000 pages of German shorthand notes, which still today are being transcribed and published. I shall be referring to the recently published Nachlass manuscripts in this chapter. In Chapter 3 I return to the reading-writing technologies and Husserl’s problems with these. Husserl seems to simply take these material mediating technologies for granted. Herbert Spiegelberg, that foremost historian of phenomenology, once told me that Husserl, writing standing up, would be interrupted midmorning by his wife, who would bring in coffee and cookies, and Husserl would regularly comment, “Ach, was gibt? Kuchen, Ja.” As it turns out, even this standing practice is debatable, and I will return to it again.

This indicates that it is unlikely that Husserl gave attention, whether ordinary or phenomenological, to ordinary use-technologies. So, in these ordinary senses Husserl is missing his technologies. In this chapter I will be giving special attention, not to such ordinary technologies, but to special technologies used in science practice, to instruments. Telescopes and microscopes, optical technologies, were of high importance in the early formation of science, and as the recently published Nachlass shows, Husserl did have things to say about these instruments that related to the “near-far world.” But allow this to be framed by taking note of some historical comments on technologies.

Technologies

One aspect of technologies not often discussed is that they become obsolete, are abandoned, and forgotten—at different speeds. I will begin with variations on these contingencies:

The Acheulean hand axe may be the tool longest used by humans. Named for its first example found by the Acheul River in France, 1859, this teardrop-shaped bifacial stone tool was first used by Homo ergaster and Homo erectus as long ago as 1.78 million years BP. It ceased to be used or made (except by anthropologists) by 400,000 BP, the time of the proto-Neanderthal and well before Homo sapiens sapiens. This technology traveled out of Africa to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Its uses are unknown, but it is presumed to be a multitasking tool for hacking (tree limbs); digging; butchering, including cutting and breaking bones, and scraping hides. And one anthropologist thinks that the axe was a possible projectile thrown like a discus at flocked prey. Recently some have speculated that very large versions of the hand axe—too big for practical use—may have been display objects. I know of no other technology with this long a use-span.

Today’s cell phone beats or ties the axe’s ubiquity. Social scientists estimate close to 95 percent of today’s human population has access to cell phones since undeveloped countries have them as “leapfrog technologies” and Grameen Bank developed uses for “phone ladies,” who for small fees rent them to villagers in many countries. Calling, texting, photographing, calculating, and locating are some of the multifunctions of this contemporary—only a few decades old—technology. My favorite cell phone photo is of a Masai tribesman, spear in one hand, cell phone in the other on the African veldt.

Closer to my own practices are writing technologies, and whereas clay tablet-stylus-cuneiform technologies may have lasted a millennium or more, they are now gone. Pen and brush for ink and calligraphy remain in use after six or seven millennia. But the typewriter—along with such industrial technologies as the steam engine—lasted less than two centuries.

And, as you might guess, if we look at postmodern technologies, the use-spans are shorter and shorter. The turnover for recording technologies—Edison tubes, vinyl records, wire and tape recordings, CDs to MP3s and such, all happened within a century.

Philosophies

The philosophy I shall deal with here is that which deals with science and technology, often called today technoscience. In contemporary thought this spectrum of philosophy has been highly influenced by science studies in addition to philosophies of science and technology.

The style of science-technology analysis that emerged at Stony Brook in my technoscience research seminar, to be followed here and more specifically described in the last chapter, explicitly takes into account technologies, instrumentation, and is called postphenomenology. It also incorporates elements of American pragmatism. John Dewey held that philosophies should deal with problems facing humans, should be instrumental and experimental, and he eschewed foundations, essences, and universals. Question: Should philosophies, like technologies, have use-lifes? While my own answer is a qualified “yes,” I am well aware that this is not the usual way in which philosophy is thought of. For many there is a kind of ahistorical history bound to philosophy: After all, we introduce much of our philosophy to students by having them read the philosophical classics: pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the medievals, and particularly the early moderns—Descartes, Locke, et al.—and then on to Kant, and then the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And in all this the literary conceit is that all are our philosophical contemporaries. Such ahistorical history would be very unlike science, which has a history of disappearing scientific objects: Democritus’s hard, indivisible atoms, Aristotle’s crystalline spheres, phlogiston, aether, the four humours, and most recently event horizons—all are gone except as interesting but quaint historical objects.

Science-Technology Studies

I am going to indirectly suggest that my question about philosophical obsolescence, abandonment, and forgetfulness is stimulated by the paradigm shifts concerning science-technology studies in the mid-twentieth century. I will trace a brief history of STS here:

If we take early modern science to have originated in the seventeenth century, then by the end of the nineteenth century there was a firmly established and triumphal philosophy of science. Its main outlines included a faith in progressive accumulation of knowledge, the approximation or attainment of universal natural laws, objectivity, and freedom from religion, culture, and values. Scientific knowledge was either the only valid, or at the least the best, form of human knowledge.

The early twentieth century was more specifically marked by interpreters—themselves usually scientifically and/or mathematically trained—who saw mathematization and theory production as the core of science. Pierre Duhem, Ernst Mach, and Henri Poincaré were the best-known names. I have argued elsewhere that Husserl, himself mathematically trained, largely bought into this interpretation of science (see Chapter 2).

Traditional philosophy, including its epistemological and metaphysical emphases, was being pushed back, with logical empiricism, logical positivism, and analytic styles of philosophy ceding to science its autonomy and rational superiority. Science produced knowledge; philosophy checked its logic and propositional form.

By mid-twentieth century a “pushback” from within philosophy of science begins. The 1950s and ’60s are the beginnings of the positivist-antipositivist controversies. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Karl Popper, and Imre Lakatos stand out in Anglophone circles. All called into question the elements of the progressivist, triumphal interpretation of science noted above and argued for more discontinuity, more social-technical embeddedness, and one or another “framework” interpretations.

From within philosophy of science, however, there was very little note of technologies, materiality, or social-historical factors. And whereas in Europe there were beginnings of philosophical attention to technologies, particularly in response to the industrialization and militarization of previous decades, there was not yet what could be called philosophy of technology.

Although it is clear that what I am calling the pushback begins to take shape in the mid-twentieth century, my too brief caricature above overlooked certain parallel movements in science interpretation from the social sciences. There had been a “sociology of science” regarding science that was dominated by Robert Merton and colleagues from 1957 through the 1960s. Then from phenomenology and Alfred Schutz, The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann was published in 1966. These alternative STS interpretations, however, begin at the same time as antipositivism and Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962.

We now have two sets of interpreters on the scene: on the one side, philosophers of science and scientists themselves; on the other, social scientists. For the first set, the philosophers of science and scientists, the preference is for theory, propositions, equations, and logic—in short, a highly “conceptual” approach to science. The social scientists emphasized what I shall call, broadly, science practice. And this emphasis creates different perspectives. First, drawing from the names already cited, I look at some of the different dimensions emerging from forefronting practices:

Robert Merton coined many of the terms that describe social behaviors and expectations within science’s sociality, such as “role model” and “reference group,” and noted many nonlogical features such as “unintended consequences” and “self-fulfilling prophecies.” But much of his focus became that of looking at how scientists forge conclusions and reach consensus through citation practices.

Thomas Kuhn also attended to the social practices of scientists, taking account of how, when a revolution occurred in science, beyond the arguments that took place, there tended to be a slow generational shift of groups favoring earlier compared to later paradigms.

Popper and Lakatos looked at science practice as developing research programs involving different groups. Pure logical arguments, even falsification, had limits; thus the image of science here varied from that of the positivist dominant emphasis.

And glimmers of the role of technologies in science practice begin to appear. Alfred North Whitehead in Science in the Modern World (1963) takes particular note of twentieth-century instrument improvement. “In science the most important thing that has happened in the last forty years is the advance in instrumental design.”¹ And Kuhn notes repeatedly in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions how new observations via improved instruments make paradigm shifts possible.

This mid-century (1950s–60s) antipositivism was soon followed by many more radical shifts in STS studies beginning in the ’70s. The first of these new social science movements were from the UK, the so-called “Bath School” with its “Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge” led by Barry Barnes and David Bloor. Unlike Mertonian sociology, which looked at social structuring, the SSK program looked at how scientific conceptions were themselves socially constructed. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory was published in 1974, followed by Knowledge and Social Imagery in 1976. Both openly defended relativism philosophically. In this same time period, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar began to “follow the scientists around,” but in the laboratory, not in the theoretician’s office. Laboratory Life appeared in 1979. Interestingly, the subtitle of the first edition was The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, and the second edition has only The Construction of Scientific Facts. Latour, the primary author, deliberately takes an anthropological-sociological participant-observer point of view in a biochemical laboratory to take account of its practices. Laboratories, he contended, are where scientific knowledge is produced. “Social constructionism” became the controversial title for a wider group of science studies analysts, including Trevor Pinch, Harry Collins, Andrew Pickering, Karin Knorr-Cetina, with publications widely appearing in the 1980s. This was, simultaneously, the same time period for the emergence of an Anglophone philosophy of technology. My Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology (1979) was followed by books by Albert Borgmann, Langdon Winner, Andrew Feenberg, and Hubert Dreyfus in the ’80s.

What I am depicting here is the rise of multiple reconsiderations of science, coupled to an increased interest in technologies—all of which shift the understanding of both science and technology toward more historical, cultural, and material dimensions. To complete the depiction, however, I need to mention the rise of feminist critics of science and technology, which also begins to take place largely in the 1980s. The biologists Evelyn Fox-Keller and Donna Haraway and the philosopher of science Sandra Harding stand out here—each showing how gender roles play significant parts in science practice. I cannot take the time here to review the intense battles that took place concerning STS in the late twentieth century, but the results are tellingly clear:

All parties agree that the understanding of science as acultural, ahistorical, unified, and triumphal—the view dominant at the beginning of the twentieth century—is dead. In a wide-ranging genre review of philosophy of science in Choice in the December 1989 issue, Steve Fuller pointed out, “There has been only [one] widely cited book to extend the positivist program since 1977.”² Along with that, all parties now acknowledge in different ways the fallibilism of science and the demise of positivism. Larry Laudan’s Science and Relativism (1990), in which he writes “we are all fallibilists now,”³ and Ernan McMullin’s The Social Dimensions of Science (1992), in which a spectrum of contributors acknowledges and examines these social dimensions, are major establishment acknowledgments of this shift.

Then, within philosophy of science, one begins to see the rise of careful analyses of, in particular, the role of technologies and instruments, including Ian Hacking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Annoucement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: First Encounters with Husserl’s Phenomenology
• Half Title
• Introduction: Philosophy of Technology, Technoscience, and Husserl
• 1. Where Are Husserl’s Technologies?
• 2. Husserl’s Galileo Needed a Telescope!
• 3. Embodiment and Reading-Writing Technologies
• 4. Whole Earth Measurements Revisited
• 5. Dewey and Husserl: Consciousness Revisited
• 6. Adding Pragmatism to Phenomenology
• 7. From Phenomenology to Postphenomenology
• Appendix: Epistemology Engines
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Series Page