Abstract
I approach the idea of empirical turns and transcendental theories indirectly. I do not start “post-“ or “neg-” anything; instead I begin pre-philosophically—that is, before everyone has a position and opposes other positions—with Heidegger’s “preparatory hermeneutical” question: As whom and with what concerns do empirically or transcendentally minded philosophers of technology respond to their experience of technoscientific life? For example, in his second Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche identifies his concern as one of “taking advantage” of historical knowledge “for life,” that is, he understands himself to be motivated by a life-driven, not scientific “need.” But how are “needs” in Nietzsche’s sense to be distinguished? The question leads straight to Heidegger’s idea of a hermeneutics that comes “before philosophy”—a “hermeneutics of facticity” that considers “what goes on in [i.e., motivates] a philosophy before it becomes what it is”? I argue that once Nietzsche’s notion of need is expanded and deepened in Heidegger’s direction, we gain some clarity about how to appropriate any information “for life,” whether it is science-based, culturally operative, or phenomenological. I then consider Ihde, Stiegler, and the future prospects of empirical turns and transcendental theories in light of this idea.
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Notes
My inspiration for this line of interpretation is Gendlin (2018).
Nietzsche (1997, 60–61). Hereafter, UM2. It is useful to remember the essay’s title is “Die Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie [not Geschichte] für das Leben.” As Heidegger remarks, apropos this fact, “It is not a matter of expanding our stock of knowledge, but rather seeing with different eyes, so that we can discover what ordinary views and opinions are not able to see and do not need to see for their immediate purposes” (Heidegger 2016, 18–19).
Of course, Nietzsche was very much concerned to give an account of life, its vitality, and its creative potential—to stress what Darwinian conceptions of evolutionary development suppress. Indeed, Darwinian deafness is one of the effects of the dark star of scientism. For some of the more sensible recent considerations of Nietzsche’s concept of life, see Lemm (2015).
It is a life that in the modern university rests on “the geometric experience of the universal” (Stiegler 2015, 156–63). This view is clearly reflected in Comte’s praise for the “spirit of positivism” and remains in the current paeans to our “developed” world (Scharff 2017, 227–246; Scharff 2010, 435–466).
UM2, 67 and 122. Nietzsche spells out this “belonging” by identifying each of the three histories in accordance with its especially close affinity with one of the three aspects of time—hence, monumental and the need for inspiration regarding the future; antiquarian and the need for a sense of roots; critical and the need to change things, not just “know” they should be changed (Scharff 2015a, 208–211).
Scharff (2015a, 203–208). Thus, e.g., an “overdose” of monumental history forces us toward either an utterly abstract sense of heroism or a knowledge so detailed as to remind us that all supposed heroes have feet of clay. Too much antiquarian history turns a healthy sense of rootedness into a “perverse love of the old.” And an excess of critical history converts us into mere critics, cut off from any deeply-felt sense of how to “be” creative and unable to admire or sympathize with anything.
Regarding this long story, one central problem is that Nietzsche, like Gadamer, often speaks too quickly and uncritically about “tradition,” when in fact neither really means this in the usual sense of explicit customs/beliefs explicitly passed down to us. For both, the aim is to understand inheritance, not just as something known and represented but as something lived-through, so that its visible and determinate appearance does not blind us to its power—precisely when this is experienced as burdensome—to be a source of creative possibilities as well.
Heidegger (1977, 3). “Prepare” translates “vorbereiten,” the same term Heidegger uses to call the Second Division of SZ “Die vorbereitende Fundamentalanalyse des Daseins.” The question, set out in a manner that clearly echoes Heidegger’s earliest lectures, is how “we” (and who this “we” is will have to be included in our own inquiry) currently relate to technology, how we think about it, how we imagine it is now possible to be.
Heidegger (1962, 21; cf. 398). And much earlier: “Self-dispersed life encounters its world as ‘dispersion,’ as dispersing, manifold, absorbing, engaging, unfulfilling, boring. This means that inclination shows itself as something which moves itself toward itself. Life, caring for itself in this relationality, reflects light back on itself, which produces a clarification of the surroundings of the currently immediate nexus of care. As so characterized, the movement of life toward itself within every encounter is what we call relucence” (Heidegger 2001, 88–89).
The remark is somewhat surprising, coming from a nonfoundationalist (Ihde 1993, 3). On the individual-centered character vs. “background relations” of the two “programs,” see Ihde (1990, 73, 107–12, 124–25). This two-tier imagery is also in Ihde (2001), where life is said to involve both “body one” and “body two” experiences or “senses of being” (xi, 67–71) that correspond to perceptual and cultural “embodiments” (xi–xii) in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Ihde’s treatment of Husserl’s Galileo is more ambiguous. First, he describes Husserl’s neglect of Galileo’s telescope as evidence of a “forgetfulness of the lifeworld” that leads him to depict Galilean thinking as disembodied and ahistorical. Yet Ihde also says this leaves Husserl unable to make “the synthesizing move which construes both as ‘perceptual’” (Ihde 2016, 58, my emphasis). This, again, seems to imply that one faces two levels of “perception” first and then considers how to combine them (because phenomenologically speaking, one already lives-through this?).
Heidegger first attributes the failure to recognize this double-sidedness of the phenomenological outlook primarily to our hegemonic objectivist inheritance, but eventually he comes to think of it as a feature of factical life itself. Initially, he calls this feature ruinance (Ruinanz), or lapsing (Abfallen), or even a “sliding decline into mundane multiplicity” (after Augustine’s defluxus in multum). I argue elsewhere that Nietzsche’s struggle to find a creative path forward in a scientistic culture illustrates the power of ruinance or falling (Scharff 2015a, 285–87). By late 1922, however, this feature has definitively become SZ’s famous existential category, falling (Verfallen).
Heidegger (2004, 125). Fully quoted: “Rather, precisely going back behind … exemplary formations of factical life ought to (1) indicate in principle how and what lies ‘behind’ them, and (2) how a genuine problematic results from this; all of this not [to be interpreted] extra-temporally and for the construction of an approaching or not approaching culture, but itself in historical enactment.”.
“Staying with life,” “understanding life out of its own origin,” “going along with” factical life are common expressions in the early lectures (e.g., Heidegger 2013, 106, 120–121).
Heidegger’s image derives from Dilthey’s idea of understanding life “in its own terms,” rather than assuming that reason can always “go back behind it” and thus know it better. There is an unbridgeable gap between the thinker who starts from this idea, and the thinker who comes to experience with the belief that “Fantasies in general proceed from the polymorphism intrinsic to the libido” (Stiegler 2011, 150). For Dilthey, experiencing is too rich for any totalizing pre-experiential conceptualization; for Stiegler, apparently, it is “actually” what Freud and Marx explained better.
Careful readers of UM2 will know that Nietzsche actually says “what,” not “who,” but Heidegger knows that he does not mean this teleologically or metaphysically in the way that Aristotelians do. Nietzsche addresses this point about human “nature” in his discussion of critical history, where he distinguishes our actual, historically given “first nature” from our possible, creatively transformative “second” nature. “The best we can do,” he says, “is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge and through a new, stern discipline [i.e., critical history] combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.” Given that this is one of those places where Nietzsche “understands more than he can [properly, e.g., instead of hyperbolically, as here] make known to us” (SZ, 396), the young Heidegger already avoids entirely speaking about “what” we are, in recognition that when we start talking seriously about our “being,” references to our “natures” and to “what” we are cannot be made ontologically innocent because that already theorizes what needs to be phenomenologically interpreted instead.
The fact is, even so-called “unbiased seeing” is a specific way of looking and speaking from life-relations. The very idea of philosophy achieving “freedom from all standpoints…is itself something historical,” something determinately “bound up with the way [we] regard ourselves” (Heidegger 1999, 64). “[E]ven when theorizing, I myself originate in and come out from lived experiencing, and something experienceable is brought along from this experiencing, with which one now does not know what to do, and [thus] conveniently invents the title, ‘irrational’” (Heidegger 2002, 99).
In Technosystem, Feenberg discusses this point in terms of our being both “ontologically” and “epistemologically finite” (Feenberg 2017, 2–9).
Feenberg develops this point in light of Heidegger’s apparently paradoxical remark that “birds don’t fly because they have wings; they have wings because they fly” (Feenberg 2010b, 3–6). The former is said by an observer; the latter, from the experience of flight.
That Feenberg is himself no essentialist is obvious from his critique of Heidegger’s “Gestell” and from the fact that Achterhuis (2001) makes him one of the pioneering empirical turners (65–93).
Kisiel and Sheehan (2010), 105; also xxvi-xxviii, 433–434. Although this is not on Feenberg’s radar, it is for the sake of this sort of non-essentializing generalization that the young Heidegger developed the notion of “formally indicative” concepts, the most famous of which became the existentialia in SZ. See esp., Heidegger (1985, 38–45); Heidegger (2001, 105–106); also (Kisiel 2008, 41–67).
Does Simondon’s analysis of individuation, worked out in our generically universalizing age, actually succeed in carrying this point forward? Like Feenberg, I doubt it (Feenberg 2017, 73–81).
In Alternative Modernity, Feenberg identifies three such interventions (i.e., controversy, creative appropriation, and innovative dialogue), but he is not wedded to there being three or even to careful identification by type (Feenberg 1995, 144–66). See also his account of the recontextualization of computer games against an atmosphere designed to routinize the play in an instrumentally rational way that emphasizes winning over playing (Grimes and Feenberg 2009).
The manifesto is also known as the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Agile Alliance 2019; Agile Manifesto, 2019). The orthodox response took the form of the Scrum Alliance. After “using [the Manifesto] as a guidepost,” says its website, “additional Scrum values have been created, and continue to be developed and modified (in true Agile fashion).” This complete change of spirit from the Manifesto is not noticed. By explaining that its approach takes the same four “key values” identified in the original manifesto and then fleshes these out in a “systems-theoretical” way, it transfers the idea of agility from actual practice to the concepts and theories about that practice the organization has already chosen, so that it simultaneously promotes its own necessity by representing itself as the best approach to agile practice (ScrumAlliance 2019). Thus, the Alliance is now in the business of “certifying” ScrumMasters, Developers, Professionals (?), Trainers, Enterprise Coaches, Team Coaches, Product Owners, and Agile Practice Leaders; and it publicizes directories of “certificants” and Scrum “educators.” Its website assures potential consumers that it is committed to a “team-based approach…to achieving shared business goals,” which it fosters by promoting the value of continual “planning” through the conscious deployment of a “framework of feedback loops, allowing the team to constantly inspect and adapt so the product delivers maximum value.” It goes without saying that none of the “certificants” or “educators” are themselves the members of any “team.” For a critique, see Gray (2015), who suggests that the usefulness of Scrum varies inversely with field expertise.
“We will never experience our relationship to the essence [i.e., the predominant, inherited sense] of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it” (Heidegger 1977, 4).
I disagree, e.g., that Heidegger offers a “critique of historical science [that] has the disastrous consequence that questioning…the positivity of facts and traces ends up excluding these from any ontological dimension, in the name of their belonging to intratemporality” (Stiegler 1998, 268). Paradoxes and theories again, rather than phenomenological accounts of being-historical.
For a time, however, in his late 1930s’ “Running Notes” to SZ, Heidegger criticizes it for failing to see how Dasein ultimately cannot be understood through a hermeneutical analysis of existing humanity, but in fact requires a “leap [Sprung]” into a wholly unprecedented future (Heidegger 2018, 21–23). I thank Richard Polt for this reference.
Here, obviously, is a clear case where the full philosophical consideration of technology must insist upon some “asymmetry.” “So long as ethical and aesthetic ‘principles’ remain external to the study of technique, they appear to intrude impotently on a self-sufficient sphere with its own laws and logic of development” (Feenberg 2010a, 182, my emphasis)—and we are not far from the Cartesian fact-value distinction.
Should we follow Ihde in approaching the “failure” of neocolonial technology transfers as above all a matter of introducing high-tech “materials” without the requisite supporting social structure (Ihde 1990, 131–39)? He never asks whether this might be precisely the kind of transfer that best serves the interests of transferring corporations or countries—I made the sale; it’s up to “them” to figure out how to use the stuff.
“After machines for writing, adding, computing, and accounting, the production of a machine for thinking is only a question of ‘time.’ Indeed, thinking has already become computing. So why shouldn’t this ‘thinking’ have its machine? More and more is taken from the human being, even thinking (and self-awareness already long ago). The consequence of this process is that the human being knows ever less what to do with himself—and all the more must surround himself with gadgets” (Heidegger 2017, 153–154). To see the inner “logic” here, one needs more than “progressivist” accounts of the development of increasingly efficient instruments.
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Scharff, R.C. Before Empirical Turns And Transcendental Inquiry: Pre-Philosophical Considerations. Found Sci 27, 107–124 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09734-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09734-5