Technology and the Lifeworld

Don Ihde’s Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (1990) is a fascinating interpretation and extension of the phenomenological concept of “lifeworld” as found (in its various iterations) in the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.¹ Ihde’s central claim follows on the subtitle of the book, that “long before our remembering, humans moved from all gardens to inherit the Earth.”² This is to say that the human species has never not been technological; the dream of “non-technological existence” is nothing but “nostalgia for innocence.”³ Much in the way that Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) contends that the existential structures of Dasein elaborated therein are primordial structures of Dasein, and that therefore for Dasein not to be structured in such a way would be for it not to be Dasein, Ihde’s earth is the primordial home of humanity, a claim which shapes the entire book.⁴ As Andrew Feenberg comments, Technology and the Lifeworld marks a phase in Ihde’s career prior to his “postphenomenology[ical]” phase, but his characteristic “synthesis of aspects of phenomenology and pragmatism” can already be seen in this earlier book.⁵ Whereas Husserl “remained caught in ... epistemology,” Ihde sinks the “notion of intentionality” into the “pragmatist concepts of practice and embodiment,”⁶ a movement which simultaneously remains true to Merleau-Ponty (one of Ihde’s greatest influences), while situating phenomenology in the long tradition of American pragmatism. The following review will attempt to draw out the implications of this gesture.

Though provocative, Technology and the Lifeworld has had a much smaller influence than Ihde’s later, “postphenomenological” work. Steven L. Goldman in Technology and Culture (1991) offers three short paragraphs as part of his review of the broader series of which it was a part, but makes no critical comment.⁷ Douglas Browning in The Review of Metaphysics (1991) spends a little more time with the text, and considers it an “important and challenging contribution.”⁸ He writes that Ihde is “always suggestive and often illuminating,” that Ihde argues with “verve and perceptiveness,” but that the latter half of the book becomes progressively “more speculative and idiosyncratic,” and that Ihde’s analysis of some “fuzzier issues” are consequently hindered.⁹ Browning further states that the “one basic problem” of the work is Ihde’s emphasis on the “navigational approach” (which I will discuss below), and that the relativistic character of this approach inevitably “introduces a nonrelativistic ingredient into the game willy-nilly.”¹⁰ He asserts that “the navigational point of view is no less absolutist than the bird’s-eye.”¹¹ This is a poor criticism of the text, one that demonstrates little care for the explosive claims that Ihde makes (perhaps disarmed by his comfortable style). Robert Hollinger, in Teaching Philosophy (1992), seems more cognizant of the thrust of Ihde’s work, and holds it to be “extremely significant,” “pathbreaking,” and (perhaps even better) a “pleasure to read.”¹² Unlike Browning, he takes note of the “development of a kind of pluralism” that sets Technology and the Lifeworld apart, a pluralism that directly hinges upon the “navigational approach” Browning miscomprehends. Hollinger goes so far as to say that the book “deserves to become the standard general work in the field for years to come.”¹³ Finally, Steven Vogel, in International Studies in Philosophy (1993), also recognizes the “thoroughly postmodern” approach that Ihde takes, but is again disarmed by what he terms a “polyannaish” quality of Ihde’s arguments.¹⁴ The sheer radicality of Ihde’s book remains to be discussed.

The book is structured in two broad movements: the introduction and chapters one through four lay the groundwork for the three programs described in chapters five, six, and seven, all of which are followed by a brief epilogue. Though one might be tempted to skip to the programs to find the key concepts of the book, this would be to miss the impetus of those concepts—especially with respect to Ihde’s postmodernism. In the “Introduction,” Ihde makes two significant claims: that the world we inhabit is “technologically textured,” and that our world is in fact a “technosphere,” a “technological cocoon.”¹⁵ At both the everyday and the global level, the personal and the tectonic, the world as it is experienced is shot through with technology: we inhabit a “technologically textured ecosystem.”¹⁶ Stemming from these two claims are three questions that will direct Ihde’s inquiries: “How like or unlike is life within our technosystem from previous or other forms of life?”; “What is the relationship between science and technology?”; and “whether technologies are neutral”?¹⁷ Ihde will respond to each of these questions in detail.

In chapter one, “From Garden to Earth,” Ihde responds to the first question, and as has already been noted above, argues that “long before our remembering, humans moved from all gardens to inherit the Earth.”¹⁸ Any counter claim would have to reckon with the fact that there “are no known peoples ... who have not possessed technologies,” that even the most “minimal” cultures, like the Tasaday in the Philippines, still use technology.¹⁹ Certainly, it is possible through an “imaginative exercise” to conceive of humans “liv[ing] non-technologically,” but such a life could only be in “a garden, isolated, protected, and stable” (13). This has never been true of human existence; it is a belief originating in a “nostalgia for innocence,” in a pure origin.²⁰ Counter to this “yearning” Ihde proposes a “much more radically demythologized story of the structures and limits of ... [our] relation to an environment, or ‘world.’”²¹ Such a story must begin with a “central core of perceptual, bodily experience of an environment,” which is no way a simple or pure core.²² Following Merleau-Ponty, who took the existential analyses of Heidegger and sank them back into the flesh, the body is an irreducible manifold of sense, a complex, integrated system of disparate capacities. The body is always ambiguous, but is also always there: this is the “central core” to which Ihde refers.

The key to “perceptual, bodily experience” as our “relation to an environment” is in the phenomenological notion of intentionality: “all experience is experience of something ... experience is referential.”²³ Experience is not something locked in the head, not a Cartesian theatre of the mind, but out there. Thus, the “primitive of the system” is not some mental content or representation, but “a set of relations: I—relation—world.”²⁴ Such a conception of the world is, for Ihde, a “relativistic ontology” and a “philosophical ecology,” but this is in no way to say that it is a “relativism.”²⁵ There are “limits” to the “relativistic context of relations,” I and world, but phenomenology is “rigorously relativistic”; it does not attempt a reduction to either term as essential or foundational.²⁶ Rather, both are always structured together. The fact of this structuring precludes any reification of “technologies into Technology,” and presumption of the “neutrality of technologies.”²⁷ Reification would be to make “Technology” primary, absolute, monolithic; the presumption of neutrality would be to make the same of the perceiving subject. Instead, what is needed is a phenomenological account that “preserve[s] in the analysis something of the dynamic or actional sense that obtains in human-technology relations.”²⁸ There is always reciprocal determination at work in the intentional fold. For this reason, Ihde argues that technologies are “normative,” “actional,” and “structural.”²⁹ Norms and praxes are structured into the lifeworld, and cannot be ignored.

As such, a “double-sided analysis” is required, one that accounts for both the level of “sensory perception” or “microperception” (the level of praxis), and the level of “cultural, or hermeneutic perception” or “macroperception.”³⁰ Micro- and macroperception are structured in a “figure-to-ground” relation, requiring a necessarily “nonfoundationalist” approach. Insofar as figures can spring up from and withdraw back into the ground, and the ground itself is a “multidimensioned” field, structurally complex, there can be no locating of an absolute origin, an unmoved mover, in phenomenological description. Insofar as both micro- and macro-levels of perception are technologically textured, the everyday and the global, the “satellite metaphor” is apt for the “hidden closeness” it reveals.³¹ The ivory tower of the philosopher is disclosed in “enmeshment” and “enclosure,” only heightened so by our technological age. Thus, a “navigational” perspective is required.³² A navigational perspective is required when one finds oneself in a “dynamic and fluid situation,” and it is “necessarily relativistic.”³³ Inasmuch as the field we inhabit has no fixed points, and yet we open onto it from the ambiguous core of our perceived bodies, we are therefore required to follow Ihde and proceed from a phenomenology of our bodily experience of technologies and the technological world. Such will open up the first two programs of his book, the “phenomenology of human-technology relations” and the “hermeneutics of technology-cultural embeddedness.”³⁴

So, in chapter three, “Lifeworld: Praxis and Perception,” Ihde begins with the level of the bodily, the praxical, the everyday. To do so, he looks to “three prototypical analyses within [the phenomenological] tradition: Heidegger’s hammer, Husserl’s Galileo, and Merleau-Ponty’s feather.”³⁵ In following this trajectory of thought, Ihde is first able to demonstrate the relativity of objects—“There are no objects-in-themselves”; “all objects” are “relative to a context”—at the praxical level, and so demonstrate our embeddedness in “embodiment relation[s]” with technologies possessed of “an instrumental ‘intentionality,’” the in-order-to structure of Heidegger’s Being and Time.³⁶ In being technologically directed or referred in this way, Ihde then contends that we in our “work project[s]” find ourselves linked to a larger “perspective,” a “kind of macroperception,” which is a broader configuration of the collectivity and a plurality of work projects across a variety of disciplines and domains.³⁷ Ihde argues that Husserl misses the “interrelation” between the micro- and macro-levels, but sees in Merleau-Ponty a way forward, “the basis for a postmodern awareness of a subtle perception sufficient to both science and artistic sensitivities.”³⁸ Insofar as our “microperception” is always a “kinesthetic perception,” the capacity for “instrumentation” is built-in, as it were, at the existential level of our bodies.³⁹ Insofar as “[b]odily existence is ... correlated with a surrounding world” through a complex field of significations, the incorporation of instruments into the bodily reach of the field of significations is a real capacity of the “body-in-action.”⁴⁰ For Ihde, the “latent phenomenology of instrumentation” that we find in Merleau-Ponty reveals the first link in a chain binding together the micro- and macro-levels of perception, the practical and the cultural levels, the everyday and the global.⁴¹

In chapter four, “Adam and Galileo,” Ihde takes up Galileo again, but moves beyond the insufficient Husserlian reading of him. As noted, Ihde claims that Husserl misses the “interrelation” between “micro- and macroperception,” which is evidenced in Husserl’s criticism of the “Galilean perspective.”⁴² Husserl sees Galileo as covering over the level of “naked” perception, but does not recognize the incorporation of instruments at the bodily or “naked” level that allowed for the “Galilean perspective” in the first place.⁴³ “There is no simple seeing,” Ihde contends.⁴⁴ “What we take as a naked vision already contains the same secret relation to macroperception.”⁴⁵ For Ihde, again following Merleau-Ponty, “there is only situated seeing that is both a seeing as _____ and a seeing from _____.”⁴⁶ When we see, we see things that are “already there” (seeing as _____) and those things are there “within a panorama, a field display,” which is always with reference to my perceiving body (seeing from _____).⁴⁷ Nakedly, this seeing can be formalized as an “I-world relation[],” where the hyphen remains to mark the spacing, the intentionality, of experience (Ihde sometimes refers to this as immediate experience, but this is a colloquial, and not technical, usage; such experience is precluded by the basic premises of phenomenological thought).⁴⁸ But, when an instrument is introduced, so too is mediation (or, I would argue, mediation is increased; mediation is never added; mediation is originary). There is a necessarily perceived difference between naked seeing and mediated seeing, such as through a window, because in mediation, the “way the world is experienced is changed ontologically.”⁴⁹ I-world becomes “(I-window)-world.”⁵⁰ The window is incorporated into or embodied in my seeing; the very structure of that experience has been modulated. It is for this reason that technologies are always “non-neutral[]”—they “transform experience.”⁵¹ The window is a relatively innocuous transformation; it is transparent, barely there, disappearing in my vision. But, phenomenologically, no one can deny that there is a difference between nakedly looking out at a mountainside (for instance, standing on a backcountry trail), and mediately looking out at a mountainside (from within a cabin). Instrumentation, therefore, at the prereflective level, produces a “knowledge born of differences, of variations which hold the secrets to a world.”⁵²

In the Galilean milieu, then, where the “Flemish lens makers” and “Renaissance perspective” met, a profound “epistemic organization of perception” was established.⁵³ A “way of seeing [was] already part of the lifeworld that locates Galileo.”⁵⁴ As “a seeing” it is also “a praxis” orienting life continuously from the bodily through to the cultural level.⁵⁵ So, Ihde’s dictum: “new instrumentation gives new perception.”⁵⁶ New instrumentations “place the observer in ever new positions with respect to the universe, whether at the macro or micro levels.”⁵⁷ Implicating the same basic technology as the window, the lens is far less innocuous in the inclination of vision that it effects. The fact that technology is “normative,” “actional,” and “structural” should here become clear—normative, in that the lens “isolate[es] ... one set of perceptual possibilities”; actional, in that the lens produces a “[p]aradigm shift” in the “ways in which scientific vision [could] be embodied; and structural, in that the lens newly situates the observer in the relativistic frame.⁵⁸ Culture, then, as a consequence of this bottom-up structuration, sees its technologies fuse with language and ideation: a technology becomes a “metaphor-metaphysic,” changing “hermeneutic perception.”⁵⁹ We see this in modern astrophysics, where the concept of “lens” was used to articulate the effect of “gravitational lensing,” whereby massive bodies in space bend light-waves in between their source and their observer. A massive body is not a “lens” in the literal sense, but at both the praxical and the cultural levels, we are enough acquainted with the behaviour and language of lenses to metaphorically transfer our understanding to a similar phenomenon. This is the sort of “interrelation” that Husserl misses, and which Ihde tries to restore.

At this point in the review, the radicality of Ihde’s claims that I asserted above should be clear. And yet, they can appear strangely banal, couched in his American pragmatic style (very infrequently, in comparison, is Merleau-Ponty so clear, though he is consistently profound). Working from the basic or primitive structure of intentionality, through the instrumental intentionality (in-order-to) of objects, Ihde is now well-positioned to embark on his first program, “A Phenomenology of Technics,” wherein he undertakes a description of “human-technology relations.”⁶⁰ For the sake of space, I will not follow the particulars of his argument here too closely, but only present his conclusions. Ihde identifies three points in the spectrum of human-technology relations that can be isolated and described:

Variant 1, Embodiment Relations
(I-technology)-World

Variant 2, Hermeneutic Relations
I-(technology-World)

Variant 3, Alterity Relations
I-technology-(-World)⁶¹

Ihde adds to these background relations and horizonal phenomena, the former of which includes the “present absence” of appliances that “become[] part of the experienced field of the inhabit,” and the latter of which includes “edible technologies” that effect an “internal background relation of the most extreme fringe type.”⁶² Though Ihde does not make this point explicit, background relations and horizonal phenomena follow the same logic, but occur at opposite limits of our “relativistic context of relations.”⁶³ The hyphen within each set of parentheses in the three variant I-world relations above he terms the “enigma position,” the position wherein a “partial symbiosis” occurs.⁶⁴ With background relations and horizonal phenomena, the symbiosis becomes near-complete (technology-world; I-technology). Such symbioses will only increase in number in a “totalized technological culture.”⁶⁵

Ihde now turns his attention from I-world relations to culture more broadly, the collective configuration of those relations in all their manifold complexity. Here, in “Program Two: Cultural Hermeneutics,” we find contextual praxes such as “fashion,” social “status,” and personal “identity,” each of which constitute sub-spheres of the “relativistic context of relations” which is our world.⁶⁶ Ihde notes Barthes’s work on fashion, making the link between his cultural hermeneutics and the semiotic/semiological studies of culture, which treat cultural artifacts as (relativistic and differential) objects within a complex system of relations and significations. At this level, then, for Ihde (and for the semioticians), technology is a “hermeneutic device” entailing a “reading process.”⁶⁷ As in individual hermeneutic relations, wherein a nonisomorphic intentional reference (simply: a word does not equal a thing) requires a “hermeneutic transparency,” versus a “perceptual transparency,” cultural hermeneutics involves the entirety of the “sedimented acquisition of the literature lifeworld.”⁶⁸ In semiological terms (derived from Ferdinand de Saussure), in every utterance, every instance of parole (speech), there is a reference to the system, langue (language)—a linguistic figure-ground relation.⁶⁹ Since “read[ing] an instrument is an analogue to reading a text,” every technology has “a doubled set of contextual involvements”—the first, that of the “artifact within its immediate use-context” (utterance; parole); the second, that of the artifact’s “juxtaposition [with] the larger cultural contexts” (system; langue).⁷⁰ We see, then, a primordial reading that is the hermeneutic capacity structuring both language and technology, an intentional reading as _____. Thus, between the micro-, naked, or sensory level (seeing as _____), and the macro-, mediated, or cultural level (reading as _____) there is an isomorphic process at work, differentiated by the variations in intentional structure noted above (variant 1 vs. variant 2), which reciprocally conditions each level. Such a structure can have no “single or unified trajectory” but is instead characterized by “multistability.”⁷¹ This multistable structure is anathema to foundationalism, and is “distinctly postmodern.”⁷²

Finally, then, in chapter seven, “Program Three: Lifeworld Shapes,” and eight, “Epilogue: The Earth Inherited,” Ihde draws conclusions from the “lifeworld curvatures” heretofore described.⁷³ Ihde’s use of curvature is here a technical term implemented to shift the language from absolutizing trajectories to relativistic inclinations. Technology is non-neutral, inclining those who inhabit the technologically textured lifeworld in various directions, but it is not determining. What, then, are the “discernible vectors” of these technological inclinations?⁷⁴ Ihde discusses four that he considers significant: “pluriculturality”; “heightened contingency” and consequent “heavier weighting to decision”; “visualization” (due to image-technologies and the “magnification/reduction” bias brought about by lenses and Renaissance perspective); and “oscillatory phenomena” (the “social effect of magnification/reduction selectivities”).⁷⁵ The old ways of thinking—especially those nostalgic and mythological intellectual paradigms—cannot effectively reckon with the problems of this lifeworld. Such still rely on an absolute perspective, a view from nowhere, when only a navigational perspective can here be effective. The navigational perspective explicitly recognizes our embedded, embodied, and instrumented perspective, and allows one to “dance” through this field.⁷⁶ But dance requires “long, technical apprenticeship[],” and so for us, close to thirty years on from the publication of Technology and the Lifeworld, the “task” remains for us to “cultivate the right weight and lightness of movement to maintain a balance within the world.”⁷⁷ The “field of vision” has “not yet fully gestalted”; we are still learning to navigate, to focus.⁷⁸ This space in which we find ourselves is “often both confusing and dangerous,” but Ihde provides us with an excellent resource for learning to embrace the confusion and the danger of a “diverse” and “multistable” world with “a sense of playfulness,” and perhaps even joy.⁷⁹

I have not spoken here of the concerns with which we are presented, because Ihde himself does not emphasize them. And yet, one cannot say that they are unimportant to him. The threats of “nuclear war” and “global pollution” are noted on the first page of the book, he closes with a call for a “worldwide conservational ethic,” and he praises “feminist criticism,” which “cuts across all previously noted cultural combinations ... at both micro- and macro-levels” (favourably citing Donna Haraway, whose A Cyborg Manifesto fuses nicely with Ihde’s arguments here).⁸⁰ What is needed, then, to extend Ihde’s deeply challenging insights, would be a critique of power in its own “postmodern sensibility,” as shaped by the “linkage of the earth” that Ihde has tried to positively evaluate (i.e., to seek the positive potentialities of the “technosystem”). I am inclined to think of “biopower” in the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, the critique of logistics and management in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and Haraway’s oppositional cyborg, to name just a few different treatments of power at the dawn of the postmodern age.⁸¹ Hans Jonas’s argument for deepened responsibility and Baudrillard’s radical insights in Simulacra and Simulation are also especially relevant for discussions of a globally interlinked world.⁸² Ihde’s Technology and the Lifeworld is not a complete project, but he would be the first to say that he never presumed it to be so: it is at most, and at its best, a “partial topography.”⁸³ He has given us a marvellous spring-board for studies in postmodernity, in the interstices of humanities and science-technology, in the polymorphous and plural world—the earth—that is, and has always been, our home.

Notes