ABSTRACT
Don Ihde was born in 1934. He studied philosophy at the University of Kansas and theology at the Andover Newton Theological School with the well-known theologian Paul Tillich. He worked at Boston University and Southern Illinois University for some years and since 1969 he has been Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York (SUNY). He is the Chief Editor of an important series of books, the Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology. Don Ihde is one of the doyens of current philosophy of technology. He is still
very active in the discipline. In 1979 he published his first book on philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis, which showed his philosophical orientation towards Heidegger and Husserl. His next book, Technology and the Lifeworld was published in 1990. Here he worked out for the first time his ideas on the role of technology in our observation of reality referring to empirical examples. The book forms his ‘empirical turn’ that we find in many current philosophers of technology (see also for instance the portrait of Andrew Feenberg). In 1991 Instrumental Realism came out which in a certain sense is the philosophy of science counterpart to the more philosophy of technology oriented Technology and the Lifeworld. In 2002 Ihde published Bodies in Technology in which he gives special consideration to the role of corporality during our observations. He is also concerned here with observations of our own bodies (for instance by means of medical imaging techniques). Ihde’s interest in philosophy of technology came about especially through his
study of the role of scientific instruments. Such instruments play an intermediating part in observations. This role remained the most important focus of his attention in all his work on philosophy of technology. This work is in the tradition of the phenomenology which was developed by, amongst others, Edmund Husserl. Heidegger, too, wrote about the role of technology in our observation and experience of reality but often in a very critical vein. To him technology in particular meant a reduction of our experience of reality. Instead of the full, gorgeous reality we merely see things from which something still has to be made. Ihde joins up with this in a sense when he emphasises that technology gives us a framed version of reality. This is what literally happens when we look out through a window frame: we then see only that part of reality that can be seen through the window. Technology therefore does not play a neutral role in our observation. It always changes somewhat the way in which we see and experience things (see also Chapter 12). To Heidegger it was mainly a negative change, a narrowing down, but Ihde is much more positive. Technology can, according to him, enhance our observation of reality. For instance, our realisation of the finiteness of the earth was enhanced when astronauts could take photos of the earth on which it could be seen as a beautiful coloured ball in a vast dark environment. Technology always plays its intermediating role in a cultural context, which also helps to determine the way it functions. Ihde illustrates this amongst other things with reference to an example about observation when navigating. He demonstrates that the instruments used by Columbus were useless to the inhabitants of the islands that he discovered because these instruments did not fit into their cultural context. Let us look at a quotation from the work of Ihde:
If the role of perception, especially at the microperceptual order of things, does not immediately seem to fit the concerns of philosophy of science, the opposite is the case with respect to the philosophy of technology. The materiality of body carries with it, particularly with regard to artifact use, certain rather immediate implications. Merleau-Ponty offers three examples in the discussion of bodily spatiality: ‘A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is. If I am in the habit of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can “get through” without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body.’ In Polanyi’s parlance, these phenomena would be examples of tacit knowledge, since they are a kind of ‘know how’ without explicit conceptual judgment attached to them. But they are more – they are examples of how artifacts (technologies) may be used or experienced in use. They are examples of what I call embodiment relations. Such relations are existential (bodily-sensory), but they implicate how we utilize technologies and how such use transforms what it is we experience through such technologies.
