BOOK REVIEW

Don Ihde: Heidegger’s Technologies:Postphenomenological Perspectives

Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, xii+155, $65.00(hard), ISBN 978-0-8232-3377-9

Soraj Hongladarom

Published online: 24 November 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most discussed philosophers of technology,

and Ihde is certainly right when he says that, among European philosophers talking

about technology in the first half of the twentieth century, Heidegger remains

‘‘virtually the only one of these to continue to draw major comment’’ (p. 1). It is

almost unthinkable nowadays to imagine an introductory course in philosophy of

technology that does not discuss his views on technology in one way or another.

According to Ihde, Heidegger has two phases of such views. In the 1920’s with the

publication of Being and Time, Heidegger proposes an analysis of the relation

between human beings and technology as a distinction between the ‘‘present-at-

hand’’ and ‘‘ready-to-hand’’ and Ihde says that even today this analysis is still valid

among many philosophers of technology. The ‘‘present-at-hand’’ is the kind of

relation that happens when the human is being conscious of the tool he has at his

hand, as when he realizes that he is holding a hammer, for example. The ‘‘ready-to-

hand,’’ on the contrary, is a kind of flowing relation where the human as tool user is

not aware of the tool at all but is focused on whatever task that he is using the tool

for. That is the first phase. The second phase, however, takes place after World War

II with the publication of his major work on technology, The Questions ConcerningTechnology, in the 1950’s. Ideas in the latter work are also rather familiar to the

student of philosophy of technology. Heidegger talks about new, modern technology

enframing nature, with the result that nature itself becomes a ‘‘resource well’’ to be

exploited by humans through their technologies. Heidegger’s favorite example is the

river Rhine and the attempt to dam it. The dam represents an attempt to enframe the

river, making it a ‘‘standing-in-reserve’’ for human consumption. The river ceases

its primordial being as an integral part of nature within which the human being is

also a part, and becomes a dead resource, so to speak.

S. Hongladarom (&)

Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand

e-mail: s.hongladarom@gmail.com

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Minds & Machines (2013) 23:269–272

DOI 10.1007/s11023-012-9296-9

However, what Ihde is doing in this book is to take Heidegger to task with the

newer technologies that were not fully developed in his lifetime. What would

Heidegger say to today’s technologies such as the Internet, genetically modified

organisms, mammal cloning and the like? What characterizes today’s technologies

is the tight integration between information and whatever they are technologies of.

For example, there is a very tight integration between information science and

molecular biology in today’s bioinformatics. The sequencing of the human genome

requires a full use of information technology to parse the monumental amount of

information contained in the genome. According to Ihde, the kinds of technology

discussed by Heidegger are those from the older, industrial era; he was familiar with

the technologies behind the hydroelectric dam, the typewriter, the television, and the

nuclear bomb, but having died in 1976 he could scarcely have imagined the full

bloom of the Internet and its social networking sites, for example. Another

prominent German philosopher of a later generation, Jurgen Habermas, has his own

Facebook fan page. If Heidegger were alive today (he died when the Internet was

still in its infancy), would he approve of somebody making his fan page on his

behalf? What would Heidegger think about the Internet and the way it is being used

so ubiquitously today? These are some of the questions posed by Ihde in his

engagement with Heidegger’s philosophy of technology throughout the book.

According to Ihde, Heidegger was ‘‘prescient’’ in some aspects about techno-

science, a blend between technology and science that characterizes today’s scientific

and technological enterprises. Ihde sees Heidegger entertaining the idea of

‘‘framework relativity’’ of science before Kuhn did. For Ihde the two thinkers

agree that what counts as scientific knowledge is dependent on an overarching

framework; it is the framework that provides the terms and conceptions used in

scientific knowledge their meanings. However, there are differences. For Kuhn,

once a paradigm is superseded, terms that derive their meanings from their direct

dependence on the previous paradigms become totally rejected or have their

meanings totally changed. Thus, for Kuhn terms such as ‘‘phlogiston’’ or ‘‘ether’’

lose their meanings within the new paradigm and become relegated to history of

science instead. On the contrary Heidegger would not see the change as a wholesale

discard, but in some way the senses of the old terms still persist, lying buried and

‘‘covered over or remain[ing] vestigially beneath or below their replacements’’

(p. 103). Furthermore, Ihde sees that Heidegger is prescient about technoscience in

that Heidegger regards science as essentially a socially constructed program. The

essence of science is research; hence Ihde sees Heidegger being able to discern

science as a kind of activity, a social program, since research always depends on a

number of highly skilled people, a system of organization and support. In this way

Heidegger predates social scientists of science such as Latour and his followers (p.

104). Thus one sees that according to Ihde, Heidegger’s program is not wholly about

discussion about old technologies, but some of his ideas could be useful as a

precursor toward an understanding, at least in a historical context, of how science

and technology could be viewed together (as ‘‘technoscience’’) and how technology

itself comes before science.

An interesting part of the book concerns Ihde’s argument that technology comes

before science both ontologically and historically. To Ihde, Heidegger regards

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technology as only ontologically prior to, but perhaps historically later than science

(p. 60). However, Ihde says that Heidegger is wrong, and presents an argument

purporting to show that technology is both prior to science in the ontological and

historical senses. The argument that technology is prior to science at all seems to run

contrary to popular conception, which holds that science should be there before

technology in order to provide for the gist of knowledge, so to speak, so that

technology applies itself to science. On the contrary, Ihde argues Heidegger is right

in claiming that technology comes before in the ontological sense. Ihde says, ‘‘On

the ontological level, Technology is a certain way of experiencing, relating to and

organizing the way humans relate to the natural world’’ (p. 60). When technology

(or Technology with capital ‘‘T’’ to use it in Heidegger’s own sense of emphasizing

its ‘‘essence’’) is understood as a certain way of dealing with the world, science

follows ontologically because science itself is nothing more than a certain kind of

activity, one that emphasizes knowledge discovering and making, all for the purpose

of mastering the world, but it is the attitude of mastering the world that is already a

technological attitude, thus making the latter ontologically prior to the former.

Moreover, Ihde, following works by historians and sociologists of science such as

Lynn White, argues that technology is also historically prior to science because the

technology of building a mechanical clock paves the way for a kind of knowledge

systematization which would not have been possible were it not for the technology

that divides up time neatly into equal chunks, as exists in the mechanical clock.

Here one can see Ihde’s view on science and technology in a nutshell. Ihde is

following the program of those who study science not as a static body of knowledge

with its logical structure, but as a living, dynamic human enterprise with its ups and

downs, successes and failures. His view that technology is both ontologically and

historically prior to science shows that science itself is so imbued with technology,

with certain ways of looking at the world, that it would be a folly to look at it as a

disinterested body of knowledge as the older philosophy of science tends to do. By

doing this, Ihde is painting a picture of Heidegger as perhaps a precursor of the

social scientific study of science and technology. Here is perhaps Heidegger’s

positive contribution to both philosophy of science and philosophy of technology.

His negative contribution for Ihde is of course that of essentializing technology and

his failure (though hardly a fault of his) to see the development of newer

technologies in the past two or three decades. That Ihde keeps on repeating that

Heidegger fails to see how technologies develop after his death perhaps is intended

to show that there are still some scholars who act as if Heidegger were alive today.

There could be some who still employ Heidegger’s tools to comment on and

criticize these newer technologies. There is a reason for this. If one believes that

Technology (with capital ‘‘T’’) has an enframing essence, then it has the essence

timelessly. Consequently, these philosophers presumably would look at the newer

technologies (the Internet, the genome project, etc.) as yet other manifestations of

the essence of Technology. But that would be too restrictive, and doing so would

result in a rather complete failure to see how technologies interact with the changing

times and how technologies and their social and cultural contexts depend on one

another in a very dynamic way.

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There are six chapters in the book, many of which have already been published in

various journals and books. Chapter One is a very detailed exposition of

Heidegger’s view on technology; Chapter Two is an essay that argues for the

historical and ontological priority of technology to science. Chapter Three is an

attempt to ‘‘deromanticize’’ Heidegger; that is, an attention to the ‘‘politics of the

artifact,’’ a perception that a thing or an artifact is always in the midst of political

powerplay. By appreciating the politics involved, often lying hidden beneath the

romantic veneer couched in Heideggerian language, the stark reality of the artifact

that reflects deep injustices or political power can be shown. This deromanticization

is carried over to the next section, an interlude, where Ihde contrasts two ways of

looking at the same thing, a simple Italian cottage. Chapter Four deals with the

priority of technology. Chapter Five, ‘‘Heidegger’s Technologies: One Size Fits

All,’’ is a critique of essentialism in Heidegger’s view. Chapter Six concludes the

book.

Ihde says that his outlook is ‘‘postphenomenological.’’ That is, he employs

findings from related disciplines such as history, sociology and other related fields to

help shed light on the phenomenon of technology in society. Rather than thinking

about technology in the abstract, employing ancient Greek terminology and

searching for an essence of technology, Ihde is doing what many philosophers

(mostly those of the younger generation) are already doing: looking over their

shoulders to find out what their colleagues in related fields are doing and adopting

those findings for their philosophical analyses. Ihde contends that Heidegger was

blinded by his insistence that the essence of technology is obscured by the

particularities of separate applications of technologies. But in fact it is those

particularities that are much more interesting because they represent the actual cases

of how we human beings interact with the world in a way that reflects our desires,

goals and attitudes that are relative to changing circumstances. The hilarious

account of the pen and the typewriter in Chapter Five illustrate Ihde’s postphe-

nomenological perspectives very well.

The book is a very good introductory text on Heidegger’s philosophy of

technology, and I would say also of Heidegger’s thought in general. Ihde often

carries Heidegger’s views to their almost reductio conclusions, and it would be

interesting to see how a committed Heideggerian would respond to his criticisms.

Hence, in addition to being a good introductory text on Heidegger, the book is also

useful as a text in a course on philosophy of technology. It seems that the old way of

doing philosophy of technology—that of sitting in an armchair and pondering the

fate of the world being gripped by the unrelenting forces of technology—is

moribund. In the end, it remains a tantalizing question whether Heidegger would,

had he been alive, have his own Facebook profile page or a fan page.

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