Hubert Dreyfus invited me to his office at the University
of California, Berkeley in
November of 1992. I was on
sabbatical and had just participated in the Annual Meeting of the
American
Society for Information Science (ASIS) that was held in Pittsburgh,
October
23-29, 1992, where I talked about ‘Information Technologies and
Technologies of
the Self’ (Capurro 1986) and referred to the book by Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow
on Michel Foucault (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983). Leading up to my
meeting with
Dreyfus, I met my friend and colleague Thomas Froehlich (Kent State
University, School of Library
and Information Science) as well as German philosopher Wolfgang
Schirmacher (New School
for Social Research, New York).
I had also consulted with the School
of Communication, Information
and
Library Studies at Rutgers University, and the Department of
Information
Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. Lastly, I had the
fortuitous opportunity to
speak with the Buddhist expert, Liu Xiaogan, who was living in exile at
Princeton
University.
As such, I was fully
immersed in foundational issues of Library and Information Science and
particularly in Information Ethics, a topic that had become a major
societal
issue with the rise of the Internet.
Coming from phenomenology and hermeneutics, I
was fascinated when I read
Hubert Dreyfus' books dealing with information technology from the same
perspective. I expected a U.S.
philosopher to be analytic and to reject Continental philosophy in
general and
Heideggerian phenomenology in particular. It was a sunny November day.
I was
impressed by the beautiful campus and by his warm hospitality. Dreyfus
and I
talked about phenomenology in the U.S. I mentioned his book What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of
Artificial Intelligence (Dreyfus 1972) as well as Terry Winograd’s
and
Fernando Flores’ Understanding Computers
and Cognition (Winograd & Flores 1986) in a short contribution
to the
XIVth German Philosophy Congress in 1987 (Capurro 1987). I also
referred to
Dreyfus in a 1987 article for the German computer journal Informatik-Spektrum
dealing with Winograd and Flores (Capurro
1987a) as well as in an article on Artificial Intelligence from an
ethical
perspective dealing with Joseph Weizenbaum (Capurro 1998). All these
thinkers
helped me further develop my ideas on Information Ethics. In 2008 I
referenced
Dreyfus’ book, Being-in-the-World: A
Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, specifically where he
notes, ”In
anxiety Dasein discovers that it has no meaning or content of its own;
nothing
individualizes it but its empty thrownness.” (Dreyfus 1991, 180) My
reference
was in the context of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the
sources of
morality and their relevance for Intercultural Information Ethics. I
wrote,
"Such an experience is not necessarily accompanied by sweating and
crying,
but it is rather nearer to what we could call today a ‘cool’ experience
of the
gratuity of existence." (Capurro 2008, 642)
Reading these and various other related texts
during the period of my
acquaintance with Hubert Dreyfus, I developed a fascination for his
phenomenological analysis of computer technology. His breath-taking
study on
Heidegger's Being and Time (Heidegger
1987) is a uniquely original interpretation of this seminal work of
20th
century philosophy. For readers of the original German text, reading
Heidegger
through Dreyfus is an experience in its own right, an Anglo-Saxon, even
pragmatist,
Heidegger, so to speak. The task of interpreting Heidegger, as such,
was also
done by Winograd and Flores, but Dreyfus presents a deeper
understanding of the
issues at stake as he opened new doors to a phenomenological
understanding of
what the information age is.
In a recent outline on digital hermeneutics and
digital ontology I
reference authors like Gianni Vattimo, Vilém Flusser, Luciano
Floridi, Don
Ihde, Michael Eldred, Albert Borgmann, Lucas Introna, Bernhard Irrgang,
Lawrence Lessig, Wolfgang Sützl, and Daniel Fallman. I quote
Hubert Dreyfus'
concluding remarks in his book On the
Internet: "In sum, as long as we continue to affirm our
bodies,
the Net can be useful to us in spite of its tendency to offer the worst
of a
series of asymmetric trade-offs: economy over efficacy in education,
the
virtual over the real in our relation to things and people, and
anonymity over
commitment that our culture has already fallen twice for the
Platonic/Christian
temptation to try to get rid of our vulnerable bodies, and has ended in
nihilism. This time around, we must resist this temptation and affirm
our
bodies, not in spite of their finitude and vulnerability, but because,
without
our bodies, as Nietzsche saw, we would be literally nothing. As
Nietzsche has
Zarathustra say: ‘I want to speak to the despisers of the body. I would
not
have them learn and teach differently, but merely say farewell to their
own
bodies – and thus become silent. (Dreyfus 2001, p. 106-107)." (cited in
Capurro 2010)
Hubert Dreyfus' initial analysis in 1972
of
"what computers can't
do" finds an echo in present-day research into what algorithms can and
can't do as well as in discussions of what they should and should not
be
allowed to do.
References
Capurro,
Rafael (1987). Zur Kritik der künstlichen Vernunft. http://www.capurro.de/intellekt.html
Capurro,
Rafael (1987a). Die Informatik und das hermeneutische
Forschungsprogramm.
In Informatik-Spektrum, 10, 329-333
http://www.capurro.de/winograd.html
Capurro,
Rafael (1996). Information
Technology and Technologies of the Self. In: Journal of Information
Ethics, 5
(2), 19-28.
http://www.capurro.de/self.htm
Capurro,
Rafael (1998). Die Verantwortbarkeit des Denkens. Künstliche
Intelligenz aus
ethischer Sicht. In: Forum für interdisziplinäre Forschung 1,
15-21.
http://www.capurro.de/verantwortbarkeit.html
Capurro, Rafael (2008) in Kenneth E. Himma
& Herman T. Tavani, (eds.) (2008). The
Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. New Jersey: Wiley,
639-665.
http://www.capurro.de/himma.html
Capurro, Rafael (2010). Digital
hermeneutics: an outline. In: AI & Society 35 (1), 35-42.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00146-009-0255-9
Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1972). What
Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. New York: MIT
Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1991).
Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. (2001). On the
internet. New York:
Routledge.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. & Rabinow,
Paul (1983): Michel Foucault. Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago:
The University
of Chicago
Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1987). Being and
Time. Transl. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK:
Basil Blackwell.
Winograd, Terry and Flores, Fernando
(1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for
Design. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex.