INTRODUCTION
We
live in societies whose political, legal, military, cultural and
economic systems are based on digital communication and information
networks or
in societies that are making major efforts to bridge the so-called
digital
divide (Capurro, et al., 2007). Maybe this is one reason why
hermeneutics, the
philosophic theory dealing with issues of interpretation and
communication, has
apparently lost the academic interest it had in the 19th century as methodology of the humanities as
well as understanding human existence in the 20th century.
Santiago
Zabala, editor of a recent book in honor of the Italian philosopher
Gianni
Vattimo, quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer, the founding father of philosophic
hermeneutics, as follows:
Vattimo
has specifically called
hermeneutics a koiné: the common
language in which philosophical thought after Heidegger and
Wittgenstein, after
Quine, Derrida and Ricoeur, has spread everywhere; virtually a
universal
philosophical language. (Zabala 2007, p. 3)
In
his book The End of
Modernity.
Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture
Vattimo
remarks that computer science makes the difference between modernity
and
post-modernity (Vattimo 1985, p. 22).
As
I shall try to show
in this paper, hermeneutics is intimately related since the 1970s with
digital
technology. After having passed through critical theory (J. Habermas),
critical
rationalism (K. Popper), analytic philosophy (early L. Wittgenstein,
Hilary
Putnam, Donald Davidson), deconstructivism (J. Derrida), the
phenomenology of the
symbol (P. Ricoeur), psychoanalysis (J. Lacan), dialectic materialism
(A.
Badiou), mediology (R. Debray), the hermeneutics of the subject (M.
Foucault)
and particularly through Gianni Vattimo’s “weak thought” (“pensiero
debole”),
to mention just some prominent contemporary philosophic schools,
hermeneutics is
facing today the challenge arising from digital technology becoming
what I call digital hermeneutics. Every
revolutionary transformation in philosophy that leads to the creation
of a new
type of rationality arises usually from an outstanding scientific or
technological breakthrough (Bosteels, 2006,
p. 116). This is the case of today’s global and interactive digital
network, the
Internet. The Internet’s challenge for hermeneutics concerns primarily
its social
relevance for the creation, communication and interpretation of
knowledge. This
challenge implies a questioning of the pseudo-critical rejection of
hermeneutics with regard to technology in general and to digital
technology in
particular (Capurro 1990). Facing the digital challenge hermeneutics
must develop
a “productive logic” (Heidegger 1976, 10) towards understanding the
foundations
of digital technology and its interplay with human existence. A
productive
logic “leaps ahead” (Heidegger, ibid.) the established
self-understanding of a given science, in this case of
hermeneutics, in order to undertake a revision of its main concepts and
disclose a new area of research.
There
is a
blindness in some studies of contemporary hermeneutics with regard to
these
challenges (Figal, 2007), with a few exceptions (Irrgang, 2005, 2007;
Fellmann,
1998; Kurthen, 1992), as well as in seemingly comprehensive
encyclopaedia articles
(Gadamer 1974, Grondin 1996, Ramberg & Gjesdal, 2005) also with a
few exceptions
(Introna, 2005; Mallery, Hurwitz & Duffy, 1990). In their article
“Hermeneutics” in the Encyclopedia
of
Artificial Intelligence Mallery et al. speak about the
“precomputational
nature of contemporary hermeneutics” and suggest “the reformulation and
refinement of ideas about both hermeneutics and AI.” (Mallery, Hurwitz
& Duffy,
1990, p. 374).
But
there is, indeed, a history of digital
hermeneutics
to which
I shall refer in the first part of this paper, before giving an outline
of the
major topics of digital hermeneutics in the second part. The paper does
not
intend to give a comprehensive analysis of the literature in the field
nor
discusses related contributions in philosophy of computing (Floridi,
2004), philosophy
of information technology (Mitcham 2004), philosophy of technology
(Mitcham, 2000,
1994), phenomenology of information technology (Iharco, 2002, Mingers,
2001) or
even of specific information technologies such as the mobile phone
(Arnold,
2003). Its purpose is to raise the attention of IT researchers and
hermeneuticists to the theoretical and practical relevance of the
encounter of
their areas of research that are sometimes seen as incompatible to each
other.
There is still a lot of translation work to be done in order to get
these two
cultures come closer to and profit from each other. Is digital
hermeneutics an
oxymoron?
A SHORT HISTORY OF DIGITAL HERMENEUTICS
The story begins, to my
knowledge, with the discussions dealing
with artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1970s and particularly with
Hubert Dreyfus’
book What
Computers Can’t Do: A
Critique of Artificial Reason where
he pointed to
the importance of the context of everyday practices in which we are
embedded
before we start with any kind of knowledge objectivations and their
symbolic
manipulations in AI systems (Dreyfus, 1972 followed by 1992). Hubert
and Stuart
Dreyfus discuss
Husserl’s problem of objectivising the shared background of a belief
system that
should correlate the everyday context of the life-world and could be
used to
make computers intelligent. They stress the limits of this endeavour:
But, as Heidegger predicted,
the task of writing out a
complete theoretical account of everyday life turned out to be much
harder than
initially expected. Husserl’s project ran into serious trouble, and
there are
signs that Minsky’s has too. During twenty-five years of trying to
spell out
the components of the subject’s representation of everyday objects,
Husserl
found that he had to include more and more of the subject’s
common-sense
understanding of the everyday world. (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1988 in
Boden, 1990,
p. 322-323)
Their conclusion is:
If Heidegger and
Wittgenstein are right, human beings are much
more holistic than neural nets. Intelligence has to be motivated by
purposes in
the organism and goals picked up by the organism from an ongoing
culture. If
the minimum unit of analysis is that of a whole organism geared into a
whole
cultural world, neural nets as well as symbolically programmed
computers still
have a very long way to go. (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, op.cit., p. 331)
With
regard to our present experiences “on
the Internet” Hubert Dreyfus writes in 2001:
I’ve
suggested that, where meaning is
concerned, what the Net is doing to us is, in fact, making our lives
worse
rather than better. Living one’s life on the Web is attractive because
it
eliminates vulnerability and commitment but, if Kierkegaard is right,
this lack
of passion necessarily eliminates meaning as well. (Dreyfus, 2001, p.
102)
This scepticism is shared in
some respect by two other
American philosophers, Don Ihde and Albert Borgmann, who have made
substantial
contributions to philosophy of information technology inspired also by
phenomenology
and hermeneutics since the seventies and early eighties (Idhe, 1979,
1983,
Borgmann, 1984). Ihde has undertaken a thorough analysis of the
human-machine
relations particularly with regard to the bodily dimension in the
tradition of
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He distinguishes between
"embodiment relations" in case we experience the world through a
machine
and
"hermeneutic relations" in which humans are confronted with the machine
as
“other” than themselves (Ihde, 1979, p. 12-13). In both cases
technology is not
neutral in the sense that it transforms the quality of human
experience. The
hermeneutic experience is the one Ihde attributes to the relation
between the
programmer and the computer. He writes:
The relation is one
analogous to ‘writing’ (programming into a
computer language) and ‘reading’ (interpreting the output) (…) The
organization
of computer ‘language’ is that which enhances the collection of data, factual information of any kind;
it also enhances the breakdown of that data into bits
or atomistic items, organized according to a system of categories;
and in this organization
there is an unfolding of what I shall call linear ‘logics. (Ihde,
1979,p.
58-59)
Ihde compares the
interaction of programmers with computers as
different from the everyday experience of non-technical users in which
case the
hardware remains a “hidden background” with regard to the interface
experience:
the results often appear
hermeneutically as that which is to
be read and as that to which one must respond. The computer in this
case has
rather directly been connected to social situations – yet the computer
itself
is totally blind to social contexts.” (Ihde, 1979, p. 60)
With regard to the bodily
experience he writes in 1979:
And while the computer plays
little role with respect to these
self-experiences as bodily
experiences (at least yet) it does begin to amplify a more restricted
area of
self-experience, the extension of language, albeit a highly
circumscribed type
of language. (Ihde, 1979, p. 63)
Some thirty years later the
situation has radically changed in
both regards: computers are becoming more and more part of bodily
experiences (EGE,
2005) and they have amplified the extension of language to everyday
language in
a global scale as in the case of the Internet. The view of
computers
as something "other" is
disappearing, i.e., they are less and less "some-thing" or
"other-than-us" and permeate the world in which we – or, more
precisely: some of us – live.
In his book Technology
and the Character of Contemporary Life Albert Borgmann develops a phenomenology of “focal things and
practices” related to Heidegger’s views on technology (Borgmann, 1984).
According to Borgmann focal things and practices are characterized by
its
simplicity: “A jug, an earthen vessel from which we pour wine, is such
a
thing.” (Borgmann, 1984, p. 198). What looks prima facie
like a romantic view of pre-technological society has
the power to reveal the hidden “tightly patterned character of
technology” that
Borgmann interprets as our belief in the endless promises of
technology. In fact,
such promises appear from the focal things perspective as an emptiness
where
they can find their proper place and vice versa, the disappearance of
focal
things points to a potential threatening of technology (Borgmann 1984,
p. 199).
Technology – Borgmann does not distinguish in this context between
digital and
non-digital or conventional technology – builds a positive horizon in
which
focal things might have a re-birth within
a technological society: they should be re-considered not just as
things but as
social practices. The commitment to such practices is, according to
Borgmann,
our opportunity to counterbalance technology. The great meal of the day
that
gathers the family around a table is such a practice in contrast to a
drive-thru consumption of a Big Mac although in many cases a Big Mac
together
with a TV program is all we need (Borgmann, 1984, p. 208). What remains
tacit
in this (and other) examples is the question that for millions of human
beings
a Big Mac is a great meal if they have the chance to have it. In other
words,
Borgmann argues from the pre-understanding of the life-world of a rich
country
that turns today to have in many cases similar social troubles as the
so called
less-developed ones.
Another key contribution to
digital hermeneutics was the book
by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores Understanding Computers and Cognition. A
New Foundation for Design (Winograd & Flores, 1986;
Winograd,
1995). In
the preface they write: “We encounter the deep questions of design when
we
recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.”
(Winograd
& Flores 1986, p. xi). Winograd and Flores develop their
view in
opposition
to what they call the “rationalist tradition” and with explicit
relation to
hermeneutics. They follow Gadamer by stressing that every
interpretation relies
on the interaction between the “horizon” of the interpreter and the
text.
Gadamer uses also the concepts of “pre-understanding” or “prejudice” to
address
the implicit assumptions of the interpreter (Gadamer, 1975). The
process of
understanding is a never-ending one implying unspoken
conditions. Language
is understood as a social process through which commitments are
generated. In
accordance with
Heidegger’s philosophic turn of hermeneutics as a process of
understanding not
primarily of texts but of human existence, they write: “existence is
interpretation, and interpretation is existence.” (Winograd
& Flores, 1986, p. 31). To exist means
to be located in a space of open possibilities
without being able to take an absolute, a-historical and universal
viewpoint.
They apply Heidegger’s tool analysis in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1976,
§ 16)
to describe our experience with computer programs in their quality of
“readiness-to-hand” as far as we use them in a transparent way that
turn into
“present-at-hand” when a “breakdown” takes place. In his commentary on Being and Time Hubert Dreyfus calls
these two modes of coping with entities other than the human subject or
“Dasein”, ”availableness” and “occurrentness” (Dreyfus, 1991, p.
64-87). He explains these concepts as
follows:
The issue is understanding,
not explanation – making sense of how
things are, not explaining how they work.
We understand a phenomenon when we
see how it fits in with other phenomena. Since one cannot make
availableness
intelligible on the basis of some combination of occurrent elements,
one must
turn the question around and seek to account for occurrentness by
showing that
the occurrent is revealed by selectively leaving out the situational
aspects of
the unavailable. (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 123)
Heidegger mentions three
modes of unfamiliarity or
“breakdown,” – he uses the terms “trouble” (“Störung”) and “break”
(“Bruch”) –
namely 1) “conspicuousness” when tools become unusuable because they
are
damaged; 2) “obstrusiveness” when we miss a tool that we expect to be
“ready-to-hand,” and 3) “obstinacy” in case tools happen to stand just
in the
way, although they are not damaged and we do not miss them. In each
case, tools
do not simply lose their character of “availableness” or
“readiness-to-hand”
becoming “occurrent” as mere objects “present-at-hand” (Heidegger,
1976,
ibid.). Heidegger calls “world” the perspective that allows us to see
tools as
decontextualized things. The formula “being-in-the-world” characterizes
the
mode of being of human beings addressing the way in which we originally share a common world having a
‘pragmatic’ relation to things as tools. This is not to say that
Heidegger is
negating or underestimating the objective view to
tools as things. Being able to switch
between the two modes makes manifest our capability of going beyond both, tools and objects. In
accordance with the Aristotelian definition of the object of the “first
philosophy,” namely the question of beings as
beings (Met. 1060 b 31), Heidegger will state that the
pre-understanding of
Being makes possible the ontological understanding of beings
(Heidegger, 1976).
He replaces the philosophic concept of subject and its correlate, the
object, and
chooses the one of existence or “Dasein”. To exist means to share with
others
originally “pragmatic” relations to things as tools (Greek pragmata)
within the horizon of Being. Heidegger's
tool analysis does not set out to describe the phenomenon of modern
technology.
It is also not opposed to the theoretical or objective view of science.
Quite
the contrary, it looks for its existential foundation (Capurro, 1992).
Winograd and Flores use this
analysis in order to deal with
design questions arising from “breakdowns” when using computer
programs.
Programmers should articulate possible
situations in which the users get involved with digital tools that
become useless,
and foresee their “pre-understanding.” But, they add, computer programs
are not
necessarily more user-friendly in case they mimicry human understanding:
There is an error in
assuming that success will follow the
path of artificial intelligence. The key to design lies in
understanding the
readiness-to-hand of the tools being built, and in anticipating the
breakdowns
that will occur in their use. A system that provides a limited
imitation of
human facilities will intrude with apparently irregular and
incomprehensible
breakdowns. On the other hand, we can create tools that are designed to
make
the maximal use of human perception and understanding without
projecting human
capacities onto the computer. (Winograd & Flores, 1986, p. 137)
The mimicry of human
intelligence, autonomy, sensual
perception, emotions etc. can turn programs into objects
“present-at-hand” instead
of transparent tools for conversation. This is not to say that, for
instance,
intelligent robots might be quite useful “in spite of (or at times
because of)
not reflecting the nature of human perception and action.” (Winograd
&
Flores 1986, 128). In other words, AI is not about imitating human
intelligence
but about making a difference with regard to it – otherwise the term
‘artificial’ makes no sense (Negrotti, 1999). According
to Winograd and Flores, computer
programs are embedded in existential situations in which the
user must take a decision with regard to given options and based
on his/her pre-understanding. The user is not an isolated subject but
is
embedded in a social context in which computer programs are used as
“tools for
conversation.” The computer itself is then
a structured
dynamic
communication medium that is qualitatively different from earlier
media
such as print and telephones. Communication is not a process of
transmitting
information or symbols, but one of commitment and interpretation. A
human
society operates through the expression of requests and promises among
its
members. There is a systematic domain relevant to the structure of this
network
of commitments, a domain of ‘conversation for action’ that can be
represented
and manipulated in the computer. (Winograd & Flores, 1986, p. 176)
In my book Hermeneutics of Scientific Information
published I explore the
question of information
retrieval as an interpretation process of bibliographic data stored in a computer (Capurro, 1986, see also
Capurro, 2000a). My argument is as follows. When we create a
bibliographic
database we do it on the basis of fragmented pieces of information such
as
journal articles. In order to retrieve them we must create a common
background,
for instance, a classification scheme or a thesaurus or to rely on the
original
text itself searchable as basic index. What we do in any case is to fix
or
objectivize a pre-understanding common to producers and users of the
database.
Such background changes according to new scientific developments,
historical
situations, new linguistic utterances etc. There is no such a thing as
a a-historical
knowledge nor are users isolated minds with disembodied cognitive
structures
but social beings that share pragmatically a horizon of
pre-understanding in
their everyday life as well as in their professional activities. The
question
of relevance and pertinence in information retrieval that plays a key
role in
information science can thus be hermeneutically re-considered with
regard to different
horizons of expectations based on the Gadamerian concept of “fusion of
horizons.” In
terms of Luhmann’s system theory (Luhmann, 1987) information
retrieval can be understood as a communication process based on a
meaning
offer, Luhmann calls it “message”
(“Mitteilung”), a selection process that he
calls “information” (“Information”) and the
integration of information into the pre-understanding of the system
(“Verstehen”). These are the three components of the concept of
communication
(Luhmann, 1987, p. 225-226). The creation of explicit and digitally
objectivized
horizons of understanding such as formal categories (author, title of
the
publication etc.) as well as classification codes, descriptors and
abstracts
allowed searches in large bibliographic data bases since the early
1970s. The
present discussion about the semantic web faces similar approaches
(Pellegrini
& Blumenauer, 2006, Capurro, 2006a).
This view of the
relationship between hermeneutics and information
retrieval was proposed in similar terms by Thomas Froehlich in an
article
published in 1994 in the Journal of the
American Society for Information Science (Froehlich, 1994). Froehlich states that the design of
information systems includes three hermeneutical aspects namely:
1) a
hermeneutics of users, capable of interpreting their own needs as well
as their
relations intermediaries and the system itself,
2) a hermeneutics of
the
collection capable of laying the foundation for the processes of
document or
text selection as well as of they ways
in which there are indexed and catalogued, and
3) a hermeneutics of the
intermediary system that takes place with the classic matching
procedure during
the information retrieval process. These ideas have been further
developed in
the field of library and information science, for instance, by
Frederico Fonseca
(2005) as well as by Melissa Cole and David Avison (Cole & Avison,
2007).
The book by Winograd and
Flores had strong impact on some
members of the computer science community, particularly among the ones
devoted
to software development. This impact is
documented in the proceedings of the international conference Software Development and Reality
Construction organized by the Austrian software engineer
Christiane
Floyd
and her co-workers that took place in Germany in 1988. Among the
some
thirty participants there were Donald E. Knuth, Gordon Pask, Heinz von
Foerster
and Kristen Nygaard (Floyd et al., 1992). In the introduction
Christiane Floyd
writes:
We focus on software,
since we consider it to be pivotal in the intertwining of computer
technology
and the human world. (…) Cognition, then may be viewed as bringing
forth
concepts and insights fitting our
experience and viable for obtaining
our aims in open situations where we interpret our needs. It is shaped
by our
perspective and unfolds against a background or meaning horizon
coloured by our
tradition, our interests and our life experience. The main points of
current
controversial discussion concern the relation of my own reality
construction to
yours and that of others, and the interleavement between our scope for
reality
construction and the so-called objective world of nature shaped by
socio-cultural evolution. (Floyd, 1992, p. 13-17)
Heinz von Foerster and
Christiane Floyd conceive the relation
between self-organization and software development as a dialogical
process,
also called constructivism, through which the participants construct
together a
common understanding. She writes:
The interactions between the
participants of this conference
may be taken as recursive operations giving rise to stabilities in
terms of
richer distinctions and common insights leading to further
interactions. In the
case of design, I have argued that the making and revising design
decisions are
recursive operations and the resulting web of design decisions the
emerging
stabilities. In doing so, I may find a way of understanding
these processes better as an observer. Even more, I
am interested in facilitating these processes as a participant.
(Foerster &
Floyd,1992, p. 81)
The idea of a “web of design
decisions” is closely related to
the hermeneutic insights by Winograd and
Flores. In their contribution to this conference Heinz Klein and Kalle
Lyytinen
propose a new understanding of data modelling based on the “hermeneutic
circle.” Interpretation is a never ending process for which there is no
possibility to find an “anchoring point.” But at the same time it is
possible
to question the presuppositions upon which the conceptual scheme relies
upon
such as type of definitions, integrity constraints, and semantic rules.
To
elicit such pre-understanding is called by the authors “bracketing.”
They give
the following example:
Assume you are reading a map
and have difficulty matching the
landmarks that you see to the map. You may say to yourself, well maybe
I am not
here, but have already overshot my destination. You have now
“bracketed” a
fundamental assumption. This means, you have identified a fundamental
presupposition on which your map reading up to this point rests, put it
aside
“into brackets” and “pealed it away” so to speak. By attempting to do
this
systematically, particularly in social communication where different
minds look
at the same “text” from slightly different viewpoints, several layers
of
presuppositions may be revealed and bracketed. Again there is no
guarantee that
this converges or any implications that this leads to an “approximation
of
reality. (Klein & Lyytinen, 1992, p. 214-215)
Applying this example to
data modelling means that all data
models have a fundamental bias that can be made more transparent
through
bracketing in form of a self-critical dialogue. As they remark (Klein
& Lyytinen,
1992, p. 213, 215) this procedure is similar to the one I developed for the
area of information
retrieval (Capurro,
1986). They apply the Gadamerian metaphor of “fusion of horizons ” to
data
modelling in the sense of capturing some of the meanings intended by
the users
but alien to the developers who must translate them into some
appropriate formalism
and re-translate into the user’s horizons in order to become part of
their
everyday practices. Inspired, as they say, by the book by Winograd and
Flores
and based on their doctoral dissertation dealing with a hermeneutic foundation of the concepts of tool and
machine in the context of a programmer’s environment (Budde &
Züllighoven,
1990), Budde and Züllighoven use Heidegger’s notion of “equipment”
(“Zeug”) in
order to describe the kind of software tools they work with (Budde
& Züllighoven,
1992, p. 253). The following example shows that “embodiment relations,”
as Don Ihde
calls them (Ihde 1979, p. 12-13), were perceived and phenomenologically
articulated
in a similar way by computer scientists:
Technical equipment binds us
into a multitude of obvious and
hidden links. It transforms our physical and sensual aspects and our
body
language. The more complex the procedures that are “encapsulated” into
technical equipment, the more “abstract” the gestures of our body
become.
(Budde & Züllighoven, 1992, p. 257)
They make a key distinction
between technical equipment as
tool vs. as machine that correlates in some way Heidegger’s distinction
between
“readiness-to-hand” and “present-at-hand.” In their formulation: “A machine is repeatable motion which is
abstracted from its specific context and cast
into construction” (Budde
& Züllighoven,
1992, p. 260). It is the result of a process of decontextualization
from
the human
context of its use. On these premises, they explore the notion of
algorithm as
the result of formalizing an activity or “reducing [it] to its
form”
(Budde & Züllighoven,
1992, p.260) with the purpose of de- and
re-contextualization. In other words, formalisms and machines mean the
same
thing. They follow: “Software systems which appear as machines when in
use
will be called automata.”
(Budde & Züllighoven, 1992, p. 262)
The concept of automata
recalls the classical non-digital
predecessors such as androids that were presented to the astounding
onlookers
as something familiar to them as well as machines. This happens in our
everyday
experience when we have no means of influencing, say, a ticket machine
in order
to get what we want. In a programming environment software developers
aim at using
software such as compilers, editors or browsers, as a tool, and not as
automata
that they use for handling “programming materials” such as an interface
specification using “programming utensils” such as spelling checkers or
e-mail
systems. They summarize:
It depends on our objects of
work and the different settings
in which they are used whether we look at software components as
materials,
utensils, or tools. […] As software developers we process, probe and
organize programming
materials by means of software
tools
and with the support of programming
utensils. (Budde &
Züllighoven,
1992, p. 255)
In his contribution to this
conference, Wolfgang Coy points to
the limits of the tool metaphor when speaking, for instance, of
telecommunication or computer networks: “Here the idea of a technical
medium
arises, which allows another description of readiness-to-hand.” (Coy,
1992, p. 279)
I make a similar point with regard to the misinterpretation of the tool
analysis in Heidegger’s Being and
Time
understood as a pre-modern philosophy of technology (Capurro, 1992).
Heidegger’s
aim was to show how the “world” understood as a horizon of meaning
arises when
we go “beyond” tools, i.e. at the moment when their tacit frame of
reference breaks
down. Heidegger’s formula “being-in-the-world” refers to this original
tacit
situation or “pre-understanding” in which we are pragmatically embedded
that
relates ultimately our ontological projects regarding the meaning of
Being
itself or our pre-conceptions of what we mean when we speak about
reality. In
his later writings and particularly in The
Question Concerning Technology Heidegger develops an
interpretation
of
modern technology based on the concept of “challenging disclosure” by
which
everything becomes a object of human manipulation within the horizon of
“enframing” (“Gestell”) that embraces all kinds of possible
manipulative
“positioning” (“stellen”) of objects (Heidegger, 1977). I disagree with
Andrew
Feenberg who misinterprets Heidegger’s questioning of technology as
“essentialism” (Feenberg, 2000). Heidegger is in fact trying to grasp
the
present, i.e., in the early fifties of the last century, shape of
modern
technology without prejudicing future changes. Information technology
appears,
on the one hand, within the horizon of modern “enframing” – I use the
term
“information Gestell” – as well as, on the other hand, of human liberty
and language. This second perspective weakens the totalitarian or
ideological
ambitions
of digital technology by situating it within larger non manipulative
potentialities of language. The conjunction of language and information
technology leads to what I call “weak constructivism”. I borrow the
“weak”
concept from Vattimo’s “pensiero debole” (“weak thinking”) (Vattimo,
1985). Joseph
Goguen points to these non manipulative experiences, opening a
fascinating dialogue
with Eastern thought, particularly with Buddhism, in the very heart of
software
development (Goguen, 1992, 1992a). At
the other end of this debate on hermeneutics and information
technology, Thomas
Gordon develops a hermeneutic defence of artificial intelligence as far
as the
meaning of the term intelligence is not fixed and we might be able to
develop
AI in ways that do not necessarily contradict the arguments by Dreyfus,
Winograd & Flores and others (Gordon, 1992).
I believe that many of the
issues concerning the relation
between hermeneutics and information technology discussed in the
conference I
already mentioned on Software
Development
and Reality Construction some
twenty years ago are key questions of digital hermeneutics today and in
future (Floyd
et al. 1992). Their relevance can be seen for instance in a recent
study on the
potential of hermeneutics in information systems research by Melissa
Cole and
David Avison (Cole & Avison, 2007). In this case, hermeneutics is
understood in its classical sense as the theory of text interpretation
in the
constructivist Gadamerian tradition. Melissa Cole explored the notion
of
‘convenience’ in Internet shopping applying the hermeneutic circle as
an
empirical methodology for the interpretation of implicit prejudices in
online
consumer behavior. She summarizes her experiences this way:
Despite its potential as a
powerful IS research approach,
hermeneutics is not a popular methodology. The lack of formal
structures for
conducting hermeneutics research; the difficulty in understanding and
correctly
using its technical language; and the time needed to learn ‘how to do’
hermeneutic reflection have reduced its attractiveness when compared
with other
approaches such as survey, case study and action research. And yet, its
ability
to investigate evolving behaviours by uncovering anomalous words or
deeds makes
hermeneutics highly suitable for human-computer investigations, a core
topic area
for IS researchers. (Cole & Avison, 2007, p. 831)
And she is well aware that
hermeneutics deals not only with
making explicit the pre-understanding of the consumers but of the
researchers as
well as far as their intuitive leaps can become more transparent in
case the
researcher mutates into an interpretative one.
Matthew Chalmers connects
hermeneutics and semiology in order
to discuss the way systems used in computer-supported collaborative
work (CSCW)
represent information, situation and activity. He points out that
hermeneutics
offers a unifying view on the social science and computer science
within CSCW.
Collaborative filtering (CF) is an example of the relevance of
hermeneutics to CSCW.
They write:
If you rate one or more
recommendations, you feed back into
the process of adaptation of your profile, your neighbour set, and your
neighbours’
neighbour sets. Ripples of change spread out, demonstrating adaptivity
and
configurationality. The hermeneutic circle is strong here, and there is
no
meaning for a rated object independent of a person’s interpretation. If
an
object has no ratings, it can not be recommended. (Chalmers 2004, p.
223)
Hans Diebner aims at an
“operational hermeneutics” as an
adaptive cognitive model bridging the gap between hermeneutics and
cybernetics.
He writes:
… we deal with the interplay
between perception and construction
of reality, best circumscribed by the German play on words
‘Wahrnehmung’ and
‘’Wahrgebung’ (‘truth taking’ and ‘truth giving’). The external reality
is
perceived via stimuli by the sensorial organs and passed on to the
brain where
a model of the world is constructed and performed as a simulus. The
continuously ongoing process of re-adaptation can be paraphrased as a
tuning
and measurement process. We think that this process reflects crucial
features
of the hermeneutic circle. (Diebner, 2003)
DIGITAL HERMENEUTICS:
AN OUTLINE
As
the Internet and particularly the World Wide Web became a social
interactive
information and communication technology in the mid-1990s the relevance
of its
challenge to hermeneutics became even more obvious. In
a recent study devoted to Vattimo’s “aesthetic pacifism” the Austrian
philosopher Wolfgang Sützl remarks that Heidegger worked with a
concept of
modern technology opposed to modern communication technology that is
characterized by small and networked artefacts (Heidegger 1967). He
quotes Vattimo’s essay on Philosophy,
Politics and Religion from 1996:
The possibility to see the
Gestell not only as the highest
risk and negativity but also a first lightening of the event of Being
is
related to the discovery of modern technology as a communicative one.
Neither
Heidegger nor Adorno did this step. Both think modern technology based
on the
model of the engine, of mechanical technology: this model implies
necessarily
the idea of a passive dependency of the periphery with regard to the
centre…
(Sützl, 2007, p. 148, my translation, RC)
The leading modern
pre-understanding of the engine as a
metaphor for the process of social construction is being substituted by
the one
of the network understood as technology and as a medium of
communication. Vilém
Flusser was sceptical about dialogical forms of human interaction in
view of
the overwhelming power of mass media and their hierarchic structures
(Flusser,
1996). He did not foresee the impact of the
Internet that was in its infancy in 1991 when he
died. According to
Richard Rorty one of Vattimo’s
most distinctive
contributions to philosophical thinking is
the suggestion that the Internet provides a model for things in general
– that
thinking about the World Wide Web helps us to get away from Platonic
essentialism, the quest for underlying natures, by helping us see
everything as
a constantly changing network of relations. The result of adopting this
model
is what Vattimo calls “a weak ontology, or better, an ontology of the
weakening
of being.” Such an ontology, he argues, “supplies philosophical reasons
for
preferring a liberal, tolerant, and democratic society rather than an
authoritarian
and totalitarian one. (R. Rorty quoted by Zabala, 2007, p. 25)
Hermeneutics
faces today the question of the impact of the Internet not only at all
levels
of society but also with regard to the self-understanding of human
beings,
i.e., with the ontological or existential foundation of the digital
construction of reality. I do not use
the term ‘foundation’ in a strong metaphysical sense. I follow
Vattimo’s idea
that hermeneutics can provide only weak foundations that make possible
to question
rational and irrational ambitions to dominate reality particularly on
the basis
of digital power (Capurro, 2006; Weizenbaum, 1976) although some
philosophers
seem to be more optimistic in this regard (Floridi, 2006, 1999). What
is new about
digital hermeneutics? I believe that we are dealing with two sides of a
single
weakening process of modern technology. On the one side there is a
weakening of
the interpreter that finds herself within a network that she can only
partially
control (Capurro, 1995, p. 75). This is a similar situation to other
modern
networks such as, say, highways or electricity. In the case of the
Internet its
political and economic importance is also evident as can be seen, for
instance,
in the interest of governments, particularly of non-democratic ones, to
regulate this medium through, say, data filtering or prosecution of
non-obedient
Internet users. The question of Internet governance is no less
important than
the question of freedom and regulation with regard to, for instance,
traffic. On
the other hand, information technology is a weak technology as far as
it deals
with “conversations of mankind” (Rorty, 1989) now based on networked
subjects, an
oxymoron from the point of view of the autonomous subject constructed
by
European modernity. The network has no central point or final
destination
contrary to what some cyber-prophets proclaim. It is already part of
the everyday
life of millions of people. It is integrated in their bodily existence,
as Don
Ihde has shown (Ihde, 2002). If it is true that we change technology
then it is
also true that technology transforms us. This happens, indeed, at the
very bottom
of our bodily experience. Ihde writes:
We
are our bodies – but in that very basic notion one also discovers that
our
bodies have an amazing plasticity and polymorphism that is often
brought out
precisely in our relations with technologies. We are bodies in
technologies.
(Ihde, 2002, p. 138)
This
is particularly true in the case of the Internet. We are (not just) our
brains
and thoughts. But it happens that the ways we perceive reality and the
thoughts
we develop are shaped hermeneutically by our digital technologies and vice versa, digital technologies have to
adapt to the ways we perceive and interpret reality, otherwise they
will be useless
and, in the worst case, dangerous. The Internet has brought up changes
in our
spatio-temporal social experience that were difficult to imagine some
decades
ago. It would be naïve to speak about this technology just as a
tool without
taking seriously its impact at the levels of our being-in-the-world.
From this
perspective digital
hermeneutics is in line with Ihde’s project of “expanding
hermeneutics” (Ihde, 1998) particularly with “material hermeneutics” in
contrast to traditional text-focused hermeneutics (Ihde, 2005) as far
as the digital
text is different from its mate, the printed one, one main difference
being
that it allows to perform actions in the world including the actions of
interpreting material (and visual) phenomena. As Ihde rightly
stresses, it would be a “designer fallacy”
to believe that as in the case of the author’s intentions with regard
to the
meaning of his text, it is the designer, as an isolated individual who
has the
control over the meaning of the object without taking into account the
inter-relations with the materials being worked with, the uses and
users,
including their complex and multistable cultural contexts (Ihde 2008;
on Ihde
see Selinger, 2006). This is a similar insight to the proposal by
Chrstiane
Floyd and Heinz von Foerster concerning software development and
reality
construction based on a dialogical constructivism mentioned above.
This
dialogical
view of technology implies, as clearly analyzed by the Australian
philosopher
Michael Eldred, questioning Heidegger’s The
Question Concerning Technology and the Greek classical tradition
behind him
as far as technology is seen as something – the event of
“un-concealment”
– that happens between us and not just
between the artist or technites and
matter (Eldred, 2006). It means also to enlarge the German concept of
technology (“Technik”) with regard all
kind of techniques including the ones of making love, of cookery,
leadership
and piano-playing. An “expanded
hermeneutics” must twist materiality and digitality within the large
context of
such tecniques and it should include, of course, not only texts of the
past or
of mass media, as Vattimo remarked (Vattimo, 1985, p. 187), but visual
media as
well.
Digital
hermeneutics is based on digital ontology, a concept that Michael
Eldred (2001)
and I (Capurro, 2001) developed some years ago (Capurro, 2001). What is
digital
ontology? Eldred writes:
As
long as we remain 'embedded'
unquestioningly in the digital casting, everything is manifest as bits.
But
what does it mean that every appears as a bit? Precisely this view of
beings as
a whole, that we only admit everything that is in its being
when we
understand it against the horizon of the digitally functionalized logos represents the encasting central
draft thesis of a digital ontology. (Eldred, 2001)
The
main point concerns
the word “unquestioningly” which
makes the whole difference between digital ontology as a possible
and indeed today’s pervasive interpretation of Being and
the metaphysical thesis that the digital is the real (Capurro 2006). An
epistemological (weaker) version of this thesis is: things are
(understood) as far as we are able to digitize them. Digital
ontology is pervasive in the sense that it is not necessary that people
adhere
to it consciously. It has a tendency, as every ontology, to becoming
the
apparently only true perspective. The practical or ontic consequences
of
digital metaphysics can be devastating as described for instance by
Albert
Borgmann in Holding on to Reality:
Information
Technology has deeply
influenced the ways we cope today with the threat of the devastation
and loss
of meaning. The challenge to the festive resolution of the ambiguity
that rises
from the surrounding injustice and misery we are inclined to meet with
a
version of virtual ambiguity, a loosening of the ties that should
connect our
celebrations with their real and entire context. While virtuality is
our reply
to the devastation of common meanings hyperinformation is our response
to the
oblivion of individuals. Common hyperinformation is the huge amount of
colorful
information we accumulate through pictures and videos especially. But
all the
other records we keep and that are kept about us are part of
hyperinformation.
(Borgmann, 2000, p. 230)
Borgmann’s
answer to the challenge of
“utopian hyperinformation” – it would be better to call it ‘dystopian
hyperinformation’ – is a no less utopian book culture. Any
dualistic thinking is dangerous as far as
it overlooks
the ambiguity on both sides and other possibilities in between. I do
not think
that it makes sense, as Borgman suggests, to emphasize one side – say,
the
materiality of printed books or of focal points of celebration – in
detriment
to the other. We are cyborgs. The cell phone is part of our bodily
existence.
It is our "focal thing" and the practices and celebrations take part
in this digital world too. The "lightness" of digital technology has become part of the gravity of everyday life which is also the gravity of the market.
Everything, including our body, can be object of digitization and
become a
matter of economic transactions based on the space-time fluidity of the
digital
sphere. But digital technology can
nonetheless be hermeneutically disclosed as a weak technology for human
conversation. In other words, digital hermeneutics must address the
changes
brought up to our condition humaine
in all its facets. It is not
enough, I think,
as Daniel Fallman does, to contrast the “usability tradition”
represented by Ihde,
with Borgmann’ “more romantic outlook” (Fallman, 2007). A similar
dualistic thinking can be found in Hubert Dreyfus book On the Internet:
on the
one side there is the Internet which includes virtuality, aesthetics,
anonymity,
knowledge, the infinite, invulnerability, detachment and the observer,
while on
the other there is reality, ethics (and
religion), commitment, the body, finitude, vulnerability,
responsibility and
action. His concluding remarks are in line with this view of the
Internet as
an area
of aesthetics detached from the real ethical questions of human life:
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)
The question whether
digital technology takes us away from
our bodies or whether it allows us a different interaction with
them can be seen as another form of nihilism but of a
different kind than the Platonic/Christian
one Nietzsche was fighting against. It could be that there is a new
kind of
affirmation of the body because we are able to better understand what
is going
on with it even at the nano level on the basis of digital technology.
This new
kind of nihilism is related to the fact that our capacity to manipulate
digitally our bodies does not provide us with the ethical thinking
necessary to
manage this capacity to transform ourselves, which also means the very
Nietzschean idea of playing with nature not “going back to it”
following
Rousseau (Nietzsche, 1999, 150). The experience of our groundless
existence does
not arise out of this or of any other technology but is something that
characterizes human life as such. Being human is an experiment.
According to
the theologian Karl Rahner we are our own designers: “homo faber sui
ipsius,” which
includes now more and more the possibility of designing our body at
very early
stages and on fundamental (genetic) levels. Facing the moralist who
says that
humans should not do everything they can, and the sceptic who does not
trust
that we will freely give up what we can, Rahner points to the ethical
limit of
“what does not work” under the very factual worldly conditions (Rahner
1966, p.
59) that would eventually mean our
self-annihilation (Capurro, 2002).
The
hermeneutics of the
Internet is paradoxical insofar as it is this technology itself that
makes
possible a critical appraisal of a “strong” hermeneutic subject while
at the
same time such appraisal allows possible strong informational codes as
clearly
foreseen by Lawrence Lessig (1999). A second-order hermeneutics, if I
may call
it in this manner, allows us to observe the use of this code
‘weak/strong’ for
instance at the level of local and global information policies as well
as with
regard to the Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs or Second Life,
the hybridization of the Internet with the
human
body and with regard to all kind of artificial tools in the field of,
say,
robotics and bionics. Wikipedia is an
example for global and comprehensive cooperation which means a
weakening of the
role of the author and a strengthening of community work. Blogs weaken
the
hierarchic structures of classic journalism. Second Life offers a kind
of
digital stage where people can play different roles from ‘real life.’
Of
course, in many cases, there is the danger of blocking social
processes. E-mail
is a classic example of a bottom-up weak digital technology that can be
used
strategically to question political power structures. But it can also
be used
for the distribution of viruses. A weaker privacy can lead to
situations
and
structures of political surveillance no less than to new forms of
social
contact. Weaker norms of intellectual property might allow a more broad
and
free distribution and use of knowledge particularly in societies or
social
groups that do not have access the economic power to pay such sources.
But it
can also lead to a situation that is untenable for individuals and
enterprises
that live from the protection of their intellectual creativity. Today’s
information society that wants to make accessible all kind of knowledge
to
everybody all the time is paradoxically largely based on enterprises
such as Google or Microsoft whose
programs remain secret. The question of secrecy is
vital for any information society and it
is more fundamental than, or, at least, as crucial as, the question of
privacy (Capurro &
Capurro, 2007).
The question of concealing and un-concealing information in the digital
age is a
key issue of digital hermeneutics.
Digital
hermeneutics has a double-bind
with regard to the linguistic and
the mathematical code. It aims at
translating and interpreting logos
and arithmos within the human realm
but it is not restricted to this sphere.
I also deals with the digital interpretation and construction of
natural
processes. And vice versa: the horizon of the
digital is not the possible only one for un-veiling reality – including
human
existence as
well as nature – or the “truth” of Being in Heideggerian terms. I am
questioning anti-technological humanism as well as digital
metaphysics. I
believe that we live in an age in which the sense
of Being is widely interpreted from a
digital perspective as the ‘Zeitgeist’ of post-industrial
societies. From
this perspective I also question what one could call a digital humanism
that
would look for the limits of the digital within the realm of the
human. The
reason for this is that digital technology allows a desubjectivation of
human
processes of interpretation without being necessarily opposed to them. This means a dehumanization of hermeneutics as
far as, for instance, biological processes can be seen as processes of
interaction and communication based on the genetic code that can be
itself object of human manipulation.
Digital
hermeneutics observes how the
digital code is being interpreted
and implemented (or not) in the globalized societies of the
twenty-first
century. It deals with all processes related with the digital network
at the
social level, autonomous systems of interpretation, communication and
interaction
(robotics) as well as all kind of hybrid biological systems (bionics)
and
digital manipulation at the nano level. This broad spectrum of
phenomena can be
restricted, for practical purposes, to the study of social systems of
interpretration and social construction of meaning based on the
Internet or on
what we now call Web 2.0. The hermeneutic
circle as a key metaphor of philosophic hermeneutics should be
re-interpreted as a hermeneutic network. This
leads to a change of another
core
idea of hermeneutics, namely the Gadamerian “fusion
of horizons” (Gadamer 1975, p. 284). It is not
only a “fusion”
but a “linking” that characterizes the relationship between the
messengers of
the digital network that need to call each other through what system
theory
calls the “meaning offer.” In this regard, digital hermeneutics
transcends the
classical task of hermeneutics as a theory of
interpretation und discovers its own hidden
dimension as a theory of messages or angeletics
(Capurro 2003b). There
is
no interpretation without a “meaning
offer.”
Hermes is not just the interpreter of heavenly messages but the gods’
messenger
as well. Of course, digital angeletics
does not address comprehensively the complex phenomenon of messages and
messengers that pervades human history as well as natural processes.
Digital
hermeneutics is particularly
concerned with the analysis of power
structures in the field of (digital) messages in society, a perspective
related
to the thought of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (Frohmann 2007,
Foucault
1983, Capurro 2006, 1995). Bernd Frohmann writes:
A
primary issue of traditional information
ethics is access, which in a
networked environment becomes the familiar issue of “information rich”
and
“information poor”. (…) Bur when we reflect on the processing
capabilities of
networked digital machines, issues arise of how we are constituted
through and
by such systems, how are we written by them, and what they do with and
to us.
These issues are not only different from those of access, but shed a
different
light on the benefits and moral value of access. Deleuze’s work
suggests that
the discovery of a “line of flight” leading us away from the “self
writing”
performed by networked digital machines might be a compelling ethical
issue, as
does Foucault’s emphasis on the role of documentation in disciplinary
societies. (Frohmann 2007, p. 67)
Communication
and artificiality are the
two key philosophic issues of
the 21st century. If we want to understand our lives – including all
kinds of
artificial and natural processes in which we are embedded – in the
present age
we must address these issues particularly from the digital perspective.
In Being and Time Heidegger
refers to
human understanding as a circle that is not a circulus
vitiosus but a hermeneutic or productive one. He says that
what is crucial is not to get out of the circle but to come into “in
the right
way” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 153). Today this circle is characterized by
the
hybridization of
the digital with at all levels of human existence and self-appraisal.
Societies
in the 21st century are looking for the “right way” to get
into the digital
network. They are more and more aware that this network needs a broader
ontological foundation than the digital itself. Digital hermeneutics
becomes
thus a second order hermeneutics that observes the code
‘digital/non-digital’
in all societal processes.
In
a digitally globalized world with
societies based on digital networks
without a fixed meta-system to which they can refer in their search for
truth
criteria or ethical and political legitimization questions concerning
polarization, misunderstandings, conflicts, oppositions, conjunctions,
ambitions, interests and illusions with regard to the processes of
understanding at a local and global level become a key aspect
particularly
considering this from the perspective of the accelerated technological
innovation that started with the Internet at the end of the last
century and is
expanding now on the basis of mobile
communication technologies. But the impact of digital communication
goes far
beyond such a global system as it implies a methodological perspective
that
transforms genetic biology into a technology aiming at the artificial
transformation
of living beings, atomic physics into a technology aiming at the
manipulation
of the material support of all beings at the most basic level. Psychic
processes
and their organic support are becoming object of manipulation based on
digital
technology for all kind of enhancements. Digital hermeneutics answers,
so to
speak, to the call of the digital by making explicit its ontological
presuppositions. As a philosophic discipline it does not place itself
outside
history but tries to understand the factual present situation in which
human
existence and human thinking is located. It looks for a radicalization
of the
process of self-understanding of human societies that interact with
natural and
technical networks and construct complex hybrid living
systems. The 19th and
the 20th centuries
were fascinated by history and nature. The 21st century is
the
century of communication and artificiality.
These
are strong reasons, I believe, in
order to understand
why digital technology in a similar but
not identical way as in the case of other media, becomes today a key
hermeneutic
issue. It faces
not just a challenge at the level of the processes of understanding and
construction of meaning but finds itself within
societies that see this transformation
as something obvious, and give themselves a name that has become a
vague slogan
namely ‘information society’ to which the term ‘knowledge’ is sometimes
added.
This digital turn is nothing alien to hermeneutics as far as it
understands
itself from its very beginning as a questioning of what is apparently
obvious
as well as to what resists immediate understanding. Non-understanding
often
conceals itself behind what is apparently obvious particularly with
regard to
the question concerning the interpreter herself.
Who
are we as a
society at the local and global level in the age of digital and
globalized
communication? This question does not address a problem of text
interpretation but our own
self-understanding and ‘veri-fication’
in the sense that the media itself and the processes that are object of
hermeneutical study are at the same time existential dimensions of the
interpreters themselves The hermeneutic subject ‘veri-fies’ or makes
herself a
digital object.
Digital
hermeneutics and second-order cybernetics come together. While in the
last
century mass media could give the impression that they were a kind of
meta-observer
that would guarantee an objective view of all social systems, such
vision
becomes today problematic. This is the main lesson brought about by
the Internet
as an interactive technology that transforms all receivers of mass
media
messages into potential messengers beyond the one-to-one technology of
the
telephone. The rise of the Internet as an apparently autonomous sphere
shows
the historical dimension of this cultural invention that spread over
the globe
with the speed of light, which is in this case almost not a metaphor,
becoming
soon not something independent of the real life of the people but the
very
heart of our political, economic and cultural life. The cellular phone,
as a
mobile device linked to the Internet,
challenges,
as Michael Arnold recently stressed making aware of its “Janus-faces”
(Arnold,
2003), our conceptions of freedom and space mobility, of independence
and
vulnerability, of nearness and distance, of public and private, of
being busy
or being available, production and consumption, masculine and feminine.
He
writes:
The
perceived need for technology to
enable communication at a distance
perhaps indicates that one is distant from those one might like to
communicate
with, if not be with. However, communication is possible at a distance,
through
the phone, which is reassuring for those who are independent, but who
also feel
isolated or vulnerable. Even if the phone is never used, it can be
carried at
all times, and the very fact that it is possible to communicate, or
itself creates
a link that reinforces connectedness. The phone thus speaks of both a
sense of
isolation and a sense of reassurance. We are distant but we are
connected. In
the formal organizational context also, the faces of isolation,
vulnerability
and reassurance emerge in the presence of the mobile phone. … When I
telephone
I am part of a social network or familial or organizational network. I
am
related to others. I exist, they exist, and our relation to one another
exists.
I am confirmed. I have a position in the scheme of things. I am
reassured. (Arnold, 2003, p. 244-245).
Conceived
like this the mobile phone is an
eminently existential or
‘ontological’ device on today’s message society. This is a hermeneutic
insight
that becomes manifest today in all its global and local relevance
(Brigham
& Introna 2006). Digital hermeneutics is at the crossroad of the
producer
and interpreter of digital programs no less than at the connection of
such
programs with natural processes. Hermeneutic questions arise thus not
just out
of the digital alone but from the interferences of media as well as
from the
messages that other media send to potential messengers. This was
already the
case of Plato hearing the voices of the spoken language in face of the
invention
of writing no less than Derrida’s answer to the call of logocentrism.
Another
key topic of hermeneutics, namely
the relation between the whole
and its parts is getting transformed by the digital network with regard
to the
possibility of having an overall view of
its object of study. Digital hermeneutics questions the obviousness of
these
totalitarian visions. It can look at the
whole (“totum”) from different perspectives but not at the same time
(“non
totaliter”). This formula “totum sed non totaliter”
makes its own totalitarian ambitions weaker
as far as it becomes aware that the business of interpretation arises
from
something outside the interpreter and its hermeneutic
power, namely from a message. This
is the point in which hermeneutics and ethics meet as they allow the
subject to
reflect critically on what “common sense” says by allowing a situation
of weak
social stability in a process of permanent social change. Hegel’s
“objective
spirit, Heidegger’s historical "un-concealment" of truth as a
(possible)
“world”
or Wittgenstein’s “forms of life” allow the hermeneutic subject to take
a rest,
so to speak, and give an answer to historical challenges. Today,
information
societies have a general tendency towards what Derrida, following
Heidegger,
calls the metaphysics of presence. Digital hermeneutics should make
explicit
this spectrality of the digital.
CONCLUSION
The
task of hermeneutics in the digital age is twofold, namely to think the
digital
and at the same time to be addressed by it. The first task leads to the
question
about in which way the digital code has an impact on all kind of
processes,
particular on societal ones. In this regard, digital hermeneutics is at
the
core of information ethics understood as the ethical reflection on
rules of
behaviour underlying the global digital network including its
interaction with
other social systems as well as with natural processes. The second task
refers
to the challenge of the digital with regard to the self-interpretation
of human
beings in all their existential dimensions, particularly on their
bodies, their
autonomy, their way of conceiving and living in time and space, their
moods and
understanding of the world, the building of social structures, their
understanding of history, their imagination, their conception of
science, their
religious beliefs.
If
according to Lawrence Lessig “code is
law”
(Lessig,
1999), hermeneutics must reflect on the nature of this code and its
interaction
with economy, politics and morality. The balance between these spheres,
including nature, is related to what was often called justice (“dike”)
in Greek
classic philosophy. This concept is broader than the one applied to
social
interactions, particularly with regard to the distribution of economic
wealth.
It implies the complex interplay between humans and nature using
different
programs or digital codes that interact with natural processes (Eldred,
2006).
It would be ‘unjust’ if cyberspace would pretend to dominate other
spheres
becoming a digital metaphysics. The task of weakening such a project is
a major
task of digital hermeneutics. One example of a strong version of the
digital is
the dominance of mass media with their hierarchic structures in the 20th
century. Vilém Flusser feared that this power would eventually
become the
dominant one over dialogical structures of communication (Flusser,
2006). The
Internet weakens media monopolies. The digital code makes possible the
interaction of the human with the natural and the artificial. The
digital
network weakens the classic Western view of an autonomous subject and
makes
possible a dialogue with Taoist views of nature (Jullien 2003) as well
as with
Japanese Buddhism (Capurro, 2006b).
Ethics
deals mainly with one question: who am I? This question is not to be
understood
as asked by an isolated individual but as a basic human question that
is stated
implicitly or explicitly in practical life by every human being no less
than by
groups, states and today in a global dimension: who are we as
humankind? This
question is anything but academic. It is a question of survival.
Hermeneutics
in the digital age must become aware of this situation in order to make
explicit the different political, legal and cultural norms and
identities, the
way they are affected by the digital code and the consequences for the
construction
of human identities as well as for the interaction between nature and
society.
Following Foucault, ethics can be understood as the questioning of
morality
(Foucault, 1983). It works as a catalyst of social processes weakening
the
dogmatism of morality and law without just striving towards their
replacement
through another moral code. It is a open or free space that allows a
permanent
critique of all kind of blocking processes within and beyond the
digital
sphere.
Human
existence is a valuing activity but the human evaluator has no value
but a
“dignity” or “Würde” as Kant called it. This is not necessarily
based on a
metaphysic view of man and world but arises already from the very
situation of
being-in-the-world itself as far as this being itself is not something we could valuate but is the horizon
within which every valuation takes place. Within this horizon all
beings, human
or not, have a dignity but non-human beings, as far as they are not
subjects of
valuation processes, have a relative value when they become object of
human
transactions within a social process of valuation. From this
perspective, the
economy as a process of permanent valuation is a main trait of every
human
community as such. This hermeneutic reflection makes clear why the
digital
sphere as a product of human invention, cannot become the final horizon
of
valuation for all possible understanding of the world and human
existence.
Being relative, the digital becomes an opportunity for the subjects of
the 21st
century to transform themselves and their connections in and with the
world
overcoming for instance the strong metaphysical concepts that were
leading for the self-understanding of
Western
societies for centuries. This does not mean
that such concepts could be let aside or just replaced by the new ones,
but they can be hybridized with different
kind of
reasons, imaginations, ambitions and utopias, hopes and disappointments
arising
from the digital code.
If
this is the case, in different ways and intensities, the digital code
becomes a
real contribution to humanity as well as to its interaction with
non-human
spheres. It could weaken the metaphysic ambitions of (Western) logos by making it more flexible with
regard to the global cultural interplay in which we look for reasons
for our preferences
in dialogue with different beliefs and desires of other human beings. A
future
world must be open to an open horizon of understanding in which the
“principle
of charity” plays a major role avoiding that reasons become dogmatic
beliefs to
be eventually imposed others by force.
The digital network could become the place where such translations
between
different languages take place in a global scale in this new century.
This
means to allow the other to articulate herself in the network, looking
for
nodes of relations, becoming a hermeneutic subject of the digital
age. This
is the reason for the relevance of intercultural information ethics
(Hongladarom &
Ess, 2007; Capurro, Frühbauer, Hausmanninger, 2007).
Who
are we in the
digital age? What
does it mean for humanity to become transformed through the digital
code? What are the epistemological, ontological and ethical
consequences? How
do human cultures become hybridized and in which way does this
hybridization
affect the interplay with natural processes and their interplay with
the
production and use of all kind of artificial products in a digital
economy?
These questions go far beyond the horizon of classic hermeneutics as a
theory
of text interpretation as well as beyond classic philosophic
hermeneutics as
dealing with the question about human existence independently of the
pervading impact of digital technology. We live
in a
world that is less and less a familiar “life-world.” We have
become a
troublesome field that requires hard labor and heavy sweat
(“factus sum mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii”) (Augustinus,
1998, X, p.
16). Hermeneutics
misunderstands itself if it does not
take care ontic and ontologically of digital technology with its
overwhelming
impact on the world.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I
thank
Arun Kumar Tripathi (Dresden University of Technology, Germany) for his
commitment to an e-mail dialogue on the subject of this paper and for
his
invaluable hints to relevant literature. I also thank Thomas J.
Froehlich (Kent State
University, USA)
for his criticisms and the editors from the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee for
polishing my English.
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