+ All Categories
Home > Documents > Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

Date post: 31-Aug-2014
Category:
Upload: yosista
View: 101 times
Download: 1 times
Share this document with a friend
Popular Tags:
16
361 Human Studies 27: 361–376, 2004. C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines DON IHDE 1 and EVAN SELINGER 2 1 Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA (E-mail: [email protected]); 2 Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA (E-mail: [email protected]) Abstract. One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.” The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop the concept and claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological commitments, although suggestive, did not lead him to appreciate the epistemological value of materiality. We also take steps towards establishing how an understanding of this topic can provide the basis for reinterpreting the history of phenomenology. Key words: camera obscura, embodiment, epistemology, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, perception, technoscience Introduction One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.” 1 The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowl- edge itself. In this essay, we further develop the concept, beginning with two provocative questions. Could Maurice Merleau-Ponty have invented the concept of “epistemology engine”? The short answer is that he did not. Is it methodologically significant that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological com- mitments would have prevented him from doing so? The short answer is a qualified, yes. In what follows we will defend these answers, proceeding by: (1) defining “epistemology engine”; (2) demonstrating how an analysis of a dominant “epistemology engine,” the camera obscura, reveals the material origins of modern epistemology; and (3) defending our two principal claims concerning Merleau-Ponty. It should be noted from the outset that although our analysis focuses upon the limits of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of materiality, our overall appraisal of his philosophy of lived experience as embodied experience remains positive. In order to present a cogent historical treatment of Merleau-Ponty, namely one that is steeped explicitly within the context of the emerging technoscience
Transcript
Page 1: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

361Human Studies 27: 361–376, 2004.C© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

DON IHDE1 and EVAN SELINGER2

1Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA(E-mail: [email protected]); 2Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute ofTechnology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA(E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.” The idea is that someparticular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the humansubject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop theconcept and claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological commitments, although suggestive,did not lead him to appreciate the epistemological value of materiality. We also take stepstowards establishing how an understanding of this topic can provide the basis for reinterpretingthe history of phenomenology.

Key words: camera obscura, embodiment, epistemology, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, perception,technoscience

Introduction

One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.”1 The idea is thatsome particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively asa metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowl-edge itself. In this essay, we further develop the concept, beginning withtwo provocative questions. Could Maurice Merleau-Ponty have invented theconcept of “epistemology engine”? The short answer is that he did not. Isit methodologically significant that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological com-mitments would have prevented him from doing so? The short answer is aqualified, yes. In what follows we will defend these answers, proceeding by:(1) defining “epistemology engine”; (2) demonstrating how an analysis of adominant “epistemology engine,” the camera obscura, reveals the materialorigins of modern epistemology; and (3) defending our two principal claimsconcerning Merleau-Ponty.

It should be noted from the outset that although our analysis focuses uponthe limits of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of materiality, our overall appraisal ofhis philosophy of lived experience as embodied experience remains positive.In order to present a cogent historical treatment of Merleau-Ponty, namelyone that is steeped explicitly within the context of the emerging technoscience

Page 2: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

362 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

literature, we became obliged to focus upon his conceptual limitations insteadof rhetorically highlighting what, in Merleau-Ponty, might contribute to theargument we are developing. Thus, while our primary goal is to enrich previousdiscussions of the notion of an “epistemology engine,” we also aim to establishhow an understanding of this topic can provide the basis for reinterpreting thehistory of phenomenology.

Finally, we hope that by the end of the essay the reader will also be clearon three additional points. First, it should be clear how our overall discus-sion relates to the more familiar topic of science’s deep metaphors such asthe theme of the “clockwork universe” that was prevalent in early modernity,and the more recent motif of returning to the “book of life” through “codes”in contemporary genetic biology. Second, it should be clear why the task ofsituating the production of knowledge in the lifeworld vis-a-vis an “episte-mology engine” differs from other endeavors, notably the Marxist project ofconstructing a materialist account of history, and Karl Popper’s (1962) theoryof myth as the origin of scientific theory. Third, it should be clear why the con-cept of “epistemology engine” belongs to a “post-subjectivist” epistemology,but not a “post-human” philosophy.2

Defining Epistemology Engine

An “epistemology engine” is a technology or a set of technologies that throughuse frequently become explicit models for describing how knowledge is pro-duced. The most dramatic examples of “epistemology engines” influence ournotions of subjectivity, directly affecting how we understand what it meansto be human and to perceive things from a human perspective.3 They enableus to draw connections between the knowledge producing capacity of thehuman mind and technologies that putatively function according to similarmechanical processes. The philosophy of mind is replete with theorists mod-eling the brain, which even today is poorly understood, on technologies whosedesign is better understood. An epistemology engine is thus a special case ofa more general phenomenological notion that entails the ways in which life-world practices form the basis for what often become scientific theories. Butit is also a case in which the practices are engaged with technologies, whichin turn, suggest what can be models for knowledge. In antiquity, catapultsworked this way for the ancient Greeks. Later on, the mill served this functionfor G.W. Leibniz, as did the telegraph system for Sir Charles Sherrington, andhydraulic and electro-magnetic systems for Sigmund Freud (Searle, 1986:44). The digital computer is currently functioning as an “epistemology en-gine” for many, and as a result, possibly even endangering our appreciationfor the intuitive basis of expertise (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986). Similarly,cyborg fantasies engender and feed postmodern ideas about identities (Ihde,2002: 67–87). We will present our own study of a specific “epistemology

Page 3: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

MERLEAU-PONTY AND EPISTEMOLOGY ENGINES 363

engine” in the next section, when we analyze the legacy of the cameraobscura.

In light of the above examples, it should be clear that “epistemology en-gine” is a phrase that designates a material-semiotic link between embodiedpractice and technology.4 A more specific definition is as follows: With epis-teme and logos as its etymological roots, we use epistemology in the traditionalsense; it refers to the study of the defining features of knowledge and justifica-tion, including their limits. In everyday language, engine refers to a machine,one that converts energy into mechanical force or motion. In the context of“epistemology engine,” we use the word to designate the genesis of concep-tual ideas from praxis, specifically the emergence of theory from activityembedded in “human-technology-world” relations.5 Engine designates howpraxis, far from being inherently antithetical to theory, is capable of inspir-ing the shape that theoretical concepts will come to assume. Praxis can startthe engine of theory, converting – if we stretch the metaphor – the energy ofpractical coping into theoretical force. Along with philosophical phenomenol-ogists and pragmatists, some historians of technology have long been aware ofhow practical involvement – which intellectualist history has denigrated whencompared with the more revered terms of “divine inspiration” and extraordi-nary “mental cogitation” – can be a fundamental source of insight.6 Considerthe well-known phrase: “Science owes more to the steam engine than the steamengine owes to science.” This phrase suggests a radical inversion between thetraditional priority of theory over practice. Traditionally, just as engineeringis depicted as applied physics, technological innovation is characterized asscientific spin-off. But in the case of the steam engine, technological innova-tion inaugurated revolutionary changes in theoretical understanding. It pavedthe way for advances in calorific theory that in turn led to the development ofthermodynamics. In this sense: “The machine, not raw nature, suggested thephenomena” (Ihde, 2000: 21).

In sum, the concept of “epistemology engine” appears to be a theoreticalextension of the phenomenological insight that practical coping tends to pre-cede theoretical reflection.7 Since this concept resonates with the basic tenetsof phenomenology, the question before us is: Why is it that Merleau-Pontyfailed to invent it? Before thoroughly answering this, we need to further expli-cate how an “epistemology engine” functions – and this is best accomplishedby way of analyzing a concrete example.

Camera Obscura and Epistemology

Historically, both John Locke and Rene Descartes explicitly used the cameraobscura as a model for both the subject and the production of knowledge. Asis well known, optical devices were the first and most important instruments ofmuch early modern science. And while telescopes (Galileo) and microscopes

Page 4: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

364 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

(Leewenhoek) are most often mentioned, the camera obscura was a favoritetoy of the Renaissance. The recent publication by David Hockney (2001)of the popular and controversial book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering theLost Techniques of the Old Masters, has re-opened the question of the useof such devices for the production of art. His claim, that many Renaissancethrough eighteenth century artists used the camera obscura to construct re-alistic paintings, has drawn fire from many historians and critics. Yet, whilethis rediscovery is anything but new to historians of technology, and while heclearly overextends his point, there can be little doubt that the camera obscurawas so used.

Its use in science, or here, epistemology, is perhaps less known. Yet, bothLocke and Descartes deliberately draw upon this optical device to constructtheir notion of how knowledge is obtained. In a sense, we can credit themwith making the camera obscura into an epistemology engine. Although, to

Page 5: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

MERLEAU-PONTY AND EPISTEMOLOGY ENGINES 365

be historically accurate, we should note that the optical effect of the cameraobscura, the casting of an inverted image on a surface by means of a pinholeor small opening, probably goes back to antiquity. Its explicit structure andits possible uses were clearly described by Al Hazen in his Optics (1038).He also made the camera obscura and its effects an analog to the eye. Muchlater, Leonardo da Vinci used a camera obscura and noted the same analogy:“when the images of the illuminated bodies pass through a small hole into adark room. . . they will appear upside down and smaller. . . the same happensinside the pupil” (1970: 133).

The move that makes this camera-eye analog into what we are calling an“epistemology engine,” is the added analog to the subject or ego, thus makingthe camera into an analog for making knowledge itself. Locke’s descriptionis quite explicit:

. . . external and internal sensation area the only passages I can find ofknowledge to the understanding. . . the windows by which light is let intothis dark room: for methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closetshut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visibleresemblances, or ideas of things without. . . [these] resemble the under-standing of a man, in reference to all the objects of sight and the ideas ofthem (1976: 11, 17).

The camera becomes the model for knowledge, and we shall illustrate howthis quite well describes early modern epistemology by presenting Descartes’version of the camera:

We shall here generalize from this illustration of the camera and showhow every important feature of early modern epistemology relates to thefeatures of this epistemology engine: First, the sun (a), or “external reality”is outside the camera box and is not directly known to the “subject” (b), whois inside the box. Note that this distinction invents both the subject/objectsplit and the notions of external and internal or subjective reality. Second,the subject inside the box knows only his or her ideas or impressions, thatis, the image or representation on the screen or tabula rasa. Because this isthe case, the subject must (c) infer via the geometrical method – which isthe only relation between external and internal reality – what is the case.This, then, poses a major problem for early modern epistemology: How canthe subject “know” that (c) there is a correspondence between external andinternal reality? Descartes’ answer lies in (d), his notion of a philosophical Godor an ideal observer. The elaborate arguments about God, who would not, ifperfect, deceive human subjects is supposed to guarantee the correspondence.But, as the camera model shows, the reason this is really possible is becausethe ideal observer can simultaneously see both inside and outside the box. Oneof us has argued that this ideal observer is not God, but Descartes himself whoemploys a “cheat code” because he is describing both the inside and the outside

Page 6: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

366 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

of the box in describing the epistemological situation (Ihde, 2002: 72–73).The related and limited points here, however, are to show how the camera isindeed the model, which both poses and generates the outlines of early modernepistemology, and thus is the engine through which knowledge production isunderstood. Knowledge production is modeled upon a specific technology –and both its strengths and problems relate to the limitations of that specificmodel.

Merleau-Ponty: Science, Technology, and Knowledge

Having detailed what an “epistemology engine” is, we can now explain whyMerleau-Ponty did not invent it. Our first reason is that Merleau-Ponty’s limita-tions upon technoscientific thinking leads to a limitation concerning sciencewithin a lifeworld. Merleau-Ponty was highly sensitive about the limits oftechnoscientific thinking as is shown in his revealing comments made in the1960 essay “Eye and Mind.”

Although the primary motif running through “Eye and Mind” is a contrastbetween the arts and sciences, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless characterizes therevealing aspects of the visual arts as a “secret science,” a “silent science,”and a “pictorial science” (1964: 161, 186). Additionally, when Merleau-Pontydiscusses how painters use the technology of the mirror as a “technique ofthe body,” he praises the way in which a mirror can be used as “. . . theinstrument of universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectaclesinto things, myself into another, and another into myself” (1964: 168). Thekinship to phenomenology, in the case of the mirror, is obvious. The mirrorshifts perspectives with respect to what is subject and what is object. But,note, that in this description of mirrors and artists, the relationship is not“mechanical” as such.

The existence of these positive comments about science and technologyis not surprising.8 Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology was based onclarifying the distance between the lifeworld and the world of science, thusassigning science its proper place in the whole of truth. He never intended tobe polemical, to try to refute scientific claims because they were scientific.9

And yet, no matter how much he appreciated aspects of science and tech-nology, Merleau-Ponty, like Edmund Husserl before him, was concerned thatthe sciences of his day, and the techniques of analysis and transformation thatdepend on them, seem to operate effectively only when practitioners lose sightof how scientific culture is ultimately dependent on the lifeworld. Merleau-Ponty contends that scientists too easily forget that all knowledge, includingscientific knowledge, emerges from a situated perceiver; they obscure thephenomenological insight that knowledge is always constituted from a partic-ular point of view, that scientific symbols are only endowed with meaning assecond-order expressions of the world as perceived. In short, Merleau-Ponty

Page 7: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

MERLEAU-PONTY AND EPISTEMOLOGY ENGINES 367

contends that science in general only succeeds by virtue of its reductionism:“Science manipulates things and gives up living in them” (1964: 159). In thelight of this attitude towards science, it is not surprising that Merleau-Pontyrefers to the trajectory of contemporary scientific research as “sensitive tointellectual fads and fashions” (1964: 160). In this context, he evokes the po-litical term “ideology” to pejoratively characterize the attempt to model thehuman mind on advances in cybernetics:10

Thinking ‘operationally’ has become a sort of absolute artificialism, suchas we see in the ideology of cybernetics, where human creations are derivedfrom a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of humanmachines. If this kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history;if, pretending to ignore what we know of them through our own situations,it were to set out to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstractindices. . . we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth norfalsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from whichthere is no awakening (1964: 160).

Since Merleau-Ponty normally is not a hyperbolic writer, one may won-der why he uses strong dystopian rhetoric – notably apocalyptic imagerythat signals the end of history – to sensitize us to how the representationalbias expressed by “operational thinking” dissociates human beings from theworld of experience. Indeed, this style of dystopian rhetoric left an indelibleimpression on some of Merleau-Ponty’s most prominent phenomenologicaldisciples, including Hubert Dreyfus. Twenty-six years after Merleau-Pontywrote “Eye and Mind,” in the context of critiquing the operational thinkingunderlying so-called expert computer systems, Dreyfus and his brother Stuartlament the possibility that humans may soon become slaves to computers.They ominously write:

The chips are down, the choice is being made right now. And at all levelsof society computer-type rationality is winning out. Experts are becomingan endangered species. If we fail to put logic machines in their properplace, as aids to human beings with expert intuition, then we shall endup servants supplying data to our competent machines. Should calculativerationality triumph, no one will notice that something is missing, but now,while we still know what expert judgment is, let us use that expert judgmentto preserve it (1986: 195).

Simply put, both Dreyfus and Merleau-Ponty are concerned about the epis-temological and normative peril of modeling human perception and thoughton a technoscientific paradigm. And if we restrict our focus to Merleau-Ponty,we can say that the main reason why he is troubled by the technoscientificconstruction of the “model of human machines” is because such a modelrepresents the human body as an “information machine.” It treats the human

Page 8: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

368 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

body hypothetically as a “possible body” and misses the concrete carnality ofthe “actual” lived body:

Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks ofthe object-in-general, must return to the “there is” which underlies it; to thesite, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and forour body – not that possible body which we may think of as an informationmachine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly atthe command of my words and acts (1964: 160–161).

By depicting scientific thinking as looking on “from above,” Merleau-Pontyalerts the reader that he sets the tone for his distressful commentary on cyber-netics in his early attempt to ground perception in incarnate subjectivity in thePhenomenology of Perception. In this text he provides a philosophical alter-native to the inherent Cartesianism found in naıve realism (“empiricism”) andtranscendental philosophy (“intellectualism”), beginning by criticizing theo-retical attempts to construct the body as a mechanical device. In the first sectionof the Introduction, “Sensation,” he claims that when behavioral psychologistsappeal to physiology they distort our lived experience of perception, an expe-rience that is structured not only by vision, but by the synesthetic interplay ofall of the senses expressed as a plenary gestalt in relation to an environment’saffordances.11 Due to the sedimentation of common-sense realism, neitherthe physiologist nor the behaviorist begins analysis with phenomenologicaldescription. Instead, they both investigate perception by trying to locate anaturalized explanation that reveals the “objective” origins of sensation andits causal power. Specifically, the behaviorist turns to physiology in order toreduce perceptual behavior to “the elaboration and patterning of stimuli, bya longitudinal theory of nervous functioning, which establishes a theoreticalcorrelation between each element of the situation and an element of the re-action” (1962: 7). Citing Koehler, Merleau-Ponty refers to this correlationbetween situation and response as the “constancy hypothesis.”

In principle, the constancy hypothesis sets up a “point-by-point corre-spondence and constant connection between a stimulus and any elementaryperception,” treating each stimulus as corresponding to “one sensation andone only” (1962: 7, 228). To clarify what this means, let’s consider how theconstancy hypothesis treats vision. First, because each stimulus is correlatedwith a specific sensory response, the visual stimulus is limited to its ownvisual sphere and is considered analytically separable from the other senses,such as the auditory stimulus, which is deemed to be limited to its own acous-tic sphere. For each point on the surface of the visual stimulus, there is apoint of stimulation on the retina; hence the same stimuli will always pro-duces the same sensation. If the constancy hypothesis is correct, then whena human perceiver approaches an object, the size of the image that the ob-ject projects on the retina will vary accordingly. The object will project a

Page 9: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

MERLEAU-PONTY AND EPISTEMOLOGY ENGINES 369

large image on the retina when one moves closer, and a smaller image on theretina when one moves further away. In short, the constancy hypothesis spec-ifies that the normal act of perception consists of subjects blindly registeringsensations without these subjects taking an active role in how those sensa-tions are organized; this means that sense data are not modified or qualifiedby higher order operations. Perceptual anomalies “are explained by refer-ence to the intervention of facts usually conceived as belonging to a higherlevel – such as judgment. These anomalies originate, not in the elementarydata themselves, but rather in the interpretation, which these data are given(Gurwitsch, 1966: 5). Merleau-Ponty therefore claims that adherents of theconstancy hypothesis are obliged to insist that the subject displays insuffi-cient “attention” to “normal sensations” during the experience of perceptualanomalies.

If Merleau-Ponty only used the “testimony of consciousness” as “bod-ily phenomena” to point out the aspects of perception that the constancyhypothesis distorts, then we would have little reason to question the possi-bility for an invention of the concept of “epistemology engine.” The crucialpoint is that Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the manner in which theoristslook at the world is existentially related to their dispositions towards theworld. He argues that the constancy hypothesis is based on a value-ladentechnological fantasy that functions as a “cryptomechanism” (i.e., a machinethat buries the lived experience of perception) (1962: 58). This fantasy isso deeply sedimented in our beliefs that it is experienced as a “natural intu-ition,” one that sanctions the behaviorist in: (1) viewing the external worldas objective in-itself and (2) analytically reducing the perceptual field vis-a-vis second-order abstractions into atomistic units. In other words, the analystwho endorses the constancy hypothesis is forced to theoretically constructa mechanized account of human embodiment in order to generate explana-tory power. The analyst is forced to depict our bodies as an amalgamationof separate parts that work together like a machine. By depicting perceptionmechanically and making it resemble an apparatus in which the senses arethe instrument with which or by which representations of the objective worldare passed on to the perceiver, perception becomes abstracted from its livedopenness towards the ambiguity of the world. What the constancy hypothesisessentially does, therefore, is use copy-theory to depict humans as translationmachines:

As in the case of the reflex arc theory, physiology of perception begins byrecognizing an anatomical path leading from a receiver through a definitetransmitter to a recording station equally specialized. The objective worldbeing given it is assumed that it passes on to the sense-organs messageswhich must be registered, then deciphered in such a way as to reproduce inus the original text (1962: 7).

Page 10: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

370 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

Like the sign-concept distinction, which, for Merleau-Ponty, is a relationof separation, the relation of message-translation (or receiver-transmitter-recording station) in the constancy hypothesis is one of externality; messagesfrom the external world are depicted as transmitted to the inside of us, andthe body is viewed as a “screen” between myself and the world.12 Contraryto their explicit goal of rejecting Cartesianism, adherents of the constancyhypothesis allow the distance between the world and the subject to remainin all of its skepticism-producing glory. The persistence of this view retainssuch a powerful hold over the imagination that even in “Eye and Mind”Merleau-Ponty finds it necessary to write: “The body’s animation is not theassemblage or juxtaposition of its parts” (1964: 163).

Clearly, this recognition of an implicit technologization within the con-stancy hypothesis is pointing in the direction of our “epistemology engine”notion. Since Merleau-Ponty was able to recognize how a technological fan-tasy rooted in copy-theory underlies the constancy hypothesis, why do werefrain from crediting him with inventing the concept of “epistemology en-gine”?

Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

There does seem to be some parallel between Merleau-Ponty’s critique ofmodern epistemology by way of the mechanization of the body and the prob-lems that arise from taking the camera obscura as a model for knowledgeproduction. There are, however, certain important differences as well.

The simple answer to our guiding question is that Merleau-Ponty rarelyaddresses questions of technology at all; when he does, as in the cases above,it is an indirect examination. Indeed, to make a move from an objectivist orview-from-above perspective to his criticism would, in a certain sense, beto inaugurate a second move. From Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, however,this second move would make the issue more complex than it needs to be.Merleau-Ponty simply showed little interest in technologies as such, and –with a different twist that we address below – did not show sensitivity to deal-ing with human-technology relations. If technologies provide the models forknowledge, such as that which constructs the object body as both mechanicaland distinct from experience, they remain implicit and in the background forMerleau-Ponty.

Then, too, when Merleau-Ponty did forefront technologies or technologicalprocesses, as in the case of cybernetics above, he seems to have simply takenfor granted a prominent early twentieth century attitude associated with manyof the great European philosophers who saw modern technologies as threats totraditional culture, thereby giving a prevailing dystopian tone to the analysis.But, and this is a deeper issue, these technologies were also usually viewedas simply external entities. In Merleau-Ponty’s case, it is as if cybernetic

Page 11: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

MERLEAU-PONTY AND EPISTEMOLOGY ENGINES 371

processes, translation machines, and the like simply operate on their own. Adeeper and more clearly analyzed human-technology set of relations is notexamined. Thus, Merleau-Ponty would seem to occupy the same attitude andground of his early phenomenology predecessors: Husserl with his accusationthat science forgets the lifeworld; Heidegger with his notions of technologyas enframing; Ortega y Gassett with technology leading to mass man; and thelike.

In this respect, our allusions to Hubert Dreyfus also become relevant.Dreyfus, too, seems to regard machines that have been claimed to be artifi-cially intelligent as autonomous entities somehow outside human-technologyrelations. This much should be clear from the very title of his books: WhatComputers Can’t Do and Mind Over Machine. The famous embarrassmentregarding computers and chess, one that is frequently cited as a critique ofDreyfus, is illustrative. Because “Deep Blue,” a programmed chess-playingcomputer, defeated a master player, Kasparov, in 1997, Dreyfus is often pre-sumed to have been refuted on his artificial intelligence claims. Deep Bluedid not play chess intuitively, but instead relied on brute computational powerthat could only be modified for “pruning” in relation to a small subsection ofmoves:

Deep Blue, the chess program that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, ran on astate-of-the-art computer built especially for the purpose and could evaluate200,000,000 board positions per second (sixty billion in the three minutesthat each player has to pick the next move). However, even at this speed,Deep Blue could only search around seven moves into the future if it usedthis brute force technique. . . Garry Kasparov, in deciding which moves topick, does a much more limited search. (At top speed, human grand masterscan evaluate approximately three board positions per second.) (Litch, 2002:91)

The crucial thing to realize is that Dreyfus would be defeated with respectto the mind versus machine motif, if and only if a machine beat a human ata task that is considered paradigmatic of intelligent behavior.13 We, however,would argue that this version of the Deep Blue–Kasparov narrative is badlyframed. There never has been simply a chess-programmed, autonomous com-puter. Instead, there are humans plus computers in relations. It is, of course,possible for humans to program computers and then set the computers torunning the programs; in this case, the human-technology relation remains inplace, albeit located in the background. The “deistic” computer designer andprogrammer has set off the toy to spin by itself – until it runs down, crashes, orcompletes the run. The computer does not do anything on its own: it is not self-invented; it does not program itself; and it runs only within the input given.Those who play chess with computers at home are in this situation. But in thecontext of the Deep Blue–Kasparov match, there was a much more intimate

Page 12: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

372 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

human-technology situation at work. The first game was won by Kasparov– but after that game, Deep Blue was re-programmed, i.e., its program wastweaked so as to take account of certain Kasparov moves, and this happened af-ter each match until Kasparov resigned the sixth and final match. Thus a bettertelling of the story would be: Yes, Kasparov lost the series, but it was not humanversus machine; it was human versus humans-plus-machine, a rather unequalcontest to say the least! In this version, Kasparov’s claims that the computer“played like a human,” and that it was worthy of praise for “understandingsome very deep positions,” should be understood as metaphorical allusions,claims made under the spell of a misleading “epistemology engine.”14

This retelling, however, moves the tale into today’s technoscience style ofanalysis, an analysis which, were it told in terms used by Bruno Latour, takesaccounts of both humans and non-humans in collectives; or told within thepostphenomenological framework we follow, it is a tale of human-technologyrelations where the shifting positions of the human in the relation must beaccounted for. The entire atmosphere within contemporary science or techno-science studies has shifted towards an appreciation of the material culture andinstrumental materiality of technoscience practices. We do not believe this iseither a style or perspective that would have been taken by Merleau-Ponty,given the characterization of technologies as objects as cited above. Merleau-Ponty did not forefront technologies and habitually did not forefront eithersocial or human-technology relations.

If Merleau-Ponty remained with his predecessors with respect to prevail-ing attitudes towards modern technologies, what he did with respect to earlymodern epistemology was indeed more radical. The Cartesian paradigm ofsubject-and-object (the subject “in-the-box” and the object “external”) re-tains whatever is experiential and reflexively referential only for the think-ing, mental “subject.” By first making the “subject” an embodied subject,Merleau-Ponty is both replacing the Cartesian subject and substituting for it,the embodied corps vecu, or lived body.

In Merleau-Ponty’s very framing of what can now be called a “body/body”problem, the object body – the body conceived of in second order and implic-itly mechanistic terms as an object for various sciences (neurology, physiology,anatomy, etc.) – is made to strongly contrast with the lived or phenomenolog-ical body, a body that is not only experienced, but is modeled upon motile,kinesthetic actional and holistic experienced patterns. Indeed, one can arguethat what this contrastive framing of a body/body problem accomplishes isan avoidance of a body/mind problem. Cartesian epistemology regards thebody itself as reducible to the mechanical object body, with the subject – butonly as mental – retaining the actional, holistic, and gestalt qualities whichMerleau-Ponty wants to identify in the lived body. Rephrasing this reconcep-tion, one can say that the phenomenological body is neither mechanical, nor

Page 13: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

MERLEAU-PONTY AND EPISTEMOLOGY ENGINES 373

locatable either inside or outside a box. An embodied subject is not “in itsbody” but is its body in a world. Another way to put this is to say that Merleau-Ponty rejected a mechanical interpretation for both the body and the mind,but made “mind” embodied as a lived materiality. But this epistemologicaltransformation, while returning some sense of materiality to the subject, whois now embodied subject, could be made without reference to technologies assuch.

We have hinted, however, that there is within Merleau-Ponty’s thinkinganother dimension to what one might call human-technology relations. Wecan call these his human-technology embodiment relations. Here, again, therole of a phenomenologically interpreted body is central. One’s experienceof embodiment not only exceeds the mechanical; it is not limited to being aclear and distinct object. In the Phenomenology of Perception, there are twostriking instances, which illustrate this point: the blind man’s cane and thewoman with the feathered hat. Both illustrate the same phenomenon:

A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between thefeather in her hat and the things which might break it off. She feels wherethe feather is just as we feel where our hand is. If I am in the habit of drivinga car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can “get through” withoutcomparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I gothrough a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against thatof my body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 143).

The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him and is no longerperceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extendingthe scope and active radius of touch and providing a parallel to sight. Inthe exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressivelyas a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the positionof object than of the position of objects through it. The position of thingsis immediately given through the extent of the reach that carries him toit, which comprises, besides the arm’s reach, the stick’s range of action(Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 143).

Here are descriptions of human-technology relations in a rich phenomeno-logical sense, but note, in this context, these “technologies” are neither me-chanical nor external objects. In short, in such human-technology relations,both the common sense and dystopian concepts of technologies are tran-scended. Could it be that more complex technologies, such as cybernetic de-vices and translation programs could also fall into human practices in similarways? The trajectories from such an insight were not followed by Merleau-Ponty himself.

This pregnant insight, however, in some degree still falls outside the ques-tion of an epistemology engine. The camera obscura served as a point-by-pointmodel for early modern epistemology; it was a conceptual device. And, onceso understood, it is, we would argue, much more easily seen with respect to

Page 14: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

374 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

both its productive suggestibility, and its severe limitations that today are be-coming questioned. There is, in conclusion, a moral to the story: If the internalsecret to the early modern epistemology engine of the camera lies in the cheatcode whereby the inventor simultaneously sees both the inner workings andthe outer situation, the phenomenological critique is one which restores theneed to recognize the reflexive perspective from which the situation is de-scribed. That is what is done when Descartes’ position is implicitly identifiedwith the God position. Or, to invert the situation, had Descartes taken his owndescription of the epistemological situation as true, he would have had to havedone the description from the perspective of the subject-in-the-box, which hedid not, in fact, do. To recognize this is to make a phenomenological point.There remains, however, a subtler point to be made. It could be stated thatthe deepest level of modeling done within Cartesian thought reads materialitymechanically, whereas the implicit reading of embodiment, which foreshad-ows a sense of materiality, is not mechanical. It is precisely this point that anemphasis upon epistemology engines brings out – technological materialityis not itself mechanistic, but is human-technology interactive. Technologi-cal materiality is thus poorly understood when it is characterized in termsof mechanical metaphors. But to recognize the role of technologies and tounderstand these with sensitivity calls for a sensitivity beyond that practicedby the classical phenomenologists of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Notes

1. The notion of “epistemology engine” was first developed in Ihde (2000).2. For a more in-depth discussion of “posthumanism,” see Ihde and Selinger (2003).3. Closely related to the topic of “epistemology engines” is the theme of the lifeworld origins

of theories and ideas that can be found in the contemporary technoscientific literature.A few examples will prove illustrative. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) tracethe genealogy of modern experimental science and its foundational notion of empiricalobjectivity to the technology and culture of the airpump. They argue that differing relationstowards (and with) this device proved so decisive in the debates between Thomas Hobbesand Robert Boyle that science and politics became radically restructured for Westernsociety. Manuel De Landa (1991) demonstrates that the art and science of warfare – rangingfrom the mobile siege artillery of the Renaissance, the clockwork armies of the ThirtyYears War, the Napoleonic campaigns, the Nazi blitzkrieg, contemporary cybernetic battle-management systems, and satellite reconnaissance networks – cannot be understood inthe absence of philosophical-historical reflection upon the changing forms through whichhumans and technologies are combined and organized. Most recently, Peter Galison (2003)demonstrates a connection between Albert Einstein’s involvement with railway schedulesand clocks as a patent clerk and his theory of special relativity. Galison’s analysis effectivelydeconstructs the traditional account of genius, bringing materiality and meaning back tothe lifeworld.

4. For a more in-depth discussion of “material-semiotic” couplings, see Haraway (1997).5. The conceptual structure of “human-technology-world” relations, and its relevance to the

philosophy of technology, is developed in Ihde (1990).

Page 15: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

MERLEAU-PONTY AND EPISTEMOLOGY ENGINES 375

6. The most relevant contemporary empirical fieldwork on the topic of “genius” and itsrelation to practical involvement can be found in Mialet (1999).

7. This is why Ihde’s philosophy of “epistemology engines” is structured in terms of inquiryinto how technologically mediated practical action can subsequently inform how theories,even theories about the body, are configured. The main idea here is that the environmentwhich one is immersed in exerts a strong metaphorical influence over how most, if notall, things that enters into that environment are interpreted. For example, in Ihde’s recentwork in Bodies in Technology, he shows how material practices can function as a pre-conscious springboard that shape what theorists imagine the body to be and how theyimagine it to function. Instead of viewing the so-called history of philosophy principallyas an intellectual history of ideas, Ihde places philosophical thought on a continuum withlifeworld activity, provocatively suggesting that philosophical ideas can be generated fromtechnologically meditated lifeworld praxes.

8. For in-depth analysis of Merleau-Ponty and the topic of scientific realism, see Rouse (1986).9. Merleau-Ponty criticizes Karl Jaspers for setting up an opposition between descriptive and

explanatory psychology. He writes: “For the philosopher, as for the psychologist, thereis therefore always a problem of origins, and the only method possible to follow, in itsscientific development, the causal explanation in order to make its meaning quite clear,and assign to its proper place in the body of truth. That is why there will be found norefutation, but only an effort to understand the difficulties peculiar to causal thinking”(1962: 7, fn.1).

10. The epistemological use of ideology is elaborated and defended in Feyerabend (2001).11. For an explicit comparison of the relation between Merleau-Ponty, see Sanders (1993).12. For more on the use of the “screen” metaphor, see Merleau-Ponty (1967: 219).13. Dreyfus tends to use three strategies to defend himself on this charge (although these

comments were made years prior to the Deep Blue match). Firstly, against early critics,such as Alvin Toffler, Dreyfus claims that his initial comments on chess playing machineswere descriptive and not predictive, i.e. they were simply reports about the state of the art inthe 1960s (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986: 112). Secondly, Dreyfus associates his predictionsabout “holistic understanding” with the inability of technologies to exhibit “consistentsuccess”: “We predict that in any domain in which people exhibit holistic understanding,no system based upon heuristics will consistently do as well as experienced experts, even ifthose experts were the informants who provided the heuristic rules” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus,1986: 112). Third, Dreyfus claims that what he is really saying is that computers will notplay chess in the manner that human beings play chess: “Since similarity for a strong chessplayer means similar ‘fields of force’ and since no one has yet succeeded in describingsuch fields, there is little prospect of duplicating human performance in the foreseeablefuture” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986: 115).

14. This reframing narrative is based upon research done by William Braynen and reported inan unpublished research paper produced for the Technoscience Research Seminar, StonyBrook University, Fall, 2002.

References

Da Vinci, L. (1970). The Literary Works of Leonardo. Trans. by J. Richter. Berkeley: Universityof California Press.

De Landa, M. (1991). War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press.Dreyfus, H. (1992). What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge:

MIT Press.Dreyfus, H. (2001). On the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Page 16: Don Ihde, Evan Selinger - Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

376 D. IHDE AND E. SELINGER

Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. (1986). Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition andExpertise in the Era of the Computer. New York: Free Press.

Feyerabend, P. (2001). Against Method. New York: Verso.Galison, P. (2003). Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W.W.

Norton and Company.Gurwitsch, A. (1966). Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology. Evanston IL: Northwestern

University Press.Haraway, D. (1997). Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan c© Meets Onco-

MouseT M . New York: Routledge.Hockney, D. (2001). Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.

New York: Viking Press.Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Ihde, D. (1993). Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction. New York: Paragon House.Ihde, D. (1998). Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science. Evanston IL: Northwestern

University Press.Ihde, D. (2000). Epistemology Engines. Nature 406: 21.Ihde, D. (2002). Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Ihde, D. and Selinger, E. (2003). Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press.Litch, Mary. (2002). Philosophy Through Film. New York: Routledge.Locke, J. (1976). Essay on Human Understanding, Vol. II. New York: Dutton Publishers.Marx, K. (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton and

Company.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by C. Smith. London: Rout-

ledge & Kegan Paul.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Eye and Mind. In J. Edie (Ed.), The Primacy of Perception and

Other Essays. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1967). The Structure of Behavior. Trans. by A.L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon

Press.Mialet, H. (1999). Do Angels Have Bodies? Two Stories about Subjectivity in Science: The

Cases of William X and Mister H. Social Studies of Science 29: 551–582.Popper, K. (1962). Conjectures and Refutations. New York: Basic Books.Rouse, J. (1986). Merleau-Ponty and the Existential Conception of Science. Synthese 66: 249-

272.Sanders, J. (1993). Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and the Materiality of Meaning. Man and World

26: 287–302.Searle, J. (1986). Minds, Brains, and Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Selinger, E. and Crease, R. (2002). Dreyfus on Expertise: The Limits of Phenomenological

Analysis. Continental Philosophy Review 35: 245–279.Selinger, E. (2003). The Necessity of Embodiment: The Dreyfus–Collins Debate. Philosophy

Today 47: 266–279.Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the

Experimental Life. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.


Recommended