Expanding hermeneutics to the world of technology
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Expanding hermeneutics to the world of technology Jure Zovko1,2 Received: 1 December 2019 / Accepted: 14 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our “lifeworld”. Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the “Ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the “Ready-to-hand” in Heidegger’s sense of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life. Keywords Hermeneutics · Being-in-the-world · Ready-to-hand · Technology · Technoscience explanation · Understanding
1 Introduction In the last decades of the twentieth century, hermeneutic philosophy became one of the most influential forms of discourse within the context of the humanities in Continental Europe and Latin America. Italian postmodernist philosopher Gianni Vattimo characterized hermeneutic philosophy as a common language (koinē) of civilized communication in the humanities.1 Charles Taylor depicted a human being as a “self-interpreting animal”, i.e. as ens hermeneuticum. This definition should explain even more plausibly the differentiation of humans from animals than the classical determination animal rationale.2 Richard Rorty foresees a shift today from epistemology to hermeneutics, emphasizing that hermeneutics is “what we get when we are no longer epistemological.”3 Rorty claimed that hermeneutics is not a substitute for epistemology; nor is it a new theoretical foundation to explain how science or knowledge works, he hopes rather that after the failure of the epistemological approach,
* Jure Zovko [email protected] 1
Institute for Philosophy Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Department of Philosophy, University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia
2
a “hermeneutic space” will be opened in which tolerance, potential consensus, incommensurability and civility should prevail. One of the key problems of hermeneutic philosophy is that, under the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, it was characterized by a sharp separation and distinction of the humanities from the natural and technological sciences. Unfortunately, Dilthey’s distinction between “explanation” (Erklären) and “understanding” (Verstehen) has contributed to the
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