Once a person has decided on a step as economically irrational as studying philosophy, they should at all costs choose a topic that will motivate and intellectually stimulate them with its depth and beauty. For intellectual satisfaction is the only reasonable explanation of why anyone would read a pile of articles and a book every day and then go off to write thousands of words with slim prospects that they will have the kind of impact on society that the budding philosopher imagines but never sufficiently admits in public. Studying philosophy and other humanities is like having homework for the rest of your life. And who likes homework?
I don’t. That is why I spent a long time considering which philosophical topics I enjoy enough to sacrifice to them the most productive years of my life and to put up with the feeling of having homework every day. I realised that my closest relationship is with technology, and from a very particular angle. I became interested, and this interest lasts to this day, in how technologies affect our thinking at the level of the individual and how technologies change culture at the level of society.
Many years before I began to understand what cognitive science is about and heard the word “phenomenology” for the first time, I was aware of the strength of technology and its power to influence my thinking. Probably around the age of twelve, when I started learning to program on my powerful Intel Celeron 300 MHz computer with 32 MB of RAM, I understood for the first time that programming is similar to natural language. Except that, unlike natural language, a programming language can communicate with me. It is a little bit alive, because I write some commands to it and the programming language answers me back. This “interactive loop”, which characterises a programming language, was the main reason why I learned to program faster than I learned foreign languages. Whereas for a foreign language I needed to have someone at hand willing to give me their time, the computer was always with me at home and ready at any moment to hold an interactive conversation with me. Nowadays this no longer holds, for there are dozens of websites and mobile apps like Duolingo that combine the power of the interactive loop of programming languages with natural language.
The fact is that thanks to learning to program I glimpsed the computational universe much earlier than I knew anything about mathematical derivatives or the linguistic ablative. Loops and conditions, variables and constants, functions and objects. All of this belonged to a grammar I learned thanks to programming. It was not a grammar only for communicating with a computer; as I like to claim, it was also a grammar for thinking. And not only in some figurative sense. In mathematics I intuitively understood what functions are. In philosophy, Plato’s transcendental forms (or ideas) seemed natural to me, and so did the accidents of beings, or monads. I always mapped these new and esoteric concepts from philosophy back onto my knowledge of programming, specifically onto object-oriented programming. For it taught me to abstract really existing things into “entities” or “objects” that have certain properties (attributes) and behaviour (functions or methods). And last but not least, thanks to programming with objects I acquired the rather abstract and philosophical distinction between the actually existing and the potentially existing. For object-oriented programming usually requires programmers first to define templates of entities, as it were, with their potential properties and behaviour, and then to turn these entity templates into really existing objects that change dynamically while the program runs and respond to what the user does. Even though I had no idea where Plato’s abstract, immaterial, yet existing ideas dwell as the patterns of everything real, I quite naturally likened them by analogy to the object templates (“classes”) of object-oriented programming.
A long time has passed since my first dabbling with programming. Whereas back then programming was, for most of society, an obscure and unattractive matter, today things are different. Computer culture and its symbols and metaphors have become a public sediment of our lives. Our grandparents sign up for Twitter, humanities students debate algorithmic social justice, and over a beer in the pub people argue about how much the algorithms of the social network Facebook helped elect Donald Trump president in 2016 or what role they played in the Brexit referendum. A transcoding is taking place between the vocabulary and culture of the computer and the culture of humans. And to such an extent that today human culture includes the computer as one of the basic pillars of our present lives. Besides the fact that people generally know more about computers and programming than twenty years ago, has the culture and logic of the computer penetrated our minds more deeply than merely at the level of knowing facts and concepts? How much has computer culture taught us to think and perceive algorithmically? And is this a legitimate question for philosophy, or have I decided to study in philosophy something that does not belong there?
I think Edmund Husserl answers this question well in his last, unfinished book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Here Husserl introduces for the first time the concept of the Lifeworld. It is a concept that points to the fact that the most basic mode of our lives is the world we perceive through our senses, by means of which the world appears to us in a certain perceptual and sensory way. It is not the world of science, it is not the world of mathematics; it is the world of bodily proportions and human senses. However modest this concept sounds, it has non-negligible consequences, for example for the study of science and of how science works. For Husserl wrote the Crisis to a large extent as a critique of the science of his day and of how it worked. According to Husserl, science had become too detached from the normal (L)ifeworld, which had two consequences. First, science, and the philosophy trying to imitate science, by detaching themselves from the lifeworld ceased to provide answers to people’s ordinary problems. Second, science, with its orientation towards the mathematisation and quantifiability of the world, forgot that the scientific understanding of the world is only one of many ways of finding one’s bearings in the world. And this is because science is a recent creation of human civilisation, together with mathematics, geometry and the abstraction of the world from really existing to idealised objects, whereas the lived existence of the Lifeworld is more fundamental. For Husserl this also means that the intellectual tools that science uses – logic and mathematics – must logically be the result of a human activity that was not so abstract but was anchored in the practical, everyday world of the senses, of perception and of interaction with the material objects around us. Science follows the lifeworld. And while the Lifeworld can get by without science (humanity survived for roughly 300,000 years without science), science cannot exist without the Lifeworld.
According to Husserl, this gulf between science and the Lifeworld was opened by Galileo with his mathematisation of the world, specifically with the method of geometrising the world that he used in his discoveries of the craters and mountains on the lunar surface, the satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. Husserl claims, however, that Galileo could never have made these discoveries had he not been born into a society and culture in which mathematics and the geometrisation of the world were ideas known and sedimented in the thinking of the people of the time. If we agree with Husserl that it was precisely the mathematisation of the world that lay behind Galileo’s discoveries (and let us recall that it was Galileo who declared that nature is a great book written in the language of mathematics), we must look for the culprit of the separation of science and the Lifeworld deeper in European history, indeed right in ancient Greece, among the first philosophers. Greek philosophy did not give European consciousness merely certain dogmas, a list of technical words, ideas about the world and intellectual frameworks; above all it discovered something unprecedented: thinking about the world in abstract form, thinking about things we do not see and cannot touch, because they are not at hand in our presence. If mathematics is the intellectual tool par excellence for abstracting and objectifying the world, then Greek philosophy was the first to prompt the European intellect to go beyond, in thought, the lived world of presence and of the senses here and now, and to reason about abstract objects and possible worlds.
Husserl’s argument concerning Galileo is as follows: science, beginning with Galileo, forgot its everyday, material and non-mathematical roots in the Lifeworld, and so began the dominance of abstract reasoning and “pure” mathematics in the study of the world, with physics being, for Husserl, the prototypical representative of such a science.
Husserl tries, by a historical and archaeological method, to trace how mathematics and the geometric method of studying the world came about, and he concludes that geometry and mathematics have their beginnings in ancient Egypt and Babylon, where the land surveyors needed to refine their methods of measurement in order to lay out plans of urban space and of individual buildings better. According to Husserl, the purely empirical measuring of the surveyors gradually began to uncover certain fixed and stable shapes, which over time, driven by the desire for philosophical (theoretical) knowledge and for generalising empirically found regularities, were more and more idealised and abstracted into intersubjectively perceivable and accepted laws.
According to Husserl’s account, then, the purely abstract nature of today’s mathematics is the result of a millennia-long process of “grinding down” a very raw material, which was the world perceived through human senses and bodily processes: length, height, depth, roundness and other concepts that are general in our thinking today were gradually discovered and formalised because people perceived the world around them with their senses and also related these concepts to their bodies: urban space, buildings, the height and weight of things inevitably derived from the ordinary bodily proportions of the human being. Can anything be heavy or distant for a person if the person has no body?
Because Husserl, not least through the wide use of his concept of the Lifeworld, privileged the natural, pre-scientific world, many of his interpreters reduced his understanding of the relationship between the Lifeworld and science to the view that Husserl is anti-scientific, for he is interested only in the pre-scientific, subjective and bodily-sensory perception of reality, which in the eyes of logical-positivist theorists and commentators on Husserl is clearly secondary compared with the so-called objective and rational method of mathematics and geometry, or compared with physics as the prototypical example of an objective science.
Here I agree with a post-positivist and specifically post-phenomenological interpreter of Husserl, the American philosopher Don Ihde, who in his 2010 article Husserl’s Galileo Needed a Telescope! notes that although Husserl privileges the Lifeworld as the most fundamental for human beings, he also considers the study of the practice of contemporary science important. In other words, following Ihde, we can call the relationship between the Lifeworld and science a Husserlian hermeneutics: the Lifeworld provides the historical perceptual-bodily-material sediment of the thinking and practice of human existence, which, through the method of abstraction, gradually turns from a pre-scientific world into a scientific one. Yet the scientific world in turn needs the Lifeworld in order to exist and to be filled with some fundamental meaning of why it makes sense at all to study the world theoretically and abstractly.
In the American philosopher’s article we read that Ihde fully agrees with Husserl that the scientific world did not arise ex nihilo but is the evolutionary product of long processes of the Lifeworld. On the other hand, Ihde criticises Husserl’s genealogy, as it were, or history of the development of geometry and mathematics for completely ignoring an important thing that is present in Husserl implicitly but never explicitly. That thing is the role of the materiality of instruments and technologies, which according to Ihde play a crucial role in the epistemic processes of the scientific knowing of the world, not only in the case of the ancient land surveyors and geometers but quite unambiguously in the case of the Italian genius Galileo. In other words, had it not been for the technology of the telescope (and lens grinding), Galileo would most likely never have been able to arrive at his discoveries purely by means of his knowledge of mathematics and geometry.
To show what role the telescope and its materiality played in Galileo’s scientific discoveries, we need to study science not as an abstract, purely mental human activity; we must reconstruct how Galileo really worked, how he really used the technology of the telescope, and how the changes in perception and thinking brought about by using the telescope really led to the postulation of his theories. For Ihde, such a way of studying technologies and their materiality is one of the pillars of his new way of phenomenological analysis of technologies, which, unlike Husserl and Heidegger, places technologies at the centre of its attention as its main object of interest. Because this emphasis on technologies differs from so-called “classical phenomenology”, Ihde comes up with a new name for his type of phenomenological analysis, which he calls post-phenomenology.
Ihde begins his post-phenomenological analysis of Galileo and the telescope with a short historiographical preparation. In 1597 Galileo was still defending Ptolemy’s geocentric model of cosmology with his arguments. Twelve years later, however, in 1609, he heard from a Jesuit friend about the magnifying lenses of the lens grinder and inventor Hans Lippershey. Galileo, a trained lens grinder himself, began making his own lenses, which were 8–30 times more powerful than Lippershey’s original ones. It took a while before Galileo turned his telescope towards the heavens. Once he did, he very soon came up with new discoveries. Among them were the craters and mountains on the moon.
As Derek De Solla Price notes in his 1984 article on the interaction of the philosophy of science and the history of technology, Notes Towards a Philosophy of the Science/Technology Interaction, the first night Galileo pointed the telescope at the moon he was most likely disappointed. He saw only shadows that looked like craters and mountains. Only during further nights spent observing the moon did Galileo realise that what he saw were not merely illusions of craters and mountains, but the real ruggedness of the moon’s surface. How is it possible that Galileo did not see those craters the first time, even though the telescope showed, for our purposes, an identical image?
Ihde has an explanation for this. In what is perhaps his most important book, Technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth (1990), which laid firm foundations for postphenomenology, this American philosopher of technology and phenomenologist divides perception into two categories, microperception and macroperception:
- Microperception: This is the perception, at the level of the individual, of sensory data coming from the outside world.
- Macroperception: Ihde, like Husserl, claims that microperception is never “pure”; even something as fundamental as the perception of sensory data is influenced not only by a person’s cognitive abilities, but also by the immediate as well as the wider sociocultural context in which the person dwells, from which they come and by which they have been influenced since early childhood.
If we return to Galileo’s study of the moon, we must remember that Galileo’s Lifeworld and the macroperception of the society in which he lived were influenced by the teaching of Aristotle, which declared that all celestial bodies, including the moon, are perfect spheres that move around the Earth in a motion following perfect circles. The lunar “spots” that are visible to the naked eye were explained by people before Galileo in various ways; the theory that prevailed most was that they were apparent imperfections caused by the absorption of light coming from the Earth.
Galileo’s “psychological priming” thus dictated to him that craters and wrinkles on the surface of the moon do not exist, that they are only illusions, because the moon must be a perfectly smooth celestial body.
In the short pamphlet Sidereus Nuncius, published in 1610, Galileo writes step by step about the process of discovering the moon’s imperfections. For example, he describes how the craters “have their dark part on the side facing the sun, while on the side away from the sun their edges are lit up like shining [mountain] ridges”.
Galileo’s drawings of the lunar surface from Sidereus Nuncius (1610)
Source: Galileo Galilei, Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Once Galileo had confirmed by means of calculations as well that there are craters and mountain ranges on the moon, a discontinuous leap occurred in his perception, in his Gestalt. As with Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit picture or the well-known Necker cube, once we discover a new way of looking at the same sensory data, we cannot un-see what we had not seen until then. Understandably, for historical and political reasons it took a long time yet before Galileo’s discovery, which supported the argument for the Copernican model of heliocentrism, gained acceptance and could begin to sediment in the macroperception of the whole (educated, European) society.
What, according to Ihde and the postphenomenological analysis of technologies he founded, does this mean for Husserl? That Husserl was fundamentally mistaken about what enabled Galileo to make his discoveries. For Husserl it was the sedimentation of geometric thinking, abstraction and mathematisation. For Ihde, far more important is the materiality of the telescope as a technology and a medium that mediates a new relationship between human perception and the world. The telescope transforms human sight by extending our natural abilities, magnifying/bringing objects closer in a way that our biological equipment does not allow. Galileo’s telescope changed his seeing of the world at the microperceptual level. This then gradually sedimented in the macroperception of society, and so, gradually (as if by a gradual download into the minds of others), the microperception of other people began to change. And as it happened, this technologically mediated microperception led to changes in humanity’s position in the universe, in humanity’s relationship to the Church and to God himself.
According to Ihde, we find in Husserl almost no analysis of how the materiality of technologies and various instruments mediates and transforms our phenomenological consciousness. Ihde explains this by saying that Husserl himself was imprisoned in the sedimentation of his own education, which consisted of the rigorous study of mathematics, the most abstract science of all. For Husserl, science was an activity of the mind, not a matter of physical effort or of interaction with scientific instruments and technologies.
Paradoxically, then, it was Husserl himself who, in his analysis of Galileo in the Crisis, forgot the Lifeworld and completely ignored that perhaps the most important milestone of Galileo’s scientific revolution was not the millennia-long sedimentation of abstract mathematics in Galileo’s Lifeworld (and in Ihde’s macroperception), but rather the relatively new invention of the telescope and the interaction of its material properties with the perceptual-bodily conditions of the human being, which for the first time in history mediated the world in a new, hitherto unseen way.
References
DESOLLA PRICE, Derek J., 1984. Notes Towards a Philosophy of the Science/Technology Interaction. In: Rachel LAUDAN, ed. The Nature of Technological Knowledge. Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? [online]. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, p. 105–114 [cited 2020-09-28]. ISBN 978-90-481-8394-4. Available at: doi:10.1007/978-94-015-7699-4_6
GALILEI, Galileo and Albert VAN HELDEN, 2015. Sidereus nuncius or, The sidereal messenger. Second edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-32009-0.
HUSSERL, Edmund and David CARR, 1984. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: an introduction to phenomenological philosophy. 6th pr. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern Univ. Press. Studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy. ISBN 978-0-8101-0458-7.
IHDE, Don, 1990. Technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The Indiana series in the philosophy of technology. ISBN 978-0-253-32900-4.
IHDE, Don, 2011. Husserl’s Galileo Needed a Telescope! Philosophy & Technology [online]. 24(1), 69–82 [cited 2020-10-04]. ISSN 2210-5433, 2210-5441. Available at: doi:10.1007/s13347-010-0004-5