DIGITAL HERMENEUTICS: AN OUTLINE Rafael Capurro International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) Distinguished Researcher in Information Ethics, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, USA

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Contents Introduction Hermeneutics and the Internet Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics Conclusion References

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics 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

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Introduction May be 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 nineteenth century as methodology of the humanities as well as understanding human existence in the twentieth century.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Introduction Hermeneutics is facing today the challenge arising from digital technology becoming what I call digital hermeneutics.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Introduction 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

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Introduction Facing the digital challenge hermeneutics must develop a “productive logic” (Heidegger) towards understanding the foundations of digital technology and its interplay with human existence.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet The leading modern pre-understanding of the engine as a metaphor for the process of social construction has been substituted by the one of the network understood as technology and as a medium of communication.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet What is new with regard to 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

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet On the other hand, information technology is a weak technology as far as it deals with “conversations of mankind” (Rorty) now based on networked subjects, an oxymoron from the point of view of the autonomous subject constructed by European modernity.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet 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 all levels of our being- in-the-world.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet Digital hermeneutics is concerned with how the digital code is being interpreted and implemented (or not) in the globalized societies of the twenty-first century.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet It deals with processes related with the digital network at the social level, autonomous systems of interpretation, communication and interaction (robotics) as well as all kinds of hybrid biological systems (bionics) and digital manipulation at the nano level.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet In a digitally globalized world with societies based on digital networks without a fixed meta-system, questions such as those of the search for truth criteria or ethical and political legitimization become a key aspect of technological innovation.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet These questions concern the polarization, misunderstandings, conflicts, oppositions, conjunctions, ambitions, interests and illusions with regard to the processes of understanding at a local and global level.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Hermeneutics and the Internet

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics “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)

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics The main point concerns the word “unquestioningly” that 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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 apparently the only true perspective.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics It also deals with the digital interpretation and construction of natural processes. And vice versa: the horizon of the digital is not the only possible one for the un-veiling reality – including human existence as well as nature – or the “truth” of Being in Heideggerian terms.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics The consequences of digital metaphysics can be devastating as described for instance by Albert Borgmann in Holding on to Reality (2000).

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics Borgmann’s answer to the challenge of “utopian hyperinformation” is a no less utopian book culture. Any dualistic thinking is dangerous as far as it oversees the ambiguity on both sides and other possibilities in between.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics In Being and Time Heidegger refers to human understanding as a circle that is not a circulus vitiosus but a hermeneutic or productive one. What is crucial is not to get out of the circle but to come into “in the right way”. Today this circle is characterized by the hybridization of the digital at all levels of human existence and self-appraisal.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics Today this circle is characterized by the hybridization of the digital at all levels of human existence and self-appraisal. Societies in the twenty-first century are looking for the “right way” to get into the digital network. This means that the hermeneutic circle as a key metaphor of philosophic hermeneutics should be re- interpreted as a hermeneutic network.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics And this leads to a change of another core idea of hermeneutics, namely the Gadamerian “fusion of horizons”. 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” (Luhmann).

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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 (from Greek ‘angelía’ = message). There is no interpretation without a previous “meaning offer.”

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics The cellular phone, as a mobile device linked to the Internet, challenges 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics 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”).

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics 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 kinds of processes, particular the societal ones.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Conclusion 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Conclusion 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 their bodies, their autonomy, their way of conceiving and living in time and space,

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Conclusion 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

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Conclusion 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?

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Conclusion 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?

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Conclusion 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.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics Conclusion Hermeneutics misunderstands itself if it does not take care ontic and ontologically of digital technology with its overwhelming impact on our lives.

R. Capurro: Digital Hermeneutics References See original publication in Ethics & IT (2009) See also: