2. Towards a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Technology

This chapter aims to show why the philosophical study of technology cannot be limited to phenomenology, but necessarily requires a hermeneutic approach. By elucidating the relation between phenomenology and hermeneutics, Romele criticizes the idealist tendencies in Husserlian phenomenology, as well as the ontological hermeneutics developed by Heidegger and Gadamer. The chapter instead advocates an ontic and pragmatic hermeneutic approach. Turning this approach to philosophy of technology, Romele argues that the ‘material hermeneutics’ as practiced in postphenomenology falls short and unmasks it as ‘material idealism’. Notwithstanding its self-professed ‘empirical’ interest in ‘the things themselves’, such idealism jettisons everything about the appearance of things that cannot be captured in terms of ‘technological mediation’, thus ignoring the sphere of symbolic, social, and cultural mediations that always already shape how ‘the things themselves’ are and can be interpreted. The chapter closes by illustrating how a hermeneutic phenomenology of technology opens to a multidisciplinary political hermeneutics of technology.