Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology by Hans Pedersen & Megan Altman

Author:Hans Pedersen & Megan Altman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

The Experience of Cyberbeing

The greater part of a century has passed since the construction of the first electronic computers and the development of cybernetic theory. How do we find ourselves participating in cyberbeing from day to day? Computers have become ubiquitous elements of our everyday environment—most conspicuously in the form of mobile smartphones. But even those of us who do not own such devices depend, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly, on information technology.

As we did with cybernetics, we have to grant the “correctness” of this development from the start. We need and desire information in countless circumstances, so our devices yield clear rewards. They are effective, efficient, and empowering. They can expand our knowledge, save lives, make money, enable new artforms, strengthen friendships and communities, and even undermine tyranny. But these benefits are so clear, and the possibilities so alluring, that they may lure us deep into a way of existing that some are beginning to regret. Many today are concerned about the mental health effects of the overuse of digital devices: distraction, addiction, loneliness, depression, even psychosis.4

But concern for our mental health remains superficial unless we investigate what health is, what the mind is, and thus what it means to be human or Dasein. An analysis of the “pros and cons” of cyberbeing needs to respect the richness of the phenomena. For instance, as both friends and foes of the contemporary lifestyle like to point out, the bursts of information from our devices provide our brains with “a dopamine squirt” (Richtel 2010). But to remain on this level is to exemplify the reduction to the measurable that is characteristic of cybernetics. A deeper understanding would have to interpret phenomena such as pleasure, desire, and addiction as manifestations of Dasein’s way of being as care (Heidegger SZ, 194–196). This interpretation in no way denies any correct findings of neurology, but it attempts to put them into the appropriate ontological context.

Here we can only sketch some ways in which our everyday use of information devices illustrates the inauthentic “falling” delineated in Being and Time(cf. Dreyfus 2009, Chap. 4). These “negatives” are tendencies and temptations rather than inevitabilities, and they go hand in hand with “positives.” By “inauthenticity” (Uneigentlichkeit), Heidegger means a mode of existing that is not one’s own (eigen). Instead of being alert to who I am, to the fact that my own being is at stake and I am responsible for becoming someone in the face of mortality, I tend to plunge into the tasks immediately at hand, and lose myself in busyness. I do “what one does” instead of acting as an individual. It would be misguided to issue a blanket condemnation of this falling. Falling is a normal and universal tendency, even though its prevalence varies (Heidegger SZ, 129). Furthermore, authenticity does not mean simply turning away from everydayness, but seizing on it individually (169). Heidegger does not ask us to be teetotalers when it comes to falling—that way would lie a state of constant anxiety. But he does ask us to be ready to snap out of falling when the time is right.

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