Forthcoming in Teaching Philosophy
Peter Ludlow (aka Urizenus)
The first time I saw a talk by Jacques Derrida, he was expounding on a claim (which he attributed to Heidegger) that the sign of a great thinker is that he has but one thought. I think his point was that leading intellectual figures can take one key idea and use it as a fixed point in rethinking almost everything that we take for granted. Consider Freud on the role of sexual repression in our mental life, or Marx on class struggle. Hubert Dreyfus has his own fixed point — actually two: the importance of our being embodied agents (his Merleau-Pontian fixed point), and the importance of commitment and risk (his Kierkegaardian fixed point). In this book he uses those two fixed points as a lens for investigating the Internet.
Of course the problem with having “one thought” or even two is that it is easy to overlook the subtleties in a particular domain of human experience, and even worse, one can be flat out mistaken if the fixed points are poorly chosen. Like Procrustes, who said his bed would accommodate everyone, and then proceeded to stretch or amputate his guests so that they would fit, the fixed points can be more distorting than illuminating.
This tends to be the problem with Dreyfus’s On the Internet. It is serviceable enough as an introduction to Dreyfus’s ideas about embodiment and commitment, but as an introduction to anything about the Internet it is surprisingly narrow, often misleading, and at times simply mistaken. The intellectual foils tend to be laughably silly straw persons, and the discussion of the technology itself ranges from simplistic to being grossly in error.
