Digital Hhermeneutics

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DIGITAL HERMENEUTICS: AN OUTLINE

Rafael Capurro

Published in AI & Society 2010, 35 (1), 35-42. A previous longer version

is available here. See PowerPoint and PP in Portuguese.

CONTENT
Introduction
Hermeneutics and the Internet
Digital Ontology and Digital Metaphysics
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to give an outline of digital hermeneutics
understood as the encounter between hermeneutics and digital
technology, particularly the Internet. In the first part, I want to raise the
attention of IT researchers and hermeneuticists to the theoretic and
practical relevance of the encounter of their areas of research that are
sometimes considered as incompatible to each other. There is still a lot
of translation work to be done in order to get these two cultures come
closer to and profit from each other. The second part of the paper deals
with the foundation of digital hermeneutics on what I call following
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Heideggers and Vattimos paths digital ontology as opposed to digital

metaphysics.

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 socalled digital divide (Capurro, et al., 2007). 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. Santiago
Zabala, editor of a recent book in honor of the Italian philosopher Gianni
Vattimo, quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer, the founding father of philosophic
hermeneutics, as follows:
Vattimo has specifically called hermeneutics a koin: the
common language in which philosophical thought after Heidegger
and Wittgenstein, after Quine, Derrida and Ricoeur, has spread
everywhere; virtually a universal philosophical language. (Zabala
2007, p. 3)
In his book The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture Vattimo remarks that computer science makes the
difference between modernity and post-modernity (Vattimo 1985, p. 22).
Hermeneutics is facing today the challenge arising from digital
technology becoming what I call digital hermeneutics. Every revolutionary
transformation in philosophy that leads to the creation of a new type of
rationality arises usually from an outstanding scientific or technological
breakthrough (Bosteels 2006, p. 116). This is the case of todays global
and interactive digital network, the Internet. The Internets 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 (Capurro
1990). Facing the digital challenge hermeneutics must develop a
productive logic (Heidegger 1976, p. 10) towards understanding the
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foundations of digital technology and its interplay with human existence.

A productive logic leaps ahead (ibid.) the established selfunderstanding of a given science, in this case of hermeneutics, in order
to undertake a revision of its main concepts and disclose a new area of
research.
There is a blindness in some studies of contemporary hermeneutics
with regard to these challenges (Figal 2007), with a few exceptions
(Irrgang 2005, 2007; Fellmann 1998; Kurthen 1992), as well as in
seemingly comprehensive encyclopaedia articles (Gadamer 1974,
Grondin 1996, Ramberg and Gjesdal 2005) also with a few exceptions
(Introna 2005; Mallery, Hurwitz and Duffy 1990). In their article
Hermeneutics in the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence Mallery et al.
speak about the precomputational nature of contemporary
hermeneutics and suggest the reformulation and refinement of ideas
about both hermeneutics and AI. (Mallery et al. 1990, p. 374).

HERMENEUTICS AND THE INTERNET

As the Internet and particularly the World Wide Web became a
social interactive information and communication technology in the mid1990s the relevance of its challenge to hermeneutics became even more
obvious. In a recent study devoted to Vattimos aesthetic pacifism the
Austrian philosopher Wolfgang Stzl remarks that Heidegger worked with
a concept of modern technology opposed to modern communication
technology that is characterized by small and networked artefacts
(Heidegger 1967). He quotes Vattimos essay on Philosophy, Politics and
Religion from 1996:
The possibility to see the Gestell not only as the
highest risk and negativity but also a first lightening of the
event of Being is related to the discovery of modern
technology as a communicative one. Neither Heidegger nor
Adorno did this step. Both think modern technology based
on the model of the engine, of mechanical technology: this
model implies necessarily the idea of a passive
dependency of the periphery with regard to the centre!
(Stzl 2007, p. 148, my translation, RC)
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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

medium

of

communication. Vilm Flusser was sceptical about dialogical forms of

human interaction in view of the overwhelming power of mass media and
their hierarchic structures (Flusser 1996). He did not foresee the impact
of the Internet that was in its infancy in 1991 when he died. According to
Richard Rorty one of Vattimos
most distinctive contributions to philosophical thinking
is the suggestion that the Internet provides a model for
things in general that thinking about the World Wide Web
helps us to get away from Platonic essentialism, the quest
for underlying natures, by helping us see everything as a
constantly changing network of relations. The result of
adopting this model is what Vattimo calls a weak ontology,
or better, an ontology of the weakening of being. Such an
ontology, he argues, supplies philosophical reasons for
preferring a liberal, tolerant, and democratic society rather
than an authoritarian and totalitarian one. (R. Rorty quoted
by Zabala 2007, p. 25)
Hermeneutics faces today the question of the impact of the Internet
not only at all levels of society but also with regard to the selfunderstanding of human beings, i.e., with regard to the ontological or
existential foundation of the digital construction of reality. I do not use
the term foundation in a strong metaphysical sense. I follow Vattimos
idea that hermeneutics can provide only weak foundations that make
possible to question rational and irrational ambitions to dominate reality
particularly on the basis of digital power (Capurro 2006a; Weizenbaum
1976) although some philosophers seem to be more optimistic in this
regard (Floridi 2006, 1999).
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 (Capurro 1992). On the one side there is a weakening of the
interpreter that finds herself within a network that she can only partially
control (Capurro 1995, p. 75). In the case of the Internet its political and
economic importance is also evident as can be seen, for instance, in the
interest of governments, particularly of non-democratic ones, to regulate
this medium through, say, data filtering or prosecution of non-obedient
Internet users. The question of Internet governance is no less important
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than the question of freedom and regulation with regard to, for instance,
traffic. On the other hand, information technology is a weak technology
as far as it deals with conversations of mankind (Rorty 1989) now
based on networked subjects, an oxymoron from the point of view of the
autonomous subject constructed by European modernity. The Internet
has no central point or final destination contrary to what some cyberprophets proclaim. It is already part of the everyday life of millions of
people. It is integrated in their bodily existence, as Don Ihde has shown
(Ihde 2002). If it is true that we change technology then it is also true that
technology transforms us. This transformation is at the heart of our bodily
experience. Ihde writes:
We are our bodies but in that very basic notion one
also discovers that our bodies have an amazing plasticity
and polymorphism that is often brought out precisely in our
relations with technologies. We are bodies in technologies.
(Ihde 2002, p. 138)
This is particularly true in the case of the Internet. We are (not just)
our brains and thoughts (our beliefs and desires). If we argue that the
ways we perceive reality and the thoughts we develop are shaped
hermeneutically by our digital technologies and vice versa, then it can be
inferred that digital technologies have to adapt to the ways we perceive
and interpret reality, otherwise they will be useless and, in the worst
case, dangerous.
The Internet has brought up changes in our spatio-temporal social
experience that were difficult to imagine some decades ago. It would be
nave to speak about this technology just as a tool without taking
seriously its impact at all levels of our being-in-the-world. From this
perspective digital hermeneutics is in line with Ihdes project of
expanding hermeneutics (Ihde 1998) particularly with material
hermeneutics in contrast to traditional text-focused hermeneutics (Ihde
2005) as far as the digital text is different from its mate, the printed one,
one main difference being that it allows to perform actions in the world
including the actions of interpreting material (and visual) phenomena. As
Ihde rightly stresses, it would be a designer fallacy to believe that as in
the case of the authors intentions with regard to the meaning of his text,
it is the designer, as an isolated individual who has the control over the
meaning of the object without taking into account the inter-relations with
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the materials being worked with, the uses and users, including their
complex and multi-stable cultural contexts (Ihde 2008; on Ihde see
Selinger 2006).
This dialogical view of technology implies an event of "unconcealment", as clearly analyzed by the Australian philosopher Michael
Eldred (2006), questioning Heideggers The Question Concerning
Technology and the Greek classical tradition behind him. This event
happens between us and not just between the artist or technites and
matter (ibid.). It means also to enlarge the German concept of technology
(Technik)

with regard all kind of techniques including the ones of

making love, of cookery, leadership and piano-playing. An expanded

hermeneutics must twist materiality and digitality within the large context
of such techniques and it should include not only texts of the past or of
mass media, as Vattimo remarked (Vattimo 1985, p. 187), but visual
media as well.
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. 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.
This broad spectrum of phenomena can be restricted to the study of
social systems of interpretation and social construction of meaning based
on 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. 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, particularly from the
perspective of the accelerated technological innovation that started with
the Internet at the end of the last century and is expanding now on the
basis of mobile communication technologies.
But the impact of digital communication goes far beyond such a
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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. Psychic
processes and their organic support are becoming object of manipulation
based on digital technology for all kinds of enhancements. Digital
hermeneutics answers, so to speak, to the call of the digital by making
explicit its ontological presuppositions. As a philosophic discipline it does
not place itself outside history but tries to understand the factual present
situation in which human existence and human thinking is located. It
looks for a radicalization of the process of self-understanding of human
societies that interact with natural and technical networks and construct
complex hybrid living systems. The ninetieth and the twentieth centuries
were fascinated by history and nature. The twenty-first century is the
century of communication and artificiality.
These are strong reasons, I believe, in order to understand why
digital technology in a similar but not identical way as in the case of other
media, becomes today a key hermeneutic issue. It faces not just a
challenge at the level of the processes of understanding and construction
of meaning but finds itself within societies that see this transformation as
something obvious, a vague slogan namely information society to which
the term knowledge is sometimes added. This digital turn is not alien to
hermeneutics as far as it understands itself from its very beginning as a
questioning of what is apparently obvious as well as to what resists
immediate understanding. Non-understanding often conceals itself
behind what is apparently obvious particularly with regard to the question
concerning the interpreter herself.

DIGITAL ONTOLOGY AND DIGITAL METAPHYSICS

Digital hermeneutics is based on digital ontology, a concept that
Michael Eldred (2001) and the author developed some years ago
(Capurro 2001). What is digital ontology? Eldred writes:
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
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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)
The main point concerns the word unquestioningly that makes the
whole difference between digital ontology as a possible and indeed
todays pervasive interpretation of Being and the metaphysical thesis that
the digital is the real (Capurro 2006). 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.
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. 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. I am
questioning anti-technological humanism as well as 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. From this perspective, I also question what one could call a
digital humanism that would look for the limits of the digital within the
realm of the human. The reason for this is that digital technology allows a
de-subjectivation of human processes of interpretation without being
necessarily opposed to them. This means a dehumanization of
hermeneutics as far as, for instance, biological processes can be seen as
processes of interaction and communication based on the genetic code
that can be itself object of human manipulation.
The consequences of digital metaphysics can be devastating as
described for instance by Albert Borgmann in Holding on to Reality:
Information Technology has deeply influenced the
ways we cope today with the threat of the devastation and
loss of meaning. The challenge to the festive resolution of
the ambiguity that rises from the surrounding injustice and
misery we are inclined to meet with a version of virtual
ambiguity, a loosening of the ties that should connect our
celebrations with their real and entire context. While
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celebrations with their real and entire context. While

virtuality is our reply to the devastation of common
meanings hyperinformation is our response to the oblivion
of individuals. Common hyperinformation is the huge
amount of colorful information we accumulate through
pictures and videos especially. But all the other records we
keep and that are kept about us are part of
hyperinformation. (Borgmann 2000, p. 230)
Borgmanns answer to the challenge of utopian hyperinformation
it would be better to call it dystopian 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. I
do not think that it makes sense, as Borgman suggests, to emphasize
one side say, the materiality of printed books or of focal points of
celebration in detriment to the other. We are cyborgs. The cell phone is
part of our bodily existence. It is our "focal thing" and the practices and
celebrations take part in this digital world too. 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.
But digital technology can nonetheless be hermeneutically disclosed
as a weak technology for human conversation. In other words, digital
hermeneutics must address the changes brought up to our condition
humaine in all its facets. It is not enough, I think, as Daniel Fallman does,
to contrast the usability tradition represented by Ihde, with Borgmann
more romantic outlook (Fallman 2007). 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. His concluding remarks
are in line with this view of the Internet as an area of esthetics detached
from the real ethical questions of human life:
In sum, as long as we continue to affirm our bodies, the
Net can be useful to us in spite of its tendency to offer the
worst of a series of asymmetric trade-offs: economy over
efficacy in education, the virtual over the real in our relation
to things and people, and anonymity over commitment that
our culture has already fallen twice for the
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Platonic/Christian temptation to try to get rid of our

vulnerable bodies, and has ended in nihilism. This time
around, we must resist this temptation and affirm our
bodies, not in spite of their finitude and vulnerability, but
because, without our bodies, as Nietzsche saw, we would
be literally nothing. As Nietzsche has Zarathustra say: I
want to speak to the despisers of the body. I would not
have them learn and teach differently, but merely say
farewell to their own bodies and thus become silent.
(Dreyfus 2001, p. 106-107)
The question whether digital technology takes us away from our
bodies or whether it allows us a different interaction with them can be
seen as another form of nihilism but of a different kind than the
Platonic/Christian one Nietzsche was fighting against. It could be that
there is a new kind of affirmation of the body because we are able to
better understand what is going on with it even at the nano level on the
basis of digital technology. This new kind of nihilism is related to the fact
that our capacity to manipulate digitally our bodies does not provide us
with the ethical thinking necessary to manage this capacity to transform
ourselves, which also means the very Nietzschean idea of playing with
nature not going back to it following Rousseau (Nietzsche 1999, 150).
The experience of our groundless existence does not arise out of this or
of any other technology but is something that characterizes human life as
such. Being human is an experiment. According to the theologian Karl
Rahner we are our own designers: homo faber sui ipsius, which
includes now more and more the possibility of designing our body at very
early stages and on fundamental (genetic) levels. Facing the moralist
who says that humans should not do everything they can, and the sceptic
who does not trust that we will freely give up what we can, Rahner points
to the ethical limit of what does not work under the very factual worldly
conditions (Rahner 1966, p. 59) that would eventually mean our selfannihilation (Capurro 2002).
If we want to understand our lives including all kinds of artificial
and natural processes in which we are embedded in the present age
we must address the key issues of communication and artificiality from
the digital perspective. 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 (Heidegger 1976, p. 153). Today this circle is
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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.
And this leads to a change of another core idea of hermeneutics,
namely the Gadamerian fusion of horizons (Gadamer 1975, p. 284). 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
1987). 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

angela = message) (Capurro 2003). There is no interpretation without a
meaning offer. Hermes is not just the interpreter of heavenly messages
but the gods messenger as well. Of course, digital angeletics does not
address comprehensively the complex phenomenon of messages and
messengers that pervades human history as well as natural processes.
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. 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. The
rise of the Internet as an apparently autonomous sphere shows the
historical dimension of this cultural invention that spread over the globe
with the speed of light, which is in this case almost not a metaphor,
becoming soon not something independent of the real life of the people
but the very heart of our political, economic and cultural life. The cellular
phone, as a mobile device linked to the Internet, challenges, as Mathew
Arnold recently stressed making aware of its Janus-faces (Arnold
2003), 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. He writes:
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The perceived need for technology to enable

communication at a distance perhaps indicates that one is
distant from those one might like to communicate with, if not
be with. However, communication is possible at a distance,
through the phone, which is reassuring for those who are
independent, but who also feel isolated or vulnerable. Even
if the phone is never used, it can be carried at all times, and
the very fact that it is possible to communicate, or itself
creates a link that reinforces connectedness. The phone
thus speaks of both a sense of isolation and a sense of
reassurance. We are distant but we are connected. In the
formal organizational context also, the faces of isolation,
vulnerability and reassurance emerge in the presence of
the mobile phone. ! When I telephone I am part of a social
network or familial or organizational network. I am related to
others. I exist, they exist, and our relation to one another
exists. I am confirmed. I have a position in the scheme of
things. I am reassured. (Arnold 2003, p. 244-245).
Conceived like this, the mobile phone is an eminently existential or
ontological device on todays message society. This is a hermeneutic
insight that becomes manifest today in all its global and local relevance
(Brigham and Introna 2006, Introna 2007). Digital hermeneutics is at the
crossroad of the producer and interpreter of digital programs no less than
at the connection of such programs with natural processes. Hermeneutic
questions arise thus not just out of the digital alone but from the
interferences of media as well as from the messages that other media
send to potential messengers. This was already the case of Plato hearing
the voices of the spoken language in face of the invention of writing no
less than Derridas answer to the call of logocentrism.
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.
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). This formula totum sed non
totaliter makes its own totalitarian ambitions weaker as far as it
becomes aware that the business of interpretation arises from something
outside the interpreter and its hermeneutic power, namely from a
message. This is the point in which hermeneutics and ethics meet as
they allow the subject to reflect critically on what common sense says
by allowing a situation of weak social stability in a process of permanent
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social change. Hegels "objective spirit", Heideggers historical "unconcealment" of truth as a (possible) world or Wittgensteins forms of
life allow the hermeneutic subject to take a rest, so to speak, and give
an answer to historical challenges. Today, information societies have a
general tendency towards what Derrida, following Heidegger, calls the
metaphysics of presence. Digital hermeneutics should make explicit this
spectrality of the digital.

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. 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. 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, 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.
According to Lawrence Lessig code is law (Lessig 1999),
hermeneutics must reflect on the nature of this code and its interaction
with economy, politics and morality. The balance between these spheres,
including nature, is related to what was often called justice (dike) in
Greek classic philosophy. This concept is broader than the one applied to
social interactions, particularly with regard to the distribution of economic
wealth. It implies the complex interplay between humans and nature
using different programs or digital codes that interact with natural
processes (Eldred 2006). It would be unjust if cyberspace would pretend
to dominate other spheres becoming a digital metaphysics. The task of
weakening such a project is a major task of digital hermeneutics. One
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example of a strong version of the digital is the dominance of mass

media with their hierarchic structures in the twentieth century. Vilm
Flusser feared that this power would eventually become the dominant
one over dialogical structures of communication (Flusser 2006). The
Internet weakens media monopolies. The digital code makes possible the
interaction of the human with the natural and the artificial. The digital
network weakens the classic Western view of an autonomous subject
and makes possible a dialogue with Taoist views of nature (Jullien 2003)
as well as with Japanese Buddhism (Capurro 2006b).
Ethics deals mainly with one question: who am I? This question is
not to be understood as asked by an isolated individual but as a basic
human question that is stated implicitly or explicitly in practical life by
every human being no less than by groups, states and today in a global
dimension: who are we as humankind? This question is anything but
academic. It is a question of survival. Hermeneutics in the digital age
must become aware of this situation in order to make explicit the different
political, legal and cultural norms and identities, the way they are affected
by the digital code and the consequences for the construction of human
identities as well as for the interaction between nature and society.
Following Foucault, ethics can be understood as the questioning of
morality (Foucault 1983). It works as a catalyst of social processes
weakening the dogmatism of morality and law without just striving
towards their replacement through another moral code. It is a open or
free space that allows a permanent critique of all kind of blocking
processes within and beyond the digital sphere. Who are we as a society
at the local and global level in the age of digital and globalized
communication? This question does not address a problem of text
interpretation but our own self-understanding and verification in the
sense that the media itself and the processes that are object of
hermeneutical study are at the same time existential dimensions of the
interpreters themselves The hermeneutic subject verifies or makes
herself a digital object.
Human existence is a valuing activity but the human evaluator has no
value but a dignity or Wrde as Kant called it. This is not necessarily
based on a metaphysic view of man and world but arises already from
the very situation of being-in-the-world itself as far as this being itself is
not something we could valuate but is the horizon within which every
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not something we could valuate but is the horizon within which every
valuation takes place. Within this horizon, all beings, human or not, have
a dignity but non-human beings, as far as they are not subjects of
valuation processes, have a relative value when they become object of
human transactions within a social process of valuation. From this
perspective, the economy as a process of permanent valuation is a main
trait of every human community as such. This hermeneutic reflection
makes clear why the digital sphere as a product of human invention,
cannot become the final horizon of valuation for all possible
understanding of the world and human existence. Being relative, the
digital becomes an opportunity for the subjects of the twenty-first century
to transform themselves and their connections in and with the world
overcoming for instance the strong metaphysical concepts that were
leading for the self-understanding of Western societies for centuries. This
does not mean that such concepts could be let aside or just replaced by
the new ones, but they can be hybridized with different kind of reasons,
imaginations, ambitions and utopias, hopes and disappointments arising
from the digital code.
If this is the case, in different ways and intensities, the digital code
becomes a real contribution to humanity as well as to its interaction with
non-human spheres. It could weaken the metaphysic ambitions of
(Western) logos by making it more flexible with regard to the global
cultural interplay in which we look for reasons for our preferences in
dialogue with different beliefs and desires of other human beings. A
future world must be open to an open horizon of understanding in which
the "principle of charity" plays a major role avoiding that reasons become
dogmatic beliefs to be eventually imposed others by force. The digital
network could become the place where such translations between
different languages take place in a global scale in this new century. This
means to allow the other to articulate herself in the network, looking for
nodes of relations, becoming as a hermeneutic subject of the digital age.
This is the reason for the relevance of intercultural information ethics
(Hongladarom and Ess 2007; Capurro et al. 2007).
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? How do human
cultures become hybridized and in which way does this hybridization
affect the interplay with natural processes and their interplay with the
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affect the interplay with natural processes and their interplay with the
production and use of all kind of artificial products in a digital economy?
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. We live in a
world that is less and less a familiar life-world. We have become a
troublesome field that requires hard labor and heavy sweat (factus sum
mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii; Augustinus 1998, X, p. 16).
Hermeneutics misunderstands itself if it does not take care ontic and
ontologically of digital technology with its overwhelming impact on our
lives.

Acknowledgemets I thank Arun Kumar Tripathi (Dresden University of Technology,

Germany) for his commitment to an e-mail dialogue on the subject of this paper and for his
invaluable hints to relevant literature.

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Last update: January 9, 2010

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