Abstract
This paper defends the possibility that meaningful learning can be supported by the Internet. Responding to Hubert Dreyfus’s neo-Kierkegaardian contention that the Internet inhibits and does not support meaningful learning, we argue that it is a valuable tool for learning that can promote the development of intellectual expertise without the accompanying atrophy of personhood that Dreyfus believes is a prominent effect of extensive engagement with the Internet. Additionally, we argue that a conflation of practically ultimate commitments and epistemically ultimate commitments underlies Dreyfus’s conception of unconditional commitments that constitutes the core of his critique of the possibility of meaningful learning on the Web.
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Notes
This last point—that e-learning makes possible wider access to courses and other educational resources—seems on its own a compelling reason to believe that e-learning has been and will continue to be a boon for the cultivation of intellectual capital. As Alfred P. Rovai among others has noted, Web-based education has made higher education more accessible to those whose life-circumstances—such as the presence of a disability or the need to hold a full-time job or extensive family obligations—make it extremely difficult to attend traditional universities (2009, 7). Considering how the Internet has impacted just the reach of Open Universities alone nicely illustrates this point. Already as of 2005, 22 nations housed Open Universities with enrollments in the hundreds of thousands (Rovai 2009, 5). That a larger pool of people thus has access to higher education suggests that a greater number of people can implement the fruits of such education into their lives, careers and communities.
The 1999 article on which we focus can also be found, reproduced, in Dreyfus (2003). Also, the main lines of Dreyfus’s argument in this article are repeated in Chapter Four of his book, On the Internet (Dreyfus 2009). Though the book covers many more topics than are treated in the 1999 article, the specific argument that is the topic of this essay is presented in more detail in (Dreyfus 1999); thus, our focus in this essay will be on the earlier article. It is, however, important to note that (Dreyfus 2009) is, in certain areas, less pessimistic in terms of its evaluation of the prospects for e-learning than either the 1999 article or the first edition of On the Internet in 2001. This moderation in Dreyfus’s assessment is most evident in two areas. First, whereas Dreyfus (1999) held that the Internet levels all distinctions of comparative significance, Dreyfus (2009) maintains that this problem largely has been solved by a combination of Google’s deployment of “a syntactic way to use human judgment to compute importance and even a syntactic way to compute relevance” and the introduction of the human encyclopedist’s expertise in the construction of sites such as Wikipedia. Second, Dreyfus (2009) indicates a greater openness to sharing course content (though not offering courses for credit) via the Web. For instance, in commenting on his own experience of sharing his class lectures via Podcast, he notes that this is a “much appreciated form of education that would have been impossible without [the Internet]” (2009, 133). Additionally, he reports experimenting with running a virtual classroom on Second Life and concluding that while it would be “folly” to substitute such a virtual classroom for an embodied, real classroom, when it is not possible to hold embodied meetings in a real classroom, “meeting as avatars to discuss the material is an educational possibility to be enthusiastically embraced” (2009, 143). Though (Dreyfus 2009) thus includes important concessions to the view that the Net can make positive contributions to learning, the main contours of the position expressed by Dreyfus in (1999) remain unchanged in Dreyfus (2009). For instance, in the earlier article Dreyfus believed that only the first two of Kierkegaard’s three stages of existence, the aesthetic and the ethical, “can be implemented with Information Technology, while the religious stage, which alone makes meaningful learning possible, is undermined rather than supported by the tendencies of the Net” (1999, 15). This point is echoed in (2009) with Dreyfus’s argument in Chapter Two that Web-based instruction can promote learning only through the level of competence but not expertise or mastery. More importantly, and of direct relevance to our argument, Dreyfus’s contention in 1999 that the dominant tendency of the Web is to inhibit rather than support meaningful learning and meaningful human lives is reiterated in 2009 where Dreyfus notes, “where meaning is concerned, what the Net is doing to us is, in fact, making our lives worse rather than better. Living one’s life on the Web is attractive because it eliminates vulnerability and commitment but, if Kierkegaard is right, this lack of passion necessarily eliminates meaning as well” (2009, 137).
“Ultimate” is our term for the sort of deep commitment Dreyfus believes is essential to meaningful learning. Dreyfus himself most commonly uses the term “unconditional” for such commitments. As we explain in the first section below, however, even according to Dreyfus’s own analysis of what he calls “unconditional commitments,” unconditionality turns out to be only one of the several characteristics that constitute the sort of deep commitment he has in mind; thus, for reasons of clarity we will use the term “ultimate commitments” throughout this paper for Dreyfus’s “unconditional commitments”.
It is important not to confuse unconditionality in Dreyfus’s Kierkegaardian sense with unconditionality as it functions in Kantian moral philosophy. Though the unconditionality of Kant’s categorical imperative is similar to Dreyfus’s unconditional commitments in that both play a foundational normative role, the differences between their conceptions are nonetheless profound. For Kant, our unconditional obligations are (a) revealed by reason, (b) justified by reason, and (c) binding upon all rational beings in virtue of their common rationality. Dreyfus’s Kierkegaardian ultimate commitments, by contrast, involve a commitment to a self-defining way of life where this commitment is (a) pre-reflective, (b) impelled by affect, and (c) potentially idiosyncratic in that it may vary dramatically from individual to individual. In footnote 11 below, we further explore the difference between Kantian and Dreyfusian unconditionality.
As noted earlier, Dreyfus (2009) no longer advances points (a) and (b). He is, however, still committed to (c) and (d). It is, moreover, points (c) and (d) that are the focus of our response to Dreyfus’s critique of meaningful learning via the Web.
The connection between a lack of real-world consequences and revocability noted by Dreyfus is that acting in the real world imposes an obligation to accept responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. For instance, a man who fathers children in the real world but takes no interest in supporting them financially or emotionally is rightly subject to censure and his having fathered those children becomes an ineliminable part of his history. Even if he tries to walk away from this responsibility, its existence will nonetheless impact his life in profound ways. A virtual man, by contrast, who fathers virtual children in, say, Second Life, can walk away from those children—the virtual consequences of his virtual actions—without any serious repercussions. He can walk away from these virtual consequences with no more thought than the decision to change the channel on his television when the current program bores him.
In On the Internet, Dreyfus emphasizes this point. Commenting on the various ways the body contributes to our sense of significance, he notes that the body plays this role “so effortlessly, pervasively, and successfully that it is hardly noticed. That is why it is so easy to think that, thanks to telepresence, we could get along without it, and why it would, in fact, be impossible to do so” (2009, 70–71). For more on Dreyfus’s thoughts on the significance of embodiment, see particularly Chapter Three and the Conclusion of On The Internet (Dreyfus 2009). The importance of embodiment is a point that Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward also emphasize in their Kierkegaardian and Dreyfusian inspired critique of education via the Net. Drawing upon Kierkegaard, they note that “the locality and embodiment of communication… are for Kierkegaard important ingredients of healthy relationships among individuals” (2000, 172). Though their critique of the possibility of education via the Web concedes that “not everything that can be learned through computer-mediated instruction requires the special meaningfulness and significance fostered by the ‘interpersonal connectivity’ that Dreyfus and Kierkegaard want to preserve for the sake of our deepest human relations” (176), they are still more pessimistic than we are about the tendencies of the Net. While we argue below that the Net can support and enhance meaningful interpersonal relationships and, consequently, meaningful learning, they maintain that the Net tends to inhibit meaningful relationships in the following way: “[b]y dis-locating the locus and structure of conversation, the Internet stymies and breaks down interpersonal connectedness…” (174).
One important respect in which (Dreyfus 2009) differs from (Dreyfus 1999) is that his position on this point has softened somewhat. While still maintaining that the “Press and the Internet are the ultimate enemy of unconditional commitment” (2009, 88) and that “where meaning is concerned, what the Net is doing to us is, in fact, making our lives worse rather than better” (137); Dreyfus does note that if “one is already committed to a real-world cause, the World Wide Web can increase one’s power to act, both by providing relevant information, and by putting committed people in touch with other people who share their cause and who are ready to risk their time and money, and perhaps even their lives, in pursuing their shared end” (137). This is, in our estimation, an improvement in Dreyfus’s evaluation of the prospects for the Web to support the pursuit of meaningful commitments; nonetheless, his general conclusion is still more pessimistic than is warranted. Even in (2009), Dreyfus seems to view such cases as outliers that run against the dominant tendencies of the Web’s influence on human consumers.
An executive for a corporation in the energy industry whom we interviewed for this article nicely illustrates this point. A lover of the outdoors, he recently relocated from Syracuse, NY, to a small island off the East Coast of Rhode Island. He observed, “During my lunch break, I’ll often take a walk on the beach or trails through the island’s nature preserves. And it’s not unusual for me to finish a teleconference at 5 p.m. and be out on the water—clamming or fishing or paddle-boarding—by 5:30.” Such opportunities to enjoy nature had, he reported, increased dramatically since the move. He also noted that access to Internet on the island was crucial to the move being possible: “Without it,” he noted, “I wouldn’t have been able to both make the move and continue in my present position.”
For data on the energy savings purchased by work-at-home, see (Fu et al. 2012).
On the other hand, if one were to accept the conclusion of this objection and hold that one’s commitment to reason is both epistemically and practically fundamental and that fidelity to the requirements of reason in one’s actions is thus the fundamental practical value, it is worth noting that one’s ultimate commitment would be very different from the highly varied and individualized sort of ultimate commitment envisaged by Dreyfus. In this case, what one has is an ultimate commitment that can be shared with all rational beings and which serves as a basis for the critical evaluation of the more individualized “ultimate commitments” endorsed by Dreyfus. Precisely that view, in fact, is at the center of Kantian systems of ethics which take as their starting point Kant’s assertion that “all obligation in general… rests… solely on the autonomy of reason itself” (Kant 1993, 136). Such deontological systems thus provide a model for how one might subject all of one’s practical commitments—except the commitment to following reason—to reasoned criticism and possible revocation. For this reason, such systems also have the resources to check the dangerous enthusiasms to which “ultimate commitments” in Dreyfus’s sense would otherwise be prone. This remark, of course, only scratches the surface of a much-debated issue in disputes between Kierkegaardians and Kantians, a full treatment of which is beyond the scope of the present study. For purposes of the topic of this article, the point that we want to emphasize in connection with this dispute is simply the following: whether one endorses or rejects a Kantian account of normativity, one has the resources to critique Dreyfus’s conception of ultimate commitments. Non-Kantians can consistently distinguish between practically and epistemically fundamental commitments and thereby subject Dreyfusian commitments to rational criticism. For their part, by endorsing reason as both epistemically and practically fundamental, Kantians can draw upon humanity’s common rationality to evaluate the more individualized commitments Dreyfus views as “ultimate”.
This is also the appropriate place to remark that though we are here challenging Dreyfus’s contention that the Internet is predominantly inimical to meaningful learning and meaningful lives, this should not be taken to reflect our holding a generally negative judgment on the whole of Dreyfus’s extensive scholarship on the Web or, more specifically, his book, On the Internet. Both the first (2001) and second (2009) editions of On the Internet are wide-ranging and seminal works that include some of the most important philosophical scholarship on the implications of electronic culture for humanity and society. Moreover, his work stands as a much needed counterpoint to the widespread and often unqualified enthusiasm extended to the Web’s capacity to dramatically enhance education. As Michael Peters noted in his review of the first edition of On the Internet, it “is a relief to read an analysis of the Internet that is not yet another contribution to the hyped-instrumentalist discourse… touting efficiency gains and the lasting technical transformation of education” (2002, 403). On the Internet is thus an extremely valuable resource for those interested in exploring reasons for tempering the unbridled optimism sometimes exhibited by enthusiasts of the Web. Two other noteworthy places to begin such exploration are Neil Postman’s “Questioning Media” and David Kaplan’s “How to Read Technology Critically.” The former does a masterful job of laying out several key questions one must ask in taking a critical attitude to the implementation of any new technology, including the Internet (Postman 2003). The latter details how narrative accounts of technology which are informed by robust normative conceptions of social justice and human welfare can provide a promising vantage point from which to critically evaluate technological innovations (Kaplan 2009).
We are indebted to two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The final version benefitted significantly from their corrections, insights and suggestions.
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Petrik, J., Kilybayev, T. & Shormanbayeva, D. The internet, identity and intellectual capital: a response to Dreyfus’s critique of e-learning. Ethics Inf Technol 16, 275–284 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-014-9352-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-014-9352-7