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Don Ihde
The task of a phenomenology of human-technol ogy relations is to discover the various structural features of those ambiguous relations. In taking up this task, I shall begin with a focus upon experien tially recognizable features that are centered upon the ways we are bodily engaged with technologies. The beginning will be within the various ways in which I-as-body interact with my environment by means of technologies. previous features mentioned in the preliminary phe nomenology of visual technics. Within the framework ofphenomenological rela tivity, visual technics first may be located within the intentionality of seeing. I see-through the optical artifact-the world This seeing is, in however small a degree, at least minimally distinct from a direct or naked seeing. I see-the world I call this first set of existential technological rela tions with the world embodiment relations, because in this use context I take the technologies into my experiencing in a particular way by way of perceiv ing through such technologies and through the reflexive transformation of my perceptual and body sense. In Galileo's use of the telescope, he embodies his seeing through the telescope thusly: Galileo--telescope-Moon Equivalently, the wearer of eyeglasses embodies eyeglass technology: l--glasses-world The technology is actually between the seer and the seen, in a position ofmediation. But the referent of the seeing, that towards which sight is directed, is "on the other side" of the optics. One sees through the optics. This, however, is not enough to specify

A Technics Embodied
If much of early modern science gained its new vision of the world through optical technologies, the process of embodiment itself is both much older and more pervasive. To embody one's praxis through technologies is ultimately an existential re lation with the world. It is something humans have always - since they left the naked perceptions of the Garden - done. I ha ve previously and in a more suggestive fashion already noted some features of the visual embodi ment of optical technologies. Vision is technologic ally transformed through such optics. But while the fact that optics transform vision may be clear, the variants and invariants of such a transformation are not yet precise. That becomes the task for a more rigorous and structural phenomenology of embodi ment. I shall begin by drawing from some of the
Originally "Program One. A Phenomenology of Technics" in Don IMe, Technology and the Llfeworld, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 72-108, abridged.

Donlhde
thi, relation as an embodiment one, This isbecause one first has to determine where and how, along what will be described as a continuum of relations, the technology is experienced, There is an initial sense in which this position ing is doubly ambiguous. First, the technology must be technically capable of being seen through; it must be transparent. I shall use the term technical to refer to the physical characteristics of the tech nology. Such characteristics may be designed or they may be discovered. Here the disciplines that deal with such characteristics are informative, al though indirectly so for the philosophical analysis per se. If the glass is not transparent enough, seeing-through is not possible. If it is transparent enough, approximating whatever "pure" transpar ency could be empirically attainable, then it bc comes possible to embody the technology. This is a material condition for embodiment. Embodying as an activity, too, has an initial am biguity. It must be learned or, in phenomenological terms, constituted. If the technology is good, this is usually easy. The very first time I put on my glasses, I see the now-eorrected world, The adjustments I have to make are not usually focal irritations but fringe ones (such as the adjustment to backglare and the slight changes in spatial motility). But once learned, the embodiment relation can be more pre cisely described as one in which the technology becomes maximally "transparent," It is, as it were, taken into my own perceptual-bodily selfexperience thus: (I-glasses}-world My glasses become part of the way I ordinarily experience my surroundings; they "withdraw" and are barely noticed, if at all. I have then actively embodied the technics of vision. Technics is the symbiosis of artifact and user within a human action. Embodiment relations, however, are nO[ at all restricted to visual relations. They may occur for any sensory or microperceptual dimension. A hear ing aid does this for hearing, and the blind man's cane for tactile motility. Note that in these correct ive technologies the same structural features of em hodiment obtain as with the visual example, Once learned, cane and hearing aid "withdraw" (if the technology is good - and here we have an experien tial clue for the perfecting of technologies). I hear the world through the hearing aid and feel (and hear) it through the cane, The juncture (I-artifact) \vorld is through the technology and brought dose by it. Such relations through technologies are not limited to either simple or complex technologies. Glasses, insofar as they are engineered systems, are much simpler than hearing aids. More complex than either of these monosensory devices are those that entail whole-body motility. One such common tech nology is automobile driving. Although driving an automobile encompasses more than embodiment relations, its pleasurability is frequently that associ ated with embodiment relations. One experiences the road and surroundings through driving the car, and motion is the focal activity. In a finely engineered sports car, for example, one has a more precise feeling of the road and of the traction upon it than in the older, softer-riding, large cars of the fifties. One em bodies the car, too, in such activities as parallel parking: when well embodied, one feels rather than sees ,the distance between car and curb one's bodily sense is "extended" to the parameters . of the driver-car "body." And although these em bodiment relations entail larger, more complex artifacts and entail a somewhat longer, more com plex learning process, the bodily tacit knowledge that is acquired is perceptual-bodily. Here is a first clue to the polymorphous sense of bodily extension. The experience of one's "body image" is not fixed but malleably extendable and lor reducible in terms of the material or techno logical mediations that may be embodied. I shall restrict the term embodiment, however, to those types of mediation that can be so experienced. The same dynamic polymorphousness can also be located in non-mediational or direct experience, Persons trained in the martial arts, such as karate, learn to feel the vectors and trajectories of the opponent's moves within the space of the combat. The near space around one's material body is charged. Embodiment relations are a particular kind of use-context. They are technologically relative in a double sense. First, the technology must "fit" the use. Indeed, within the realm of embodiment rela tions one can develop a quite specific set ofqualities for design relating to attaining the requisite techno logical "withdrawal." For example, in handling highly radioactive materials at a distance, the mech anical arms and hands which are designed to pick up and pour glass tubes inside the shielded enclosure have to "feed back" a delicate sense of touch to the operator. The closer to invisibility, transparency,