Digital Technology and Embodiment: The Flesh as Paradigm

Involving a variety of approaches, such as postphenomenological hermeneutics, informational ontology, and posthumanism, the contemporary philosophical debate addresses our relationship with digital technologies by discerning two main features of the term ‘digital’, one related to our bodily experience, and the other to the computational sphere. Yet, the aspect related to our hands and fingers, and the aspect that traces back to the functionality of computational devices themselves are mostly discussed separately. The present paper, in turn, draws on the ambivalence of the ‘digital,’ while trying to reflect on both of the abovementioned aspects at one and the same time. A philosophical understanding of our symbiotic and synergic interaction with current technologies is the overall concern of the paper, which focuses on the entanglement of the phenomenology of embodiment and of digital technology; the former revisited as the phenomenology of the flesh, the latter broadly conceived as a prominent part of the techno-ecosystem in which our specific form of life is continuously evolving.