World oriented self-formation as sublimation: or why postphenomenology needs Peircean pragmatism

Abstract

Postphenomenology is an approach in philosophy of technology that investigates how technologies influence and shape world and self. Although postphenomenology has from the beginning expressed the ambition to offer a nonessentialist and nonfoundational framework, a structural development of this aspect is virtually absent. A Peircean pragmatism, as will be proposed, can provide this framework, as well as the building blocks for developing the view of self-formation in terms of sublimation. This view attempts to recognize that our environment, which is increasingly a technological environment and subject to radical change, greatly shapes who we are and influences who we ought to be. And, at the same time, it resists the idea that the self is not more than a plaything of contingent influences and forces.