In an influential paper, Verbeek has suggested to expand the (post-)phenomenological repertoire of describing human-technology relations with the cyborg relation to capture what is at stake when “the human and the technological actually merge rather than ‘merely’ being embodied” (Verbeek, 2008, p. 391). According to Verbeek, a new entity emerges when humans use implanted technologies such as neurotechnology, antidepressants, or pacemakers. In this paper, we wonder if the cyborg relation describes something phenomenologically distinct from other post-phenomenological human-technology relations.

We argue that Verbeek’s cyborg relation presupposes a problematic picture of the living body as static and closed-off from its environment, which is at odds with a central notion in phenomenology: the distinction between the objective and lived body. The lived body has dynamic boundaries, and cannot be thought of as static and closed-off from its environment, (Plessner, 1975). This perspective leads us to argue that we have always been ‘cyborgs’ (De Mul, 2014), and that Verbeek’s cyborg relation is grounded in a phenomenologically questionable view on the lived body. Moreover, based on empirical findings, we argue that the experience of using implantable technologies can be described by the existing human-technology relations.

Secondly, the term cyborg can be stigmatizing to people who use implantable technologies, which makes the use of the term ethically concerning. Reasoning from critical disability studies, the term has been and could be used in a dehumanizing and othering way (Shew, 2022). In light of these two concerns (the descriptive/phenomenological and the normative/ethical), we propose to reject the cyborg relation as a new human-technology relation altogether. 

Still, we are sympathetic with Verbeek’s fingerspitzengefühl that something phenomenologically distinct is at stake between, for example, wearing glasses and using a neural visual prosthesis. We propose to capture this by adding a dimension of intimacy to the repertoire of post-phenomenology that spans across all the human-technology relations. Embodiment, hermeneutic, and alterity relations can all be experienced in a more or less intimate way, depending on how closely intertwined a technology is with our embodied relation to the world. Furthermore, taking on an ecological approach, we find that the dimension of intimacy allows us to more aptly capture what is at stake, ethically, in how human-technology relations are embedded in politicized sociotechnical systems.