Summary of Human Flourishing in Science and Technology
Summary of Human Flourishing in Science and Technology
Human Flourishing an effort to achieve self-actualization and fulfillment within the context of a larger community of
individuals, each with the right to pursue his or her own such efforts. Human flourishing involves the rational use of
one's individual human potentialities, including talents, abilities, and virtues in the pursuit of his freely and rationally
chosen values and goals. Human civilizations and the development of science and technology. Human person as both
the bearer and beneficiary of science and technology. Human flourishes and finds meaning in the world that he/she
builds. Human may unconsciously acquire, consume or destroy what the world has to offer. Science and Technology
must be treated as part of human life that needs reflective and meditative thinking.
A German philosopher named Martin Heidegger and a seminal thinker in the continental tradition of philosophy. Widely
acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century. Heidegger’s view on
technology was he strongly opposes the view that technology is a means to an end or a human activity. These two
approaches, which he calls, respectively, the instrumental and anthropological definitions, are indeed correct, but do
not go deep enough as he says, they are not yet true. Heidegger points out, technological objects are means for ends,
and are built and operated by human beings, but the essence of technology is something else entirely. Technology,
according to Heidegger must be understood as “a way of revealing”. Revealing is his translation of the Greek word
alètheuein, which means to discover.
Technology is the way of revealing that characterizes our time. Technology embodies a specific way of revealing the
world, a revealing in which humans take power over reality. While the ancient Greeks experienced the making of
something as ‘helping something to come into being as Heidegger explains that modern technology is rather a forcing
into being. Technology reveals the world as raw material, available for production and manipulation. According to
Heidegger, there is something wrong with the modern, technological culture we live in today. In our age of technology
reality can only be present as a raw material. Rather, our understanding of the world - our understanding of being, of
what it means to be - develops through the ages. In our time, being has the character of a technological framework,
from which humans approach the world in a controlling and dominating way. Every attempt to climb out of technology
throws us back in. The only way out for Heidegger is “the will not to will”. We need to open up the possibility of relying
on technologies while not becoming enslaved to them and seeing them as manifestations of an understanding of being.