Lesson 4

• Flourishing is a state where people experience positive emotions, positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning, most of the time," living "within an optimal range of human functioning."
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  Human Flourishing is 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.

  •     It 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 CIVILIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

   

  1.  Human person as both the bearer and beneficiary of science and technology.

  •       Bearer – a person or thing that carries or holds something.

  •       Beneficiary- a person that receives help or an advantage from something : one that benefits from something

  2.  Human flourishes and finds meaning in the world that he/she builds.

  3.  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.

               
• Reflective Thinking - an active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form of knowledge, of the grounds that support that knowledge, and the further conclusions to which that knowledge leads.
• Meditative thinking is a kind of thinking that thinks the truth of being, that belongs to being and listens to it.
• Science and Technology must be examined for their greater impact on humanity as a whole.
• TECHNOLOGY AS A MODE OF REVEALING?

   

  MARTIN HEIDEGGER is a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. It is widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century.
• Heidegger’s view on technology:

   

  c.     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.

  d.    Since the essence of a tree is not itself a tree, he points out, so the essence of technology is not anything technological.
• Heidegger’s view on technology:

   

  a.    He strongly opposes the view that technology is “a means to an end” or “a human activity.”

  b.    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.”
• What, then, is technology, if it is neither a means to an end nor a human activity?

   

  •       Technology, according to Heidegger must be understood as “a way of revealing” (Heidegger 1977, 12).

  •       Revealing is his translation of the Greek word alètheuein, which means ‘to discover’ – to uncover what was covered over. Related to this verb is the independent noun alètheia, which is usually translated as “truth,” though Heidegger insists that a more adequate translation would be “un- concealment.”
• reality? 

  • according to Heidegger, it is not given the same way in all times and all cultures (Seubold 1986, 35-6). 
  • Not something absolute that human beings can ever know once and for all  •        It is relative in the most literal sense of the word – it exists only in relations.
  • Inaccessible for human beings. As soon as we perceive or try to understand it, it is not ‘in itself’ anymore, but ‘reality for us.’
• HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY BE A WAY OF REVEALING?

   

  •       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.
• HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY BE A WAY OF REVEALING?

   

  1. What does this have to do with technology?  2. What does Heidegger mean when he says that technology is “a way of revealing”?

   

  •       Everything we perceive or think of or interact with “emerges out of concealment into not concealment, 

  •       By entering into a particular relation with reality, reality is ‘revealed’ in a specific way.

  •       Technology is the way of revealing that characterizes our time.
• WHY IS TECHNOLOGY NOT A HUMAN ACTIVITY?

   

  •       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.
• WHY IS TECHNOLOGY NOT A HUMAN ACTIVITY?

   

  •       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.
• WHY IS TECHNOLOGY NOT A HUMAN ACTIVITY?

   

  •       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 (as a ‘standing reserve’). This state of affairs has not been brought about by humans; the technological way of revealing was not chosen by humans.