Human Flourishing in
Science & Technology
(HEIDEGGER)
Learning Outcomes
At the end of this chapter, the students should be
able to:
1.
Discuss what technology reveals;
2.
Examine modern technology and its role in
human flourishing; and
3.
Explain the role of art in a technological world.
The Question
Concerning
Technology
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
1.
Technology as a Mode of Revealing
2.
Technology as Poeisis: Applicable to Modern
Technology?
3.
Questioning as the Piety of Thought
4.
Enframing: Way of Revealing in Modern Technology
5.
Human Person Swallowed by Technology
Technology
as a Mode of Revealing
Common Understanding of technology

Means to an end

Product of human activity

Practical application of science
Do you agree with this definition of technology?
Technology is instrumental and
anthropological:
Correct but not
true.
We pursue the true
through the
correct.
Technology is a way of bringing
forth, making something.
What is brought forth is the truth.
Ancient Greek concepts:
• Poiesis – bringing forth
• Aletheia – truth, disclosure, unconcealedness
• Techne – skill, art, or craft
Technology is a poiesis that discloses
or reveals the truth.
Is this idea of technology
applicable to modern
technology?
Modern Technology
 Challenges
forth
 Very aggressive in its activity
 Sets or brings about a setting upon
 Expedites unconcealment of nature
 Stores that which is extracted from nature
Modern technology views Earth as a
huge gas station, a representative of the
extraction,
drilling and rape
of Mother nature.
Modern Technology
Age
of switches
Standing reserve
Stockpiling for its own sake
Questioning is a piety of thought.
A process of knowing
the truth of who we are
as beings in this world.

Martin Heidegger in
Question Concerning
Technology
Enframing
 Way
of revealing in modern technology
 Views
nature as calculable and orderable
system of information (calculative thinking)
 Earth
as gas station
 Conceals
 Modern
poeisis
physics is the herald of enframing
Meditative thinking – let nature reveal itself without forcing it.
The human person swallowed by
technology
Art as a way out of enframing
 Technology
experience
is poetic in the primordial
 Nature
is art (techne) par excellence
 Nature
is the most poetic
• There is difference between technology and modern technology.
 It
is in questioning that we
build a way to understand.
 Technology
is usually thought of as
that which solves problems but
Heidegger asserts that it is something
we must question.
 Calculative
and meditative
thinking works together.
Aristotle’s Conception of the
Four Causes was mechanical.
Causa materialis
2. Causa formalis
3. Causa finalis
4. Causa efficiens
1.
Aition is an ancient Greek word which
means ‘cause’ or ‘reason’, that to which
something else is indebted’, not cause and
effect

Aition is responsible for bringing forth
Though we have
consigned
technology as a
tool, it belongs to
the realm of truth
as a way of
revealing.
Technology
as something
that defines
how we do
science is
aition.
Though
enframing
happens, it
cannot snuff
out the
poetic
character of
technology.
The wasteland grows. Woe to him who harbors
the wasteland. Our earth is not an earth of
calculation. If this remains such, only a God
can save us.
Friedrich
Nietzsche
Group Activity:
Choose and present an artwork that helps reveal
who the human person is in the face of modern
technology.
Beauty and message of artwork
= 40%
Philosophizing, weaving together
the elements of Heideggerian thought
= 60%
---------100%