CHAPTER 2

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY AND

THE HUMAN CONDITION
A. The Human Person Flourishing in Terms
of Science and Technology
The essence of technology is by no means anything
technological - Martin Heidegger

 Science and Technology are the forefront of our society.

 Technology changes us and the world around us in countless
ways.
 Technology has always been a double-edge sword, empowering
with both creative and destructive nature.
 Technology that eases our labor can detach us from a meaningful
sense of work.
 What can cure disease can encourage us to view the human body
as something to be engineered, modified and immortalized?
 How should we understand and evaluate both the promise and
peril of the things we create?
 What implications arise from our understanding of what it means
to be human and live well?
 Human Flourishing- defined as an effort to achieve self-
actualization and fulfilment within the context of a larger
community of individuals, each with the right to pursue his or
her own such efforts.
 It encompasses the uniqueness, dignity, diversity, freedom,
happiness and holistic well-community and population.
 Catholicism and Islam are home to long traditions of
philosophical, theological, and legal reflection on the nature and
dignity of the human person and the value of scientific
knowledge.
 Human person and human body are divine gifts deserving of
unconditional respect.
 Science, technology are recognized as positive principle but can
also, like human enterprises, serve evil ends.
 Karl Marx- revolutionary socialist.
 He states that humans are naturally social beings, and, therefore,
society is essential “unity of man in nature”.
 Marx defines alienation as the estrangement of humans from
aspects of human nature.
 Marx calls “the loss of and subservience to the object, and the
appropriation as alienation”.
 Genetic intervention simply presents itself as potentially
developing into another consumer choice.
 Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
 Is the fountainhead behind every achievement of science,
technology, political theory and aesthetics, especially romantic art in
today’s world.
 He explains that the purpose of life is earthly happiness or
flourishing that can be achieved via reason and the acquisition of
virtue.
Technology as a Way of Revealing

 Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, wrote an essay.

“The Question Concerning Technology”.
 Technology was based on its essence:
 The essence of technology is not something we make; it is a
mode of being or of revealing
 Technology even holds sway over beings that we do not
normally think of as technological (gods and history)
 Technology is primarily a matter of modern and industrial
technology.
 Technology is not simply the practical application of
natural science.

Two characteristics of modern technology as a revealing

process:
 Challenging
 Expediting
 Heidegger uses a technical word to name the things
that are revealed in modern technology as “standing
in reserve”.
 For Heidegger en-framing is the “essence” of modern
technology.
 This frame of modern technology is the network or
interlocking things standing in reserve.
 Human Flourishing
 According to Plato and Aristotle, human flourishing is
said to be the best translation for the Greek word
Eudaimonia.
 Plato, in the Republic, contends that the soul or mind
has three motivating parts:
 Rational
 Spirited or emotional
 appetitive
 Eudaimonia is constituted not by honor or wealth power
but rational activity in accordance with excellence in
 the virtues of character including courage, honesty, pride,
friendliness and wittiness,
 the intellectual virtues-notably rationality and judgement,
as well as mutually beneficial friendships and scientific
knowledge and unchanging
 As physical beings, we require nourishment, exercise, rest
and keep our bodies functioning properly.
 As emotional beings, we have wants, desire, urges and
reactions.
 As social beings, we must live and function in particular
societies.
 As rational beings, we are creative, expressive, knowledge-
seeking and able to obey reason.