Nnadiebube Journal of Philosophy

Since the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, lively philosophic reflections have been started concerning the problem of man in relation to modern technology. Moreover, it is doubtless that technology in this modern time impacts on all aspects of human life to a frightening depth and extent unknown to man in earlier ages. Hence, Heidegger’s thought on the subject of technology is very relevant in understanding and appreciating the positive and negative impacts of technology on modern world. This paper analytically interrogates the main point of Heidegger’s interpretation that modern technology is a provoking/challenging setting-up disclosure/revealing of nature, “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” Can this be accepted as the whole truth? Through critical analytic and hermeneutic methods, this paper found out that technology of itself is not dangerous; but our technological behaviours certainly have ethical implications in the sense that there can be good or bad, true or false and, so, our technology can be appropriate or inappropriate. We arrived at the conclusion that what is urgently needed today is an appropriate modern technology, which requires that we reflect on our ends and values before we commit ourselves to the development of new technologies, or even to the continuation and use of certain older ones.

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