The Reconstituting Nature of Modern Technology on Environment

Abstract

My argument in this article is that, even though technology enables a renewed experience of nature by enhancing our appreciation and understanding of it, it also constrains the way the same nature appears to us in a very particular and unique way. To support this argument, I underline the reconstituting and manipulative tendency of technology on nature. Technology has become a form of revealing where environment is reduced to a hip of resources for human manipulation, thereby making it lose its ontological significance; through technology we humans are divorced from our internal relationship to our environment. We live according to an atomic conception of ourselves as independent from our specific environmental contexts, with alienating results not only from each other but also from our very environment. The enucleating philosophical question of the entire article is: With all the material benefits of modern technology, do we ever stop to think of its environmental consequences? The article will employ the phenomenological method taking the Heideggerian perspective of understanding modern technology. Heidegger argues that modern technology has passed from being an instrument (machines, ipads, smartphones, computers, genetic engineering, processes and invention) used by humans to attain specific ends to a way of being-in-the-world.