Telescopes allow us to see what is distant, such as the moon’s irregular surface. However, due to their instrumentality, the image rendering leaves those basins in the remoteness of scientific representation, for the seizing of lunar craters is unmanageable to the unaided eye. According to Husserl, the Galilean program of the mathematisation of nature precisely diverted the genuine dimension of everyday sensible experience. Despite the indisputable plainness of the modelling he proposed, the Astronomer would have overstated the clairvoyant power of his discipline. It is the main critique Husserl addresses to the Modern scientific understanding of the lifeworld (or Lebenswelt). Indeed, from Modernity on, as we can read in Crisis, scientific representations would have moved away from the immediate concreteness of lifeworld—which phenomenology, on the contrary, aims to recover—in the elaboration of increasingly complex but void and abstract replicas of mathematical substitution of real-world entities. It is something not only Husserl remarked.
Indeed, Arendt particularly stressed the technical and sometimes harmful use we make of these more and more perfect theoretical achievements. According to Arendt, the distance of mathematical modelling makes us alien to ourselves and to the world that we occupy. The Earth, devoid of its centre, thus becomes dominatable by the technique we use to lift and control it via the Archimedean point. It is against this understanding that Serres’ Natural Contract also stands. Here, the Frenchman precisely criticises our parasitic behaviour toward the world we inhabit. To overcome our natural parasitism, we must transform ourselves into symbionts and recover a more genuine sense of the real, beyond the blind vision of technique and scientific representation.
My talk will focus on these two perspectives. Here, I will try to show the elements of continuity with Husserl’s phenomenological reflection for the development of a more conscious use of our means.