Abstract

Much of our experience today is mediated through mathematical constructs that escape our immediate intuitions, social media being a primary example. Understanding the proliferation of these constructs may help us see how they are destabilizing ethical judgment. Since its inception with Husserl, phenomenology has set out a sustained critique of the philosophical sources that led to the mathematization of nature. It has also been alert to the dangers that this mathematization presented. Husserl argued that the life-world was being transformed with a gradual substitution of the abstract object for the authentic phenomenon. This paper looks at what I consider to be a contemporary form of Husserl’s critique, largely through the lens offered by the Belgian philosopher, Jean Ladrière. In line with Husserl, Ladrière argues that we are witnessing the prevalence of a specific scientific rationality of construct that is populating the life-world with its products, its artifacts. The artifacts represent fragments of reality—ones constructed on the basis of mathematical ideals, of a reduced and formal grasp the real. The consequence, according to Ladrière, is a destabilization of ethical judgment. Hermeneutic phenomenology, he suggests, offers the elements of a potential response, essentially constituted by a hermeneutic of the artificial.