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The Oversight of Life’s OneselfThe methodological-scientistic concerns that became predominant since the seventeenthcentury overlooked the fact that formed consciousness (Bildung) overcomes all naturalsense, since, while the latter is always limited by a certain sphere, consciousness “operatesin all directions and, as such, is a general sense.” 21 It is within a (formative) preunderstandinghorizon that the Greek paideia is found in the “visual-objective model ofexternality (spatiality),” 22 i.e., in the model of the thing, 23 in which the categories ofspatiality and temporality are inherent in the thing itself. The classic visual-objectivemodel of the thing restricts reflective consciousness to the factum and its exact observation;science is the measure of all knowledge where space and time are exclusively asystem of coordinates for accessing exact and accurate clues about all things. At ananthropological level, this model turned the concepts of logos and space into the commonplacesbetween the “world” of nature (the external, the physical) and the “world” ofculture (the internal, the reflective consciousness). Man is since seen as an (objectifiable)corporal or biological thing, as a sum, a “pure object of the physical or external world,something that can be touched and objectified, i.e., a body comparable to that of ananimal yet specifically different from it because it is endowed with something that animalsdo not have, the logos or the nous.” 24 The Western model of man, for which Christianityis strongly responsible as the heir of the platonic concept of the body as a “passingcondition of the soul,” 25 introduces a deeper and more radical distinction 26 : “Flesh andspirit are not anthropologically constitutive elements of the human entity but rather waysof being of man in his referral to divinity. Man ... is not an amalgamation of two completelydifferent substances but a single incarnate subject.” 27The crisis in the sciences after the seventeenth century is the crisis of culture (paideia),a crisis of existence brought about by the hyper-development that the Galilean legacygenerated, with the subsequent multiplication of increasingly specialist knowledge, of newmethodologies which opened up new horizons, but whose premises or conditions he didnot theorize: the geometrical-mathematical legibility of the universe requires a transcendentalperformance of consciousness, an act of the spirit creating something that did notexist before. 28 The ideality of Galilean science, which translates into forms and essences,is based upon a “seeing,” as the sum total of the senses, which operates in a phenomenologicalhorizon: it reflects on an exterior world, a pure exteriority, since matter is resextensa and only knows idealities if they are presented before its very eyes: “The geometricdeterminations to which Galilean science tries to reduce the being of things areidealities. These, far from being able to account for the sensory, subjective and relativeworld in which our daily activity takes place, necessarily refer to this world of life; it isonly in relation to this world that they have a meaning; it is on the insurmountable groundof this world that they are built.” 2921Hans-Georg Gadamer, Verdad y método, trans. Ana Agud Aparicio and Rafael de Agapito(Salamanca: Sigueme), 47.22Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 58.23Cf. Martin Heidegger, Qu’est-ce qu’une chose? (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 16-18.24Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 58.25Ibid., 60.26Juan Marias, El Tema del Hombre. Antologias Filosoficas I (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1989), 16.27Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 60.28Edmund Husserl, La Crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale, trans.Gérard Granel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 110f.29Henry, La Barbarie, 18.156