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" "Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. If, then, the Revelation of God is a self-revelation that owes nothing to the truth of the world, and if we ask where such a self-revelation is achieved, the answer is unequivocal: in Life and in Life alone. Therefore we are in the presence of the first fundamental equation of Christianity: God is Life – he is the essence of Life, or if one prefers, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what God is, but we do not know it through the effect of some knowledge or learning – we do not know it through thought, against the background of the truth of the world. Rather we know it, and we can know it, only in and through Life itself. We can know the essence of God only in God. But this observation is premature.
Michel Henry (10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan. His novel L'amour les yeux fermés (Love With Closed Eyes) has won the Renaudot Prize in 1976.
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Men turned away from Life’s Truth, caught in all the traps and marvels where this life is denied, ridiculed, mimicked, simulated – absent. Men given over to the insensible, become themselves insensible, whose eyes are empty as a fish’s. Dazed men, devoted to specters and spectacles that always expose their own invalidity and bankruptcy; devoted to false knowledge, reduced to empty shells, to empty heads – to “brains.” Men whose emotions and loves are just glandular secretions. Men who have been liberated by making them think their sexuality is a natural process, the site and place of their infinite Desire. Men whose responsibility and dignity have no definite site anymore. Men who in the general degradation will envy the animals. Men will want to die – but not Life. It is not just any god today who is still able to save us, but – when the shadow of death is looming over the world – that One who is Living.
The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.
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The change that perverts individual subjective praxis does not simply involve its reduction to stereotypical and monotonous acts. Along with this narrowing and impoverishment that already indicate the fall of culture, another phenomenon occurs that pushes this process of enculturation to its culmination: the activity of these meaningless acts reverts to a total passivity. It is the objective device in its various organizations and uses that dictates the nature and type of what little remains for the worker to do. It is true that the capacities of the individual at work, and especially the bodily capacities, cannot be entirely abstracted. This is because Bodily-ownness (Corpspropriation) remains the hidden and inescapable foundation for the transformation of the world, in its technical age just as much as in any other age. It just so happens that the force of the Body has been replaced by the objective network of the machine, and the body is only taken into consideration to the precise degree that the device requires the intervention of the individual, however modestly. This amounts to the derisory role that is still conceded to life and its knowledge, that is to say, to culture. The most complex computer ends with a keyboard that is easier than a typewriter. The information age will be the age of idiots.