Comment le capital trouve sa substance et son essence dans le travail vivant, de telle manière qu’il provient exclusivement de lui, ne peut se passer… - Michel Henry

The key feature of modernity, which makes it into a barbarism of a hitherto unknown kind, is precisely to be a society lacking any culture and existing independently from it. As ordinary and common as it might seem today, this situation creates an almost untenable paradox, if it is the case that life, as self-conservation and self-growth, is itself a cultural process. This is something that all past civilizations illustrate. Barbarism is thus a sort of impossibility. If it happens nonetheless, it is never through an inexplicable dulling of the powers of life. Instead, the powers of life must be turned against themselves, in the phenomena of hate and resentment. This happens because life, in a suffering that is coextensive with its being and that it can no longer bear, attempts to get rid of itself. Barbarism cannot exist without the emergence of Evil, which is a mad but wholly intelligible desire of self-destruction. Or rather, in every state of social regression, it is possible to discover, underneath the evidence of the features of stagnation and decline, the violence of the deliberate refusal of life to be itself.

Kandinsky calls the content that painting must express, that is, our invisibility (or invisible life), 'abstract'. So, the Kandinskian equation can now be written as follows: <nowiki>Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos =</nowiki> abstract. Kandinsky also calls the means of painting 'abstract', so long as they are grasped in their purity. To the extent that they are abstract, colours and drawings are likewise inscribed in the equation formulated above, the equation which forms the original dimension of Being itself. In this respect, we have just discovered the true meaning of the concept of abstraction applied to painting.

Science as such has no relation with culture, because it develops outside of its realm. We sought to establish this situation in the preceding chapter, and on its own it does not justify any pejorative evaluation or condemnation that would lead to the disqualification of science. The philosopher has the duty to intervene only when the domain of science is understood as the sole existing domain of true being and subsequently leads to the rejection of the domain of life and culture into nonbeing or an illusory appearance. Once again, it is not the scientific knowledge that is in question; it is the ideology joined to it today which holds that it is the sole possible knowledge and that all other ones must be eliminated. Amidst the collapse of the beliefs, that is the sole belief that persists in the modern world, the previously encountered and universally echoed conviction that knowledge means science.