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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 existi… - 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.
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About Michel Henry
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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The second mask worn in the refusal to take into consideration the cultural specificity of the tasks and the condition of the university is the argument of utility. This one is dear to parents. Don't studies serve the purpose of getting a job? Truly speaking, as the development of the potential of individual subjectivity through repeated practice and the transmission of knowledge, teaching helps those who benefit from it to become suited for a certain number of activities, for perfecting their abilities as well as acquiring new ones. It is evident that the more the level of this teaching is raised, the greater are the choices and the number of "outlets" provided. The idea, to the contrary, of limiting knowledge to what will actually be put into practice is both criminal and contradictory. It is contradictory due to the fluctuation of demand in an evolving world and thus to the necessity of constant adaptation. This ability to adapt is a function of one's degree of intelligence as well as the extent of one's mastered knowledge. It is criminal because it signifies the stoppage of the individual's potential development. It is the deliberate reduction of one's being to the condition of a cog in the techno-scientific machine.
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This is because the doing carries life as its irresistible presupposition, because there is no doing unless given to itself in life’s self-givenness, unless the work of salvation is entrusted to it. Entrusted to doing and to action, but not to any old action. If we examine the list of works of mercy, we see that is not a simple enumeration of empirical attitudes and conduct that would be beneficial to people who practice them. A hidden contrast runs through them, but not an opposition between simple precepts still removed from their achievement in practice, which is demanded as the single road that leads to life. Instead, the opposition appears on the level of the action itself. It distinguishes and contrasts two types of action – in effect, one that leads to life and the other to death.
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