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" "The imagination brings into being what has not yet taken place in being: hitherto inexperienced tones, impressions, emotions, feelings and forces. The imagination is indeed creative, even in a radical sense that gives it a positivity that was not glimpsed by classical thought. Art's creative imagination does not give us decoys to contemplate, for example the depth of a third dimension where there was only a flat surface. It has ceased to be, according to Kant's famous definition, the faculty of representing a thing in its absence. It has become the magical power of making something real. What type of thing is it then? Where and how does the imagination bring it into existence? We have already answered this: it gives a thing life, as a modality of life. What it creates is in fact this new modality. The movement of the imagination is thus nothing other than the movement of life, its internal becoming, the tireless process of its coming into itself, an arrival in which it is felt in ever more vast, differentiated and intense experiences.
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 fact that this weight [of existence] becomes too heavy and that it can be experienced as a weight and as an unbearable weight, is due to the fact that it is impossible for life to undo that with which it has been burdened, that is to say, itself. [...] Culture is the set of enterprises and practices in which the overflowing of life is expressed. All of them are motivated by the "burden", the "too much" that prepares living subjectivity internally as a force ready to be dispensed and required to act under this burden.
The life that we are speaking about cannot be confused with the object of scientific knowledge, an object for which knowledge would be reserved to those who are in possession of it and who have had to acquire it. Instead, it is something that everyone knows, as part of what we are. But how can "everyone" -- that is, each individual as a living being -- know what life is, except in the respect that life knows itself and that this original knowledge of the self constitutes its own essence? Life feels and experiences itself in such a way that there is nothing in it that would not be experienced or felt. This is because the fact of feeling oneself is really what makes one alive. Everything that has this marvelous property of feeling itself is alive, whereas everything that happens to lack it is dead. The rock, for example, does not experience itself and so it is said to be a "thing". The earth, the sea, the stars are things. Plants, trees, and vegetation are also things, unless one can detect in them a sensibility in the transcendental sense, that is to say, a capacity of experiencing itself and feeling itself which would make them living beings. This is life not in the biological sense but in the true sense -- the absolute phenomenological life whose essence consists in the very fact of sensing or experiencing oneself and nothing else -- of what we will call subjectivity.
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Because practice is subjective, theory which is always the theory of an object, can't access to the reality of this practice, what it is in itself, but only represent it, in such a way that this representation lets out of itself the real being of practice, the effectivity of the doing. Theory does nothing.